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THE NEW
PRINCETON REVIEW.
62d Year. MARCH, 1887. No. 2.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.
In trying to explain to ourselves the meaning of an edifice we take into account whatever opposed or favored its construction, the kind and quality of its available materials, the period, the opportu- nity, and the urgency for it ; but still more important is it to consider the genius and taste of the architect, especially whether he is the proprietor, whether he built it to live in himself, and, once installed in it, if he takes pains to adapt it to his way of living, to his necessi- ties, and to his purposes. Such is the social edifice erected by Na- poleon Bonaparte, its architect, proprietor, and principal occupant from 1799 to 1814; it is he who has made modern France; never was an individuality .so profoundly stamped on any collective work, so that, to comprehend the work, we must first study the character of the man,
I.
He is not only out of the common run, but there is no standard of measurement for him ; through his temperament, instincts, facul- ties, imagination, passions, and moral constitution he seems cast in a different mould, composed of another metal than that which enters into the composition of his fellows and contemporaries. Evidently, he is not a Frenchman, nor a man of the eighteenth century ; he be- longs to another race and another epoch ; we detect in him, at the first glance, the foreigner, the Italian, and something more apart and beyond these, surpassing all similitude and analogy. Italian he was through blood and lineage ; first, through his paternal family, which
is Tuscan, and which we can follow down from the twelfth century ;
10
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at Florence, then at San Miniato ; next at Sarzana, a small, backward, remote town in the state of Genoa, where, from father to son, it rubs along obscurely in provincial isolation through a long line of notaries and municipal syndics. “ My origin,” says Napoleon himself, “ has made all Italians regard me as one of themselves.” When the Pope hesitated about coming to Paris to crown Napoleon, the Italian party in the Conclave prevailed against the Austrian party by supporting political arguments with the following slight tribute to national amour-propre : “A fter all, we are imposing an Italian family on the barbarians to govern them. We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls." This significant expression illuminates the depths of the Italian na- ture, the eldest daughter of modern civilization, imbued with its right of primogeniture, persistent in its grudge against the trans- alpines, the rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique patriotism.
Leaving Sarzana, one of the Bonapartes emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes himself, and lives after 1529. Thus, just at the moment when the energy, the ambition, and the vigorous and free sap of the Middle Ages began to run down and then dry up in the shrivelled trunk, a small, detached branch roots itself in an island not less Italian, but almost barbarous, amidst institutions, customs, and passions belonging to the primitive mediaeval epoch, and in a social atmosphere which is rude enough to preserve all its vitality and harshness. Grafted, moreover, by marriages, and repeatedly, on the wild stock of the island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his grandmother and mother, is wholly indigenous. His grandmother, a Pietra Santa, belonged to Sart^ne, a Corsican canton par excellence, where, in 1800, hereditary vendettas still maintained the regime of the eleventh century, where the permanent contests of inimical fam- ilies were suspended only by truces, where, in many villages, nobody went out except in armed bodies, and where the houses were crenel- lated like fortresses. His mother, Laetitia Ramolini, from whom in character and in will he derives much more than from his father, is a primitive soul on which civilization has taken no hold ; simple, all of a piece, unsuited to the refinements, charms, and graces of a worldly life ; indifferent to comforts and even cleanliness ; as parsimonious as any peasant woman, but as energetic as the leader of a band ; power- ful, physically and spiritually, accustomed to danger, ready in des- perate resolutions ; in short, a rustic Cornelia, who conceived and gave birth to her son amidst the risks of battle and of defeat, during
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the thickest of the French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horse- back, nocturnal surprises, and volleys of musketry. He passed his youth “ amidst precipices, traversing lofty summits, deep valleys, and narrow defiles, enjoying the honors and delights of hospitable enter- tainment,” treated everywhere as a brother and compatriot. At Bolognano, where his mother, pregnant with him, had taken refuge,
“ Where hatred and vengeance extended to the seventh degree of relationship, where the dowry of a young girl was estimated by the number of her cousins, I was feasted and made welcome, and everybody would have died for me.”
Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king in a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had declared themselves. Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, “ bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over a painful sentiment,” like a vanquished man, always suffering and obliged to serve. At Brienne he keeps aloof from his comrades, and unbosoms himself only to Bourrienne in explosions of hate: “I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can ! ” “ Corsican by nation and character,” wrote his professor of
history. Leaving the academy, and in garrison at Valence and Auxonne, he remains always hostile. Addressing himself to Paoli, he writes:
“ I was born when our country perished. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood — such was the odious spectacle which first greeted my eyes ! ”
A little later, his letter to Buttafuoco, principal agent in the French annexations, is one long strain of concentrated hatred which, after some effort at self-restraint in cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-hot lava, in a torreht of scorching invective. From the age of fifteen his imagination seeks refuge in the past of his island ; he writes about it, dedicates his book to Paoli, and then, unable to get it published, makes an abridgment, which he dedicates to Abb6 Raynal, recapitulating in it, in a strained style, and with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community. And the style, far more than the feeling, denotes the foreigner. Un- doubtedly, in this work, as in other youthful writings, he follows as well as he can the authors in vogue — Rousseau, and especially Raynal ; he gives a schoolboy imitation of their tirades, their senti- mental declamation and their humanitarian grandiloquence. But
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these borrowed clothes, which incommode him, do not fit him ; they are too tight, and the cloth is too fine ; they require too much cir- cumspection in walking ; he does not know how to put them on, and they rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned orthog- raphy, but he does not know the true meaning, connections, and re- lations of words, the propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact bearing of imagery ; he strides athwart incongruities, incoherences, and barbarisms, stumbling along in inexperience and impetuosity ; his eager, eruptive thought, overcharged with passion, indicates the depth and temperature of its source. Already, at this early date, the Professor of Belles Lettres in the Academy notes that “ in the strange, incoherent grandeur of his amplifications it seems as if he saw granite fused in a volcano.” Ill adapted to the society of his comrades, it is clear beforehand that current conceptions which have weight with them will take no hold of him.
Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other, it might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other, although accepting neither. Pensioner of the king, who supported him at Brienne, and afterward in the Military Academy ; who also supported his sister at St. Cyr ; to whom, at this very time, he addresses entreating or grateful letters over his mother’s signa- ture, it does not enter his mind to draw the sword in his patron’s behalf; in vain is he a certified gentleman, endorsed by D’Hozier, reared in a school of noble cadets — he has no noble and monarchical traditions. Poor, restless, and ambitious, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal, he is not dazed with democratic illusions ; he entertains no feeling but disgust for the Revolution as it is carried out, and for the sovereignty of the people. At Paris, in April, 1792, when the struggle between the monarchists and the revolutionists is at its height, he tries to find “ some useful speculation,” and thinks he will hire and sublet houses at a profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard, “ Che Coglione ! ” Immediately after this: “ How could they let that rabble enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannon-ball and the rest would run away.” On August loth, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the people and the king with equal contempt, and “ views, at his ease, the occurrences of the day.” He has no inward Jacobin or royalist impulse ; his countenance is so calm as to often excite hostility. In
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like manner, after the 31st of May and the 2d of June, his souper de Beaucaire shows that if he condemns the insurrection it is chiefly because he deems it fruitless. None of the political or social con- victions which then exercise such control over men’s minds have any hold on him. Previous to the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to be a “ republican montagnard ” ; or follow him for months in Pro- vence, “ the favorite and confidential adviser of young Robespierre, admirer of the elder Robespierre, intimate at Nice with Charlotte Robespierre.” After the 9th of Thermidor he is arrested as a Robespierrist, then set free, when he is entirely without occupation, “ idling about the streets of Paris,” until he attaches himself to Barras, who had overthrown and killed his two protectors. “ Robes- pierre was dead,” says he, later on, “ and Barras played a part ; I had to attach myself to some one and to something.”
Among the fanaticisms which succeed each other he remains indifferent to every cause, and devoted wholly to his own interests. On the I2th of Vend^miaire, leaving the theatre in the evening and seeing the preparations of the sectionists, “ Ah,” he exclaims to Junot, “if they would only put me at their head, I am sure that in two hours I would plant them in the Tuileries and drive out those wretched conventionalists!” Five hours later, summoned by Barras and the conventionalists, he takes “ three minutes ” to decide what he will do, and, instead of “ making the representatives jump,” it is the Parisians whom he mows down. But he is to become a veritable condottiere, that is to say, leader of a band, more and more inde- pendent, and pretending to submit under the pretext of the public good ; looking out solely for himself, aiming at his own interest, general on his own account and for his own advantage in his Italian campaign, before and after the i8th of Fructidor; but still 2. con- dottiere of the first class, already aspiring to the loftiest summits, “with no stopping-place but the throne or the scaffold,” “ determined to master France, and Europe through France, ever occupied with his own plans, and without distraction, sleeping three hours during the night,” making playthings of ideas and of people, religions and governments, managing mankind with incomparable dexterity and brutality, the same in the choice of means as of ends, a superior artist, inexhaustible in prestiges and seductions, in corruption and in intimidation, wonderful, and yet more terrible than any wild beast suddenly turned in on a herd of browsing cattle. An able diplomat who was, at that time, a friend, called him the little tiger.
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At this same date we have two portraits drawn from life, one physical, painted by Guerin, and the other moral, traced by a superior woman, who, to the completest European culture, added tact and worldly perspicacity — Madame de Stael ; each seems to interpret the other.
"I saw him for the first time,” says the latter, "on his return to France after the treaty of Campo-Formio. I soon found, in the various opportunities I had of meeting him during his stay in Paris, that his character was not to be described in ter7Hs comtnonly employed j he was neither mild nor violent, nor gentle nor cruel, like certain personages we happen to know. A being like hhn, wholly un- like anybody else, could neither feel nor excite sympathy ; he was both more and less than a 7>ian j his figure, understanding, and language bore the impress of a strange nation; . . . far from being reassured on seeing Bonaparte oftener he intimidated me more and more every day. I had a confused impression that he was not to be influenced by any emotion of sympathy or affection. He regards a h7t77ian bemg as a fact, a7i object, a7td not as a fellow-creature. He neither hates nor loves, he exists for himself alone j the rest of humanity are so many ciphers. The force of his will consists in the imperturbable calculation of his egoism ; he is a skilful player, with the human species for an antagonist, whom he proposes to checkmate. . . . Every time that I heard him talk I was struck with his
superiority J it bore no resemblance to that of men informed and cultivated through study and social intercourse, such as we find in France and England ; his conversation indicated the tact of circu77istances, like that of the hunter in pursuit of his prey. His spirit seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes while it wounds. I felt a profound irony in his mind which nothing great or beautiful could escape, not even his own reputation, for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought. . . . With him, everything was means to ends ;
the involuntary, whether for good or for evil, was entirely absent ; he examined things only with reference to their immediate usefulness ; a general principle was repugnant to him, either as so much nonsense or as an enemy.”
Now, contemplate in Gu6rin the spare body, those narrow shoul- ders under the uniform wrinkled by a sudden movement, that neck swathed in its high twisted cravat, those temples under long, smooth, straight hair, exposing only the mask, the hard features intensified through strong contrasts of light and shade, the cheeks hollow up to the inner angle of the eye, the projecting cheek-bones, the massive, protuberant jaw, the sinuous, mobile lips, pressed to- gether as if attentive, the large, clear eyes, deeply sunk under the broad, arched eyebrows, the fixed, oblique look, as penetrating as a rapier, and the two creases which extended from the base of the nose to the brow, as if in a frown of suppressed anger and determined will. Add to this the accounts of his contemporaries who saw or heard the curt accent or the sharp, abrupt gesture, the interrogating, im- perious, absolute tone of voice, and we comprehend how, the moment
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they accosted him, they felt the dominating hand which lays hold of them, presses them down, holds them firmly, and never relaxes its grasp.
Already, at the receptions of the Directory, when conversing with men, or even with ladies, he puts questions “ which prove the superiority of the questioner to those who have to answer them.” “Are you married? ” says he to this one, and “ How many children have you ? ” to another. To that one, “ When did you come here ? ” or, again, “ When are you going away ? ” He places himself in front of a French lady, well known for her beauty and wit, and the viva- city of her opinions, “ like the stiffest of German generals, and says: ‘ Madame, I don’t like women who meddle with politics!”’ Equality, ease, and familiarity — all fellowship vanishes at his approach. On his appointment to the command in Italy Admiral Deeres, who had known him well at Paris, learns that he is to pass through Toulon, and proposes to introduce his comrades. “ I am about to press forward,” he afterward wrote, “ when the attitude, the look, and the tone of voice suffice to arrest me. And yet there was nothing offensive about him ; still, this was enough. I never tried after that to overstep the line thus imposed on me.” A few days later, at Alberga, certain generals of division, and among them Augereau, a vulgar, heroic old soldier, vain of his tall figure and courage, arrive at headquarters, not well disposed toward the little parvenu sent out to them from Paris. Recalling the description of him which had been given to them, Augereau is abusive and insubordinate. “One of Barras’ favorites! The Vend^miaire general! A street general! Never in action! Hasn’t a friend! Looks like a bear because he always thinks for himself ! An insignificant figure! He is said to be a mathematician and dreamer ! ” They enter, and Bonaparte keeps them waiting. At last he appears, with his sword and belt on, explains the disposition of the forces, gives them his orders, and dismisses them. Augereau is thunderstruck. Only when he gets out of doors does he recover himself and fall back on his accustomed oaths. He agrees with Massena that “ that little
of a general frightened him.” He cannot comprehend the
ascendency “which overawes him at the first glance.”
Extraordinary and superior, made to command and to conquer, singular and of an unique species, is the feeling of all his contem- poraries ; those who are most familiar with the histories of other nations, Madame de Stael and Stendhal, go back to the right
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sources to comprehend him, to the “ petty Italian tyrants of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” to Castruccio Castracani, to the Braccii of Mantua, to the Ticcimini, to the Malatestas of Rimini, and the Sforzas of Milan. In their opinion, however, it is only a chance analogy, a psychological resemblance. Really, however, and historically, it is a positive relationship. He is a descendant of the great Italians, the men of action of the year 1400, the military adventurers, usurpers, and founders of life-governments ; he inherits in direct affiliation their blood and inward organization, mental and moral. An offshoot of their forest before the age of refinement, impoverishment and decay is transplanted to a similar and remote nursery, where the tragic and militant regime is permanently estab- lished ; the primitive germ is preserved there intact and transmitted from one generation to another, renewed and invigorated by inter- breeding. Finally, at the last stage of its growth, it springs out of the ground and develops magnificently, blooming the same as ever, and producing the same fruit as on the original stem. The soil of France, however, which has been broken up by revolutionary tem- pests, is more favorable to its growth than the worn-out fields of the Middle Ages ; and there it grows by itself, without being sub- ject, like its Italian ancestors, to rivalry with its own species.
II.
“ The man-plant,” says Alfieri, “ is in no country born more vigorous than in Italy,” and never, in Italy, was it so vigorous as from 1300 to 1500, from the contemporaries of Dante down to those of Michael Angelo, Caesar Borgia, Julius II., and Macchiavelli. The first distinguishing mark of a man of those times is the integrity of his mental instrument. Ours has lost somewhat of its temper, sharp- ness, and suppleness ; in general, a compulsory, special application of it has rendered it one-sided ; the multiplication, besides, of ready- made ideas and acquired methods has made it fit only for a sort of routine ; finally, it is much worn through excess of cerebral action.
It is just the opposite with those impulsive spirits of new blood and of a new race. Roederer, who sees Bonaparte daily at the meetings of the Council of State, and who notes down every even- ing the impressions of the day, is carried away with admiration.
“Punctual at every sitting, prolonging the session five or six hours, discussing before and afterward the subjects brought forward, always returning to two ques- tions, ‘Is that just?' ‘Is that useful?’ examining each question in itself, under
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both relations ; next, consulting the best authorities, the actual moment, and ob- taining information about bygone jurisprudence, the laws of Louis XIV. and of Frederick the Great. . . . Never did the council adjourn without its members
knowing more than the day before, if not through knowledge derived from him, at least through the researches he obliged them to make. Never did the members of the Senate, of the Corps Ldgislatif, or of the tribunals pay their respects to him, without being rewarded for their homage by valuable instructions. He cannot be surrounded by public men without being the statesman. What characterizes him above them all is the force, flexibility, and constancy of his attention. He can work eighteen hours at a stretch, on one or on several subjects. I never saw him tired. I never found his mind lacking in inspiration, even when weary in body, nor when violently exercised, nor when angry, I never saw him diverted from one matter by another.”
He says himself, later on, that
“ Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of drawers. When I want to take up any special business I shut one drawer and open another. None of them ever get mixed, and never does this incommode me or fatigue me. If I feel sleepy I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.”
Never has brain so disciplined and under such control been seen, one so ready at all times for any task, so capable of immediate and absolute concentration.
" His flexibility is wonderful, in the instant application of every faculty and energy, and bringing them all to bear at once on any object that concerns him, on a mite as well as on an elephant, on any given individual as well as on an enemy's army. . . . When specially occupied, other things do not exist for
him ; it is a sort of chase from which nothing diverts him.”
And this hot pursuit, which nothing arrests save capture, this tenacious hunt, this headlong course by one to whom the goal is never other than a fresh starting-point, is the spontaneous gait, the natural, even pace which his mind prefers.
" I am always at work, I meditate a great deal. If I seem always equal to the occasion, ready to face what comes, it is because I have thought the matter over a long time before undertaking it. I have anticipated whatever might happen. It is no genius which suddenly reveals to me what I ought to do or say in any unlooked-for circumstance, but my own reflection, my own meditation. ... I work all the time, at dinner, in the theatre. I wake up at night in order to resume my work. I got up last night at two o’clock. I stretched myself on my couch before the fire to examine the army reports sent to me by the Minister of War. I found twenty mistakes in them, and made notes which I have this morning sent to the minister, who is now engaged with his clerks in rectifying them.”
Whether consul or emperor, he demands of each minister a full statement of the slightest details. It is not rare to see them leave
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the council-room overcome with fatigue, due to the long interroga- tories to which he has subjected them ; he disdains to take any notice of this, and talks about the day’s work simply as a relaxation which has scarcely given his mind exercise. And what is worse, it often happens that, on returning home, they find a dozen of his letters requiring immediate answer, for which the whole night scarcely suffices. The quantity of facts he is able to retain and store away, the quantity of ideas he elaborates and produces, seems to surpass human capacity, and this insatiable, inexhaustible, un- changeable brain thus keeps on working uninterruptedly for thirty- two years.
Through another result of the same mental organization, it never works in vain ; and this, at the present day, is our greatest danger. For the past three hundred years we have been more and more los- ing sight of things in their full and complete sense ; subject to the constraints of a domestic, many-sided, and extended education, we fix our attention on the symbols of objects rather than on the ob- jects themselves ; instead of on the ground itself, on a map of it ; in- stead of on animals struggling for existence, on nomenclatures and classifications, or, at best, on stuffed specimens displayed in a mu- seum ; instead of on men who feel and act, on statistics, codes, his- tories, literatures, and philosophies ; in short, on printed words, and, worse still, on abstract terms difficult to understand, and deceptive, especially in all that relates to human life and society. In this do- main the object, indefinitely expanded and complex, now eludes our grasp ; our vague, incomplete, incorrect idea of it badly corresponds with it or does not correspond at all ; those who may desire some sig- nificant indication of what society actually is, beyond the teachings of books, require ten or fifteen years of close observation and study to re-think the phrases with which these have filled their memory, to substitute for the more or less empty and indefinite term the fulness and precision of a personal impression. We have seen how ideas of Society, State, Government, Sovereignty, Rights, Liberty, the most important of all ideas, were, at the close of the eighteenth century, curtailed and falsified ; how, in most minds, simple verbal reason- ing combined them together in dogmas and axioms ; what an off- spring these metaphysical simulacra gave birth to, how many life- less and grotesque abortions, how many monstrous and destructive chimeras. There is no place for any of these chimeras in the mind of Bonaparte ; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of politi-
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cal abstraction goes beyond disdain, even to disgust ; the ideology of that day is, through the necessity and instinct for the real, repug- nant to him, as a practical man and statesman, always keeping in mind, like the great Catherine, “ that he is operating, not on paper, but on the human hide, which is ticklish.” Every idea entertained by him had its origin in his personal observation, and it was his per- sonal observation which controlled it.
If books are useful to him it is to suggest questions, which he never answers but through his own experience. He read very little, and hastily ; the literature of elegance and refinement, the philosophy of the closet and drawing-room, with which his contemporaries are imbued, glided across his intellect as over a rock ; nothing but ma- thematical truths and positive notions about geography and history found their way into his mind and deeply impressed it. Everything else, as with his predecessors of the fifteenth century, comes to him through the original, direct action of his faculties in contact with men and things, through his rapid and sure tact, his indefatigable and minute attention, his indefinitely repeated and rectified divina- tions during long hours of solitude and silence. Practice, and not speculation, is the source of his instruction, the same as with a me- chanic brought up amongst machinery.
" There is nothing relating to warfare that I cannot make myself. If nobody knows how to make gunpowder, I do. I can construct gun-carriages. If cannon must be cast I will see that it is done properly. If tactical details must be taught, I will teach them.”
Hence his competency at the outset ; general in the artillery, major-general, diplomatist, financier, and administrator, all at once and in every direction. He takes in at a glance every piece of every human machine he fashions and manipulates, each in its proper place and function ; the generators of power, the organs of its transmission, the extra working gear, the composite action, the speed which en- sues, the final result, the complete effect, the net product ; never is he content with a superficial and summary inspection ; he penetrates into obscure corners and to the lowest depths, “ through the techni- cal precision of his questions,” with the lucidity of a specialist, and, in this way, borrowing an expression from the philosophers, his idea is found adequate to its object.
Hence his eagerness for details. In each ministerial department he knows more than the ministers, and in each bureau he knows as much as the clerks.
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" I have my reports on situations always on hand ; my memory for an Alexan- drine verse is not good, but I never forget a syllable of my reports on situations. I shall find them ready in my room this evening, and shall not retire until I shall have read them through.”
It is the same in the financial and diplomatic services, in every branch of the administration. His topographical memory and his geographical conception of countries, places, ground, and obstacles culminate in an inward vision which he evokes at will, and which, years afterward, revives as fresh as on the first day. His calculation of distances, marches, and manoeuvres is so rigid a mathematical operation that, frequently, at a distance of two or three hundred leagues, his military foresight turns out correct, almost on the day named, and precisely on the spot designated. Add to this one other faculty, and the rarest of all ; if things turn out as he foresaw they would, it is because, as with famous chess-players, he has accurately measured not alone the mechanical moves of the pieces, but the character and talent of his adversary ; he has added to the calcula- tion of physical quantities and probabilities the calculation of moral quantities and probabilities. In fact, no one has surpassed him in the art of defining the various states and impulses of one or of many minds, either prolonged or for the time being, which impel or re- strain man in general, or this or that individual in particular ; what springs of action may be touched, and the kind and degree of pres- sure that may be applied to them. This central faculty rules all the others, and in the art of mastering man his genius is found supreme.
No faculty is more precious for a political engineer; for the forces he acts upon are never other than human passions. But how, except through divination, can these passions which grow out of the deepest sentiments be reached ; and how, save by conjecture, can forces be estimated which seem to defy all measurement ? On this dark and uncertain ground, where one has to grope one’s way. Napoleon moves with almost absolute certainty ; he moves promptly and, first of all, he studies himself ; indeed, to find one’s way into another’s soul requires preliminarily that one should dive deep into one’s own. “ I have always delighted in analysis,” said he, one day, “ and should I ever fall seriously in love I would take my sentiment to pieces.” “ Why and how are such important questions one cannot put them to one’s self too often.” “ It is certain,” writes an observer, “ th&t he, of all men, is the one who has most meditated on the why which controls human actions.” His method, that of the experi-
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mental sciences, consists in testing every hypothesis or deduction by some positive fact which he bars observed under definite conditions; a physical force being ascertained and accurately measured through the deviation of a needle, or through the rise and fall of a fluid, this or that invisible moral force can likewise be ascertained and approximately measured through some emotional sign, some de- cisive manifestation, consisting of a certain word, tone, or gesture It is these words, tones, and gestures which he dwells on ; he detects inward sentiments by the outward expression ; he figures to himself the internal by the external, by some physiognomical trait, some striking attitude, some summary and topical circumstance, so perti- nent and with such particulars as will afford a complete indication of the innumerable series of analogous cases. In this way, the vague, fleeting object is suddenly arrested, brought to bear, and then gauged and weighed, like some impalpable gas collected and kept in a graduated transparent glass tube. Accordingly, at the Council of State, while the others, either legists or administrators, adduce abstractions, articles of the code, and precedents, he looks into natures as they are — the Frenchman’s, the Italian’s, the German’s ; that of the peasant, the workman, the bourgeois, the noble, the returned emigre, the soldier, the officer, and the functionary — every- where the individual man as he is, the man who ploughs, manufac- tures, fights, marries, generates, toils, enjoys himself, and dies.
Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the dull, grave arguments advanced by the wise official editor and Napoleon’s own words, caught on the wing, at the moment, vibrating and teem- ing with illustrations and imagery. Apropos of divorce, the princi- ple of which he wishes to maintain :
" Consult, now, national manners and customs. Adultery is no phenomenon ; it is common enough — une affaire de canape . . . There must be some curb
on women who commit adultery for trinkets, poetry, Apollo and the muses, etc.”
But if divorce be allowed for incompatibility of temper you un- dermine marriage ; the fragility of the bond will be apparent the moment the obligation is contracted ; “ It is just as if a man said to himself, ‘ I am going to marry until I feel different,’” Nullity of marriage must not be too often allowed ; once a marriage is made it is a serious matter to undo it.
" Suppose that, in marrying my cousin just arrived from the Indies, I wed an adventuress. She bears me children, and I then discover she is not my cousin — is
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that marriage valid ? Does not public morality demand that it should be so con- sidered ? There has been a mutual exchange of souls, of transpiration."
On the right of children to be supported and fed although of age, he says :
“ Will you allow a father to drive a girl of fifteen out of his house ? A father worth 60,000 francs a year might say to his son, ‘ You are stout and fat ; go and turn ploughman.’ The children of a rich father, or of one in good circumstances, are always entitled to the paternal porridge. Strike out their right to be fed, and you compel children to murder their parents.”
As to adoption :
“ You regard this as law-makers and not as statesmen. It is not a civil con- tract nor a judicial contract. Analysis leads to vicious conclusions. Men are governed by their imagination only ; without imagination they are brutes. It is not for five cents a day, simply to distinguish himself, that a man consents to be killed ; if you want to electrify him touch his heart. A notary, who is paid a fee of twelve francs for his services, cannot do that. It requires some other process than a legislative act. What is adoption ? An attempt of society to imitate na- ture. It is a new kind of sacrament. . . . Society ordains that the bones and
blood of one being shall be changed into the bones and blood of another. It is the greatest of all legal acts. It gives the sentiments of a son to one who never had them, and reciprocally those of a parent. Where ought this to originate ? Above, like a clap of thunder ! ’’
His words are scintillations flashing out one after another. No- body, since Voltaire and Galiani, has poured out such volleys of them, on society, on laws, on government, on France and the French, expressions which, like those of Montesquieu, penetrate to and sud- denly illuminate the darkest recesses ; they are not hammered out laboriously, but burst forth, the outpourings of his intellect, its natu- ral, involuntary, and constant gesticulation. And what adds to their value is that, outside of the council meetings and of intimate con- verse, he does not use them ; he employs them solely for thinking ; at other times he subordinates them to his end, which is the practi- cal effect ; generally he writes and speaks another language, the lan- guage which is suited to his audience ; he eliminates surprises, the fits and starts of the imagination and of improvisation, the outbursts of genius and of inspiration. Those which he allows himself are simply employed to dazzle this or that personage whom he wants to accept one of his grand ideas, Pius VII. or the Emperor Alexan- der; his conversational tone is then caressing, familiar, expansive, and pleasing ; he is before the footlights, and when on the stage he plays in turn all parts, tragedy and comedy, with the same spirit.
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whether fulminating or insinuating, and even with humor. With his generals, ministers, and principal agents he restricts himself to a concise, positive, technical, business style; any other would spoil matters ; the impassioned sentiment is apparent only in the impe- rious brevity, force, and dryness of his accent. For his armies and the common run he has his proclamations and bulletins ; that is, sonorous phrases purposely composed for effect, the facts as they are stated being designedly simplified, arranged, and falsified ; in short, so much good champagne for arousing enthusiasm, as well as an ex- cellent narcotic for maintaining credulity, a sort of popular mixture retailed out by him just at the proper time, and whose ingredients are so well proportioned that the public drinks it with delight, and becomes at once intoxicated. His style on every occasion, whether affected or spontaneous, shows his wonderful knowledge of the masses and of individuals ; except in two or three cases, on one exalted domain, of which he always remains ignorant, he has ever hit the mark, applying the appropriate lever, giving just the push, weight, and degree of impulsion which accomplishes his purpose. A series of brief, accurate memoranda, corrected daily, enables him to frame for himself a sort of psychological tablet whereon he notes down and sums up, in an almost numerical valuation, the mental and moral dispositions, characters, faculties, passions, and aptitudes, the strong or weak points, of the innumerable human beings, near or remote, on whom he acts.
Let us try for a moment to form some idea of the grasp and ca- pacity of this intellect ; we should probably have to recur to Caesar to find its counterpart ; but, for lack of documents, we have nothing of Caesar but general features — a summary outline ; of Napoleon we have, besides the perfect outline, the features in detail. Read his correspondence, day by day, then chapter by chapter ; for example, in 1806, after the Battle of Austerlitz, or, still later, in 1809, after his return from Spain, up to the peace of Vienna ; whatever our tech- nical shortcomings may be, we shall find that his mind, in its com- prehensiveness and amplitude, largely surpasses all known or even credible proportions.
He has mentally within him three principal atlases, always at hand, each composed of “ about twenty note-books,” each distinct and each regularly posted up. The first one is military, forming a vast collection of topographical charts as minute as those of an itat-niajor, with detailed plans of every stronghold, with specific in-
i6o
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dications and the local distribution of all forces on sea and on land — crews, regiments, batteries, arsenals, storehouses, present and future supplies of men, horses, vehicles, arms, munitions, food, and cloth- ing. The second is civil, and may be compared with the heavy, thick volumes published every year, in which we read the state of the budget, and comprehend, first, the innumerable items of receipt and expenditure, ordinary and extraordinary, internal taxes, foreign contributions, the products of domains in France and out of France, the fiscal services, pensions, public works, and the rest ; next, all administrative statistics, the hierarchy of functions and functionaries, senators, deputies, ministers, prefects, bishops, professors, judges, and those under their orders, each where he resides, with his rank, juris- diction, and salary. The third is a vast biographical and moral dic- tionary, in which, as in the pigeon-holes of the Chief of Police, each notable personage and local group, each professional or social body, and even each population, has its label, along with a brief note on its situation, needs, and antecedents, and, therefore, its demonstrated character, eventual disposition, and probable conduct. Each label, card, or strip of paper has its summing-up ; all these partial summa- ries, methodically classified, terminate in totals, and the totals of the three atlases are combined together, so as to furnish their possessor with an estimate of his disposable forces. Now, in 1809, however full these atlases have become, they are clearly imprinted on Na- poleon’s mind ; he knows not only the total and the partial sum- maries, but also the slightest details ; he reads them readily and at ever)'^ hour ; he comprehends in a mass, and in all particulars, the various nations he governs directly, or through some one else ; that is to say, 60,000,000 of men, the different countries he has con- quered or overrun, consisting of 70,000 square miles. On the psychological and moral atlas, besides a primitive omission which he never will supply, because this is a characteristic trait, there are some estimates which are wrong, especially with regard to the Pope and to Catholic consciences ; in like manner he rates the energy of national sentiment in Spain and Germany too low ; he rates too high his own prestige in France and, in the countries an- nexed to her, the balance of confidence and zeal on which he may rely ; but these errors are rather the product of his will than of his intelligence ; he forges them ; left to himself his good sense would rest infallible. As to the other two atlases, the topographical and the military, they are as complete and as exact as ever ; it is in vain
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that the reality which they present to him has become swollen and complex ; however monstrous at this date, they correspond to it in their fulness and precision, trait for trait.
But this mass of notations forms only the smallest portion of the mental population which fills this immense brain; on the idea he has of the real, germinate and swarm his conceptions of the possible. Without these conceptions there would be no way to handle and transform things, and that he did handle and transform them we all know. Before acting, his plan is decided on, and if this plan is adopted, it is one among several others, after examining, comparing, and giving it the preference ; he has, consequently, conceived the others. Behind each combination he has adopted we detect those he has rejected. It is certain that among his diverse faculties, how- ever great, that of the constructive imagination is the most powerful. At the very beginning we feel its heat and boiling intensity beneath the coolness and rigidity of his technical and positive instructions.
“When I arrange a military plan,” said he to Roederer, "no man is more pusillanimous than I am. I magnify to myself all the dangers and all the evils that are possible under the circumstances. I am in a state of agitation that is really painful. But this does not prevent me from appearing quite composed to people around me ; lam like a girl giving birth to a child."
He thus grows passionate in the throes of the creator, absorbed with his creation that is to come ; he already anticipates and delights in occupying his imaginary edifice. “ General,” said Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre to him, one day, “you are building behind a scaffolding which you will take down when you have done with it.” “Yes, madame, that’s it,” replied Bonaparte; “you are right. I am always living two years in advance.” His response came with “ in- credible vivacity,” as if an eruption, the outburst of a spirit affected in its inmost fibre. Accordingly, on this side, the power, the rapidity, the fecundity, the play, and the jet of his thought seem immeasurable ; what he has done is astonishing, but what he has undertaken is much more so ; and whatever he may have undertaken is far surpassed by what he has imagined ; however vigorous his practical faculty, his poetical faculty is stronger; it is even too vigor- ous for a statesman ; its grandeur is exaggerated into enormity, and its enormity degenerates into madness. In Italy, after the i8th of Fructidor, he said to Bourrienne :
" Europe is a molehill ; never have there been great empires and great revolu- tions, except in the Orient with its 600,000,000 of men.”
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The following year, at St. Jean d’Acre, on the eve of the last as- sault, he added :
“ If I succeed I shall find in the town the pacha’s treasure and arms for 300,000 men. I shall stir up and arm all Syria. ... I shall march on Damascus and Aleppo ; as I advance in the country I shall increase my army with the discontented. I shall proclaim to the people the abolition of slavery, and of the tyrannical govern- ment of the pachas. I shall reach Constantinople with armed masses. I shall overthrow the Turkish Empire ; I shall found in the East a new and grand empire, which will fix my place with posterity, and perhaps I will return to Paris by the way of Adrianople, or by Vienna, after having annihilated the house of Austria.”
Become consul, and then emperor, he often recurs to this happy period, when, “ rid of the restraints of a troublesome civilization,” he could imagine at will and construct at pleasure.
" I created a religion ; I saw myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an ele- phant, with a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran, which I composed to suit myself.”
Confined to Europe, he thinks, after 1804, that he will reorganize Charlemagne’s empire.
“The French Empire will become the mother country of other sovereignties. . . . I mean that every king in Europe shall built a grand palace at Paris for
his own use ; on the coronation of the Emperor of the French these kings will come and occupy it ; they will grace this imposing ceremony with their presence, and honor it with their salutations. The Pope will be there ; he came to the first one ; he must necessarily return to Paris, and fix himself there permanently. Where could the Holy See be better off than in the new capital of Christianity, under Na- poleon, heir to Charlemagne, and temporal sovereign of the Sovereign Pontiff? Through the temporal the emperor will control the spiritual, and through the Pope, consciences.”
In November, 1811, in a high state of excitement, he says to De Pradt :
“ In five years I shall be master of the world ; only Russia will remain, but I will crush her. . . . Paris will extend out to St. Cloud.”
To render Paris the physical capital of Europe is, through his own confession, “ one of his constant dreams.”
" I would like to see her a city of two, three, four millions of inhabitants, some- thing fabulous, colossal, unknown down to our day, and its public establishments adequate to its population. . . . Archimedes proposed to lift the world if he
could be allowed to place his lever ; for myself, I would change it wherever I could be allowed to place my energy, perseverance, and budgets.”
This, at all events, he believes; for however lofty and badly sup-
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ported the next story of his structure may be, he has always ready a new story, loftier and more unsteady, to put above it. A few months before launching himself, with all Europe at his back, against Russia, he said to Narbonne :
“ After all, my dear sir, this long road is the road to India. Alexander started as far off as Moscow to reach the Ganges ; I said this to myself after St. Jean d’Acre. ... To reach England to-day I need the extremity of Europe, from which to take Asia in the rear. . . . Suppose Moscow taken, Russia subdued,
the czar reconciled, or dead through some court conspiracy, perhaps another and dependent throne, and tell me whether it is not possible for a French army, with its auxiliaries, setting out from Tiflis, to get as far as the Ganges, where it needs only a thrust of the French sword to bring down the whole framework of that In- dian commercial grandeur. It would be the gigantic expedition of the nineteenth century, I admit, but practicable. Through it France, at one stroke, would secure the independence of the West and the freedom of the seas.”
While uttering this his eyes shine with strange brilliancy, and he keeps on accumulating motive after motive, calculating obstacles, means, and chances ; the inspiration is under full headway, and he gives himself up to it. The master faculty finds itself suddenly free, and it takes flight ; the artist, encased in politics, escapes from his trammels ; he is creating out of the ideal and the impossible. We take him for what he is, a posthumous brother of Dante and Michael Angelo ; in the clear outlines of his vision, in the intensity, the co- herency, and the onward logic of his reverie, in the profundity of his meditations, in the superhuman grandeur of his conceptions, he is, indeed, their fellow and their equal. His genius is of the same stature and the same structure ; he is one of the three sovereign minds of the Italian Renaissance. Only, while the first two operate on paper and on marble, the latter operates on the living being, on the sensitive and suffering flesh of humanity.
Henri Taine,
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE
TARIFF.
A TARIFF, in SO far as it is intended to be protective, is a tax levied on the community to indemnify a certain number of persons for their losses in carrying on certain kinds of business ; or, rather, if any one likes it better, to furnish them with a fair profit in certain kinds of business. There is, perhaps, no tax which may not be properly submitted to the popular judgment, if it be submitted in its true shape, without disguise. This requires a distinct defini- tion both of its object and of its amount. This rule is rigidly applied to all taxes except the protective tax. It is applied rigidly in all appropriations for the expenses of the Government, such as the salaries of its civil and military servants, the cost of the navy, of fortifications, of the river and harbor improvements, of the public buildings, of subventions to railroads, and of the redemption of the public debt. For none of these things is an appropriation either left indefinite in amount or hidden away in another for entirely different objects. But in voting funds for the creation or promo- tion of certain branches of industry, the rule is totally disregarded.
In the first place, the money levied on the tax-payer for this purpose is mixed up with the money levied for the general expenses of the Government. How much of the taxes goes for the protec- tion of native industry is never known or specified, and no pains are taken to find it out. One may really approve of protective tax, and yet be totally unable to approve of any tax levied in this way for any purpose whatever. Granting that it is expedient for the Government to spend money in the maintenance or the promo- tion of the iron manufacture, for example, it must be expedient, also, for the public to know the exact amount which it costs annually; just as it is expedient that it should know exactly how much the army and navy costs, or how much the annual improve- ment of rivers and harbors costs. No view, however broad, of the province of government can furnish an excuse for concealing the expense of any great national undertaking. The question “ how much,” is a question which every tax-payer has a right to ask, as
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 16$
regards all branches of the public expenditure, and which every Secretary of the Treasury ought to be able to answer. There is not a single good reason for concealing the national expenditure in protec- tion, any more than for concealing the national expenditure in any- thing else. But there is no trace of this expenditure in the national accounts. Everybody knows it must be large, but nobody knows how large. The only sources of information on this subject are the guesses made in free-trade books and pamphlets, which, of course, possess but little authority in the popular eye. The debates be- tween free-traders and protectionists on this point are the most bewildering part of the controversy. Every now and then a free- trader, home or foreign, undertakes to foot up the amount of the contributions which American consumers, and especially the farm- ers, make to the maintenance of the various branches of domestic industry. Such attempts always excite great indignation among protectionists. A pamphlet containing calculations of this sort, by an Englishman named Montgredien, was published in this country a few years ago, and has been denounced by various protectionist writers with great bitterness, as if it were a sort of impertinent prying into somebody’s private affairs. I dare say it was incorrect. I do not, indeed, see how such calculations can come anywhere near correctness. But what a curious state of mind about the national finances that is, which treats as illicit all efforts to discover the exact amount of the national outlay, on what is admittedly an object of the highest national importance.
Next, it must be said that any fund of large amount, raised and distributed in this way, must of necessity prove a corruption fund. By this I do not mean a fund distributed in bribes to individuals or organizations, but a fund the existence of which must be constantly present to the mind of the lazy, the improvident, or incompetent, as something to fall back on if the worst come to the worst. Sup. pose the national appropriations for the purpose of protecting manu- facturing industry were made in the ordinary way by a distinct vote of Congress ; were made, for instance, as the appropriations for the promotion of the carrying trade — the steamship subsidies, as they are called — are made, in the shape of an annual maximum sum. Suppose this sum were paid over to the corporations, or individuals, engaged in each manufacture, on their giving proof that they were carrying on a bona fide business. Suppose that to each were given as much as would meet the loss, as shown by his books, incurred by
1 66 SOA/E POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.
him in competing with foreigners in the home markets. I am not advocating this. Any one can see its difficulties. I acknowledge how much less troublesome it is to protect by levying duties on foreign goods at the port of entry. But the political objections to the protective system, as now administered, cannot be made so clear in any way as by inquiring how the plan of distributing the money directly by the public Treasury would work.
The measure of each manufacturer’s needs would, of course, be the amount lost in his business through foreign competition. It would hardly be possible to restrict the number of participators in the bounty, because one of its great objects would be the multipli- cation of manufactures. We should have to invite as many people as possible to set up mills and furnace.s, and then to come to us for help. But see what an amount of inspection we should need to pre- vent the distribution of the fund becoming a gross job. It would be impossible, for instance, to pay the subsidy or indemnity on a simple statement of the loss sustained. We should have to inquire how the loss was sustained ; whether really by foreign competition, or by lax or inefficient or dishonest methods of doing business ; whether by simple misfortune, or insufficiency of capital, or want of experience. We would never consent that the Treasury should furnish insurance against loss from any cause whatever ; that the same measure should be dealt out to the idle, the improvident, and the slow, as to the industrious, the energetic, and the ingenious. No government would undertake to help in the same degree, through direct sub- sidies, every one who chose to go into the iron or cotton business. It would investigate and discriminate. It would not treat all men’s complaints as equally respectable. Indiscriminate protection, if it were given directly, would speedily be felt to have all the evils of indiscriminate charity. A manufacturer who said, “ I am not able to go on with my business and must have more state aid,” would be met in the same way as a man who said, “ I must have relief, be- cause I have got no money.” The latter, before receiving relief, would surely be asked ; “ Why have you no money ? Is it because you are lazy or because you are unfortunate ? ” In like manner, the manufacturer who demanded more protection, simply because the amount he received was not sufficient to save him from bankruptcy, would be asked: “Why is the amount you receive insufficient? Is it the fault of the market, or your own lack of fitness for the business in which you have engaged ? In the former case you are entitled
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 1^7
to relief. In the latter it would be a waste of the tax-payers’ money, and a waste of your own life, to start you again.”
That such a system could long prevail in any country without damage to the moral constitution of those who were benefited by it, all experience of human nature forbids us to expect. The effect of the possession of money, or of a rich father, on a young professional man, is well known. It is only the men of very strong character who make their mark in spite of it. In all walks of life, indeed, it is generally those who have burnt their bridges who make the stiff est fight. Manufacturers would need to be more than human to make the very best use of their faculties, while knowing that they had in Congress a protector of boundless wealth and indulgence, who, when the allowance was exhausted, asked only one question, namely, how much more was needed?
Looking at the protective system, as it now exists, from the side of legislation, the political objections to it under our form of gov- ernment are still stronger. The only governments fitted to deal with votes of money of an indefinite amount, for an ill-defined purpose, if any be fitted, are governments of the parliamentary type, in which the finances are managed by a responsible minis- ter, and all the appropriations collected in a systematic whole called the budget. Even in such hands, the support of industry, through indirect taxation, is open to immense abuse. But such a minis- ter, responsible to the public for the whole financial system, can make some attempt to reconcile the conflicting claims of the great industries. Under our system — the presidential system, as it is called — nobody in particular is responsible for the financial scheme of the year. There is, in fact, no official scheme, in the strict sense of the term, submitted to Congress. The Secretary of the Treasury puts into his report a mass of multifarious information about the public finances, but the recommendations with which he follows it up are rarely heeded by the Legislature. The real work of what is called in other countries a Minister of Finance, is done by a committee of the House of Representatives, which makes the first draft of the appro- priation bills. But these bills, including the tariff bill, never pass the House in the shape in which they are drawn up, or anything ap- proaching to it. Each member feels himself fully entitled to pro- pose, and, if he can, to carry modifications in them, and many members do carry modifications in them ; so that when a bill is finally passed it is generally impossible for any one, in or out of
1 68 SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.
the House, to say who its author is. And so numerous are the influences which are brought to bear on the framing of it, that the most powerful of them is hardly ever known. The commit- tee is beset by hundreds of manufacturers from all parts of the country, representing every variety of industry, and each claiming to be the final authority on his own subject. Each, too, demands that Congress shall either alter, or shall not alter, the duty on some particular article of foreign importation, and supports his demand with an array of figures, the correctness of which nobody attempts to dispute, if for no other reason, for want of time. Failure to influ- ence the committee, too, rarely discourages any tariff lobbyist. He transfers his labors to the House, and attacks the bill through indi- vidual members, who, being generally much more ignorant of the subject than the members of the committee, fall an easy prey to him. The general result is apt to be that the bill, as finally passed, has but little, if any, resemblance to the bill as it issued from the committee-room. It is often, when examined, found to be some- thing very different in its operation, not only from what its first projectors intended it to be, but from what everybody else at the end thought that it really was. There is hardly a more pitiable spectacle in politics than the vexation and amazement of the coun- try, after a new tariff bill has been passed, over the discovery that nobody can tell what its effect on industry is likely to prove.
There is, however, one other reason of the unfitness of Congress for the proper working of our protective system besides the absence of a responsible ministry charged with the management of the finances. It has been the American policy from the beginning, and a wise policy, to provide, by paying the members, that the legisla- tures of the country shall be a fair representation of the plain people who compose the bulk of the population. The bulk of the popu- lation has but little money, but is keenly alive to the use of the money, and eagerly engaged in the pursuit of it. We send to the Legislature, both State and Federal, men who are generally poor and generally honest when they go there, but not unwilling to be rich if a respectable occasion offers, and are very apt to have their imagination touched by the history and condition of millionaires. In plain and simple communities, such as two or three of the New England States still remain, in which capital is scarce and great capitalists unknown, the relation of these legislators to their con- stituency leaves little to be desired. But in States in which great
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 1 69
accumulations of wealth have taken place, in which great capital- ists frequently have great favors to ask of the State, and in which legislators are constantly called on to deal with measures which contain, or are thought to contain, as Johnson said of the Thrale brewery, “ The potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice,” these relations leave a great deal to be desired. The be- lief of the great capitalists in the venality of legislators in some States, if not in many, is well known, and is one of the most un- pleasant political phenomena of the day. In fact, they make hardly an attempt to conceal it. I have never talked with one who had ever found himself in the power of a State Legislature, or had to ask anything of it which seriously affected his interests, who was afraid to avow his belief that the members were venal, and who did not pre- tend to hold proofs of their venality; who had not stories to tell, not only of his having to pay in order to get what he sought, but of his having to pay in order to escape a tax on what he possessed already. In the New York Legislature, certainly, the practice of introducing bills simply for the purpose of frightening rich men, or “ striking them,” as it is called, is by no means uncommon. Nor is the practice unknown of delaying the passage of measures in which rich men are interested, until they are forced to inquire what it is that stops the way. One hears the same stories of all States in which there are large corporations or great capitalists exposed in any manner to legislative action. Doubtless there is in all this much exaggeration, but any one who is determined to gain his ends with the State government through corruption, is pretty sure, if he cannot succeed, at all events to find many ways of spending money in the attempt.
All this is an illustration of the growth of a political evil which is both novel and peculiar to our time. In all past states of society with which we have any acquaintance, the governing class has been the wealthy class. The military or feudal states were ruled by the men who had the most land. The great commercial re- publics, like Venice and Genoa, were ruled by the men who had the most money. It is in our day and generation, and in this country, that the Government has for the first time, both in its legislative and administrative branches, passed into the hands of the poor, in a rich community. I say the poor in a rich community, for there have been states before now in which poor men filled all the offices ; but these were states, such as some of the Swiss cantons, in which the rulers and ruled were, as regards this world’s goods, pretty much
I/O SOME POLITICAL AEID SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.
on a level, and in which the absence of temptation made it easy for everybody to be virtuous. Here, on the other hand, we are try- ing the novel experiment of governing a commercial community, during a period of rapidly growing wealth, by the instrumentality of men without fortunes. This will probably, hereafter, continue, for better, for worse, to be the democratic way. No other way is pos- sible. The rule of the many must always be the rule of the com- paratively poor, and, in this age of the world, the poor have ceased to be content with their poverty. They seek wealth, and, in times when wealth is accumulating rapidly, they seek it eagerly. We can- not change this’state of things. We must face the problem as it is presented to us. That problem is, I do not hesitate to say, the great problem of government in every civilized country — how to keep wealth in subjection to law ; how to prevent its carrying elec- tions, putting its creatures on the judicial bench, or putting fleets and armies in motion in order to push usurious bonds up to par.
There is only one way of meeting this difficulty. We cannot at will put down corruption by a sudden increase of human virtue. In other words, we cannot protect legislators against wealthy specula- tors, by making them either suddenly purer, or more contented. The way to arm them against temptation is to leave them as little as possible to sell of the things which capitalists are eager to buy.
I do not mean to say that the tariff has produced, or is produc- ing, definite, ascertainable, or provable corruption in Congress ; that is, that manufacturers go down to Washington and pay members for raising the duty on this, or not lowering it on that. But I do say that the state of things is vicious through which Congress has the chance every year of increasing or lessening the incomes of thousands of rich men, of threatening to ruin great industrial enterprises or largely to increase their profits, and this through changes in legisla- tion so slight as not to be perceptible to the great mass of the public, yet so intricate as to be comprehensible only to a small portion of it. Every time the tariff comes under discussion — and it comes under it every year — hundreds of wealthy corporations or individuals either fear a loss or expect a gain. This puts every member of Congress in the position toward them of a possible enemy or a possible benefactor; in the one case to be bought off, in the other to be re- warded. The lobby which looks after the tariff every winter in the protectionists’ interest is not composed of speculative economists, occupied with the effect of legislation on the general weal. It is
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OP THE TARIFF. I/I
composed of shrewd, practical business men, engaged in procuring or hindering legislation which will increase or diminish their bank account by an amount which they can readily figure out, and which, if called on, they freely submit to the committees.
The protectionist answer to much of what is said with regard to the changeableness of congressional policy about the tariff is, chiefly, that if the tariff were not attacked incessantly by free-traders and their allies, in one disguise or another, these changes would never take place. If, in short, the people who are hostile to the protective sys- tem would refrain from criticising the tariff in which it is embodied, there would be as much stability in the policy of the Government with regard to import duties as any one could desire. Unfortu- nately, however, tariffs have to be made for the community, such as it is, and not as protectionists would desire to see it. There has always been in this country a considerable body of persons who are opposed to any protection at all ; there is another body, also con- siderable, opposed to high protection. As long as speech is free they will continue to exert an influence, more or less pronounced, upon Congress and the voters. If they do not always have their way in legislation, they are always able, at every election, to diffuse among manufacturers the fear that they will have it. The effect of this fear on business is, manufacturers say, almost as pre- judicial as actual legislation.
The problem which protectionists have to solve, therefore, touch- ing the relations of the Government to industry in this country, would seem to be the production of a tariff which nobody will at- tack— a very difficult task, we must all admit, if it is to be such a tariff as extreme protectionists really desire. As long as there ex- ists, about the amount of protection needed, the doubt and mys- tery which we now witness ; as long as the classes for whose protec- tion the tariff is intended are as numerous and as clamorous as they now are, it will be impossible to satisfy them all by any protective tariff whatever. There is only one rule known to us by which a tariff can really be measured and defended. If the principle of rais- ing duties for revenue only were once adopted, every one would know at a glance how high the tariff ought to be. There might be disputes about the distribution of its burdens among different com- modities, but there would be none about the sum it ought to bring in. If there were in any year a surplus, every one would agree that the tariff ought to be lowered. If there were a deficit, every one
1/2 SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.
would agree that it ought to be raised. We should thus, at least, get rid of the perennial contention about the weight of the duties, and we should no longer be dependent for stability on the wisdom of Congress.
Now let me^ consider another, and, from a social point of view, perhaps the most important, aspect of the tariff question. Can any one find, in the work of any American author, or in the speech of any American orator — I mean, of the free States — prior to the civil war, any intimation that we should have, fully developed on Ameri- can soil, within the present century, what has long been known in Europe as " the labor question ”? Of course, we can all recall that sometime famous letter of Lord Macaulay’s, in which he predicted the speedy triumph in this country of poverty over property, and the periodical division among the have-nots of the goods and chat- tels of the haves. But some of us can remember, too, the mocking and proud incredulity with which that dismal prediction was re- ceived. He was told, in hundreds of newspaper articles, that Euro- pean experience furnished no proper materials for forecasting the economical future of the United States; that no such division of classes as he foresaw could take place here. I do not need to say that his predictions have not been fulfilled, and are never likely to be. I am one of those, too, who believe firmly that property will always, in every country, be able to take care of itself. It will al- ways have the superiority in physical force, as well as in intelli- gence, on its side. The great bulk of the population is, in every country, and, above all, in this, composed of those who have prop- erty or expect to have it ; and so it will always be, as long as our civilization lasts. But certainly, all the answers to Macaulay have not stood the test of time and experience. » In i860 nobody here was seriously troubled by the condition or expectations of the working classes. In fact, Americans were not in the habit of think- ing of working-men as a class at all. An American citizen who wrought with his hands in any calling was looked on, like other American citizens, as a man who had his fortunes in his own keep- ing, and whose judgment alone decided in what manner they could be improved. Nobody thought of him as being in a special degree the prot^g^ of the State. In fact, the idea that he had a special and peculiar claim on State protection was generally treated as a piece of Gallic folly, over which Anglo-Saxons could well afford to smile. There was no mention of the free laborer in political platforms at
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 173
that day, except as an illustration to Southern slave-holders of the blessings of which their pride and folly deprived their own society.
We have changed all this very much. Under the stimulation of the war tariff, not only has there been an enormous amount of capital invested in industrial enterprises of various sorts ; not only have mills and furnaces and mines and protected iterests of all sorts greatly multiplied, but there has appeared in great force, and for the first time on American soil, the dependent. State-managed laborer of Europe, who declines to take care of himself in the old American fashion. When he is out of work, or does not like his work, he looks about, and asks his fellow-citizens sullenly, if not menacingly, what they are going to do about it. He has brought with him, too, what is called “ the labor problem,” probably the most un-American of all the problems which American society has to work over to-day. The American pulpit and the American press are now hammering away at it steadily. Commissions, both State and Federal, are nearly every year appointed to collect facts bearing on it, and working-men are invited to come before them and explain it. Popular attention to it is stimulated by occasional riots and huge strikes, in which thousands take part, and which every now and then strain to the uttermost the State powers of protecting life and property. Its leading features are, however, well known. The rate of wages paid in the protective industries is seldom as high as working-men think they ought to have, and is often, if not most of the time, greater than their employers think they can afford to pay. And then employment in these industries is somewhat precarious. Every now and then there is a reduction, or a lock-out, simply be- cause the protected market is not good enough. In fact, we have to-day before our eyes, at all the great centres of industry, as they are called at the mills and mines and furnaces — most of the phe- nomena which “the pauper labor of Europe” now furnishes for the perplexity of European statesmen and philanthropists. Nor must I be told that this is an exceptional state of things, arising out of a brief and transient depression of industry. It has lasted from 1873, with a very brief interval of two years, until the present year.
Now, this labor problem, which so many statesmen and philan- thropists and economists are trying their teeth on, is every day made more difficult, every day further removed from solution, by that fatal lesson of government responsibility for the condition of
1/4 SOM£ POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.
a particular class of a community, which every believer in high tariffs, every manufacturer who depends on the tariff, is compelled to preach. Of all the novelties which the last twenty-five years have introduced into American politics and society, decidedly the most dangerous is the practice of telling large bodies of ignorant and excitable voters at every election that their daily bread depends not on their own capacity or industry or ingenuity, or on the capa- city or industry or ingenuity of their employers, but on the good- will of the Legislature, or, worse still, on the good-will of the Ad- ministration. In other words, the “ tariff issue,” as it is called in every canvass, is an issue filled with the seeds of social trouble and perplexity. Anything less American and more imperialist than the regular quadrennial proclamation that if the presidential elec- tion results in a certain way the foundations will be knocked from under American industry, the factories closed, and the workers thrown out of employment, could hardly be conceived. And yet, as long as a large number of industries exist through the tariff, and could not exist without it, and men’s eyes are turned, whenever there is a depression in business, not to the market of the world or to the resources of their own ingenuity, but to the lobbies of the Capitol, this announcement is inevitable. Every canvass thus be- comes a lesson in dependence on the State. It becomes a sort of formal acknowledgment by the leading men of both political par- ties that one class of the community, at least, is composed of gov- ernmental protdg^s ; for the party which denies that its coming into power will derange industry makes this acknowledgment, just as effectually as the party which brings the charge.
The truth is, that the first field ever offered for seeing what the freedom of the individual could accomplish, in the art of growing rich and of diversifying industry, was offered on this continent. It was blessed with the greatest variety of soil and climate, with the finest ports and harbors, with the greatest extent of inland naviga- tion, with the richest supply of minerals, of any country in the world. The population was singularly daring, hardy, ingenious, and self-reli- ant, and untrammelled by feudal tradition. That opportunity has, under the protective system, been temporarily allowed to slip away. The old European path has been entered on, under the influence of the old European motives ; the belief that gold is the only wealth ; that, in trading with a foreigner, unless you sell him more in specie value than he sells you, you lose by the transaction ; that diversity
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 1/5
of industry being necessary to sound progress, diversity of individual tastes, bent, and capacity cannot be depended on to produce it ; that manufactures being necessary to make the nation independent of foreigners in time of war, individual energy and sagacity cannot be trusted to create them.
The result is that we have, during the last quarter of a century, deliberately resorted to the policy of forcing capital into channels into which it did not naturally flow. We thus have supplied our- selves with manufactures on a large scale, but in doing so we have brought society in most of the large towns, in the East, at least, back to the old European model, divided largely into two classes, the one great capitalists, the other day laborers, living from hand to mouth, and dependent for their bread and butter on the constant mainte- nance by the Government of artificial means of support. Agriculture has in this way been destroyed in some of the Eastern States, and, what is worse, so has commerce.
Had individuals in America been left to their own devices in the matter of building up manufactures, it is possible that the gross pro- duction of the country in many branches would have been less than it is now ; but it is very certain that American society would have been in a healthier condition, and American industry would have been “taken out of politics,” or, rather, would never have got into it. An agricultural population, such as that of the Northern States sixty years ago, was sure not to confine itself to one field of indus- try exclusively. Enterprise and activity, love of work and love of trying all kinds of work, were as marked features of the national character then as they are now. The American population could boast of much greater superiority over the European population than it can now. There was sure, therefore, to have been a constant overflow from the farms of the most quick-witted, sharp-sighted, and enterprising men of the community, for the creation of new manu- factures. They would have toiled, contrived, invented, copied, until they had brought into requisition and turned to account — as, in fact, they did to a considerable extent in colonial days — one by one, all the resources of the country, all its advantages over other coun- tries in climate, soil, water-power, in minerals, or mental or moral force. Whatever manufactures were thus built up, too, would have been built up forever. They would have needed no hothouse legis- lation to save them. They would have flourished as naturally and could have been counted on with as much certainty as the wheat
17^ SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OP THE TARIFF.
crop or the corn crop. Instead of being a constant source of uncer- tainty and anxiety and legislative corruption, they would have been one of the main-stays of our social and political system. American manufactures would then, in short, have been the legiti- mate outgrowth of American agriculture. They would have grown as it grew, in just and true relations to it. They would have ab- sorbed steadily and comfortably its surplus population, and the American ideas of man’s capacity, value, and needs would have reigned in the regulation of the new industry.
The present state of things is one which no thinking man can contemplate without concern. If the protectionist policy is per- sisted in, the process of assimilating American society to that of Europe must go on. The accumulation of capital in the hands of comparatively few individuals and corporations must continue and increase. Larger and larger masses of the population must every day be reduced to the condition of day laborers, living from hand to mouth on fixed wages, contracting more and more the habit of look- ing on their vote simply as a mode of raising or lowering their wages, and, what is worse than all, learning to consider themselves a class apart, with rights and interests opposed to, or different from, those of the rest of the community.
What, then, is to be done by way of remedy? Nothing can be done suddenly ; much can be done slowly. We must retrace our steps by degrees, by taking the duties off raw materials, so as to enable those manufactures which are nearly able to go alone, to get out of the habit of dependence on legislation, and to go forth into all the markets of the world without fear and with a manly heart. We must deprive those manufactures which are able to go alone already of the protection which they now receive, as the reward of log-rolling in Congress, in aid of those still weaker than themselves. And we must finally, if it be possible, by a persistent progress in the direction of a truly natural state of things, prepare both laborers and employers for that real independence of foreigners, which is the result, simply and solely, of native superiority, either in energy or industry or inventiveness or in natural advantages.
E. L. Godkin.
THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.
Eloquence may be defined to be the utterance of convictions or emotions in such a way as to produce corresponding convictions or emotions in others ; and in the history of the world it has been one of the most powerful agencies for the advancement of liberty, civili- zation, and religion. It existed before there could be any analysis of its nature, or any rules for its exercise. Just as there was speech before there could be grammar, and men reasoned before there could be any science of logic, so there were orators before eloquence could be made itself an object of study, or any rules could be laid down for the guidance of those who desired to excel in its manifes- tation. Judah knew nothing, presumably, at least, either of logic or of rhetoric, and the laws of elocution, we may believe, were utterly undreamed of by him; yet the pleading pathos of his intercession for Benjamin won its way to the heart of Joseph, and to this day sends a responsive thrill through every one who reads it with attention.
But though eloquence existed thus, before it could be analyzed, we must not suppose that the analysis of it is of no importance. Anatomy is not life, but it has taught many things which enable men to live more healthily; and, in the same way, though the analysis of eloquence is not eloquence, it may yet be of great practical service to those who are called to make verbal appeals on any subject to their fellow-men. Looking, then, thus at eloquence, and seeking to resolve it into its elements, we find this tripartite division — namely, matter, manner, and spirit. The matter is the argument or substance of the subject treated, and includes all those things which are comprised in the science which is technically known as logic ; such as invention, reasoning, arrangement, the exposure of fallacies, and the like. The manner comprehends external things, such as style, illustration, and all that comes under the head of rhetoric, together with appropriate utterance, in suiting the tone and gesture to the thought, and all the details which belong to the department of elocution. The spirit is that in the man himself, which lifts the matter and the manner up for its own purposes, fuses them into a white heat in its own glowing
forge, and runs them into the mould of the occasion so that the result 12
178
THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.
is attained, in an address which carries with it the intellectual con- viction, the prompt decision, and the fervid enthusiasm of all who hear. Of these three, thus described, the spirit is by far the most important, and we must seek for the essence of eloquence more especially in that. You may have the matter clearly arranged and cogently expressed, and you may have the manner possessed of the negative quality of faultlessness, yet there may be no eloquence. While, again, there have been cases in which the matter has been crude and ill-digested, and the manner rough, uncouth, and almost ludicrous, but both of these have been lost sight of, as the speaker bore everything before him on the torrent of resistless earnestness and impetuosity. The proof of a thing is in its power ; and there- fore, with such facts before us, we are forced to conclude that we must seek for the essentials of eloquence mainly in that spirit, which gains its object, even when the matter and the manner are compara- tively neglected or disregarded.
But while we make that admission, we are very far indeed from alleging that these other things are of no importance whatever. Because they are not of the essence of eloquence it does not by any means follow that they have nothing to do with it. On the contrary, if, without regard to them^ certain men have produced such astound- ing effects by their words, we may well ask how much more they might have accomplished if they had been thoroughly trained in logic, rhetoric, and elocution, so as to have been able to call up at will, and, as it were, automatically, all the advantages which thorough discipline in these departments, at the proper stage in their deve- lopment, would have secured. Just here, indeed, comes in the bene- fit of preliminary training in the departments of logic, rhetoric, and elocution, before one enters upon the career either of the minister, the statesman, or the barrister. It gives opportunity for the cultiva- tion of those things which may make true eloquence more effective, and the absence of which may mar the force of what otherwise would be the most successful oratory ; and it does so at a time when the mastery of them may become so thorough, so much a part of the man himself, that he will act upon them with the uncon- sciousness that is characteristic of habit. “ How can people remem- ber to turn out their toes at every step all their lives?” was the question of a little fellow to his mother, when she was seeking to impress upon him the duty of attending to his “walk ” ; and he had to be told that they do not remember, but that they get into such a
THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.
179
strong habit of doing what she recommended, that it would be un- natural for them to do otherwise. But it is quite similar in matters of more importance ; so it is only when the student is caught early enough, and trained thoroughly enough, that the right matter and manner of discourse will become habitual with him, and he will be able to use all the finest qualities of style and all the best graces of elocution unconsciously, and as matters of course ; and it is only then that they will be of the highest service to him.
Mark the qualifications, however. He must be caught early enough. Attention to these things, as ends in themselves, will do him grievous harm at a later stage in his history ; when, for example, he is in the thick of his duties as a preacher and pastor, or in the midst of multitudinous engagements at the bar. The effect then will be to spoil nature, while yet he never can acquire such ease as to make art natural. It will make him stilted, self-conscious, and manneristic. If we wished to injure a preacher who is in actual work, one very sure way of doing so would be to set him, then, to the study of these things ; but, on the other hand, if we desired to prepare a young man for doing effective service as a speaker, we should take care that while he is as yet in his formative stage, and, so to speak, in the gristle, with his habits yet to be acquired, he should be committed to the care of a wise teacher, to learn the arts of reasoning and com- position; and, if possible, to that of a still wiser teacher, to take lessons in elocution. Dr. Thomas Guthrie tells us that during his student life in Edinburgh he “attended elocution classes winter after winter, walking across half the city and more, fair night and foul, and not getting back to his lodging till about half-past ten. There he learned to find out and correct many acquired and more or less awk- ward defects in gesture ; to be, in fact, natural ; to acquire a command over his voice so as to suit its force and emphasis to the sense, and to modulate it so as to express the feelings, whether of surprise or grief, or indignation or pity. ” * Thus these acquirements became part and parcel of himself. He used them with just as little con- sciousness of deliberate purpose and intention at the moment, as one uses his limbs in walking or his tongue in articulation, and every one who ever listened to his sermons from the pulpit, or his speeches from the platform, will attest that they lent a charm even to his eloquence.
♦ Autobiography and Memoir of Thomas Guthrie, Vol. I., p. 158.
l8o the essentials of eloquence.
Again, our student must be trained thoroughly enough. In these two departments of the matter and the manner of eloquence, it is very specially true that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” It will, in fact, be worse than none ; for it will be just enough to make the man conscious that he must attend particularly to cer- tain things, and that will be fatal to the highest eloquence. In the heat of composition or of speech everything of that subordinate sort must come so spontaneously that special attention is not diverted to them, from the main purpose which the orator has in view. At such a time his motto must be “This one thing I do.” He must be emptied and lost and swallowed up in his purpose to carry the con- victions of his audience with him, on the great theme which he is treating. Self in every form must drop out of his consciousness, for the instant that he is recalled to the recollection of himself his power departs, and he begins to flounder and to fail. If one hesitates as to the correct spelling of a word he is almost sure to spell it wrongly ; but those which he spells unconsciously, as he writes, he generally spells correctly. In like manner, if the rules of logic or rhetoric or elocution are ever recalled to the consciousness of a man when he is speaking, he will miss the mark which most of all he desired to strike. A great popular orator some time ago told us that a friend, in the kindest possible manner, remonstrated with him in regard to a pe- culiarly infelicitous gesture of which he seemed, at some particular parts of his discourse, to be specially fond ; and that on the next oc- casion when he discovered that he was about to use it, and tried to do without it, the effect was that in his eagerness to keep from yielding to his impulse he lost his point completely, and failed to impress it on his audience. So let all who are prosecuting the study of elocution — and we rejoice to know that in so many of our colleges there is special provision made for studying it — see that they train themselves so thoroughly in it that they may conform to its rules automatically ; for, as in morals, whenever a man thinks him- self humble then is the moment of his most insidious pride, so in eloquence, whenever a speaker becomes conscious in any measure of himself, and is led to think of how he is doing that which he is speak- ing, or how he is to do that which is still before him, he loses that w’hich, most of all, the true orator desires to attain. But when one has so completely mastered the principles of logic, rhetoric, and elocution that he acts upon them without thinking either of them or of himself, then the manner is to the matter as the powder is to the
THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE. l8l
ball, and the spirit is the spark by which the might that was in the powder is exploded for the propulsion of the ball, and sends it with tremendous impact against the wall of the fortress which he is seek- ing to bombard.
But now we come face to face with the question. What is that spirit which is thus identical with the soul of eloquence ? And here it must be confessed that it is much more easy to propose such an inquiry than it is to give to it a distinct or satisfactory reply. It is like asking “ What is life? ” and any answer which we can give may be just as vague and disappointing as that of the Teutonic biologist when, in reply to the question just named, he said, “ Life — Life — Life is the ego of the organism. ” Anatomy cannot seize life ; science cannot produce it, or define it ; all any one can do is to recognize it, nourish it, and train it. Just so the spirit of eloquence cannot be caught by any analysis ; neither can it be conferred by any teacher. All we can do with it is to recognize, foster, educate, and direct it so as to fit its possessor for taking advantage of the opportunities that may come to him, and do thereby the service which God has fitted him to render to his generation.
But though we cannot distinctly define it, though we cannot give material expression to that which is in itself impalpable as an essence, we may yet, by the help of analogy, get some idea of its nature. It is that in the man which enables him to see the occasion for his utterance, and which inspires him to say the fitting word to meet that occasion. It is a natural aptitude for the perception of the “ time to speak, ” combined with a spontaneous and irresistible im- pulse to seize that time, and a special gift for laying hold of the right things to meet the requirements of the occasion. It corresponds in the orator to genius in the poet or the painter ; or to that in the mathematician which draws him to his science, and enables him to rise to eminence therein. It is thus, in its origin, a special endow- ment from God, and does not belong to every man. All are not orators, and all cannot be orators, any more than all can be poets, or sculptors, or musicians, or metaphysicians. Where the gift exists it may be cultivated or developed. But it cannot be imparted. In a most important sense orator nascitur ; and there are some men who never could be eloquent, just as there are others who could never produce a painting. You might teach them to draw and show them how to use the brush : but they could never do anything that would give them a claim to be ranked among artists. Opie was, perhaps, a
1 82 THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.
little too sarcastic, when, to one who said,“ Pray, may I ask what you mix your colors with,” he answered, “With brains, sir”; and Mozart was similarly satirical to a youth who came asking him how he was to begin musical composition, when he told him to “ Wait.” “ But,” said his visitor, “you composed much earlier.” “ True,” was the re- ply, “ but then I asked nobody about it.” So, again, we all remember the story told by Dr. John Brown,* concerning Sir Joshua Rey- nolds, to this effect : “ He was taken by a friend to see a picture. He was anxious to admire it, and he looked over it with a keen and careful, but favorable eye. ‘ Capital composition, correct drawing ; the color, tone, chiaroscuro excellent, but it wants — it wants, that^ snap- ping his fingers ” ; and, wanting that, though it had everything else, it was worth nothing. Now these three great men, each in his own way, thus indicated that genius for painting or music is needed by those who would attain to real excellence in either. And the same is true of eloquence. There must be in the man a genius for oratory, else he will never be an orator. The inventor indicates his bent or bias, even in his earliest years, by his mechanical contrivances. Faraday’s home-made electrical machine, when he was a bookseller’s apprentice, was the prophecy of his future greatness in electro-magnetism. The boy Stephenson’s clay engines and Liliputian mills, set up in the small streams running into Dewley Bog, were the predecessors of his loco- motive. And Pope tells us that even as a child he “ lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.” Now, precisely in the same way, the genius for eloquence shows itself even in earliest years, and Daniel Webster had no truer triumph in his later life than that which he achieved in his boyhood, when his father yielded to the power of his plea for the captive rodent, and said, “ Zeke, let that woodchuck go! ” Here, then, in that natural aptitude for the use of argument and appeal in arti- culate speech, and the impulse to employ it on every fit occasion, which will show themselves in the sports of boyhood or in the dis- cussions of the debating society, if they can reveal themselves no- where else, we have the evidence of the possession of that which is akin to what Reynolds missed in the picture and Mozart in the inquirer, namely, the genius for eloquence, without which all else is vain. If one has that, then let him go on in the study of oratory, for that will dominate all his acquirements, and mould them all to its purpose ; but without that, he may become a “ neat speaker,” able
* Hora Subseciva, 1st series, p. i66.
THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE. 1 83
to express his meaning fluently, correctly, even perhaps elegantly, but nothing more. Life must precede organization ; but organiza- tion will not produce life. Nay, rather it is life that organizes. So training will not make an orator ; but a genius for oratory will ma- nipulate and utilize the training and make the man truly eloquent.
Taking, now, another step forward, and presuming that one has this special gift, what more is required for the highest eloquence ? I answer, in the first place, a good character. The ancient rhetori- cian laid it down as a fundamental principle that the orator must be a good man ; and we are conscious that any suspicion which we have of a speaker’s character or sincerity takes a large discount from the power of his words. Just here, indeed, we come upon a clear distinction between eloquence and music, painting, sculpture, or others of what are called the “ fine arts.” Incidentally, indeed, and unconsciously, the flaw in the man, in any department, will reveal itself in his work, but you can abstract the picture or the statue from the artist, and admire or the reverse, without any regard to his moral standing in the community. It is different, however, with the orator. You cannot separate the speech from the speaker. The painting stands upon its own merits, and is judged simply and solely as a work of art. But the oration needs character behind it, to make it powerful in the highest degree. Character gives force even to the utterances of a stammering tongue, while the lack of it will make the most glowing appeals comparatively ineffective. If there be any reasonable ground for believing that the speaker is insincere or im- moral, then his oration has no more influence upon the hearers than the representation of an actor on the stage has on the spectators, or, rather, it has just the same kind of influence, for they admire it as a performance, and nothing more. If anything were needed to prove the truth of these statements, we might point to what has recently occurred in England, where the exposures in a late trial have with- drawn one of the most rising of its Parliamentary orators from public life, and blighted a career which was full of richest promise. But when the speaker is one whose life for years has been known and read of all men, and who has proved himself to be a pure, disinter- ested, and consistent man, then the weight of all that gives momen- tum to his words, they have in them what the Abb6 Mullois has so felicitously called “ the accent of conviction,” and they tell with power upon his audience. His character is thus to his speech as the reflector is to the lamp behind which it is placed, intensifying its
1 84 THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.
lustre, and widening the area of its illuminating influence. In this way ethics, as well as logic and rhetoric, connects itself with elo- quence, and here, also, purity is an element of power. And if this be true, as a general principle, I cannot forbear from adding that it is especially true of the eloquence of the pulpit. Chaucer said of his good parson :
" The lore of Christ and his apostles twelve He taught, but first he followed it himselve ; ”
and anything suggestive of insincerity in the preacher must kill the effectiveness of his sermon.
But, as another thing needed, even when a genius for eloquence is present, I name a cause worthy of its exercise. Nothing would be more ludicrous than for a man to make an ordinary statement with all the fervor and earnestness with which he would plead for the life of one whom he believed to be innocent. But when a great cause is imperilled, then the orator sees the occasion and rises to it, and, forgetting himself in the interests at stake, he car- ries everybody with him on the full tide of his impassioned utter- ance. It is in this way that we account for the paucity of orators at one time and the number of them at another. In many men the gift of which we have spoken remains dormant, because there has been in their history no call for its development. Like the “ mute inglorious Miltons ” of whom the poet sings, they have had nothing to evoke out of them that which was latent in them. But a great cause rouses the sleeping energies of a people, and awakes to the full exercise of their powers the men whom it needs for its ad- vancement. In a sense — like Him whose cause is the greatest of all — it makes “ the dumb to speak ” ; for it brings into prominence, as leaders of the people, by their words, those who, but for it, might never have been heard, or heard of, by their fellow-men as orators. Every great war makes its own generals, and every great movement calls out its own orators. Thus it is that epochs of re- formation or revolution, or controversy on great and important truths, have been made illustrious by the eloquence of men developed by themselves. We need do no more, in this connection, than name such men as Athanasius, Luther, Latimer, Knox, and others, or al- lude to such epochs as those of the American Revolution, the passing of the Reform Bill and the Anti-Corn-Law Crusade, in England ; the Disruption of the Scottish Church, the Anti-Slavery Struggle in
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this country, and the like. Each of these had its own orators, whom it called to the front, and who have left behind them words which even yet stir our pulses, as we read them, and compel us to say, with the great rival of Demosthenes, “ What must it have been to have heard them from their own burning lips?”
But it is not enough that there be a great cause. For the de- velopment of eloquence like theirs, we must have, also, in the men themselves, a strong conviction of the rectitude and importance of that cause, and an intense perception of its urgency. These, indeed, are the very elements of that earnestness whose praise is in the mouths of so many, but whose real nature so few comprehend. Mul- titudes confound it with rant. They seem to say of it, as Bottom did of the lion’s part in the Midsummer Night's Dream, “You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.” But a true view of the matter is vastly different from that. Earnestness consists in a positive conviction of the truth in the case, and of the urgent im- portance of that truth at the moment, so that the man “ cannot but ” speak out what is burning in him to find expression. If a man has no settled convictions about the matter in hand, let him keep si- lence until he gets them, for speech, in these circumstances, will be worse than useless. But conviction is infectious, and the very re- cognition of it in a man of moral integrity, intellectual force, and emotional fervor, will often of itself produce the effect which the orator desires. Again, if a man can keep any utterance back let him do so, for usually such an utterance is not yet ripe for being sent forth. Let him dam up the current, therefore, for a time, until it force itself over the barrier, and then its power will be im- mediately perceived. And, in general, when some great cause is concerned, when he has something to say which he cannot hold back, when, like the old prophet, the “ word is as a burning fire shut up in his bones, and he is weary of forbearing and cannot stay,” then let him give it outlet, and the genius of eloquence will bear him on, so that it shall be said of him :
“ His words did gather thunder as they ran,
And, as the light’ning to the thunder Which follows it, riving the spirit of man.
Making earth wonder.
So was their meaning to his words.”
But to the highest development of eloquence a great occasion is as essential as a worthy cause. Indeed, we may say that sometimes
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a great occasion is itself eloquent, and strikes the key-note to which the oration, as it were, sets itself. The truth is felt by the audience before the speaker opens his lips, and all that he has to do is to give voice to emotions which are already struggling to find expression in the hearts of those who are to hear him. Then, as feeling grows by being uttered, the orator will kindle as he moves on ; will, as the saying is, rise to the occasion ; whereas, in point of fact, it might be, perhaps, more accurate to say that the occasion lifted him.
So, again, there is much of eloquence in an audience. No doubt it is not yet eloquence ; but it is there, as steam is in water, and the born orator supplies the heat which is needed for its generation into steam. If the hearers are in sympathy with the speaker, then their responsiveness to his arguments and appeals will carry him on to loftier flights ; these, again, will make a still deeper impression on the audience, and that, in its turn, gives him an additional stimulus. “ Give him a cheer,” said one, in a crowd gathered round a great con- flagration, as he saw a fireman falter for a moment at the final effort that was needed to save a life. “ Give him a cheer,” and, as the admiring huzza was raised, the heart of the brave hero gathered new courage, so that he succeeded in his noble endeavor. Just in the same way the applause of a sympathetic and responsive audience bears up a speaker as the water does the ship that rides upon the waves. There is a constant action and reaction between the orator and his hearers. As Mr. Gladstone once put it, “He gets from them in vapor that which he gives back to them in flood,” and when they have got it they return it to him with interest. Thus, between them, they zigzag up the mountain pathway until they reach the summit, whereon are conviction, decision, and enthusiasm.
But even if the audience be antagonistic rather than sympathetic, it still has a great part to play in the production of eloquence. For, in that case, the orator is put upon his mettle. Like a wary athlete, he takes care how he begins the conflict. With cool deliberation he chooses his ground. Then, after fencing awhile in light and playful fashion, he sees his opportunity, and, taking up his adversary in his unyielding grasp, he summons all his strength for the encounter, throws him at his feet, and stands supreme. Only those who have enjoyed a triumph of this sort can have any idea of the excitement of the conflict or of the joy of the victory, for such things are ac- corded but to few, and not often even to them.
An audience, then, as well as a cause and an occasion, are needed
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for the generation of eloquence. For eloquence is not a thing which an orator carries about with him, as a “ reader ” carries his recitation, which he can bring out in solitude or before a few as well as before a multitude. It needs the presence of the multitude, as well as the great cause and the fitting occasion. Henry Clay must have been greatly tickled when his rustic host, after entertaining him with the best which his house afforded, said: “ Now, Mr. Clay, wouldn’t you make just a little speech to me and my wife } ” But he could not make an oration then. He needed the surroundings of the Senate chamber, the stimulus of antagonism, the support of sympathizers, and, above all, a cause worthy of himself and his country, and then his oratory was as genuine as it was effective.
If, then, these principles be correct, it will follow that orators of the highest sort must always be comparatively rare. Eloquence can never be a common thing. It must, to say the least, be as excep- tional as poetic genius or artistic excellence. It is not to be ex- pected from every man, or even from the same man at all times. Every preacher cannot be an orator, nor even the same preacher, in every sermon ; and the same thing holds equally of pleaders at the bar and statesmen in the Senate. It is, therefore, only an unthinking clamor that would demand such an impossibility, and complaint of that sort very frequently springs from unreasonable expectation.
But give us a man with the stirrings of oratorical genius in his soul ; let him be early and thoroughly trained in the mastery of elo- cution and the management of action ; make him familiar with the setting forth of an argument after a logical fashion, and in such style as rhetoric shall approve ; let him be known for high-toned principle and genuine moral excellence; give him such practice in public speaking as may be gained through taking interest in the affairs of his Church, his city, or his State ; then let him be placed in the thick of some tremendous conflict for truth, or law, or liberty, or religion ; let him be brought out by some such occasion as Webster had in his reply to Hayne, or Lincoln had in his conflict with Doug- las, or Gladstone had in his opposition to Beaconsfield in his famous Mid-Lothian campaign, and he will speak in language which will echo round the world and reverberate through all coming ages.
Wm. M. Taylor.
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It has long been an open secret that there is war amongst the political economists. John Stuart Mill no longer receives universal homage, but has to bear much irreverent criticism ; even Adam Smith might be seriously cavilled at were not the habit of praise grown too old in his case. He is still “ the father of political econ- omy ” ; but, like other fathers of his day, he seems to us decidedly old-fashioned. The fact is, that these older writers, who professed to point out the laws of human business, are accused of leaving out of view a full half of human nature ; in insisting that men love gain, they are said to have quite forgotten that men sometimes love each other — that they are not only prehensile, but also a great many other things less aggressive and less selfish.
Those who make these charges want to leave nothing human out of their reckonings ; they want to know “ all the facts,” and are ready, if necessar}'-, to reduce every generalization of the older writers to the state — the wholly exceptional state — of a rule in German grammar. Their protest is significant, their purpose heroic, beyond a doubt ; and what interesting questions are not raised by their pro- gramme ! How is the world to contain the writings, statistical, histori- cal, critical, which must be accumulated ere this enormous diagnosis of trade and manufacture shall be completed in its details ; and after it shall have been completed in detail who is to be born great enough in genius and patience to reduce the mass to a system comprehensi- ble by ordinary mortals ? Moreover, who is going surety that these new economists will not be dreadful defaulters before they get through handling these immense assets of human nature, which Mill confessed himself unable to handle without wrecking his bookkeep- ing ? Are they assured of the eventual collaboration of some Shaks- pere who will set before the world all the standard types of eco- nomic character ? Let it be said that the world hopes so. Even those who cannot answer the questions I have broached ought to bid these sturdy workers “ God speed ! ”
The most interesting reflection suggested by the situation is, that political economists are being harassed by the same discipline of ex- perience that, one day or another, sobers all constructors of systems.
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They cannot build in the air and then escape chagrin because men only gaze at their structures, and will not live in them. Closet stu- dents of politics are constantly having new drill in the same lesson : the world is an inexorable schoolmaster in these courses ; it will have none of any thought which does not recognize it. Sometimes theorists like Rousseau, being near enough the truth to deceive even those who know something of it, are so unfortunate as to induce men to rear fabrics of government after their aerial patterns out of earth’s stuffs, with the result of bringing every affair of weight crash- ing about their ears, to the shaking of the world. But there are not many such coincidences as Rousseau and his times, happily ; and other closet politicians, more commonly cast and more ordinarily placed than he, have had no such painful successes.
There is every reason to believe that in countries where men vote as well as write books, political writers, at any rate, give an honest recognition of act to these facts. They do not vote their opinions, they vote their party tickets; and they are the better citizens by far for doing so. Inside their libraries they go with their masters in thought — mayhap go great lengths with Adolph Wagner, or hold stiffly back, “ man versus the state,” with Spenser — outside their libraries they “ go with their party.” In a word, like sensible men, they frankly recognize the difference between what is possible in thought and what is practicable in action.
But the trouble is, that when they turn from voting to writing they call many of their abstract reflections on government studies of politics, and thereby lose the benefit of some very wholesome aids to just thought. Even when they draw near the actual life of living governments, as they frequently do, and read and compare statutes and constitutions, they stop short of asking and ascertaining what the men of the street think and say of institutions and laws ; what little, as well as what big, influences brought particular laws into ex- istence ; how much of each law actually lives in the regulation of public function or private activity, and how much of it has degene- rated into “dead letter”; in brief, just what things it is — what methods, what habits, what human characteristics and social condi- tions— that make the appearance of politics outside the library so different from its appearance inside that sanctum ; what it is that constitutes “ practical politics ” a peculiar province. And yet these are the questions most necessary to be answered in order to reach the heart of their study.
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Every one who has read great treatises on government which were not merely speculative must have been struck by their ex- haustive knowledge of statutes, of judicial precedents, and of legal and constitutional history, and equally by their tacit ignorance of anything more than this gaunt skeleton of institutions. Their best pages are often those on which a modest asterisk, an unobtrusive numeral, or a tiny dagger sticking high in the stately text, carries the eye down to a foot-note, packed close in small print, in which some hint is let drop of the fact that institutions have a daily as well as an epochal life, from which the student might “ learn some- thing to his advantage.”
The inherent weakness of such a system is shown by the readi- ness with which it is discredited when once a better one is put beside it. What modern writer ,on political institutions has not felt, either directly or indirectly, the influence of De Tocqueville and Bagehot ? Both these inimitable writers were men of extra- ordinary genius, and, whatever they might have written about, their writings would have been admiringly preserved, if only for the wonder of their luminous qualities. But their political works live, not only as models of effective style, but also as standards of stimulating wisdom ; because Bagehot and De Tocqueville were not merely students, but also men of the world, for whom the only acceptable philosophy of politics was a generalization from actual daily observation of men and things. They could see institutions writ small in the most trivial turns of politics, and read constitu- tions more clearly in a biography than in a statute-book. They were men who, had they written history, would have written the history of peoples, and not of courts or parliaments merely. Their methods have, therefore, because of their essential sanity, gone far toward discrediting all others; they have leavened the whole mass of political literature. Was it not Bagehot, for instance, who made it necessary for Professor Dicey to entitle his recent admirable work The Law of the Constitution, that no one might think he mistook it for the Life of the Constitution ?
Who has not wished that Burke had fused the permanent thoughts of his splendid sentences of wisdom together into a noble whole — an incomparable treatise whereby every mind that loved liberty might be strengthened and fertilized ? He had handled affairs, and could pluck out the heart of their mystery with a skill unrivalled ; he spoke no word of mere hearsay or
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speculation. He, it would seem, better than any other, could have shown writers on politics the difference between knowledge and insight, between an acquaintance with public law and mastery of the principles of government.
Not that all “ practical politicians ” would be the best instruc- tors in the deep — though they might be in the hidden — things of politics. Far from it. They are too thickly crowded by daily detail to see permanent outlines, too pushed about by a thousand little influences to detect accurately the force or the direction of the big and lasting influences. They “ cannot see the forest for the trees.” They are no more fitted to be instructors because they are practical politicians than lawyers are fitted to fill law-school chairs because they are active practitioners. They must be something else besides to qualify them for the high function of teaching — and must be that something else in so masterful a wise that no distraction of active politics can for a moment withdraw their vi- sion from the great and continuous principles of their calling.
The active statesman is often an incomparable teacher, however, when he is himself least conscious that he is a teacher at all — when he has no thought of being didactic, but has a whole soul full of the purpose of leading his fellow-countrymen to do those things which he conceives to be right. Read the purposes of men like Patrick Henry and Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, men un- tutored of the schools — read their words of leadership, and say whether there be anything wiser than their home-made wisdom.
It is such reflections as these — whether my examples be well chosen or not — which seem to me to lead directly to the right principle of study for every one who would go beyond the law and know the life of States. Not every State lets statutes die by mere disuse, as Scotland once did ; and if you are going to read constitu- tions with only lawyers for your guides, be they never so learned, you must risk knowing only the anatomy of institutions and never learning anything of their biology.
“ Men of letters and of thought,” says Mr. Sidney Colvin, where one would least expect to find such a remark — in a Life of Walter Savage Landor —
" Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to declaiming at their ease against the delinquencies of men of action and atlairs. The inevitable friction of practical politics generates heat enough already, and the office of the thinker and critic should be to supply not heat, but light. The difficulties which
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attend his own unmolested task, the task of seeking after and proclaiming salutary truths, should teach him to make allowance for the still more urgent difficulties which beset the politician — the man obliged, amidst the clash of interests and temp- tations, to practise from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain and at the same time the most indispensable of the experimental arts.”
Excellent! But why stop there? Must the man of letters and of thought observe the friction of politics only to make due allow- ance for the practical politician, only to keep his own placid con- clusions free from any taint of scorn or cavil at men whose lives are thrown amidst affairs to endure the buffetings of interests and resist the tugs of temptation? Is not a just understanding of the conditions of practical politics also an indispensable prerequisite to the discovery and audible proclamation of his “salutary truths?” No truth which does not on all its sides touch human life can ever reach the heart of politics ; and men of “ unmolested tasks,” of mere library calm, simply cannot think the thoughts which will tell amidst the noise of affairs. An alert and sympathetic percep- tion of the infinite shifts of circumstance and play of motive which control the actual conduct of government ought to permeate the thinking, as well as check the criticisms, of writers on politics.
In a word, ought not “ man of the world ” and “ man of books ” to be merged in each other in the student of politics? Was not John Stuart Mill the better student for having served the East India Company and sat in the House of Commons? Are not Professor Bryce and Mr. John Morley more to be trusted in their books be- cause they have proved themselves worthy to be trusted in the Cabinet ?
The success of great popular preachers contains a lesson for stu- dents of politics who would themselves convert men to a saving doc- trine. The preacher has, indeed, an incalculable advantage over the student of politics in having as his text-book that Bible which speaks of the human heart with a Maker’s knowledge of the thing he has made ; by knowing his book he knows the deep things of daily life. But the great preacher reaches the heart of his hearers, not by knowledge, but by sympathy — by showing himself a brother-man to his fellow-men. And this is just the principle which the student of politics must heed. He must frequent the street, the counting-house, the drawing-room, the club house, the administrative offices, the halls — yes, and the lobbies — of legislatures. He must cross-examine the experience of government officials ; he must hear the din of conven-
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tions, and see their intrigues; he must often witness the scenes of election day. He must know how men who are not students regard Government and its affairs ; he will get many valuable suggestions from such men on occasion ; better than that, he will learn the available approaches to such men’s thoughts. Government is meant for the good of ordinary people, and it is for ordinary people that the student should elucidate its problems ; let him be anxious to keep within earshot of such.
This is not to commend the writer on politics to narrow “ practi- cal ” views and petty comment ; it is not to ask him to find a philo- sophy of government which will fit the understanding and please the taste of the “ ward politician ” ; it is only to ask him to keep his generalizations firmly bottomed on fact and experience. His phi- losophy will not overshoot the hearts of men because it is feathered with high thought, unless it be deliberately shot in air. Thoughts do not fail of acceptance because they are not commonplace enough, but because they are not true enough ; and in the sort of writing about which we are here speaking, truth is a thing which can be detected better by the man who knows life than by the man who knows only logic. You cannot lift truth so high that men cannot reach it ; the only caution to be observed is, that you do not ask them to climb where they cannot climb without leaving terra firma.
Nor is the student, who naturally and properly loves books, to leave books and sit all his time in wiseacre observation amidst busy men. His books are his balance — or, rather, his ballast. And of course the men of his own day are not the only men from whom he can learn politics. Government is as old as man ; men have always been politicians ; the men of to-day are only politicians of a particu- lar school ; the past furnishes examples of politicians of every other school, and there is as much to be learned about government from them as from their successors.
Carlyle had the sort of eye for which one should pray when seeking to find men alive and things actual in the records left of them. Who has not profited by his humorous familiarity with the foibles and personal habits of the men who lived about the court of the Hohen- zollerns? Who has not learned more than any other man could have told him of Prussian administration under its first great organizer by looking with Carlyle into the sociable informalities of Frederick Will- iam’s “ tobacco parliament ” ? Carlyle knew these men well enough to joke with and rail at them. He twitted them with their family 13
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secrets, and, knowing what clay they were of, was not awed by their state ceremonials. Yet he saw them, as he himself bitterly com- plains, only through the medium of crabbed documents and dry-as- dust books, with no seer like himself to help him in his interpreta- tions. It was hard straining of the eyes to see so far back through the dense and murky atmosphere of formal record and set history ; but he saw, nevertheless, because he did not need to be told all in order to know all ; the dryest of historians could hardly avoid drop- ping some hint which would suffice Carlyle more than would tomes of “profane history.”
If you know what you are looking for and are not expecting to find it advertised in the newspapers, but lying somewhere beneath the surface of things, the dullest fool may often help you to its dis- covery. It needs a good nose to do the thing, but look how excel- lent is the game to which a casual scent may bring you in such a domain as the study of politics. There are whole worlds of fact waiting to be discovered by inference. Do not expect to find the life of constitutions painted in the great “ standard authorities,” but, following with becoming patience their legal anatomy of institutions, watch their slightest movement toward an illustrative foot-note, and try to find under that the scent you are in quest of. If they cite an instance, seek the recital of the same case elsewhere, where it is told with a different purpose ; if it promise well there, hunt it further still, and make sure you catch every glimpse it affords of men’s actual dealings with Government. If your text mention names of conse- quence, seek them out in biographies, and scan there the personal relations of men with affairs for hints of the methods by which gov- ernments are operated from day to day. You will not need any incentive to read all their gossip, in letters and journals, and so see governors as men ; but do more ; endure official interviews and ses- sions of Parliament with them ; collate their private letters and their public despatches — there’s no telling when or where you will strike fresh trails of the game you seek. Interview judges off the bench, courtiers away from court, officers off duty. Go to France and live next door a prefect in the provinces ; go to London and try to find out how things of weight are talked about in the smoking-room of the House of Commons.
Such excursions must, of course, lead the student far afield ; he will often get quite out of sight from his starting-point, the “ stan- dard authority ” ; but he will not, on that account, be lost. The fact
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is, that all literature teems with suggestions on this topic of politics. Just as the chance news item, the unstudied traveller’s reminis- cence, the passing social or financial scandal,* and every hint of any present contact of men with law or authority, illumines directly, or by inference, the institutions of our own day, similar random rays thrown across the pages of old books by the unpremeditated words of writers quite guiltless of such instructive intent may light up, for those who are alert to see such things, the most intimate secrets of state. If it be beyond hoping for to find a whole Greville for every age of government, there may be found Grevillian scraps, at least, in the literature of almost every time. From men as far back and as well remembered as Cicero, down to men as recent and as easily forgotten as several who might be named, politicians have loved to explain to posterity the part they took in conspicuous affairs ; and that portion of posterity which studies politics by inference ought to be profoundly thankful to them for yielding to the taste.
Approach the life of states by such avenues, and you will be convinced of the organic nature of political society. View society from what point you will, you always catch sight of some part of government; man is so truly a “political animal” that you cannot examine him at all without seeing the points — points of his very structure — whereat he touches and depends upon, or upholds, the State.
In 1850, while Governor-General of Canada, Lord Elgin writes to Lord Grey :
“ Our Reciprocity measure was pressed by us in Washington last session, just as a railway bill, in 1845 or 1846, would have been passed in Parliament. There was no Government to deal with, ... it was all a matter of canvassing this member of Congress or the other.” f
How? “ No Government to deal with”? Here’s a central truth to be found in none of the “ standard authorities,” and yet to be seen by a practised diplomatist all the way from Canada. About the same date M. Bacourt came to this country to represent the French Government and be made wretched by the crude deport- ment of the Americans. His chief concern was to get away to some country where people were less unconventionally at their ease in drawing-rooms ; but he turned, when necessary, to the
* Did not the Dilke trial, in London, for instance, help us to understand at least one influence that may sometimes make a lawyer Home Secretary ?
t Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 121.
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business of his legation ; and whenever he did so he found that “ here diplomafic affairs are not treated as everywhere else, where we communicate with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and arrange the matter with him alone.” He must “ arrange ” the matter with several committees of Congress. He must go to see Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Winthrop, whose “ husbands are members of the House of Representatives, and on the committee having charge of commercial affairs, in which ” he “is interested,” for “ they say that these gentlemen are very particular about visits from for- eign ministers to their wives.” * Just Lord Elgin’s testimony. Again the “standard authorities” are added to, and that in a quarter where we would least expect to find them supplemented. We need despair of no source.
These are only near and easily recognized illustrations of the errant mode of study I am expounding and advocating. Other systems, besides our own, receive similar chance illumination in the odd corners of all sorts of books. Now and again you strike mines like the Mdnioires of Madame de Rhnusat, the Letters of Walpole, or the Diary of a Pepys or an Evelyn ; at other periods you must be content to find only slender veins of the ore of familiar observation and intimate knowledge of affairs for which you are delving ; but your search will seldom be altogether futile. Some new-opened archive office may offer cahiers, such as revealed to De Tocqueville, more than all other records, the ancien regime. Some elder Hamer- ton may tell you of the significant things to be seen “ round his house.” All correspondence and autobiography will repay perusal, even when not so soaked in affairs as the letters of Cromwell, or so reminiscent of politics as the Memoirs of Samuel Romilly.
Politics is the life of the State, and nothing which illustrates that life — nothing which reveals any habit contracted by man as a political animal — comes amiss in the study of politics. Public law is the formal basis of the political life of society, but it is not always an expression of its vital principle. We are inclined, oftentimes, to take laws and constitutions too seriously, to put implicit faith in their professions without examining their conduct. Do they affect to advance liberty, for instance? We ought to go, in person or in imagination, amongst the people whom they command, and see for ourselves whether those people enjoy liberty. With reference to laws and constitutions of our own day we can learn such things best
* Souvenirs of a Diplomat, pp. i8g, 281.
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by supplementing books and study by travel and observation. The best-taught class in modern public law would *be a travelling class. Other times than our own we must perforce be content to see through other men’s eyes.
In other words, statute-books and legal commentaries are all very well in the study of politics, if only you quite thoroughly understand that they furnish only the crude body colors for your picture of the State’s life, upon which all your finer luminous and atmospheric effects are afterward to be worked. It is high time to recognize the fact that politics can be effectually expounded only by means of the highest literary methods. Only master workers in language and in the grouping and interpretation of heterogeneous materials can achieve the highest success in making real in words the complex life of states. If I might act as the interpreter of the new-school economists of whom I have already spoken, I trust with due reverence, I should say that this is the thought which, despite their too frequent practical contempt for artistic literary form, is possessing them. John Stuart Mill and Ricardo made a sort of logic of political economy ; in order to simplify their processes, they deliberately stripped man of all motives save self-interest alone, and the result was evidently ^'■doctrinaire" — was not a picture of life, but a theorem of trade. Hence “ the most dismal of all sciences ” ; hence Sidney Smith’s exhortation to his friend not to touch the hard, unnatural thing. The new-school economists revolt, and say they want “ a more scientific method ” ; what they really want is a higher literary method. They want to take account of how a man’s wife affects his trade, how his children stiffen his prudence, how his prejudices condition his enterprise, how his lack of imagination limits his market, how strongly love of home holds him back from the good wages that might be had by emigration, how despotically the opinion of his neighbors forbids his insisting upon a cash busi- ness, how his position in local society prescribes the commodities he is not to deal in ; in brief, how men actually do labor, plan, and get gain. They are, therefore, portentously busy amassing particulars about the occupations, the habits, the earnings, the whole economic life of all classes and conditions of men. But these things are only the raw material of poetry and the literary art ; and without the intervention of literary art must remain raw materials. To make anything of them, the economist must become a literary artist and bring his discoveries home to our imaginations — make these in-
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numerable details of his pour in a concentrated fire upon the centre- citadels of men’s understandings. A single step or two would then bring him within full sight of the longed-for time when political economy is to dominate legislation.
It has fallen out that, by turning its thoughts toward becoming a science, politics, like political economy, has joined its literature to those books of yiatural science which boast a brief authority, and then make way for what is “latest.” Unless it be of the constitu- tion of those rare books which mark an epoch in scientific thought, a “ scientific work ” may not expect to outlive the prevailing fashion in ladies’ wraps. But books on politics are in the wrong company when they associate with works among which so high a rate of mor- tality obtains. The “ science ” proper to them, as distinguished from that which is proper to the company they now affect, is a sci- ence* whose very expositions are as deathless as itself. It is the sci- ence of the life of man in society. Nothing which elucidates that life ought to be reckoned foreign to its art ; and no true picture of that life can ever perish out of literature. Ripe scholarship in his- tory and jurisprudence is not more indispensable to the student of politics than are a constructive imagination and a poet’s ey^ for the detail of human incident. The heart of his task is insight and inter- pretation ; no literary power that he can bring to bear upon it will be greater than he needs. Arthur Young’s way of observing, Bage- hot’s way of writing, and Burke’s way of philosophizing would make an ideal combination for the work he has to do. His materials are often of the most illusive sort, the problems which he has to solve are always of the most confounding magnitude and variety.
It is easy for him to say, for instance, that the political institu- tions of one country will not suit another country ; but how infinitely difficult is it to answer the monosyllables How? and Why? To reply to the Why he must make out all the contrasts in the histories of the two countries ; but it depends entirely upon what sort of eye he has whether those contrasts will contain for him vital causes of the effect he is seeking to expound. He may let some anecdote es- cape him which gleams with the very spark needed to light up his exposition. In looking for grave political facts only, he may over- look some apparently trivial outlying detail which contains the very secret he would guess. He may neglect to notice what men are most talked about by the people ; whose photographs are most fre- quently to be seen on the walls of peasant cottages, what books
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are oftenest on their shelves. Intent upon intrigue and legislation, he may pass over with only a laugh some piquant gossip about leg- islator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government. He may admire self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about it. The man who thinks the polls disagreeable, uninteresting places has no busi- ness taking up a pen to write about government. The man who de- spises the sheriff because he is coarse and uncouth, and who studies the sheriffs functions only from the drawing-room or the library, will realize the life of government no better than he realizes the vanity of “ good manners.”
If politics were to be studied as a great department of human conduct, not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of the world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the imagination. There might then enter into it that individuality which is immortality. That personal equation which constitutes the power of all books which have aught of power in them would then rescue books on politics from the dismal category of “ treatises,” and exalt them to the patriciate of literature. The needed reaction against the still “ orthodox ” methods of discoursing upon laws and constitutions, like that already set afoot against the “ orthodox ” political economists, should be a “literary movement” — a movement from formalism to life. In order really to know anything about government, you must see it alive ; and the object of the writer on politics should be nothing less than this, to paint government to the life — to make it live again upon his page.
Woodrow Wilson.
THE COURSE OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.
“The tendency of American architecture,” said an honored American, some time ago, “ is to the fantastic.” He was not with- out warrant. The desire to have one’s own way, unchastened by law, by knowledge, or by the sense of congruity, is sure to lead to the extravagant ; and if a desire to be conspicuous is added, it issues in the fantastic. This is what we see in the most American of our architecture. We have been told that the late Mr. James Lick pro- posed to exalt his memory by building in California a pyramid higher than that of Cheops, and that only practical difficulties averted this and substituted for it a public benefaction. Where the aim is art, especially if it includes ornament, the fantastic tendency is strongest. Americans like to be conspicuous, and they like ornament. If we wish to see their natural tendencies displayed to the fullest and freest, we may look through our public cemeteries. There we shall find individual license, the desire for conspicuousness, and the cacoethes of ornament, on a small scale, to be sure, but enforced by condensation, like the high colors in the photographer’s camera.
These are popular influences with which our architecture has to reckon. To them we must add the impulse due to our enormous growth in population and wealth, producing an enormous and prob- ably lasting demand for new building ; the stimulus, still more effective, of new occupations, wants, ways of living, which call upon our architects for new methods and new forms. These things give American architecture the first essential to a healthy development ; it is alive, and is likely to continue so. But when we look to the pub- lic for guidance as well as impulse, the case is not so favorable. The instinct for display does nothing but harm to any art, and it has a dangerous ally in an insatiable craving for novelty. When a young architect some years ago left his master, to begin work for himself, the master’s parting advice was : “ Whatever you do, astonish peo- ple ; that is what they like.” The master has been very prominent among our architects, and has followed his own precept ; others who have come later have followed it further, and have found their profit in it, it must be said.
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Popular interest, then, while it gives the motive and life to archi- tecture, gives as yet no trustworthy guidance, and, being unskilled, is of little value for criticism. The minority which possesses taste and judgment has its helpful influence, but is not the power which fills streets with houses and warehouses, and which in larger under- takings is represented by building committees. So far as the pub- lic is concerned, its artistic sympathies are chiefly for two qualities — realism and vivacity. In architecture realism is out of the ques- tion, and there remains, apart from the likings of association, only the vivacity. This is an admirable element in a growing art, if prop- erly I'estrained and subordinated to higher qualities ; but, unchecked, and seconded by our native inventiveness, has given us the cream of the fantastic. On its mischievous effect in our literature there is no need to descant. In architecture, where quiet should be the ruling mood, and the use of vivacity is to light this up by effective contrast, its excess has been more disastrous than in literature. Moreover, the architect, appealing as he does to the rather languid and uncertain tastes of his clients, as well as to their wants, is under temptation, like their tailor and their milliner, to ply them with novelties.
To insure a true artistic form, the insistence on the practical should be enough, by some theories, if it were obediently followed. But the practical does not shape the beautiful, as every artist knows. It is enough if it can point out a safe way for the beautiful, and can walk in its company. The public, while it applies a pretty definite pressure and guidance to the development of forms of build- ing to suit its practical wants, has no parti pris in questions of art or style, but has followed very contentedly in these matters wherever its architects have chosen to lead it. So the architect has made his way in his art, unaided by any general criticism of force or value, but also unimpeded by it. Given the conditions I have cited, vivacity, variety, a sufficiency of ornament — as much, that is, as it was will- ing to pay for — and a fair share of display, the public has taken all that was offered it with complacency that soon settled into indif- ference. There has been no popular control of architecture since the time of the Renaissance, when a body of artists and amateurs took it out of the hands of the people and remodelled it. The gen- eral interest in the form of architecture as an art, and the general understanding of it, have declined together; most of all, perhaps, among democratic communities, where the public is used to concern
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itself only in order to control, and conspicuously among English- speaking people.
This interest in having an architecture, and this indifference to its form, have been, in a way, the most stimulating influences that architects could work under. They have given the spur to enter- prise, self-reliance, and invention, till there are few wants for which we have not provided a suitable form, few adventures in design before which we have quailed. American architecture has been charged with want of originality or invention, but this has been by persons who have not understood the natural limits of originality in architectural form. On the contrary, we have more originality than we have known what to do with, and we have expended it in a thou- sand vagaries. What our architects have needed has not been a spur to invention or a demand for novelties, but some influence to check their waywardness and hold them steadfastly to one manner of design till their work acquired consistency, and the public got in- struction. And here we lack a balance-wheel which most older na- tions have. The want of an old architecture, by which the taste of the intelligent is insensibly formed, means the want of a very impor- tant guiding influence. In its absence the public, however intelli- gent, can take its cue only from what the profession gives it, aided by what dim reflected light it may get from cultivation in other di- rections. And if the people need such an old architecture for their education, it is also valuable to architects for giving a healthy de- cision to their preferences and a solid starting-point for their de- velopment. As it is, our architects have never held long enough or firmly enough to any one manner of design to master it, much less to educate their public, or to bring the architecture of their country to consistent excellence. Their vacillations have been so many stumbling-blocks in the way of their constituents, so many hinderan- ces to real appreciation of their own work. These offences have cut two ways, and have been, I think, the most serious of the obstacles in the way of American architecture.
It is our misfortune that just where we might have looked for a steadying influence our architects have found a most contagious ex- ample of fickleness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries the English had been stumbling along in the pursuit of one and another derivative from the Renaissance. Early in the nineteenth, stimulated by a group of enthusiasts, and, I must believe, by a right sense of their own real aptitude, they turned again to the mediaeval
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models. Though they began, as all the modern Gothic revivals have begun, at the wrong end, they worked back, clearing themselves of the false habits in which two centuries of working against the grain had involved them, until they had recovered a fair grasp of the prin- ciples and forms of their old style. The movement grew popular; conservatism — even Lord Palmerston as Premier — could make no head against it. When, twenty years ago, the competition for the new Law Courts stirred up the whole architectural profession, only one classic design was submitted, and that as alternative to a Gothic. An enormous increase of building stimulated the revival ; the Vic- torian Gothic was everywhere. English architecture was raised in quality, and became animated, inventive, picturesque, and vigorous, as it had not been for three hundred years. The success was due, not so much to the style chosen as to the fact that, having found a style which suited them, the English followed it unitedly and persist- ently. Here seemed to be a national movement, strong, deep, and promising to endure. It lasted some fifty years — not long enough to fulfil its whole promise of excellence. Then suddenly, at the signal of two or three restless and clever young^ men, whose eyes had caught something else, the English architects with one accord threw the whole thing away ; as a boy, after working the morning through at some plaything, with a sudden impulse of weariness drops his un- finished toy to run after the first butterfly.
This was very discouraging — more discouraging to those who have the progress of architecture at heart than any other phenome- non of modern days. It is not that the Victorian Gothic was a bet- ter style than many others that were or might have been on trial ; to some persons it might seem better, to others not. The hope of modern architecture does not lie in any anointed style or such other patentable device as has been offered us of late — the turning of bricklayers into architects, or vice versa, or the use of iron, or the Eastlake system ; but, after due artistic schooling, in the sin- cerity, the unity, and the continuity of effort of those who practise it. We had looked to the English as the inheritors of an admirable past, as men of sincere conviction, conservators of tradition, models of persistence and staying power. But they have seemed to show us that their progress was at the impulse of whim rather than con- viction, ruled rather by fashion than by tradition. It is the mobile Frenchman who in this century has set us an example of steadiness. If his work, like all the rest in our day, lacks some of the higher
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qualities of older and greater styles, it has, more than any other modern work, the coherency and firmness that are at the bottom of all style. His course has been the only consistent progress among modern nations. If the infection of fashion, the corruption of wealth, frivolity, and display have, latterly, left their mark in his work, in this the Frenchman is a warning, but our most instructive warning is the apostasy of England.
This is the more unfortunate for us in that English example has told more on our own architectural development than any other. Our young architects, it is true, have not gone to England to learn their profession, because there is no architectural instruction in England. A few have gone to Germany to study, and a good many Germans have immigrated to us. But, of American students who have been fortunate enough and wise enough to secure the advan- tage of a European training in architecture, all but a fraction have found it in Paris, where alone they could find a well-digested, system- atic course of study, seconded by all the best appliances for learn- ing, by a steady artistic tradition, an artistic environment, and the best-trained body of practising architects that now exists. They have come back full of zeal, and of the traditions of the French school. This French training has been furthered by the fact that the best of our architectural schools, all of recent growth, have modelled their teaching on that of Paris, and imported its traditions, so that here we have apparently enough to make the French influence the determining one in our architecture. At one time it seemed to be so. The public buildings in most of our cities took on a reflex of the French style, and one convenient form, adopted or perverted from it — the so-called French roof — was seized upon by every architect and every carpenter, and oppressed every house in the land. Yet, in the long run, the French influence, with every appearance in its favor, has, in respect to style, been completely overborne by the English, has faded away almost as if it had never been, and that in spite of the fact that the ificole des Beaux Arts continues to be the nursery of our best architects. Our young men go to Paris, spend their one, two, three, or more years in one of her ateliers, see, think, and breathe nothing but French architecture. They come home and do their first work possibly under the dominion of the old impulse, but in a year or so their building is, in its elements and character, as if they had studied in England, and not in France.
The reasons for this phenomenon are intricate, and hard to trace
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out fully. In painting, the tendency has been curiously opposite. Our painters owe scarcely anything to England. The young paint- ers coming home do not leave Paris behind ; their French habit is always with them. For this the reason is comparatively clear. The men who have developed modern painting, especially landscape — which, for all our efforts in other directions, is the real domain of modern painting — are the French; and in this I do not forget that Constable and Turner sounded its key-note. But English archi- tecture has never been superior to French, and in the subversion of the last ten years it has dropped below itself. The causes of its su- premacy with us are for the most part, I think, not artistic. The instinct of race counts for something — perhaps a great deal ; Anglo- mania, pure and simple, also something ; constant intercourse and a common professional literature weigh a great deal more in the scale. The facts that in both countries men live in their own houses, built for themselves, and that the people of both nations live much in the country, or in that suburban limbo which outdoes the country in its rural tastes, with their accompanying fondness for an easy- going picturesqueness, are also influential. In truth, their fondness for the picturesque seems to be their artistic common feeling. After the French flush had passed over, Americans seized on the Victorian style, and in their own fashion made it almost as much at home here as in England, finding it lend itself most kindly to that passion for the fantastic of which I have spoken. A taste for the picturesque, and even the homely, in opposition to what is sub- dued or formal, sympathizes with the exaggerated craving for per- sonal independence which characterizes Englishmen and Americans. French architecture never appears in undress, and this has prevented our welcoming it heartily for domestic use, though we accepted it for public buildings. Indeed, I have heard an American, who claimed acknowledgment as a critic, dismiss the whole architecture of Paris with contumely because it was not picturesque. Finally, when we consider that the four English building-papers send us every week, for a small sum, a score of well-drawn illustrations of the best work that is done in their country, while French architectural periodicals are meagre and costly, it is easy to see how professional literature brings great weight into the scale.
So, in the long run, the English influence has distinctly prevailed, even over those of us who were born, as it were, to another manner. After the Boston and Chicago fires it looked as if the Victorian
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style, or some offshoot from it, would be ours, and we were in the way of a permanent, wholesome growth. If the English had shown the steadfastness with which we commonly credit them, their example might have held us to our course. The two nations, working per- sistently together in the line they had fixed, might have wrought out a style, not better than another, but with a character of its own, and apt to supply all the wants of our people or to express all the ideas of our architects. But at the critical point our English leaders faltered, and then stampeded. American architects followed them as fast as they could, and there was an end of modern Gothic. The Queen Anne phase followed in England, and was immediately imi- tated here ; but it has not the qualities of a large style, and we shall soon tire of this too. The “ Colonial ” fashion has divided our attention with it. Both of them have had this special merit, that they have somewhat chastened the spirit of the fantastic, though they have not subdued it. Already there is a movement toward the more classic forms of the Italian Renaissance, and our next lurch may be back to Vignola and Palladio.
It may be asked — it is often asked, directly or implicitly — why should architects, especially American architects, who have no past to trammel them, cling to precedent? Why do we not cast off con- ventionalism, and set to work to form a style of our own, out of our own materials? But this is against the order of nature, and as im- practicable in art as it is in science. It would be no more preposte- rous to set out to develop geometry anew from the start, avoiding the Pythagorean Proposition and the rest of the geometer’s elements, than to create an architecture by ignoring the styles that have gone before. The thing was done once, ab initio, before the beginning of history, and it took thousands of years to develop a tolerable architecture. Continuity is the condition of success and of progress in this, as in every other line of human endeavor. Every great architecture has been the fruit of persistent effort by many genera- tions laboring to perfect the same forms. It took two hundred and fifty years to advance from the Doric style, as it appears in the old- est temples at Selinus, to its perfection, as we see it in the Theseum and the Parthenon. The evolution of the finished Gothic of the thir- teenth century had required two centuries of a multitudinous effort to which our modern building activities are child’s play. Architec- ture languished in unskilled hands between these periods ; but the continuity of its development was never broken through all the
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range of history till the time of the Renaissance, and then only to take a new grip of the old line farther back.
It has been argued that the only architecture possible to us now is eclectic. Perhaps this is true. We have already tried it freely. But, unfortunately, eclectic design, while it looks temptingly easy, and so is the natural recourse of the undisciplined, is extremely dif- ficult, perhaps the most difficult of all design. Men of small ac- quirement may work safely in a formed style, but such men are eclectic at their peril. It takes much knowledge, a keen and sensi- tive eye, to search out among various examples the forms which have natural affinities. It takes a great deal of skill to add the deli- cate adjustments, the modifications, slight, perhaps, but indispen- sable, which are needed to make them fit happily together. The eclecticism to which we are used is like the packing of beech nuts into chestnut burrs. And the fatal weakness of eclectic skill is that it does not propagate itself, as does the power of a finished style. It takes long to acquire it, and, once acquired, it is an indi- vidual faculty which dies with its possessor. Nor is it cumulative. Every man’s line of progress is his own ; what he accomplishes does not ally itself with what his neighbor is doing. The result, as we see it, is in most individual cases failure, and in the mass confusion. The only eclecticism which can lead to permanent good is one in which architects shall come to agreement as to what forms they shall select, and set to work in common to shape these selec- tions into a harmonious whole. But the moment this happens eclecticism is crystallized into development, and ceases to be eclectic.
Our very riches have betrayed us. In the multitude of examples before them architects have forgotten the great advantage which early builders had in their comparative poverty of available forms; Instead of frittering away their labor and emasculating their fancy among a multitude of unrelated details, not used continuously enough for real intimacy, they worked with comparatively few, and these closely allied, but enough for all practical uses. With these they wrought steadily, the whole community together, refining, de- veloping, adjusting them, till they thought in them as readily as in their speaking language, not tiring of them any more than of their own children. Then they used them currently to express their ideas, and the forms changed only as the forms of language change in pro- cess of growth. With us the language overloads the ideas. It is not
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that ideas are lacking to us. Those who think so misunderstand the case. We have abundance of ideas ; it is with the language that we struggle, not holding to one form of speech long enough to make it our own. We are always laboring with grammatical exercises, like a college student in his Latin oration ; or else we scramble on, h tort et a travers, like a tourist at Paris, disfiguring the idea by spoiling the speech. That with all this disadvantage we at times find an utter- ance in which both the thought and the language are acceptable, is to the credit of our pains-taking and of our intelligence, but not of our method.
Now architecture, even more than the other fine arts, is an art of ensemble — an art, that is, of broad effect, wherein by far the most Important consideration is the relation of the different factors of a design to the whole, and the unity of the impression which they pro- duce. The cardinal virtues of good architecture are proportion, concordance of parts, and subordination. (I speak of technical ex- cellence ; at present the expressive qualities of art are beside our purpose.) In comparison with these virtues, beauty of detail is of secondary importance, vital though that also is to really good achievement. Architecture may be very bad with very good detail, but even very bad detail cannot ruin architecture in which the larger virtues which I have mentioned are present. From this condition it follows that architecture is at its best when those qualities have widest sway, that it shines in large combinations — not necessarily in bigness of scale, though that too is telling, but in designs which give scope for the harmonious coordination of many members. A well-combined group of buildings is better than one of better parts, but ill-combined ; the finest street architecture is that in which the separate buildings help each other to a fine general effect, rather than that in which their designs have most individual charm. But this is the view of the art which Americans have been slowest to accept. It does not suit the shape of the Anglican mind, nor does it chime in with the American habit. It has not made any impression on the public, and although archi- tects themselves recognize it after a sort, it has not had a real effect even on them. Every man for himself, is the working theory of both client and architect, and our building goes on with scarcely a serious effort either for unity in the present or consistency in the long run. Yet unity and the steadfastness that works consistency are the indispensable conditions to general excellence. The lack of
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these tends more even than ignorance to make architecture the slave of whim and the servant of fashion.
So, while the eclectic habit may, in its way, enable the individual to refine his own practice, and may deliver our architecture piece- meal from many faults, it is the longest imaginable road to unity. In spite of great improvement in the last fifteen years, in which even the fantastic character is wearing off, at least in the eastern half of the country, we are as far as ever from any broad excellence. It is in city architecture that we fail most. The good effect of this de- pends much less on the quality of design of its individual buildings than on the breadth, harmony, and repose, the continuity of surface and sweep of line, that are got by their association. Of these best qualities our recent building shows hardly a trace. Our street frontages are sliced up into pitifully narrow lots. Every man builds to suit himself alone, and the houses, to use the slang of the French studios, are all swearing at each other. Their tumultuous architecture, as a whole, has scarcely more artistic effect than the strings of cabs, carts, wagons, and horse-cars that struggle through them. If we walk through the new streets of one of our wealthy cities — Boston, for instance — we see handsome fagades, rich and often elegant in detail, and even in general design, and we think our building has improved wonderfully in a generation. Perhaps we compare it complacently with t!ie street architecture of a dull city like London. But we cast our eyes down the length of the street, and the impression is gone ; the elbowing fagades, discordant lines, and broken colors pervert the whole effect not only to confusion, but to absolute meanness. We could sigh for the broad surfaces and swinging lines which excuse the paltry monotony of Regent Street and its Quadrant, to say nothing of the splendid vistas of the avenues of Paris. Really the best ensembles are in those older streets where building contractors have built whole blocks in uniform — poverty-stricken in design, but borrowing breadth and the dignity of repose from their union. So a well-drilled regiment of even shabbily uniformed soldiers will make a better show on parade than a crowd of gentlemen in fancy dresses — and our streets are always on parade.
Though the architecture of a city is more important than that of its buildings, yet among us there is no one to look out for it. If there were even a pervading style in the work of our architects, the general effect would in some degree take care of itself. The fault of this lies with the architects themselves, as I have said of another 14
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fault, for it is they that set the mode. They give their clients, sub- stantially, what they please, and the clients accept it. If they had any positive convictions in respect to style, these might lead to steadfastness, and that, in the end, to agreement. But for convic- tion we have whim ; and so, for style we have fashion. Within one human life we have had the pseudo-classical fashion, the Downing fashion, the Victorian fashion, the French fashion, the Queen Anne fashion, and now we have two or three fashions at once. A dyspep- tic hunger for novelty has taken hold of us.
There are those who argue seriously that uniformity of style would bring in a tiresome monotony. . This is like arguing that the English language is monotonous because we have to talk and write it constantly. It is sameness of thought that breeds monotony, not persistence of language. A Gothic town is not monotonous. No one would be comforted by introducing the Bourse and the Made- leine of Paris among the picturesque Renaissance of Nuremberg; nor would a sprinkling of Victorian architecture improve Parisian streets. We all recognize the excellence of a well-sustained type of architecture when we see it embodied in a foreign city — we admire it and honor it. But when we get to our own work we are at sixes and sevens. We forget our debt to our community and to each other.
In this unstable condition of things the influence of single men of unusual force or attainment goes for much, though it is difficult to dissociate the influence of the individual from that of the circum- stances which determine his own bent. A number of years ago, Mr. Richard M. Hunt returned to New York after a long profes- sional schooling in Paris. His study in the Ecole des Beaux Arts and in the office of M. Lefuel, who had succeeded Visconti as archi- tect of the new Louvre, gave him an advantage over his fellow- architects; the vigor and quality of his professional work, as well as its novelty, attracted attention at once, and drew to him as pupils a number of aspiring young men, the best of material for the making of architects. This group furnished an unusual proportion of the men who have since taken the lead in their profession. His influ- ence and theirs gave, I think, the main impulse to the French move- ment of which I have spoken. Since then the extraordinary power of the late Mr. H. H. Richardson has drawn many of the strongest of our young men after him into the practice of a form of Roman- esque. Whether its example would have had its full effect without the attractive novelty of the style in which it was embodied, we may
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doubt. It is, unfortunately, easier to attract a following by a fashion than by an excellence. Yet the real value of Mr. Richardson’s example lay not in the style he chose, but in the use he made of it ; and the thing which commended the style to him was doubtless its adaptability to the qualities of design at which he aimed. Though the power of the man is incommunicable, the qualities of breadth, subordination, simplicity, and repose which he put into his work have made themselves felt, and can be reproduced by his fol- lowers in their degree. His style can be copied, and it must be greatly perverted from his use of it before these embodied virtues of his can be eliminated from it. Wherever it prevails it extinguishes the fantastic as a rising tide puts out fire. Mr. Richardson’s career is in itself an invaluable example of conviction and steadfastness, of an unflagging effort to express certain high qualities of design, which we have for the most part neglected, in a language which he per- sisted in mastering, and which he never changed after he had found it. Many, whom his conviction has not reached, make haste to imi- tate his manner. The drawback is that this new departure, like the rest, comes as a fashion ; the inevitable question is : When will it go as a fashion, and what will take its place ?
We have gained a good deal in the last generation. We have done much work that is respectable, and some that is excellent ; but the interval between our best work and our ordinary is abnormal — our average is far below that of other great nations. Will our pres- ent disjointed efforts lift us much higher? Our architectural forms, our means of expression, do not improve and become more pliant in our hands, as they should ; they simply change. Here is no ques- tion of a national architecture — a thing for which many people have sighed. If we ever get any architecture that is consistent and last- ing, it will be national enough for the wants of those who like to set their pride of country on so small a pedestal as mere national pecu- liarities. But it is more important that it be good ; and where are we to look for the unity and steadfastness without which no nation ever attained excellence ? Shall we have to write of our architec- ture as Jacob said of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel ?’’
W. P. P. Longfellow.
VICTOR HUGO.
III.
What has been said of the dramas will, with little adaptation, apply to the novels; to such an extent, indeed, that it scarcely seems worth while to speak of them separately at all. There is the same inflation of proportions, the same displacement of moral centre, the same motley choice of heroes and villains, the same diseased love of antithesis, the same tendency to insist that his nightmares are reality ; we shall have occasion, therefore, to add but very little to what we have already said.
One of the series, Le dernier Jour d'un Condamni, a “ powerful work of poetic psychology,” ought not to be regarded as a narrative. It was a plea for the abolition of the pain of death, the beginning of an advocacy which lasted as long as the poet’s life, and, pursued in season and out of season, was gradually merged in an unreason- ing humanitarianism, where the moral sense and sympathies were perverted to hopeless confusion. Already, in 1834, a second work of similar tendency, Claude Gueux, was issued, the “ palpitating narrative of an excusable assassination, a frequent enough case where the victim is less interesting than the criminal.” We borrow these words from one of the poet’s “ inspired ” biographers.* They might have been from the poet himself, who has given us, both in drama and novels, an almost endless array of interesting criminals. It may be permitted to doubt whether humanitarianism had any- thing to do originally with the composition of the Dernier Jour. The early editions, between 1829 and 1832, were preceded by a simple preface, in which the reader was allowed his choice between two assignable causes for the romance ; either the writer had access to papers chronicling the sensations of some condemned wretch (we all know such papers well enough in the English literature of the period), or his work was simply an exercise of insight “ in the interest of art.” Toward 1832, however, the Chamber of Deputies was much occupied with the question of capital punishment, and then appeared a new edition, with a preface long as a pamphlet, claiming, in the most sonorous language, the most serious intentions for his “plaidoirie."
Other romances of those early years, Bug-Jargal and Han
* Barbou. Victor Hugo et son Temps, p. 312.
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d'Islande, are merely the crude fancies of a boy, without knowledge of the world or of men. In their undaunted evolution of everything necessary for the story from the unaided consciousness of the writer, in their excesses, their nightmare creations, and in their joy in rhetoric pure and simple, they have a certain value as showing ten- dency. In L' Homme qui Rit and Quatrevingt-treize we are shown what such a tendency, after many years of indulgence, may produce. They, however, had the advantage of the author’s vogue as a political martyr, and did more for his reputation among uneducated French- men than the best work of his best years had ever accomplished.
In 1831 was Notre Dame de Paris, \iox\i which has
given a great deal of honest pleasure to the world. It is written with the happy swing of youth, it is full of picturesque descriptions, it is a mine of the sort of erudition possible at that day with regard to mediaeval Paris, and it has qualities as a story of the romantic school. The only characters with any resemblance to life in them are the minor ones of Gringoire and Phoebus, and there is exceed- ingly little in either.
The story of stories, however, of Victor Hugo is incontestably Les Miserables. We may confess to something such a weakness for it as Thackeray had for Monte-Cristo. It is hardly so wholesome reading as the marvel of Dumas’ creation, but still it is a very good book when one wants to get out of the world into an atmosphere of romance. At such times it is a comfort to be told of such goodness as that of Bishop Myriel — you do not care for the fact that he is only the product of two antitheses, humility with grandeur, and Victor Hugo’s conception of what a priest ought to be as against all that he is not — you are content to wonder at him, and to follow the story of the relations to society of other antitheses, christened Jean Valjean, Fantine, and the like. The narration has about it an in- credible force, which imparts to it even an air of conviction. There are moments when you are tempted by some touch of observation of nature to believe in the reality of the mighty dream. A minor character, a corner of Paris, a trait of manners, is sketched in a few simple words that give an air of truth to a whole page. In point of fact, these minor characters produce illusion only in the first rough sketch of them. As soon as they open their mouths you see they are but puppets, for even Tholomyfes chez Bombarda, or Grantaire, drunk at the Caf6 Musain, talk to revellers of incredible patience in a way that would have left Eviradnus or Charles V. breathless. Yet
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we fancy that, after all, there are few people who, for once in a way, will not enjoy Les Mis&ables in spite of all its faults, perhaps even a little also by reason of some of them. Its five volumes constitute such a formidable mass, and represent the romancer in Victor Hugo so completely, that they leave us nothing to say about its successor, Les Travailleurs de la Mer.
There were published, in 1834, two volumes of Littcrature et Philosophie Meldes, consisting oi two parts; a journal of ideas, opin- ions, and reading of a young Jacobite of 1819, and a similar journal of a revolutionist of 1830. The first part pretended to give arti- cles written, chiefly for the Conservateur litteraire, when the author was seventeen years of age, all entire and absolutely unchanged from their original form, giving to those wishing to study the poet’s de- velopment a faithful picture of his royalist “ salad-days,” The sec- ond part gave the opinions of a full-blown liberal. As a matter of course, in two volumes of Victor Hugo there are many good things well said, though the value of the essays is rather in their form than in their substance. They are still literary green fruit, and such value as they might have had would have been as documents for the possible student of the poet’s development, and that is pre- cisely what they are not. In spite of the express declaration to the contrary, the early articles have been tampered with in every con- ceivable way. They are neither given entire, nor as they were origi- nally written. To make them accord with the poet’s later taste or interest, they have been docked or added to; early judgments have been suppressed or distorted. The author’s vanity made him cover, as a wet pasture with mushrooms, the simple style of his youth with a profusion of antithetical embellishments, and his liberalism of 1834 was of a sort that made it seem necessary to him to falsify the record of his earlier opinions. This fact has been established by two critics, independently of one another, who took the pains to compare the soi-disant youthful articles with the originals in the forgotten and very rare Conservateur litter air e.'*'
Afterward, in 1875, Victor Hugo published a volume of Actes et Paroles, purporting to be the record of his political life in the Cham- ber of Peers, and in the two Assemblies, constituent and legislative. This volume also fails in purpose, for the same reason as the two just spoken of. It shows how much mendacity may go along with the
* Gustave Planche, in his Nouveaux Portraits litt&aire, Vol. I., and Ed. Eire in Victor Hugo avant 1830.
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loftiest pretensions. Its authority as to what Victor Hugo really did say or do in any given situation is absolutely null.
IV.
These last two works lead us to look more nearly at the character of the man. The effort to judge the art of the poet by the light of his life is very often misleading, and results generally in nothing but a confusion of antitheses. Still, rightly viewed, the man is the key to much that is in the work, just as, on the other hand, the work, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, reveals much of its maker. For example, the enormous, the unbounded, self-conceit of Victor Hugo is evident in the most casual reading of his books. He is continually comparing himself with the greatest names in literature ; he gives you to understand that he is, in the world of modern thought, what Napoleon was in the world of action. The instances of this ludicrous self-appreciation, to be found in every volume he ever wrote, are too numerous to be cited. He can scarcely write a serenade to a young lady without intimating to her that she is fortunate in being celebrated by such a poet.
Let us be candid and allow that here, at least, he might plead the example of Ronsard, and that in 1830 poets in general were given to thinking themselves of finer clay than the rest of mankind. But in Victor Hugo the grace that should supplement this aristo- cratic view is entirely wanting, and his sense of superiority is so little disguised that it becomes an offence to humbler mortals. Worse than that, it corrodes his own heart. In the Voix intirieureSy for in- stance, he has a poem on the death of Charles X., where, after for some time alternately celebrating the misfortunes of the king and his own virtues, he quits his royal subject altogether in order to preach in his own name the duties of poets and the office of poet- ry. The same volume affords a yet stronger example, in the poem on the death of his brother, Eugene, in which he suddenly turns from the remembrance of their youth in common to the thought of his own solitary greatness, and straightway, during several stanzas, there is no longer question of his brother, but only a good deal of sufficiently undisguised self-laudation. A tone of falsity is thus given to the whole poem, as, indeed, to nearly all the poems commemorat- ing lost friends, where there is plenty of talk about angels and flow- ers, plenty of elaborately fine thoughts, but almost never a trace of genuine feeling. Is it, then, too much to say that the defect we
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have noted in the dramas — the inability of the personage ever to rise to a heat of passion such that they could not stop willingly to shape an epigram or a pretty conceit — is the direct outcome of a corresponding defect in the author’s own character ?
If there were any doubt in the matter there would still be the record of the poet’s life to enlighten us. Biographers are not want- ing, There are, first, the particulars of his youth, communicated by Victor Hugo to Sainte Beuve, and published finally in the Portraits Contemporains ; then there is Victor Hugo raconte par un T^moin de sa Vie., from his infancy to 1841, nominally by his wife, but included in the Edition d^fi.7iitive oi the poet’s works. After these come Asseline’s Victor Hugo ititime, Challamel’s Souvenirs d'un Hugoldtre, and Bar- bou’s Victor Hugo, Histoire co^npVete, and Victor Hugo et son Te^nps. But all these, more or less directly inspired by the poet himself, have quite as much need of being controlled as the Littdrature et Philoso- phie. Various means exist of sifting the true from the false; curi- ous things may be learned by comparing Victor Hugo with himself. For instance, in 1875, in the introduction to Actes et Paroles, he recounts that he and his brothers had for their tutor an aged priest, “ still trembling from ’93,” who taught them much Latin, a little Greek, and no history. He was called the Abb^ de la Riviere. Then follows an attack on clerical education, which was to be ex- pected from Victor Hugo, with the principles he then professed. Note, however, the private instruction and the noble particle to the abb6’s name. We may find further on something to illustrate that. In Victor Hugo raconti we are told that there was a little day-school in the Rue Saint- Jacques, kept by a worthy man and his wife, named Larivi^re, chiefly for the sons of workmen. There Victor and his brothers were sent. The man had, it is true, been a priest before the revolution, and married to save his head ; at least, that is the way the poet told it in 1841.
The curious book of M. Edmond Bir6, Victor Hugo avaiit 1830, is, however, the document that is absolutely necessary for any one who cares to get at the real biography of the chief of romanticism. Alas for hero worship ! the glories of the official revelations come out badly tarnished from M. Bird’s examination. We find there established beyond a doubt that the vagaries of the poet’s imagination with regard to himself were by no means confined to the statements in the Actes et Paroles and Littlrature et Philosophie. As M. Bird’s book may not be readily accessible, we may be pardoned for borrow-
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ing from it a few facts that may tend to justify what we have al- ready said.
The care with which the poet invented and entertained a legend about himself, always to his own aggrandizement, shows that he added the talent of a Barnum to all his others. This had a curi- ous effect against the background of the immensities, and the apos- tleship of freedom and humanity. One wonders why the poet, in his emancipation from prejudices, should have thought it necessary to filch the genealogy of a very noble family of the name of Hugo, to which he bore no relation whatever, at the cost of the suppres- sion of the honest carpenter, his grandfather, and of various uncles and aunts, equally honest, but of positions occasionally even more humble ! We can understand why a man who intended to pose as a republican should choose to forget that he had once been recipient of a royal pension, but was it necessary to add mendacity to ingra- titude, and accuse Louis XVIII. of misconceiving General Hugo’s services to the extent of relieving him of command, when, in point of fact — the memoirs of General Hugo are the witness — the king did exactly the opposite, and confirmed him in the honors he had won under Napoleon? We can understand that Victor Hugo should suffer in vanity when a play he produced after Cromwell, Amy Robsart, adapted from Scott’s romance, failed conspicuously, but what can one think of the fact that for many years he allowed Paris to believe that the luckless drama was written by his brother- in-law, at that time a lad of eighteen ? The greater part of his fables, like that of the enfant sublime, merely ministered to his own vanity — though in this case Chateaubriand thought the use of his name an unwarrantable liberty — but occasionally, as when, after the death of the author, he asserted, more than once, that M. de Neuf- chateau’s* preface to Gil Bias was written by himself at the age of sixteen, he reveals a moral obliquity that may throw light on some of the eccentricities of his drama. It is of lesser account that he antedated many of his earlier pieces in their later editions, in order that his political opinions of those days might seem of less conse- quence to his liberal friends and followers ; but the fact that he entered into an agreement with his publishers, with regard to one, at least, of his books, for the manufacture of several editions out of one, by change in titles, or that after 1840 he published the Ori- entales with two prefaces, one dated January, 1829, preface to the
* Fran9ois de Neufchateau was the creator of the Museum of the Louvre.
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first edition, and the other, preface to the fourteenth edition, Febru- ary of the same year (when, in fact, in March, 1830, the book was really at its sixth edition!), that, again, is unpleasant.
Nearly all these unjustifiable deeds, even to most of his meanest actions, had this in common, that they were done in the interest of a boundless self-conceit and egotism. His self-worship ordina- rily injured him rather than others. As a liar he was modest com- pared with Voltaire ; as a charlatan he was not, like Rousseau, des- picable ; but his shortcomings were, if we are not much mistaken, more prejudicial to the quality of his work than were theirs. As a general fact, a poet may be guilty of a great degree of moral ob- liquity, or of courses seriously evil, without detriment to the exercise of his genius. There are failings and failings, however, and among them all there is one, precisely that of self-worship, which seems to us sure to injure the perfection, to take off the bloom, as it were, of any pretension of universal tenderness and sympathy. Where the fault is less exaggerated than in Victor Hugo, who often cannot finish even a lyric of love without stopping to make a genuflexion before his own image, it imparts a false ring to harmonies otherwise pleasing, but in this case, where it is undeniable, flagrant, and flaunt- ing, the most sonorous words, the finest sentiments, may be heaped together in thousands of well-turned verses, and the impression left, after all, will be one of emptiness. That is the reason why the dust is left to gather even on the volumes containing his finest poems. Critics find it easier to allow that Victor Hugo was the greatest arti- ficer in rhymes and metres, the greatest rhetorician in verse of this century, than to read him.
There is, however, another cause for the neglect in which the works of Victor Hugo are left — a cause with which he cannot be reproached, and which attaches equally to the school to which he belonged. In opening these volumes we find that their erudition, their ideals, their reasoning, are no longer ours. Matthew Arnold somewhere said of Byron that his fault, and that of his time, was that he did not know enough ; meaning, we suppose, that his informa- tion, with regard to subjects on which he wrote, was not sufficient to make his representation of them of lasting value. This would be true, to a yet greater extent, of Victor Hugo. In his Orientales, his pic- tures of any past time, or foreign people — due account being made of the poet’s aims — we must reproach him with not knowing enough, and not knowing rightly. It is true, he is forever laying claim to the most rigorous historical accuracy. The description of the decadence
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of Rome {Lcgcnde dcs Steeles) contains not a detail that may not be verified ; the expenses of the queen’s establishment, cited in Ruj Bias, to the uttermost figure, are, equally with the armorial bearings, of scru- pulous exactitude. You see how far his conscience reaches ; its pains are given entirely to the bric-a-brac of his pieces; if the costumes be copies, the figures that stalk about in them are absolutely fantastic.
A word, by the way, as to this accuracy. In his travels on the Rhine, the poet gives a formidable list of ruined castles, with the dates of their foundation and the names of their builders — a proof at once of erudition and of memory, as he boasts, in his preface, that his notes are given just as they were written at the close of the day’s tramp, in the village inns, without the aid of books. Let the boast pass. There is scarcely a castle in the list about which he has not made some blunder. For any one who cares to examine further, in- stances of similar looseness of statement abound. For us they serve simply to demonstrate that the lyric poet had not the faintest idea of what is justly required of the historian. This sort of superficial erudition, busying itself solely with picturesque details, and leaving the men and women of history to be revived according to the whim of the poet’s imagination, results in nothing but sham Mussulmans, sham knights-errant, a sham Lucrezia, a sham Mary Tudor, and so on — creatures that our generation cannot help regarding with more curiosity than respect. The entire romantic machinery, mediaeval, re- naissance, Oriental, or Spanish, as it was used fifty years ago, appears to us as antiquated as the Castle of Otranto. Its most considerable outgrowth, the Gothic revival, in the light of which the monuments of the Middle Ages were not only preserved but restored, has passed away, and we look at its work — well, not with entire approval.
In short, the great intellectual movement which gave the roman- tic school to the world has done what it could, and must make way for something else. We scarcely credit M. Zola when he exalts him- self as the representative of the literary life of the future, but we agree with him that romanticism is dead, and that it had in it from the beginning the seeds of premature decay. It was, as we have said before, essentially a period of transition ; it had the force to change, but not to produce the finished type. It was like those mag- nificent churches of the twelfth century, at the moment when the Abb6 Suger was accomplishing his revolution at Saint-Denis ; fine as they are, they are weighted by the traditions of the style they left behind them, and they reveal but imperfect notions of anything which could take its place. JOHN Safford FiSKE.
GEORGE MEREDITH.
At the foot of Box Hill, in one of the lovely valleys of the Sur- rey downs, a cottage stands, half hidden by encircling trees. A little space of flowers spreads before it, an old yew hedge screens the garden from curious passing eyes. Within, for the privileged who pass the gate, an apple-bordered walk leads up the slope to a terrace underneath some hanging woods, where Mr. Meredith has built him- self a study. Here, toward sunset, the fortunate may meet Mr. Mere- dith himself coming down between the apple-trees. He is service- ably shod, he usually carries a stout stick in his hand, the head — iron-gray now — is held erect, the eyes kindle to light beneath thoughtfully knit brows, the mouth, for those who know him, seems ever ready to break into sonorous speech. He has come down pre- pared to walk and talk. These walks and talks are among the great enjoyments of his friends, and as round the neighborhood of Rydal Water in an older generation, so round the neighborhood of Box Hill now must hang many a lasting association of intellectual pleas- ure.
It was my good-fortune to find myself in his company on the turf back of Box Hill one brilliant, breezy morning. Our eyes tra- velled over the valley where park woods, russet with the changing leaf, clustered beneath the box and juniper of surrounding slopes, and threw into vivid contrast the yews of Norbury, which are asserted to have held their place for upward of two thousand years. West of the valley the greens and range rolled skyward, bearing a tower solitary upon its highest point. Southward, the Weald of Sussex rolled under light October mists to Brighton downs, and legendary glimpses of the sea. And while we mounted, with the horizon widening beneath us, we spoke of the share the intellect has had in human develop- ment. Our talk was of the nature of Socratic dialogue, slight and tentative remark on one side serving only to mark the paragraphs of full discourse upon the other. Mr. Meredith held the intellect to be the chief endowment of man, and that in him which it is most worth while to develop. By intellectual courage, he said, we make progress. Intellect is the guide of the spiritual man. Feeling and
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conduct are to be thought of as subordinate to it. Intellect should be our aim. It can be developed by training. The morbid and sen- timental tendencies in the ordinary healthy individual can be cor- rected by it. Starting wrongly, a man can be brought right by it. The failure of many eminent men in old age is to be attributed to the habit of looking at life sentimentally rather than intellectually. Truth seeks truth ! And we find truth by the understanding. Let the understanding be only fervid enough, and conduct will follow naturally. When we consider what the earth is and what we are, whither we tend, and why, we perceive that reason is, and must be, the supreme guide of man. Perceive things intellectually. Keep the mind open and supple. Then, as new circumstances arise, man is fit to deal with them, and to discern right and wrong.
“ But Socrates ” — and I ventured here to quote Professor Clif- ford’s “ Virtue is habit.”
“ Unquestionably that applies to the moral truths already con- quered. Virtue is the habit of conforming our actions to truth, once perceived. But in the life of every man and nation unforeseen cir- cumstances arise, circumstances which are outside the ordinary, al- ready decided laws. It is by the intellect, by the exercise of reason, that we can alone rightly deal with these. The man whose intellect is awake will conquer new domain in the moral world. It is our only means of spiritual progress. Habits of conduct, though excellent, are insufficient. They guide us in the beaten track ; when new mat- ter presents itself they are evidently unable to deal with it.”
I wish I could recall the vivacity, the keen vigor, the wealth of wit and illustration with which he sustained his theme. As we walked along a stretch of turf on the summit of Box Hill, with the southern landscape lying pearly beneath us, and a south-east wind boisterously singing through the reddening woods upon the hill, he seemed to raise our spirits to corresponding heights, rough, pure, and keen, where footing was not easy, but invigorating, and every breath was sharp and good to draw. We spoke of death. He said, “ It should be disregarded. Live in the spirit. Project your mind toward the minds of those whose presence you desire, and you will then live with them in absence and in death. Training ourselves to live in the universal, we rise above the individual.” The noonday sun gained power on the plain, and church spires glistened between village trees. Thought turned naturally also to books, and to the public they address.
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I have no thought of offering here a review of Mr. Meredith’s work. But in connection with our talk the thought presented itself that there might be interest in considering how far the perception of the need for intellectual development, which furnished the text of the talk upon Box Hill, has been also the text and inspiration of the philo- sophy which we find in his books. His poetry appeals to a narrower public than his prose. We will therefore speak only for the moment of the latter. The Shaving of Shagpat, which was his first prose work, appeared in 1855. Since then we have had in the following order Farina, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Evan Harrington, Emilia in England — now published again, under the title of Sandra Belloni — Rhoda Fleming, Vittoria, Harry Richmond, Beauchamp' s Career, and last, but by no means least esteemed by his admirers, Diana of the Crossways. That is, in a space of thirty years, eleven volumes of prose. These, though published now each in one volume, vary in length as well as in other qualities, and we therefore fall into the usual rough incorrectness of averages when we say that each may have taken nearly three years to produce. But the general fact is not incorrect, that they have been produced slowly, with much thought on the writer’s part, and are to be accepted as the ripe fruit of his mind. “ I have brooded over them,” he once said to me, “ and the thoughts with which the best of them were written remain with me vivid as at the moment of production. Such thoughts are the keenest part of spiritual life. Narrative is nothing. It is the mere vehicle of philosophy. The interest is in the idea which action serves to illustrate. Without action’ the mind fails in grasping the idea ; therefore, action becomes necessary, but the understanding must be fixed upon what lies behind.” Let me say here that in reproducing what Mr. Meredith has at various times said to me, I do but reproduce the translation of his speech, as it has passed through my mind. A verbal memory must be very accurate which will guar- antee the exact phrases occurring in lengthened conversations, and the alteration of a word or two may sometimes so change the mean- ing which was in the speaker’s mind that I must guard Mr. Meredith from being held responsible for a possible misconception on my part or failure to render what has been received.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Emilia, Vittoria, Beauchamp' s Career, and Diana of the Crossways are the books of which the author seems most willingly to speak. He expels Farina from the new edition, and though there is fine tragic work in Rhoda Fleming
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and comedy in the Egoist, though some of his admirers esteem Harry Richmond as a triumph of romantic adventure, and Evan Harringto7i is perhaps the book which a reader new to Mr. Meredith’s work would do well to begin with, the five first-mentioned are assuredly those which illustrate most completely the richness, the vigor, and originality of the mind in which they were conceived. It can surprise no attentive reader to learn that the thoughts which accompanied their creation are still vivid as in the day that the books were written. Notwithstanding the length of time which has elapsed between the first and the last of these human studies the continuity of intention in them is no less remarkable than the variety of subject. From Richard Fever el to Diana, the progress has been steadily in one direction. As toward a star shining above earth’s common lights, Mr. Meredith has kept his face set toward the development of man’s understanding. In his philosophy brain stands on one side and sensation on the other. “ Their sense is with their senses all mixed in,” he says of women in one of his earlier poems :
" Destroyed by subtleties these women are.
More brain, oh Lord ! more brain ; or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win. ”
In the moral world there is no such thing as fact, there is only proportion, and the maintenance of balance demands vitality. No dead hand can hold the scales. For this reason, as creeds stiffen into forms, they must become after a time insufficient, and in an age which may, both by its fruition and decay, be fitly called the autumn of many creeds, the development of the understanding has become urgent. We all recognize this in a general way, but we have each a secret court where, under the ranks of vanity, prejudice, and custom, invisible flatterers hover round us, and when a perception of truth orders general execution among those, we are apt, like Nelson, to put a blind eye to the telescope. Mr. Meredith has affixed to this pro- cess the name of sentimentalism. “ A happy pastime,” he describes it, “ and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless, but a damning one to those that have anything to forfeit.” He wages war against it in many forms. The words quoted are from Richard Feverel, and the sentimentalist in that book fares badly. By the time Emilia in Engla?id was written sentimentalism had dra- matized itself still further, and the story is almost a study of simple fervor on the one side and the ‘‘ Nice Feelings and Fine Shades ” upon
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the Other. It is here the ordinary feminine development which is lashed in the persons of the Miss Poles and their elect. In Rhoda Fleming we have the two young men, Algernon and Edward Blan- cove. . Algernon, the mere creature of sensation, is described in one of his phases by this sentence :
“ Adolescents who have the taste for running into excesses enjoy the breath of change as another form of excitement ; change is a sort of debauch to them. They will delight infinitely in a simple country round of existence — in propriety and church-going — in the sensation of feeling innocent. There is little that does not enrapture them if you tie them down to nothing and let them try all.”
Edward was “ in reality the perilous companion.”
“ He had a fatally serious spirit, and one of some strength. What he gave himself up to he could believe to be correct in the teeth of an opposing world until he tired of it, when he sided as heartily with the world against his quondam self.”
These two act as the Uncle Hippias and the Adrian Harley of Richard Feverel might have acted in similar circumstances, though the final repentance of Edward Blancove makes it perhaps hardly fair to bracket him with the “Wise Youth.” The sentimentalist dashed with the cynic appears again in the Cecil Baskelett of Beauchamp' s Career, in the person of the Egoist himself, and in the frigid Dacier of Diana. His last, perhaps his best, appearance in the sensuous form is the Sir Lukin Dunsterne of the latter book, who, with the serenest absence of conscience, was ever ready to believe that “there was something not entirely right going on.” The individuals, indeed, do not resemble each other, but the same enemy is exposed and attacked in their persons. Feminine fol- lowers of the Miss Poles are to be found among the minor charac- ters of every story. The figure of Mr. Richmond Roy, in Harry Richmond, stands alone for a colossal representation of sentimen- talism which takes the astounded reader so by storm that, after ranging over every note in the scale from farce to pathos, after suffering dim misgivings that the heroic hero is being missed, after inclining to love the attractive good-for-nothing, and to bow be- fore the opening of a genius always in the bud, it is still impossi- ble to recall the bronze statue of Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth figuring on horseback on the Bella Vista, without an inclination both to tears and laughter. It is a wonderful creation, in which there is so much of statue and so much of man that, when the end comes with a simple “ I am broken,” we scarcely know if it is man
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or the image of him that has disappeared. He is literally and figura- tively shattered, the whole deception falls to pieces under our eyes, yet when we examine the fragments, we admit, “ It is of this ma- terial that we are made.” There is not one book of Mr. Meredith’s in which sentimentalism goes free. The class described in Richard Feverel as “ seeking to enjoy without incurring the immense debtor- ship for the thing done,” is the same that Diana despises for “ fiddling harmonics on the sensual string.” Epigrams might be culled in dozens from his pages as specimens of the shafts he draws against this common tendency, but they are only as straws upon the wind, serving to show a general direction. There is, as he says in description of his latest heroine, a broad thought significant of an attitude of mind opposed to the sentimental. This attitude of mind is his. The problems of life present themselves to him as problems to be solved intellectually, and the reader who would follow him at all must follow him with the intellect. No one can read a volume of his without very considerable exercise of brain.
The natural result has been to lay him open to two charges. It has been said, on the one hand, that he is a cynic ; on the other, that he writes over the heads of the public, and is unreadable. With re- gard to the first accusation, it is the lot of every one who wars against sentimentalism, especially where the strokes are delivered with the Homeric vigor of Mr. Meredith’s; but it is altogether unfounded. He says of himself : “ I never despair of humanity. I am an ardent lover of nature. It is therefore impossible that I should be a cynic.” The business of the novelist who aims at truth is to illustrate the variability of the human species. He must take men and women as they are, not by any means all commonplace, but with human liabil- ity to error, which heroism does not necessarily eradicate. The best men are still imperfect. To recognize this is not cynicism, while we perceive that the imperfect may also be the best. Take The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and consider what it is that the author satirizes in it. Assuredly not nature nor humanity, but the attempt to keep a growing creature in bonds when the time has come for him to walk alone. The “ system ” of Sir Austin Feverel is typical of all systems, profoundly pondered, instinct with the spiritual life of its author, full of wise and elevated maxims, excellent, necessary even, perhaps, in moral childhood, but ruinous when forced upon the vigorous adult mind. In the struggle between Richard and the system one had to be destroyed. So it must ever be. Richard represents the 15
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young generation fighting with what is dead in the forms of those that have gone before. The subject has a classic breadth. Think of the spirit in which it is treated, the faith in the future which that spirit implies, and the charge of cynicism is answered at once. The cynic has no sympathy for processes of nature. He is described in the person of Adrian Harley :
“To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character was the wise youth’s problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of those fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had been and was, a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of gods in the back- ground. Why not laughter of mortals too ? Adrian had his laugh in his comfort- able corner.”
Turn from this to the description of Austin Wentworth, in the same book, or to Tom Bakewell in prison.
“ There lay Tom Hobnail. Tom ! A bacon-munching, reckless, beer-swilling animal, and yet a man ! a dear, brave, human heart, notwithstanding, capable of devotion and unselfishness.”
Or this glimpse of Sir Austin Feverel when, at the end of certain boyish adventures which form the first act of the drama, Richard has conquered the promptings of his lower nature and taken the upright course. The boy has gone to do the painful right, the father waits for him, and, while he waits,
“ The solemn gladness of his heart gave Nature a tongue. Through the deso- lation flying overhead — the wailing of the Mother of Plenty across the bare, swept land — he caught intelligible signs of the beneficent order of the universe from a heart newly confirmed in its grasp of the principle of human goodness, as mani- fested in the dear child who had just left him ; confirmed in its belief of the ulti- mate victory of good within us, without which nature has neither music nor mean- ing, and is rock, stone, tree, and nothing more,”
Instances will multiply in the mind of every reader. The “ two poor, true women jigging on their wretched hearts to calm the child ” in the midst of the final catastrophe, and the whole last chapter of Richard Feverel., are among them. I dwell rather specially upon The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, but only because it happens to be the first of 'this series of books, and what is found in it is to be fol- lowed through the subsequent work of the author. There is never anywhere a mockery of feeling. What Mr. Meredith thinks of those who indulge themselves in such jeering is shown tolerably plainly by his treatment of Cecil Barkelett, who was, he tells us,
" Gifted with the art, which is a fine and a precious one, of priceless value in so- ciety, and not wanting a benediction upon it in our elegant literature, namely, the
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art of stripping his fellow-man, and so posturing him as to make every movement of the comical wretch puppet-like, constrained, stiff, and foolish. He could pre- sent you heroical actions in that fashion.”
It is not the author’s fashion, Emilia, Vittoria, Beauchamp' s Career, attest his reverence for the heroic. Satire is mixed with all of them, but it is satire of the affectations, not of the simplicities of feeling. Satire of that kind is a wholesome salt, not always pleasant to the sen- sitive palate, but opposite in every property to the poison of cynicism. His presentation of woman is a subject which offers itself naturally here, but it would lead too far for the limits of the present article. The most striking feature of it is the frankness with which he takes them on their merits. He surrounds them with no halo, he wraps them in no mystery, but, approaching them as simply as he ap- proaches man, he lays the strength and the weakness open before us. The perceptive quality of the intellect is well marked here :
“ Alas for us,” he boldly complains, “ this, our awful baggage in the rear of humanity, these women who have not moved on their own feet one step since the primal mother taught them to suckle, are perpetually pulling us backward on the march.”
The embryonic condition of their reasoning powers, the reliance on the senses, which long process of evolution has made almost in- stinctive to them, are facts which he very honestly calls on them to recognize and remedy. He entirely refuses the doubtful form of homage which consists in putting them on a plane other than that of the understanding, but no living writer of English has done higher honor to the qualities which they possess. The friendship of Emma and Tony, in Diana of the Crossways, is one among many instances. His gallery of heroines speak for themselves. Lucy, Emilia, Rose, Jenny, Diana, Emma, imperfect every one, still send us seeking for comparison to Shakspere. And Ren^e, graceful Ren6e, cannot, for all her faultiness, be omitted.
“ She chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the gondoliers; she was like a delicate cup of crystal, brimming with the beauty of the place, and making one of them drink in all his impressions through her. Her features had the soft irreg- ularities which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light ; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly ; thought flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night light- ning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed : her age was but newly seventeen, and she was French.”
Humanity is not passing as an ironic procession before eyes
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which have rested comprehendingly on these bright figures. The difficult task of their creator has been to show that feeling, however sweet and good, is insufficient. If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate Providence to another. Alas ! love, divine as it is, can do no more than lighten the house it inhabits — must take its shape, sometimes intensify its narrowness ; can spiritualize, but not expel, old life-long lodgers above stairs and below.
The second charge, of writing over the heads of the public and becoming obscure, cannot be so easily disposed of. “ It is a terrible decree,” we are told in Diana of the Crossways, “ that all must act who would prevail, and the more extended the audience the greater the need for the mask and buskin.” Mr. Meredith permits himself, perhaps too often, to forget this “ terrible decree.” He looks at life intellectually, and assumes that the public will do the same to an extent which no general public ever yet has done, or, in our concep tion of it, will do. It may be that he forgets to act ; it may be that he disdains ; it may be that nature is too strong for philosophy to conquer. Whatever the reason, he writes as he talks, presupposing intellectual equals who will run with him along the lines of thought. And his style is so concentrated that he gives, at times, only the shortest indications of the way. “ The art of the pen,” he some- where says, “ (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, in- stead of laboring with a drop-scene brush as if it were to the eye ; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description. That is why the poets, who spring imagination with a word or two, paint lasting pictures.” He trusts much to his reader, and counts upon a light of inward vision which is not always present. The great general public is neither intellectual nor imaginative in any high degree, and it expects to have its thinking and its seeing done for it. To sit down to a novel and find that the novelist has counted the brains of the reader as one factor in the profit and enjoyment to be drawn from the reading, is a shock which the majority resent as a totally unfair displacement of common conditions. With this majority Mr. Meredith has literally nothing to do. He can bid it “ be wary of the disrelish of brain stuff.” He can assure it that mat- ter “ that is not nourishing to brains can help to constitute nothing but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish heaps ” ; that brain stuff is not lean stuff, and that the brain stuff of fiction is internal history, “ to suppose it dull the profoundest of errors.” The ma-
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jority very naturally does not listen. The work of the intellect is too severe for it. Only the other day I heard of a butcher’s wife, living not far from Mr. Meredith, who requires the circulating library to furnish her with a three-volume novel daily, and confessed to her doctor that, having nothing else to do, she lies on the sofa and reads it. She is interesting, because typical of a class numerous in all civil- ized communities, namely, the class which has conquered the material and as yet scarcely perceives the spiritual problems offered for man’s solution. What could such a consumer of fiction make of the fol- lowing sentence ?
" And how may you know that you have reached to philosophy ? You touch her skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of sentimental- ism. You are one with her when — but I would not have you a thousand years older. Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental route — that very winding path which again and again brings you round to the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another whirl : your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at all the spiritual. ... A thousand years ! You may count full many a thousand by this route before you are one with divine philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will reach and embrace her, give you the savor of truth, the right use of the senses, reality’s infinite sweetness. To such an end let us bend our aim to work, knowing that every form of labor, even this flimsiest, as you esteem it, should minister to growth.”
The love of nature which breathes through his pages might be made the subject of a separate article. Who, that has read of it, ever forgets the meeting between Richard Feverel and Lucy Des- borough, in the meadow above the weir, or the hour spent by Ren^e and Nevil Beauchamp, side by side, under Adriatic dawn, or, for an- other instance, the description of his own county of Surrey, and the reviving effects of a natural life, which occur in Diana of the Cross- ways ?
For the direction of his whole work, so far as it can be com- prised in one sentence, I would like to take this quotation from the last pages of his last work :
“ Who can really think and not think hopefully ? When we despair or dis- color things it is our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their drudge. I heard you whisper with your very breath in my ear ; ‘ There is nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by.’ ”
Flora L. Shaw.
DON FINIMONDONE.
A CALABRIAN SKETCH.
The comare cleaned with her apron a place on the doorstep, so that the signora, who came from so far away, could sit down without soiling her dress. Then “With permission,” said she, and sat down herself, to tell the story of Don Finimondone.
It is an ugly thing to keep Lent twelve months in the year ; but when the olives are scarce, and the sheep, because of the drought that burns up the pastures, are reduced so that they are a pity to see, and the earth cracks between the blades of buckwheat, it is a bad prospect for the next carnival. So they found it, when the winter was over, and in the village they began to think of the coming carni- val time. It was not a great city — anything but that — yet it was a town like another, with a church and a priest and a mayor and a piazzetta, and an honest people that were not heathen, and wanted a little carnival in honor of their blessed faith.
At the inn, every evening, there gathered a group of massari, massarotti, the greater and the less, to arrange the ways and means for the celebration of the carnival. In the great cities, where they waste money by the shovelful, they have not to spoil their brains with thinking of every lira that is spent. The committee talked like so many windmills ; and those of them who had been to the cities had the best of it, for they could say what they had seen there. But all could speak with reason of the hard times and the bad year, and say that little could be done.
It might have been that nothing was done but for compare Vin- cenzo, the son of an old massaro who was reputed rich for those parts, for he had fields, and a house and a stable, and sheep and poultry, and some cafisioi oil that came from the oliveto, where at noon the trees made it almost as dark as it is at Ave Maria in autumn. No one could say that they had ever seen him spend two tari at once without making wry faces, as if they had pulled so many of his teeth. There was only one thing of which he was prodigal, and that was predictions of evil. He was never content ; he would say his say about everything, and never finished talking ; he would dispute
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about the shadow of a donkey. His family led a sorry life, and more than once his wife wished herself dead.
Everything, according to him, was going to the bad. Did it rain, there would be another flood for the sins of the world, and that with- out the ark to put two beasts in. Did the sun shine, the grass was burning up, and the geese would die with their mouths open for thirst. If the olives were scarce, there would not be enough oil to fry the good things of heaven ; and if it were a good year, he said that it was a pity to see the branches loaded till they broke, and olives so cheap that it was indeed ruin, it was.
From his habit of foretelling the ruin of everything, he had gained the name of Don Finimondone ; and it is not certain that he would not have had some satisfaction to see the world come to an end, provided he could have the opportunity to say to the mayor and people of the village, “ I always told you so ! ” And since the sun shone and the rain fell in their accustomed measure, year after year, Don Finimondone became more and more discontented with the earth and the heavens. If he had been there when the world was made, it would have been a different thing!
His son, Vincenzo, was of quite another stuff ; he was all his mother, good soul, that sang when she worked, and listened when her husband scolded, as if he were counting so many beads of the rosary, and when he beat her she only said, “ Better the hand than the stick.”
If Vincenzo had only had his father’s money to spend there would have been a carnival worth seeing ! But Vincenzo was a blacksmith, and, though he had a house and a forge, and four furrows under the sun to sow beans and some handfuls of maize and buck- wheat, he had no more than was needed to keep his wife and chil- dren. Every year there was another baby ; and while the grand- mother said, “ Another soul gained for Paradise,” the grandfather grumbled, “ Another mouth to eat, and poverty enough for ten.” But Vincenzo and Mariangela and the children throve and were happy. Cola, the biggest boy, could already blow the bellows while his father beat the hot iron ; the mother, with the baby on her back and the little ones hanging to her skirts or running beside her, sowed the field and pulled up the weeds that were choking the buckwheat ; or, if it were winter, spun and wove the cloth to make the garments of the family.
When the carnival was at hand Vincenzo had had greater ex-
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penses than usual, for his mule had died when the days were short- est, and the earth was frozen, so that it was hard to dig the hole to bury the poor beast. Some weeks later Vincenzo had bought a new mule, a fine bay ; and in honor of this animal had painted his cart a bright blue, with Sant’ Antonio, that preached to the fishes, the large, the middle-sized, and the small, upon one side ; and upon the other were represented the souls in purgatory. There was not a finer cart, one might wager, not even in Messina, where they make such beautiful ones ; and when Vincenzo had given the last touch to the red and yellow flames, it seemed that one might warm his hands at them. And the parish priest, Don Giuseppe, was so pleased with the appearance of the cart that he said, when the images of the blessed saints in the church should need a new coat of paint, Vin- cenzo should give it to them.
The first thing needful for a carnival procession is at least one cart, for the masks to ride in, and Vincenzo offered his for that pur- pose. They would also have had another cart, and have trimmed it with green cloth and cotton-wool to represent the waves and the foam of the sea, with three sirens to sit and sing in it, that were the daughters of compare Mariano, the sacristan — handsome figures of girls, with long, long hair — while the blue cart, with a mast and a sail in it, should carry the little monk that stopped his ears with cotton-wool and tied himself with his rope girdle to the mast, and, blessed be the saints ! was deaf as a bell for all that the sirens sang so loud, and so was saved. But Don Giuseppe, the priest, said that it was not a monk, but, on the contrary, a pagan ; and that they could not have the daughters of the sagrestano, and still less his cart, that carried people to the campo santo, for sirens are only a profane fable.
Finally it was decided to have only Vincenzo’s cart and the bay mule ; and, because this would cost nothing or little, the committee should wear false heads made of pumpkins, with holes for eyes and mouth and nostrils, and they should ride in the blue cart between the pious fishes and the souls of purgatory.
The day before the carnival was to begin there were great doings at the forge. Vincenzo was shaping a new set of shoes for the bay mule, and compare Carmenio, who was also of the committee of the carnival, blew the bellows until the hot iron was red as coral. The others of the committee sat in the doorway, over which were nailed a horseshoe and two pieces of thin iron bent in the form
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of a pair of horns, and between them, written with charcoal, were the figures 8 and 9, so that if the witches should come — may they be far from us! — they could not cross the threshold. Don Finimondone came along the road, from the sheepfold, and stopped to look at the bay mule, that was tied by the halter near the door of the forge.
“ Is not that a fine mule that your son bought at the fair ? ” said compare Q,zxx(\e.x)\o. “ Look what legs; and he will draw double the load of the other one.”
“ Say fora-fascino and benedica ! ” cried Vincenzo, for fear of the evil eye.
But compare Carmenio did not hear him, as he walked up the road with Don Finimondone, to whom he paid great court, because he wished to marry the daughter Filomena, that had great black eyes, and a mattress, and a box of linen that she had spun and woven for herself, besides the little dowry that her father would give to her.
Whether it was the witches that put a hand in, despite the horse- shoe over the door, or whether it was the unlucky praises spoken by compare Carmenio, with one thought for the mule and ten for Filomena, who can say? But the fact is, that when Vincenzo stooped to lift up the hind foot of the mule to shoe him, the beast put him in one of those kicks of which two would leave nothing for the doctor to do, only for the priest. Vincenzo cried out that the mule had broken his bones, and he fell to the ground like a fig-tree under the axe. The men took him up gently and carried him home on their arms, while little Cola ran on before to tell his mamma that the bad mule had killed poor papa. Mariangela came to the door with the great tears running down her face, that was white as a washed rag. “ My man, they have killed my man ! ” she screamed.
Behind her came the mother, zia Agnese, with the corners of the handkerchief on her head trembling as if she had the fever. Vin- cenzo said that he was anything but dead — though not all the neigh- bors believed that he spoke truly. Then they took him into the house, laid him upon the bed, and sent for the doctor.
“ But even the doctors do not know everything ; and for all that they write who knows what words on a scrap of paper, and the apothecary reads it, and then puts a little of this and of that into a phial that you pay for like the best wine, when the witches or the evil eye come into the affair,” said Mariangela, “ there is more than the signor dottore that is wanted.”
So she put a little water and salt in a dish, and dipped her finger
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in it, and made three crosses on her husband’s forehead, and said otto nove and benedica, to draw out the evil eye, as if it had been a nail that was stuck into his foot ; and poor Vincenzo said he already felt better.
“ For it was all my fault,” observed Mariangela ; “ stupid that I am, I heedlessly swept the house last evening, so as to have every- thing ready for the carnival, and forgot to lay the broom across the doorway.”
Whoever sweeps at night steals the horse of a witch, for — as every one knows — they ride on broomsticks, and those that lack the broomstick have to walk, and are too late to dance the ridda, which makes them angry.
Filomena, who had heard of the misfortune, came in from the field ; and taking the new red tassels which she had made for the mule, to keep him from the evil eye, she threw them out of the door and said, “ May the devil cbme and take his own mule ! ”
Don Finimondone sat upon a bench by the hearth, with his elbows resting on his knees, his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and his chin between his palms.
“ I said that the bay mule would play some ugly trick,” he re- peated.
The doctor came, and said that for three broken ribs one must have patience ; and he wrote in his pocket-book so fast it was a pleasure to see the words crawl like flies over the paper, and then he tore out the page, and Cola ran with it to the apothecary.
And who would believe it ! it was not the pain of the broken bones that most troubled Vincenzo, it was the thought of the carnival that gnawed his mind and gave him no peace. He turned this way and that, as if the bed were full of thorns, and although, as luck willed it, a sheep had died the night before, so that his mother could make him some broth, he would eat nothing, for all that she begged him, “ My little heart, eat two spoonfuls, it will do you good.”
The thought of the blue cart and the pumpkin heads tormented him ; he had it fixed in his mind, and he ground it over and over like flour. Mariangela offered to put on, herself, the great cloak and the pumpkin head, and go in his place in the cart, to pacify him ; but he would not hear of it.
“ Oh, why should you go in the cart ? ” said he. “ It is of no use. Moreover, there is witchcraft in the matter, and you would go to break your neck, besides doing an unsuitable thing.”
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Then Vincenzo would have wished that compare Carmenio should go in the blue cart and take his place as leader of the carnival. But Don Finimondone said that it should not be so; it was enough that the mule had spoiled his son for the holidays, without ruining the cart and breaking the bones of any other Christians, and neither mule nor cart should go out of the stable the next day. Vincenzo could not content himself, and Mariangela cried, and Filomena scolded, and zia Agnese, poor old woman, did not know to which saint to make her vows, for trouble of mind. And Don Finimondone went into the stable, with ever so long a face and in the worst of humors ; and he drew the cart into its place, and tied the mule by the halter to the stall, and locked the stable door upon the inside, and passed the night in the hayloft, “ With women and geese there is no peace,” observed Don Finimondone.
At sunrise the next morning, which was the first day of the car- nival, compare Carmenio betook himself to the house of Don Fini- mondone to ask for news of his friend Vincenzo. Filomena came down the door-yard with a stick in her hand, to drive the geese to the pasture, that was little better than stubble.
“ Good-day, comare Filomena,” said Carmenio ; “you are up early to help the sun to light the world.”
“ It is because I must take these little beasts to the pasture that I am here to have the pleasure of seeing you, compare Carmenio,” she replied.
“ If I were a great gentleman, comare Filomena,” went on Car- menio, “ you should know nothing of geese but the feathers in cush- ions. You should have a silk dress for every day in the week, and a pair of gold ear-rings. Meanwhile, here is a handkerchief that I bought for you at the fair.”
Filomena took the scarlet handkerchief and knotted it around her neck. “ So many thanks, compare Carmenio,” said she ; “ it is a consolation to have those who care for us.”
“ And if you have more than one who cares for you,” observed compare Carmenio, “ it is true that I shall split his head as if it were wood. If there is another that you prefer to me, say so quickly and I will go away. If not, I love you from my soul, as I have said, and as I will say before the priest.”
“ There is no one else ; no, compare Carmenio,” she answered, “ and I have my box of linen, and a mattress, and some pennies of dowry.”
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The soft little rings of black hair curled around Filomena’s ears, and her coral ear-rings were so red that compare Carmenio could not contain himself ; he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and kissed- Filomena under the ear. She became as red as the coral ear- rings, and said :
“ We do wrong to think of such things when my brother is in so bad a state.”
Carmenio also became very serious at once. “Tell me, how is Vincenzo ? ” he asked.
“ Badly, badly,” replied Filomena. “ My sister-in-law says he did not close his eyes all night. The thought of the carnival weighs on his mind like so much lead. ‘ If it had been a little later,’ he com- plains ; ‘ if that mule would have kept his feet to himself until after the carnival, it would have made me a good penance for Lent.’ Poor thing, there he is kept in bed, and my father makes it worse with his words.”
“ It has been said that in praising the mule, benedicaP said Car- menio, “ I cast the evil eye on compareY mc^nzo. If I believed that I could never forgive myself for my heedlessness.”
“And who says it?” asked Filomena, indignant. “Tell me quickly, for I will scratch his face with my hands for speaking ill of you ! ”
“ It was — saving respect — it was Don Finimondone.”
“ A-ah ! ” screamed Filomena, “ the spiteful old man ! He tells stories too big for the mouth of an oven, and he leads my mamma the life of a soul in purgatory. More than once I have been just ready to put my hands on him, to see my poor, little, old woman cry. And now he speaks ill of you!”
Here Filomena sat down upon the ground, threw her apron over her head, and cried like a fountain.
“ See, comare Filomena,” said Carmenio, “ words are not stones. If we love each other, when once we are married we can go to an- other village, and Don Finimondone will no longer come into the matter. I have a few lire laid by, to buy the roof and a little piece of land, and there is the black donkey, with her colt, that, when he is grown, will draw me a cart like a horse.”
“ That is well,” answered Filomena, “ but take care that my father knows nothing of it. The trouble is, we never can say a little word to each other, like honest people, for my father comes to dis- turb us, and says that you come buzzing around me like a bee among
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the buckwheat ; and that when the lover talks the spindle is silent ; and that you are a simpleton and a good-for-nothing, and that I am a silly thing to let myself be taken with such airs. And now you must go, for I have to attend to my geese.”
“ Good-by for now,” said Carmenio ; “ shall you come into the piazzetta ? "
“Yes,” she replied, “ I can come there, for my father has shut himself into the stable, and says he will not come out until the fool- ishness is at an end.”
And so the lovers parted ; she went about her business and he about his, while the fresh March wind that blows at sunrise lifted the dust of the road like a little cloud.
Carmenio went to the committee of the carnival and told them how Vincenzo was, and that Don Finimondone had said that they should not have the bay mule and the blue cart. Everybody said his say about Don Finimondone, and there was not a dog that gave him a good word.
“Without Vincenzo and the blue cart,” said one, “ we shall have to do without the good and the best. But so it is, and we must have patience.”
Then was heard a noise as of trotting hoofs that came nearer and nearer, and soon there appeared the wicked mule, caparisoned with red cloth, and upon his back there rode a horrid figure, like a man, but with a disproportionate head, over which was wrapped a great black cloak that left to be seen only the long nose of an ugly false- face, and covered the whole body down as far as the knees. The mule seemed uneasy, as if he carried an evil burden.
“ I am come to ride at the head of your procession,” said the black man.
The committee were like stone, for fear.
“ I was called to come and take my mule, and here I am,” he pro- ceeded, in a terrible voice, that seemed as if he had his head in an empty wine-cask.
There was nothing to be done about it — the procession must move. They went through the streets like so many monks, they crossed themselves continually, and dared not speak for dread of the black man, who might be, if not the devil himself, at least a witch, for, as is well known, witches can take whatever shape they please. The whole village was out to see the carnival procession pass ; the infirm old people had crawled out like flies in the first warm sun-
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shine of spring ; the women held their babies in their arms ; the chil- dren stood and stared with their fingers in their mouths, or hid their faces in their mammas’ skirts for fear of the masks, as they came near. Don Giuseppe came out of the church, and waited to see the procession.
Pom, po7n — that was the bass-drum, beaten by compare Carmenio, who sat, with the others of the committee, in the cart of the sagres- tano — for since there were to be no sirens, or other heathen, they were permitted to have the horse and cart that were used to go upon consecrated ground. And in front of them rode the black man upon the bad mule.
Oh ! he had an evil tongue that never rested, and it struck every- where. Whoever had stolen as much as a handful of beans heard of it ; and whoever had quarrelled with his neighbor got a solemn rep- rimand for it, as if he were before the judge. To poor old comare Marta, who lived by plain sewing, and whose son was in the prison for shooting a man, such things were said, because she had brought up her boy to commit mortal sin, that the poor creature covered her face with her hands, and ran into her house, all in tears. The black man reproved the sagrestano for having stolen a little piece of candle from the altar of the blessed Sant’ Antonio, who could very well do without it, to light himself home, one stormy night when there was not a ray of moonlight, and whoever went through the streets risked his neck, it was so dark. The women ran here and there, like hens when the fox is outside the coop, for the black man blamed this one for a bad housewife, and that one for speaking ill of her neighbor, and another for idleness — and there was not a living soul that dared to contradict him. He was like a second conscience — he stuck his nose in everywhere and had no pity.
Finally, he spoke to comare Filomena, who stood with a group of young girls in a corner of the piazzetta.
“ Ah ! even the civetta comes to the snare at last, according to the proverb ; and for all your pursed-up mouth, and your playing the dead pussy-cat, it is known that you go to the threshing-floor to talk in the evening with Carmenio the carpenter.”
Every one looked to see comare Filomena fall and faint away. Anything but faint away ! She knew how to give him bread for his cake, and answered him before all the people :
“ Thanks for so many compliments. I am used to such, and worse, for when it is a question of evil speaking my papa can give
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points to the devil. Go and take lessons of him if you want to know how the thing is done.”
The black man had nothing to say. He struck his mule and went off at a gallop, and those who had gotten out of it without blame could laugh at the unlucky ones. Some persons said there was a smell of sulphur in the air, and Don Giuseppe judged it pru- dent to bless all the people together, to make it quite safe. There was no more sport of any kind, and they all went home.
“ It will be at least a little consolation to Vincenzo,” observed Car- menio, “ that if the festa had to end badly, he was not there to see it.”
That same evening he went to see his friend Vincenzo, to tell him how things had gone. Zia Agnese opened the door for him. “ We are unfortunate,” she said to him ; “ my husband would not listen to reason, and this afternoon he came out of the stable, lead- ing the bay mule by the halter, and then he sold him for twenty lire less than my son paid for him fifteen days ago.”
“ That mule eats up money like grain,” added Don Finimondone, from the corner of the hearth, where he sat upon a bench ; “ he has made us lose twenty lire, to say nothing of the broken bones and the doctor’s bill. A world of trouble, say I.”
“ It was a sorry sight, the procession,” said Carmenio, by way of changing the subject. “ Every one was like stone for fear of the witch, except my brave Filomena. Whoever got a reproof swallowed it in holy peace; but Filomena was as shrewd as the devil himself, and gave him an answer that was suited as cheese to macaroni. ‘Grazie tante,' says she ”
“ A-ah, the evil tongue that she has in her mouth,” interrupted Don Finimondone, “to tell me, before all the people, that I am worse than the devil ! ”
“You ! ” they exclaimed in chorus.
“I knew very well that it was my papa,” remarked Filomena; “ witch or not, there were the very same patches on the knees of his trousers that I sewed with my own hands last Sunday to make him decent to go to hear mass. And if I have talked at the threshing- floor with compare Carmenio, it is because I shall marry him in an- other month, and in this house one cannot say two words in peace. If you give me my cassa of linen and the mattress, I will go away without one tari of dowry.”
“ And I will take her without anything in her hands,” said Car-
memo.
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DON FINIMONDONE.
“ Have you no fear of her tongue ? ” asked Don Finimondone. “ When you bring her back to me and say, ‘Take your daughter, for there is no living with her,’ I will shut the door in her face, and leave her in the middle of the road.”
“ He who has a log can have chips,” observed Vincenzo, from his bed, “ and if my sister knows how to open her mouth upon occasion, it is because she is the daughter of her father.”
“ As for me,” said zia Agnese, “ I don’t complain of my daughter Filomena ; she is a good girl, and sweeps the house for me, and kneads the bread and tends the poultry, and sews and spins with a good will. And with a good man she will be a good wife.”
“ And I shall be a good man to her, I shall,” promised compare Carmenio, and meant what he said.
“ When she has the cares of a house,” said comare Mariangela, “ you will see that she will not talk so much. When hens have to live by scratching they have no time to peck each other, and you will find her good and gentle enough. And you can see, from Vin- cenzo and me, how two that love each other can live on little and be content.”
“ And I tell you plainly, once for all,” said Carmenio, “ that I shall marry your daughter ; and if you forbid the marriage I will speak, and let the whole town know that it was you who spoiled the festa, so that it was like a penance — you, that made Lent of our carnival.” And, therefore, rather than have the story told to all the people, Don Finimondone consented that Filomena should marry compare Carmenio, and even gave him the dowry, so many heads of the king, counted into his hands.
“You will repent your marriage, compare Carmenio, you will re- pent it,” prophesied Don Finimondone, “ but you will still have the consolation of the money.”
* * * * * * * “And were they happy together, Filomena and Carmenio?” asked the signora.
“ Oh ! cara signora, who can tell ? They had their troubles, like the rest of the world, but they never have ceased to love each other, and they are content. There comes old Carmenio now, from his work in the field.”
“ And how did you know so much about it ? ” pursued the signora. “ Eh ! I was Filomena ! ”
E. Cavazza.
IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.
Saturday, the iitk. — Here we are, on board the Royal Mail Steam- ship Barataria, gliding down the muddy Mersey on our way home to America. The Barataria is perhaps the fastest boat afloat, and a first favorite with the travelling public. So it is that we are five hundred and thirty first-class passengers. All sorts and conditions of men we are, homeward bound, nearly all of us. There may be a scant dozen Britons on board and perhaps as many more Germans ; and the rest — more than five hundred of us — are Americans.
We untied our steamer-chairs, wisely painted a visible green, that they might be picked out with certainty from the hundreds of others not distinguished by this academic color. Then we sat us down to take stock of our fellow-passengers before we should run into the jaws of the Irish Channel. There were not a few people we knew. We saw a young couple from Chicago, bent on enjoying the few final days of their wedding journey — he was boiling over with energetic activity ; and she was as pretty as a bride should be, with a pleasant, bird-like manner. We recognized a gentleman from Philadelphia, the owner of an authenticated great-grandfather, of whom he was not prouder than a man might well be. He was walk- ing with a Scot Abroad, a North Briton who had tried life and made a good living in almost every one of the British colonies on which the sun never sets. Not far off we discovered a clever man from Boston, the author of the satirical story. None of Your Busmess, who was understood to have spent the summer in applying the finishing touches to a brilliant international novel, Princes, Americans, and Fools. We saw a perky little parson from Brooklyn, who — so our friend Brown told us — had just been appointed Professor of Homeo- pathic Theology in a New England fresh-water college. Then there was our friend Brown himself, who knew everybody and whom everybody knew, who took an interest in all things and who had al- ways the latest news.
Before we had been in our chairs ten minutes, and just as the Ba- rataria passed the Rock Light, our friend Brown spied us out and came and stood before us. He had a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his pockets.
i6
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“ Don’t you give thanks that you are quit of that miserable apology for a town, called Liverpool?” he asked. “Once I heard a man call it a semi-detached suburb of New York — but he was a Bos- tonian, and jealous. New York isn’t very clean, I know, but it is not the marvel of ugly dirt and of dirty ugliness that Liverpool is. Just look at the sky now, it is as dingy as the river — and I can’t say more than that. The highest proof possible of the beauty and charm of England is that the wandering American is willing to pass through this gateway of gloom to attain it. To my mind there is nothing satisfactory about Liverpool — except the facilities for leaving it ; and I confess I do not see how any one ever stays over- night, who can borrow enough to pay his fare to London. Why, do you know” — and here the voice of our friend Brown took on ac- cents of unspeakable scorn and loathing — “ do you know that Liver- pool has an obscure and probably obscene suburb called Bootle ? Bootle! Just think of it! And how could a white man live in a town where the horse-cars run past his door to Bootle? Liverpool always strikes me as a sort of huge and oppressive practical joke that the nineteenth century has played on mankind. And I am not in- clined to forgive nature for wasting an earthquake on an inoffensive city like Charleston when it could have been used over here to so much better advantage in ridding the earth of Liverpool ! ”
Our friend Brown knows full well that we do not share his extra- vagance ; and his delivery of this last appalling sentiment was at once defiant and interrogative. We answered that we did not agree with him at all, and that Liverpool was a monument to the enter- prise of the Englishmen of the last hundred years.
“ It rs all very well for you to say that,” our friend Brown replied, “ but I am the victim of a scurvy trick, and I hold Liverpool respon- sible, and all its inhabitants. I find that I have a man in my state- room with me, and he is little Mat Hitchcock. Now, you know whether or not that is a cheerful prospect.”
We agreed that if we had to choose a companion for an ocean voyage it would not be Mr. C. Mather Hitchcock.
“ He is a bore of the utmost perseverance,” returned our friend Brown, with a recurrence of his heat, “ he is a conversational styptic. If Erasmus were to-day to publish his Praise of Fools., Mat Hitch- cock would be capable of writing to thank him for the compliment.” Here our friend Brown seemed to have fallen again into extrava- gance ; and we said so.
IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.
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“ That is because you don’t know what he has been trying to do,” said our friend Brown. “ He has started twice to tell me the ancient and honorable tale of Captain Judkins and the fog on the Banks. I headed him off by the bold assertion that I was in a hurry, as I was going with one of the engineers to take a little walk through the boilers.”
We expressed our doubt that even Mat Hitchcock should believe that.
“ But he did,” our friend Brown answered. “ He is very credu- lous indeed — he even beliewes in himself. I’m going to beg the chief steward to give me a seat at table as far from his as possible.”
Just then a very pretty girl passed by, engaged in an earnest discussion of comparative literature with the perky like parson. We caught only a fragment of a single sentence — “but Jane Austen is so minute.”
“ That girl was on the boat going over,” said our friend Brown ; “ she’s from Baltimore, and all those terrapin girls are pretty. We used to call her the pocket Venus, but now she has taken to talking about Miss Austen, I think I shall call her Jane, for she too is ‘so minute.’ You see how she has already carried the parson into camp. Just let her give you one good glance, and she has you on a string for the rest of the trip. And I think her mischievous mouth is quite as fetching as her soulful eyes. She has a very taking way, and she flirts gently, with an innocent manner most consummate and masterly. I believe almost any pretty girl, who happens to be clever also, is capable of filling the chair of Applied Histrionics in a girl’s college — that is, if there were ever any need of such a course of instruction.”
The rattling reverberations of a Cathayan gong notified us that dinner was about to be served. When we took our seats at table, we saw afar off, at the other end, the young lady whom our friend Brown had called Jane Austen; and we saw also that our friend Brown had a place exactly opposite to hers, and that Mat Hitch- cock was removed from him by at least two tables.
Sunday, the \2lh. — Soon after breakfast we dropped anchor off Queenstown, where the Barataria waited for the London mails. A few passengers went ashore, either to attend church or to taste the real old Irish whiskey on Irish soil. As we were not at sea, there was no service on board. To lie at anchor is very relaxing to the morals, and it was well-nigh impossible even to make believe that this was
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Sunday morning. The New England conscience has been sharp- ened by the east wind of Boston and by inherited dyspepsia, but it was not sharp enough to cut the lethargy engendered by the sun- shiny quiet of the Baratarid s decks, as the boat lay at anchor in Queenstown harbor, and we were not surprised to see the clever man from Boston lying back lazily in his steamer-chair, with a yellow- covered novel in his hand, bearing a most naturalistic title. We ob- served that ladies of the strictest bringing up, who would shrink from the thought of entering a shop on Sunday, did not now dis- dain to dicker with the aquatic pedlars, whose boat-loads of Irish lace and Irish bog-oak ornaments encompassed the ship about. These pedlars were mostly pleasant-faced Irishwomen, with tongues as ready as an Irish tongue is expected to be.
So the morning glided away imperceptibly until the tender came out to us again, with the six hundred and more sacks of the mails and a dozen or two belated passengers. Among these passengers was one whom we could not but remark. He was a young English- man, tall and blond, with a full beard ; he was not yet thirty, and he walked like one sure and proud of his youth and his strength and himself. He was a handsome, manly fellow, and the only peculiarity of manner we noted was a certain vague shyness, equally removed from diffidence and from defiance — the two extremes into which a shy man is liable to fall.
After luncheon, as the Barataria was gliding past the bleak coast of the Green Isle, our friend Brown took one of our chairs.
“ Did you see a young Englishman,” he asked, “ who came on board at Queenstown — a fine-looking fellow, and a gentleman every inch of him ? Well, he had the seat next m.e at table, and we got talking, of course. He is a university man — used to be Fellow of Merton, at Oxford, you know — and he’s a barrister. But his interest seems to be rather in politics than law. He’s a high-and-dry Tory of the fine old crusted kind, and he has a deep admiration for the conservatism of our Constitution. He is going over now to investi- gate the workings of our institutions on the spot. And he seems to know something of our institutions, though he is as ignorant as most of them about our geography. He actually asked me what were the great lakes of America, adding that, of course, he knew Wenham Lake, but he couldn’t always remember the names of the others. Yet I like him ; he’s genuine, he’s sterling, hall-marked, 925 fine. He tells me that he is going straight to Salt Lake City, to look into
IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.
245
the Mormon Problem. I’m inclined to think that he has his mind set on doing a book about us — like the rest of the bold Britons who see the broad United States from the windows of the parlor car, as they rush from Sandy Hook to the Golden Gate.”
Later in the day, shortly before dinner, as we were taking our three-mile walk — twenty-seven times around the upper deck — we saw the young Englishman sitting in a most elaborate life-saving steam- er-chair, with beautiful leather cushions, and with a great variety of devices for raising and regulating the foot-rests and the head-rests.
Our friend Brown nudged us as we passed, and said : “ Neat thing in chairs, isn’t it ? And did you note his initials painted on the back — ‘ H. R. H.’ I don’t know’ his name yet, but I feel that it is my duty hereafter to call him His Royal Highness.”
Just then the pretty girl from Baltimore came out on deck from the ladies’ cabin.
“ I’ll leave you to finish your constitutional alone,” said our friend Brown, “ for I’ve promised to take Jane Austen for a walk before dinner.”
Holiday, the i^th. — In general, the travelling Scotchman is good company, but the Scot Abroad, who happened to have a seat oppo- site to us at table, was an exception to this rule. He was a rumbling, grumbling creature, a contemner of the United States, and a most voracious eater. When we came down to luncheon a little late, we found him in serried argument with the gentleman from Philadel- phia, who had also a proper fondness for the good things of this life, and who was speaking of Pennsylvania as a land flowing with milk and honey.
“There’s no market like Philadelphia,” he was saying. “ Further East they don’t know what a terrapin is, or a canvas-back, either. You hear people talk about canvas-back in New York, who don’t know a canvas-back from a red-head — not but what a red-head is a good enough duck. And I like teal.”
“ Those ducks are the best things you have in the States, per- haps,” said the Scot Abroad, “ but they’re not as good as the ducks in China. I’ve eaten two at a time there.”
“ I can eat two canvas-backs,” returned the gentleman from Philadelphia, “ and without a great appetite either. I’m not hun- gry now — I’m only eating because I’ve nothing else to do.”
“ There’s nothing in the States equal to green turtle, as you get it in the City,” the Scot Abroad remarked.
246 IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.
“ You say that because you’ve never tasted terrapin in Philadel- phia,” was the triumphant retort. “ And it must be done by a darkey cook, too. A white man doesn’t know anything about terrapin ; he hasn’t any right to touch it. But a darkey deals with Br’er Ter- rapin gently, like an artist and a lover. Why, if I ever found a white man who could really cook terrapin, I’d bet there were kinks in his hair.”
The Scot Abroad changed his tack but not his tactics.
“ These American apples,” he said, “ that you are exporting from the States now are poor stuff.”
“ Sometimes they are,” confessed the gentleman from Philadel- phia ; “ there’s odds in them, I know. And there’s nothing worse than a bad apple, just as there’s nothing better than a good apple. By-the-bye, do you make your apple-pie as we do — with a pint of sweet champagne ? ”
The Scot Abroad was cornered, but he met the difficulty boldly.
“ I never made an apple-pie,” he said, “ but I’ll cook a mutton chop with you.”
“ Then I should have to broil you a steak,” replied the gentleman from Philadelphia, with calm self-confidence.
“ Have you ever noticed,” whispered our friend Brown, who had come down to lunch with us, “ how the Philadelphians seem to have modified Wordsworth’s boast? They pride themselves on good liv- ing and no thinking.”
It is needless to say that our friend Brown is a New Yorker. We told him that he made a mistake in saying so many malicious things.
“ But just think of the many more I don’t say,” he urged in ex- tenuation.
“ Did you ever try cream with your buckwheat cakes ? ” asked the gentleman from Philadelphia.
But before the Scot Abroad could gather his forces, our friend Brown remarked, “ I can’t listen to any more of this — I must have air. On board ship our gastronomic sins have a habit of rising up and bearing witness against us. I had an au revoir breakfast this morning ; and if I don’t get on deck in a minute I may be seized again with nassau, as the old lady called it.”
As we mounted to the upper deck, our friend Brown asked, “ Have you seen His Royal Highness this morning? I had a little chat with him before breakfast — I warned him not to let that Hitchcock tell
IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE. 247
him the tale of Judkins in the fog. I like H. R. H. — he’s genuine and simple and manly.”
We paused opposite our chairs and invited our friend Brown to sit down for a little chat.
“ I’m sorry,” he answered, “ but I can’t wait now. I’m bespoken. I’ve promised to play shuffleboard with Jane Austen.”
Just then the young couple from Chicago passed before us, and the lady whom our friend Brown called Jane Austen came up from the lower deck and joined them. Before our friend Brown had taken leave of us to unite himself to this little party, H. R. H. hap- pened within hail of the Chicago bridegroom, who seized him at once and took him up, nothing loath, to be presented to the Chicago bride and to Jane Austen.
“ I’ll give His Royal Highness just five minutes to get ac- quainted,” said our friend Brown, “and then I’ll sail in and claim my game of shuffleboard.”
But before the five minutes were up, the little quartet at the other end of the boat, the young couple from Chicago, Jane Austen, and His Royal Highness, had gone down to the lower deck to play shuffleboard, without a thought of our friend Brown.
“ She is a pretty girl,” said our friend Brown, “ but she has left me out in the cold, hasn’t she? If I wasn’t a religious man, as the deacon said, I could swear with the best of you.”
The run that day was just four hundred miles.
Tuesday, the \/^th. — There came up a sudden spurtle of rain, early in the afternoon, which drove most of the Barataria' s passen- gers in-doors. When we went into the music-room for a minute we found the pretty American girl at the piano, singing “In the Gloam- ing,” while the young Englishman was turning the leaves for her. As we came out our friend Brown stopped us.
“His Royal Highness takes to it kindly, doesn’t he?” was his greeting to us. “ I’m glad to see it. He’s a fine fellow, and it’s for- tunate that he has fallen into the hands of a sample girl like Jane Austen. You see, he is coming over to study our institutions, and I like to see him at work on so favorable a specimen of the most fascinating of them all — the American girl.”
The sentiments of our friend Brown were excellent, but there was perhaps a shade of annoyance in his voice. We asked him how he had been wasting his morning.
“ I’ve been talking to that Scotchman,” he answered; “trying to
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trepan a merry jest into him ; but it was love’s labor lost. I told him I went over on the Dalmatic, of the Blue Ball Line, you know, and I praised the discipline of that boat, saying that whenever I might go on deck I always found somebody on the lookout, if it wasn’t one of the officers, it was an engineer or a steward or a cook. And, would you believe it ? that North Briton took this seriously, and told me he thought there must be some exaggeration, as he could hardly think that they would put a cook on the bridge of any one of these Atlantic liners. He’s quite impervious to a joke. If I get to talking much with him I shall lose my specific levity. Isn’t it curious that these Britishers don’t recognize mendacity as an ele- mentary form of humor? ”
We expressed sympathy with our friend Brown.
“ There’s more back,” he went on. “ I changed the subject and we began discussing sight-seeing. At last, when I happened to say that the Paris Opera was a magnificent monument of the Second Empire, that Scotchman floored me with an enthusiastic query as to whether I had ever seen Holyrood. But I had my revenge on him. I called up Mat Hitchcock and I introduced them, and I begged Mat to tell that interesting anecdote of Captain Judkins, and then I escaped with my life.”
We asked our friend Brown what he was going to do after dinner.
“I don’t know what to do,” he replied; “perhaps I can get a chance to turn over Jane Austen’s music for her. Otherwise I don’t know where to go. That’s the worst of life on board ship ; if it rains, you can’t gather around the fire and swap stories. I couldn’t stand a sailor’s life, not because of the hardships and dangers but because of the deprivations. You see, a sailor at sea has no chance to sit down before his hearth and enjoy the pleasant loquacity of a hickory log. I set great store by an open fire. Now, a sailor is de- prived of one of the highest of human pleasures — he can’t build a fire, any more than he can play billiards or ride horseback ; he has never a chance to acquire these accomplishments, poor fellow. Even on shore I suppose he has to stand by and see the other man poke the fire — and that’s an open confession of inferiority. I may, perhaps, acknowledge that you can edit a newspaper better than I can, or conduct a prayer-meeting better than I, but I will not con- fess inferiority in the making of a wood-fire.”
We took occasion to say that we had noticed the lofty bearing of a man making a fire.
IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.
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“ It is true enough,” our friend Brown continued ; “ and no won- der. Prometheus was proud, you know, and so have been all fire- makers since his time. I have wondered sometimes if the first mur- der— Cain and Abel quarrelled over a burnt offering, didn’t they ? — did not arise out of a prolonged discussion of rival theories of build- ing a wood-fire on the altar. But I hate to think that there should be any stain on the purity of the crackling flame — even historically. That’s what makes me so angry when I see a miserable set of cast- iron logs, adorned with stray sprigs of asbestos mistletoe ! Did you ever see anything more indecent than that shallow sham, blazing with unsatisfying gas ? It is a mere immoral mockery of one of nature’s greatest gifts, all very well on the stage, of course, where all is imitation and suggestion only, but at home it is a soul-destroying device of the devil, for it tends to kill the love of truth at what should be its altar — the family hearth.”
We suggested that perhaps this was pushing the Parsee doctrine a little too far.
“ No,” insisted our friend Brown, “ I’ll stand by what I have said, and go to the stake for it, if need be. A cast-iron imitation of a wood-fire is degrading, disgusting, indecorous. A hickory stick across the andirons, hissing and blazing, is the first element of win- ter hygiene and of youthful morals. Spare the log and you will spoil the child. Are you aware that the return to the open fireplace is coincident in our country with the recent remarkable revival of public interest in political purity?”
We acknowledged that this curious coincidence had hitherto evaded us.
“You see it now,” our friend Brown continued ; “ fire is the cen- tre of the world and of life and of society. That’s why I am always sorry for the sailor ; he cannot warm his hands by the cheery crackle of the back-log. His case is almost as hard as that of the unfortu- nate wretch who lives in a boarding-house and who has to huddle over a register. It makes me sad to think of the thousands of homes without hearths — where the little children at Christmas have to hang their stockings over against a mere empty hole in the wall, with the hope that Santa Claus will come down a flue. And the sailor is but little better off.”
We remarked that there were fiery furnaces, seven times heated, deep down in the bowels of the boat.
“Did you ever go down there? ’’asked our friend Brown.
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“Well, I have done it, and it is not a pleasant recollection. I’d just as lieve not know that there are more than a hundred poor devils down under our feet now, almost naked, grimy with soot and half choked with fine coal dust. Out of sight out of mind. But a stoker has no sinecure. If it wasn’t a cheerful sight for me to see, what must it be for him to live ? Did I ever tell you about Cable J. Dexter, the great Chicago grain speculator? He was stranded in ’Frisco in 1870 without a cent between him and starvation, and he shipped as stoker on a Pacific Mail Steamer. He made the round trip and then he quit ; starvation was shorter and not surer. Only a year ago, after he had engineered the big boom in winter wheat, he told me that sometimes he waked up at midnight to feel at his side for the coal-shovel — just as though all his wealth were a dream and the hard labor a present reality.’’
Just then the clever man from Boston sauntered along by us, and our friend Brown suggested that we four should settle down to whist until such time as it might please the clerk of the weather to turn off the rain.
The run that day was four hundred and twenty miles.
Wednesday, the i^tk. — The little skurry of wind on Tuesday had raised a slight swell, and, with the increase in motion, there were fewer people on deck in the morning.
“ I have to take great care of my internal equilibrium,’’ said our friend Brown ; “ if I make the slightest error of judgment in my conduct or my diet, then I suffer for it all the rest of the trip. I’ve discovered a great remedy, and I tried it again last night successfully. It’s to take a poached egg on toast after you have gone to bed, and wash it down with a little hot Scotch whiskey. It’s sovran for sea- sickness. Going over I gave it to a man who was feeling despe- rately miserable, and who was doubly despondent because he couldn’t take care of his wife and baby. Well, it cured him. I mixed it pretty stiff and it did its work. But he told me the next morning that, for nearly an hour after he took it, he thought he was a biga- mist and the father of twins.”
We remarked that intemperance was doubly dangerous on ship- board.
“Yes,” our friend Brown went on ; “ I suppose a sailor, when he takes a drop too much, sees sea-serpents climbing in over the bow. Did you ever hear about the girl down in Maine, who wrote her lover a quadruple temperance letter ? ”
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We expressed our ignorance of this anecdote.
“ ’Tisn’t much of a story,” said our friend Brown, “ but it shows what queer things a girl will do sometimes. Well, down at Casco, in Maine, there was a young fellow who had worked his way up from before the mast until he was captain of a new ship, and part owner, too. Then he asked his girl to marry him, and she took him. The first cruise of the new ship was to be the young skipper’s last voyage, for he’d had an offer of a partnership. After he’d been gone about a week the girl got over the sorrow of parting, and began to take stock of his character. He was good, healthy, kindly, intel- ligent, long-headed, and keen-witted. She had every chance of hap- piness with such a husband. So far as she could see, he hadn’t a fault, nor even a failing which might ripen into a fault. It was true that sometimes he went on a ‘ tear ’ when he came off a cruise. The more she thought about this, the more she feared that this might grow to be a habit, and land him in a drunkard’s grave. You see, she got morbid about the one possible speck. At last, she sat down and wrote him a letter, telling him just how she felt, and begging him, by the love he bore her, not to touch another drop, and, above all, not to go on a spree when he came off cruise. When she’d got her letter written she felt better — merely writing it had relieved her mind. But she didn’t know where to address it. It was too late to reach her lover at Liverpool, which was the first port the new ship was bound for, and it was quite uncertain where he would go next. He had told her that his course depended entirely on freights, and on the advices he should get in Liverpool, and that he might go to Havre or to Bordeaux, or to Marseilles or to Genoa, he didn’t know which. She solved the difficulty by making four copies of the letter and sending one to each port. Now, it so happened that her lover sailed from Liverpool for Havre, and from Havre to Bordeaux, and from Bordeaux to Marseilles, and from Marseilles to Genoa ; and he got all four copies of that letter. And, when he read the fourth copy, he was just too mad to hold in, so he sat right down and wrote her a short note, breaking off the engagement, and telling her that a woman who hadn’t any more confidence in a man than to treat him that way had better be released from the obligation of marrying him.”
We inquired whether this lover’s quarrel had not been mended when the sailor came home.
“ He wasn’t that kind of man at all,” answered our friend
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Brown. “ If he was set, he was set. When he got back from the cruise he didn’t go on a spree. I believe he never touched another drop of liquor. But he never went to see the girl. He sold out his share in the ship and accepted the partnership, and, in less than two years, he married the senior partner’s daughter. About that time an old aunt of his wife’s died, and left her the house next door to the captain’s first girl ; and they set up housekeeping there, right under that girl’s eyes, and she’s seen his family growing up around him year by year, while she lived on, a little old maid, all alone by herself. Women are kittle cattle, arn’t they?”
Then our friend Brown rose and shook himself. “ I think there’s a good moral in that story for all girls,” he said, “ and I guess I’ll go and tell it to Jane Austen.”
A pleasant laugh rang out as the young Englishman and the American girl threaded their way through the double rows of steamer-chairs on the shady side of the steamer.
Our friend Brown glanced up, and it was with a certain acidity that he said, “ Fine teeth are a great incentive to gayety.”
He watched the young people as they walked away. “ His Royal Highness seems to be taking notice,” he said; “I think I’ll go into the smoking-room.”
The run that day was four hundred and fifty miles.
Thursday, the i6th. — Shortly after midnight we ran into a dense bank of fog. As we were likely at any moment to meet detach- ments of the fishing fleet, the Barataria' s engines were slowed down. The harsh voice of the fog-horn was to be heard at frequent inter- vals during the night, and it waked us before cock-crow in the morn- ing. When we went on deck the air was thick and moist ; and the dampness settled on the rigging and dripped gloomily on the deck.
“ I think this drip, drip, drip of the fog is quite as demoralizing as the fog-horn is disheartening,” said our friend Brown, as we joined him on the lower deck, where we could find shelter from the moist- ure of the mist. “ And the wild notes of the fog-horn have every vice a sound can have.”
The young couple from Chicago came up to us, and the bride seemed to be uneasy in her mind.
“ My wife sat up half the night, looking through the porthole for fear something might happen,” said the bridegroom, jocularly.
“ I didn’t do anything of the sort,” she replied, indignantly.
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“ But this fog is terrible, isn’t it? Do you think the captain knows where he is ? ”
“ We’re within a mile of land now,” our friend Brown answered, “ only we are not going that way,” and he pointed down.
The bride tried to smile at this feeble jest.
\
“ Don’t you harrow up your young soul with anticipatory disas- ter,” our friend Brown continued, consolingly. “ It isn’t good for people’s nerves on board ship to get talking about the wreck of the Oregon or reading the Wreck of the Grosvenor. It’s much more amusing to read the Wreck of the Thomas Hyke, which was alto- gether more remarkable.”
” But if we should run into something?” she returned, despond- ently.
“ ‘ It would be bad for the coo,’ as Stephenson said,” our friend Brown rejoined. “ Our enlightened selfishness may rejoice that we could run over any ordinary boat and scarcely feel it. So you need not worry about the summer styles in life-preservers, and the most fashionable ways of wearing them. You must remember that the captain is the ship’s husband, and he can’t afford to lose the boat unless he wants to be the ship’s widower.”
“ The captain has a good many lives to care for,” said the Chi- cago bridegroom ; “ no other boat carries five hundred first-class passengers.”
“But other boats carry fifteen hundred steerage, sometimes, be- sides first-class passengers,” retorted our friend Brown. “ Really, though we seem to be a great many, there are fewer souls on board now than most big boats carry. I confess, I don’t like to cross on a ship that takes steerage passengers ; in case of danger, they would have the bad taste to think their lives as valuable as mine.”
The pretty American girl looked out of the door, not far from us, and the Chicago bride called her. Our friend Brown volunteered to bring down from the upper deck the chairs of the party. We offered to assist him. When we came down with the chairs we found that the handsome young Englishman had also joined the gathering. While our friend Brown was tucking the rugs and wraps about Jane Austen, as he called her. His Royal Highness went after his steamer-chair also. Thus we formed a compact little group on the lower deck, partly sheltered from the thick dampness of the fog and from the enervating roar of the fog-horn.
For a while the conversation was general ; and when it flagged
254 /Z»Z^ J\rOT£S OF AJV UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.
our friend Brown suggested “Twenty Questions,” offering to take His Royal Highness on his side and explain the game to him if Jane Austen would lend her aid. The young couple from Chicago had become engaged the summer before at Narragansett Pier, and they were practised in the art. Although we should have preferred to stand afar off and take no part in the quarrel, the young couple from Chicago enlisted us on their side. Thp perky little parson joined us, and Mat Hitchcock thrust himself among our opponents. And the rest of the afternoon glided away in acrimonious discussion.
Our run that day was only three hundred and ninety miles. But toward evening the fog was blown away by a fresh breeze.
Friday, the lyth. — There was a cloudless sunrise this morning, as glorious a sight as a man may see. But when we reproached our friend Brown for having missed it, he was quick to explain.
“ I hope I’m too good a Christian,” he said, “ to have part or lot in the Parsee ceremony of getting up to see the sun rise. Besides, I was suffering from a singularly acute attack of marine inertia, per- haps a reaction from the mental activity of yesterday’s ‘Twenty Questions.’ Don’t you fall into a condition of sloth sometimes at sea, when you don’t want anything but just to be let alone? ”
We acknowledged that this phase of feeling was easy to under- stand.
“ I have been moved to liken a long day at sea to a tirade in a French tragedy, when the watery Alexandrines roll over you in most exasperating monotony,” he proceeded. “There’s a great deal of tautology about the ocean ; it’s always saying ditto to itself. You tire of seeing the waves follow each other, almost as though they were drilled in platoons, with now and then a top-lofty one riding ahead proudly like an ensign.”
We quoted the jest about Britannia ruling the waves and not ruling them straight.
“You tell that imported joke to His Royal Highness and he’ll laugh at it,” said our friend Brown. “When I can catch Jane Austen alone I’ll quote to her the French saying that ‘Women are like the waves of the ocean — always the same and yet never alike.’ ”
We remarked that she was probably preparing for the concert which was to take place that night.
“Yes,” he replied, “ His Royal Highness and Jane Austen are to sing a duet. The perky little parson is getting up the show. I think it would be a good scheme to have a theatre on board ship.
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regularly fitted up. You may remember that Noah, the founder of the P. and O. line, when he went to sea, took his menagerie with him. I think that must have relieved the monotony of the voyage not a little. A really enterprising steamship company nowadays would make proper arrangements so that its boats on every voyage would receive a hail from the Flying Dutchman and get a glimpse of the sea-serpent rearing its horrid head.”
Although there was not a theatre on board the Barataria, there was a printing-press for the purpose of preparing the daily bills-of- fare, and capable of printing also the bill-of-the-play of the Grand Entertainment and Concert which was given that evening in the main saloon. The programme of the Grand Entertainment and Con- cert was divided into two parts ; in the first part the Scot Abroad sang“ Auld Lang Syne,” the Chicago bridegroom recited “ Buck Fan- shaw’s Funeral,” the Chicago bride sang “ In the Gloaming,” the perky little parson read “ The Raven,” the handsome young Englishman sang “ The Vagabond,” and the pretty American girl sang “ Let me Dream Again.” The final number of the first part, so the pro- gramme informed us, was the singing of “The Star Spangled Ban- ner,” “by the 530 Barataria chorus.” This began well enough, but as barely a dozen of the five hundred and thirty knew the words of the American anthem, it “ rather petered out toward the end,” as our friend Brown put it.
Our friend Brown had no part or lot in the Grand Entertainment and Concert. He sat in the music-room and made sarcastic remarks. The chief numbers of the second part were what the programme declared to be a “ Banjo Solo, by Messrs. Knox and Decker,” and a duet by Jane Austen and His Royal Highness. As the music of this duet was as emotional as the words were warm, our friend Brown got up and went out on deck for a walk in the dark. Thus he missed the final item on the play-bill, the singing of “God Save the Queen,” “by the 530 Barataria chorus,” a failure even more la- mentable than that of “ The Star Spangled Banner,” and for the same reason.
Between the two parts the plate had been passed around, and nearly seventy-five pounds had been collected, to be divided be- tween the Sailors’ Orphan Asylum at Liverpool and a hospital in New York.
Our run that day was four hundred and sixty-five miles.
Saturday, the \%th, — This was to be the last day of our voyage.
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Shortly after noon it was announced that the run was four hundred and sixty-two miles, and that we were then a little less than two hun- dred miles from Sandy Hook. A certain half-suppressed excitement began to be perceptible among the passengers, and it increased as the hours passed, and we drew nearer and nearer to our native land.
Four steamer-chairs had been taken right up into the bow, and here the young couple from Chicago, Jane Austen, and His Royal Highness had sat all the afternoon. Our friend Brown had joined the group twice or thrice. He had been made welcome, yet he was uneasy and soon wandered away again. The three Americans were engaged in telling the young Englishman all about America, the United States in general, and the cities of Chicago and Baltimore in particular. Probably our friend Brown, as a New Yorker, had no need for the information, which the young Englishman accepted with pleasure.
He joined us as we stood under the bridge, after dinner, just as the Baraiaria, to the great joy of its five hundred and thirty pas- sengers, was rapidly gliding ahead of a steamer of an opposition line which had left Queenstown two days before us.
“What is the use of all this excitement about seeing land?” he asked. “ I’ve seen the sacred soil of Long Island before now — in fact, I was born there.”
We told him that most of the passengers were probably rejoic- ing at the swiftness of our homeward voyage — almost the quickest on record.
“ The Barataria is really fast,” he returned, “ but few people have discovered a little trick of the steamship companies to re- duce the apparent length of the voyage. Once the time was taken from Liverpool to New York; then, it was counted from Queenstown to Sandy Plook ; and now they are beginning to reckon it from Fastnet to Fire Island. By this fictitious shortening they can save a day seemingly, even if the boats were no faster.”
We remarked that the voyage was now so short that the old so- ciability among the passengers was dying out. The gentleman from Philadelphia had told us Captain Kitchener complained that it was no longer worth while to get acquainted with his passengers, and that he had given up all attempt at friendly overtures ever since a passenger, to whom he had been explaining things, had offered him a shilling.
“ That passenger must have been on his return trip,” said our
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friend Brown ; “ after a fellow has spent six weeks in England, he stands ready to tip an archbishop half-a-crown.”
While we were talking the clouds had blown away from the moon, and the soft rays bathed in silver splendor the watery pathway of the boat. Snatches of song came fitfully from two or three little groups gathered in pleasant corners. We saw that the young couple from Chicago were half concealed behind a boat, and that he had his arm around her and that she had laid her head on his shoulder.
We drew Brown’s attention to the young moon, shedding its silent sympathy over the lovers.
“ It’s the same old moon, you know,” he retorted, “the same old moon, gut en a vu Men d'autres”
Our friend was not given to quoting French, and this seemed to us to be the outward and audible sign of an inward and spiritual dissatisfaction. His pace, as we walked the deck, was violent and irregular. At last he stopped abruptly.
“ Ah,” he said, “ there’s His Royal Highness making the most of his last evening with Jane Austen. Perhaps he’s wondering if he is going to find in Salt Lake City any girls as agreeable as she is.”
We remarked that she was a good type of the pretty American girl.
“ All cats are gray at night,” he replied, sharply, “ and every girl is pretty by moonlight.”
A few minutes after it struck four bells. Then the Barataria was abreast of Fire Island Light, and the firework signals were let off, which made known our presence to the men ashore, who were searching the horizon for incoming steamers. Long before we reached Sandy Hook the news of our arrival in America had been flashed under the ocean to London and Paris.
Sunday., the igth. — When we waked in the morning, before day- break, the Barataria was at anchor in the lower bay, off Quarantine, We went on deck and saw the electric lights twinkling in the dawn along the Brooklyn Bridge, which makes Siamese Twins of the two great cities on the East River.
By the time the health officer had given the Barataria a clean bill, the deck had begun to fill up ; and, as the boat started, at least half the passengers were gazing at the green shores of their native land.
As we passed Bedloe’s Island our friend Brown gazed up at M.
Bartholdi’s colossal figure, and smiled as he said : “ There she 17
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stands, you see, holding the torch of liberty now, after having so long extended the palm of charity.”
We noted that something had given a tinge of acerbity to our friend Brown’s remarks, and that his humor was more saturnine.
“ You will observe,” he continued, “ that I have emerged from my stateroom this morning crowned with the high hat of civilization, although it looks as rough as the buffalo-robe of barbarism. Ob- serve, also, our fellow-passengers of the female persuasion. There’s a modern Jewish adage, I believe, that a man should clothe himself beneath his ability, his children according to his ability, and his wife above his ability. Judging from the clothing of the wives on this boat the past week, one would think ill of the ability of the men on board. But just look at the women now. It is only at sea that a woman doesn’t care how she looks, and as soon as she gets in sight of land she makes up for lost time. I’d give a picayune to see the face of His Royal Highness when he gets his first glimpse of Jane Austen this morning.”
But this pleasure was denied him, as the young Englishman had met the American girl before we caught sight of either of them. She had donned a most becoming dress of a most coquettish simplicity. As they passed us she was apparently expressing to him her resolute determination to attempt varied violations of the revenue laws.
When the Barataria had been warped alongside the dock, and the baggage was beginning to be examined by Uncle Sam’s white- capped officers, we saw them again for a moment. He was taking his leave. They shook hands heartily. The American girl, already surrounded by the spoils of her summer campaign, abstracted her attention from her ten trunks long enough to bestow on him a bril- liant smile of farewell.
Not far from us was the young couple from Chicago ; they ac- costed His Royal Highness as he passed ; and, in answer to some question of the bridegroom’s, we heard the young Englishman say:
“ I’ve changed my mind, you know. I don’t think I shall go there just yet a while. They tell me that St. John Hopkins College is no end of an interesting place, and I’m thinking of going there first.”
Brander Matthews.
CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.
THE LAND AND LABOR PARTY.
That able writer and leader, Mr. Henry George, has put before the public an issue, which should, if possible, be fully unmasked. It is not a mere economic measure v.'hich he has broached, but also a new ethical spec- ulation ; and it is not a legitimate political reform which he is attempting, but a sweeping social revolution, fraught with the gravest moral and^reli- gious effects. In the guise of a philanthropic statesman, however unwit- tingly, he is leading an assault upon divine laws and institutions, which no legislation can touch without peril, as all history has shown.
Hebrews and Christians, Roman Catholics and Protestants, alike find the right of private property clearly set forth in Holy Scripture. In the Old Testament it is exhibited as a positive command of the Creator ; and in the New Testament as a sacred trust from the sovereign Proprietor of all things. No distinction whatever is made between property in land and in other goods. The proposed exemption of the soil from private ownership is a notion not to be found anywhere in the Bible, and as little based in divine as in human law. To deprive the individual of such property, with- out his consent, would be no more scriptural and right than to deprive him of any other property as justly acquired and duly sanctioned ; and though it were done by a popular vote, under all the forms of legislation, and on pretence of the public good, it would still be but legalized theft in the view of every Christian man.
It need not be concealed that, on one occasion, some of the early Chris- tians voluntarily sold their lands and houses, and for a time held the pro- ceeds in common. But, in the very act of constituting this charity fund, the indestructible right of private property in land, as well as in other goods, was still recognized and sanctioned by the apostles : “ While it remained, was it not thine own ? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power ? ” Moreover, the exceptional incident was but an ideal example to the Church, not to the State ; and to plead it now as a precedent in our legislatures and courts would be too hypocritical for a moment’s thought. The worst type of socialism is known to be that which thus borrows Christian ideas as a mask for infidelity and atheism.
Without charging Mr. George with any such perverseness, it ‘must be said that his economic views, though sometimes devoutly expressed, are opposed to the Christian doctrine of property, as well as to the interests of the individual, of the family, and of the State, to say nothing of the Church. In particular.
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it will be found that his specious scheme for enriching the laboring class by impoverishing the land-holding class would begin with legal and moral injustice ; that it would strike back through the past, at an original right of the first land-holder, without whom an acre in New York, with all its po- tential wealth, was once worth no more than an acre in the moon ; that it would take from thousands of innocent individuals, not merely their social importance, but their justly earned means of subsistence and beneficence ; that it would unsettle the family homestead, ever to be prized as a corner- stone of the republic ; that by making the State the sole landlord, it would render popular government a sort of feudal despotism of the poor over the rich, and breed the worst vices of a crude democracy ; in a word, that it would lead logically to the public confiscation of all private wealth, and to an inversion of social classes, with the dominance of the one least fitted for leadership in the higher spheres of civilization, such as learning, art, science, and religion. In fact, could such views ever be fully carried out, the Chris- tian Church would become impossible, and civilized society swiftly relapse to anarchy and barbarism.
Mr. George might disclaim the logical issues of his reasoning, but its premises are too plainly and boldly put forth to be misunderstood, as will appear by a few chance extracts from his work called Progress and Poverty :
“ Private property in land is a bold, bare, enormous wrong, like that of chattel slavery. ”
“ Historically, as ethically, private property in land is robbery.”
“ Though the sovereign people of the State of New York consent to the landed pos- sessions of the Astors, the puniest infant that comes wailing into the world, in the squalid- est room of the most miserable tenement house, becomes at that moment seized of an equal right with the millionaires. And it is robbed if the right is denied.”
“ But it will be said ; there are improvements which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself ! Very well : then the title to the improvements becomes blended with the title to the land ; the individual right is lost in the common right.”
“ Herbert Spencer says ; ‘ Had we to deal with the parties who originally robbed the human race of its heritage, we might make short work of the matter.’ Why not make short work of the matter anyhow ? ”
“ By the time the people of any such country as England or the United States are suffi- ciently aroused to the injustice and disadvantages of individual ownership of land to induce them to attempt its nationalization, they will be sufficiently aroused to nationalize it in a much more direct and easy way than by purchase. They will not trouble themselves about compensating the proprietors of land.”
“ I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust ; the second, needless. It is not necessary to confiscate land ; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.”
“ The homestead owner will be a loser only as the man who has bought himself a pair of boots may be said to be a loser by a subsequent fall in the price of boots. His boots will be just as useful to him, and the next pair of boots he can get cheaper. . . . The
Duke of Westminster, who owns a considerable part of the site of London, would still have all he could by any possibility enjoy, and a much better state of society in which to enjoy it.”
‘ ‘ This revenue arising frqm the common property could be applied to the common
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benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. We might not establish public tables — they would be unnecessary.”
“ We should reach the ideal of the socialist, but not through governmental repression. Government would become merely the agency by which the common property was admi- nistered for the common benefit.”
“ All that is necessary to social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists — ‘ Land and Liberty.’”
To lay bare all the fallacies underlying these statements would be no easy task. At the outset, land is vaguely defined as the source of all wealth and a common bounty of nature, which no man creates or may appropriate, whereas mere land in itself is worthless except as some man does appro- priate it and make it his own, as it were, a very part of himself, by possession and use. Through this false definition, land is morally distinguished from produce, the land-holder from the laborer, and it is held right to own goods or houses, but wrong to own the bare ground. On the assumption that all men have equal rights in this common bounty of the soil, it is asserted, in no figurative sense, that the people still own the land, as if the people had not already, for the public good and upon known conditions, conceded an individual right of land-ownership, which has ever been sanctioned by law and guarded with the very sword of justice. As a further inference, it is even maintained that society could now have the same right to land made valuable by individual labor as to land from which it had not parted, but left in a state of nature, undeveloped and worthless. It is also still more strangely argued that any increased value of land which may come with the growth of the community must rightfully belong to the wealth-producing laborer of to-day, and not to the laborer of yesterday, who has become a land-owner, and whose land has itself been earned by other laborers and held at risk and expense for generations. Because decreasing wages some- times coexist with increasing rent, it is fancied that this growing land value is a tax upon the present earnings of labor, rather than the fruit of past earn- ings invested in land. Throughout the whole reasoning it is forgotten that, in this country at least, with its clear legal titles, private land-ownership is itself but rewarded labor, not defrauded labor, and to destroy it would be the very suicide of labor. All the ills of the workingman are thus unfairly charged to an abstract land-owner, rather than to the capitalist, with whom he is in close practical relations, or to other well-known causes of poverty. Then, to cap this absurdity, the various cures of labor distress, such as public economy, education of workingmen, trades unions, partnerships with employers, governmental aid, more equal distribution of public lands, are severally treated as but so many aggravations of the mere imaginary wrong of private property in land. This vague, scarecrow monopoly, it is at length maintained, can only be aboli^ed by seizing all land as State pro- perty, and collecting the rent into the public treasury for the relief of the laboring classes. It is then shown, very clearly and boldly, how such legis- lation, as by a stroke of the pen, would equalize wealth and make the rich
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poorer and the poor richer. The largest share might go to workingmen and artisans, as the chief producers of wealth ; but farmers could live on their homesteads without owning them, as serfs of the sovereign people, and reduced millionaires would at last have to pay tribute as vassals to Knights of Labor. And thus is to be set on foot, in the midst of our advanced civili- zation, under the forms of law, a course of open land-robbery and pillage which hitherto has only been achieved by barbarian hordes in an age of lawless violence.
In plain opposition to such vagaries stands the Christian doctrine at every point of view. A few only of its elements need here be stated :
First. The private ownership of land, as of other property, is a divine right expressed in the very constitution of man by his Creator. It is fos- tered by an innate desire as imperious as the desire for aught else which can be exclusively owned and used. It is asserted by a moral sense, which as spontaneously condemns violations of it by ourselves or others. It is more or less clearly enforced by the usages and laws of all peoples, savage and civilized ; and it can be called in question only by some sophistical rea- soning or perverted judgment. Primarily, the right inheres in the very relation of man to the earth, upon which he depends, and which, so far as occupied and utilized by him, becomes attached to his personality, or belongs to him alone. If it be wrong for him to own such land, because it is a part of nature, then it is wrong for him to own his horse or his house, which are also parts of nature. Though such land were, indeed, originally a divine creation, yet he has produced therein a value as much his own as anything else of human production, and thus acquired a special right in the common bounty of the Creator. The mere abstract general right of mankind, could it now override his acquired special right, would simply call for an indis- criminate distribution of all private wealth among men, wholly regardless of their endowments, needs, and deserts. Even on the theory of the social con- tract, existing individual rights in land must have been acquired by common consent, and society could not now go back upon its own agreement without new consent, as the State does not exercise the right of eminent domain except in cases of public necessity, and then only upon a fair valua- tion and reimbursement of the land-owner. Without, however, discuss- ing here any of the ethical theories of property in general, such as self- interest, utility, the general good, the law of the land, it is enough to say that from each of them might be brought arguments for the natural jus- tice of individual proprietorship in the soil. Every reason which proves the right of a man to any property at all may prove his right to property in land.
Second. The private ownership of land has ever been sanctioned by divine law, since the day that Adam, as the first land-holder, was given dominion over the earth. Under the Jewish theocracy it was not only allowed, but made inalienable by the agrarian jubilee, or repossession of homesteads every fifty years, and fixed by solemn tenure from Jehovah him-
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self as the one supreme Proprietor : “ The land shall not be sold forever ; for the land is mine.” The decalogue also clearly includes it. As traced, like other property, to the primary right which every man has to himself and to the fruit of his labor, it has the same ground in the commandment which forbids violations of property rights. To take from its owner land which has been justly acquired by discovery, purchase, inheritance, or gift, and which he has enriched with his own toil, would be as plain stealing as to take from him the wares wrought by his skill or the home built with his earnings. And to do this by law, on a plea of justice, would simply assail all law and justice as seated in the bosom of God and voiced in the hearts of men.
Third. The private ownership of land, viewed as a divine trust under human law, has the same checks and safeguards as other property. If the law be broken or the trust be violated, then the land is legally or morally forfeited. The land-holder simply becomes a criminal, who is made to give up his false title, or an unfaithful steward, from whom shall yet be taken even that which he seemeth to have. The gigantic abuses of landlordism in the British Islands, as of land speculation in the United States, furnish no reasons for abolishing this kind of property, but only for better laws of entail and monopoly. And the few land-holders in either country who are like the slothful servant, hiding his lord’s money in the ground, cannot detract from the many who, on their own estates and the world over, are maintaining churches, charities, missions, schools, colleges, libraries, mu- seums, and countless other institutions for social well-being and human progress.
Fourth. The private ownership of land is as consistent with Christian neighborship, or love of mankind, as other forms of wealth. It is rooted in the same first duty of every man to provide for his own household, without which, so far from being a Christian, he is said to be worse than an infidel, and it may have its flower and fruitage in the same beautiful and noble cha- rities of home, kindred, country, and humanity. The distinction is not less false than invidious by which the land-owner, on his well-tilled acres, is de- picted as selfishly monopolizing the Creator’s gifts to his creatures, any more than the laborer himself monopolizes them with his manufactured stores of the same raw material, as controlled by his skill and capital. If distinctions must be made, it might seem that the land-holding class, the great commu- nity of homestead owners, would best keep the family as a seated institu- tion, uphold the State with patriotic roots in the soil, and maintain the Church in its strength and freedom ; rather than the laboring class in our large cities, especially the foreign refuse, who literally have no attach- ment to our native land, but have come hither to menace our social peace with alien views of property, marriage, and religion, and false cries of liberty, equality, and fraternity. No such distinctions, however, are needed in a country of freemen, where the laborer and the land-owner are so often com- bined in the same person and so continually changing places. True Chris-
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tian patriotism would rather dictate that the legislative rule of any one class, laborer or land-owner, without regard to its virtue and intelligence, is to be deprecated as dangerous alike to the State and to the Church. And true Christian philanthropy, instead of arraying laborer against land-owner, in a world-wide conspiracy against civilization, seeks ever to knit together all classes in all nations as one brotherhood of mankind.
Fifth. The Christian ideal of wealth, as set before the young ruler and illustrated at Pentecost, calls for the highest personal and social virtue, but does not distinguish land as common property, to be forfeited or confis- cated, any more in charity than in equity. Even its surrender to the Church by a vow of poverty has ever implied the right to have withheld it for other uses ; and its seizure by the State, in the name of Christian charity, has not hitherto been even proposed. History is, indeed, full of sad attempts to revive the communism which for a while illumined the golden age of Christianity. But they have only shown, with few exceptions, that the aboli- tion of private property in land has ever tended to the dissolution of society. The Roman Catholic communities of monks and nuns have simply pre- cluded such results by connecting the vow of celibacy with that of poverty. The various Protestant communities of mystics and perfectionists, by merg- ing homesteads in a common estate, with a common table and dwelling, have sooner or later destroyed all family life and purity, or only averted such disaster by retaining individual estates, and holding the mere produce in common. Some communities of socialists, claiming a sort of new Chris- tianity, have sought to openly abolish the family and reorganize the State by abnegating individual land-ownership. But Mr. George espouses none of these doctrines. Though he seeks an ethical basis for his project of land- nationalization, and ever throws over it a warjji color of sympathy for the toiling masses, yet he does not offer it as Christian doctrine. He merely proposes, in the name of political economy, to confiscate all the landed property of the country, as it stands, by popular and legislative action, through the short and easy method of taxation. The people have only to vote back to themselves the land for the good of the workingman. It is well that the scheme can thus stand out in its stark simplicity^ Had it been invested with any Christian sentiment, it might have seemed as if Mercury had at last stolen the very robe of Charity.
Sixth. It remains to add, that the only radical cure of our social evils must be moral and Christian, rather than merely economic and political ; striking at the roots of poverty in ignorance and vice, and of avarice in self- ishness and pride ; binding together the laborer, capitalist, land-owner, in bonds of charity ; and ever nobly diffusing culture with wealth, virtue with intelligence, and religion with knowledge. Other remedies, however needful and praiseworthy, are but palliatives, or in themselves worse than the dis- ease. The nationalization of land would no more heal our wounds than the organization of labor. Neither higher interest nor higher wages would bring us higher morals. The dreams of our philanthropy must get substance in
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Christianity. The republic of Plato and the utopia of More can only be chastened and fulfilled in the kingdom of Christ.
In this article it has not been designed to defend the Christian doc- trine of property, but simply to state it, and lift it into view as the real issue involved in the “ Land and Labor ” movement. The sooner this issue is clearly perceived the better will it be for all parties. As masked in the brilliant sophisms and humane sentiments of Mr. George, it is hidden from multitudes who are reading his works, and already in haste to apply his teachings at the polls. When such a covert attack is made upon the very foundations of Christian civilization, it is time for all Christian citizens to rally to the common defence.
At the same time, in meeting this issue, it should not be forgotten that property has its duties as well as its rights, its responsibilities as well as its privileges, its penalties no less than its rewards. The growing misuse of property should also be frankly acknowledged as one great aggravation of our social evils and an occasion of discontent ; and the chief remedy should be sought in a more kindly Christian care, as well as sounder instruction of the working masses, now in so much danger of being misled by blind guides and false teachers.
FRUIT FROM AN OLD TREE.
In the quiet garden of Christ’s College, at Cambridge, there is a mul- berry-tree of which a fond tradition tells that it was planted by the hand of John Milton. The tree is banked with earth about its roots and bound with iron about its trunk ; the outward spread of branches, which was once the sign of youthful vigor, has become the downward curve of limbs bending to decay and leaning heavily upon their crutches. It is a living symbol of venerable age. But its leaf is still green, and, as we stood beneath it last summer, my friend picked a mulberry from the lowest bough, and said: “ You see it is fulfilling the words of the Psalmist.” Whereupon we fell into discourse upon the bringing forth of fruit in old age, and talked of Landor’s Last Fruit Off an Old Tree, which was published in his seventy-eighth year, but was not by any means his last, and of Victor Hugo’s L^gende des Siecles, and of Longfellow’s Aftermath, and wondered much at the rarity and beauty of such a prolonged fertility in poets.
Doubtless this feeling of personal interest and surprise is the first that rises in the mind when one takes up the new Locksley Hall, and remembers that its author is seventy-six years old. The inclination to regard it as a curiosity rather than as a work of art, to dwell more upon the mere circum- stance of its production than upon its meaning and value, to use it either as an illustration of the longevity of genius or as the text for a lamentation over the inevitable decay of mortal powers, is natural and almost irresistible. But we question whether, from a critical standpoint, this inclination ought not to be regarded as a temptation. At least, we may be sure that if the in-
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terest exhausts Itself upon mere personalities, it will come far short of the obligations and the opportunities of true criticism. For the appearance of this poem is, in fact, one of the most significant literary events of this decade. Its author stands among the few living men who are justly entitled to be called distinguished, rather than merely celebrated. Perhaps there are not more than three others in the world, certainly there are not so many as three in England, whose claim to distinction, in the highest sense of the word, is so clear and unquestionable. And one of these others — a master of men and leader in practical affairs — has thought the poem worthy of a review so careful and so earnest as almost to deserve the name of a reply. The real importance of what is sometimes scornfully called mere literature, the value and power of poetry as a criticism of life, have seldom been acknowledged more emphatically than by the simple fact that Mr. Gladstone, the most influential personage in English politics, has seen fit to pay the new Locksley Hall the highest possible compliment of a serious answer. The tone and manner of his article in the Nineteenth Century ought to be a sufficient rebuke to our shallow newspaper writers, absurdly called critics, who hastened, on the strength of an incorrect telegraphic report, to dismiss Lord Tennyson’s latest production with a few vulgar jests and a general chorus of “ Go up, thou bald-head ! ” Such work almost makes one regret that since the days of Elisha the bears have allowed one of their most beneficent functions to fall into neglect.
The first Locksley Hall was beyond a doubt the strongest and most im- mediately successful thing in the volumes of 1842, which gave Tennyson his place as a popular poet. The billowy rush of the verse, the romantic in- terest of the story, the vigorous spirit of hope and enthusiasm which throbbed through the poem and made it seem alive with the breath of a new age, at once captivated all readers. It was this poem, more than any other, which lifted Tennyson beyond the admiration of a narrow circle and opened to him the heart of the world. And it is worthy of notice that, even in its outward form, this poem is one of the few which his scrupulous self- criticism has suffered to remain unchanged. There are but four slight verbal variations between the first and the last editions.
Forty-five years have passed ; and now the poet takes up the thread of his youthful dream once more, and follows it to the end. There was a pro- phetic hint of this sequel in the earlier poem. We heard the eager young soldier complaining the loss of the “ harvest of his youthful joys,” and dimly foreseeing his own image in the unconsolable sadness of old age :
" Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest."
But that picture could not be filled out until the experience had really come. The result of the bitter personal disappointment which then seemed to have shattered his life forever, the value of the glowing hopes for the future of his country and the world in which he sought a refuge from him-
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self, could not be fairly estimated until they had been tested by time, until he knew what life was in its entirety. Not until now would it have been possible for Tennyson to complete the life-drama of Locksley Hall. The dramatic nature of the poem must not be forgotten, for it is this which gives unity and significance to the two parts. They are not disconnected strings of brilliant metaphors and comparisons, or trochaic remarks upon human life and progress. They are the expression of a character, the lyric history of a life ; they form a complete and rounded whole. They are two acts in the same play. The hero, the scene, remain the same. Only the time is changed by half a century.
It seems quite evident that Tennyson was not willing to leave his hero as he stood in the first act. For with all his attractive, not to say “mag- netic,” qualities, there was something about him that was unlovely and repellent, almost absurd. He made too much of himself, talked too loudly and recklessly, was too much inclined to rave and exaggerate. He was conscious himself of a tendency to “ bluster ” ; and that most suggestive and wholesome critic, Mr. R. H. Hutton, was not far out of the way when he called him a “ grandiose and somewhat bumptious lover.” Tennyson doubt- less wished to do for him what time really does for every man whose heart is of true metal — make him wiser and kinder and more worthy to be loved. The touches by which this change has been accomplished are most delicate, most marvellous, most admirable. Compare the rejected lover’s jealousy of the baby rival whose lips should laugh him down, and whose hands should push him from the mother’s heart, with the old man’s prayer beside the marble image of Amy,
“ Looking still as if she smiled,”
sleeping quietly with her little child upon her breast. Or turn from the young man’s scornful and unjust description of the man who had carried off his sweetheart, to the noble and generous tribute which he lays at last upon the grave of him who
“ Strove for sixty widow’d years to help his homelier brother-man."
Or put his first wild complaint of the worthlessness and desolation of his life beside his later acknowledgment of the joy and strength which had come to him through the larger, deeper love of Edith. Surely, if words have any meaning, the poet means to teach us by these things that not only youthful jealousy, but also youthful despair, is false, and that for every one who will receive its moral discipline and hold fast to its eternal hopes, life is worth the living.
So far, then, as the story of the two poems is concerned, so far as they present to us a picture of an individual human character, and trace its development through the experience of joy and sorrow, their lesson is sweet and sound and full of encouragement. It shows the frailty of the exuberant flowers of romance, exaggerated feelings of passion, born in an
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atmosphere of tropical heat and unable to endure the cooler air of reality. But it shows also that the garden of life has better and more lasting blos- soms, affections which survive all shock and change, a man’s love which is stronger than a boy’s fancy, a man’s reverence for honest worth which can overcome a boy’s resentment for imagined wrongs,
“ A sober certainty of waking bliss,”
which makes divine amends for the vanished dreams of boyhood. It re- minds us of the story of the “ child-wife,” Dora, and the woman-wife, Agnes, which Dickens has told in David Copperjidd, or of Thackeray’s history of Henry Esmond.
But when we come to consider the sequel of the poem in its other as- pect, as a commentary on modern England, as an estimate of the result of those buoyant, bounding hopes which seemed to swing the earlier verses onward in the full tide of exultation toward a near millennium, we shall find room for a great difference of opinion. There are some who regard the new locksley Hall as a veritable palinode, a complete recantation of the poet’s youthful creed, a shameful desertion from the army of progress to the army of reaction, a betrayal of the standard of hope into the hands of despair. There are others, among them Mr. Gladstone, who think that though the poet has not really deserted the good cause, he has at least yielded too far to despondency, and that he is in danger of marring the jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign with unnecessarily “ tragic tones.” It seems to me that both of these views are unjust, because they both fail to go far enough beneath the surface. They leave out of sight several things which are necessary to a fair judgment of the poem.
First of all is the fact that the poet does not speak for himself, but through the lips of 2. persona, a mask; and what he says must be in character. Mr. Gladstone has, indeed, noted this fact ; but he has failed to take fully into account the peculiar and distinctive qualities of the character which the poet has chosen. The hero of Locksley Hall is a man in whom emotion is stronger than thought ; impulsive, high-strung, supersensitive ; an idealist rather than a practical reformer ; one to whom everything that he sees must loom larger than life, through the mist of his own overwrought feelings. This is his nature. And if in youth he took too bright a view of the future, it is quite as inevitable that in age he should take too dark a view of the present. If there be any exaggeration in his complaints about the evils of our times, it is but fair to set them down to the idiosyncrasy of the charac- ter, and not to the sober conviction of the poet.
But suppose we put this plea of dramatic propriety aside, and make Tennyson answerable for all that his hero says. We shall find that there were some things in the first rhapsody quite as hard and bitter as any in the second. Take the vigorous imprecations against the social wants, the social lies, the sickly forms, by which the young man is oppressed and infuriated. Hear him cry :
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“What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these ?
Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys.’
See his picture of the hungry people, creeping like a lion toward the sloth- ful watcher beside a dying fire. Here, at least, even in the first outflow of hopeful music, are the warning notes. And though there may be more severity in the old man’s condemnation of the iniquities and follies of soci- ety, in one point at least he has grown milder. He does not indulge in any more “ cursing.”
Observe, also, if we are to hold Tennyson responsible for a retraction in the second poem of anything that he taught in the first, just what is the point to which that retraction applies. He does not deny his early hope for the future of England and the world ; he denies only the two false grounds on which that hope was based. One of these grounds was the swift and wonderful march of what is called modern improvement ; meaning thereby the steamship, the railway, the telegraph, and the advance of all the industrial arts. Of these he says now :
“ Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space.
Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace.”
And is not this true ? Have we not all felt the shrinkage of the much- vaunted miracles of science into the veriest kitchen utensils of a comfort- worshipping society? Physical powers have been multiplied by an unknown quantity, but it is a serious question whether moral powers have not had their square root extracted. A man can go from New York to London now in seven days. But when he arrives we find him no better man than if it had taken him a month. He can talk across three thousand miles of ocean, but he has nothing more, nothing wiser, to say, than when he sent his letter by a sailing-paeket. All the inventions in the world will not change man’s heart, or
“ Lift him nearer godlike state.”
The other ground of hope in the old Locksley Hall was the advance of modern politics, through the freedom of speech and the extension of suf- frage, which seemed to promise at no distant date a sort of universal “ Par- liament of Man,” a “ Federation of the World.” In the new Locksley Hall the poet confesses that this ground also has failed him. He no longer thinks so highly of Parliament that he desires to see it reproduced on a larger scale. The virtues of talk as a panacea for human ills appear to him more than dubious. He hazards the conjecture that
“ Old England may go down in babble at last."
And he breaks out in fierce indignation against the “rivals of realm- ruining party,” who care more for votes than for truth, and speak more for the preservation of their own power than for the preservation of the Empire.
Now, what is all this but the acknowledgment of the truth which most
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sober men are beginning to feel ? Fifty years ago material science and political theory promised large things. The promise has been kept to the ear and broken to the hope. The world has gone forward — a little — but it has not gone ringing down the grooves of change, it has not swept at once into a brighter day — not by any means. There are heavy clouds upon the sky. The moral condition of humanity in general, and of England in particular, is certainly not free from elements of degradation and serious threats of danger. Let me quote two sentences, from writers who deserve at least an attentive hearing.
“British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison- swamp of reeking pestilence, physical and moral ; a Uving Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive ; such a Curtius’ gulf communicating with the nether deeps as the sun never saw till now.” Thus spoke the Sage of Chelsea. And, after the same fashion, Ruskin says : “ Remember, for the last twenty years, England and all foreign nations, either tempting her or following her, have blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly ; and have done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it is in his power to do.”
These utterances, like the darker verses in Mr. Tennyson’s poem, are not meant to be taken as complete pictures of the present time. They are only earnest and vigorous warnings against the easy-going, self-complacent optimism which talks as if the promised millennium had already dawned. To reply to them by an enumeration of the inventions which have been made, and the political measures which have been passed, during the last half-century, is quite beside the point. The question remains. Is human life really higher, holier, happier I
The answer, if it is thoughtful as well as hopeful, must be, A little. But still the strife, the shame, the suffering, endure. Still
“ City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime ;
There among the glooming allies Progress halts on palsied feet,
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.”
If we ask when and how these things shall cease, the reply comes not from the fairy-tales of science nor from the blue-books of politics, but from the heart of Christian charity and from the promise of Christian faith. And this is the reply which Tennyson has given, in words as pure and clear and musical as he has ever uttered :
“ Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine,
Forward, till you learn the highest Human Nature is divine.
“ Follow Light and do the Right — for man can half-control his doom —
Till you see the deathless Angel seated in the vacant Tomb.
“ Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.
I that loathed have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last."
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The last line recalls us once more to the personal interest of the poem, which, after all, is the strongest. The hero of Locksley Hall is bidding us farewell. He has played his part through. The drama of life is ended.
In the first act we saw the youth seeking to forget his private sorrow in the largest public hopes ; turning from the lost embraces of his “ faithless Amy,” to lay his head upon the vast bosom of the age, and listen to the deep throbbing of cosmic hopes.
In the second act we see the old man seeking to forget his public dis- appointments in his private affections ; turning back from that hard and unrestful world-bosom, wJipre he has heard nothing better than the clank of machinery and the words of windy oratory, to find rest in the soft, sweet memories of Amy and Edith, and the man whom time had changed from his enemy into his friend ; and looking forward to the promise of Christianity for the fulfilment of his hopes in an age not yet revealed.
Who that understands anything of a young man’s or an old man’s heart can question the truth of these two pictures ? And who will venture to say that the true philosophy of life does not lie somewhere between optimism and pessimism, in that steadfast and chastened meliorism to which the Gospel of the Incarnation makes its appeal and gives its promise ?
THE HALF-CENTURY OF VICTORIA’S REIGN.
The Victorian epoch in English history can hardly fail to stand out as distinct, if not as illustrious, as the Elizabethan, the Cromwellian, or any other. What it will stand for, it is perhaps too soon to pronounce. Only we may be sure that it will not be recognized as a refluent wave in the tide of civilization, but an era of steady, though not always rapid, advance in every department of human interests. The coronation bells of fifty years ago rang in, unconsciously,
“ the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.”
But our object is not to moralize nor philosophize, but simply to recall some of the leading political and social events of a reign as exceptional in its character as in its length.
There have been some fifteen changes of administration, under Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Lord Derby, the Earl of Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Earl of Salisbury, none of them lasting over six years. Derby was premier three times, and the office was held twice by Russell, Palmerston, Disraeli, and Gladstone. The entire term of the latter has been eleven years, Palmerston coming next with nine years. The fifty years have been almost equally divided between the ascendency of the Conservative and of the Liberal parties.
In 1839 the repeal of the Com Laws began to be vigorously agitated by
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the Anti-Corn-Law League, under Richard Cobden ; it was finally settled by the bold and sudden action of Sir Robert Peel, who, as premier, brought in a bill for the repeal in 1846, impelled and aided thereto by a threatened famine occasioned chiefly by the failure of the potato crop in Ireland. Under the momentum of this act England in three years had fully adopted the principle of free trade, which has been unshaken to this day. In the same year (1839) began the Chartist agitation, culminating in the year of revolutions, 1848, when the “ monster petition ” was presented to the House of Commons. Unwise leadership and riotous proceedings led to its speedy collapse, but two of its six demands have since been embodied in legislation, namely, the ballot, and the abolition of property qualification for members of Parliament. A third, universal suffrage, has been almost conceded. The other three were annual parliaments, the equalization of parliamentary districts, and payment of the members.
On February 10, 1840, the Queen was married to Prince Albert of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha, a union which contributed much to the wise and harmo- nious relations of the Crown with the Parliament and the people. In 1840, Sir Rowland Hill successfully proposed his plan of cheap postage, whereby all rates for letters were reduced to one penny, resulting in an enormous increase both of correspondence and' of revenue, and setting the example which has been followed by all nations.
At the beginning of this reign Daniel O’Connell was agitating the Repeal of the Union, both in Parliament and by means of “ monster meetings.” During his lifetime a comparatively peaceful policy was pursued by the Irish people, but under the revolutionary impulses of 1848 a rebellion was fomented by John Mitchel, Smith O’Brien, and others. There have been similar uprisings at various times, especially on the part of the Fenian Brotherhood, which was superseded five years ago by the National League. Among the concessions which have been successively extorted by the Irish are courts for the sale of encumbered estates, the establishment of a Roman Catholic university, a reform bill extending the suffrage, a bill entitling out- going tenants to compensation for their improvements, the disestablishment of the English Church in Ireland, and the Arrears of Rent Bill, all of which have led steadily up to the point now in abeyance, designed to lift the crushing weight of foreign landlordism from the soil, and to place in the hands of the people the control of their domestic affairs by an Irish Parlia- ment. Two of the notable events of Victoria’s reign were her visits to Ire- land in 1849 and 1853, the latter for the purpose of attending the great Irish Industrial Exhibition.
In 1842, the north-eastern boundary of Great Britain and the United States was fixed by the Ashburton Treaty, and four years later the north- western boundary was similarly settled. Except in the temporary stimulat- ing of the Chartist movement and of the Irish agitation, England rode out the revolutionary storms of 1848-49, when every other European government was rocked to its centre, and in some cases wrecked. In 1851 the system
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of international expositions was inaugurated, and the return of peace was celebrated by the great World’s Fair in the Crystal Palace at London. In the same year the gold deposits in Australia were discovered, giving rise to an immense immigration, and to the rapid transformation of a convict settle- ment into an Oriental sub-empire. In 1867 the American provinces were formed into a federal union, known as the Dominion of Canada, which (especially since the acquirement of its vast north-western territory, equal in area to three-fourths of Europe, and since the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad) has advanced swiftly in population and resources.
Following the lead of the United States, a treaty of commerce was con- cluded with Japan in 1854. Four years later, treaties were concluded with China. In the same year Parliament transferred the rule of India from the East India Company to the Crown ; and in the same year also, the disabili- ties of the Jews in Great Britain were removed. During our civil war the sympathy of the Queen, and of the Prince Consort, so long as he lived, was understood to be on the side of the Union. The sympathy also of the great middle class, and the wise and conciliatory diplomacy of Lord Palmerston, and Messrs. Seward and Adams, happily frustrated the intrigues of the Confederate Government, and, with the exception of the cases growing out of the spoliations by rebel cruisers, since amicably adjusted, prevented any serious complications between the two nations. The second International Exposition, much greater though less significant than the first, was held in 1863. In 1867 transatlantic telegraphic communication was established between Ireland and Newfoundland. Seventeen years earlier, submarine cables had been laid between London and Dublin, and between Dover and Calais. The first English telegraph line was on the Blackwall Railroad, in 1837, used for the conveyance of railway signals. In 1869 the Suez Canal was completed ; and, six years after, England obtained control of it by the purchase of the shares of the Khedive of Egypt.
In 1870 the statistics of illiteracy, showing that not one-half of the popu- lation could read, bestirred Parliament to organize a system of compulsory public education, supported partly by local taxation and partly by a Govern- ment grant, the result of which was an increased school attendance of at least 1,500,000. Soon afterward a great reform in the British Army was accomplished by abolishing the purchase system. Beneficent legislation has been enacted since the Queen’s accession in reform of the criminal code, which was still cruel and unequal ; also in forbidding women and children to work in mines and collieries, and regulating and limiting em- ployment in this kind of labor. The compulsory payment of church rates by dissenters was abolished in 1868. In the opening year of Victoria’s reign the first complete report of registration was made, followed in the next year by an investigation in the direction of sanitary reform. Among the re- sults were the abolition of the window tax, compulsory vaccination, a system of drainage and sewerage and water in towns, street cleaning and paving, the enforced removal of refuse and nuisances, and a number of other vital 18
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sanitary improvements. These were mainly secured by the establishment, in 1848, of a General Board of Health for the kingdom. In forty years the death rate of England and Wales has been lowered from over 22 per thousand to about 19^, and the deaths by zymotic diseases from 4^4 to about 2^.
On the 28th of April, 1876, Queen Victoria assumed, by authority of Parliament, the title of Empress of India. It was two hundred and seventy- six years since the East India Company began to trade with “ the Indies.” Forty years later they began to fortify their trading-posts. In 1757 Clive had completed his successful contest with France for supremacy, and had brought Bengal, with a population of 30,000,000, under the British rule. Under successive governor-generals, province after province was annexed or made tributary — Benares, the Cameatic, Mysore, Malabar, Hyderabad, a part of Burmah, Scinde, the Punjaub, and Oude, till in 1857 the Indian Empire comprised a population of 250,000,000, and a territory as large as Europe, exclusive of Russia.
Then came the great explosion, known as the Sepoy Rebellion, in 1857, which threatened to blow the whole fabric into atoms. The sepoys, or native troops, had been the dependence of the British for their conquests and the maintenance of their power, but an impression that the Government had deliberately adopted a policy of extirpating their religion and caste dis- tinctions created a sudden and universal panic, and they raised anew the standard of the Great Mogul at Delhi. Led by Nana Sahib, a deposed Indian king, they held the country for several months, committing number- less atrocities. The tide was first turned by the advance of Havelock upon Cawnpore and Lucknow, followed by Sir Colin Campbell, but it was nearly a year before the British control was reestablished. And with it the entire administration of affairs was transferred from the'East India Company to the Crown and Parliament. Another result was the adoption of a wiser and more conciliatory policy toward the natives, and a steadily advancing system of enlightenment, industrial and commercial development, and pre- paration for local self-government.
During the reign of Victoria, England has waged a couple of wars with Afghanistan, one of them as disastrous as any in her history ; and wars with China in 1840, 1856, and i860, the first being known as the Opium War, in resistance to the efforts of the Chinese Government to prevent the importa- tion of that drug from India, and resulting in the cession of the island of Hong- Kong to Great Britain, and the opening of the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai to British commerce. She also took a hand, in 1840, in subduing Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, who had re- volted against the Sultan, and by her naval victories under Lord Napier contributed largely to the result. There has been occasional fighting in South Africa with the Boers, Caffres, and Zulus. A brief war occurred in 1856-57 between Persia and the Indian Government, and another with Abys-
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sinia in ths following year. Five years ago occurred the exciting episode of the revolt of El Mahdi, with the brief but heroic career of General Gor- don, and the withdrawal of the British forces from Upper Egypt. Forcible possession was taken of the seaport of Aden, on the south coast of Arabia, in 1839. But the only foreign war of magnitude was that in the Crimea, 1853-55, from which England reaped the chief glory. This arose from the demand of Russia for a protectorate over the Greek Christians in Turkey. England and France united with the Turks in resistance. After much ne- gotiation and some fighting the contest was concentrated at Sebastapol, the Russian port and fortress on the Black Sea. The investment lasted for a year, lacking a few days, and its evacuation by the Russians practically ended the war. The sufferings and losses of the besiegers by disease and exposure were frightful, seven times as many of the English dying in the hospital as in battle ; and it was this exigency which called forth Florence Nightingale, and the system of sanitary and Christian work which has done so much to mitigate the horrors of war. The famous battles were those of the Alma, Balaklava, Tchemaya, Inkerman, and the storming of the Malakoff and the Redan. The generals who won most renown were the English Lord Raglan, who was killed, and General Todleben, who directed the defence.
The reign of Victoria has been as remarkable for its adventurous enter- prise in exploration and discovery, in various regions of the world, as the reign of Elizabeth. The most daring of these expeditions have been directed toward the North Pole. Sir John Franklin’s last voyage began in 1845. In 1854 Commander McClure returned after a three years’ imprisonment in the ice of the polar seas, having accomplished the North- west passage ; McClintock, however, afterward ascertained that Franklin had discovered it as early as 1846. In 1872 Captain Hall’s expedition reached latitude 82°i6', and four years later Captain Nares reached 8^°2o', north of Greenland, with a sledging party. Livingstone discovered Lake Ngami in 1849, and the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi in 1855. Richardson, with Barth and Oberweg, discovered Lake Tchad in 1850. Two years after. Burton and Speke discovered Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria N’yanza, and the Victoria Nile in 1862. Two years later still, Baker dis- covered Lake Albert N’yanza. In 1871 Stanley made his memorable expe- dition in search of Livingstone, and in 1877 established the identity of the Lualaba and Congo rivers, Cameron having crossed Africa a year or two before, thus opening up the “ Dark Continent ” to the world.
Our space will not allow us to even outline the scientific events of the reign, or the innumerable applications of science to the utilities and comforts of life. We may mention the beginning of transatlantic steam navigation in 1838. War steamers were first used two years after, in the Egyptian war. The Thames Tunnel was opened, with great demonstrations, in 1843. There
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has been an enormous increase in commerce, and in manufacturing and mining industries, so that, in the former, England leads the world, with hardly a good second. There has been a still more remarkable extension of railways in the United Kingdom. Since Victoria’s accession these have grown from between one and two thousand miles, carrying 33,000,000 pas- sengers annually, to between seventeen and eighteen thousand miles, carry- ing, probably, seven or eight hundred millions. The telegraph system, in 1868, came into the hands of the Government, and was thereby greatly ex- tended. The patents taken out by inventors have increased from about a hundred to several thousands. The condition of the insane, the pauper, and the prisoner has been immeasurably improved. Agriculture has been quite transformed, both in its methods and productiveness. The cities were destitute of many of the most important sanitary and police and other arrangements for the comfort and convenience of the people, which are now a matter of course. One out of every eleven persons was a pauper, a fact which was largely due to unwise poor-laws, whose whole effect was to promote pauperism and to support the dram-shops.
In reference to the fine arts, we must content ourselves with quoting Liibke, that England “has shown the working of an independent artistic, creative power as never before in her history” ; and his editor, Mr. Clarence Cook, claims that it is to England even more than France that we owe the revival of art in our days. Her greatest architectural achievement has been the new Parliament Houses, completed in 1847; A style called the “ Victorian Gothic ” took its rise from this structure. Among the painters and engravers who have adorned the reign are Turner, Eastlake, Millais, Watts, Leigh- ton, Leslie, Landseer, Maclise, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Whistler, Holman Hunt, Leech, Cruikshank, Doyle, Webster, and Linton. The most famous sculptors have been Gibson, Wyatt, Westmacott, Woolner, Macdowell, and Thornycroft. Some of the best-known architects have been A. W. Pugin, Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, Waterhouse, Donaldson, Scott, and Barry.
At the time of Victoria’s coronation the Pickwick Papers were coming out, and Carlyle published his French Revolution. The University of London was just established. It is a remarkable fact that the three most representative literary epochs of England, except perhaps that which immediately followed the introduction of printing, were in the reigns of her female sovereigns. The productiveness of this period has been common to all departments, though the special development has been in history, fiction, and the literature of science. It has been the era of Milman, Macaulay, Carlyle, Grote, Merivale, Stanley, Freeman, Froude, Kinglake, Layard, Wilkinson, and Maine. It has produced Thackeray, Dickens, Kingsley, George Eliot, Reade, Trollope, Black, Collins, Borrow, Macdonald, and some of the best work of Bulwer and Disraeli. Among its writers on science have been Faraday, Murchison,
CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS. 2^7
Darwin, Lyell, Owen, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Carpenter, Proctor, Lewes, Max Muller, Lubbock, Tylor, Buckland, Mivart, Wallace, Whewell, Hugh Miller, John Pye Smith, and the Duke of Argyll. We may add, as writers upon philosophy and art. Sir William Hamilton, James Mar- tineau. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Buckle, McCosh, Ruskin, Gladstone, James Fergusson, Hamerton, and Frances Power Cobbe. The roll of Vic- torian poets includes Tennyson, the Brownings, Keble, Faber, Matthew Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Lord Houghton, Aytoun, Bailey, Swinburne, William Morris, and the Rossettis. Among essayists and critics we may name John Wilson, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey, Helps, Douglas Jerrold, Dr. John Brown, Peter Bayne, and John Morley. Invaluable service has been done to literature by such workers as Robert and William Chambers, Charles Knight, John Kitto, J. Payne Collier, Alexander Dyce, Halliwell-Phillips, Samuel Smiles, William and Philip Smith, and W. W. Skeat. Is it more than a coincidence that this reign has developed almost a complete literature by women ? Witness the names of Mary Somerville, Harriet Martineau, Frances Power Cobbe, Mrs. Betham-Edwards, Mrs. Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke, Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Ingelow, Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Mrs. Ritchie, Mrs. Craik, and Miss Yonge.
Some of the ecclesiastical landmarks in the history of this reign have been the culmination of the Tractarian movement in Oxford, the seces- sion of Newman, Manning, Faber, and others to the Roman Catholic Church, and the rise of the Broad Church party ; the establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1859, and the disestablishment of the Irish Church ; the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, the Revision of the English Bible, at the instance of the Convocation of Canterbury, and the great development of missionary work both at home and abroad. Note- worthy names connected with these latter movements have been Lord Shaftesbury * and Samuel Morley, and the missionaries, Livingstone, Duff, and Robert Moffatt. Among theological and ethical writers we may specify Maurice, Newman, Pusey, Bishops Wilberforce and Colenso, Archbishop Trench, Dean Alford, Principal Tulloch, Conybeare and Howson, Isaac Taylor, Doctor Chalmers, Fairbairn, and Henry Rogers.
THE REFORM OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY.
Last winter there appeared in Leipsic an anonymous pamphlet, Zur Reform des akademischen Lebens,\ which attracted considerable attention in the newspapers, and fairly expressed the character of the agitation now in
*The Duke of Argyll has recently said in Parliament, that “the social reforms of the last half century have been due mainly to the influence, character, and perseverance of one man — Lord Shaftesbury.”
t Zur Reform des akademischen Lebens, Wider Duellzwang und Verbindungstyrannei. Verlag von Alexander Dunker in Leipzig. 1885.
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progress against the abuses of German university life. The attack is a strong and general one upon the student societies, and we may read between the lines that the principal animus of the author is against the smaller universities, since it is well known that the students attending these are, pro- portionately, more given to the traditional customs, das Raufen und Saufen, than those of Berlin or Leipsic. The author first dwells upon the stim- ulating effect of scientific and literary societies where, in the evening, the student, having sat before his professors during the day, renews the dis- cussion of his chosen subject with fellow-students whose tastes are similar and whose knowledge and ability are on a par with his own. From such motives and from the social instinct, as well as for political purposes, have sprung from time to time the existing societies. But, unfortunately, in many societies founded centuries back, the original purpose has become a dead letter, and the written constitutions, instead of advancing, are overgrown with a mass of antiquated laws in which a false code of honor, retaliation, and social exclusiveness are the most prominent features, embodying all that is worst from the past and none of the spirit of the present. Here belong most of the color-bearing {Farben tragende) or duelling societies, in the first rank of which are the Corps. They are recruited partly from the wealthiest commercial class, partly from members of similar organizations in the schools, while the better element are men of moderate means from the best strata of society. To the Fuchs, fresh from the gymnasium, the mem- bers of these societies, surrounded by a halo of secrecy, with their color insignia and bravado, pass for the ideal and only genuine students ; under pressure of solicitation he joins their ranks, ignorant of the bind- ing nature of the entrance pledge, or that he must conform to a set of tra- ditional ideas and practices which may be wholly foreign to his previous tastes and training. He finds it the fashion to abuse Bismarck and the Government, and make light of “ patriotism.” He must carefully look after his dress, never carry a book through the streets, hold aloof from “ second class ” students, and, as for lecture-going and study, they are laughed at as “philistine exertion,” for which, in fact, he has no time. Touches of con- science are quieted by the immediate round of dissipation and the “ duties ” of the Corps which he enters ; Friihschoppen, Nachmittagsbummel, and Abend- kneipe leaving leisure only for the cultivation of fencing.
The remarkable influence, amounting to despotism, enjoyed by the duelling societies, which generally comprise not more than one-seventh of the whole student body, is in part their inheritance from the period when they embraced much larger numbers, in part it is due to the passive en- durance of the non-society majority, but chiefly to the terrorism of the duel. Spreading from the Corps, this duel-coercion {Duellzwang) has gradually compelled other student societies, in defence of their good standing, either * to adopt the honor code and the duel, or to forego the public wearing of their colors and thus retire into a subordinate position in the estimation of the university. The absurd principle of this honor code is well known.
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It is not necessary to follow the author into the details of the three kinds of duels — the genuine duel, which is not peculiar to, or even common in, the university, and the distinctively university forms, the Bestimmungsmensur, between friends or friendly societies, which keeps the student in practice for the more serious Kontrahage, between members of rival societies. These are parodies of the real duel, rarely ending fatally, the most serious effects of which are not bodily injuries, but the baser qualities of character they cultivate, the brutal type of student which they raise to leadership, and the prominence given to physical over moral courage. Is the student, who is brought up under this false code to a stoical indifference to pain, training for the sympathetic art of the physician, for the statesman, with his feeling for the sufferings and needs of the people, for the teacher who shall train younger minds ? True, among the best elements of the Corps are men with the spirit and independence to issue from this ordeal of dissipation and duelling unhurt, but the larger number never recover from the long stifling of true and ele- vation of false ideals, and carry the mark into the professions and society. The author tacitly admits that the best material of the university is largely in the Corps. Among the passive majority of non-members is found the other extreme class, composed of the model students, the Musterschiiler, who go through the university as through a treadmill of daily lectures with the ex- amination at the end, neither looking to the right nor left at the questions of the day ; they obtain their degree and pass to the monotony of business and the beer table. The reform of academic life must be in the regeneration of the societies, in their breaking away from the mass of traditional practices which now encumber them.
Happily, in Bonn, Konigsberg, Strasburg, Heidelberg, and elsewhere a reaction is gathering strength, which promises sooner or later to free the societies of these fetters. This is seen, first, in the revival of interest in the distinctively scientific and literary societies ; second, in the fact that ques- tions in the foreground of public life are also beginning to take hold upon student circles ; third, the almost extinct flame of national feeling is brightening. The national union is a reality, the highest ideal of the Ger- man Student Society should now be to forward the progress of reform in home government.
LOWELL’S DEMOCRACY AND OTHER ADDRESSES.*
The distinguished and ever welcome author of My Study Windows and Among My Books again invites us to his study and his library. The series of essays before us suggestively opens with such a paper as we might expect from an American minister at the Court of St. James, and closes, as well, with an article rightfully expected from an accomplished scholar and author. Within the limits of these two discussions, entitled, respectively,
* Democracy and Other Addresses. By James Russell Lowell. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., New York and Boston, pp. 245, 1887.
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“ Democracy ” and “ Harvard Anniversary,” are included two specifically memorial addresses, “Garfield” and “ Stanley,” while the five remaining papers, “ Fielding,” “ Coleridge,” “Books and Libraries,” “Wordsworth,” and “ Don Quixote ” are more distinctively literary, and are thus finely in keeping with the governing quality of the author’s mind.
In the opening paper it is interesting to note the signal illustration pre- sented of what Mr. Whipple has termed Literature and Life. As we turn the pages, we are at a loss to determine which is the more apparent, the practical political wisdom of the man of affairs or the delicate scholarly dis- cernments of the man of letters. From first to last, the discussion is as fine an example of conciliatory address as there is extant. Fearless in its utter- ance of what the author felt at the time to be the truth, it is, yet, so hap- pily conceived and expressed that every Englishman who heard it thought better of the British Constitution than ever before, and better, also, of that great democratic commonwealth across the sea, of which the invited speaker was an official representative. Of the two memorial addresses, “ Garfield ” and “ Stanley,” suffice it to say that nothing could have been more graceful and appropriate. Tender in tone and overflowing with that heartfelt sym- pathy so germane to the hour of common international sorrow, just enough was said to hallow the memory of the distinguished dead, and once again to seal more firmly than ever the growing comity of the two English peoples.
To the critical judgment of Fielding and his place in English letters we find it difficult to give our fullest assent. Agreeing, in the main, with what the author states as to his sincerity, humor, keenness of observation, and ex- cellence of style, we cannot accord him that possession of genius which Mr. Lowell sees fit to accord, while we emphatically dissent from what seems to us to be a somewhat studied attempt to justify before the world of letters the so-called literary morality of the author of Tom Jones. The paper on Coleridge, brief as it is, presents him in his true light as poet and proser, translator and critic, philosopher and man, and but expresses our oft-re- peated experience when it speaks of the abiding impress that Coleridge has made upon all those who aim to understand him. The monograph that follows on “ Books and Libraries ” is packed to the full with common sense and educated sense, and is to be especially commended to American under- graduates as a helpful guide in literary reading. We are told, only as a lover of books can tell us, what we are to find in them and do with them ; that, in the phrase of Wordsworth, they are “ a substantial world ” ; that literature is one thing and printed matter quite another ; that books are useless save as they make thinkers, and that it is only “ the supreme books ” of any literature that should attract and absorb us. In his review of Words- worth he states, in a few terse sentences, the very secret of his limitations when he says, that he was “too insular and parochial,” “great in passages,” possessing more of “the vision, than of the faculty divine.” With equal terseness he gives us the secret of his strength, as he states that he will always “allure the finer natures of every generation,” and have something for them
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in their hours of spiritual need which no other English bard can so well supply. In “ Don Quixote,” the critic becomes the veriest enthusiast as he sits entranced in the view of the exuberant richness of Spanish romance. With all his superb wealth of imagery and diction, he is scarcely able to express what he owes and what the world of letters owes to the gifted Cervantes. Once again, Sancho and Rozinante are as real as life, and the serio-comic is at its climax.
It is in the closing paper of this series, however, that Mr. Lowell is at his best. Home again at Harvard, in the presence of as notable an audience as the living generation of Americans has seen, with two centuries and a half of Harvard’s history behind him, and midway between the old and the new in American education, he speaks as a man of letters to men of letters, as an educator to educators, and under a profound conviction of the gravity of the hour. As he reviews in graphic detail the bitter struggles of the early colo- nists in their efforts to establish Christian institutions ; as he offers fitting trib- ute to those “ simple and godly men ” who, with all their faults and possible narrowness, may well put to the blush the best of their descendants, we feel bound, on the one hand, to reverence their memory as never before, and, on the other hand, we receive a new and deeper stimulus to take up the work that they laid down, and reassert the vital union of Christianity and culture.
Of the literary style and spirit of these collected essays nothing better can be said than this, that Mr. Lowell wrote them. Clear, cogent, and manly in their utterances, they are marked throughout by that peculiar fineness of touch and beauty of form that are as natural to their author as fragrance is to the flower. As we read them, we understand in full what Mr. Stedman means when he terms Mr. Lowell “ our representative man of letters,” and what Mr. Lowell himself means when he speaks “ of that exquisite some- thing called style.” A literary artist in the best sense, when he utters his thought he utters it in its final form, and we marvel as we read. He has done in prose what Tennyson and Swinburne have done in verse, carried the art of expression well-nigh to its possible perfection, and has done, more- over, what neither of the English poets has so well done, evinced the in- separable relation of literary art to what Bacon has quaintly termed “ the mental stuff ” behind it. James Russell Lowell is more than a writer. He is the expresser and interpreter of ideas in the choicest forms of his na- tive tongue. He has been called by his critics and is known among us as a master of English speech and style. Is he not, we may add, in academic phrase, the Head Master in our American School of Literary Art ?
ALEXANDER’S PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY.*
A POSITIVE service may be rendered to philosophy by a clear and satisfactory statement of its problems and the difficulties which beset
* Problems of Philosophy. Archibald Alexander, Professor of Philosophy in Columbia College. New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1886.
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their solution. This service Professor Alexander attempts in his little volume of one hundred and seventy pages. There are three possible methods of treating metaphysical questions, says the author in his intro- duction, the sceptical, the dogmatic, and the critical. The last alone is free from fatal defects and capable of fruitful application. The volume then passes in review a number of the great problems of contemporary phi- losophy, and closes with a suggestive chapter on “ The Doctrine of Cause and Effect.”
We believe that Professor Alexander has succeeded in throwing light on many of the questions discussed. His book is marked, however, by certain minor defects, which it is our ungracious task to point out. The disjunctive method which he employs so extensively is a keen and effective weapon. But its value depends on an exhaustive statement of alternatives. Here, we think, the author fails in several instances. In the discussion of the human will he says : “ If the will is free, it is not conditioned by any ante- cedent motive. If the presence or absence of any motive affects the action of the will, there is no freedom.” As a matter of fact the profoundest ethical thinking of the time has been called forth by a third alternative, namely, the possibility of freedom under the law of motive. Again, in treat- ing of “ God and the Principle of Right,” the author says ; “ If we assert that the holiness of God conditions his will, we must conclude that the essence of holiness is independent on the divine volition, and that God must will according to the principle of holiness, which elevates that prin- ciple to supremacy and dethrones Deity.” But surely the dilemma may be avoided by identifying holiness with the divine nature. Willing according to the principle of holiness is, in that case, willing according to the divine nature, and Deity is not dethroned. These logical slips detract somewhat from the value of the discussions, and impart to the book a slight tinge of dogmatism. Other faults of less importance are the meagreness of some of the discussions, and an occasional tendency to over-subtlety in logical distinctions.
These faults are greatly outweighed, however, by the positive merits of Professor Alexander’s book. Those who have learned to associate philos- ophy with obscurity will be agreeably disappointed by the crystal-like clear- ness of the author’s thought. There is never any room for doubt as to his meaning. The style of the book is a model of simplicity and precision. One derives a positive pleasure from such clear-cut sentences. Every page betrays the well-trained reasoner and the lucid thinker. In his concise statement of problems Professor Alexander has performed a good service to philosophy. His discussions are remarkably free from hack- neyed phrases, and are highly suggestive throughout. We hope that the author will not stop here, but that he will in a future volume devote his trained intelligence to the solution of some of the problems he has so clearly stated.
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RICHARDSON’S AMERICAN LITERATURE,*
Histories of literature have won an honorable place in the great his- toric field. Under the application of a true philosophy of history, they have become valuable adjuncts to historic studies in their broader aspects and relations. In place of dry manuals crammed with mere statistics about authors and their works, we have now a vitally historic treatment of all great literary movements, ancient or modern, which, by a free use of all side-lights from race, climate, political, social, and religious conditions, secures for literature its true recognition as a factor in the problem of civili- zation.
Professor Richardson’s work follows this line of literary investigation. It is evident that, in his opinion, his predecessors, as historians of American literature, have not always employed a true “ perspective.” His introduc- tory chapter is, accordingly, a discussion of what should be the “ perspective of American literature.” “ . . . Does it not remain true,” he says, p. xvii., “that some critics have bestowed an unwarrantable amount of time upon writers of humble rank and small influence, simply because they were early ? ” Designed or undesigned, so far as this criticism has force, it bears directly upon Professor Moses Coit Tyler’s earlier work in the same field. And while commending Mr. Edmund Stedman’s Poets of America, as mark- ing a period in the literary progress of the country, the comment is made on his work that “ he has partly failed to indicate our emergence from colonial- ism and provincialism by his too kindly insertion of many names of little rhymers and poetesses, who are beginning to be covered by the cloud of oblivion or who have never emerged from obscurity.” There is force un- doubtedly in this criticism. As Professor Richardson says very well, “ the history of literature is one thing, bibliography is quite another.”
We may go further, and say, the history of intellectual development in America is one thing, the history of American literature is quite another. The tendency in writing such histories has been too strong for claiming as literature what does not really belong to it. The lines need to be more sharply drawn, and the classification made more exact. The work under review has been undertaken with truer conceptions of what a history of literature should be than have often prevailed. Still, while commending earnestly the limitations which Professor Richardson has put upon his his- toric method, our query would be whether he has narrowed the scope of his own work sufficiently. If, as he says, “ practically our literature is only about eighty years old,” the question will be asked, “ Does it then need two volumes of 500 pages each in order to give its history ? ” And when he in- cludes the name of Samuel Sewall among the authors whom it is necessary for the student to know thoroughly for the purpose of comparative criticism, has he not erred in making the pages of that garrulous old diarist of any
* The Development of American Thought. By Charles F. Richardson. New York; G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1886.
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consequence whatever as a condition precedent to the growth of our literature ?
There is too much of irrelevant matter, or matter, if not wholly irre- levant, too remotely connected with any genesis of our literature. Thus, in his discussion of the race-elements in American literature, the American Indian is introduced. We have specimens of what is called his “intellectual output,” i. e., his poetry or his legends, preceded by a discussion of his char- ^ acter. But Professor Richardson has failed to show how, save as a theme for our novelists or poets, the Indian has had anything whatever to do with the development of American literature. If his claim is true for the Amer- ican Indian, why not for the Southern negro ? He, too, has a place in the pages of our writers, not less conspicuous than that of the Indian. Witness Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mr. Harris’s Uncle Remus. Again, we have, pp. 142-145, a somewhat extended estimate of Edwards’s doctrine of the Will — in a history of philosophy or theology quite in place, but somewhat irrelevant, to say the least, in this history of literature. We must question, also, the ac- curacy of the statement that Edwards’s fame now rests wholly * on the famous treatise (p. 141). Even if Chapter VIII., “ Religion and Philosophy in Later Years,” be desirable as bringing out the connection of religion and philosophy with our literary development, we see no reason for not having made it the closing part of Chapter IV. The unity of discussion is broken, and there is an introduction of names which have certainly as slight a connection with literary movements as any in Professor Tyler’s or Mr. Stedman’s histories. The closing chapter of the volume, “ Border-lands of American Literature,” is, however interesting, only another instance of yielding to the temptation which seems to beset all historians of literature. It is these excursions into border-lands of literature which have diminished the value of their work. The one thing needful for historians of literature is to distinguish sharply between the history of thought in the departments of theology, philosophy, science, and that of literature, properly so-called.
There are also some serious blemishes of the style. Far-fetched and strained comparisons or allusions like the following disfigure the book : Characterizing Nathaniel Ward, for his Simple Cobbler (p. loi) as an “Early New England Sartor Resartus,” a “ pseudo Hans Sachs in prose ” ; Increase Mather’s “ style [as] inferior to that of the author of the Religio Medici ” (p. 129) ; Cotton Mather as “rivalling John Stuart Mill in early acquaintance with many books and subjects,” as “in talk ... a sort of lesser Johnson or Coleridge,” and “in literature a Puritan Burton without his wit” (pp.
1 3 1-2), verges, to say the least, on a serious fault. Sometimes, however, he drops into the cheap and easy method of estimating men by pointing out what they were not. Thus, he says of Franklin (p. 175) that he “ possessed not a spark of the fire which burned in Dante or Savonarola ” ; of Edward Everett (p. 237), that he “ was not a great creator, not an irresistible destroy-
* The italics are ours.
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er ” ; speaking of Mr. Bancroft’s method in writing history, he says Buckle and Carlyle would have written very differently. Of course, and so would Gibbon or Hume or Freeman. To say (p. 359) of “ the literary style in which Emer- son wrote, that it was not Bacon’s, nor Addison’s, nor Macaulay’s, nor Car- lyle’s,” is mere surplusage. We note also a coinage of epithets from proper names which is questionable — “ Edwardsian,” “ Matherian,” “ Landorian,” and a use of words hardly correct ; “ untidy piece of work ” (p. 134), “wt?- describers ” (p. 133), “ conditions ” (p. 8), P.D. Gott (p. 399),
possibly a misprint for Ph. D., “ nor with the creeds or convictions ” (p. 142), “ till toward ” (p. 377). What is a “ chemical trace of Chaucer ” in Holmes and Lowell, after which we are bidden to ask ? Professor Richardson, in his literary estimate of such writers as Irving and Emerson, writers in whom the literary element is chief — shows often a rare and happy insight. In fact, his book is at its best when pure literature and not its adjuncts, is treated. Though his style is popular rather than severely classical, it is vigorous, clear, and never dull. Some will think he has rated Emerson’s poetry too highly in putting it “among the choicest achievements of American litera- ture,” and some will think that he has given scant praise to Mr. Parkman’s histories. But in the main he has shown a discriminating insight and lit- erary judgment in the treatment of our American literary work, so far as it has come under his notice in this volume. We shall wait with some inter- est for the forthcoming volume. We may add that the typographical execu- tion of the work is excellent.
BOOK NOTICES.
THE STANDARD ORATORIOS. A Handbook, by George P. Upton. Chi- cago ; A. C. McClurg & Co. 1887.
More than a few professed oratorios and other works labelled as sacred music are la- mentably misnamed. The sanctities of de- votion which make and enkindle real mas- ter works in religious music are replaced in other instances, which lack this spirituality of impulse, by theatrical effects. The altar, the cathedral, the worshippers, the religious reverence vanish, and the glare of footlights takes their place. In such a work as Ros- sini’s Stabat Mater, for example, there is absolutely nothing “sacred” except its li- bretto— its Latin text and title. The music is secular. It is opera masquerading in church costume. To call this “ sacred ” is injurious, for it leads to a loss of religious appreciation in art. In fact, as Wagner observed in his letter on the music of the future, it was the rise of Italian opera which historically de- stroyed the old religious Italian music.
Mr. Upton has the one thing most need- ful for a critic who is to deal with sacred music. He has appreciative insight into that devotional spirit which is the deep im- pulse interior to all truly religious music, and by which such music must be interpreted if it is to be intelligible. He is not blind- ed by all the blare of Berlioz’s four brass orchestras in the Requiem, but, with full sympathy for Berlioz’s daring invention and surpassing technique, still stands by the se- vere judgment of Hiller against a musician who “believed neither in a God nor in Bach,” and yet ventured to call his music religious. Mr. Upton’s book is inviting in every way, and unerring in its delineation of the cha- racteristic features of the standard oratorios. For those who wish a convenient manual filled with accurate portraitures it will prove very useful. Only one mistake, if it be a mistake, needs to be noted, and that is the occasional classification of masses under ora- torios. Mozart’s Requiem Mass is certainly not an oratorio : if it were, then Mr. Up- ton ought to have included such other masses as those of Cherubini and Beethoven.
AMERICAN COMMONWEALTHS. CALIFORNIA. By Josiah Royce, As- sistant Professor of Philosophy in Har- vard College. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1886.
Professor Royce has given us a very good history of California for the period which it
covers — about 1846-1855. He has given a full account of the conquest, marred by a somewhat controversial excursus as to Fre- mont’s connection with it, and of social con- ditions as they were during the early fever of gold-mining. With the exception of cer- tain odd and persistent blemishes of style, the volume furnishes an excellent record of the early commonwealth of California.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOEL BAR- LOW. By Charles Burr Todd. New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1886.
The comparatively few who have read Bar- low’s Hasty Pudding know that he was a poet who would have made for himself a place in American literature if he had not been willing to cramp his action by assum- ing the ponderous armor of which the Co- lutnbiad is one of the most wearisome ex- amples. He was a many-sided man — not only a poet, but a man of business and a politician ; and this volume is written largely for the purpose of clearing his character as a politician. Unluckily, his character as a man of business is closely dovetailed with his character as a politician. How did he make the fortune with which he returned to the United States? The volume before us ig- nores the question, but it is a vital one. If he made it by the surreptitious favors of the French emperor, there is fair ground for the accusation that he returned to the United States as the emperor’s agent ; if not, not. This volume leaves Barlow’s reputation as hazy as it found it.
TALKS WITH SOCRATES ABOUT LIFE. Translations from the Gorgias and the Republic of Plato. New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1886.
Any one who makes Plato known to the masses of the American people does an immeasurable service in a good cause. Any translation will not do justice to that won- derful implement of the human mind, with its condensed expression and its words fi’’l of original power — the Greek language ; but if any style could convey the racy talk of Socrates or the naive myths and eloquent sentences of Plato, it is the simple, pure, idiomatic, quaint Saxon of the translator of this little volume. The anonymous author — a lady well known throughout the country for her charities and her culture — has already published two little books, cheaply and beautifully issued by the Scribners, which
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contained the defence and death of Socrates (The Apology and Crito), his conversations with Protagoras (entitled A Day in Athens). These have had a wide circulation, espe- cially in the rural districts.
The present volume surpasses even the others in ease and flexibility of style and Sax- on vigor. We have carefully compared the Greek with this and Jowett’s translation, and find this often racier and easier, and always equally correct.
The book will be useful to the young. The Gorgias is much more than a treatise on rhetoric, though even on that trite theme it has invaluable lessons for our future lawyers and politicians. It touches on the highest subjects which can interest the human mind. Its great question is, ttcSS fiioorsoy, “ What is the best way of life?”
Plato’s or Socrates’ argument in these discussions rests on the highest inference or intuition in moral science known to man : namely, that the greatest conceivable happi- ness and health of the human soul arise from benevolence and truth and justice and purity ; and, therefore, that the Maker and Source of this soul must be of like na- ture. Therefore, if these be axioms, suc- cess won by wrong is not success, but fail- ure. Wickedness, however high or gilded or triumphant, is always and everywhere a disease and wound and misfortune. And upon these principles are built, by Socrates, three theses of transcendent importance :
(i) That it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. (2) That it is better for the wrong-doer to be punished than to escape punishment. (3) That it is better always to be than to seem, and that rhetoric and all arts should be used only for truth, and not falsehood.
But, as earthly life does not always prove these principles, the Divine Prototype has •constituted a final assize where truth alone appears, and the soul is judged as it really is, and goes to that life which is harmonious to its nature here. There sin appears in its true light, as a disease and injury, and works out its natural effects. Such a philosophy is harmonious with the Christian system.
THE MORALS OF CHRIST. By Aus- tin Bierbower. Colegrove Book Co. Chicago: 1885.
It is refreshing to come across a volume showing so little of the art of the profes- sional bookmaker, but written in such sim- ple, nervous, and straightforward English as Bierbower’s Morals of Christ. Christ’s moral teachings are considered from a threefold standpoint, as a departure from the Mosaic morality, the morality of the Pharisees and the Graeco-Roman morality. Christ’s morality departs from that of the Old Testament in substituting for the neg- ative restraints of an external law, the free.
positive and spontaneous morality which springs from an internal principle. It insists on essentials, such as justice, truth, kindness and love against the ceremonial requirements of the Pharisees, and it aims to substitute a humane, non-resistant, cos- mopolitan, and unselfish ideal for the ag- gressive selfishness of the Greeks and Romans. The morality of Christ was for the poor and the rich, for the many and the few, for the weak and humble, the proud and strong. The author em- ploys the antithetic method throughout his book; many of his contrasts are vivid and striking. He is somewhat disposed to mag- nify differences and overlook points of agree- ment, but he has given, on the whole, a fair outline of Christian morality, which is brought into more distinct relief by the back- ground of current morality, in relation to which Christ’s teachings were so novel and revolutionary.
KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. Su- preme Head. An historical sketch, with an introduction and notes. By Frede- rick George Lee, D.D. Bums & Oates, London. Catholic Publication Society, N. Y. : 1886.
One who did not know something of the personal history and present status of Dr. Lee, might be puzzled to find a book written by a clergyman of the Church of England, published by a Roman Catholic House in London and New York, and dedicated to the memory of Cardinal Fisher.
The fact is. Dr. Lee is a sort of ecclesias- tical enthusiast, and has a hobby of his own about “ Corporate Reunion,” a plan by which he hopes to join together in one — by secret ordination — the Church of England and the Church of Rome. To accomplish this, his darling purpose, he is ready and willing to give up all that was gained by the Reformation. He is without doubt a Roman Catholic in heart and in fact, while with easy conscience, and without scruple, he holds his living in the Church of England.
In the light of such facts it is easy to understand his motive in writing this history of Edward VI.
All the changes wrought in the Liturgy or government of the Church were grave blunders, that should be speedily reformed backward. The supremacy of the Bishop of Rome over all Christendom must be acknowl- edged by all as a Catholic dogma. The book is written and published in the interest of such views, and facts are skilfully used, perverted sometimes, to strengthen his po- sition and his argument.
Every great social or moral revolution has its attendant evils, though its results may be wholly good. The reign of Edward VI. was a period of intellectual and spiritual revolt.
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BOOK NOTICES.
And he would be an unwise man who would stand sponsor for everything that was said and done in the heats of controversy or pas- sion. Dr. Lee has seized upon some of the worst features of the time, and labelled it history. Only the ignorant and unlearned can be deceived by it.
SOME PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF CARLYLE. By Andrew James Symington. Alex. Gardner, Paisley, and 12 Paternoster Row, London. 1886. i2mo.
A few days ago the writer heard a lady, who had been reading the Life of Longfel- low, remark that he was not the kind of a man whom she most admired — there was too much sweetness, and not enough spice in him. Fortunately the world is large enough to contain people of all possible tastes, and this lady is representative of a class who are born to be admirers of men like Carlyle. Probably three-fourths of his friends derived three-fourths of their pleasure, when with
him, from that very element of spice in his conversation, which, since his death, has been criticised as if it were merely spite. A wholly-sweet Carlyle would not have been Carlyle, nor have attracted to his side those who became his friends. They liked him for what he was. To show just what he was, and how he talked, by giving extracts from his conversations, is the chief object of Mr. A. J. Symington’s book entitled, Some Personal Reminiscences of Carlyle, and as such it forms an interesting addition to the Carlyle literature. The reader may be pleased to hear what Mr. Symington, who knew both Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, has to say of the relations between them. "If," he says, of Mrs. Carlyle, “her husband, from dyspepsia, sleeplessness, or absorption in study, was sometimes thought by outsiders to be difficult to live with, there was no if in her case ; she was difficult to live with, and manifestly, with a considerable difference for the worse. Carlyle, first to last, was ever patient and kind to her . . . whenever
he found out what her wishes really were ; for with heart and hand he never ceased loyally to love, honor, and admire her.”
BOOKS RECEIVED,
Of which there may be critical notice hereafter.
Adams. — The Emancipation of Massachusetts, pp. 382. Boston, 1887 ; Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
Allison AND Penrose. — The City Government 0/ Philadelphia, pp. 72. Baltimore, 1887: Johns Hop- kins University.
Bigg. — The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, pp. xxvii., 304. Bampton Lectures, 1886. New York, z886 : Macmillan & Co.
Bugbee. — The City Government of Boston, pp. 60. Baltimore, 1887 ; Johns Hopkins University.
Channing. — Passages from the Unpublished Manuscripts of William Ellery Channing, pp. no. Bos- ton, 1887 : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
Clark.— The Philosophy of Wealth, pp. xii., 235. Boston, 1886 ; Ginn & Co.
Egleston. — The Land System of the New England Colonies, 66. Baltimore, 1886: Johns Hopkins University.
Fischer. — Descartes and His School, pp. xvi., 589. Translated by J. P. Gordy and edited by Noah Por- ter. New York, 1887 : Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Fullerton. — The Conception of the Infinite, pp. 131. Philadelphia, 1887 : J. B. Lippincott Co.
Haweis. — The Story of the Four, pp. xitiv., 203. New York, 1886 : T. Y. Crowell & Co.
The Picture of Jesus, pp. xvi., 271. New Yorfc, 1886 : T. Y. Crowell & Co.
Jewett. — The Normans, pp. xv., 373. New York, 1887 : G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
McCosh. — Realistic Philosophy. Vols. I. and II., pp. 252 and 325. New York, 1887 : Charles Scribner’s Sons.
MacCulloch. — From Dawn to Dusk, pp. 134. Philadelphia, r887 : J. B. Lippincott Co.
Mommsen. — Provinces of the Roman Empire. Vols. I. and II., pp. xiv., 397 and 396, with eight maps by Kiepert. Translated by William P. Dickson. New York, 1887 : Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Newton. — Social Studies, pp. 379. New York, 1887 : G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Rylance. — Orthodoxy and the Heathen, pp. 12. New York, 1887 ; James Pott & Co.
Saltus. — The Anatomy of Negation, pp. 226. New York, 1886 : Scribner & Welford.
Taylor. — The Parables of Our Saviour, pp. 445. New York, 1887 : A. C. Armstrong & Son.
Whedon. — Essays, Reviews and Discourses, pp. 352. New York, 1887 : Phillips & Hunt.
Statements, Theological and Critical, pp. 400. New York, 1887 ; Phillips & Hunt.