Miscellaneous essays and addresses

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MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

MISCELLANEOUS

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ESSAYS Ato ADDRESSES

BY

HENRY STDGWICK

3Lontiou
M ACM ILL AN AXD CO., Limited

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1904

All rights reso-vea

PREFATORY NOTE'

Henry Sidgwick had long intended to collect together
essays and addresses written by him at different times ;
and some essays on ethical subjects he had published
under the title of Practical Ethics in the " Ethical Library "
series (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.) in 1898. The
volume now published contains miscellaneous essays on
other subjects. Several of them were specified by the
author during the last few weeks of his life as suitable for
such a collection, though with some hesitation in one or
two cases. After due consideration, all the papers that he
named have been included ; and we have added a few
others, which seemed likely to be of interest to the
general reader. We have not included any of the papers
published in Mind ; some of them will appear more appro-
priately along with some hitherto unpublished philosophical
lectures in a volume which is being edited by Professor
James Ward.

It will be seen that the papers fall mostly into three
divisions, according as they deal with literature, economics
and sociology, or education ; and it seemed best to arrange
them, within the limits of each division, in chronological
order. The only exceptions are the essay on Bentham
and Benthamism, which we have placed between the

v

vi ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

literary and economic groups, and the essay on Alexis de
Tocqueville, M-hich has been printed at the end of the
volume as a supplement. This paper was written when
the author was twenty-three, and, not being among those
specitied by him, could hardly find a place among the
maturer essays which compose the rest of the book ; but it
seemed of sufdcient interest not to be omitted altogether.

With the exception of the two papers on Shakespeare,
all those in the volume have been published before — most
of them in Eeviews and Magazines, The Scope and Method of
Economic Science and The Pursuit of Culture as an Ideal
separately, and The Theory of a Classical Education in a
volume of essays. Thanks are due to Publishers and
Editors for their kind consent to republication.

ELEANOE MILDEED SIDGWICK.
AETHUE SIDGWICK.

CONTENTS

PA'IF

1. EccE Hojio {IVestminster lieview, July 1866) . . 1

2. The Prophet op Culture {Macmillan'.i Magazine, August

1867) . . . . . " . .40

3. The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh

Clough {Westminster Review, October 1869) . . 59

4. Shakespeare's Methods, with SPECiAii reference to

Julius C^sar and Coriolanus . . .91

5. Shakespeare and the Romantic Drama, with special

REFERENCE TO MaCBETJ{ . . . .120

6. Bentham and Benthamism in Politics and Ethics

(Fortnightly Revieio, May 1877) . . .135

7. The Scope and Method of Economic Science. An

Address given as President of the Economic Science and
Statistics Section of the British Association in 1885 . 170

8. Economic Socialism (C^on^emjJorari/iJei-ieii;, November 1886) 200

9. Political Prophecy and Sociology {Natvmal Review,

December 1894) . . . . .216

10. The Economic Lessons of Socialism {Economic Journal,

September 1895) ..... 235

11. The Relation of Ethics to Sociology {International

Joimial of Ethics, Octoher 1899) . . .249

12. The Theory of Classical Education. (From Essays on

a Liberal Education, edited by F. W. Farrar. Mac-
millan and Co., 1867) . .' . . . 270

13. Idle Fellowships {Contemporary Review, April 1876) . 320

14. A Lecture against Lecturing {New Review, May 1890) . 340

15. The Pursuit of Culture as an Ideal. A Lecture

delivered to the students of the University College of
Wales, Aberystwith, in October 1897 . . . 352

SUPPLEMENT

Alexis de Tocqueville {Macmillan's Magazine, November 1861) 361

vii

EREATA

Page 64, line 11 from foot, for " hut the term was somewhat indefinite
read "but the term is somewhat indefinite."

For footnote to page 168, end of first paragraph, see page 374.

ECCE HOMO^

( Westmirister Review, July 1866)

Few persons who have read through Ecce Homo will be pre-
pared to deny, whatever faults they may find with its methods
and conclusions, that it possesses very remarkable positive
merits. As the present article will unavoidably be made
up chiefly of censure and criticism, we wish at the outset
to give most warm and sincere praise to the originality of
the conception, the vigour of its execution, the sympathetic
intensity with which the writer has grasped the chief points
in the character and work of Jesus, the flowing and fervid
eloquence with which he has impressed them on his readers.
His conceptions are, of course, partly old, partly new ;
whatever we may think of the latter element, we willingly
admit that he has made us feel the old as if it were new.
It requires genius to produce this effect : and genius of a
certain kind our author possesses. His book will probably
have a most beneficial operation, especially among the
persons whose impression will be that the author has
preached them a series of good sermons, and meanwhile
contrived somehow to set Christianity upon a basis im-
pregnable to the assaults of modern criticism and science.

^ Ecce Homo : a Sin-vei/ of the Life and Works of Jesus Christ. 8vo. 4th
edition. London : Macniillan. 1866.

[This book, now known to he by J. R. Seeley, was published anonymously, as
was this article on it ; but Sidgwiek and Seeley were friends, and by the time the
review was published each was aware of what the other had written, and they
had already been in correspondence about the book. — Ed.]

I B

ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES

At the same time the author might fairly complain if we
treated his book as belonging to the class which, as a literary
cynic has said, tend to edification rather than instruction.
It claims to be much more : it is clearly the result of a
good deal of general reading and reflection ; and eminent and
cultivated persons have spoken of it as if it were likely to
have a permanent influence on the thought of students. As
we have a strong conviction that it is not calculated to pro-
duce this effect, it seems desirable that we should support this
conviction by a close examination of its principal features.

The first thing that will surprise a student who has
taken up the book is the total absence of any introductory
discussion of the evidence on which the historical portion
of the book is intended to be based. Considering that we
derive our knowledge of the facts from a limited number of
documents, handed down to us from an obscure period, and
containing matter which in any other history we should
regard as legendary : considering that in consequence these
documents have been subjected for many years to an
elaborate, minute, and searching investigation : that hun-
dreds of scholars have spent their lives in canvassing such
questions as the date of their composition, their authorship,
the conscious objects or unconscious tendency of each author,
his means of information, and his fidelity to fact, the prob-
ability of their being compiled or translated from previous
works in whole or part, or of their having undergone
revisions since the original publication, the contradictions
elicited by careful examination of each or close comparison
of them together, the methods of reconciling these contra-
dictions or deciding between conflicting evidence, and many
other similar points, — it might seem natural that the author
of such a work as this should carefully explain to his readers
his plan and principles for settling or avoiding these im-
portant preliminary questions. But by a bizarre arrange-
ment of his matter, the author defers all discussion of this
subject till he has reached his fifth chapter, entitled " Christ's
Credentials." In this chapter he gives us, still fragmentarily
and incidentally, his notions of historical criticism ; and as

ECCE HOMO

we get nothing further from liim on this important topic,
it is desirable to examine the chapter somewluit closely.

He begins by saying, that, in his previous chapters, he
"has not entered into controvertible matter": the in-
accuracy of this statement, even as tested by his own
definition of " controvertible matter," we pass by for the
present, being eager to come to that definition. " We have
not," he continues, " rested upon single passages, nor drawn
upon the fourth gospel." Uncontrovertible matter, there-
fore, seems to be whatever the synoptic gospels have in
common. If this were all that had been evolved, after the
trouble spent in examining the relation between the three
first gospels, it would be a somewhat meagre and jejune
result ; but let that pass. It is clear that, whatever else
the synoptic gospels have in common, they all contain a
number of miraculous stories. We hasten, therefore, to see
what he will say of miracles ; and what he does say of
them is so extraordinary, that, for fear of misrepresenting
him, we must quote the whole passage, referring at the
same time to page 10, where similar views are indicated.

It will be thought by some that in asserting miracles to
have been actually wrought by Christ we go beyond what the
evidence, perhaps beyond what any possible evidence, is able to
sustain. Waiving then for the present the question whether
miracles were actually Avrought, wo may state a fact which is
fully capable of being established by ordinary evidence, and
which is actually established by evidence as ample as any
historical fact whatevei- — the fact, namely, that Christ professed
to work miracles. We may go further, and assert with con-
fidence that Christ was Ijelieved by his followers really to Avork
miracles, and that it was mainly on this account that they con-
ceded to him the pre-eminent dignit}^ and authority which he
claimed. The accounts we have of these miracles may 1)6
exaggerated ; it is possible that in some special cases stoincs
have been related which have no foundation whatever ; but, on
the whole, miracles play so important a part in Christ's scheme
that any theory which would represent them as due entirely to
the imagination of his followers or of a later age destroys the
credibility of the documents not partially but wholly, and leaves
Christ a personage as mythical as Hercules. Now the present

ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

treatise aims to show that the Christ of the Gospels is not
mythical, by showing that the character those biographies
portray is in all its large features strikingly consistent, and at
the same time so peculiar as to be altogether beyond the reach
of invention both by individual genius and still more by what
is called the ' consciousness of an age.' Now if the character
depicted in the Gospels is in the main real and historical, they
must be generally trustworthy, and, if so, the responsibility
of miracles is fixed on Christ. In this case the reality of the
miracles themselves depends in a great degree on the opinion
we form of Christ's veracity, and this opinion must arise gradually
from the careful examination of his whole life. For our present
purpose, Avhich is to investigate the plan which Christ formed
and the way in which he executed it, it matters nothing whether
the miracles were real or imaginary ; in either case, being be-
lieved to be real, they had the same effect. Provisionally,
therefore, we may speak of them as real.

Now every line of this seems to us to show ignorance
or misapprehension of the question at issue, as at present
understood by the most intelligent advocates on either side
of the controversy. He states the dilemma as it was stated
in the eighteenth century, but as we never expected to see
it stated again, except in the official rhetoric of the less
educated clergy, " Christ professed to work miracles ;
therefore, either he did work them, and was possessed of
supernatural power, or he did not work them and was
unveracious." Now German criticism for many years past
has always started with the negation of both alternatives,
and with the two assumptions which our author declares
to be irreconcilable. The stvident who treats the gospel
narratives historically — in using the word, we intend no
jjetitio principii, but simply to express in a word, '' accord-
ing to the method applied everywhere else in history " —
does not regard the reality of miracles as a question of
more or less evidence, to be decided by presumptions with
regard to the veracity of witnesses. If by miracle is meant
a violation, or — if the word be invidious — transcendence
of the laws of nature, or — if the phrase be ambiguous —
the uniformities of our physical experience, he rejects the

ECCE HOMO

notion absolutely. If he admits one miracle, he is no
longer competent, as liistorian, to say how many more he
will admit, and whether any are to be repudiated ; the
theologian has to decide from principles peculiar to himself
how much fictitious matter an inspired writer may be
allowed to insert, and how much interference is consistent
with the Divine wisdom. On the other hand, it is regarded
as equally certain — though the certainty is of a different
kiud — tliat Jesus was not a wilful deceiver.^ The whole
constructive work of the critical school is based on the
attempt to show that what our author assumes to be
impossible may be done, that we can distinguish between
history and legend in the biography of Jesus, without
supposing him to have " professed to work miracles," unless
we call phenomena not contrary to the analogy of experience
by that name. Such are the cures of the so-called demoniacs
and of persons afflicted with certain other diseases — those,
namely, in which the influence of the nervous system may
be believed to be occasionally very great. No one thinks
of denying that, as far as these go, Jesus did and was
believed to do what appeared to him and to others " mighty
works." But it is a very different tiling to assume that he
was believed by himself and others to possess " boundless
supernatural power." This theory and all that the author
has based upon it "' must be regarded as decidedly contro-
vertible matter. To speak of miracles " provisionally as
real " is the one thing that no one will do. The question
of their reality stands at the threshold of the subject, and
can by no device be conjured away.

We see then that the critical school will hardly admit
that all that the synoptic gospels have in common may be
relied upon as certain. It will be fairly urged that the
rejection of miracles proper — as we may call what is in-
explicable in accordance with the known laws of experience

^ The partial acquiescence in deception, attributeil to him by M. Renau, has
found, we believe, no more favour in Germany than in England.

"^ Among other statements we are told that tlie Pharisees conceived Jesus to
be capable of boundless mischief. Tlie truth is, they conceived him to be a
s\iccessful exorcist : no unique phenomenon, as is proved by Matt. xii. 24-27, to
which our author refers. Cf. also Acts xix. 13-16.

ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

— involves such destructive effects, that we require certain
methods of reconstruction before we can deal with the
documents at all. The phenomena the student has now
before him are not miracles but the records of miracles,
legends, myths, semi-legends, semi-myths, or whatever else
he may call them. He has to account for them ; and
whether he treats them ration alls tically, or semi-rationalisti-
cally, or on the principle of Mythus, or on the principle of
" Tendenz," or by some process intermediary between, or
compounded of these, whatever method he uses will
necessarily affect his view of the rest of the gospel narra-
tives. He must treat these latter as a whole : he cannot
explain the composition of a part of them without, at the
same time, determining the degree of authenticity possessed
by the rest. It is very possible that he may come to the
conclusion that certain other statements " common to the
synoptic gospels" are not to be relied on. Thus, again,
the question of miracles stands at the threshold of the
subject in a way that seems never to have occurred to our
author. It is possible that he may have good reasons for
relying on the particular portions of the narrative which he
has quoted and referred to ; but if he writes for persons who
" provisionally " reject miracles — and he seems to do so —
he is bound to give these reasons. This self-confident con-
struction, this arbitrary settlement, without vouchsafing an
argument, of questions that have been long and elaborately
discussed, would have been put forth in Germany by no
man of equal ability with our author, not even by Ewald.
The first chapter will afford an excellent illustration of
what we have been saying. In it we have an account of
the relation between Jesus and John the Baptist, in which
the author clearly thinks that he has exercised a sober
criticism of his authorities, and that his results are scarcely
" controvertible." Indeed, he afterwards goes so far as
to suggest an explanation of the marvels recorded as
following the baptism, which is conceived after the crass
rationalism of the school of Paulus. The account is as
follows : —

ECCE HOMO

The Baptist addressed all Avho came to him in the same stern
tone of authority. Young and old gathered round him, and
among them must have been many whom he had known in
earlier life, and some to whom he had been taught to look up
with humility and respect. Uut in his capacity of prophet he
made no distinction. All alike he exhorted to repentance ; all
alike he found courage to baptize. In a single case, however,
his confidence failed him. There appeared among the candi-
dates a young man of nearly his own age, who was related to
his family. We must suppose that he had had personal inter-
course with Christ before ; for though one of our authorities
represents John as saying that he knew him not except by the
supernatural sign that pointed him out at his baptism, yet we
must interpret this as meaning only that he did not before
know him for his successor. For it appears that before the
appearance of the sign John had addressed Christ with ex-
pressions of reverence, and had declared himself unfit to baptize
him. After this meeting we are told that on several occasions
he pointed out Christ as the hope of the nation, as destined to
develop the work he himself had begun into something far more '
memoral^le, and as so greatly superior to himself, that, to repeat
his emphatic words, he was not worthy to untie his shoe.

He proceeds to say that John described the " character " of
Jesus by calling him the Lamb of God. This last statement,
as it rests on an unusual interpretation of a passage in the
fourth gospel, even our author can hardly regard as more
than a plausible conjecture. As regards the passage we
have quoted, the relationship between Jesus and John rests
on the authority of the third gospel only ; John's declaration
of his unfitness, etc., rests on the authority of the first gospel
only — the several occasions are to be inferred from none of
the synoptics ; the " emphatic words," though no doubt
applied by the early Christians to Jesus, do not appear
to have been said of him personally, but rather of the
unknown Messiah, whose forerunner John conceived him-
self to be. All that we learn from the synoptics of the
subsequent relations of Jesus and John implies anything
rather than a recognition of the former by the latter as
Messiah.

This is a sample of the author's carelessness even in

ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES

applying his own principles. At the same time he entirely
ignores the view held, not merely by Strauss and the mythi-
cists, but by scholars who differ as widely from this school as
Schenkel does, viz. that Jesus was never recognised by
John as Messiah. The arguments that support these views
are these. The supernatural circumstances recorded as
attending the baptism show that fact has here been at least
to some extent modified by legend. What is afterwards
told us of John, that he continued at the head of a school
distinct from that of Jesus, and in certain points strikingly
opposed to it, that towards the end of his life, as though
struck for the first time with the possibility of Jesus being
the expected Messiah, he sent to inquire into his claims,
that he was not convinced of their validity (for if he had
been we should have heard of it, nor would Jesus have
spoken of him as less than the least in the kingdom of
heaven), — all seems irreconcilable with the protestations
and revelations at the baptism, even when the supernatural
element in these has been carefully extracted. Again,
tradition had a peculiar incentive to colour the facts of this
baptism. It was difficult to explain why Jesus should have
undergone this baptism of repentance at all, in accordance
with the traditional view of his person and attributes.
Therefore, it is urged, in a later development of the tradi-
tion, which has found its way into one only of the synoptic
gospels, John is represented as feeling and expressing the
difficulty, and Jesus as removing it.-^ In the fourth gospel
the difficulty seems no longer felt, while the development of
tradition has gone much further. This theory is naturally
ignored by the orthodox, but it ought to have been at least
noticed by a writer who treats his authorities with the
freedom of our author.

In the next chapter, on the Temptation, we find the
following critical principle enunciated : —

^ If this suspicion is once admitted, the reply of Jesus will be seen to contain
a very inadequate answer to the diflBculty. The baptism had a particular
symbolic meaning ; it implied past sin. present repentance, and preparation for
the expecte<l Messiah : it could hardly come under the head of duties incumbent
upon the Messiah as well as all other men [iracav diKaioavv-qv).

ECCE HOMO

The account of the temptation, from whatever source derived,
has a very striking internal consistency, a certain inimitable
probability of improbal>ility, if the expression may be allowed.
That popular imagination which gives Ijirth to rumours and then
believes them, is not generally capable of great or sublime or
well-sustained efforts.

Wunderthutige Bilder sind mei.st nur schleclile Gemalde.

The popular imagination is fertile and tenacious, but not very
powerful or profound. Christ in the wilderness was a subject
upon wliicli the imagination would very readily work, but at the
same time far too great a sul)ject for it to Avork upon success-
fully ; we should expect strange stories to be told of his adven-
tures in such a solitude, but we should also expect the stories to
be very childish.

It is curious that the writer should not see that if tliis
principle can determine anything, it can decide everything.
The miraculous stories of the New Testament, with hardly
an exception, and the majority of the miraculous stories of
the Old Testament, whatever else they are, are certainly not
" childish." What, for instance, can be more " sublime and
well-sustained " than that most incredible of Hebrew
legends — the account of the ascent of Elijah ? What
imagination could be more " powerful and profound " than
that which produced the story of the transfiguration ? The
tales of the apocryphal gospels are for the most part childish,
and this has been fairly urged on the orthodox side as an
argument for plenary inspiration. But if we reject this
subjective and sesthetic criterion as decisive of the whole
question, we cannot trust it in any particular case, nor
profess to tell legend from fact by mere literary discrimi-
nation. We pass by, then, our author's theory of the
Temptation as one among many plausible conjectures, with
this objectionable peculiarity, that it is based on the sup-
posed consciousness by Jesus of (apparently unbounded)
supernatural powers. If this consciousness be supposed
veracious, it must be left to the theologian to realise and
explain ; if a delusion, it is one which the historian will
find uo sufficient ground for attributing to Jesus.

10 £SSAVS AND ADDRESSES I

The rest of the first part of the book is taken up with
an account of the external side of Jesus' work : the position
he took up, as distinguished from tlie doctrine he preached.
We find throughout the same apparent ignorance of the
views of the most eminent critics, the same careless or
arbitrary application of the writer's own principles. Along
with these we find much clear and vivid insight into human
nature and the larger facts of classical and Hebrew history —
much artistic grouping and felicitous expression of familiar
truths, and some that are less familiar. But as a historical
essay we must rank the result very low, as it contains none
of the distinctions and limitations, none of the nuances of
colouring, so important to a historical picture, which long-
continued, free, and careful study of the gospels has gradually
brought out. His fundamental notion is that Christ repre-
sented himself as king ; that he " laid claim to the royal
title ;" that he " calls himself habitually king ;" and that in
this capacity he proceeded to form a society, pronounce
judgments, issue laws. He never even alludes to the fact,
which strikes the least intelligent reader of the gospels, that
Jesus, while he continually proclaimed " the kingdom of
Heaven," never once applied to himself the title of king.
Even the view of traditional orthodoxy is more faithful to
the facts, in this respect, than our author's. Every popular
preacher tells us that Jesus, from his humility, chose for
himself the title of " Son of Man." It has been the subject
of much controversy, and must be regarded as still un-
decided, what associations precisely w^ould be called up by
this phrase in the minds of the contemporaries of Jesus —
whether those which it would derive from Ezekiel and
other passages of the Old Testament, or those which the
authors of Daniel and the Book of Enoch attach to it. But
that it would not be generally understood as equivalent to
Messiah seems clear, among many passages, from Matt. xvi.
13-17. Here Jesus asks, "Whom do men say that I, the
Son of Man, am?" and regards as a divine revelation
Peter's reply, " Thou art the Christ." To one who takes
the synoptic gospels by themselves, nothing can seem plainer

ECCE HOMO II

than that Jesus did not declare himself to his disciples as
Messiah, at any rate till some time after his appearance as a
preacher, and that he took pains to prevent a belief in his
Messiahship from spreading among the people. He is repre-
sented as rebuking the demons who did homage to him.
From some passages we should infer that he tried to con-
ceal his healing powers, and imposed, with this object, strict
silence upon those whom he cured. ^ In proclaiming, there-
fore, the kingdom of God, he would seem by no means to
proclaim himself as king ; but simply to take up and echo,
in a different strain, the teaching of John. All the passages
to which our author refers, in support of the opposite theory,
he colours more or less wrongly. Jesus claims " power on
earth to forgive sins ;" but he does so expressly as " Son of
Man." Now " Son of Man " can only be made to mean
" king " indirectly, as meaning Messiah, and this meaning, as
we have seen, did not clearly attach to the phrase. Again,
our author tells us that Jesus was asked whether tribute-
money ought to be paid, as a " way of sifting his monarchical
claims." The more usual — and surely more probable —
explanation is that the question was put to him not as king
but as liabbi. It was selected by his adversaries to bring
him into a disagreeable dilemma, from the known difficulty
of reconciling religious duty (as it was conceived) with
political expediency. Again, " Christ continued to speak
of himself as king with such consistency and clearness that
those who were nearest his person . . . quarrelled for places
and dignities under him." It would be truer to say that he
gradually led — without any distinct claim on his own part —
his disciples to regard him as Messiah, which in their minds
meant — inter alia — king. If he had ever spoken of himself
as Messiah or king the chroniclers would certainly have told
us. No doubt at the close of his career, on his last entry
into Jerusalem, " he pointedly refused " to silence " those who
hailed him as Son of David." But it seems hasty to infer
from this that " he clung firmly to the title of king, and
attached great importance to it." Our author states that

^ Sometimes with singiilar vehemence. Cf. Mark i. 43, efM^pifj-rjadfievoi.

12 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES i

" the Jews procured his execution because . . . they could
not forgive him for claiming royalty and at the same time
rejecting the use of physical force . . . They did not object
to the king, they did not object to the philosopher ; but they
objected to the king in the garb of a philosopher." Here
the writer is partly indulging a vigorous imagination, partly
relying on the fourth gospel alone. According to the
synoptics, it was not " the Jews " generally who procured
his execution, but their religious leaders ; ^ and they did so
not primarily because he was king or philosopher, but
because he was a religious innovator, who threatened to pull
down the temple. No doubt the mob deserted and mocked
their fallen favourite ; but this desertion was not the cause,
but the effect, of his apparent fall. If he could not save
himself, and come down from the cross, he was no king for
them. It is certainly possible to hold very various opinions
with respect to the gradual progress or unveiling of the
claims of Jesus, from his first announcement of the kingdom
of heaven to the crv Xeyet? with which he replies to Pilate —
a phrase which, though not proclamatory, is not evasive.
There is no doubt that he ultimately claimed, and was
understood to claim, to be Messiah ; but when, how far,
how clearly, did he make the claim ? The question has
many difficulties, and every one who forms a definite theory
must depend much on conjecture. But as our author does
not even recognise that there is this gradual progress or un-
veiling, it would take us too far from his book to discuss the
question any further.

It follows that we cannot attach much value to his
remarks on what he calls " Christ's Eoyalty." So long as
Jesus was not looked upon as king, but simply as holding
the keys of the kingdom of heaven, he would be to his
disciples more what John was, — a teacher laying down
precepts, rather than a king issuing ordinances. The people
would regard him as a leader of a school or sect, differing
from the Pharisees, Sadducees, or Essenes, as each of these

^ Their mortal hostility is represented as being of ancient date. Cf.
Mark iii. 6.

ECCE HOMO 13

sects differed from the other ; but like them all, basing itself
on the law of Moses, and superadding its peculiar tenets.
It is true that his hearers contrasted his bold free handling
of morality with the anxious servility of the learned com-
mentators. But it does not therefore follow that they
regarded liim as a rival of Moses or representative of
Jehovah. Here again, in endeavouring to form an exact
idea of the relations of the teaching of Jesus to the written
or even to the oral law, we come upon difficulties to whicli
our author scarcely alludes, and which he does not in the
least help us to solve. These relations appear either pro-
gressive or inconsistent, as far as the indications in the
synoptic gospels can be trusted. At one time Jesus avers
that he is not come to destroy the law, that one jot or tittle
shall in no wise pass from it, that no one shall break one
of these least commandments without heavy penalties ; at
another time he compares the existing institutions, apparently,
to old wine-skins and old raiment, and asserts that " the
Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath." And in his remarks
on what " was said by them of old time," though he for the
most part supplements the Mosaic law, he also distinctly
condemns maxims that are to be found in it (so Matt. v.
38, 43, and reff.). Again, he tells his disciples to observe
and do whatsoever the Scribes and Pharisees bid them
observe, even, it would seem, to tithing mint and anise and
cummin, for they, the Scribes and Pharisees (not Jesus him-
self, observe), sit in Moses' seat. Elsewhere he says that
they make the word of God of none effect by their tradi-
tions, and attacks particular traditions with indignant
vehemence : he also says that they bind upon men burdens
grievous to be borne. These apparent contradictions are
variously explained : sometimes by subtle interpretations of
particular passages, sometimes by referring conflicting pre-
cepts to different periods of Jesus' career, sometimes by
assuming that one or other of our present gospels has been
the work of at least two hands (for instance, the combina-
tion of a " universalist " and a " particularist " in Matthew's
gospel is a theory held by some Germans). We do not

14 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES i

object to our author that he disagrees with any or all of the
existing views on the subject, but that he does not seem
aware that it is necessary for him to have a view at all.
So of the limits to which Christ confined his preaching : at
one time he sends his disciples to the lost sheep of the house
of Israel, and forbids them to go among the Samaritans ; he
can hardly be brought to heal a Syrophcenician, and com-
pares the race to dogs ; elsewhere he indicates in parables,
and once expressly declares, that the kingdom will be taken
from the Jews and given to another nation. These contrasts
admit of a similar variety of explanation: the author of
Ecce Homo does not notice them. The consequence of all
this is that the many good things he has to say about
Christ's legislation are useless to the accurate reader in their
present form, because the framework in which they are
placed is so carelessly and clumsily constructed out of un-
supported assumptions. When we find, for example, a
writer stating that Jesus regarded baptism as an indispens-
able rite of initiation into his kingdom, supporting his state-
ments on an external and political interpretation of the
interview with Xicodemus, quite alien to the spiritualism of
the fourth gospel, and getting over the awkward fact that
Jesus is never represented in the synoptic gospels as baptiz-
ing, by means of the assumption that he regards John's
baptism as sufficient, — we have an uneasy feeling that even
what we admire in him may prove unsound when closely
tested. We are obliged to take to pieces his vigorous
rhetoric and rearrange it for ourselves, which is a great
drawback to the thorough enjoyment of it.

The author says, in his preface, that he has reconsidered
the whole subject from the beginning, traced the biography
of Jesus from point to point, and accepted " those con-
clusions about him . . . which the facts themselves, critically
weighed, appear to warrant." We willingly believe him
quite sincere in this assertion, but we could not select more
appropriate words to describe what, in our opinion, he has
omitted to do. At least we find it hard to understand how
a man who has gone through tliis process should then write

ECCE HOMO 15

— " no important change took place in Christ's mode of
thinking, speaking, or acting ; at least the evidence before
us does not enable us to trace any such change," without
supporting this opinion by arguments. There is no more
fruitful source of error in history than the determination to
find the tree in the seed, and to attribute to the originators
of important social changes detailed foresight as to the shape
those changes were to assume. To this vulgar prejudice
our author seems to have yielded without the least attempt
at resistance or self-justification. Because Christianity was
ultimately preached as a universal religion, he assumes that
Jesus must have intended from the first to found a world-
wide society, and totally ignores, as we have seen, the
scattered indications of a more limited conception to be
found in the gospels, and the fact that even after his death
his disciples preached for some time only to Jews and pro-
selytes. Because the effort to impose upon all members of
the Christian Society, become universal, the obligations of
the Mosaic law was abandoned after a struggle (which many
critical historians consider to have been long and bitter) :
because, as the expectation of Christ's speedy advent grew
faint, and his expectant Church began to organise itself for
long life without a Head, the moral teaching of Jesus
assumed more and more to his followers the character of a
code of laws — it is inferred that he deliberately proposed to
himself to supersede the Mosaic law by a new one pro-
mulgated on his own authority, no explanation being even
suggested of the passages in which he expressly asserts the
contrary. Because Jesus was perpetually and cousistently
exalted after his death by his followers, we are told that
he perpetually and consistently exalts himself: because
Christians felt that their intensest religious ardours, and
their most powerful moral impulses, sprang from and were
bound up in their personal devotion to their Master, our
author tells us that " Christ claims to be a perpetual attrac-
tive power ... to humanity struggling with its passions
and its destiny he says, Cling to me, cling ever closer to
me," and represents Jesus as intending this passion for himself

1 6 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES i

to be the root and first principle of all morality in the
Church. It is true that he might justify himself abundantly
from the fourth gospel for this colouring. But here as
elsewhere he quotes the language of the fourth gospel, and
then adds that the expressions of the synoptics " give sub-
stantially the same meaning." This makes it difficult for
us to believe that his acquaintance with the critical school
can be very profound ; for he seems to know that certain
persons reject the fourth gospel, and yet not to know that
the marked difference between it and the synoptics, with
respect to this " self-exaltation," is one of the reasons which
induces them to do so. We do not mean here, or generally,
that our author's view is entirely wrong, but that it is
wrongly coloured. If he would rewrite the passages in
which it is expressed in conformity with the conclusions of
criticism, he might still use a good deal of his present
eloquence. No doubt the Jesus of the synoptics shows a
remarkable contrast of humility of temper with conscious-
ness of pre-eminence; but the precise combination of
humility and self-exaltation which our author paints can
only be obtained by forcibly mixing the colours of the fourth
gospel with those of the three first. In the synoptics Jesus
for some time consistently abstains from exalting himself;
he occasionally refers to his example as a means of influenc-
ing his followers, but not more markedly than another
revered teacher might do ; and though, where he speaks
openly of his Messiahship, he assumes obedience and rever-
ence to be due to him, and regards then'efusal to pay them
as a grievous sin, yet he does not make this duty towards
himself prominent in his inculcation of moral precepts.
The author refers to the institution of the Lord's Supper to
support his view ; but it fails to do so until interpreted in
the fourth gospel, and here we have another instance of his
singular style of criticism. He speaks of St. John's dis-
course, " which we may quote without distrust, as it is so
manifestly confirmed by the accounts given by the other
Evangelists of the institution of the Supper." Now no
critic that we are aware of, who ' distrusts ' this gospel at

ECCE HOMO 17

all, excepts from his distrust the discourse referred to : the
question among such critics is whether we are to regard it
(with Strauss and Schenkel) as intended to give the spiritual
counterpart and substitute for the too carnal institution of
the Supper/ or merely a later spiritual interpretation of it.
There is exactly the same question with regard to the dis-
course with Nicodemus, in the third chapter of this gospel,
which, as we have seen, our author takes and interprets in
a fashion entirely his own. There are good reasons for
rejecting the fourth gospel as an accurate narrative ; there
are good reasons for accepting it as such ; there may be
good reasons for accepting part, and rejecting part, but our
author certainly does not put tliem forward. At the same
time the most suspicious critic would hardly deny that there
may be an element of truth in this gospel very valuable, as
supplementing the other three, and that it is in itself not
improbable that Jesus recognised the importance of the
singular personal influence that he exercised over other men,
and even foresaw that it would continue and increase after
his death ; but that he intended a passionate devotion to
himself to be the mainspring and motive-power of morality
in his followers, we certainly sliould not infer from our
authorities reasonably estimated.

We have next to consider what is, according to our
author, the chief principle and supreme rule in the morality
taught by Jesus — the trunk, or stem, springing from the
passion which he regards as the root. This he develops at
great length in what is, perhaps, the most striking and
effective portion of his work ; we can hardly hope to do
justice to it in a scanty summary, but we may avoid any
serious misrepresentation. Christ, he says, placed the happi-
ness of man in a political constitution. He did not consider,
as certain philosophies had done, each individual as an in-
dependent being, but as a member of a society. The great
duty he requires from all who enter the kingdom of God is

^ It is certainly singular, and tends to support this view, that there is no
mention of the institution of the Supper in the fourth gospel ; but this question,
which is connected with the much discussed Passover controversy, we must
pass by.

C

i8 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES I

a disinterested sacrifice of self to the interests of the whole
society. This sacrifice is to be made without a view to the
ultimate interest of the individual : indeed, to be complete
it demands of a man what he cannot do with a view to his
ultimate interest, that he should love his enemies. He
" issued from the Mount an edict of comprehension," assert-
ing the unity of the human race, their equality before God,
and fraternity under God's fatherhood. He made morality
universal, thus giving to men what a philosopher or two
had claimed for them but coldly and ineffectually. But for
the better execution of this edict, instead of giving detailed
laws to his society, he tried to evoke the law-making faculty
in each member of it. Philosophers had tried the same
thing, but they had wrongly regarded reason as the law-
making faculty ; Christ saw that passion could be only con-
trolled by passion, and therefore his law-making faculty is
a passionate, enthusiastic philanthropy, or, in our author's
fine phrase, the enthusiasm of humanity. This enthusiastic
condition of mind is what is meant by the Trvevfia "Aytov
of which we hear so much in the early Church. More
closely examined it is discovered to be a love not of the
race, nor of each individual, but of man as man, or of
humanity in each individual. Thus Christ, for the first
time, placed the love of man distinctly in the list of virtues.
Morality had previously been negative ; he discovered
Positive Morality — a new continent in the moral globe.

Now if this had been put before us in a sermon as a
spirited general sketch of what Christianity has been to the
world — of tlie moral idea that it has generated among man-
kind— we should not have been disposed to find fault with
it. But the biographer of Jesus, if he would be loyal to
historic truth, must forget all about the subsequent de-
velopment of Christianity, and endeavour to see Jesus as
he appeared to his Jewish contemporaries. We hoped
from our author's preface that he might have done this ;
but we feel that he has not, and that in consequence his
portrait wants fidelity in details. We feel continually as
we read — ' This is what has been felt since Jesus, and

ECCE HOMO 19

what would not have been felt had it not been for Jesus ;
but it is not precisely what Jesus taught.' Here and
there we feel that if Jesus planted, Jean Jacques and
Comte have watered.

If we cannot assert that any virtue may not be found
at least in germ in the teaching of Jesus, we may still
show that our author has brought into prominence the
wrong points in that teaching, and mingled with it alien
conceptions. In the first place it seems to us an over-
statement to say that Christ placed the happiness of man
in a political constitution, and did not consider him as an
independent being. Isolation and self-sulHciency were
marked features of the ideals that reigned in Greece during
the post- Aristotelian period, and the ideal of Jesus may so
far be contrasted with these. But the writer makes it too
nearly akin to Benthamism. It seems to us truer to say
that Jesus taught philanthropy more from the point of
view of the individual than from that of society. His
disciples were to do good to their enemies, to do good
expecting no return, to give freely, to lend to those who
could not pay ; but, as our author himself admits, to each
precept is attached a reason which comes home directly to
the individual. This reason sometimes appeals to self-love
— their reward should be great, they should receive again
full measure, pressed down and running over : sometimes to
a nobler sentiment — it was more blessed to give than to
receive, they would be children of the Highest, they would
be like God in His grand impartial effusion of benefits.
All this is not what we call philanthropy in its essence,
though it leads to the same results ; much less is it the
enthusiasm of humanity. Our author asks — " Can a man
love his enemies with a view to his own interest ? " This
is a diiticulty to be felt by a more introspective age than
that to which Jesus preached : it was at any rate not felt
by the author of the third gospel.^ But we are told that
Christ " quoted a sentence from the book of Deuteronomy,
in which devoted love to God and man is solemnly enjoined

1 Cf. Luke vi. 35.

20 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

upon the Israelite," and declared "an ardent, passionate,
or devoted state of mind to be the root of virtue." By
the " sentence from the book of Deuteronomy " our author
means two sentences, one from Deuteronomy and the other
from Leviticus ; the latter, which alone speaks of love to
man, runs simply — " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself." He has imported into this, in his mind, the
ardour and passion that belong to the former sentence ;
this sentence expresses simply a calm, though very lofty
ideal of equity : we do not love ourselves with passion or
enthusiasm. Again, the injunction to the young man to
sell his goods and give them to the poor was surely given,
not primarily for the sake of the poor, but for the sake of
the young man himself: it was a test, not of philanthropy,
but of faith. We must repeat, we are only arguing about
the comparative prominence of the two points. It seems
to us that Jesus would have reversed Paul's estimate of
Tr/cTTt? and a^dirrj ; he valued love highly, but he speaks
more of faith. What he chiefly inculcates is not enthusi-
asm, or if enthusiasm, not that of passionate affection ; it is
a calmer, and, some may think, a far grander sentiment,
faith in virtue, in the ideal of which philanthropy is only a
part — the readiness to sacrifice all, not for humanity, but
for the good cause, for the right. In so far as the writer
speaks of the state of feeling in the early Church among
the followers of Jesus after his departure, his remarks seem
to us far more correctly coloured. An " enthusiastic " or
elevated " condition of mind " is no unfair modernisation,
from one point of view, of the " outpouring of the Holy
Spirit ; " of that outpouring, love was one of the chief and
most striking fruits. The word a^ydirif], which is only
found twice in the synoptic gospels, occurs more than a
hundred times in the other books of the New Testament,
in various passages of description, exhortation, prayer, and
thankssfiviufij, culminating in the sublime encomium of
Paul.

In what we have said we have left out as far as
possible the strictly religious element in the teaching of

ECCE HOMO 21

Jesus. We have done so because our author has done so,
and because we do not join -with many of his critics in
condemning his treatment in this respect. He tliereby
confines himself to a part only of the work of Jesus, and
his book is so far one-sided ; but it is a part that can
fairly be discussed by itself, and if this had been his only
Gue-sidedness we do not think it would have been strongly
felt. But it has led him into a further error which we
must notice ; it has led him to neglect the great difference
between Jewish and ethnic morality, and consequently
somewhat to misrepresent the relation of Jesus to the one
and the other. Jewish morality was always suffused with
the glow of religious feeling which makes the morality of
most philosophers seem cold in comparison : the Greek
moralised with his eyes turned inward, the Jew with his
eyes turned toward the God of his fathers. To say that
Jesus, in preaching positive morality, discovered a new
continent in the moral globe, is strangely unfair both to
Jews and Gentiles ; but among the Jews morality was not
only positive : it was even enthusiastic, towards each and
all of the chosen people of God. Ethnic patriotism was
a feeling directed chiefly toward the State ; but Jewish
patriotism, burning more brightly amid the ruins of national
existence, flowed into the channels of individual sympathy
and tenderness. When Jesus spoke to his disciples of
other Jews as their brethren, he used no new and un-
familiar word. He does not find it necessary to inculcate
almsgiving ; he only attempts to purify it from the alloy of
vanity and ostentation — a purification which it doubtless
much needed, as we fear it somewhat needs still. Many a
Tobit, no doubt, had given his bread to the hungry and
his garments to the naked, had bitterly afflicted himself
for the calamities of his suffering brethren, before Jesus
shed on the virtues of jihilanthropy and tenderness the
peculiar light of his sublime idealism. Here again,
the old account of Christianity, which represents it as
internalising and universalising what liad before been too
external and too limited, seems much truer tluiu the

22 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES I

antithesis which our author superadds between " positive "
and " negative."

But in this work of Christianity what precise portion is
the historian to attribute to Jesus ? We have already-
hinted at some of the difficulties which bans; about this
question ; and we approach the solution of it, we must
premise, with a diffidence very unlike our author's confident
certainty. We have to form our judgment upon slender
evidence, examined in the doubtful light of historic analogy.
Our author, in all the second part of his book, writes with
a consistent determination to find his ideal of morality
completely developed in Jesus. He unfolds a carefully
considered utopia, or scheme of human progress, for which
Jesus' words are made to supply from time to time texts or
mottoes. Sometimes he strays considerably from his text,
e.g. Christ is supposed to have said that the enthusiasm of
humanity was the source of virtue : the best method of
producing this enthusiasm is discovered to be family affec-
tion : therefore family affection must be encouraged in
obedience to Jesus ; — we feel that we have got a long way
from " He that hateth not his father and his mother."
Every student of morality is aware of the facility with
which all the virtues may be deduced from each one, and
no one who has realised the fertility, breadth, and origi-
nality of the moral conceptions of Jesus, can doubt that any
ideal we are likely to form may be built upon a careful
selection of his words. But the historian's hard duty is
not to exaggerate, however strong the temptation to do so
may be. It is only to hasty hero-worshippers that this
will appear equivalent to nil admirari ; the historically
cultivated mind will feel that a portrait requires light and
shade to give it the requisite reality, and that the more it
gains in reality the more profound is the admiration that it
excites. The defect of Eenan's Vie cle Jisus was not its
historical fidelity but its want of that quality. It was not
in so far as he had realised the manner in which the idea of
Jesus was conditioned by the circumstances of time and
place and the laws of human development, but in so far as

ECCE HOMO 23

he had failed to do so, that his work proved inefficacious to
stir tlie feeling's of Englishmen. We felt that he had
looked at his subject through Parisian spectacles ; and taken
up too ostentatiously the position of a spectator — a great
artistic error in a historian. His most orthodox assailants
in England felt for the most part that their strength lay in
showing not that the Jesus of lienan was a mere man and
ought to have been more, but that he was not the right man.
The truth seems to be that in the simple and grand
conception that Jesus formed of man's position and value in
the universe, all the subsequent development of Christianity
is implicitly contained: l)ut that the evolution of this con-
ception was gradual, and was not completed at his death.
The one thing important to Jesus in man was a principle so
general that faith, love, and moral energy seem only diflerent
sides of it. It was the ultimate coincidence, or rather, if we
may use a Coleritlgian word, indifference of religion and
morality. It was " the single eye," the Tightness, of a man's
heart before God. It was faith in the conflict with baser
and narrower impulses, love when it became emotion, moral
energy as it took effect on the will. It was that which
living in a man filled his whole body with a light, purified
him completely, so that nothing external could defile him.
This principle led to various results. In the first place (and
in this respect the teaching of Jesus left nothing to be sup-
plied) it intensified or deepened all moral obligations. This
inner light could not produce right outward acts, except
through the medium of right inward impulses. Moreover,
the man who had it could acquiesce in no compromises, but
must aim at perfection. The second consequence of the
principle ought to have been, and is in Christianity as at
present understood, that the degree in which a man possesses
this inner Tightness of heart fixes his rank in the kingdom
of God at any time. Birth, wealth, worldly position, even
intellectual culture (though it may enable one man to do
more good than another), even past good works (if the spirit
in which they were done is growing faint), are insignificant
as claims in comparison with this. But, as actually preached

24 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES i

by Jesus, this principle seems (if we take our authorities as
they stand) to have assumed a paradoxical and one-sided
shape. He gives not equality but superiority to those in
poverty and bodily wretchedness. This shape, it is to be
observed (by this time we need hardly say that the author
of Ecce Homo seems not to have observed it), is especially
paradoxical and one-sided in one of our three authorities.
In all of them we find the saying that it is easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of heaven. In the first gospel we have
the impossibility of serving God and mammon insisted upon,
and in connection with this all careful provision for material
wants discouraged. But it is only in Luke tliat we find a
blessing pronounced on the poor and a woe on the rich : ^ it
is only in Luke that we find applied to wealth the passionate
phrase " unrighteous mammon," which, taken in connection
with the parable that precedes, suggests the idea that there
is something unholy in wealth, that it ought to be got rid
of, while it is possible in getting rid of it to utilise it.
These passages have been frequently understood as having
only that point of paradox which a new truth requires in
order to force its way into tlie world. But the phrases in
Luke seem too strong to be explained in this way, and
almost amount to a slight distortion of view. This may be
referred to more than one reason, issuing naturally from the
conception of Jesus combined with his circumstances. M.
Eeuan is not perhaps entirely wrong in attributing the
passages that discourage providence to the exuberance of
simple faith in a Galilean peasant, ignorant of the compli-
cated arrangements of society. But this hardly reaches the
height of the character. We rather refer them to his severe
uncompromising absoluteness of idealism, that requires careful
tempering to be made practical." Again (and this our author

^ The question with regard to the two recensions of the " Beatitudes " as they
are called seems to be this : — have we in the first gospel a softening down and
spiritualising of the original teaching, or in Luke an Ebionitish exaggeration of
it ? It is difficult but important to decide.

'^ Comj)are his utterance with respect to purity, Matt. v. 27-30. Here, how-
ever, we wouLl gladly think that the first gospel lias, by a dangerous mistake,
brought vv. 29, 30, into a wrong connection. Cf. Mark ix. 43-47.

ECCE HOMO 25

finely describes), Jesus with his intense apprehension of what
constitutes true human worth, would feel a peculiar horror at
the hard insolent selfishness that often accompanies wealth ;
most men with character enough to break through the com-
fortable acquiescence of conventional ethics have felt this in
some degree. Again, his estimate of human worth, together
with faith in Divine equity, might seem to point to a here-
after, when the positions of rich and poor should be reversed.
This is suggested by the parable of Lazarus,^ taken together
with the beatitudes in the same gospel. Besides, the prac-
tical experience of Jesus would lead him to take the worst
view of the rich. His converts were found among the poor
and lowly, who were at the same time intellectually babes.
The rich would be to a great extent also the wise and
prudent; property and education would combine in hinder-
ing them from joining the train of an unauthorised and
vagabond master. These reasons may account for a partiality
that requires to be accounted for in a teacher in whom all
have recognised a rare ethical balance, and a singular freedom
from asceticism.

Thirdly, when conscience was thus turned inward, and
morality made to depend on the state of the heart, it was a
necessary consequence that the ceremonial law must fall.
This elaborate system of minute observances was needless,
and if needless it was burdensome. But this deduction was
only partially made by Jesus ; to complete it was reserved
for one only second to Jesus among the benefactors of man-
kind— for Saul of Tarsus. How far Jesus actually went it is
hard to say. Where the account given by our authorities is
as here primd facie fluctuating and confused, the modes of
reconciliation or explanation naturally vary. Perhaps we
may say that he rejected anything in the written or oral law
that seemed to him immoral or imperfectly moral, that
among things indifferent he disregarded or attacked particular
traditions that he felt to be specially vexatious or trivial, but

in general contented himself with " exceeding the righteous-

^ It is to be observed that the coiniiion view that the rich man is punished for
neglecting Lazarus is at variance with Abraham's reply, audcau hardly be deduced
solely from the iwiOvixQv xopTaadijvai in verse 21 (Luke xvi. 19-31).

26 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES i

ness of the Scribes and Pharisees," superadding to the tradi-
tional external obligations his strict requisition of lightness
and purity of heart. Still his murmur of burdens grievous
to be borne foreshadows — but only foreshadows — a time
when the handwriting of ordinances should be completely
blotted out.

Fourthly, if man's position in the universe, or, more reli-
giously, in the sight of God, depends upon his rightness of
heart, it followed that the kingdom of God was opened to
all of Adam's seed. But, here again, it is to Paul we owe
the complete declaration that Christ has put on one level
circumcision and uncircumcision, Greek, Jew, barbarian,
Scythian, bond and free. Did the idea of Jesus reach to
this ? Perhaps hardly in the earlier part of his career,
before his claims seemed finally rejected by the leaders of
his people, when he felt himself limited in his work to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel, when he forbade his
disciples to evangelise the Samaritans, when he spoke of
Syrophcenicians as dogs. Yet, even then, his conception
seems not so much limited as not extended ; circumstances
have not extended it. He yields to a proof of faith in the
Syrophoenician woman. Perhaps, toward the close of his
life, amid forebodings of his coming doom, there rose in his
mind a clear foresight that his kingdom would be of Gentiles
— can we say that it would be universal ? At any rate, we
find no distinct expression of this in the synoptic gospels ;
and the historian must very doubtfully accept the discourses
of the fourth, even where they most accord with the image
he has formed to himself of Jesus.

We have sketched this outline in contrast with our
author's, to show exactly to what degree we can admit that
the " edict from the Mount " gave to mankind the univer-
sality of rights which a few philosophers had ineffectually
claimed for them. We should like to say a word about
these philosophers. In our author's treatment of them he,
very needlessly, exceeds the limits of fair advocacy. He
seems, indeed, to regard himself as holding a brief against
philosophers in general. In one passage (p. 100) he draws

ECCE HOMO 27

a fancy portrait of tlie " philosophic good man." This is,
perhaps, just within the limits of fair advocacy ; that is to
say, it is a spirited and instructive caricature. A philo-
sopher might draw a fancy portrait of the religious enthu-
siast, equally fair, equally instructive, and equally one-sided.
In truth, enthusiasm and reason are supplementary ; neither
can dispense with the other ; and it is for the interest of the
human race that each should keep a jealous watch on the
other. But in one respect the past philosopher is at a great
disadvantage, as compared with the past prophet, and has
more claim on the tenderness of the historian. The philo-
sopher introduces his new truth to the world enclosed in a
system ; when humanity has extracted and assimilated the
kernel, the empty husk is found with the philosopher's name
inscribed on it ; the prophet hurls his new truth out in the
form of a paradox, the point of which is ever after found
useful. This applies peculiarly to Stoicism ; we associate
the term with salient extravagances ; the most valuable part
of the system that flourished under the name is so familiar,
so axiomatic to us, that we do not value it. There is no fear
that men will fall into the error of putting Stoicism for
quantity of effect, or intrinsic excellence on a par with
Christianity. The Porch was one entrance into the Church;
and the panegyrist of Jesus ought to treat Stoicism with
the tender and scrupulous fairness due to a forerunner
superseded, and a rival outshone. One repeated unfairness
in our author's treatment of the philosopher springs from a
misconception which is strange in one who has evidently
read his Plato. He speaks of " reason " as if it meant only
logic ; as if its supremacy kept the man entirely cold ; as if
it were impossible to feel ardour and enthusiasm for abstrac-
tions. " He who refrains from gratifying a wish on some
ground of reason, at the same time feels the wish as strongly
as if he gratified it." In an earlier passage he asks the
philosopher triumpliantly, " Where is the logical dilemma
that can make a knave honest ? " Now we admit that one
of the great philosophical blots of Stoicism was the confusion
it made between distinct mental faculties, elaborative, intui-

28 £SSA YS AND ADDRESSES i

tive, emotional, volitional, so that a Stoic might commit the
absurdity of trying, by a logical dilemma, to make a knave
honest. But how was the Stoic himself made and kept
honest, and pure, and self-sacrificing ? Not by his logic, but
by the enthusiasm that he felt when he contemplated the
true law, the right reason, the wisdom that became dearer
to him than any pleasure, the idea of good that rose up in
and absorbed liis soul, casting into shade the 'prima naturae,
the lawful objects of the earlier natural impulses. " It is
one of the most remarkable features," we are told, " of
Christ's moral teaching, that he does not command us to
regulate or control our unlawful desires, but pronounces it
unlawful to have such desires at all." Whether this is
a thoroughly sound treatment of ethics we are not now
inquiring ; but it describes accurately Stoic theory, and
Stoic practice. That an ordinary man, one of the masses,
intellectually speaking, could only get his unlawful desires
destroyed by means of a feeling of personal devotion, we are
not prepared to dispute ; and hence the effect of Christianity
was incomparably greater in extent than that of any philo-
sophy could have been. But to deny this efficacy to those
incredibiles ardores that the inner vision of truth and wisdom
excited in a few, is worse than a mere historical error : it
implies a psychological deficiency.

In a way partly similar, partly different, our author
tries to depreciate the tenet as held by the Stoics of human
brotherhood, the universality of moral obligation. He does
not deny that it was held by them in all completeness. He
knows that Cicero's Stoic says, " Each one of us is a part
of the world, hence we must prefer the common advantage
to our own ; the universe is the common city of gods and
men": that Seneca writes, "We are members of a vast
body ; we are naturally kinsmen ; there is communio juris
among us all ; live for another if you would live for
yourself " : that Marcus Aurelius writes (expressing in a
scholastic form what may even be called the enthusiasm of
humanity), " Unless you regard yourself as a member of
the human society, you do not yet love men from the heart ;

ECCE HOMO 29

doing good does not give you a completed joy ; you do it
simply as a thing fit to do, not as doing good to yourself."
Yet he seems unable to do hearty justice to pliilosophers.
He says of the tenet : " It had become a commonplace of
Stoic philosophy " (hinting it was confined to the lecture-
room), " but to work it into the hearts and consciences of
men required a higher power." Yes, " of men," but of
what men ? Not of Stoics, but of the mass of mankind,
who never were and never could become Stoics. That a
tenet may change the face of society, it must be accepted
in some sort by the numerical majority. If Christians had
remained as few in number as Stoics, the "edict" of Jesus
would have had as much and as little effect as the " claim "
of Zeno. True, the insincere Stoic was undoubtedly less
controlled by his profession than the insincere Christian.
The force of public opinion on him was smaller. There is
just this element of truth in what our author means to
say ; but it is precisely what he has not expressed. Into
the hearts and consciences of sincere Stoics the tenet was
worked, probably as much as it has since been into the
hearts and consciences of sincere Christians — that is,
generally, in a very limited and unsatisfactory degree. To
what Christian monarch can we point who more than
Marcus Aurelius made this sublime principle his inspiration
and his restraint, the subject of his meditations and the
guide of his life ?

We must now turn to our author's detailed account of
the subordinate principles or laws (as he calls them) into
which the teaching of Jesus branched. AYe find continual
repetition of the same misplaced colouring, and the same
mistaken ingenuity. When he gets hold of a vague popular
misconception, he exaggerates it, he refines it, he elaborates
it, he systematises it ; he generally does anything but correct
it. But we find him very refreshing to read ; his style is
so free from cant, haziness, self-consciousness, sickly sweet-
ness, turgid rhetoric ; his treatment so bold, independent,
distinct, coherent. Indeed, the whole plan is too coherent.
He is not content to find in Jesus a rare balance of moral

30 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES i

intuitions ; he insists on attributing to him an articulate
system of ethics ; consequently he is constantly suggesting
for him, without any evidence, ideas, feelings, reflections
alien to his age and inconsistent with the simple directness
of the prophetic character. For instance, he points out the
" apparent inconsistency " between the absolute purity and
severity of the moral ideal of Jesus, and his readiness to
sympathise with sinners. He then shows how the incon-
sistency is overcome by the conception of the " law of
mercy." We should rather say that the inconsistency was
never felt, and therefore not overcome. The one virtue
seemed as natural, sprang as spontaneously as the other.

We have already discussed our author's " provisional "
assumption of a right to speak of the miracles as real.
This assumption is much used or abused in his chapter
on Positive Morality. He works up into a more definite
and imposing form the popular notion that Jesus was a
wonderful example of practical philanthropy. He tells us
we might have thought it more appropriate to Jesus to
instruct more and give less time to the relief of physical
evils ; but no, he thought otherwise : " his biography may
be summed up in the words 'he went about doing good';
his wise words were secondary to his beneficial deeds ;
the latter were not introductory to the former, but the
former grew occasionally and, as it were, accidentally out
of the latter." Xow the perfect unselfishness of Jesus, and
his tenderness for his fellow-men, affords the foundation for
the popular notion ; but the pointed form which is given to
it in the passage we have quoted seems in direct conflict
with our authorities. Even if w^e assume that the number
of cases recorded is not exaggerated (an assumption which
on purely historic grounds we shall find it difficult to
admit), there is nothing which we should infer with more
certainty from the gospels than that Jesus regarded teach-
ing and preaching as his primary function. He is always
represented as taking the initiative in this. He comes
into Galilee preaching ; he enters into the synagogue and
teaches ; he goes into the next towns that he may preach ;

ECCE HOMO 31

we read always, " he began to teach " by the seaside, in
the synagogue, elsewhere ; the multitude came unto him,
and he teaches them as is his wont. But he exercises
his gift of healing only when appealed to ; the people
throng round him and press liiin to exercise it ; they
" bring unto him " diseased persons, and he heals them ;
lepers and others fall in his way and entreat him ; he
heals all, but with occasional reluctance, with repeated
efforts to keep his possession of the gift as secret as possible.
It was the spiritually sick that he came to seek and to save ;
there is no evidence of any eagerness on his part to relieve
ordinary physical evils.

In one of his two chapters on the " Law of ^lercy," our
author describes two repentances — that of Zacchteus, the
rich receiver of taxes, and the well-known story of the
woman who was a sinner. The passage is in his best style ;
the colouring is not overdone, the contrast and the observa-
tions to which it gives rise are as just and appropriate as
they are fresh and striking. With this illustration he
connects an excellent account of " the three stages in
the progress of the treatment of crime : the stage of
barbarous insensibility, the stage of law or justice, and that
of mercy or humanity." This last stage, he tells us, was
reached by the morality of Jesus. Law, to keep up a
proper sensibility for the injured, has to be cruel to the
injurer. But the mercy of Jesus overcomes the emotional
difticulty, achieves the emotional feat, of sympathising with
and loving the injurer, while at the same time hating the
sin and pitying the sufferer far more than law. Therefore,
it is a positive duty of Christ's followers to attempt the
restoration of the criminal classes. Practical men may
plausibly urge that the enterprise is hopeless ; but Christ,
says our author, rising into one of his loftiest strains of
eloquence, knew of no limits to enthusiasm —

He laid it as a duty upon the Church to reclaim the lost,
because he did not think it Utopian to suppose that the Chiu-ch
might be not in its best members only, but through its whole
body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that can charm away

32 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES

the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to the savage
and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an entrancing
view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over the streets
and palaces of the city of God.

We willingly lend our liearts to this preaching. This
is true Christianity : " the Article of Conversion is the true
Artimdus stantis aut cadentis Ecdesice" But when we close
the book the question forces itself upon us — What was it
that Jesus actually did in this direction ? The attentive
reader of the two chapters we refer to will discover a
distinct and palpable seam running through them, where
the exposition of the duty is sewn on to the account of the
example. The question is how to deal with the criminal
classes, the enemies of their kind, outlaws, injurers of society,
who fall under the ban of law and justice. " Therefore,"
says our author, " Christ went among " — whom ? thieves
and murderers ? — no, " publicans and sinners." There is
surely a great difference between the two classes. The
publicans were not enemies of society, but a sordid and
repulsive part of its organisation ; instruments that law
used and despised, not objects against which it was directed.
Mr. Plumptre ^ compares them with Eoman Catholic excise-
men in Ireland. " Sinners " is a vague term, but it is clear
that the persons described by it were vicious as distinct
from criminal, liable to social ostracism, not legal punish-
ment. Suppose a man, then, in the habit of dining with
excisemen and prostitutes, with a view to their moral
improvement. He would show, perhaps, more heroism,
certainly more originality, than a man who went as a city
missionary among the criminal classes of London ; but it
would be only in a very general sense that we could say
that the one man followed the example of the other.
Again, there is no evidence that Jesus sought out publicans
and harlots, and endeavoured to pierce through the hardened
shell of vicious habit that encased their hearts. Some of
them thronged among the crowd to hear him, and he did
not repel them ; similarly they had gone to John to be

^ Smith's Dictionary of the. Bible.

ECCE HOMO 33

baptised, and he had baptised them. Those with whom he
associated had, we may believe, already shown signs of
repentance ; his preaching had already stirred iu them the
impulse toward goodness. All honour to the tender insight
that could discern and cherish this impulse when others
saw only the mould of life and circumstance in which the
character was assumed to have hardened ! All honour to
the magnanimity that in this work could brave the con-
demnation of the pious, the censure of those whose ceusure
was felt heaviest ! ^ But the particular duty which our
author sets before us of sympathising with and converting
the hardened outlaw, while we sympathise with, and exact
justice for, his victim, Jesus does not, from the evidence
before us, appear to have actually undertaken. This emo-
tional problem we have to attempt ; let us solve it as it
can be solved in the spirit of Christianity ; but let us not
strain history till it cracks in a morbid anxiety to make the
emotional stimulus afforded by Christ's personal example as
great as possible.^

But Jesus did not manifest only pity and tenderness,
conspicuous as these qualities were in him : he also showed
anger and resentment. Our author, therefore, to complete
his work has to explain the Law of Kesentment. We
looked forward with some interest to this explanation, as
we foresaw the difficulty in which he would be placed, and
considered that his mode of dealing with that difficulty
would be an excellent test of his qualities as a historian.
For the objects of the resentment of Jesus were the religious
teachers of his nation — a nation appointed by Providence
to be the religious teachers of mankind. These are the only
persons against whom he inveighs with bitter vehemence ;
for whose virtues he has no praise,^ for whose faults he

• In choosing a publican for a disciple, Jesus would go further still. But,
although the puhlicans were as a class rapacious and unjust, there was nothing
incompatible, whatever bigots might think, in tax-gatherin;4 and virtue.

- A good instance of this straining is sten where our author endeavours to
bring prostitutes under tlie heail of "injurers," by describing them as "the
tempters who waylaid the chastity of men." We hear the fact cracking.

* We ought to notice as an exceptiou that he once said of one of them " that
he was not far from the kingdom of God." This incident coutirms us in the view
we subsequently express.

D

34 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

has no excuse. Now the religious teachers of a people,
whatever may be their defects and shortcomings (and we
shall hardly be suspected of a disposition to underrate
them), are not usually those against whom an impartial
moralist concentrates his invective. Here, therefore, the
example seems to require careful interpretation. The ordi-
nary commentator, who is not troubled by any considerations
of historic analogy, finds no difficulty at all. In reading
Matt, xxiii. and the parallel passages in Luke, he conceives
an idea of the Pharisees and scribes made to suit these
passages. He willingly believes that they were hypocriti-
cal and rapacious, serpents and vipers, making long prayers
to devour widows' substance, whose proselytes were children
of hell, whose carefully purified vessels were full of extortion
and excess. For purposes of edification this answers very
well ; every one feels that against so odious a combination
of vices no invectives can be too vehement, too scathing.
If it is pointed out to the commentator that Jesus elsewhere
seems to speak of these persons as the whole who needed
not a physician, the righteous whom he was not come to
call to repentance: elsewhere as possessing a righteousness
of their own, though below the standard of his lofty require-
ments,— he simply replies that these were different Phari-
sees and different scribes. The author of Ecce Homo is at
once too genuinely honest and too widely cultivated to rest
content with this. He finds it necessary to represent the
Pharisees as a historian, using all the sources of evidence
within his reach, may reasonably conceive them to have
existed ; and to realise the relations of Jesus towards them
as a whole, in accordance with such representation. Only on
this basis can he conscientiously expound the example and
develop the Law of Kesentment. Let us see what the result is.
In the first place, from his consistent determination not
to treat the career of Jesus as in any respect progressive,
he ignores what is the only true key to these relations. He
cannot trace their gradual embitterment, arising out of the
ever increasing clearness of the irreconcilable antagonism
between the insulted bigots and the daring innovator, from

ECCE HOMO 35

the outset of Jesus' niinistiy, wlieii he simply left the
" righteous " on one side as having no immediate call to deal
with them, to that period near its close, when, foreseeing and
almost courting the inevitable doom, he poured out in those
well-known charges the concentrated energy of his indigna-
tion. Still he quite appreciates the comparative historic
value of the earlier and later utterances. Of the worst
charges he says (we could not expect him to say more),
" We have not the evidence before us which might enable
us to verify these accusations." He sees that the point of
the antagonism between the " one learned profession " and
Jesus was, that the former were " legalists," that they
asserted " the paramount necessity of particular rules."
They " believed that the old method by which their ancestors
had arrived at a knowledge of the requirements of duty —
namely, divine inspiration — was no longer available, and
that nothing therefore remained but carefully to collect the
results at which their ancestors had arrived by this method,
to adopt these results as rules, and to observe them punctili-
ously." He says that it may be urged that such men, how-
ever mistaken, did " in some cases the best they could, that
they were serious and made others serious." But Jesus, he
finds, " made no allowance " for them. How is this to be
explained ? How is our indignation against these sincere but
mistaken bigots to be sufficiently stimulated ? It appears
that after all they were impostors of a very subtle sort.
" Their good deeds . . . did not proceed from the motives from
which sitch deeds naturally spring, and from which the public
suppose them to spring." When tliey tithed their property they
were impostors, because they made people think they did so
from " ardent feelings," whereas their real motive was "respect
for a traditional rule." When they searched the Scriptures,
they were impostors, because they pretended to be possessed
with the spirit of what they read without really being so.
Thus, because they followed " motives which did not actuate
them, but which tliey supposed ought to actuate them," he
thinks it right to say of them that they were " destitute of
convictions " ; " winning the reverence of the multitude by

36 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES

false pretences " ; " actors in everything " ; " their whole life
a play."

Now we cannot conceive the true analysis of bigotry and
legalism more blurred and confused than it is by this in-
genious rhetoric — a rhetoric all the more dangerous because
it is, as the author proceeds to show, of so universal applica-
tion. Eeligious conservatives in all ages are men who cling
to the letter without comprehending the spirit — who inherit
the results of an enthusiasm whose counterpart in the pre-
sent they misunderstand and dislike. But to say that,
because they are destitute of enthusiasm, they are " destitute
of convictions," that " their zeal for truth is feigned," because
their view of truth is narrow, that " they love the past
only because they hate the present," to charge them with
wilful fraud as pretenders to an ardour and enthusiasm
that they have not, to describe their virtues as being no
virtues at all, because they are mixed with conventionality
and triviality, — would be the blindest advocacy, or the most
unscrupulous special pleading. In the secular strife between
the old and the new, upon which human progress depends,
our good wishes are entirely with the innovators. Nor
have we a word of condemnation for the champions of this
grand cause, if in the fiery heat of battle they strike some-
what merciless and sweeping blows. It is by such strokes
that great victories have generally been won. Still the
most terrible fury in assault may be combined with a just
recognition of the merits of adversaries, a generous sympathy
with whatever in them is or might have been virtue ; and
in our ideal we conceive these qualities combined. Such
magnanimity we, in common with the whole Christian
world, have read in the close of our Master's life, as told
by Luke.^ The end has come; the people, whose eyes he

1 Here for the last time, our author quotes the fourth gospel to support his
most infelicitous interpretation of the third. It is the only support he has. The
reply to the high-priest is no " menace " ; it is simply a calm assertion. His
address to the women expresses mere sadness ; most generous sadness : it is his
people's deserved doom that grieves him : he would avert it if it were possible :
hence the "forgive them." No one, we think, who read the account in Luke hy
itself, would take the words otherwise. We attribute the sentence he quotes
from John xix. 11 to the indignation of a disciple.

ECCE HOMO 37

has been vainly endeavouring to open, have made their
choice ; they have identified tliemselves with their tradi-
tional leaders ; his work is closed, his strife is over, and
with it the bitterness of the strife has melted into pure
sadness, into all-embracing forgiveness. But our author
reads the passage otherwise. It was only the Koman
soldiers he forgave. Having hated in the world his enemies,
the legalists, he hated them unto the end. In his dying
moments he pointedly excepted them from pardon ; thus
giving his followers a most solemn intimation, that " the
enthusiasm of humanity," though it destroys " a great deal
of hatred . . . creates as much more," that the new com-
mandment he gave unto them did not exclude bitterness,
irreconcilable hostility, intolerant anger, vindictive enmity.

Here, then, is what the enthusiasm of humanity comes
to ; here is the last fashion of the Imitatio Christi. We
are to love the whole human race, except our religious
adversaries ; we are to cherish the ideal of man in every
man, only not in a legalist. We are to have an inexhaustible
sympathy with those who are trying in every way to do
wrong ; nothing but enmity for those who are trying in a
mistaken way to do right. We are not to burn any one, we
are told, on the whole ; we might burn the wrong man ;
but the spirit of auto-da-fe is thoroughly Christian ; some
one ought to be burnt if we could only tell who. Perhaps
much of this is conscious paradox, meant to be taken cum
grano ; but we fear the writer may carry his readers — that
he has carried himself — dangerously far. Other men have
felt the profoundest pity for the Jewish nation, whose
passionate patriotism and imperishable faith have passed
through so fearful a doom of blood and fire to haunt the
world as a spectral anachronism for ever ; our author
assures us, with the calm truculence of a thoroughgoing
enthusiast —

Almost all the genuine worth and virtue of the nation was
gathered into the Christian Church ; what remained without was
perversity and prejudice, ignorance of the time, ignorance of
the truth — that mass of fierce infatuation which was burnt up

38 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES i

in the flames which consumed the temple or shared the fall of
of the Antichrist Barcochebah.

This thoroughly exemplifies the Law of Eesentment ; this
is the " irreconcilable hostility " of the religious partisan.
We disown the authority of this law; we decline to follow
this example. We have not so learned Christ ; it is not
thus we would be filled with his spirit. Let the author of Ecce
Homo, and those who think with him, look well to what they
are doing. They would willingly deliver men from bondage to
the letter of an ordinance ; let them not bind upon us servile
conformity to the pattern of a life. ISTeither the one nor
the other is compatible with the true liberty of the spirit.
For the spirit of moral heroes does not only live after them ;
it grows, it deepens, it enlarges after them. It transcends
the limits of their earthly development ; it overleaps the
barriers that circumstance had fixed ; it shakes off the
bonds that action had imposed ; it is measured not by what
it did, but by what it might have done and will yet do.
So we imitate our other patterns and examples in the
essence, not the limitations, of their virtues ; so we must
imitate our great pattern and example, the great originator
and source of our morality. True, the Christian has to
combine anger with love, resentment with sympathy ; but
he is not to suppress the latter towards a special class of
men, because he regards them as the counterpart of the
antagonists of Jesus. Nay, this is the peculiar lesson that
enthusiasts have to learn, if progress is ever to be peace-
ful : to recognise and love the virtues that may thrive
wonderfully under the most besotted adherence to the most
narrow and contemptible notions. In Jesus the limitation
of sympathy arose from inevitable partiality of view ; cir-
cumstances had sundered him too widely from the orthodox
party ; it was necessary that he should fight them to the
death. We may imagine how differently he might have
spoken of them if he could only have seen their best side
instead of their worst. Surely he who could discern and
cherish the sparks of love, the germs of devotion, the yearn-
ings after virtue in the hearts of publicans and sinners.

ECCE HOMO 39

would liave seen the glowing zeal, the anxious obedience,
the earnest self-denial, the sublime aspiration, that lingered
in and leavened that mass of paltriness and bigotry and
error. lie would have learnt of long prayers offered up
not to cover spoliation, of teachers who bore, as far as men
could bear, the burdens they laid on others, of proselytes of
whom Pharisaic effort had not made children of hell, but
who were soon to pour in eager throngs through the opened
gates of the city of God. He might even have personally
known one, then an eager pupil of the great pillar of
legalism, the young Pharisee who more than any of his
own followers was to inherit his spirit and complete his
work, and strike the final and triumphant blow for the law
of liberty and love.

Our limits compel us to stop. To develop and support
fully on all the points on which we differ from our author
our divergent view, would require a book as long as his
own — nay, perhaps longer, as we should find it expedient to
use more argument for each assertion. His method we think
radically wrong ; his conclusions only roughly and partially
right. But we would not part from him in this tone. The
one thing in which we agree with him outweighs all the
rest. We desire as sincerely as he does that the influence
of Jesus on the modern world should increase and not
decrease. That his book will tend to produce this effect on
the majority of readers we can hardly doubt ; that such will
be its operation on the minds even of students we think
most probable. We cannot possibly have sound history
without uncompromising criticism and perpetual contro-
versy ; but it is good to be reminded from time to time
to drop the glass of criticism, and let the dust-clouds of
controversy settle. Many students who cannot patiently
lend their minds to our author's teaching may be stimulated
by it to do as he has done : may be led to contemplate in the
best outline that each for himself can frame, with unwonted
clearness of vision and unwonted force of sympathy, the
features of a conception, a life, a character which the world
might reverence more wisely, but can never love too well.

II

THE PEOPHET OF CULTUEE

{Macmillan's Magazine, August 1867)

The movement against anonymous writing, in which this
journal some years ago took a part, has received, I think, an
undeniable accession of strength from the development (then
unexpected) of Mr. Matthew Arnold. Some persons who
sympathised on the whole with that movement yet felt that
the case was balanced, and that if it succeeded we should
have sacrified something that we could not sacrifice without
regret. One felt the evils that " irresponsible reviewers "
were continually inflicting on the progress of thought and
society : and yet one felt that, in form and expression,
anonymous writing tended to be good writing. The buoyant
confidence of youth was invigorated and yet sobered by
having to sustain the prestige of a well-earned reputation ;
while the practised weapon of age, relieved from the
restraints of responsibility, was wielded with almost the
elasticity of youth. It was thought we should miss the
freedom, the boldness, the reckless vivacity with which
one talented writer after another had discharged his missiles
from behind the common shield of a coterie of unknown
extent, or at least half veiled by a pseudonym. It was
thought that periodical literature would gain in carefulness,
in earnestness, in sincerity, in real moral influence : but
that possibly it might become just a trifle dull. We did not
foresee that the dashing insolences of " we-dom " that we
should lose would be more than compensated by the delicate
impertinences of egotism that we should gain. We did not

40

II THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 41

imagine the new and exquisite literary enjoyment that
would be created when a man of genius and ripe thought,
perhaps even elevated by a position of academic dignity,
should deliver profound truths and subtle observations with
all the dogmatic authority and self-confidence of a prophet :
at the same time titillating the public by something like
the airs and graces, the playful affectations of a favourite
comedian. "We did not, in short, foresee a Matthew Arnold :
and I think it must be allowed that our apprehensions have
been mucli removed, and our cause much strengthened, by
this new phenomenon.

I have called Mr. Arnold the prophet of culture : I will
not call him an " elegant Jeremiah," because he seems to
have been a little annoyed (he who is never annoyed) by
that phrase of the Daily TeUfiraph. " Jeremiah ! " he
exclaims, " the very Hebrew prophet whose style I admire
the least." I confess I thought the phrase tolerably felicitous
for a Philistine, from whom one would not expect any very
subtle discrimination of the differentiae of prophets. Nor
can I quite determine which Hebrew prophet Mr. Arnold
does most resemble. But it is certainly hard to compare him
to Jeremiah, for Jeremiah is our type of the lugubrious ;
whereas there is nothing more striking than the imperturb-
able cheerfulness with which Mr. Arnold seems to sustain
himself on the fragment of culture that is left him, amid
the deluge of Philistinism that he sees submerging our age
and country. A prophet however, I gather, Mr. Arnold
does not object to be called ; as such I wish to consider and
weigh him ; and thus I am led to examine the lecture with
which he has closed his connexion with Oxford, — the most
full, distinct, and complete of the various utterances in
which he has set forth the Gospel of Culture.

As it will clearly appear in the course of this article, how
highly I admire Mr. Arnold as a writer, I may say at once,
without reserve or qualification, that this utterance has dis-
appointed me very much. It is not even so good in style
as former essays ; it lias more of the mannerism of repeating
his own phrases, which, though very effective up to a certain

42 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ii

point, may be carried too far. But this is a small point :
and Mr. Arnold's style, when most faulty, is very charming.
My complaint is that, though there is much in it beautifully
and subtly said, and many fine glimpses of great truths, it
is, as a whole, ambitious, vague, and perverse. It seems to
me over-ambitious, because it treats of the most profound
and difficult problems of individual and social life with an
airy dogmatism that ignores their depth and difficulty. And
though dogmatic, Mr. Arnold is yet vague ; because when he
employs indefinite terms he does not attempt to limit their
indefiniteness, but rather avails himself of it. Thus he speaks
of the relation of culture and religion, and sums it up by
saying, that the idea of culture is destined to " transform
and govern " the idea of religion. Now I do not wish to be
pedantic; and I think that we may discuss culture and religion,
and feel that we are talking about the same social and intel-
lectual facts, without attempting any rigorous definition of
our terms. But there is one indefiniteness that oufrht to be
avoided. When we speak of culture and religion in common
conversation, we sometimes refer to an ideal state of things
and sometimes to an actual. But if we are appraising,
weighing, as it were, these two, one with the other, it is
necessary to know whether it is the ideal or the actual that
we are weighing. When I say ideal, I do not mean some-
thing that is not realised at all by individuals at present,
but something not realised sufficiently to be much called to
mind by the term denoting the general social fact, I think
it clear that Mr. Arnold, when he speaks of culture, is
speaking sometimes of an ideal, sometimes of an actual
culture, and does not always know which. He describes it
in one page as " a study of perfection, moving by the force,
not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure
knowledge, but of the moral and social passion for doing
good." A study of this vast aim, moving with the impetus
of this double passion, is something that does, I hope, exist
among us, but to a limited extent ; it is hardly that which
has got itself stamped and recognised as culture. And Mr.
Arnold afterwards admits as much. For we might have

II THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 43

thought, from the words I have quoted, tliat we had in
culture, thus possessed by the passion of doing good, a
mighty social power, continually tending to make " reason
and the will of God prevail." But we find that this power
only acts in fine weather. " It needs times of faith and
ardour to flourish in." Exactly ; it is not itself a spring
and source of faith and ardour. Culture " Lelieves " in
making reason and the will of God prevail, and will even
" endeavour " to make them prevail, but it must be under
very favourable circumstances. This is rather a languid
form of the passion of doing good ; and we feel that we
have passed from the ideal culture, towards which Mr.
Arnold aspires, to the actual culture in which he lives and
moves.

Mr. Arnold afterwards explains to us a little further
how much of the passion for doing good culture involves,
and how it involves it. " Men are all members of one
great whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature
will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest, or
to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest. . . . The
individual is obliged, under pain of being stunted and
enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry
others along with him in his march towards perfection."
These phrases are true of culture as we know it. In using
them Mr. Arnold assumes implicitly what, perhaps, should
have been expressly avowed — that the study of perfection,
as it forms itself in members of the human race, is naturally
and primarily a study of the individual's perfection, and only
incidentally and secondarily a study of the general perfec-
tion of humanity. It is so incidentally and secondarily for
the two reasons Mr. Arnold gives, one internal and the other
external : first, because it finds sympathy as one element of
the human nature that it desires harmoniously to develop ;
and secondly, because the development of one individual is
bound up by the laws of the universe with the development
of at least some other individuals. Still the root of culture,
when examined ethically, is found to be a refined eudie-
monism : in it the social impulse springs out of and re-enters

44 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES U

into the self-regarding, which remains predominant. That
is, I think, the way in which the love of culture is generally
developed : an exquisite pleasure is experienced in refined
states of thought and feeling, and a desire for this pleasure
is generated, which may amount to a passion, and lead to
the utmost intellectual and moral ejffort. Mr. Arnold may,
perhaps, urge (and I would allow it true in certain cases)
that the direct impulse towards perfection, whether realised in
a man's self or in the world around, may inspire and impas-
sion some minds, without any consideration of the enjoy-
ment connected with it. In any case, it must be admitted
that the impulse toward perfection in a man of culture is not
practically limited to himself, but tends to expand in in-
finitely increasing circles. It is the w4sh of culture, taking
ever wider and wider sweeps, to carry the whole race, the
whole universe, harmoniously towards perfection.

And, if it were possible that all men, under all circum-
stances, should feel what some men, in some fortunate
spheres, may truly feel — that there is no conflict, no
antagonism, between the full development of the individual
and the progress of the world — I should be loth to hint at
any jar or discord in this harmonious movement. But this
paradisaical state of culture is rare. We dwell in it a little
space, and then it vanishes into the ideal. Life shows us
the conflict and the discord : on one side are the claims of
harmonious self-development, on the other the cries of
struggling humanity : we have hitherto let our sympathies
expand along with our other refined instincts, but now they
threaten to sweep us into regions from which those refined
instincts shrink. Not that harmonious self-development
calls on us to crush our sympathies ; it asks only that they
should be a little repressed, a little kept under : we may
become (as Mr. Arnold delicately words it) philanthropists
" tempered by renouncement." There is much useful and
important work to be done, which may be done harmoniously:
still we cannot honestly say that this seems to us the most
useful, the most important work, or what in the interests of
the world is most pressingly entreated and demanded. This

II THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 45

latter, if doue at all, must be done as self-sacrifice, not as
self-development. And so we are brought face to face with
the most momentous and profound problem of ethics.

It is at this point, I think, that the relation of culture
and religion is clearly tested and defined. Culture (if I
have understood and analysed it rightly) inevitably takes
one course. It recognises with a sigli the limits of self-
development, and its first enthusiasm becomes " tempered
by renouncement." Ileligion, of which the essence is self-
sacrifice, inevitably takes the other course. We see this
daily realised in practice : we see those we know and love,
we see the elite of humanity in history and literature,
coming to tliis question, and after a struggle answering it :
going, if they are strong clear souls, some one way and some
the other ; if they are irresolute, vacillating and " moving
in a strange diagonal " between the two. It is because he
ignores this antagonism, which seems to me so clear and
undeniable if stated without the needless and perilous
exaggerations which preachers liave used about it, that I
have called Mr. Arnold perverse. A philosopher ^ with
whom he is more familiar than I am speaks, I think, of
" the reconciliation of antagonisms " as the essential feature
of the most important steps in the progress of humanity.
I seem to see profound truth in this conception, and perliaps
Mr. Arnold has intended to realise it. But, in order to
reconcile antagonisms, it is needful to probe tliem to the
bottom ; whereas Mr. Arnold skims over them with a lightly-
won tranquillity that irritates instead of soothing.

Of course we are all continually trying to reconcile this
and other antagonisms, and many persuade themselves that
they have found a reconciliation. The religious man tells
himself that in obeying the instinct of self-sacrifice he has
chosen true culture, and the man of culture tells himself
that by seeking self-development he is really taking the
best course to " make reason and the will of God prevail."
But I do not think either is quite convinced. I think each
dimly feels that it is necessary for the world that the other

' Hegel.

46 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

II

line of life should be chosen by some, and each and all look
forward with yearning to a time when circumstances shall
have become kinder and more pliable to our desires, and
when the complex impulses of humanity that we share shall
have been chastened and purified into something more easy
to harmonise. And sometimes the human race seems to the
eye of enthusiasm so very near this consummation : it seems
that if just a few simple things were done it would reach it.
But these simple things prove mountains of difficulty ; and
the end is far off I remember saying to a friend once — a
man of deep culture — tliat his was a " fair-weather theory
of life." He answered with much earnestness, " We mean
it to be fair weather henceforth." And I hope the skies are
growing clearer every century ; but meanwhile there is much
storm and darkness yet, and we want — the world wants —
all the self-sacrifice that religion can stimulate. Culture
diffuses " sweetness and light " ; I do not undervalue these
blessings : but religion gives fire and strength, and the world
wauts fire and strength even more than sweetness and light.
Mr. Arnold feels this when he says that culture must "borrow
a devout energy " from religion ; l3ut devout energy, as Dr.
Newman somewhere says, is not to be borrowed. At the
same time, I trust that the ideal of culture and the ideal of
religion will continually approach one another : that culture
will keep developing its sympathy, and gain in fire and
strength ; that religion will teach that unnecessary self-
sacrifice is folly, and that whatever tends to make life harsh
and gloomy cometh of evil. And if we may allow that the
progress of culture is clearly in this direction, surely we may
say the same of religion. Indeed the exegetic artifices by
which the Hellenic view of life is introduced and allowed a
place in Christian preaching would sometimes be almost
ludicrous, if they were not touching, and if they were not,
on the whole, such a sign of a hopeful progress : of progress not
as yet, perhaps, very great or very satisfactory, but still very
distinct. I wish Mr. Arnold had recognised this. I do not
think he would then have said that culture would transform
and absorb religion, any more than that religion would

n THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 47

transform aud absorb culture. To me the ultimate and
ideal relation of culture and religion is imaged like the
union of tlie golden and silver sides of the famous shield
— each leading to the same " orbed perfection " of actions
and results, but shining with a diverse splendour in the
light of its different principle.

Into the dithculties of this question I have barely-
entered ; but I hope I have shown the inadequacy of Mr.
Arnold's treatment of it. I think we shall be more per-
suaded of this inadequacy when we have considered how
he conceives of actual religion in the various forms in which
it exists among us. He has but one distinct thing to say
of them, — that they subdue the obvious faults of our
animality. They form a sort of spiritual police : that is
all. He says nothing of the emotional side of religion ; of
the infinite and infinitely varied vent which it gives, in its
various forms, for the deepest fountains of feeling. He says
nothing of its intellectual side : of the indefinite but inevit-
able questions about the world and human destiny into
which the eternal metaphysical problems form themselves
in minds of rudimentary development ; questions needing
confident answers — nay, imperatively demanding, it seems,
from age to age, different answers : of the actual facts of
psychological experience, so strangely mixed up with, and
expressed in, the mere conventional "jargon" of religion
(which he characterises with appropriate contempt) — how
the moral growth of men and nations, while profoundly
influenced and controlled by the formulie of traditional
religions, is yet obedient to laws of its own, and in its turn
reacts upon and modifies these formulae : of all this Mr.
Arnold does not give a hint. He may say that he is not
treating of religions, but of culture. But it may be replied
that he is treating of the relation of culture to religions ;
and that a man ought not to touch cursorily upon such a
question, much less to dogmatise placidly upon it, without
showing us that he has mastered the elements of the
problem.

I may, perhaps, illustrate my meaning by referring to

48 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ii

another essayist — one of the very few whom I consider
superior to Mr. Arnold — one who is as strongly attached to
culture as Mr. Arnold himself, and perhaps more passion-
ately,— M. Renan. It will be seen that I am not going to
quote a partisan. From " my countryman's " judgment of
our Protestant organisations I appeal boldly to a Frenchman
and an infidel. Let any one turn to M. Eenan's delicate,
tender, sympathetic studies of religious phenomena — I do
not refer to the Vie de JSsus, but to a much superior work,
the Essais d'Histoire religicuse, — he will feel, I think, how
coarse, shallow, unappreciative, is Mr. Arnold's summing up,
"they conquer the more obvious faults of our animality."
To take one special point. When Mr. Arnold is harping on
the " dissidence of Dissent," I recall the little phrase which
M. Eenan throws at the magnificent fabric of Bossuet's
attack upon Protestantism. " En France," he says, " on ne
comprend pas qu'on se divise pour si peu de chose." M.
Ptenan knows that ever since the reviving intellect of
Europe was turned upon theology, religious dissidence and
variation has meant religious life and force. Mr. Arnold, of
course, can find texts inculcating unity : how should unity
not be included in the ideal of a religion claiming to be
universal ? But Mr. Arnold, as a cultivated man, has read
the New Testament records with the light of German erudi-
tion, and knows how much unity was attained by the
Church in its fresh and fervent youth. Still, unity is a
part of the ideal even of the religion that came not to send
peace, but a sword : let us be grateful to any one who
keeps that in view, who keeps reminding us of that. But
it may be done without sneers. Mr. Arnold might know
(if he would only study them a little more closely and
tenderly) the passionate longing for unity that may be
cherished within small dissident organisations. I am not
defending them. I am not saying a word for separatism
against multitudinism. But those who feel that worship
ought to be the true expression of the convictions on which
it is based, and out of which it grows, and that in the
present fragmentary state of truth it is supremely difficult

II THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 49

to reconcile unity of worship with sincerity of conviction —
those who know that the struggle to realise in combination
the ideals of truth and peace in many minds reaches the
pitch of agony — will hardly think that Mr. Arnold's taunt
is the less cruel because it is pointed with a text.

I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is as judged
by his own rules and principles that I venture to condemn
Mr. Arnold's treatment of our actual religions. He has said
that culture in its most limited phase is curiosity ; and I
quite sympathise in his effort to vindicate for this word the
more exalted meaning that the French give to it. Even of
the ideal culture he considers curiosity (if I understand him
rightly) to be the most essential, though not the noblest,
element. Well, then, I complain that in regard to some of
the most important elements of social life he has so little
curiosity ; and therefore so thin and superficial an apprecia-
tion of them. I do not mean that every cultivated man
ought to have formed for himself a theory of religion.
" Non omnia possumus omnes," and a man must, to some
extent, select the subjects that suit his special faculties.
]^>ut every man of deep culture ought to have a conception
of the importance and intricacy of tlie religious problem, a
sense of the kind and amount of study that is required for
it, a tact to discriminate worthy and unworthy treatment of
it, an instinct which, if he has to touch on it, will guide
him round the lacun?e of apprehension that the limits of
his nature and leisure have rendered inevitable. Now this
cultivated tact, sense, instinct (Mr. Arnold could express my
meaning for me much more felicitously than I can for my-
self), he seems to me altogether to want on this topic. He
seems to me (if so humble a simile may be pardoned) to
judge of religious organisations as a dog judges of human
beings, chiefly by the scent. One admires in either case
the exquisite development of the organ, but feels that the
use of it for this particular object implies a curious, an
almost ludicrous, limitation of sympathy. When these
popular religions are brought before Mr. Arnold, he is
content to detect their strong odours of Philistinism and

so ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ii

vulgarity ; he will not stoop down and look into them ; he
is not sufficiently interested in their dynamical importance ;
he does not car^ to penetrate the secret of their fire and
strength, and learn the sources and effects of these ; much
less does he consider how sweetness and light may be added
without any loss of fire and strength.

This limitation of view in Mr. Arnold seems to me the
more extraordinary, when I compare it with the fervent
language he uses with respect to what is called, jpar excellence,
the Oxford movement. He even half associates himself
with the movement — or rather he half associates the move-
ment with himself.

It was directed, he rightly says, against " Liberalism as
Dr. Newman saw it." What was this ? " It was," he
explains, " the great middle class Liberalism, which had for
the cardinal points of its belief the Reform Bill of 1 8 3 2 and
local self-government in politics ; in the social sphere free
trade, unrestricted competition, and the making of large
industrial fortunes ; in the religious sphere the dissidence of
Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion."
Liberalism to Dr Newman may have meant something of all
this ; but what (as I infer from the Apologia) it more
especially meant to him was a much more intelligent force
than all these, which Mr. Arnold omits : and pour cause ;
for it was precisely that view of the functions of religion
and its place in the social organism in which Mr. Arnold
seems at least complacently to acquiesce. Liberalism, Dr.
Newman thought — and it seems to me true of one phase or
side of Liberalism — wished to extend just the languid
patronage to religion that Mr. Arnold does. What priest-
hoods were good for in the eyes of Liberalism were the
functions, as I have said, of spiritual police ; and that is all
Mr. Arnold thinks they are good for at present ; and even
in the future (unless I misunderstand him), if we want
more, he would have us come to culture. But Dr. New-
man knew that even the existing religions, far as they fell
below his ideal, were good for much more than this ; this
view of them seemed to him not only shallow and untrue,

n THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 51

bat perilous, deadly, soul-destroying ; and inasmuch as it
commended itself to intellectual men, and was an intelligent
force, he fought against it, not, I think, with much sweetness
or light, but with a blind, eager, glowing asperity which,
tempered always by humility and candour, was and is very
impressive. Dr. Newman fought fur a point of view which
it required culture to appreciate, and therefore he fought in
some sense with culture ; but he did not fight for culture,
and to conceive him combating side by side with Mr.
Matthew Arnold is almost comical.

I think, then, that without saying more about religion,
Mr. Arnold might have said truer things about it ; and I
think also that without saying less about culture — we have
a strong need of all he can say to recommend it — he might
have shown that he was alive to one or two of its besetting
faults. And some notice of these might have strengthened
his case ; for he might have shown that the faults of culture
really arise from lack of culture ; and that more culture,
deeper and truer culture, removes them. I have ventured
to hint this in speaking of Mr. Arnold's tone about religion.
What I dislike in it seems to me, when examined, to be
exactly what he calls Philistinism ; just as when he com-
mences his last lecture before a great university by referring
to his petty literary squabbles, he seems to me guilty of what
he calls " provincialism." And so, again, the attitude that
culture often assumes towards enthusiasm in general seems
to spring from narrowness, from imperfection of culture.
The fostering care of culture, and a soft application of sweet-
ness and lis;ht, mirdit do so much for enthusiasm — enthu-
siasm does so much want it. Enthusiasm is often a turbid
issue of smoke and sparks. Culture might refine this to a
steady glow. It is melancholy when, instead, it takes to
pouring cold water on it. The worst result is not the
natural hissing and sputtering that ensues, though that
cannot be pleasing to culture or to anything else, but the
waste of power that is the inevitable consequence.

It is wrong to exaggerate the antagonism between
enthusiasm and culture ; because, in the first place, culture

52 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES il

has an enthusiasm of its own, by virtue of which indeed, as
Mr. Arnold contemplates, it is presently to transcend and
absorb religion. But at present this enthusiasm, so far from
being adequate to this, is hardly sufficient — is often in-
sufficient— to prevent culture degenerating into dilettantism.
In the second place, culture has an appreciation of enthusi-
asm (with the source of which it has nothing to do), when
that enthusiasm is beautiful and picturesque, or thrilling
and sublime, as it often is. But the enthusiasm must be
very picturesque, very sublime ; upon some completed
excellence of form culture will rigorously insist. May it
not be that culture is short-sighted and pedantic in the
rigour of these demands, and thus really defeats its own
ends, just as it is often liable to do by purely artistic
pedantry and conventionality ? If it had larger and
healthier sympathies, it might see beauty in the stage
of becoming (if I may use a German phrase), in much
rough and violent work at which it now shudders. In pure
art culture is always erring on the side of antiquity — much
more in its sympathy with the actual life of men and
society. In some of the most beautiful lines he has
written, Owen Meredith expresses a truth that deserves to
be set in beautiful language :

I know that all acted time
By that which succeeds it is ever received
As calmer, completer, and more sublime,
Only because it is finished ; because
We only behold the thing it achieved,
We behold not the thing that it was.
For while it stands whole and immutable
In the marlde of memory, how can we tell
Wliat the men that have hewn at the block may have been ?
Their passion is merged in its passionlessness ;
Their strife in its stillness closed tor ever ;
Their change upon change in its changelessness ;
In its final achievement their feverish endeavour.

Passion, strife, feverish endeavour — surely in the midst of
these have been produced not only the rough blocks with
which the common world builds, but the jewels with which

II THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 53

culture is adorned. Culture the other day thought Mr.
Garrison a very prosy aud uninteresting person, and did not
see why so much fuss should be made about him ; but I
should not be surprised if in a hundred years or so he were
found to be poetical and picturesque.

And I will go farther, aud plead for interests duller and
vulgarer than any fanaticism.

If any culture really has what Mr. Arnold in his finest
mood calls its noblest element, the passion for propagating
itself, for making itself prevail, then let it learn " to call
nothing common or unclean." It can only propagate itself
by shedding the light of its sympathy liberally ; by learning
to love common people and common things, to feel common
interests. Make people feel that their own poor life is ever
so little beautiful and poetical ; then they will begin to turn
and seek after the treasures of beauty and poetry outside
and above it. Pictorial culture is a little vexed at the
success of Mr. Frith's pictures, at the thousands of pounds
he gets, and the thousands of people that crowd to see them.
Now I do not myself admire Mr. Frith's pictures ; but I
think he diffuses culture more than some of his acid critics,
and I should like to think that he got twice as many pounds
and spectators. If any one of these grows eagerly fond of a
picture of Mr. Frith's, then, it seems to me, the infinite path
of culture is open to him ; I do not see why he should not
go on till he can conscientiously praise the works of Pietro
Perugino. But leaving Mr. Frith (and other painters and
novelists that might be ranked with him), let us consider a
much greater man, Macaulay. Culture has turned up its
nose a little at our latest English classic, and would, I
think, have done so more, but that it is touched and awed
by his wonderful devotion to literature. But Macaulay,
though he loved literature, loved also common people and
common things, and therefore he can make the common
people who live among common things love literature.
How Philistinish it is of him to be stirred to eloquence by
the thought of " the opulent and enlightened states of Italy,
the vast and magnificent cities, the ports, the arsenals, the

54 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES il

villas, the museums, the libraries, the marts filled with
every article of comfort and luxury, the factories swarming
with artisans, the Apennines covered with rich cultivation
up to their very summits, the Po wafting the harvest of
Lombardy to the granaries of Venice, and carrying back the
silks of Bengal and the furs of Siberia to the palaces of
Milan." But the Philistine's heart is opened by these
images ; through his heart a way is found to his taste ;
he learns how delightful a melodious current of stirring
words may be ; and then, when Macaulay asks him to
mourn for " the wit and the learnino- and the genius " of
Florence, he does not refuse faintly to mourn ; and so
Philistinism and culture kiss each other.

Again, when our greatest living poet " dips into the
future," what does he see ?

The heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

Why, it might be the vision of a young general merchant.
I doubt whether anything similar could be found in a
French or German poet (I might except Victor Hugo to
prove the rule) : he would not feel the image poetical, and
perhaps if he did, would not dare to say so. The Germans
have in their way immense honesty and breadth of sympathy,
and I like them for it. I like to be made to sympathise with
their middle-class enthusiasm for domestic life and bread-
and-butter. Let us be bold, and make them sjanpathise
with our middle-class affection for commerce and bustle.

Ah, I wish I could believe that Mr. Arnold was de-
scribing the ideal and not the actual, when he dwells on
the educational, the missionary, function of culture, and
says that its greatest passion is for making sweetness and
light prevail. For I think we might soon be agreed as to
how they may be made to prevail. Religions have been
propagated by the sword : but culture cannot be propagated
by the sword, nor by the pen sharpened and wielded like
an offensive weapon. Culture, like all spiritual gifts, can
only be propagated by enthusiasm : and by enthusiasm that

II THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 55

has got rid of asperity, that has become sympathetic ; that
has got rid of Pharisaism, and become humble. I suppose
Mr. Arnold would hardly deny that in the attitude in
which lie shows himself, contemplating the wealthy Thilis-
tine through his eyeglass, he has at least a superficial
resemblance to a Pharisee. Let us not be too hard on
Pharisaism of any kind. It is better that religion should
be self-asserting than that it should be crushed and stifled
by rampant worldliuess ; and where the worship of wealth
is predominant it is perhaps a necessary antagonism that
intellect should be self-asserting. But I cannot see that
intellectual Pharisaism is any less injurious to true culture
than religious Pharisaism to true worship ; and when a
poet keeps congratulating himself that he is not a Philistine,
and pointing out (even exaggerating) all the differences
between himself and a Philistine, I ask myself, Where is
the sweetness of culture ? For the moment it seems to
have turned sour.

Perhaps what is most disappointing in our culture is its
want of appreciation of the " sap of progress," the creative
and active element of things. We all remember the pro-
found epigram of Agassiz, that the world in dealing with a
new truth passes through three stages : it first says that it
is not true, then that it is contrary to religion, and finally,
that we knew it before. Culture is raised above the first
two stages, but it is apt to disport itself complacently in
the third. " Culture," we are told, " is always assigning to
the system-maker and his system a smaller share in the
bent of human destiny than their friends like." Quite so :
a most useful function : but culture does this with so much
zest that it is continually overdoing it. The system-maker
may be compared to a man who sees that mankind want a
house built. He erects a scaffolding with much unassisted
labour, and begins to build. The scaffbldin«T is often un-
necessarily large and clumsy, and the system-maker is apt
to keep it up much longer than it is needed. Culture
looks at the unsightly structure with contempt, and from
time to time kicks over some useless piece of timber. The

56 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ii

house, however, gets built, is seen to be serviceable, and
culture is soon found benevolently diffusing svi^eetness and
light through the apartments. I'or culture perceives the
need of houses ; and is even ready to say in its royal way,
' Let suitable mansions be prepared ; only without this
eternal hammering, these obtrusive stones and timber.'
We must not forget, however, that construction and de-
struction are treated with equal impartiality. When a
miserable fanatic has knocked down some social abuse with
much peril of life and limb, culture is good enough to point
out to him that he need not have taken so much trouble :
culture had seen the thing was falling ; it would soon have
fallen of its own accord ; the crash has been unpleasant,
and raised a good deal of disagreeable dust.

All this criticism of action is very valuable ; but it is
usually given in excess, just because, I think, culture is a
little sore in conscience, is uncomfortably eager to excuse
its own evident incapacity for action. Culture is always
hinting at a convenient season, that rarely seems to arrive.
It is always suggesting one decisive blow that is to
be gracefully given ; but it is so difficult to strike quite
harmoniously, and without some derangement of attitude.
Hence an instinctive, and, I think, irrational, discourage-
ment of the action upon which less cultivated people are
meanwhile spending themselves. For what does action,
social action, really mean ? It means losing oneself in a
mass of disagreeable, hard, mechanical details, and trying to
influence many dull or careless or bigoted people for the
sake of ends that were at first of doubtful brilliancy, and
are continually being dimmed and dwarfed by the clouds of
conflict. Is this the kind of thing to which human nature
is desperately prone, and into which it is continually
rushing with perilous avidity ? Mr. Arnold may say that
he does not discourage action, but only asks for delay, in
order that we may act with sufficient knowledge. This is
the eternal excuse of indolence — insufficient knowledge :
still, taken cautiously, the warning is valuable, and we may
thank Mr. Arnold for it : we cannot be too much stimu-

11 THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 57

lated to study the laws of the social phenomena that we
wish to modify, in order that " reason the card " may be as
complete and accurate as possible. But we remember that
we have heard all this before at much leni,'th from a very
different sort of prophet. It has been preached to us by a
school small, but energetic (energetic to a degree that
causes Mr. Arnold to scream ' Jacobinism ! ') : and the
preaching has been not in the name of culture, but in the
name of religion and self-sacrifice.

I do not ask much sympathy for the people of action
from the people of culture : I will show by an example
how much. Paley somewhere, in one of his optimistic
expositions of the comfortableness of things, remarks, that
if he is ever inclined to grumble at his taxes, when he gets
his newspaper he feels repaid ; he feels that he could not
lay out the money better than in purchasing the spectacle
of all this varied life and bustle. There are more taxes
now, but there are more and bigger newspapers : let us
hope that Paley would still consider the account balanced.
Now, might not Mr. Arnold imbibe a little of this pleasant
spirit? As it is, no one who is doing anything can feel
that Mr. Arnold hearing of it is the least bit more content
to pay his taxes — that is, unless he is doing it in some
supremely graceful and harmonious way.

One cannot think on this subject without recalling the
great man who recommended to philosophy a position
very similar to that now claimed for culture. I wish to
give Mr. Arnold the full benefit of his resemblance to
Plato. But when we look closer at the two positions, the
dissimilarity comes out : they have a very different effect
on our feelings and imagination ; and I confess I feel more
sympathy with the melancholy philosopher looking out with
hopeless placidity " from beneath the shelter of some wall "
on the storms and dust-clouds of blind and selfish conflict,
than with a cheerful modern liberal, tempered by renounce-
ment, shuddering aloof from the rank exhalations of vulgar
enthusiasm, and holding up the pouncet-box of culture
betwixt the wind and his nobility.

58 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES n

To prolong this fault-finding would be neither pleasant
nor profitable. But perhaps many who love culture much
— and respect the enthusiasm of those who love it more —
may be sorry when it is brought into antagonism with
things that are more dear to them even than culture. I
think Mr. Arnold wishes for the reconciliation of antago-
nisms : I think that in many respects, with his subtle
eloquence, his breadth of view, and above all his admirable
temper, he is excellently fitted to reconcile antagonisms ;
and therefore I am vexed when I find him, in an access of
dilettante humour, doing not a little to exasperate and
exacerbate them, and dropping from the prophet of an
ideal culture into a more or less prejudiced advocate of
the actual.

TIT

THE POEMS AND PEOSE REMAINS OF ARTHUR

HUGH CLOUGH^

( Westminster Review, October 1869)

These two volumes contain all that will now be given to
the world of a very rare and remarkable mind. The editor
has, we think, exercised a wise confidence in transgressing
what is usually a safe rule in posthumous publications, and
including in the volume some prose that the author had
probably not composed for permanence, and some verse that
is either palpably unfinished, or at any rate not stamped
with the author's final approval. Clough's productive im-
pulse was not energetic, and only operated under favourable
conditions, which the circumstances of his life but scantily
afforded. Therefore the sum-total of his remains, when all
is included, does not form an unwieldy book ; and on the
other hand his work is so sincere and independent that
even when the result is least interesting it does not dis-
appoint, while his production is always so rigidly in ac-
cordance with the inner laws of his nature, and expresses
so faithfully the working of his mind, that nothing we have
here could have been spared, without a loss of at least bio-
graphical completeness. There is much that will hardly be
interesting, except to those who have been powerfully
infiuenced by the individuality of the author. But the
number of such persons (as every evidence shows), has not

^ The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a Selection
from his Letters, and a Memoir. Edited by his Wife. London : JIacmillan
and Co. 1869.

59

6o ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES iii

diminished, but largely increased during the ten years that
have elapsed since his death : the circle of interest has
gone on widening without becoming fainter, and now in-
cludes no small portion of a younger generation, to whom
especially the publication of these volumes will afford
timely and welcome gratification.

The tentative and gradual process by which Clough's
remains have been published is evidence and natural result
of the slow growth of his popularity. For this there seem
to have been several reasons. It is partly due to the
subject-matter of his writings. He was in a very literal
sense before his age. His point of view and habit of mind
are less singular in England in the year 1869 than they
were in 1859, and much less than they were in 1849.
We are growing year by year more introspective and
self-conscious : the current philosophy leads us to a close,
patient, and impartial observation and analysis of our
luental processes : and the current philosophy is partly the
effect and partly the cause of a more widespread tendency.
We are "rowing at the same time more unreserved and
unveiled in our expression : in conversations, in journals
and books, we more and more say and write what we
actually do think and feel, and not what we intend to
think or should desire to feel. We are growing also more
sceptical in the proper sense of the word : we suspend our
judgment much more than our predecessors, and much more
contentedly : we see that there are many sides to many
questions : the opinions that we do hold we hold if not
more loosely, at least more at arm's length : we can imagine
how they appear to others, and can conceive ourselves not
holding them. We are losing in faith and confidence : if
we are not failing in hope, our hopes at least are becoming
more indefinite ; and we are gaining in impartiality and
comprehensiveness of sympathy. In each of these respects,
Clough, if he were still alive, would find himself gradually
more and more at home in the changing world. In the
second place his style, at least in his longer poems, is,
though without any affectation, very peculiar : at the same

Ill ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH 6i

time he has not sufficient loudness of utterance to compel
public attention. Such a style is naturally slow in making
way. Even a sympathising reader has to get accustomed
to its oddities before he can properly feel its beauties.
Afterwards, if it has real excellence, its peculiarity becomes
an additional charm. Again, the chief excellence of Clough's
style lies in a very delicate and precise adaptation of form
to matter, attained with felicitous freshness and singular
simplicity of manner ; it has little superficial brilliancy
wlierewith to captivate a reader who through carelessness
or want of sympathy fails to apprehend the nuance of
feeling.

To this we may perhaps add, that the tone which many
of Clough's personal friends have adopted in speaking of
the author and his writings has, though partly the result,
been also partly the cause of the slow growth of their
popularity. It was, for example, certainly a misfortune
that in issuing the first posthumous edition of these poems,
Mrs. Clougli prefaced them with a notice by Mr. Palgrave,
a critic of much merit, but quite inappreciative of his
friend's peculiar genius, and whose voluble dogmatism
renders his well-meant patronage particularly depressing.
There is a natural disposition among personal friends to
dwell upon unrealised possibilities, and exalt what a man
would, could, or should have done at the expense of what
he actually did ; and to this in Clough's case circumstances
were very favourable. In the first place he produced very
little, and the habit of demanding from candidates for
literary fame a certain quantum of production seems in-
veterate, though past experience has shown the fallacy of
the demand, and we may expect it to become still more
patent in the future. Indeed, if we continue as we are
now doing, to extend our own literary production and our
sympathy and familiarity with past and alien literature
fari passu, the reader of the future will have so much
difficulty in distributing his time among the crowd of
immortal works, that he certainly will contract a dislike
to the more voluminous. And in the case of poems like

62 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES in

these, that are attractive chiefly because they are charac-
teristical and representative, because they express in an
original and appropriate manner a side of human life, a
department of thought and feeling, that waited for poetical
expression, voluminous production seems not only unneces-
sary but even dangerous. On a subjective poet continence
should especially be enjoined ; if he writes much he is in
danger of repeating words or tune ; if he tries to write
much he is in danger of mistaking his faculties and forcing
his inspiration.

But besides this scantiness of production, there is much
in the external aspect of Clough's career which justifies the
disposition to regard his life as "wasted" — at best an interest-
ing failure. We have before us a man always trying to solve
insoluble problems, and reconcile secular antagonisms, ponder-
ing the " uralte ewige Eathsel " of existence, at once inert
and restless, finding no fixed basis for life nor elevated sphere
of action, tossed from one occupation to another, and ex-
hausting his energies in work that brought little money and
no fame ; a man who cannot suit himself to the world nor
the world to him, who will neither heartily accept mundane
conditions and pursue the objects of ordinary mankind, nor
effectively reject them as a devotee of something definite ;
a dreamer who will not even dream pleasant dreams, a man
who " makes the worst of both worlds."

This is no doubt a natural complaint from a practical
point of view, but it ignores the fact that the source of
Clough's literary originality and importance lies precisely in
what unfitted him for practical success. He was overweighted
with certain impulses, felt certain feelings with a too ab-
sorbing and prolonged intensity; but the impulses were
noble, at least an " infirmity of noble minds "; they are inci-
dent to most fine natures at a certain stage of their develop-
ment, and generally are not repressed without a certain
sense of loss and sacrifice. This phase of feeling is worthy
of being worthily expressed, and it is natural that it should
be so expressed by one who feels it more strongly than
other men — too strongly for his own individual happiness.

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CHOUGH 63

It is the same with other phases of feeling. Out of many
poets there are few Goethes ; the most are sacrificed in
some sort to their poetical function, and it is but a common-
place sympathy that loudly regrets it. Those at any rate
who had no personal knowledge of Clough, may recognise
that this life, apparently so inharmonious, was really in the
truest harmony with the work that nature gave him to do.
In one sense, no doubt, that work was incomplete and frag-
mentary ; the effort of tlie man who ponders insoluble
problems, and spends his passion on the vain endeavour to
reconcile aspirations and actualities, must necessarily be so ;
the incompleteness is essential, not accidental. But his
expression of what he had to express is scarcely incomplete,
and though we have no doubt lost something by his premature
death we can hardly think that we have lost the best he had
to give. His poetical utterance was connected by an inner
necessity with his personal experience, and he had already
passed into a phase of thought and feeling which could
hardly lead to artistic expression so penetrating and stirring
as his earlier poems.

But we shall better discuss this question after a closer
examination of his work, of what he had to express and how
he expressed it.

In this examination we shall treat Clough as a poet. It
is necessary to premise this, because he was a philosophic
poet, — a being about whose nature and raison cVetre the
critical world is not thoroughly agreed. Philosophic poetry
is often treated as if it was versified philosophy, as if its
primary function was to ' convey ideas,' the only question
being whether these should be conveyed with or without
metre. Proceeding on this assumption, an influential sect
maintains that there ought to be no philosophic poetry at
all ; that the ' ideas ' it ' conveys ' had much better seek
the channel of prose. To us it seems that what poetry has
to communicate is not ideas but moods and feelings ; and
that if a feeling reaches sufficient intensity, whatever be its
specific quality, it is adapted for a poetical form, though
highly intellectual moods are harder to mould to the con-

64 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES ill

ditions of metrical expression than others. The question is
often raised, especially at the present day, when our leading
poets are philosophic, whether such and such a poem —
say Browning's Christinas Eve, or parts of In Memoriam
— would not have been better in prose. And the question
is often a fair one for discussion, but a wrong criterion is
used for determining it. If such a poem is really unpoeti-
cal, it is not because it contains too much thought, but
too little feeling to steep and penetrate the thought. Tried
by this test, a good deal of Browning's thought-laden verse,
and some of Tennyson's, will appear not truly poetical ; the
feeling is not adequate. Although Clough sometimes fails
in this way, it may generally be said that with him the
greater the contention of thought, the more intense is the
feeling transfused through it. He becomes unpoetical
chiefly when he becomes less eagerly intellectual, when he
lapses for a moment into mild optimism, or any form of
languid contentment ; or when like Wordsworth he caresses
a rather too trivial mood ; very rarely when the depths of
his mind are stirred. He is, then, pre-eminently a philo-
sophic poet, communicator of moods that depend on profound
and complex trains of reflection, abstract and highly refined
speculations, subtle intellectual perceptions, and that cannot
be felt unless these are properly apprehended. He is to a
great extent a poet for thinkers ; but he moves them not
as a thinker, but as a poet.

We do not mean to say that Clough was not a thinker ;
but the term was somewhat indefinite, and in one sense he
was not. His mind brooded over a few great questions, and
was rather finely receptive than eagerly discursive ; he did
not enjoy the mere exercise of thought for its own sake.
This is evidenced by the first of the volumes before us,
especially the letters, which, except in the rare instances
where he drops to his habitual depth of meditation, are
perhaps somewhat disappointing. There is humour in them,
but the vein is thin ; and subtlety, perpetual subtlety, and
from time to time a pleasant flow of characteristically
whimsical fancy ; there is also a permanent accuracy, pro-

Ill ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH 65

priety, justesse of observation, remarkable in compositions so
carelessly thrown off; but fertility and rapid movement of
ideas are wanting. They do not seem the work of a mind
that ranges with pleasure and vigour over all subjects that
come in its way. The critical essays, again, that have been
republished, though exceedingly just, careful, and indepen-
dent, and therefore always worth reading, are not very
striking ; with the exception of occasional passages where
passionate utterance is given to some great general truth.
But though he was too much of a poet to care greatly for
the mere exercise of the cognitive faculties, though no one
could less have adopted the " philosopher's paradox " of
Lessing, we may still call him philosophic from his pas-
sionate devotion not to search after truth, but to truth
itself — absolute, exact truth. He was philosophic in his
horror of illusions and deceptions of all kinds ; in his per-
petual watchfulness against prejudices and prepossessions ;
against the Idols, as Bacon calls them, of the Cave and the
Theatre, as well as of the Tribe and the Market-place. He
was made for a free-thinker rather than a scientific inquirer.
His skill lay in balancing assertions, comparing points of
view, sifting gold from dross in the intellectual products
presented to him, rejecting the rhetorical, defining the vague,
paring away the exaggerative, reducing theory and argument
to their simplest form, their " lowest terms." " Lumen
siccum," as he calls it in one of his poems, is the object of
his painful search, his eager hope, his anxious loyalty.

The intellectual function, then, which Clough naturally
assumed was scepticism of the Socratic sort — scepticism occu-
pied about problems on which grave practical issues depended.
The fundamental assumptions involved in men's habitual
lines of endeavour, which determined their ends and guided
the formation of their rules, he was continually endeavouring
to clear from error, and fix upon a sound basis. He would
not accept either false solutions or no solutions, nor, unless
very reluctantly, provisional solutions. At the same time,
he saw just as clearly as other men that the continued con-
templation of insoluble problems is not merely unpractical,

F

66 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES m

but anti-practical ; and that a healthy and natural instinct
forces most men, after a few years of feverish youthful
agitation, resolutely to turn away from it. But with this
instinct Clough's fine passion for absolute truth conflicted ;
if he saw two sides of a question, he must keep seeking a
point of view from which they might be harmonised. In
one of the most impressive of the poems classed in this
edition as Songs in Absence, he describes his disposition

To finger idly some old Gordian knot,
Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave ;

but the reluctance to cleave knots, in the speculative sphere,
does not proceed from weakness.

It is this supreme loyalty to reason, combining and con-
flicting with the most comprehensive and profound sympathy
with other elements of human nature, that constitutes the
peculiar charm of Clough's scepticism, and its peculiar
adaptation to poetical expression. Towards the beliefs to
which other men were led by their desires, he was as
strongly, or more strongly, impelled than others ; the asser-
tions in which they formulated their hopes he would gladly
have made with the same cheerful dogmatism. His yearn-
ing for the ideal he never tried to quench or satisfy with
aught but its proper satisfaction ; but meanwhile the claims
of the real, to be accepted as real, are paramount. He
clings to the " beauty of his dreams ; " but — two and two
make four. It is the painfulness, and yet inevitableness of
this conflict, the childlike simplicity and submissiveness with
which he yields himself up to it ; the patient tenacity with
which he refuses to quit his hold of any of the conflicting
elements ; the consistency with which it is carried into
every department of life ; the strange mixture of sympathy
and want of sympathy with his fellow-creatures that neces-
sarily accompanies it — that makes the moods which he has
expressed in verse so rare, complex, subtle, and intense.

We may classify these moods, according to a division
suggested by this edition, into first, those of religious scepti-
cism, where the philosophic impulse is in conflict with the

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 67

mystical; secondly, those of ethical scepticism, where it
contends with habitual active principles ; thirdly, those
where it is perplexed with the most clamorous and absorb-
ing of human enthusiasms, the passion which forms the
peculiar topic of poetry. It is this latter division that at
once completes the consistency of Clough's scepticism, and
forms its most novel, original, and least understood applica-
tion. As he himself says, not only " saint and sage," but
also " poet's dreams,"

Divide the light in coloured streams ;

the votary of truth must seek " lumen siccum."

The personal history of Clough's religious scepticism has
rather to be guessed than known from the records of his
life that lie before us. The memoir prefixed to the volume,
written with great delicacy and dignity, but with an un-
reserve and anxious exactness in describing his phases of
thought and feeling worthy of the subject and most grateful
to the reader, can tell us little on this head. Nor do the
letters that lead us up to the time when he must in effect
have abandoned the beliefs of his childhood at all prepare
us for so deep a change. At Rugby he seems to have
yielded himself entirely to the influence of Arnold, and to
have embraced with zealous docility the view of life which
that remarkable man impressed so strongly, for good or for
evil, on his more susceptible pupils. But though some-
what over-solemn and prematurely earnest, like many Rugby
boys of the time, he was saved from priggishness by his
perfect simplicity. At Balliol he shows nothing of the
impulsiveness, vehemence, and restlessness, the spirit of
dispute and revolt, which are supposed to precede and
introduce deliberate infidelity. Thrown upon Oxford at the
time when the " Newmanitish phantasm," as he calls it,
was startling and exciting Young England, he writes of the
movement to his friends with a mild and sober eclecticism —
a tranquil juste-milieii temper which would become a dean.
He is candidly observant, gives measured admiration for good
points, notes extravagances, suggests the proper antidotes,

68 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

HI

seems disposed, on the whole, to keep out of the atmos-
phere of controversy and devote himself to his studies.
Nothing could give smoother promise of untroubled ortho-
doxy. It is true that he speaks of being " exhausted by
the vortex of philosophism "; and he must have been much
more powerfully influenced by Newmanism. than these
letters indicate. He said afterwards, that for two years of
this time he had been " like a straw drawn up the vortex
of a chimney." His mind seems habitually to have been
swayed by large, slow, deep-sea currents, the surface remain-
ing placid, even tame ; such a steady hidden movement it
seems to have been that floated him away from his old
moorings of belief. Gradually or suddenly the theologico-
juridical, ecclesiastico-mystical dialectics that went on around
him became shadowy and unreal : all his religious needs,
hopes, aspirations remaining the same, a new view of the
universe, with slowly accumulating force, impressed itself
irresistibly on his mind, with which not only the intellectual
beliefs entwined with these needs and aspirations seemed
incompatible, but even these latter fundamentally in-
congruous. And thus began a conflict between old and
new that was to last his life, the various moods of which
the series of his religious poems, solemn, passionate, and
ironical, accurately expresses.'^

Perhaps the first characteristic that we notice in these
is their rare reality and spontaneity. We feel that they
are uttered, just as they appear, from an inner necessity;
there was no choice to say them or not to say them. With

1 A similar account is to be given of another event in his life, his abandonment
of outward conformity to Anglicanism and its material appurtenances of an Oriel
fellowship and tutorship. No reader of his life and writings can doubt that with
him this step was necessarily involved in the change of opinions : yet many years
elapsed between the two, and his biogi\apher thinks that it was "some-half-
accidental confirmation of his doubts as to the honesty and usefulness of his
course " that finally led him to resignation. Such accident can surely have been
but the immediate occasion, expressing the slow hidden gro\si;h of resolve. Lax
subscription to articles was the way of Clough's world : and it belonged to his
balanced temper to follow the way of his world for a time, not approving, but
provisionally submitting and experimentalising. To do what others do till its
unsatisfactoriness has been thoroughly proved, and then suddenly to refuse to do
it any longer, is not exactly heroic, nor is it the way to make life pleasant ; but
as a xna media lietween fanaticism and worldliness, it would naturally commend
itself to a mind like Clough's.

in ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 69

some poets religious unbelief or doubt seems an abiding
attitude of intellect, but only occasionally to engross the
heart ; their utterances have the gusty force of transitory
passion, not the vitality of permanent feeling. But with
Clough it is different : the whole man is in the poems — they
spring from the very core of his being. The levity of some
of them is as touching as the solemnity of others ; it is
a surface - mood, showing explored depths beneath it, in
which an unrestful spirit finds momentary relief Another
characteristic is, that over the saddest cries of regret and
struggles of checked aspiration is spread a certain tran-
quillity— not of hope, still less of despair, but a tranquillity
that has something Aristotelian in it, the tranquillity of
intellectual contemplation. It is curious, for example, to
contrast the imperishable complaint of Alfred de Musset —

Quand j'ai connu la verite,
J'ai cru que c'etait une amie ;
Quand je I'ai comprise et sentie,
J'en otais dfya degoiltd ;

with Clough's

It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so.

The known order of the world, even without the certainty
of a personal God, source or correlate of that order, afforded
somewliat of philosophic satisfaction, however little it could
content the yearnings of his soul. It was a sort of terra
firma, on which he could set his feet, while his eyes gazed
with patient scrutiny into the unanswering void. Further,
we remark in these moods their balanced, complex char-
acter ; there is either a solemn reconciliation of conflicting
impulses, or a subtle and shifting suggestion of different
points of view. Specimens of the former are two hymns
(as we may call them), headed " Qui Idborat oral" and u^t'o?
dvfivo^; ; they attempt to reconcile the intellectual resolve
to retain clear vision with religious self-abandonment. The
latter of these has a little too much intellectual subtlety
and academic antithesis ; but the former is one of Clough's

70 £SSA VS AND ADDRESSES iii

most perfect productions ; there is a deep pathos in the
restrained passion of worship, and the clear-cut exactness of
phrase, as it belongs to the very essence of the sentiment,
enhances the dignity of the style. Somewhat similar in
feeling, but more passionate and less harmonious, is the
following fragment : —

0 let me love my love unto myself alone,

And know my knowledge to the world unknown ;

No witness to the vision call,

Beholding, unbeheld of all ;

And worship Thee, with Thee withdrawn apart,

Whoe'ei", whate'er Thou art.

Within the closest veil of mine own inmost heart.

Better it were, thou sayest, to consent :

Feast while we may, and live ere life be spent ;

Close lip clear eyes, and call the unstable sure,

The unlovely lovely, and the filthy pure ;

In self-belyings, self-deceivings roll.

And lose in Action, Passion, Talk, the soul.

Nay, better far to mark off so much air,
And call it Heaven : place bliss and glory there ;
Fix perfect homes in the unsubstantial sky,
And say, what is not, will be by and by.

Sometimes the intellectual, or as we have called it,
philosophical element, shows itself in a violence of sincerity
that seems reckless, but is rather, to use a German word,
ruchsichtslos ; it disregards other considerations, not from
blind impulse but deep conviction. The tone of the poem
is then that of one walking firmly over red-hot ploughshares,
and attests at once the passion and the painfulness of look-
ing facts in the face. In the fine poem called Easter
Bay (where a full sense of the fascination of the Christian
story and the belief in immortality depending on it, and of
the immensity of its loss to mankind, conflicts with scientific
loyalty to the modern explanation of it), the intensity of
the blended feeling fuses a prosaic material into poetry very
remarkably.

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 71

What if the women, ere the dawm was grey,
Saw one or more great angels, as they say,
(Angels or Him himself) ? Yet neither there, nor then,
Nor afterwards, nor elsewhere, nor at all,
Hath he appeared to Peter or the Ten ;
Nor, save in thunderous terror, to blind Saul ;
Save in an after Gospel and late Creed,
He is not risen, indeed, —
Christ is not risen.

As circulates in some great city crowd
A rumour changeful, vague, importunate, and loud,
From no determined centre, or of fact
Or authorship exact.
Which no man can deny

Nor verify ;
So spread the wondrous fame ;

He all the same
Lay senseless, mouldering, low :
He was not risen, no —

Christ was not risen !

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ;

As of the unjust, also of the just —

Yea, of that Just one, too !
This is the one sad Gospel that is true,

Christ is not risen !

The complex and balanced state of Clough's moods shows
itself in an irony unlike the irony of any other writer ;
it is so subtle, frequently fading to a mere shade, and so
all -pervading. In the midst of apparently most earnest
expression of any view, it surprises us with a suggestion of
the impossibility that that view should be adequate ; some-
times it shifts from one side of a question to the other, so
that it is impossible to tell either from direct expression or
ironical sugoestion what the writer's decision on the whole
is. In some of the later stanzas of the poem we have
quoted the irony becomes very marked, as where the " Men
of Galilee " are addressed —

Ye poor deluded youths, go home.
Mend the old nets ye left to roam,

72 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ill

Tie the split oar, jiatch the torn sail :
It was indeed an "idle tale,"
He was not risen.

The truth is, that though Clough from time to time attempts

to reconcile and settle, his deepest conviction is that all

settlement is premature. We meet continually phrases

like the

Receive it not, yet leave it not,
And wait it out, 0 man,

of one of his earlier poems. To use a favourite image of
his, the universe, by our present arithmetic, comes to much
less than we had fondly imagined. Our arithmetic is sound,
and must be trusted ; in fact, it is the only arithmetic
we have got. Still the disappointing nature of the result
(and let us never pretend to ourselves that it is not
disappointing) may be taken as some evidence of its
incompleteness.

This irony assumes a peculiar tone when it is directed
to vulgar, shallow, unworthy states of mind. It is not
that Clough passionately repudiates these, and takes up a
censorial position outside and over against them ; these, too,
are facts, common and important facts of humanity ; humani
nihil — not even Philistinism — a se alienum putat. His
contempt for them is deep, but not bitter ; indeed, so far
from bitter that a dull pious ear may misperceive in it an
unpleasing levity. His mode of treating them is to present
them in extreme and bald simplicity, so that the mind
recoils from them. A penetrating observer describes some-
thing like this as a part of Clough's conversational manner.
" He had a way," says Mr. Bagehot, " of presenting your
own view to you, so that you saw what it came to, and that
you did not like it." A good instance of this occurs in an
unfinished poem, called The Shadow (published in this
edition for the first time). We quote the greater part of it,
as it also exemplifies Clough's powerful, though sparingly
exercised, imagination ; which here, from the combination
of sublimity and quaiutness, reminds one of Eichter,

HI ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGII 73

only that we have antique severity instead of romantic
profuseness : —

I dreamed a dream : I tlroamt that I espied,

Upon a stone that was not rolled aside,

A Sliadow sit upon a grave — a Shade,

As thin, as unsubstantial, as of old

Came, the Greek poet told,

To lick the life-blood in the trench Ulysses made —

As pale, as thin, and said :

" I am the Resurrection of the Dead.

The night is past, the morning is at hand,

And I must in my proper semblance stand,

Appear brief S2)ace and vanish,— listen, this is true,

I am that Jesus whom they slew,"

And shadows dim, I dreamed, the dead apostles came,
And bent their heads for sorrow and for shame —
Sorrow for their great loss, and shame
For what they did in that vain name.

And in long ranges far behind there seemed

Pale vapoury angel forms ; or was it cloud ? that kept

Strange watch; the women also stood beside and wept.

And Peter spoke the word :
" O my own Lord,
What is it we must do ?
Is it then all untrue ?

Did we not see, and hear, and handle Thee,
Yea, for whole hours
Upon the Mount in Galilee,
On the lake shore, and here at Bethany,
When Thou ascended to Thy God and ours ? "

And paler still became the distant cloud.
And at the word the women wept aloud.

And the Shade answered, " What ye say I know not ;

But it is true

I am that Jesus whom they slew,
Whom ye have preached, but in what way I know not."

And the great AVorld, it chanced, came by that way,
And stojiped, and looked, and spoke to the police,
And said the thing, for order's sake .and peace.
Most certainly must be suppressed, the nuisance cease.

74 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ' in

His wife and daughter must have where to pray,
And whom to pray to, at the least one day
In seven, and something sensible to say.

Whether the fact so many years ago

Had, or not, happened, how was he to know ?

Yet he had always heard that it was so.

As for himself, perhaps it was all one ;

And yet he found it not unpleasant, too,

On Sunday morning in the roomy pew,

To see the thing with such decorum done.

As for himself, perhaps it was all one ;

Yet on one's death-bed all men always said

It was a comfortable thing to think upon

The atonement and the resurrection of the dead

So the great World as having said his say,

Unto his country-house pursued his way.

And on the grave the Shadow sat all day.

The effect of the latter part is like that of stripping an
uncomely body, familiar to us as respectably draped and
costumed, and showing it without disguise or ornament.
That ' the world ' has never seen himself in this nakedness
we feel : but we also feel that here is the world which we
know. The two lines before the three last show the
felicitous audacity with which Clough sometimes manages
metre : nothing could more sharply give the shallowness of
the mood in contrast with the solemnity of the subject than
the careless glibness of the lines,

It was a comfortable thing to think upon

The atonement and the resurrection of the dead.

The longest of the religious poems is an unfinished
one called The Mystery of the Fall. The fundamental idea
seems to be this. The legend of the Fall represents a per-
manent and universal element of human feeling, the religious
conviction of sin, but only one element : the beliefs corre-
sponding to it, even if intuitive consciousness is relied upon
as their evidence, are not affirmed by the sum-total of valid
consciousness — taking ' Sunday and work-days ' together.
Not only do our practical necessities and active impulses

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 75

require and generate other conceptions of the universe which
seem incompatible with the religious, but the latter is un-
satisfying in itself: the notions of perfect creation, lapse,
wrath, propitiation, though they correspond to a part of our
religious experience, yet do not content our religious feeling
as an adequate account of the relation of God to man.
This Clough has tried to express, keeping the framework of
the old legend, in dialogues between Adam, Eve, Cain, and
Abel after expulsion from the garden. The transitions and
blendings of the different moods are given with a close and
subtle fidelity to psychological truth : and this putting of
new wine into old bottles is perhaps justified by the pro-
minence in human history of the Hebrew legend. There is
no reason why Adam and his family should not be perma-
nent machinery for serious fable, as Jove and his subordinates
are for burlesque. Still the incongruity between the modern
moods (and especially the perfect self-consciousness accom-
panying them) and the antique personages and incidents is
here too whimsical : and, for poetry, the thought is too pre-
dominant, and the feeling not sufficiently intense ; to some
parts of the subject, as the murder of Abel, Clough's imagi-
nation is inadequate : and on the whole the result is
interesting rather than successful, and we doubt whether
the poem could ever have been completed so as to satisfy
the author's severe self-criticism.

We take a very different view of the other unfinished
long poem, Dipsychus. If it had received the author's
final touches, a few trivialities and whimsicalities would no
doubt have been pruned away : but w'e doubt whether the
whole could have been much improved. It has certain
grave defects wliich seem to us irremovable, and we should
rank it as a work of art below either of his hexameter poems.
There is not sufficient movement or evolution in it ; the
feeling is too purely egoistic to keep up our sympathies so
long ; and it is not sufficiently framed. The Venetian
scenes in which the dialogue goes on, though appropriate to
some of the moods, have no particular connection with the
most important : whereas in Amours de Voyage, and still

76 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES in

more in The Bothie, the liarmonising of external and in-
ternal presentments is admirably managed. At the same
time the composition is one of great interest. The stress of
feeling is so sustained, the changes and fluctuations of mood
are given with such perfect propriety, the thought and
expression are so bold and novel yet free from paradox, so
subtle without a particle of mere ingenuity. The blank
verse too in parts, though only in parts, seems to have been
carefully studied, and, though a little too suggestive of
Elizabethan models, to attain a really high pitch of ex-
cellence. Perhaps no other poem of Clough's has so de-
cidedly this one ' note ' of genius, that its utterances are at
once individual and universal, revealing the author to the
reader, and at the same time the reader to himself.

The constructive idea of the poem, which is a dialogue
between a man and an attendant spirit, is taken of course
from Faust. But G-oethe (as his half- apologetic prologue
hints) sacrificed something in adapting his idea to the con-
ditions of drama : and the issues in Clough's debate are so
much finer, that we feel nothing imitative in his develop-
ment of the conception. The suggestions of the spirit are
never clearly fiendish in themselves ; with much skill their
fiendishness is made to lie in their relation to the man's
thoughts. The spirit, in fact, is the " spirit of the world ; "
and the close of the debate is not between clear right and
wrong (however plausible wrong), but between two sides
of a really difficult question, — how far, in acting on society,
rules and courses repugnant to the soul's ideal are to be
adopted. True to himself, Clough does not decide the
question ; and though his sympathies are on the side of the
ideal, we never know quite how far he would pronounce
against the fiend.

The second part of the poem is almost too fragmentary
to discuss. In it the man appears at the close of a
successful career, having been attuned and attempered to the
world by an immoral liaison. How far this means is
justified by that end seems to us a disagreeable special-
isation of the general problem of the first part, much more

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 77

easy to decide. It is worked out, however, with much force.
Several songs included in this poem were in the first edition
published separately — by a great mistake, we cannot but
think, as they have more force and beauty in their original
setting ; and it was a little unfair to Clough (though less
than might be expected) to publish his fiend's utterances as
his own.

We turn now to what we may call the amatory
scepticism. This is a more proper subject of poetry,
as thought here is in no danger of being too predominant
over feeling ; at the same time it is more novel and
original, as on no subject do poets in general less allow
thought to interfere with feeling. Poets, in fact, are the
recognised preachers of the divinity, eternity, omnipotence
of Love. It is true that with some of them fits of despair
alternate with enthusiasm, and they proclaim that Love is
an empty dream : but the notion of scrutinising the enthu-
siasm sympathetically, yet scientifically, and estimating the
precise value of its claims and assertions, probably never
entered into any poetic soul before Clough. Xor is it less
alien to the habits of ordinary humanity. That the lover's
state is a frenzy, innocuous indeed, delightful, perhaps even
laudable as a part of nature's arrangements for carrying on
the affairs of the world, but still a frenzy ; that we all go
into it and come out of it, take one view of thimrs in
general when in it and another when out of it — is what
practical people accept with more or less playful or cynical
acquiescence. Poets have a license to take an opposite
view — in fact we should be disappointed if they did not ;
but we listen to them not for truth but for pleasant illusion.
It will be seen how impossible it was for Clough's nature to
acquiesce in this. Goethe sings of

Den Drang nach Wahrheit und die Lust am Trug,

as part of the poet's endowment. It was Clough's peculiar-
ity, perhaps his defect, as a poet, that he had not the
" Lust am Trug." He feels the rapture that illusion gives,
he quotes more than once with sympathy

78 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES III

Wen Gott betriigt ist wolil betrogen,

but such " wohl " he could not himself appropriate. Nor
could he serenely separate idea from fact, as his friend
Emerson does in the following passage : —

And the first condition [of painting Love] is, that we must
leave a too close and lingering adherence to the actual, to facts.
. , Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect.
But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are always melan-
choly : the plan is seemly and noble. It is strange how painful
is the actual world, — the painful kingdom of time and place.
There dwells care and canker and fear. With thought, with the
ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

This well illustrates by contrast the fundamental mood
of Clough. For his imagination at any time thus to abandon
terra firina and console itself with cloudland would have
been impossible. The fascination of the ideal was as strong
for him as for other poets, but not stronger than the necessity
of making it real. Hence in that period of youthful fore-
cast and partial experience of passion, in which the finest
love-fancies of most poets are woven, he perpetually feels
the need of combining clear vision with exaltation. He
keeps questioning Love as to what it really is, whence it
comes, whither it goes : he demands a transcendent evalu-
ation of it.

Whence are ye, vague desires ?
Whence are ye ?

From seats of bliss above,
Wliere angels sing of love ;
From subtle airs around,
Or from the vulgar ground.
Whence are ye, vague desires?
Whence are ye 1

' Is love spiritual or earthly ? ' is the passionate perplexity
that tinges many of his songs. Or if this pearl of great
price is to be found on earth, how shall we know it from
its counterfeits, by what criterion discern the impulses that
lead us to the true and the false ? In one of the finer

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 79

passages of the Mari Magno tales, this longing for direction
is uttered.

Beside the wishing gate which so they name,
'Mid northern hills to me this fancy «ime,
A wish I formed, ray wish I thus expressed :
Would I could vnsh riiy tcishes all to rest,
And know to loish the wish that were the best !
O for some winnowing wind, to the empty air
This chaff of easy sympathies to bear
Far off, and leave me of myself aware !
While thus this over health deludes me still.
So willing that I know not what I will ;
O for some friend, or more tliau friend, austere.
To make me know myself and make me fear !
O for some touch, too noble to be kind.
To awake to life the mind within the mind !

But if love be after all only " a wondrous animal delight "
in which nature's periodic blossoming culminates, the
philosophic spirit, however deep its yearning, cannot sub-
mit to it, but has to contemplate it from the outside with
tender and curious sympathy. This mood tinged with play-
fulness inspired the charming song in which he describes
how he watched

... in pleasant Kensington

A 'prentice and a maid.
That Sunday morning's April glow,

How should it not impart
A stir about the veins that How

To feed the youthful heart I

The rapture of this sympathetic contemplation is expressed
in Amours de Voyage.

And as I walk on my way, I behold them consorting and coupling ;
Faithful it seemeth and fond, very fond, very probably faithful.
All as I go on my way, with a pleasure sincere and unmingled.
Life is beautiful, Eustace ....

and could we eliminate only
This vile hungering impulse, this demon within us of craving.
Life were beatitude, living a perfect divine satisfaction.

This leads us to the deepest issue of all — a thoroughly
Platonic problem. Be this love as noble as it may, is its

8o ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES m

exaltation compatible with clear vision ? Does not this
individualised enthusiasm of necessity draw away from the
centrality of view and feeling after which the philosophic
spirit aspires ? Is it not unworthy of us, for any pleasure's
sake, to be tricked by its magic and take its coloured light
for white ?

But we are tired of reducing to prose the various phases
of this subtle blending and conflict of enthusiasms. As
expressed by Clough they have the perfect vitality and
reality of all his moods. None of these perplexities is
arbitrarily sought ; the questions raised must each have
been raised and decided by many human beings since self-
consciousness began. If no poet has uttered them before,
it is because in most men the state of mind in which they
were felt is incompatible with the flow of feeling that
poetry requires. Clough's nature was, perhaps, deficient in
passion, but it had a superabundant tenderness and sus-
ceptibility to personal influence, which made him retain the
full feeling of personal relations while giving free scope to
his sceptical intellect.

In one of the two long hexameter poems published
in his lifetime, Amours de Voyage, Clough has given a
dramatic embodiment to the motives that we have been
analysing. The poem is skilfully composed. Thoroughly
apprehending the aversion which practical humanity feels
for these perplexities, he somewhat exaggerates the egotism
of the hero of the piece to whom he attributes them, handles
him with much irony throughout, and inflicts a severe
but appropriate Nemesis at the close. The caricature in
' Claude ' is so marked that we are not surprised that
Clough, the least egoistical of men, was indignant when a
friend appeared to take the poem as an account of the
author's own experiences. " I assure you," he writes, " that
it is extremely not so." Still this attitude of the author
could not reconcile the public to a hero who (as the motto
has it) doutait de tout, meme de I'amour. That the poem
never attained the success of The Bothie we are not sur-
prised. It has not the unique presentations of external

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 8l

nature which give such a charm to the earlier poem : it
wants also the buoyant and vivacious humour which is
80 exuberant in T}ic Bothic, and of which the fountain in
Clough's later years seems almost to have dried up. But
it shows greater skill in blending and harmonising different
threads of a narrative, and a subtler management of the
evolution of moods ; it has a deeper psychological interest,
and in its best passages a rarer, more original imagination.
The * amour ' is very closely interwoven with the incidents
of the French siege of Home (of which, by the way, Clough's
letters give us interesting details), so that the two series of
events together elicit a complete and consistent self-revel-
ation of the hero. The amative dubitations turn principally
on two points — the immense issues that depend on amative
selection compared with the arbitrary casual manner in
which circumstances determine it, and the imperious claim
of passion for a concentration of interest which to the
innermost, most self-conscious, self is profoundly impossible.
These play into one another in the following very character-
istic passage : —

Juxtaposition, in tine ; ami wliut is juxtaposition 1

Look you, we travel along in the railway carriage or steamer,

And, four passer le temps, till the tedious journey be ended,

Lay aside paper or book, to talk with the girl that is next one ;

And, pnur passer le temps, witli the terminus all Ijut in prospect,

Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven.

Ah, did we really accept with a perfect heart the illusion !

Ah, did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only !
Or through all transmutation, all shock and convulsion of passion,
Feel we could carry undimmed, unextinguished, the light ot" our
knowledge !

But for the .steady fore-sense of a freer and larger existence,
Think you that man could consent to be circumscribed here into

action ?
But for assurance udthin of a limitless ocean divine, o'er
Whose great trayiquil depths unconscioris the icind-tost surface
Breaks into ripples of trouble that come and change and endure not, —
But that in this, of a truth, we have our being, and know it,
Think you we men could submit to live and move as we do here ?

G

82 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES in

■ All, but the women — God bless them ! they don't think at all
about it.
Yet we must eat and drink as you say. And as limited beings
Scarcely can hope to attain upon earth to an Actual Abstract,
Leaving to God contemplation, to His hands knowledge confiding,
Sure that in us if it perish, in Him it abideth and dies not,
Let us in His sight accomplish our petty particular doings, —
Yes, and contented sit down to the victual that He has provided.

The three lines that we have italicised seem to us almost
perfect specimens of the English liexameter, showing the
extreme flexibility which the metre has in Clough's hands,
and his only, and none of the over-accentuation which
neither he nor any one else can generally avoid. Very
opposite opinions have been delivered as to the merits of
this hexameter. Some most appreciative readers of the
poems declare that they read them continually under
protest ; that no interest in the subject and no habit can
make the metre tolerable. Mr. Arnold, however, on this
subject an especially Ehadamanthine critic, considers the
success of Clough's experiment to be so decided as to form
an important contribution to the question (which has occu-
pied a most disproportionate amount of human intellect
in our time), How Homer is to be translated ? We do not
take either view. "We think Clough's metre, as he uses it,
felicitous ; but we do not think that this proves anything
as to the appropriateness of the hexameter for translating
Homer, or for any other application of ' the grand style.'
Clough has not naturalised the metre. He has given it
ease, but not simplicity ; he has not tried to give it simpli-
city, and therefore he has succeeded with it. All English
hexameters written quite cm serieux seem to us to fail; the
line ought to be unconscious of being a hexameter, and yet
never is. But Clough's line is, and is meant to be, conscious
of being a hexameter : it is always suggestive of and allusive
to the ancient serious hexameters, with a faint but a delib-
erate air of burlesque, a wink implying that the bard is
singing academically to an academical audience, and catering
for their artificial tastes in versification. This academic
flavour suits each poem in a different way. It harmonises

Ill ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH 83

with the Oxonian studies of Tlie BotJiic ; and here, indeed,
the faint burlesque inseparable from the metre becomes from
time to time mock-heroic. In Amours de Voyage, it suits
the over-culture, artificial refinement of the hero's mind : he
is, we may say, in his abnormal difficulties of action and
emotion, a scholastic or academic personage. In short tlie
metre seems to belong to a style full of characteristic self-
conscious humour such as Clough has sustained through each
of the poems ; and we cannot analyse its effect separately.
Clough we know thought differently ; Imt we are forced to
regard this as one instance out of many where a poet takes
a wrong view of his own work. His experiment of trans-
lating Homer into similar hexameters is nearly as much a
failure as Mr. Arnold's, or any other ; and his still bolder
experiment of writing hexameters by quantity and not
accent results, in spite of the singular care and even power
with which it is executed, in a mere monstrosity.

We consider then that it was a happy instinct that led
him to the metre of The Bothie. In more ordinary metres
he often shows a want of mastery over the technicalities of
verse-writing. He has no fertility of rhymes, he is mono-
tonous, he does not avoid sing-song, he wearies us with
excessive, almost puerile, iterations and antitheses. It is very
remarkable, therefore, how in this new metre, self-chosen, he
rises to the occasion, how inventive he is of varied movements,
felicitous phrases, and pleasant artifices of language, how
emphatically yet easily the sound is adapted to the sense,
in a way which no metre but blank verse in the hands of a
master could rival. Another evidence of the peculiar fitness
of this instrument for his thought is the amount that he can
pack without effort into his lines ; as e. g. in the following de-
scription of one of the members of the Oxford reading-party —

Author forgotten aud sileut of currentest plirase and fancies,
Mute and exuberant by turns, a fountain at intervals playing,
Mute and abstracted, or strong and abundant as rain in the tropics ;
Studious ; careless of dress ; inobservant ; by smooth persuasions
Lately decoyed into kilt on example of Hope and the Piper ;
Hope an Antinoiis mere, Hyperion of calves the Piper.

84 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES in

It is hard to imagine so much said so shortly in any other
style.

The flexibility of the metre aids in bringing out another
great excellence of these poems ; the ease and completeness
with which character is exhibited. There is not one of the
personages of The Bothie, or even of Amours de Voyage,
where the sketching is much slighter, whose individuality is not
as thoroughly impressed upon us as if they had been delineated
in a three-volume novel by Mr. Trollope. We are made to
understand by most happily selected touches, and delicately
illustrative phrases, not only what they are in themselves,
but precisely how they affect one another. It becomes as
impossible for us to attribute a remembered remark to the
wrong person as it would be in a play of Shakespeare. To
say that Clough's dramatic faculty was strong might convey
a wrong impression, as we imagine that he was quite devoid
of the power of representing a scene of vivid action ; but the
power of forming distinct conceptions of character, and
expressing them with the few touches that poetry allows, is
one of the gifts for displaying which we may regret that he
had not ampler scope.

The descriptions of natural scenery in The Bothie form
probably the best-known and most popular part of Clough's
poetry. In this, as in some of his most important poetical
characteristics, he may be called, in spite of great differences,
a true disciple of Wordsworth. His admiration for the latter
appears to have been always strongly marked ; and one of
the more interesting of the prose remains now published is
an essay on Wordsworth, perhaps somewhat meagre, but
showing profound appreciation, together with the critical
propriety and exactness of statement characteristic of Clough.
His simplicity, sincerity, gravity, are all Wordsworthiau ; but
especially his attitude towards nature. Through a manner
of description quite different we trace the rapt receptive
mood, the unaffected self-abandonment, the anxious fidelity
of reproduction, which Wordsworth has taught to many
disciples, but to no other poet so fully.

In the essay referred to we find a view of Wordsworth's

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 85

poetical merits, which to many persons will appear para-
doxical, but which seems to us perfectly true, and applicable
to some extent to Clough himself. He says that Wordsworth,
the famous prefaces notwithstanding, —

"really derives from his style and his diction his chief and
special charm"; ... he bestowed "infinite toil and labour
upon his poetic style"; "in the nice and exquisite felicities
of poetic diction he specially surpassed his contemporaries";
and " his scrupulous and painstaking spirit, in this particular,
constitutes one of his special virtues as a poet. . . . He
has not . . . the vigour and heartiness of Scott, or the force
and the sweep and the fervour of Byron. . . . But that
permanent beauty of expression, that harmony between thought
and word, which is the condition of ' immoiial verse,' they did
not, I think — and Wordsworth did — take pains to attain.
There is hardly anything in Byron and Scott which in another
generation people will not think they can say over again quite
as well, and more agreeably and familiarly for themselves ;
there is nothing which, it will be plain, has, in Scott or Byron's
way of putting it, attained the one form which of all others
truly belongs to it ; which any new attempt will, at the very
utmost, merely successfully repeat. For poetry, like science,
has its final precision ; and there are expressions of poetic
knowledge which can no more be re-written than conld the
elements of geometry. There are pieces of poetic language
which, try as men will, they Avill simply have to recur to, and
confess that it has been done before them."

And he goes on to say that " people talk about style as
if it were a mere accessory, the unneeded but pleasing
ornament, the mere put -on dress of the substantial being,
who without it is much the same as with it." Whereas
really " some of the highest truths are only expressible to
us by style, only appreciable as indicated by manner."

With all this we agree : but it seems to us that two
conditions are necessary for the success in style spoken of,
and that Clough has only given one. In order to attain it,
a man must be conscious of very definite characteristic
moods, and must have confidence in them, take an interest
in and value their definite characteristics ; then in express-
ing them he must work with a patient, single-minded effort

86 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES in

to adapt the expression to the mood, caring always for the
latter more than for the former. This was certainly the
manner of Clough's composition, and hence many of his
poetic utterances have, as he phrases it, " final precision."
We do not mean to compare their effect to Wordsworth's.
Clough has none of the prophetic dignity of his master, of
the latter's organ-music he has not even an echo : and he
far surpasses him in subtlety. There is a peculiar com-
bination of simplicity and subtlety in his best things, the
simplicity being as it were the final result and outcome of
the subtlety, so that the presence of the latter is felt, and
not distinctly recognised, which we find in no other poet
except Goethe. It is this combination that fits him for his
peculiar function of rendering conscious the feelings that
pass half unconsciously through ordinary minds, without
seriously modifying them. There is a pretty instance of
this in an idyllic song which we will quote. Most of the
song is rather commonplace ; a peasant-girl driving she-
goats homeward thinks alternately of the scene, and of her
absent lover. Suddenly we are surprised with this very
Cloughian sentiment.

Or may it be that I shall tiud my mate,
And he returning see himself too late ?
For work we must, and what we see, we see,
And God he Jc7)ows, and what must he, must be.
When sweethearts wander far away from me.

The excellence of the lines that we have italicised we should
describe paradoxically by saying that their naivete is at
once perfect, and as naivete, impossible.

On the other hand, if Clough has many of Wordsworth's
excellences, he certainly has his full share of the cognate
defects. It is natural, perhaps, to the man who values the
individuality of his thought and feeling so much as to spend
great care on its expression, to want the power of discrimi-
nating between those parts of it that are, and those which
are not worth expressing. Certainly Clough has not, any
more than his master, the selective faculty that leads to the

Ill ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 87

sustained elevation and distinction wliich we expect from a
great poet, and which the adoption of a simple manner
renders peculiarly indispensable. Commonplace thought and
feeling in strikingly simple language does not make, perhaps,
more really worthless poetry than commonplace thought
and feeling in ornate language ; but its worthlessness is
more patent. There is this one advantage, that the critic
is not forced to dwell upon it : no one's taste is perverted,
except perhaps in the first charm of the poet's novelty. No
one now pretends to admire the dulness and twaddle in
Wordsworth ; and in Clough even more than in Wordsworth
the expression rises and falls with the matter : the dullest
and most trivial things are the worst put. We will only
say that the genius of twaddle, which often hovers near his
muse, makes its presence especially felt in his last poems,
the Mari Magno tales. These must, of course, be judged
as unfinished productions; but no retouching could have
enabled them to rank very high as poetry. They are easy,
pleasant, even edifying reading, and they essentially want
effectiveness. They are written in obvious emulation of
Crabbe ; and in a natural and faithful homeliness of style,
which occasionally becomes a transparent medium for a
most impressive tenderness, they certainly rival Crabbe ; but
their general level is much lower. The charm of Crabbe,
when he is not tender, lies in the combination of unobtru-
sive dignity, and a certain rustic raciness and pregnancy,
with a fair share of the artificial point and wit that properly
belong to the Popian measure. Clough has nothing of this;
and though in the best passages his characteristic fineness of
apprehension makes amends, on the dead levels of narration
the style is much inferior to Crabbe's : its blankuess is
glaring. In the first tale especially the genius of twaddle
reigns supreme ; it reminds us of — we will not say the
worst, for it has no bad taste, but — the second-rate portions
of Coventry Patmore.

The inferiority of these poems is due, as we before hinted,
to a deeper cause than a temporary defect of vigour or a
mistaken experiment of style. It is evident that we have

88 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

III

here Clougli without his peculiar inspiration — his talent, we
may say, but not his genius. As an artist he is noteworthy
— his production has many high qualities, viewed as techni-
cally as possible ; it is not, however, as a mere artist, but as
an utterer of peculiar yet representative moods, that he has
the power to excite our deepest interest. But these moods
are the moods, in the main, of youth; and when Clough,
after a period of more than usually prolonged adolescence,
finally adopted the adult attitude towards life, they ceased
to dominate his habitual thought and feeling. Not that any
abrupt change shows itself in him. There were two tempers
singularly entwined in him throughout: his letters for the
most part present a striking contrast to the contemporary
poems. In the latter we find chiefly absorbing effort after
an ideally clear vision, a perfect solution of problems : in
the former mild practical wisdom, serene submission to the
imperfections of life, cheerful acquiescence in " the best
imder the circumstances." And this quieter tone naturally
grew upon him. Not that he could ever separate specula-
tion from practice, or in either sphere settle down into
smooth commonplace : but he grew tired of turning over the
web of commonplace notions and rules, and showing their
seamy side : he set himself rather to solve and settle
instead of raising and exposing difficulties. At the same
time the sincerity which had led him to emphasise his
passionate perplexities, still kept him from exaggerating his
triumph over them : he attains no fervour of confident hope,
nor expansion of complacent optimism : he walks in the
twilight, having adapted his eyes to it somewhat, but he does
not mistake it for dawn. Whether in such twilight he would
ever have seemed to see wdth sufficient clearness to impel
him to utter his vision to the world, is doubtful : at any rate
the utterance would, we imagine, have taken a prosaic and
not a poetical form. He was looking at life steadily till he
could see it whole : aspiring, as he says in an early poem,
to

. . . bring some worthy thing
For waiting souls to ?ee.

HI ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH 89

But the very loftiness of this aspiration, and the severity
with whicli he would have judged his own claims to be a
teacher, incline us to think that he would never have
uttered the final outcome of his life's thought. What he
wished to do for the world no one has yet done : we have
scarcely reason to believe that he could have done it : and
he would have been content to do nothing less. His pro-
visional views, the temporary substitutes for " demonstrated
faith " by which he was content to walk, he would hardly
have cared to publish. That they would, however, have
been interesting, we can see from the only fragment of them
that the editor has been able to give us — a paper on The
Rdifjious Tradition. From this, as it illustrates a dif-
ferent side of Clough's mind to that on which we have
been led chiefly to dwell, we will conclude by quoting
some extracts : —

The more a man feels the value, the true import, of the
moral and religious teaching which passes amongst us by the
name of Christianity, the more will he hesitate to base it upon
those foundations which, as a scholar, he feels to be unstable.
Manuscripts are doubtful, records may be unauthentic, criticism
is feeble, historical facts must be left uncertain. Even in like
maimer my own personal experience is most limited, perhaps
even most delusive : what have I seen, what do I know ? Nor
is my personal judgment a thing which I feel any great
satisfaction in trusting. My reasoning powers are weak ;
my memory doubtful and confused; my conscience, it may be,
callous or vitiated.

... I see not what other alternative any sane and humble-
minded man can have but to throw himself upon the great
religious tradition. But I see not either how any upright and
strict dealer with himself — how any man not merely a slave to
spiritual a{)petites, affections and wants — any man of intel-
lectual as well as moral honesty — and without the former the
latter is but a vain thing — I see not how anyone who will not
tell lies to himself, can dare to affirm that the narrative of the
four Gospels is an essential integral part of that tradition. I
do not see that it is a "reat and noble thinji ... to go about
proclaiming that Mark is inconsistent with Luke ... it is no
new gospel to tell us that the old one is of dubious authenticity.
I do not see either , . . that it can be lawful for me, for the

90 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES in

sake of the moral guidance and the spiritual comfort, to ignore
all scientific or historic doubts, or if pressed with them to the
utmost, to take refuge in Eomish infallibility . . .

Where then, since neither in Rationalism nor in Eome is our
refuge, — where then shall we seek for the Religious Tradition ?

Everywhere ; but above all in our own work : in life, in
action, in submission, so far as action goes, in service, in experi-
ence, in patience, in confidence. I would scarcely have any
man dare to say that he has found it, till that moment when
death removes his power of telling it. Let no young man pre-
sume to talk to us vainly and confidently about it. Ignorant,
as said Aristotle, of the real actions of life, and ready to follow
all impressions and passions, he is hardly fitted as yet even to
listen to practical directions couched in the language of religion.
But this apart — everywhere . . . among all who have really
tried to order their lives by the highest action of the reasonable
and spiritual will.

[The following papers on Shakespeare's plays consist of parts of several
lectures given at difTerent times from 1S89 to 1898 at Newnham College. As
they did not form jiart of a course, but were delivered independently at con-
siderable intervals of time, and to different audiences, it was almost inevitable
that matters relating to Shakespeare's work generally should be treated of
more tliau once in connexion with different plaj's, and these repetitions make
it impossible to print all the lectures as they were given. Under the circum-
stances it seemed best to rearrange the lectures, with a few omissions and
adjustments, adding only a very few words where required for connexion.
— E]).]

IV

SHAKESPEARE'S METHODS, WITH SPECIAL
EEFERENCE TO JULIUS C^SAB AND COEIO-
LANUS

Julius Caesar and Coriolanus are the first and last of the
group of plays on which Shakespeare's unique position
among modern poets mainly rests — the group or series of
the seven great tragedies of his second and third periods —
beginning with Julius Ccesar and Hamlet, and ending with
Anto7iy and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, with Othello, Lear,
and Macbeth intervening between the two. Before I say
what I have to say about these plays, I should like to make
clear what I shall try to do, and especially what I shall not
try to do. I shall not try to give an abridged account of
the story of the play, as told in successive scenes. I shall
assume that we have probably all, at some time or other,
read the play ; and when I refer to points in the dramatic
story, stages, or critical moments in its action, I shall do
so chiefly with the aim of illustrating Shakespeare's method
of work.

Still less shall I attempt to rival the admirable com-

91

92 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES iv

mentary of Mr. Aldis Wright, by dealing with any of the
difficulties of interpretation which the play presents. But
I should like to say a word as to the way in which com-
mentaries of this kind should be used. Both the academic
persons who manage examinations in English literature, and
the commentators who assist in the preparation for them,
are sometimes attacked as insidious foes of the culture that
they profess to promote. It is said that under their influ-
ence the study of notes supplants and extinguishes the
study of literature ; and the story is told of a young lady
who fastened up the text with an elastic band, that it
might not distract her mind from the notes.

There is, perhaps, some justification for these sarcasms.
The natural way of using a commentator is for occasional
reference when we cannot understand the author ; the
systematic perusal of notes which an examination requires
seems artificial and may be depressing. Still, I am per-
suaded, that with a view to reading Shakespeare with
adequate intelligence, for literary enjoyment and culture,
this close and thorough study of some one play is a valu-
able exercise. The most incurable defect in our ordinary
reading of such an author lies in the misapprehensions of
which we have no consciousness whatever ; — the allusions
that we merely miss, the subtle changes in the meaning
of words and phrases that we simply ignore : but which,
in the aggregate, interpose a thin impalpable mist between
our mind and the author's, the source of which we cannot
trace or remove. To correct this, it is very useful —
whether with or without an examination in prospect —
to take some one play and read it twice through care-
fully : the first time without a commentary, marking all the
difficulties perceived : and the second time with a good
commentary, marking all the meanings missed on the first
reading as well as noting the solutions of the difficulties
perceived. The immediate effect of the second process may
be slightly depressing : but it will render all our subse-
quent reading of Shakespeare, for entertainment in hours
of leisure, more intelligent than it would have been.

IV 'JULIUS C/ESAR ' AND ' CORIOLANUS ' 93

To-day, however, I am not concerned with the business
of interpretation. My aim is chietly to use these plays to
illustrate Shakespeare's conception of dramatic work, and
his method of working up his material, not forgetting the
changes in his conception and method, and in the metrical
instrument on which he plays such different tunes at
different periods.

Let us begin by considering the date of the plays : for
this is not a matter of merely biographical or bibliographical
interest. The ardent and persistent scrutiny of Shakespeare
and his times, during the present century, has produced no
result of more value than the greater knowledge it has
given us of the chronological order of the plays. Tor the
chronological order is here markedly an order of develop-
ment, and Shakespeare is a writer whose manner — both as
regards style and versification, and as regards the deeper
qualities of dramatic treatment — is in a continual process
of change ; and we cannot really attain to a full and delicate
literary appreciation of his work if we read, say Richard
III., Julius Cccsar, and Coriolamis, as if they were the
products of the same mind at the same time.

Fortunately, in the case of Julius Ccesar the date can be
fixed, with a very high degree of probability, within very
narrow limits. We can fix it at the commencement of the
period in which Shakespeare's greatest work was done — in
the latter part of 1600 or the beginning of 1601. It may
be interestinsr to show how external and internal evidence
combine to bring us to this result. We are very ignorant
of Shakespeare's life : but there are a few points, a few
milestones in his career, which we can recognise clearly ;
and these fortunately suffice to show us the general course
of his work as a dramatist, and to mark its successive
stages. We know that in 1585, at the age of twenty-one,
he was married and father of three children baptized at
Stratford-on-Avon. We know from a splenetic utterance
in a pamphlet by Eobert Greene, a leading dramatist of the
time, written on his deathbed in 1592, that Shakespeare was
then by profession a play-actor, who was at the same time

94 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES iv

rising into reputation as a playwright : he had risen enough
to excite Greene's jealousy, but not enough to compel him
to respectful treatment : he treats him as a conceited up-
start Jack-of-all-trades, who absurdly supposes that he can
write blank verse as well as the University men. Six
years later, in 1598, his position is quite changed; for
Francis Meres, M.A., in the Wifs Treasury, published that
year, compares Shakespeare with Plautus and Seneca as a
playwright for the stage, and calls him "among the English
most excellent" both in comedy and tragedy. Meres mentions
twelve plays, which include all the plays published in the first
folio which we should on other grounds regard as Shake-
speare's early work : he includes the obviously early comedies,
Love's Labours Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of
Verona, and the charming Midsummer- Night' s Dream ; he
includes also the crude exercise in bloody horrors called
Titus Andronicus, and the fascinating but plainly youthful
Romeo and Juliet. The other four plays that Meres classi-
fies as tragedies belong to the group of English historical
plays : Julius Ccesar is not among them. Shakespeare's
serious work appears to have been concentrated at this time
on the production of scenes from English chroniclers : he
has not yet turned his attention to North's Plutarch.

Julius Cmsar, then, is not earlier than 1598 ; and as we
have evidence that the second part of Henry TV. and Henry
V. were written after Meres' book came out, but before the
end of 1 5 9 9, we may conceive Shakespeare as still occupied
with English history to the end of the century. On the
other hand, Julius Cmsar must have appeared before the
end of 1601: because in Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, pub-
lished that year, occur the lines —

The many-headed multitude were drawne
By Brutus' speech that Csesar was ambitious.

This, as you know, is the simple and summary justification
that Shakespeare's Brutus gives for his deed —

As he was ambitious I slew him —

IV 'JULIUS CMSAR' and ' CORIOLANUS' 95

and the phrase is taken by Antony as the point which his
dexterous rhetoric has to repel, and is repeatedly quoted —

But Brutus says he was ambitious, etc.

Now, though Plutarch indicates the lines of Antony's
funeral speech, which Shakespeare has followed, he says
nothing about this charge of ambition. This point is intro-
duced by Shakespeare, and it is to Shakespeare's play that
Weever must refer. Julius Ccesar, then, is not later than
1601 ; and there are probable reasons for thinking it not
earlier than 1601.

And this date is confirmed by the internal evidence from
style and versification : which I shall presently illustrate.
Julius Ccesar, judged purely by its literary and metrical
quality, may be placed at the very point of transition from
Shakespeare's first to his second manner — so far as the
tragic style is concerned. It is, as I have said, the first of
the great series of plays of deep tragic interest — i.e. the
interest of sympathy with human beings of chequered but
not ignoble character, whose gloomy fate is partly woven
for themselves by the manifestation of their character under
pressure of their circumstances — in which Shakespeare's
unrivalled gifts of dramatic characterisation are exhibited
in full maturity.

In saying this, I do not, of course, mean to draw a broad
distinction between the first and second periods. Penetrating,
intense, versatile, imaginative sympathy with human nature
in all its varieties is a gift of Shakespeare's from the first ;
and so far as comic characterisation goes, it is manifested
in one or two plays of the first period as fully as it ever is.
But in the more difficult characterisation of tragedy a some-
what longer interval of growth was required in which
Shakespeare's experience of life was widening and deepening,
and the mastery of his instrument becoming more complete.
It is not till we come to the second period — which we may
take to begin with Julius Ccesar, followed by Hamlet — that
Shakespeare's conception of character reaches its highest
point of subtlety, complexity, and coherence, and his pre-

96 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES iv

sentation of character its highest point of vitality and
impressiveness. Nor do I know any play earlier than
Julius Cccsar in which is shown in an equally high degree
the dramatist's art of combining incidents so as to exhibit
the movement and working of character under stress of cir-
cumstances, and the art of framing situations and scenes so
as to present effectively both the contrasts and the inter-
action of different characters in diverse moods.

And we may note a corresponding change in style and
diction. In the plays of the first period the profusion and
flow of poetic utterance does not always reveal an equal
fulness of thought ; there is sometimes, too, in the speeches
too uniform a level of passion, a want of the gradual rise
and fall of agitated emotion which is so striking a feature of
Shakespeare's maturest work ; there is a tendency to rhetori-
cal amplification and rhetorical ingenuity — a liability to
strain the natural imagery and inventiveness of passion into
laboured conceits and extravagances.

Now, human improvement is usually gradual, and we

cannot say that the style of Julius Cccsar is entirely free

from these latter defects. For instance, at the crisis of the

famous funeral oration of Antony, when he is showing the

crowd the bloody garments of Csesar, pierced by the assassins'

swords —

See what a rent the envious Casca made :
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed —

I am afraid that what follows is a conceit —

And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of (^sesar followed it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly kuock'd, or no.

Well, this image of the blood rushing out to see who is
knocking is not the natural fantasy of passionate sorrow
and indignation striving to communicate itself : it does not
come from the heart, and we cannot conceive its finding its
way to that organ. So before, when in Antony's pathetic

IV ^JULIUS C^SAR ' AND ' CORIOLANUS ' 97

outburst over the body of Ctesar, immediately after the
murder, he cries —

Here wast thou bay'd, brave hart ;
Here didst thou fall ; and here thy hunters stand
Sign'd in thy spoil and crimson'd in thy lethe —

the image is natural and moving : but when he goes on —

0 world, thou wast the forest to this hart ;
And this, indeed, 0 world, the heart of thee —

though the pun seems doubtless more grotesquely inappro-
priate to us than it would have seemed to an Elizabethan
audience, it is difficult to believe that it can ever have
seemed like the natural extravagance of emotion that finds
ordinary expression feeble and inadequate. I do not think
you will find such a pun at such a point of pathos in
Shakespeare's later work.

These are spots in the sun. In the main the style of
Julius Ccesar has freed itself from the immaturities of Shake-
speare's earlier period. It is thoroughly dramatic : while
there are many speeches in it which are eminently adapted
for declamation — that is, for delivery apart from their
dramatic context, — there is none that is in a bad sense
declamatory : there is none that does not gain by its
context, nor can be spared from it without some loss to the
dramatic situation. It is interesting to compare the style
of Julius Ccesar in this respect with that of Coriolanus,
which exemplifies Shakespeare's third and latest manner.
In this last stage the style suited to declamation has been
altogether abandoned : the manner is purely dramatic. You
can hardly find a single speech in Coriolanus calculated to
give much pleasure, if severed from its context : though
in their context the best speeches of Coriolanus have — with
some loss of lucidity — a greater intensity of emphasis
through greater concentration, and a more Hfelike representa-
tion of the utterances of surging passion.

I will give here one illustration from Julius Caesar of
this double quality — declamatory and dramatic. On the eve

H

98 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES IV

of the Ides of March, when the last struggle in Brutus'
mind is over, his servant tells him that Cassius and others
have come with

their hats plucked about their ears,
And half their faces buried in their cloaks.

Brutus answers —

Let 'em enter.
They are the faction. 0 conspiracy,
Shamest thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
When evils are most free ? 0, then by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage ? Seek none, conspiracy ;
Hide it in smiles, and affability :
For if thou path, thy native semblance on.
Not Erebus itself were dim enough
To hide thee from prevention.^

This is a fine outburst, but it does not seem very appro-
priate to the actual moment when the conspirator's col-
leagues are being let in ; and at first one is disposed to think
that Shakespeare in introducing it has aimed at theatrical
effect rather than dramatic propriety. And perhaps Shake-
speare would have felt this later on in his career. Still
reflection will show that it has a deeper dramatic meaning.
He has just shown us Brutus convincing himself, by a dry
unemotional process of reasoning, that Caesar must be killed ;
he wants to shows us, that while stoically determined to
act for the general good by the dry light of reason alone,
Brutus is no cold passionless pedant : he feels intensely the
moral repugnance that a fine nature must feel to the
dreadful deed.

The passage recited may also serve to illustrate the
change in versification which accompanies the change in
style as we pass from the first to the second manner. The
blank verse of the earliest period too much resembles
rhymed verse in its structure : the lines usually end with
a strong syllable and a stop, and are a little too regular for
dramatic utterance. In the versification of Julius Ccesar,

^ Act ii. Sc. i.

IV 'JULIUS C^SAR ' AND ' CORIOLANUS ' 99

on the other hand, adequate variety and llexibihty is intro-
duced by varying the pauses, allowing the sense sometimes
to run over from one line to another, and introducing extra
syllables not only at the end of lines, but sometimes even
in the middle.

To hide thy monstrous visage. Seek none, conspiracy ;

— I do not think you will find a line like that in a play
earlier than Juliits Cccsar.

In the third manner the change is carried further in
the same direction : the poet's aim often seems to be to
conceal the metrical structure, preferring to have the breaks
in the sense at the middle of the line rather than the end,
and sometimes ending the line with a word on which the
speaker cannot rest even for a moment. Take as an
instance this speech of Coriolanus : —

' Shall ' !
O good but most unwise patricians ! why,
You grave but reckless senators, have you thus
Given Hydra here to choose an officer,
That with this peremptory ' shall,' being but
The horn and noise 0' the monster's, wants not spirit
To say he'll turn your current in a ditch,
And make your channel his? If he have power,
Then vail your ignorance ; if none, awake
Your dangerous lenity. If you are learn'd.
Be not as coumion fools ; if you are not,
Let them have cusliions by you. You are plebeians,
If they be senators : and they are no less.
When, both your voices blended, the great'st taste
Most palates theirs. They choose their magistrate,
And such a one as he, who puts his ' shall,'
His popular ' shall,' against a graver bench
Than ever frown'd in Greece. By Jove himself !
It makes the consuls base : and my soul aches
To know, when two authorities are up.
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take
The one by the other. ^

I pass to examine Shakespeare's method of using his
materials, in the composition of his plays and characterisa-

' Act iii. Sc. i.

100 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES iv

tion of the personages. But here I must begin by saying
that he has no uniform method : on the contrary, the
striking characteristic of his method is that it varies so
much with the nature of the materials.

I may quote a few sentences of Gervinus in which this
is well put : —

" When he had an older drama before him, he discarded for the
most part" — perhaps that is too strong — "the whole form, and
retained only the story and the name. Was it a poor novel of
Italian origin, he could seldom use the web of the action without
first unweaving it, nor a character without creating it entirely
afresh. We need only recollect the shallow narratives out of
which he fashioned AlVs Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure,
Cymheline, and the Merchant of Venice, to perceive with what a
cold and regardless manner he treated the motives of the actions
and the actions themselves. Even in the chronicles of his
English histories, however conscientiously he observed the
historical tradition, he was obliged, in order to put life into
them, to lengthen them considerably and to introduce into them
fictitious matter, and not unfrequently to invent the explanatory
motives of the actions."

The case is startlingly different when we turn to the group
of Eoman plays, where the material is supplied by Plutarch
— read in North's translation. In Plutarch's lives Shake-
speare found history in the shape in which it suits the
dramatist — he found it in the form of biography, written
by one who had a genius for biography. Here there were
historic plots ready made : characters fully drawn, with
appropriate actions : striking situations, moving incidents,
suggestions of effective dramatic scenes in abundance — and
all belonging to the real world, not the world of fiction.

Under these circumstances the task of the dramatist did
not call for creative originality in the largest sense : his
business was mainly to select and combine the incidents of
Plutarch's narrative, developing some aspects of the story
and subordinating others, with a view to harmonious effect.
And in expressing the character of his main personage —
as in the case of Brutus, the moral hero of Julius Cccsar —
what he has to do is, to a great extent, to work on the

IV 'JULIUS CAlSAR' AND ' CORIOLANUS' loi

lines clearly drawn by Plutarch, and to reproduce and
imitate the characteristic traits given in the incidents and
utterances recorded by the biographer. This, at any rate,
is what Shakespeare does. His least appreciative critics
have rarely denied him creative and inventive powers of
the first order : but to exercise these powers here would be
inconsistent with the direct and simple manner in which
he conceives the dramatist's task. What he has undertaken
is to tell a true story by action, to bring on the stage a
great historic event, which from its nature and the person-
ages concerned is exceptionally adapted for dramatic treat-
ment ; and, as always when his undertaking is of this kind,
he shows a reverent fidelity to the essential and vital facts
of the history, though he allows himself some freedom in
handling details. Even single expressions and phrases in
which character is manifested, he is careful to note and use
in composing his speeches.

I have said that the simple aim of Shakespeare is to
tell a story dramatically. This is why so many of his
plays resist the application of the traditional classification —
handed down from the Greek stage — into comedies and
tragedies. That is, they have usually either a preponder-
antly comic or preponderantly tragic quality ; but very
rarely is this quality maintained throughout : the interest
of the comedy is deepened by the introduction of serious
pathos, as in Mucli Ado ahout Nothing, and the tragic
effects are relieved and heightened and rendered more
lifelike by scenes and personages that are at least half
comic, as the grave-diggers and the fop in Hamlet, the
porter in Macbeth, the fool in Lear. Sometimes the comic
and the serious interest is very evenly balanced, as in
Henry IV. ; sometimes the effect is not designed to be
markedly either comic or tragic, but simply interesting, as in
Cymbeline and the Winter's Talc. In Julius Casar, indeed,
the comic element is very slight, — though il always think
that the facetious citizen in the first scene rises above the
rather low average standard of Shakespeare's verbal wit, —
but I still feel that its plan of construction illustrates the

I02 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES iv

conception of the drama on which I am now insisting, I
think even the title shows this. Eegarded as a tragedy,
the hero is undoubtedly Brutus : it is in the interplay of
his character and his circumstances that the deepest interest
of the drama lies : but the central event is the death of
Julius Caesar, and it is the event that gives the title. The
character of Csesar is of quite subordinate interest ; indeed,
I think that Shakespeare deliberately presents it in the
least attractive aspect which was compatible with fidelity to
fact — emphasising his overweening and boastful conscious-
ness of his exalted position— in order that the spectator's
sympathies may not turn too decisively on Csesar's side
against Brutus. At the same time I do not doubt that
Plutarch's life suggested to Shakespeare that arrogant egot-
ism was an attribute of Ceesar. In another play Shake-
speare speaks of Csesar's famous letter — I once heard it
described as Ceesar's famous telegram — " veni, vedi, vici " as
a " thrasonical brag " ; ^ and several other utterances of the
great man would confirm this view — his divorcing his wife
because Caesar's wife must be above suspicion : his reassuring
his boatman in a storm, " Thou hast Caesar and his fortune
with thee " : his lofty insolence to the tribune who resisted
his spoliation of the public treasury, " Thou art mine, both
thou and all them that have risen against me ... it is
harder for me to [threaten to kill] thee than to do it." All
these would suggest a great man with an overblown and over-
weening consciousness of his greatness : a man who might
be fitly made to exemplify — as Shakespeare makes him
exemplify — the " pride that goeth before a fall," declaring
himself unassailable and immutable just as the mine of
conspiracy is exploding under his feet. The attractive
qualities which Plutarch also shows us in Ciesar; his grace
and honhommie, his clemency and magnanimity, Shake-
speare would doubtless have brought forward, if the plan
of the drama had been different : he does not quite conceal
these qualities, but he keeps them in the background, as I
conceive, out of regard for the main dramatic effect at

^ As You Like it, Act v. Sc. ii.

IV 'JULIUS C^SAR ' AND * CORIOLANUS ' 103

whicli he aims. He has to win a share of our sympathy
for the noble aim that partly redeems the guilt of the
assassins : he must not, therefore, dwell too much on the
lovable qualities of the victim.

However this may be, Caesar is not included among the
characters of the play who have a leading interest for us as
characters. These are Brutus, Cassius, and Antony ; and it
is instructive to note how far Plutarch has supplied matter
for the striking contrast that Brutus presents alternately to
either of the other two, and how Shakespeare has worked
upon the material supplied. I will try to show this briefly
in the case of Brutus and Cassius.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare's conception of the
relation of Brutus to the conspiracy and to Cassius is
simply Plutarch's. The lines with which Antony in the
last scene pronounces Brutus' epitaph are simply Plutarch
versified : —

This was the noblest Roman of them all :

All the conspirators save only he

Did that they did in envy of great Cresar ;

He only, in a general honest thought

And common good to all, made one of them.^

It is from this moral elevation of Brutus, as Plutarch again
tells us, that his moral support is thought indispensable by
the conspirators. Cassius is the instigator of the con-
spiracy, and Plutarch makes clear that he would have
practically guided it more wisely than Brutus, being " very
skilful in wars," and better understanding the hard neces-
sities of the cruel business he undertakes. He would not
have saved Antony alive, and he would not have added tlie
mistake of letting him make his funeral oration : Plutarch,
like Shakespeare, expressly puts down these mistakes in the
art of revolution to Brutus. But Cassius' morale is recog-
nised as lower : " it is reported," says Plutarch, " that
Brutus could evil away with the tyranny, and that Cassius
hated the tyrant." Hence, when he begins to stir his
friends against Cassar, Plutarch tells us that they only

1 Act V. Sc. V,

104 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES iv

promised to take part with him, " so Brutus were the chief
of their conspiracy ... it stood them upon to have a man
of such estimation as Brutus, to make every man boldly
think, that by his only presence the fact were holy and
just." This is the central point in Brutus' relation to the
great event, as Shakespeare presents it.

Similarly all the main details of the event and its con-
sequences : the appeal of Cassius to Brutus : the method of
rousing him by anonymous letters adjuring him to wake
from his lethargy : the relation of Portia to Brutus, her
self-wounding to test her firmness, her appeal for her hus-
band's confidence, her subsequent intense anxiety ; later
on, the death of Portia, the altercation between the two
leaders in Brutus' tent, in which their moral difference is
effectively brought out, their disagreement about the fatal
battle, the apparition of the evil genius, the chief features
of the battle itself, and of their double suicide, — all this is
taken substantially from Plutarch, though some minor de-
tails are altered. Similarly the other features of Brutus'
character, besides his moral elevation, are at least suggested
in Plutarch. Plutarch's Brutus, like Shakespeare's, is a
man who frames his manner of life by the study of philo-
sophy ; a bookish man, who falls to his book even on the
day before a battle ; and at the same time — what is not
always the case with bookish philosophers — a man of cool
self-restraint and rational firmness in trying crises of action,
never carried away by passion or covetousness, never yield-
ing to wrong or injustice. This outline Shakespeare has
filled in with the figure of a thinker, studious of self-
perfection, and self- revering ; who guides his own actions,
when most daring, by pure reason, and before he resolves
to be an assassin, makes the premises and the steps of
the formal process of reasoning that has led him to
this conclusion almost pedantically precise. It is for the
prevention of future mischief: Csesar is not now a cruel
tyrant, but experience shows that when he has attained
the crown, the highest object of ambition, he is likely to
become so : —

IV 'JULIUS CAiSAR ' AND ' CORIOLANUS ' 105

Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel

Will bear no colour for the thing he is.

Fashion it thus ; that what he is, augmented,

Would run to these and these extremities :

And therefoi'e think him as a serpent's egg.

Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,

And kill him in the shell.'

Contrast the manner in which Cassius has tried to sting
him to resolve, by appealing to his personal sense of
humiliation : —

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates :

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Brutus and Ciesar : what should be in that " Caesar " ?

Why should that name be sounded more than yours ?

Write them together, yours is as fair a name ;

Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well ;

Weigh them, it is as heavy ; conjure with 'em,

Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.

Now, in the names of all the gods at once,

Upon what meat doth this our Coesar feed,

That he is grown so great ? Age, thou art shamed !

Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods !

When went there by an age, since the great flood.

But it was famed with more than with one man"?

When could they say till now, that talk'd of Rome,

That her wide walls encompass'd but one man 1

Now is it Rome indeed and room enough.

When there is in it but one only man.

O, you and I have heard our fathers say,

There was a Brutus once that would have brook'd

The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome

As easily as a king.-

This is the speech of a man who genuinely loves free-
dom, but in whom the love of freedom takes its lowest
form of aversion to personal inferiority of position. There
is force, however, in the concluding appeal to Brutus'
ancestry : Brutus feels it, but is not to be moved to hasty

^ Act ii. Sc. i. "^ Act. i. So. ii.

I06 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES iv

resolve : he replies with grave considerateness and defers
decision. Eational himself, he expects rationality from
others : he is even under the illusion that Antony will yield
to the reasons which have led him to kill Caesar : thus his
address to the crowd before the funeral, though not without
force, is jejune and academic.

At the same time, I think that Mr. Dowden in his
interesting book on Shakespeares Mind and Art has dwelt
too exclusively on this side of Brutus' character. He is no
mere Idealist, secluded in a world of abstractions : he has
strong emotions and is in certain respects well fitted for
action. This is Plutarch's conception of him, and it is
clearly also Shakespeare's. Xotice his cool self-command at
the crisis just before the event, when the more passionate
Cassius is giving way to premature despair, under the
erroneous idea that Csesar is being informed of the conspiracy.
Observe with what firmness and calmness — though not
altogether wisely — he directs the action of the conspirators
immediately after the event. Observe the combination of
feeling and self-mastery finely shown later on in his lament
over the body of Cassius : —

Friends, I owe more tears
To this dead man, than yon shall see me pay.
I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.^

Nor is it mere negative self-mastery : he can not only
restrain his mood but summon what mood the occasion
demands. The change in Act ii. Scene i. from the mood
of painful conflict and gloomy meditation to that of
inspiriting resolve is very striking, and shows a man who,
as far as mo7'ale is concerned, is eminently fit for action.
Up to the moment when he gives his hand in final pledge
he is almost like a brooding Hamlet : —

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream :
The genius, and the mortal instruments,

^ Act V. Sc. iii.

IV 'JULIUS CAiSAR' AND ' CORIOLANUS' \Q^

Are then in council ; and the state of man
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
Tlie nature of an insurrection.^

But then comes out another side of his nature : he springs
to his right place as leader by virtue of moral superiority :
and we feel that we have here the one man who can make
conspiracy high-hearted, noble, magnanimous.
" Let us swear," says Cassius, " our resolution."

Brutus. No, not an oath : if not the face of men,
The sufierance of our souls, the time's abuse, —
If these be motives weak, break off betimes,
And every man hence to his idle bed ;
So let high-sighted tyranny range on,
Till each man drop by lottery. But if these,
As I am sure they do, bear fire enough
To kindle cowards and to steel with valour
The melting spirits of women, then, countrymen,
What need we any spur but our own cause
To prick us to redress ? what other bond
Than secret Komaiis, that have spoke the word.
And will not palter ? and what other oath
Than honesty to honesty engaged,
That this shall be, or we will fall for it ?
Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous,
Old feeble carrions and such suffering souls
That welcome wrongs ; unto bad causes swear
Such creatures as men doubt : but do not stain
The even virtue of our enterprise,
Nor the insuppressive mettle of our spirits,
To think that or our cause or our performance
Did need an oath ; when every drop of blood
That every Roman bears, and nobly bears.
Is guilty of a several bastardy.
If he do break the smallest particle
Of any promise that hath pass'd from him.-

Observe with what fidelity and inventiveness combined
Shakespeare has used his materials. The moral superiority
of Brutus, and the fact that the conspirators were not bound
by oaths : these data he finds in I'lutarch. But the com-
bination of the two is all Shakespeare's : and it is impossible
to imagine a more effective way of making his hero assume

^ Act ii. Sc. i. '^ Act ii. So. i.

io8 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES iv

the moral position that by right belongs to him. Observe,
too, how well this speech is made to illustrate what Plutarch
tells us of the style of Brutus' oratory. " When [his mind]
was moved to follow any matter he used a kind of forcible
and vehement persuasion that calmed not, till he had obtained
his desire." Forcible and vehement persuasiveness is the
exact description of the lines I have recited.

One word more before I leave Brutus and Cassius.
There is a fine tragic effect in the way in which each friend
misleads the other in turn : Brutus yielding to Cassius
when he urges the need and the call of Eome ; and Cassius
allowing his superior practical insight to be overruled, in
deference to his friend's moral superiority.

Perhaps of all the personages in the play, the character of
Antony has the greatest dramatic capabilities : there is no
room in this piece to develop them fully, but the presentation
as far as it goes is excellent both in itself and in its contrast
with Brutus. He is a man of genius without an ideal, with
a rich nature i capable of strong affections and loyal subordina-
tion: but intensely pleasure-loving and without morale,: as
Dowden well says, " looking on life as a game, in which he
has a distinguished part to play, and playing that part with
magnificent grace and skill," but with utter unscrupulous-
ness. Shakespeare's unique power of presenting the elements
of a mingled character — with good impulses but capable of
the worst crimes — was never better shown. Antony is
separated from Brutus by a moral gulf: the hideousness of
the proscription by the Triumvirs, with their cold-blooded
mutual sacrifice of friends and kinsmen to each other's
vengeance, is used with fine tragic effect — we feel it an
awful penalty for Brutus' noble crime, that the generosity
and clemency of Ciesar has been exchanged for these bar-
gaining butchers. Yet with all this, it is Antony not Brutus
that has le heme role in the encounter over Ctesar's body,
and at the funeral : because he shows not merely skilful
management for his ends, but, genuinely and intensely, the
human affection that Brutus has suppressed in himself. I
know nothing subtler in Shakespeare than the way in which

IV 'JULIUS C^SAR ' AND ' CORIOLANUS ' 109

genuine feeling burns through the craftily planned speech
with which he enters after the dreadful deed is done : —

0 mighty Ctesar ! Doat thou lie so low ?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils.
Shrunk to this little measure 1 Fare thee well.

1 kuow not, gentlemen, what you intend.
Who else must be let blood, who else is rank :
If I myself, there is no hour so fit

As CVesar's death's hour, nor no instrument

Of half that worth as those your swords, made rich

With the most noble blood of all this world.

I do beseech ye, if ye bear me hard.

Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke,

Fullil your pleasure. Live a thousand years,

I shall not find myself so apt to die :

No place will please me so, no mean of death,

As here by Csesar, and by you cut off,

The choice and master spirits of this age.^

Turning to Coriolanus, also taken from North's Plutarch,
we again find that Shakespeare's use of his materials throws
light on the leading motives and aims that governed him
in his choice and treatment of a subject. Professor Gervinus,
a commentator from whom much may be learnt, begins his
study of Coriolanus as follows : —

Fondness for the Roman State, whose mighty career Shake-
speare contemplates in this play with the proud satisfaction of
one belonging to it, seems to have induced the poet, after the
completion of Antony and Cleopatra, to take up once more the
better days of the first military greatness of this people and to
treat a more noble subject out of its history. As in Antony
he had represented the imperial time and its degeneracy, and in
Ccesar the struggle of the republic with monarchy, in Coriolanus
he brings before us the struggle between the aristocratic and
democratic elements within the republic. The play is filled with
the striving of the two powers, tribunes and consuls, plebeians and
patricians, senate and people . . . The opposition between these
two powers is everywhere exhibited as founded on their nature ;
the implacable enmity between them is shown as a necessary
result of the imprudence, unreasonableness, and harshness, of
their contrast.

^ Act iii. Sc. i.

no ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES iv

Now, I do not say that there is nothing of all this in
Shakespeare's mind, but I feel convinced that it occupied
a much more subordinate place in his aims and motives
than Professor Gervinus thinks. It is not fondness for
the Eoman State, but fondness for the Eoman character, and
a keen sense of its capabilities for dramatic representation
that moved Shakespeare, — in my view. Plutarch, his source,
is a biographer not a historian, and, as I have said, it is
in the character of a biographer that he has so strong an
attraction for our dramatist.

The fights of Romans and Volscians, the struggles of
patricians and plebeians interest him mainly as constituting
the element in which his hero first manifests his heroic
qualities, and then weaves for himself his tragic destiny by
his heroic excesses and errors of passion. I see no sign that
he has more than the vaguest conception of Eoman history
as a whole : he makes Coriolanus say, when soliciting votes
as a candidate, that " aged custom " will not permit him to
be consul, except by the people's voices : ^ not being ap-
parently aware that the whole affair happened — according
to tradition — only twenty years after the expulsion of the
kings from Eome.

It is not only that he has no general apprehension
of the difierence between the ancient and the modern
world — he makes Coriolanus talk of " our divines " as
persons with the functions of imparting virtues to the
laity — and that he falls into the anachronisms of refer-
ring to Alexander, to Cato, even to Galen, as if they
were characters familiarly known at the beginning of the
5th century B.C. This kind of thing we are accustomed
to in Shakespeare. It is more striking to contrast the
close and reverent fidelity with which he has studied
and the skill with which he has used every scrap of
information that Plutarch has given him about the char-
acters and moods of his personages, with his carelessness
and looseness in dealing with the purely political aspect
of the story.

^ Act ii. Sc. iii.

IV 'JULIUS C.-ESAR' AND ' C0K20LANUS'' in

The central facts, from tlie political point of view, are
the appointment of the tribunes and the bold proposal of
Coriolanus to abolish tlie new-fangled plebeian magistracy.
Now the psycholof/ical interest of these facts is most fully
apprehended by Shakespeare : the self - assertive pride of
office of these plebeian magistrates, contrasting with the
arrogant consciousness of personal superiority shown by the
patrician : their practised dexterity in managing the mob
and working its feelings up to the point they desire, as
contrasted with Coriolanus' reckless folly in provoking it
by violent utterances of contempt : the collapse of the
demagogues when the battle is transferred from the forum
to the field : — all this is most vividly presented. But the
political aspect of the matter has no similar interest for
him, even on what seems to us its most dramatic side.
Every schoolboy knows — I think this really is one of the
things that every schoolboy does know — how the poorer
plebeians were oppressed by the old harsh law of debt,
reducing the defaulting debtor to practical slavery : how
they were only induced to go out to light an invading foe
by the promise of relaxation of this harsh law : how the
promise was not kept : how despairing of redress the
plebeians marched away in orderly secession and encamped
on the Holy Hill two miles off, threatening to leave Eome
to the patricians and their clients. It is at this juncture
that Menenius is sent to them, and persuades them to a
compromise by the famous fable of the belly and its
members, with which the play begins : and the chief point
of this compromise is the appointment of tribunes. All
this is clearly told by Plutarch — though not witli perfect
historical accuracy : — but all this does not interest Shake-
speare. He mixes up this great historic secession of the
plebs with a disturbance about the distribution of corn
in time of dearth, which Plutarch descrilies at a later date :
he makes Menenius tell his fable to a hungry company of
mutinous citizens in a street : and he represents this event-
ful grant of the plebeian magistracy, the tribunate, as made
to another similar crowd who

112 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES iv

Said they were an-hungry ; sigh'd forth proverbs,
That hunger broke stone walls, that dogs must eat,
That meat was made for mouths, that the gods sent not
Corn for the rich men only.^

It is impossible to conceive that a dramatist moved — as
Gervinus asserts — by " fondness for the Eoman State " and
desire to show what it was " in its better days," could have
so degraded and vulgarised this most impressive incident in
its history. Nor does he understand what the tribunes are
appointed to do : he supposes that they are concerned in
managing the election to the consulship and have to
" endue " the candidate " with the people's voice " : though
I find no excuse for this blunder — as there is for other
blunders — in North's Phiiarch,

So again : he is in a muddle about Coriolanus' candi-
dature for the consulship, which he describes after Plutarch :
he thinks that it terminates in an election, and that
Coriolanus actually is consul, by the people's voices : though
as a subsequent confirmation is required, they have and
use the power of revoking their votes. But this is a mere
misunderstanding of Plutarch, who simply tells us that the
people received the candidature of Coriolanus favourably,
but changed their minds when it came to the election.

No, as I say, it is not the Koman State that interests
Shakespeare but the Eoman men and women of Plutarch,
and their remarkable dramatic capabilities. The relation
between patricians and plebeians had to be presented : but
it was in order to bring out impressively the mingled
qualities of Coriolanus. Hence it is rather irrelevant to
inquire after Shakespeare's political sympathies : it is
evident, indeed, that he is not a democrat, he does not
think that one man is as good as another, or that vox
populi is vox Dei, and there is no doubt an intention in
this play to give an impression of the ignorance and short-
sighted impulsiveness of the common people. But I con-
ceive that this is done largely with the dramatic object of
winning our sympathies for Coriolanus, whose contempt

1 Act i. Sc. i.

IV 'JULIUS C/ESAR' and ' CORIOLANUS' 113

for plebeians is thus partly justified. At the same time,
he wishes no less to represent the people as impressible by
valour, grateful for heroic services, easily led to follow and
submit to a hero, if he will only keep his temper and
use a little tact and discretion. It is the fatal defect of
Coriolanus that he cannot condescend to exhibit these
qualities.

As I have said, in combining the diverse qualities of
Coriolanus — as well as in the other characters of the play —
Shakespeare has followed and developed with the utmost care
and fidelity the indications given by Plutarch. Pre-eminent
alike in valour and physical strength, exercised in all kinds
of activity, so that no competitor was ever a match for him,
with " natural strength, and hardness of ward, that never
yielded to any pain or toil he took upon him," he performs
with a certain heroic inevitableness the great deeds of
martial prowess that win him the surname of Coriolanus.
Then when the victory is over, his magnanimity is no less
marked : his refusal of the gifts that the consul presses on
him, his determination to take simply his share with the
rest of the soldiers, his single petition for the release of an
old friend and host among the Volscian captives — these
fine features of the hero's conduct are merely transferred
from Plutarch's prose to the at once simple and dignified
verse that Shakespeare has always at command for worthy
occasions : —

I thank yoii, general ;

But cannot make my heart consent to take

A bribe to pay my sword : I do refuse it ;

And stand upon my common part with those

That have behekl the doing.^

On the other hand, says his biographer, " he was so
choleric and impatient, that he would yield to no living
creature : churlish, . . . uncivil and altogether unfit for any
man's conversation ": so that while men marvelled " much at
his constancy, that he was never overcome with pleasure,
nor money," yet " for all that, they could not be acquainted

' Act ii. Sc. ix.

I

1 14 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES iv

with him, as one citizen useth to be with another in the
city. His behaviour was so unpleasant to them, by reason
of a certain insolent and stern manner he had." Shake-
speare admirably exemplifies this (in Act i. Sc. iv.) by the
outburst of contemptuous fury at the cowardice of the
common soldiers : on account of which, though his heroism
excites admiration, he is always — so to say — on the verge
of unpopularity. When he rushes gallantly into Corioli the
soldiers' comment is

First Soldier. See, they have shut him in.

All. To the pot, I warrant him.

Hence, as Plutarch later on explains, he is altogether unapt
for the political career to which his military services entitle
him ; being " a man too full of passion and choler, and too
much given over to self-will and opinion," lacking "the
gravity, and affability that is ... to be looked for in a
governor of State ": and " thinking that to overcome always,
and to have the upper hand in all matters, was a token of
magnanimity." But having this imperious self-will, he
lacks the highest kind of magnanimity — the greatness of
soul that can forgive an injury : his rejection for the consul-
ship fills him — Plutarch tells us — with " spite and malice,"
and his subsequent banishment produces a more profound
and all - absorbing " vehemency of anger, and desire of
revenge," that sweeps away all regard for friends and for
country.

And here I would note a subtle trait skilfully intro-
duced by Shakespeare into the earlier delineation of his
hero. Knowing — as no reader of Plutarch could fail to
know — how strong an element patriotism was in the
character of a Eoman of noble type, he thinks that, to
explain the conduct of Coriolanus at this crisis, it should
be hinted in the earlier part of the play that even in fight-
ing his country's battles he is not in any high degree
moved by patriotic ardour. As the first citizen says in
the first scene, " What he hath done famously, though soft-
conscienced men can be content to say it was for his

IV 'JULIUS cjesar' and ' CORIOLANUS' 115

country, he did it to please Lis mother, and to be partly
proud." And his own casual phrase in the same scene,
about his Volscian rival Tullus Aufidius, shows us delicately
but sufficiently that it is chivalry and martial ardour rather
than patriotic self-devotion that move him —

Were half to half the world by the ears and he
Upon my party, I'M revolt, to make
Only my wars with him.

Well, these traits make up an impressive and interesting
moral figure, but not an attractive one : not a hero that can
gain our sympathies — as Shakespeare always, I think, aims
at gaining them, and always, I think, succeeds even when
his choice of a character has imposed on him the greatest
difficulties. Here, however, he has no difficulties to over-
come : since a tender and amiable side to Coriolanus is
given by the most interesting and ultimately important
elements in his life, as told by Plutarch — his relation to his
mother. " The only thing that made him to love honour,"
says the biographer, " was the joy he saw his mother
did take of him. For he thought nothing made him so
happy and honourable, as that his mother might hear every-
body praise and commend him, and that she might always
see him return with a crown upon his head." And it is not
only love that he habitually pays her, but obedience in
domestic life, for, "thinking all due to his mother, that had
been also due to his father if he had lived," he took a wife
at her desire, and " never left his mother's house therefore."
It is this double habit of intense filial affection and submis-
sive filial obedience that overcomes his passion of revenge
at the crisis of his fate, when all other forces have given
way before it, and saves him at the cost of life from the
terrible crime of destroying his fatherland.

So far, then, as Shakespeare works out this relation
between mother and son, conceiving them as similar in
their characters — alike in haughty determination, and
voluble vehemence and furious outbursts when their passion
is roused — as well as bound by indissoluble ties of affection,

ii6 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES iv

he keeps still within the limits of the original Roman type
as presented by Plutarch. At the same time, I always feel
that in endeavouring to impress us with the charm of this
side of Coriolanus' nature, he has mingled with the Eoman
oricrinal a good deal of the exuberant manliness, the eager
chivalry, cordial friendship, enthusiastic courtesy, of the
finest type of gentleman of the Elizabethan age, Plutarch
tells us that Coriolanus was churlish, uncivil, and unfit
for any man's conversation : but Shakespeare's Coriolanus
only shows these qualities when moved by his exaggerated
contempt and aversion for the weaker side of common
human nature. He is not so to his intimates : the enthu-
siasm of old Menenius shows this — the relation between
the older and the younger man is very natural and affect-
ing. Again, his loyal and frank confidence in Aufidius —
after they have sworn comradeship and even when the
latter is plotting against him — is pathetically introduced at
the crisis when he gives way to his mother's appeal : —

Aufidius, though I cannot make true wars,
I'll frame convenient peace. Now, good Aufidius,
Were you in my stead, would you have heard
A mother less ? or granted less, Aufidius ?

I'll not to Rome, I'll back with you ; and pray you,
Stand to me in this cause.^

Again, his tenderness to his wife is very beautifully though
briefly presented : but for this, unlike what I have just
noted, there is Plutarch's authority. Plutarch tells very
well how, when the women come to him in his camp, affec-
tion overcomes his determination to be stern, " and nature
so wrought with him, that ... he could not keep himself
from making much of them." The exquisite address on
his return from Corioli is all of Shakespeare's invention ;
but it is quite in harmony with Plutarch. Nothing can be
more simply effective than the contrast between the two
women. Shakespeare has obviously asked himself what
kind of daughter-in-law a woman like Volumnia would

^ Act V. Sc. iii.

IV 'JULIUS C^SAR' AND ' CORIOLANUS' 117

select to introduce into her household, and has decided
that it would be a woman like Virgilia — and very unlike
herself.

Kound Coriolanus the other characters group themselves
in effective contrast, and in relations that bring out his
characteristics. First — Menenius, the genial popular noble-
man, whose frankness the people like, though he tells them
plain truths, and has no love for their leaders and tribunes,
puts no restraint on his tongue. For an instance of
Menenius' generally good-humoured roughness of speech, see
his chaff of the leader of the mob in Act i. Scene i. —

What do you think,
You, the great toe of this asseuibly ?

First Git. I, the great toe ! why the great toe ?
Men. For that, being one o' the lowest, basest, poorest,
Of this most wise rebellion, thou go'st foremost :
etc.

This rough banter Shakespeare conceives as the right way
to deal with the mob : it is effective at the time, and it
leaves no sting behind, such as the insolence of Coriolanus
leaves. There is not much of the Roman in Menenius : but
it is a very vivid sketch of what an Elizabethan nobleman
might be who could persuade a mob by a dexterously applied
fable.

The character of Aufidius is more subtly mingled. His
furious threats of unchivalrous assault in the last scene of
Act i. contrast with Coriolanus' magnanimity —

Nor sleep nor sanctuary,
Being naked, sick, nor fane nor Capitol,
The prayers of priests nor times of sacrifice,
Embarquements all of fury, shall lift up
Their rotten privilege and custom 'gainst
My hate to Marcius.

Yet the very announcement of them, the very declaration
that his " valour's poisoned," makes us feel that we are deal-
ing with a mixed nature and not completely fallen ; and
prepares us for what follows when Coriolanus is banished :
the first generosity, as appears in Act iv. Scene v. (the outburst

iiS ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES iv

of enthusiasm here is very Elizabethan — there is nothing
more characteristic of the Ehzabethan time than enthusiasm
for human excellence), and then the clouds of jealousy
settling down again, yet not without a certain sense of
justice (see Act iv, Sc. vii.). So, again, the final treachery
and penitence at the close is characteristic.

I have spoken of Shakespeare's fidelity to his original.
This is shown in one way more strikingly here than in any
other of the Eoman plays, in the closeness with which he
follows the speeches. He takes all the ideas and as many
of the phrases as he can use, putting on emphasis and
imagery when North's English prose does not seem to
him sufficiently moving. There are three cases : — (1)
The speech in the third Act, urging the abolition of the
tribunate, already quoted from ; (2) the address to Aufidius
when he comes to him as a suppliant in Antium (Act iv.
Sc. v.); (3) Volumnia's maternal appeal (Act v. Sc. iii.).
A close comparison of these with North's original is very
interesting and instructive : but this is the kind of com-
parison which, perhaps, a lecturer had better suggest than
perform. I will only make a few remarks. In the first case
— the speech about the tribunate — Shakespeare is not pro-
fessedly giving the speech on the occasion on which the
model in Plutarch is delivered, but a repetition on a different
occasion : in the street, not in the senate : hence, perhaps, he
has introduced more of his own matter. In the second case
— the speech to Aufidius — he is very close to his original,
only introducing a few images to make it more vivid. In the
third case — Volumnia's appeal — he keeps very close to his
original so far as it goes, only the appeal is skilfully divided,
so as not to be too long, and the order slightly changed so
as to lead to the climax ; but I think it impresses him as
not quite feminine enough in style, so he adds a more
characteristically feminine though less classical passage at
the end : —

To his surname Coriolanus 'longs more pride
Than pity to our prayers. Down : an end ;
This is the last : so we will home to Rome,

IV 'JULIUS C^.SAR' AND ' CORIOLANUS' 119

And (lie among our neiglibours. Nay, behold 's :
This boy, tliat cannot tell what he would have,
But kneels and holds up hands for fellowship,
Does reason our petition with more strength
Than thou hast to deny 't. Come, let us go :
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother ;
His wife is in Corioli and his child
Like him by chance. Yet give us our dispatch :
I am hush'd until our city be afire,
And then I'll speak a little.

SHAKESPEAEE AND THE EOMANTIC DEAMA,
WITH SPECIAL EEFEEENCE TO MACBETH

The easiest method of getting a precise notion of what is
meant by the Eomantic drama (of which the Shakespearian
drama is the most splendid and impressive example) is to
interpret it negatively. The Eomantic drama is the type
of drama that dechnes to be " cribbed, cabined, and con-
iined " by the rules and restrictions which, under the
influence of the scholars of the Eennaissance, came to be
regarded as inviolable canons of classical art. In the
Eomantic drama no " unity " is considered indispensable
for the general coherence of impression which dramatic like
every other art requires, save and except the unity of
human interest which a series of events acquires from the
relations of all the events, in the way of cause and effect, to
the life of a single human being, or closely connected group
of human beings. If we may call this " unity of action,"
then the principle of the Eomantic drama is that " unity of
action " is the one unity needful ; all other unities — unity
of time, unity of place, unity of tone of sentiment, whether
tragic or comic, unity of aesthetic level in the verbal instru-
ment of expression, whether prose or verse — are all non-
essential, and may be broken or kept according to convenience.
These unities were maintained — not exactly and universally,
but in the main — spontaneously and as a matter of course,
by the great Greek tragedians : and they were imposed as

1 20

V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND ' MACBETH' 121

rules resting on indubitable a?sthetic principles on the so-
called classical drama of France : but the liornantic drama
holds it always lawful to violate them, though it may not
always be expedient.

Unity of time and place are undoubtedly helpful in
impressing the imagination of the audience with the inner
unity of the action represented : but few critics would now
maintain that they are indispensable for this purpose : and
certainly in many cases their observance would render it
impossible to bring directly before the spectators the most
essential parts of the action — the most important conse-
quences of the most important causes. Thus, e.g., in
witnessing the tragedy of Othello, the spectator must be dull
whose imagination does not follow the wedded Othello and
Desdemona from Venice to Cyprus, without the least sense
of a break in the coherence of the action. So, again, if such
an action as that of Macbeth is to be adequately represented
— if the spectator is to see how " the assassination " cannot
" trammel up the consequence," but " in these cases we still
have judgment here," — the time of the piece must be
stretched to years. We must follow Macbeth from his appear-
ance in the prime of manly vigour, fighting like " Bellona's
bridegroom " against the enemies of his country, until after
restless years of criminal rule, his

way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf ;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have ; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.^

The violation of unity in the tone of feeling stirred by
the drama, the mingling of comic with tragic effects — this
is at once a characteristic of "deej^er import, and more in
need of defence. Even ardent admirers of Shakespeare
have not always been able to approve the combinations of
effects on which he ventures. Even Coleridcre considered

Act V. Sc. iii.

122 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES v

that the " low soliloquy of the porter in Macbeth must have
been written for the mob by some hand other than Shake-
speare's " ; and this view seems to have been accepted by
Messrs. Clark and Wright. I see no reason for regarding
this as less thoroughly Shakespearean than, e.g., the utter-
ances of the Fool in King Lear, at the crisis w^hen the storm
of the old man's passion is vying with the storm of the
elements, which some readers have also found inharmonious
with the pathetic situation in which they are introduced.
Whether it is right a3sthetically to appeal to our sense of
the ridiculous at the very crisis of tragic interest, I do not
venture dogmatically to decide. There seems to me both gain
and loss in it. Undoubtedly the utterances {e.g.) of the
porter in Macbeth break the harmony of the spectator's
sentiment, and so far tend to diminish the intensity of the
tragic impression. It may be replied that they relieve the
strain on his feelings and so prevent him from being wearied :
and I have no doubt that Shakespeare — writing for a mixed
audience — had this effect in view. But this alone would
not seem to me an adequate defence ; an audience that
required for mere relief such violent mixtures of tragic and
comic as Shakespeare allows himself, would seem to me
a vulgar audience : to cultivated spectators adequate relief
might be given by more refined methods. For Shakespeare's
mixtures, however, there is usually more to be said. Firstly,
since in actual life the trivial and ridiculous does thus
mingle itself with the gravest events, its introduction often
increases in a startling way the life-likeness of the whole ;
the combination of the two elements enables the poet to
bring before us the whole scene, the whole story, in its ful-
ness. Sometimes it does even more than this : the ludicrous
element, even while it amuses, heightens the pathos, in-
tensifies the tragedy of the situation. This, I think, is
the case in the scene in Lear to which I referred ; the
grotesque accompaniment of the faithful fool renders the
outpourings of the desolate king's wounded heart more and
not less pathetic. I do not say that the additional vivid-
ness and intensity thus gained always makes up for the loss

V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND 'MACBETH' 123

through discordance of effects : hut at any rate it is charac-
teristic of the Eoniantic drama that it prefers to seize this
Jiind of gain at the risk of this kind of loss.

The same general preference is shown in otlier ways
than in the mingling of tragedy and comedy ; the Itomantic
— and especially the Shakespearean — drama will aim at
naturalness at the risk of offending our sense of taste and
decorum : it will aim at emphasis and force in the expres-
sion of feeling at the risk of repelling us hy violence
and uncouthness : it will aim at volume and richness of
effect at the risk of wearying by profusion or bewilder-
ing by variety. It has the defects of its Cjualities ;
what can be fairly claimed for it is, that for its central
object of presenting impressively the complex content of a
human story, its method, in a master's hand, is surpassingly
effective.

This disregard of unity or homogeneity in tone of senti-
ment is naturally accompanied by the license of variation
in the metliod of verbal expression which characterises this
type. The Shakespearean drama descends to prose, rises to
blank verse, and occasionally dances into rhyme at its own
sweet will, according as it finds one or other of these modes
of expression more appropriate. In Shakespeare's use of
these different verbal instruments important changes occur
as his art develops ; thus, except in two or three of the
earliest comedies, rhyme occupies a quite subordinate place,
and towards the close of his period of production he seems
to be abandoning it : still it is used, though sparingly, for
definite effects even in his best tragedies. To speak frankly,
I cannot always explain why it is used, nor can I always
explain the subtle instinct by which Shakespeare divides
the less impressive part of the dialogue between blank verse
and prose ; but one may say broadly, that in Shakespeare's
mature work blank verse is used ordinarily for passionate,
earnest, and dignified utterance, prose ordinarily for what is
either comic, trivial, or markedly unemotional, while rhymed
verse may come in where deliberate sententiousness seems
to be in place, as at the conclusion of a scene, or where a

124 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

combat of polite wits is designed, the entertainment of which
is not impaired by a touch of artificiality.^

It follows from what has been said, that it is not always
possible to classify the products of the Eomantic dramatist
as definitely tragedies or comedies. To apply such a classi-
fication rightly would be to miss the essential features of
the type. They may be either or both in varying degrees :
mainly tragic with comic elements, or mainly comic with
pathetic effects produced by an introduction of the style
of tragedy. Thus, in Much Ado ahoid Nothing, the effect
is preponderantly comic and most 'of the dialogue is in
prose ; but when, in the fourth act, the wedding is broken
off by a vile conspiracy of calumny against the bride, it
rises into blank verse ; and the passionate outbreak of the
father, under the shock of his daughter's dishonour, is in the
finest tragic manner of Shakespeare's middle period.

Do not live, Hero ; do not ope thine eyes :

For, did I think thou woiildst not quickly die,

Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,

Myself would, on the rearward of reproaches.

Strike at thy life. Grieved I, I had but one 1

Chid I for that at frugal nature's frame ?

0, one too much by thee ! Why had I one ?

Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?

Why had I not with charitable hand

Took up a beggar's issue at my gates,

Who smirched thus and mired with infamy,

I might have said " No jxtrt of it is mine,

Tliis shame derives itself from unknown loins " ?

But mine and mine I loved and mine I praised

And mine that I was proud on, mine so much

That I myself was to myself not mine.

Valuing of her — why she, 0, she is fallen

Into a pit of ink.^

The conspiracy is, as you know, unmasked, and the calumny
refuted, and all ends happily : so we have no scruple in
classifying the play as a comedy ; but when from the lively

^ When I say that l)lank verse is used for dignified utterance, it is to be noted
that it is sometimes tlie dignity of the person, rather than of the matter spoken,
that determines the choice of tliis form.

2 Act iv. Sc. i.

V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND 'MACBETH' 125

repartees of Beatrice and Benedict, and the merry jest of
making each believe that the other is pining for love of him
or her, we are suddenly swept into this passage of elevated
pathos, we feel to the full the mingled quality of the
Romantic drama.

Still, such plays as this we can classify by their pre-
dominant quality ; but there are others in which we tind
no such definite predominance of quality at all ; and in
some of these latter the aim of presenting an interesting
story is more prominent than any design of being either
tragic or comic. Thus, in Cymhcline, The Winter's Tale, and
The Tempest, the dramatist does not aim specially at moving
us to pity and terror, or amusing us with droll situations
and witty sayings — any more than a modern novelist does,
— but at exciting our sympathy with the joys and sorrows,
hopes and fears, of interesting persons to whom interesting
events happen.

I have mentioned three plays that belong to Shake-
speare's latest work, because it is important to note that
this mixed and variegated quality of the effects aimed at
by the liomantic drama is not a characteristic that Shake-
speare's art has any tendency to outgrow, — as he seems to
have a tendency to outgrow the use of rhyme. Quite the
contrary ; it is in his earliest work that we have comedy
w'ithout any pathetic or dignified scenes, and tragedy with-
out any touch of the humorous. Loves Labour s Lost and
the Comedy of Errors are both the purest comedies though
of very different kinds ; and Titus Andronicus — which, I
am sorry to say, I can find no adequate reason for not
regarding as an early production of Shakespeare's — is the
most perfectly unrelieved tragedy, and blank verse — often
very blank — from beginning to end. Whereas of the later
tragedies there is not one of which the predominant tone is
not relieved or varied — it may be heightened — by some
other element than the serious tragic style.

Partly, this may be referred to the tendency of develop-
ment of Shalvcspeare's own genius ; we seem to find in him a
growing determination to combine fulness and pregnancy with

126 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES v

impressiveness — at some sacrifice of harmoniousness — in all
his representation and expression of human life. But it is
partly to be regarded in a less personal way, as exhibiting the
final and complete triumph of the popular conception of the
drama over the scholarly conception, between which, for some
time before Shakespeare, there has been a conflict going on.

■ • ■ • « •

In the present lecture it is my object to characterise
and illustrate some of the special features of Shakespeare's
own work ; and I have thought it best to take as a kind
of centre the play of Macbeth, and dwell most on those
aspects of Shakespeare's work which Macbeth exemplifies.
That is, I shall have in view mainly the plays classified
as Tragedies or Histories — not Comedies ; I say Tragedies
or Histories, because Macbeth is to be regarded as partaking
of both characters. I see no reason for thinking that
Shakespeare regarded Holinshed's Chronicle — from which
he took the story of the play — as materially less historical
and trustworthy in its account of Duncan's murder and
Macbeth's reign, than in the later events of English history
in which he similarly followed its guidance.

And when I distinguish these from Comedies I wish
you to bear in mind that, as I have said, the separation
between the two is only partial, since it is a fundamental
characteristic of the Eomantic drama that the dramatist
can mingle the two elements in any proportion he likes.
Still, allowing for this mingled quality of the Eomantic
drama, there are still many plays which we can fairly
classify as Tragedies or Comedies. And when we compare
the two sets, I think it ought to be admitted — notwith-
standing the delight that so many of his comic personages
have given us — that Shakespeare's fame as the greatest of
modern dramatists rests more indubitably on his tragedies.
Por, first, Shakespearean tragedy impresses me as a higher
type of drama than Shakespearean comedy, because of its
greater unity of interest. In the great tragedies — in
Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello — the fate of the central
personage, or closely united pair of personages, as woven by

V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND 'MACBETH' 127

the iiitemctiou of character and circumstances, supplies a
dominant central thread of interest round which the in-
terests of all other events and personages are hung, and
from their relation to which these minor interests derive
most of their vitality. Now in the best Shakespearean
comedy this unity of central interest is wanting, and
therefore there is less coherence in total effect. Thus,
though I individually enjoy Shakespeare's comedies more
than Moliere's, I cannot deny that Moliere's type has the
decided advantage in cohesion and unity of interest. Some-
thing similar may be said of Ben Jonson. When I pass
from the Shakespearean comedy to the Jonsonian, I have to
admit, along with a great loss of charm, a certain progress
in type, an increase in coherent interest ; but in tragedy
after Shakespeare there is no similar advance. Secondly,
in one important element of a comedian's stock-in-trade,
Shakespeare's stock-in-trade seems to me inferior in quality :
I mean loit. He has plenty of it ; he delights in quips and
quirks and happy hits, neat turns of phrase and smart
repartees ; and — in the earlier part of his career at least —
is inventive and profuse in his efforts to produce them.
But the results are disappointing; his sallies and retorts
are ingenious but not felicitous; his word-plays rarely
make us laugh, and often make us blush to contemplate
our greatest comic poet lingering so complacently over
puns so poor. And we feel this all the more, as the
pleasure we get from his humour — from laughter-provoking
incongruities between what men are and what they think
themselves to be or what their situation calls on them to
be — is so varied and inexhaustible, whether we simply
laugh at the humorous personage, as at Bottom and Dog-
berry and IMalvolio ; or, better still, partly at and partly
with them, as with Falstaff and Touchstone. This humour
is only one aspect of Shakespeare's subtle and compre-
hensive grasp of human life in its strangely varied diver-
gences from the human ideal : but his combats of wit and
ingenuities of vivacious dialogue — I humbly think that
they were for an age, and not for all time.

128 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES v

And it ought to be said that as Shakespeare's art
develops, this element is valued less and less for its own
sake, and more and more as a means of exhibiting char-
acter. Of comedy then I shall say no more in detail, but
only refer to it generally, so far as may be necessary in
speaking of Shakespeare's work as a whole.

It is clear that — at least during a great part of Shake-
speare's career — his literary reputation, w^hich was con-
siderable, was not based mainly on his plays, but on his
poems, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, and on the sonnets
handed round among his friends, and not published till
1609. This is shown by his being mentioned with
praise as a poet by writers who do not even allude to his
plays.

I conceive, then, that Shakespeare, who seems to have
been quite devoid of the self-assertive egotism that char-
acterised his rival Ben Jonson, regarded his plays much as
the public regarded them : he constructed them for the
stage, and so long as they retained their popularity on the
boards it was not in the way of business to collect them in a
book. There is no reason to suppose him indifferent to their
ultimate fate ; he died prematurely at fifty-two, and may
easily have designed for his old age the task of presenting
his work in final literary form : which, as it was, had to be
undertaken seven years after his death by surviving mem-
bers of his company. But, primarily, he wrote with an eye
to his business, as playwright, play-actor, and shareholder
in the Globe Theatre, — a business which he pursued with
steady resolution, but always looking forward to leaving it
and living like a gentleman at Stratford, when he had
restored the decayed fortunes of his family.

I dwell on this business aspect of Shakespeare's work,
because I think that not only the difficulty of making out
exactly where his work begins and ends, but also the
characteristic qualities of what is undoubtedly his — both
good and bad qualities — are largely due to this cause,
that what he had to write was first and foremost an acting

V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND 'MACBETH' 129

play, made to tell on a certain given audience, whose
capacities and susceptibilities he had, as actor as well as
playwright, learned to know thorougldy. We must con-
ceive it as an audience of a very mixed character : contain-
ing doubtless a refined and cultivated element, who could
appreciate his deeper reflection, his subtleties and ingen-
uities, and catch the meaning of the compact allusive
phrases with which his later style is rife : but containing
also a vulgarer element that had to be amused by broad
drollery, entertained by varied scenes and startling tran-
sitions, impressed witli contrasts of character and changes
of moods by violent and profuse manifestations. I think
that, in the eager sustained effort to satisfy these diverse
needs the genius of Shakespeare was drawn out, but was also
here and there made to stoop to work quite below the level
of his own taste. And as the demand for new plays was
surprisingly incessant, — in one part of his career at least
it would seem that a new play was wanted about every
seventeen days, — it is not strange that even Shakespeare's
facile pen and unflagging industry could not unassisted
meet the demand, so that he was led to collaborate with
others, and take old plays and work them up into a more
effective form. I cannot doubt that in most, if not all, of
the plays regarded by at least some important critics as
doubtful,^ a mingling of Shakespearean and non- Shake-
spearean elements has been caused in one or other of these
two ways.

But if this alien element be admitted in so many of the
plays published as Shakespeare's by his fellow-actors, how
can we define its limits ? Well, I think the decision is
difiicult, and that we must candidly admit that the work
of other hands may possibly lurk unrecognised in plays
that have hitherto been unquestioningly received. For
example, I agree with the Cambridge editors " in tracing such
an element in Macbeth from the combined effect of internal
and external evidence ; but I do not think that a sober-

^ Thus Andronicm, the three parts of Henry VI., The Taming of the Shrew,
Timon 0/ Athois, Pcric/c.s; Henri/ VIIL
"^ Messrs. Clark and Wright.

E

ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

minded critic will extend the alien element far, in the plays
on which the world sets a real value. And I would add that
I do not think the general possibility of this foreign ad-
mixture ought to be used as a means of relieving Shake-
speare of the responsibility of bad writing ; indeed, however
strong my impression might be that the style of a passage
was un-Shakespearean, I should never rely on the evidence
of style alone unsupported by other tests. Experiences of
my own many years ago, when I knew more about the
authorship of anonymous reviews than I do now, convinced
me that cultivated persons generally overrate their power of
knowing an author by his style. I think, therefore, that
when Messrs. Clark and Wright say that " Shakespeare has
always a manner which cannot well be mistaken," they are
not allowing enough for the general feebleness of human
discernment of literary qualities. In the particular case of
Macbeth, however, I agree with the Cambridge editors in
thinking the second scene of Act i., in which the sergeant
reports the martial deeds of Macbeth and Banquo, is un-
Shakespearean in its laboured and level bombast unsuited
to the personage, and that most of the utterances of Hecate
and some of those of the witches, are un-Shakespearean in
their flat and fluent triviality.

Let me explain. I do not think that Shakespeare in
his maturity writes exactly bombast, as I should use the
word. I admit that his expressions are what might loosely
be called " bombastic " ; i.e. I admit that they are some-
times violent, exaggerated, extravagant, — if you like, un-
natural. Excessive emphasis is a sin of the Elizabethan
drama generally, and Shakespeare is undoubtedly among
the sinners. But his violent and extravagant phrases are
at any rate carefully prepared and worked up to : they
belong to the character, the situation, and correspond to
some adequate cause of strong emotion : they do not pro-
duce on us the effect of mere rhetorical effort gone wrong :
of a man swelling out his phrases and talking big in order
to impress us, and not impressing us after all. And I think
that there is no play of Shakespeare's better adapted to

V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND 'MACBETH' 131

illustrate this difference than Macbeth : none in which the
violent utterances are more carefully prepared and worked
up to. Take, e.(/., the meditation of Macbeth just before the
murder of Banquo : —

'r, }

To be thus is nothin<,'
But to be safely thus. — Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep ; ami in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd : 'tis much he dares ;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety. There is none but he
Whose being I do fear : and, under him,
My Genius is rebuked ; as, it is said,
Mark Antony's was by Cajsar. He chid the sisters
When tirst they put the name of king upon me.
And bade them speak to him : then prophet-like
They hailed him father to a line of kings :
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown.
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand.
No son of mine succeeding. If 't be so.
For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind ;
For them the gracious Duncan have I murder'd ;
Put rancours in the vessel of my peace
Only for them ; and mine eternal jewel
Given to the common enemy of man.
To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings !
Rather than so, come fate into the list,
And champion me to the utterance ! ^

Observe how out from the meditative calmness of the
intellectual state of analysis of his rival's character, the
passion of jealousy — naturally imperious in a powerful
mind that has given itself to criminal ambition — is gradu-
ally worked up to increasing violence of expression. The
last phrase is just w^hat might have been bombastic if it
had not been thus prepared ; but as it comes in it seems to
me right.

I will take another instance where there is an extrava-
gance of image which I cannot quite defend, but which yet
is not bombast : —

' Act iii. So. i.

132 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly : if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success ; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here ; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor : This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust ;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed ; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door.
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-oflf :
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air.
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself,
And falls on the other.^

I confess that the idea of " tears drowning the wind "
seems to me too extravagant to be approved anywhere : but
if anywhere we can tolerate it here, where it comes as the
one burst of violent emotion in a speech of which the
general language expresses admirably the tranquil tension
of anxious meditation at a tremendous crisis of life.

Observe, again, how subtly these speeches — and other
speeches of Macbeth — are suited to the character that
Shakespeare requires for the effectiveness of the drama.
Macbeth is the only one of the great group of tragedies that
belongs to Shakespeare's middle period, in which the lead-
ing villain of the piece is at the same time the hero, on
whose career (along with his wife's) the spectators have to

^ Act 1. Sc. vii.

V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND 'MACBETH' 133

concentrate their main interest : the dramatist has therefore
the difficult problem of exciting our sympathies for a man
whom he has to show descending through a series of hideous
crimes to a depth of utter wickedness. And the difficulty
is doubled because the story he has to tell precludes him
from attributing to Macbeth, at the great crisis of the
action, the only moral excellences appropriate to a
thorough-going criminal — high-hearted courage and manly
resolution. It is the wife who has to exhibit these
qualities: and if it is awkward for a hero to be a villain,
it is even more awkward for him to play second fiddle to
a woman.

But it is in triumphing over difficulties of this kind that
Shakespeare's dramatic genius is most strikingly shown : for
if there is anything in which Shakespeare's genius is in-
contestable it is in his power of winning for his personages
— under the most unfavourable circumstances — at least the
quantum of human sympathy required for dramatic interest.
He achieves this in the case of Macbeth by giving him an
intellectual comprehensiveness and penetration, and at the
same time an emotional susceptibility remarkably deep and
delicate. Thus his vacillation at the crisis, before the crime,
and the terrifying collapse and overthrow of his rational
self-control immediately after it, are felt by the spectator to
be due not to the feebleness of his nature but to its
intellectual range and emotional fineness. It is because he
can see clearly the consequences of his crime, and even feel
with sympathetic intensity the pity and horror it will
excite in others — though this gift of sympathy is perfectly
dominated by selfish ambition — that he hesitates at the
crisis ; it is through the same fineness of nature that he
feels so intensely afterwards how the springs of true human
life are for him so irrevocably poisoned.

The same characteristics give a singular charm to his
meditative utterances even at the later period of his career,
when not only morality but natural affection has been eaten
out of him by his course of relentless crime. Thus in his
speech, on hearing of his wife's death —

134 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES r

She should have died hereafter ;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-moiTow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more : it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing.^

In this speech he shows that conjugal love — so strong in
the crisis before the murder, so powerful in deciding him
to action — has withered away : the relic of it is only able
to stir in him a vague sense of the hollowness of life : but
his expression of this feeling irresistibly wins for him the
interest attaching to a fine nature in moral ruin.

^ Act. V. Sc. V.

VI

BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM IX POLITICS AXD

ETHICS

{Fortnightly Review, May 1877)

In the critical narrative, equally brilliant and erudite,
which Mr. Leslie Stephen has given us of the course of
English thought in the eighteenth century, there is one
gap which I cannot but regret, in spite of what Mr. Stephen
has said in explanation of it. The work of Bentham
is treated with somewhat contemptuous brevity in the
chapter on Moral Philosophy ; while in the following
chapter on Political Theories his name is barely mentioned.
The present paper is an attempt in some measure to supply
this deficiency. I should not have ventured on it if
Beutham's teaching had become to us a matter of merely
historical interest ; as I cannot flatter myself that I possess
Mr. Stephen's rare gift of imparting a sparkle to the dust-
heaps of extinct controversy. But no such extinction has
yet overtaken Bentham : his system is even an important
element of our current political thought ; hardly a decade
— though an eventful one — has elapsed since it might
almost have been called a predominant element. Among
the other writers to whom Mr. Stephen has devoted many
entertaining pages in his tenth chapter, there is not one of
whom this can be said. It would be almost ostentation, in
polite society at the present day, to claim familiarity with
Bolingbroke ; it would be even pedantry to draw attention
to Hoadly. The literary sources of tlie French Pevolution

135

136 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

are studied with eager and ever-increasing interest ; but
they are studied, even by Englishmen, almost entirely in
the writings of France : the most ardent reader of revolu-
tionary literature is reluctant to decline from Eousseau to
Tom Paine. Mr. Kegan Paul's entertaining biography
has temporarily revived our interest in Godwin, other-
wise Political Justice would be chiefly known to this
generation through the refutation of Malthus ; and Malthus's
own work is now but seldom taken from the shelf. There
are probably many schoolboys feeding a nascent taste for
rhetoric on the letters of Junius ; but Mr. Stephen has felt
that the inclusion of these in an account of Political
Theories requires something like an apology. Burke lives,
no doubt, not merely through the eloquence which immor-
talises even the details of party conflicts, but through a kind
of wisdom, fused of intellect and emotion, which is as
essentially independent of the theorising in which it is
embedded as metal is of its mine. But though Burke lives,
we meet with no Burkites. The star of Hume's meta-
physical fame has risen steadily for a century ; but his
warmest admirers are rather irritated by his predominant
desire for literary popularity, and are perhaps too much
inclined to turn aside from the philosophic material that
was wasted in furnishing elegant essays on National Char-
acter and The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth. In short,
of all the writers I have mentioned, regarded as political
theorists, it is only the eccentric hermit of Queen's Square
Place whose name still carries with it an audible demand that
we should reckon with his system, and explain to ourselves
why and how far we agree or disagree with his opinions.

Mr. Stephen, it should be said, is so far from denying
this exceptional vitality of Benthamism, that he even puts
it forward as an explanation of his cursory treatment of
this system. " The history of utilitarianism as an active
force belongs," he tells us, to the new post-revolutionary
era, on the threshold of which his plan compels him to
stop. This argument would have been sound if Bentham
had really been a man of the nineteenth century, born

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 137

before his time in the eigliteenth, and thus naturally
not appreciated till later, when the stream of current
thought had at length caught him up. Such freaks of
nature do sometimes occur, to the very considerable per-
plexity of the philosophical historian, in his efforts to
exhibit a precise and regular development of opinion.
But this is so far from being the case with Bentham,
that when J. S. Mill, in his most eclectic phase, under-
took to balance his claims as a thinker against those
of Coleridge, he described the coniiict between these two
modes of thought as the " revolt of the nineteenth century
against the eighteenth." The appropriateness of the phrase
is surely undeniable. No doubt it is also true, as Mr.
Stephen says, that Benthamism as an active force — and
Benthamism is nothing if it is not an active force — belongs
rather to the nineteenth century. It is just because both
these views are equally true that Bentham deserves the
special attention of the historian of opinion. In England,
at least in the department of ethics and politics, Bentham-
ism is the one outcome of the Seculum Rationalisticum
against which the philosophy of Restoration and Reaction
has had to struggle continually with varying success. It
is, we may say, the legacy left to the nineteenth century by
the eighteentli ; or rather, perhaps, by that innovating and
reforming period of the eighteenth century in which En-
lightenment became ardent, and strove to consume and
re-create. In his most characteristic merits, as well as his
most salient defects, Bentham is eminently a representative
of this stirring and vehement age : in his unreserved devo-
tion to the grandest and most comprehensive aims, his
high and sustained confidence in their attainability, and the
buoyant, indefatigable industry with which he sought the
means for their attainment — no less than in his exaggerated
reliance on his own method, his ignorant contempt for the
past, and his intolerant misinterpretation of all that opposed
him in the present.

It must be admitted that, though distinctly a child of its
age, Benthamism was not exactly a favourite child. The

138 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES vi

Fragment on Government (1776), and the Principles of
Morals and Legislation (published 1789), had found com-
paratively few sympathising readers at the time when
Political Justice and The Eights of Man were being greedily
bought. At the age of forty-two (1790) Bentham speaks,
in a letter to his brother, of " the slow increase of my
school." Yet we observe very clearly that from the first
Bentham appears as a teacher and master of political
science — one who has, or ought to have, a " school " — and
is accepted as such by competent judges. In 1778, only
two years after the publication of the Fragment, D'Alembert
writes to him, in the style of the time, as a philosopher and
professional benefactor of the human race. Two years
later he was taken up by Lord Lansdowne, who seems to
have had the eager receptivity for abstract theory which is
often found in powerful but imperfectly trained intellects,
even after the fullest acquisition of all that experience can
teach. The retired statesman bore with really admirable
patience the humours of the sensitive and self-conscious
philosopher : and in the circle at Bowood Bentham found
— besides the one romance of his life — invaluable oppor-
tunities for extending his influence as a thinker. It was
there that he first met Ptomilly, the earliest of the band of
reformers who, in the next century, attempted the practical
realisation of his principles ; and there, too, he laid the
foundation of his remarkable ascendency over Dumont.
The self-devotion with which a man of Dumont's talents and
independence of thought allowed himself to be absorbed in
the humble function of translating and popularising Ben-
tham was a testimony of admiration outweighing a bushel
of complimentary phrases : of which, however, Bentham had
no lack, though they came from a somewhat narrow circle.
" The suffrages of the few," writes Dumont in one of his
earUer letters, " will repay you for the indifference of the
many . . . Write and bridle my wandering opinions."
Through Dumont he became known to Mirabeau : and a
good deal of Benthamite doctrine found its way into that
hero's addresses to his constituents, which Dumont assisted

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 139

in composing. Brissot again, who saw a good deal of

Bentham in London, some years before 17<S9, always spoke

and wrote of him with the utmost enthusiasm : to which it

may be partly attributed that, in August 1792, a special

law of the National Assembly made him (as he tells Wilber-

Ibrce afterwards) " an adopted PVench citizen, third man in

the universe after a natural one " ; Priestley and Paine

being the first two. As soon as Dumont published the

Principes de la Code Civile et F^7iale (1802), expressions of

even hyperbolical admiration were sent to the philosopher

from different parts of Europe. A Swiss pastor subscribes

himself, rather to Bentham's amusement, " un homme

heureux, regcnere par la lecture de vos ouvrages." A

Russian general writes that his book " fills the soul with

peace, the heart with virtue, and dissipates the mists of the

mind " ; and conjures him to dictate a code to Eussia.

Another Piussian admirer ranks him with Bacon and Xew-

ton as the " creator of a new science," and writes that he is

"laying up a sum for the purpose of spreading the light

which emanates " from his writings. Nor is he without

similar honour even in his own country. Lord Lansdowne,

answering good-humouredly a reproachful epistle of sixty

pages, says that it is a letter which " Bacon might have

sent to Buckingham." In 1793 a gentleman whom he has

asked to dinner writes expressing " a woman's eagerness to

meet a gentleman of so enlightened a mind." A few years

later we find that the great Dr. Parr is never tired of

praising his " mighty talents, profound researches, important

discoveries, and irresistible arguments." On the whole we

may say that as even in his revered old age he never

attained the kind of popularity that adapts a man's name

for utterance on platforms : so even in the earlier part of his

career he often met with respect that almost amounted to

homage from men more or less influential and representative.

The degree and kind of influence which Bentham exercised

in the revolutionary period corresponds tolerably well to the

degree of affinity between his teaching and the principles

on which the revolutionary movement proceeded. In the

I40 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

combat against prejudices and privileges any ally was
welcome ; and Bentham was as anxious as any revolutionist
to break with the past, and reform all tlie institutions
of society in accordance with pure reason. It is true that,
from our point of view, the reason of Bentham appears the
perfect antithesis of the reason of Eousseau ; but it is very
doubtful whether this would have been evident to Eousseau
himself. The mainspring of Bentham's life and work, as
his French friends saw, was an equal regard for all man-
kind : whether the precise objects of this regard were
conceived as men's " rights " or their " interests," was a
question which they would not feel to be of primary con-
cern. He himself, indeed, was always conscious of the
gulf that separated him from his fellow-citizens by adoption.
" Were they," he writes in 1796, "to see an analysis I have
by me of their favourite Declaration of Eights, there is not
perhaps a being upon earth that would be less welcome to
them than I could ever hope to be." But the Anarchical
Fallacies, like some other fruits of Bentham's labours,
remained on the philosopher's shelves till the end of his
life ; only a meagre fragment of them found its way into
Dumont's Principes ; and by the time that this came out,
anarchical theories were somewhat obscured behind military
facts. And unless the " principle of utility " explicitly an-
nounced itself as hostile to the fundamental principles of
the common revolutionary creed, it certainly would not be
generally perceived to be so. I should almost conjecture
from what Mr. Stephen says of Bentham, compared with
the references to utilitarianism in his discussion of earlier
writers, that he has hardly enough recognised that Ben-
tham's originality and importance lay not in his verbal
adoption of utility as an end and standard of right political
action, but in his real exclusion of any other standard ;
in the definiteness with which he conceived the " general
good " ; the clearness and precision with which he analysed
it into its empirically ascertainable constituents ; the ex-
haustive and methodical consistency with which he applied
this one standard to all departments of practice ; and the

VI BENTFIAM AND BENTHAMISM 141

rigour with which he kept its appHcatiou tree from all alien
elements. Merely to state " utility " as an ultimate end
was nothing ; no one would have distinguished this from
the "public good" at which all politicians had always
professed to aim, and all revolutionary politicians with
special amplitude of phrase. The very Declaration of the
National Assembly, that solemnly set forth the main-
tenance of the " natural, imprescriptible, and inalienable "
riglits of man, as the sole end of government, announced in
its very first clause, that " civil distinctions, therefore, can be
founded only on public utility." Tt was not then sur-
prising that Morellet, Brissot, and others, recognising the
comprehensiveness of view and clearness of grasp that were
so remarkably combined in Bentham's intellect, the equal
distribution of his sympathies, and the elevated ardour of
his philanthropy, should have hailed him as worthy to
" serve in the cause of liberty."

And yet the almost comical contrast that we find between
Bentham's temper and method in treating political questions,
and the habitual sentiments and ideas of his revolutionary
friends, could hardly fail to make itself felt by the latter. Let
us take, for example, tlie Essay on Parliamentary Tactics
which he offered for the guidance of the new Assembly in
1789 ; and let us imagine a French deputy — a member of
the " Tiers " that has so recently been " Rien " and is now
conscious of itself as " Tout " — attempting its perusal. He
finds in it no word of response to the sentiments that are
filling his breast ; nothing said of priWleged classes whose
machinations have to be defeated, in order that the people
may realise its will ; instead of this, he is met at the out-
set with an exhaustive statement of the various ways in
which he and other servants of the people are liable to
shirk or scamp their work, or otherwise to miss attainment
of the general good. The object of the treatise, as the author
explains, is —

To obviate the inconveniences to which a political assembly
is exposed in the exercise of its functions. Each rule of this
tactics can therefore have no justifying reason, except in the

142 ESSA YS AND ADDIiESSES vi

prevention of an evil. It is therefore with a distinct knowledge
of these evils that we should proceed in search of remedies.
These inconveniences may be arranged under the ten following
heads : —

1. Inaction.

2. Useless decision.

3. Indecision.

4. Delays.

5. Surprise or precipitation.

6. Fluctuations in measures.

7. Quarrels.

8. Falsehoods.

9. Decisions, vicious on account of form.

10. Decisions, vicious in respect of their foundation.

We shall develop these different heads in a few words.

Under the head of delays, we find —

may be ranked all vague and useless procedures — preliminaries
which do not tend to a decision — questions badly propounded, or
presented in a bad order — personal quarrels — A^tty speeches,
and amusements suited to the amphitheatre or the playhouse.

The last and most important head is thus further
analysed :

When an assembly form an improper or hurtful decision, it
may be supposed that this decision incorrectly represents its
wishes. If the assembly be composed as it ought to be, its wish
will be conformed to the decision of public utility ; and when it
wanders from this it will be from one or other of the following
causes : —

1. Absence. — The general wish of the assembly is the wish of
the majority of the total number of its members. But the
greater the number of the members who have not been present
at its formation, the more doubtful is it whether the wish which
is announced as general be really so.

2. Want of Freedom. — If any restraint have been exercised
over the votes, they may not be conformable to the internal
wishes of those who have given them.

3. Seduction. — If attractive means have been employed to act
upon the wills of the members, it may be that the wish announced
may not be conformable to their conscientious wish.

VI

BE NTH AM AND BENTHAMISM 143

4. Ernn-. — If they have not possessed the means of informing
themselves — if false statements have been presented to them —
their understandings may be deceivi-d, and the ^\•ish which has
been expressed may not be that which they would have formed
had they been better informed.

And so on for page after page of dull and beggarly
elements, methodised no doubt in a masterly manner, and
calculated to have a highly salutary and sol)ering effect on the
mind of any legislator who can be persuaded to read them.
One defect which Bentham is most seriously concerned to
cure is the imperfect acquaintance that legislators are liable
to have with the motions on which they vote.

" Nothing is more common," he says, " than to see orators, and
even practised orators, falling into involuntary errors with respect
to the precise terms of a motion." This evil, he thinks, may be
obviated by " a very simple mechanical apparatus for exhibiting
to the eyes of the assembly the motion on which they are
deliberating."

" We may suppose a gallery above the president's chair, which
presents a front consisting of two frames, nine feet high by six
feet wide, filled Avith black canvas, made to open like folding
doors ; — that this canvas is regidarly pierced for the reception of
letters of so large a size as to be legible in every part of the
place of meeting. These letters might be attached by an iron
hook, in such manner that they could not be deranged. When
a motion is about to become the object of debate, it would be
given to the compositors, who would transcribe it upon the
table, and by closing the gallery, exhibit it like a placard to
the eyes of the whole assembly."

One would think that these suggestions were sufficiently
particular ; but Bentham feels it needful to give a page more
of minute directions as to size of letters, method of fixing
them, composition of the table, etc.

The salutary working of this machinery is obvious : —

When the orator forgets his subject, and begins to wander, a
table of motions offers the readiest means for recalling him.
Under the present regime, how is this evil remedied ? It is
necessary for a member to rise, to interrupt the speaker, and

144 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

call him to order. This is a provocation — it is a reproach — it
woiuids his self-love. The orator attacked, defends himself ;
there is no longer a debate upon the motion, but a discussion
respecting the application of his arguments. . . . But if we
suppose the table of motions placed above [the president], the
case would be very different. He might, without interrupting
the speaker, warn him by a simple gestxire ; and this quiet sign
would not be accompanied by the danger of a personal appeal.

The faithful Duinont is unbounded in his eulosr of this
" absolutely new and original " work, which " fills up one of
the blanks of poKtieal literature," and reports that Mirabeau
and the Due de la Eochefoucauld admired this '" truly philo-
sophical conception." Still the reader will hardly be sur-
prised to learn that ^Morellet thinks it not likely to be
appreciated by " light-minded and unreflecting persons " in
the crisis of 1789. Bentham, we feel, niust often have
appeared to his French friends as a perfect specimen of the
cold unsentimental type of Englishman ; though with an
epistolary prolixity which Sir Charles Grandison could
hardly surpass. On one occasion the admiring Brissot
cannot repress a murmur at the " dryness and di-oUery "
with which he responds to sentiment. " You have then
never loved me ! " he exclaims, — " me whose sensibilities
mingle with legislation itself ! " And in truth, though
Bentham had plenty of sensibilities beneath his eccentric
exterior, he was not in the habit of letting them mingle
with legislation.

The above extracts have sufficiently illustrated another
marked characteristic of Bentham's work in politics, besides
his severe exclusion of fine sentiments : his habit, namely,
of working out his suggestions into the minutest details.
This tendencv he often exhibits in an exaggerated form, so
that it becomes repellent or even ridiculous ; especially as
Bentham, with all his desire to be practical, is totally devoid
of the instinctive seK-adaptation which most men learn
from converse with the world. Still the habit itself is an
essential element of the force and originality of his Intel-
lectual attitude. " A man's mind," says the representative

VI BEN IB AM AMD BENTHAMISM 145

scientiric Luan iu Mlddleniarch, " must be continually ex-
panding and shiiuking between the whole human horizon
and the horizon of an object-glass." Bentham's mind was
continually performing a similar " systole and diastole " ; and
thus, in spit€ of the unduly deductive method that he
generally employs, he reaUy resembles the modem man of
science in tlie point in wliich the latter differs most strikingly
from the ancient notion of a philosopher. His apprehension,
whether of abstract theory or of concrete fact, has marked
limitations ; but as regards the portion of human life over
which his intellectual vision ranges, he has eyes which can
see with equal clearness in the most abstract and the most
concrete region ; and he as naturally seeks completeness in
working out the details of a practical scheme as in defining
tlie most general notions of theoretical jurisprudence. He
aims at a perfectly reasoned adaptation of means to ends in
constructing a " frame of morions," no less than in construct-
ing a code of laws ; and he passes from the latter to the
former without any abatement of interest or any sense of
incongruit}-. Thus, for twenty years (from 1791 to 1811),
wliile his fame as a philosophical jurist was extending
through the civilised world, he was probably better known
to the Government at home as belongnng to the rather
despised class of beings who were then called " projectors,"
from his favourite plan of a " Panopticon "' Penitentiary,
wliich was coutinuallv ur^ed on their notice bv himself and
his friends.

Panopticon or Inspection House M'as a circular building,
in which prisoners' cells were to occupy the circumference
and keepers the centre, with an intermediate anntdar wall
all the way up, to which the cells were to be laid open by
an iron grating. This construction (which with pro]:>er
modifications could be adapted to a workhouse) fills a much
larger space in Bentham's correspondence than all his codes
j)Ut together. Indeed, among the numerous wrongs, great
and small, on which the philosopher in his old age used to
dilate with a kind of cheerful acrimony peculiar to himself,
there was none which roused so much resentment as the

L

146 ESS A VS AND ADDRESSES vi

suppression of Panopticou, which he always attributed to a
personal grudge on the King's part. He composed a whole
volume on " the war between Jeremy Bentham and George
III., by one of the belligerents." " But for George III." the
narrative begins, " all the prisons and all the paupers in
England would long ago have been under mv management."

O O O I/O

For the administration of his prisons he had devised a com-
plete scheme, to the realisation of which he was prepared to
devote himself. The expense of prisoners was to have been
reduced ultimately to zero by a rigid economy, which yet,
when mitigated by the indulgences that were to be earned
by extra labour, would only produce about sufficient dis-
comfort to make the punishment deterrent. Idle prisoners
were to be fed on potatoes and water ad lib., clothed in coats
without shirts, and wooden shoes without stockings, and
made to sleep in sacks in order to save the superfluous
expense of sheets. Existence being thus reduced to its
lowest terms, a means of ameliorating it was provided in a
certain share of the profits of industry ; and Bentham was
sanguine enough to suppose that fifteen hours a day of
sedentary labour and muscular exercise combined, could be
got out of each prisoner by this stimulus. Contract-manage-
ment was an essential feature of the scheme ; it must be made
the manager's interest to extract from his prisoners as much
work as he could without injuring them ; while the prisoners
would be sufficiently protected against the manager's selfish-
ness by the terms of his contract, by the free admission of
the public to inspect the prison, and by a fine to be paid
for every prisoner's death above a certain average.

The amount of labour that Bentham spent in elaborating
the details of this scheme, defending it against all criticisms,
urging it on ministers and parliamentary friends, and vitu-
perating all whom he believed to have conspired to prevent
its execution, would have alone sufficed to fill the life of a
man of more than average energy ; while the total dis-
appointment of the hopes of twenty years, after coming
v/ithin sight of success — for in 1794 Parliament had au-
thorised such a contract as Bentham proposed — would have

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 147

damped any ordinary philanthropic zeal. Jiut Panopticon
and all that belongs to it, including all that he wrote on
the Poor Law and Pauper Management, might be subtracted
from Bentham's intellectual labours, without materially
diminishing the impression produced on the mind by their
amount and variety. Xay, even if the whole of his vast
work on Law and its administration, including innumerable
pamphlets on special points and cases, were left out of
sight, — if we knew nothing of Bentham the codifier, or Ben-
tham the radical reformer, — his life would still seem fuller
of interests and activities than most men's. Besides his
well-known pamphlet in defence of usury, he composed a
Manual of Political Economy, in which the principles of
laisser-faire are independently expounded and applied. The
Bell and Lancaster method of instruction inspired him to
enthusiastic emulation : he immediately planned an unsec-
tarian Chrestoraathic dav-school to be built in his own
garden in Queen's Square Place. The school itself never
came into existence ; for this, like some other educational
schemes, was wrecked on the rock of theology. But Ben-
tham fulfilled his part in composing a Chrestomathia, which
contained, besides a full and original exposition of pedagogic
principles, a sort of manual of geometry, algebra, and physics,
and an encyclopix-dic discussion of scientific nomenclature
and classification. And this is only one striking .specimen
of his habitual practice. Quicquid agunt homines — whatever
men do for men's happiness — is certainly the farrago of his
inexhaustible MSS. Whatever business suggests to him an
idea of amelioration he immediately studies with minute and
intense interest, until he believes himself to have perfectly
penetrated it by his exhaustive method, and is ready with
a completely reasoned scheme of improvement. Currency
projects, banking regulations, proposals for an " unburthen-
some increase of the revenue," reform of the Thames police,
a new mode of taking the census, a device for preventing
forgery, a prospect of abolishing the slave-trade, a plan
for morally improving Irish labourers in New York — each
subject in its turn is discussed with a fresh eagerness and

148 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

an amplitude of explanation that seem to belong to the
leisured amateur of social science. Xor is his attention
confined to matters strictly social or political. He is not
too much engaged in applying his method of study to ex-
pound it in an Essay on Logic, supplemented by a charac-
teristic dissertation on Language and Universal Grammar.
Chemistry and botany, from their rich promise of utility,
are continually attractive to him. He is never too busy to
help in experiments which may enrich mankind with a new
grass or a new fruit. At one time he is anxious to learn
all about laughing gas ; at another he corresponds at length
about a Frigidarium, in which fermentable substances may
be preserved from pernicious fermentation while remaining
unfrozen. Nothing seems to him too trivial an object for
his restless impulse of amelioration ; and he cannot under-
stand why it should seem so to any one else. There is an
amusing instance of this in one of his letters to Dumont
at the crisis of a negotiation in which the latter, having won
Talleyrand's patronage for the Civil and Penal Codes, is
delicately endeavouring to secure a favourable notice for
Panopticon. Dumont has asked his master to send Talley-
rand a set of economical and political works. It occurs to
Bentham that it will be a stroke of diplomacy to forward
along with the books " a set or two sets of my brother's
patent but never-sold fire-irons of which the special and
characteristic property is levity." They would serve, he
thinks, " as a specimen of the Panopticon system. One
might be kept by T. (Talleyrand), the other, if he thought
fit, passed on to B. (Bonaparte)." Even the sympathetic
Dumont declines to extend his interest to patent fire-irons,
and coldly intimates that he is " not familiar with such
instruments." The humblest games, we find, are not un-
worthy of utilitarian consideration, and may be treated in
the same confident deductive fashion as governments. At
Ford Abbey — where Bentham lived from 1814 to 1817,
and where the youthful J. S. Mill found the " sentiment of
a larger and freer existence " in the " middle-age architecture,
baronial hall, and spacious and lofty rooms " — battledores

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 149

and sliuttlecocks were kept in Irequeut exercise ; and any
tendency in manufacturers to deviate from the true type of
shuttlecock was severely repressed. " Pointed epigrams,
yes," writes the philosopher; "but pointed shuttlecocks
never were, nor ever will be, good for anything. These,
it is true, have not been tried ; but trial is not necessary to
the condemnation of such shuttlecocks as these." Uentbara
was strictly temperate in his diet : he ate meat but once a
day, and then very moderately, and was almost a teetotaler.
But the pleasures of the table were too important to be
diminished by a stupid adherence to custom ; and being
particularly fond of fruit, he used often to maximise his
prandial happiness by commencing with the dessert, before
the sensibility of his palate had been impaired by coarser
viands.

I have dwelt at some length on this side of Bentham's
character, because it seems to me that we get the right
point of view for understanding his work in politics and
ethics, if we conceive it as the central and most important
realisation of a dominant and all-comprehensive desire for
the amelioration of human life, or rather of sentient exist-
ence generally, A treatise on deontology, a code, an
inspection-house, a set of fire-irons, may all be regarded as
instruments more or less rationally contrived for the pro-
motion of happiness ; and it is exclusively in this light
that Beutham regards them. Thus, perhaps, we may partly
account for the extreme unreadableness of his later writ-
ings, which are certainly " biblia abiblia." The best defence
for them is that they are hardly meant to be criticised a.s
books ; they were written not so much to be read as to be
used. Hence if, after they were written, he saw no prospect
of their producing a practical effect, he kept them con-
tentedly on his shelves for a more seasonable opportunity.
In his earlier compositions he shows considerable literary
faculty : his argument is keen and lucid, and his satirical
humour often excellent, though liable to be too prolix. But
the fashion in which he really liked to express his thoughts
was the proper style of legal documents — a style, that is

150 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

in which there are no logically superfluous words, but in
which everything that is intended is fully expressed, and
the most tedious iteration is not shunned if it is logically
needed for completeness and precision. And as years went
on, and Dumont saved him the necessity of making himself
popular, he gave full scope to his peculiar taste. Such a manner
of expression has indeed a natural affinity to the fulness of
detail with which his subjects are treated. But the tedium
caused by the latter is necessarily aggravated by the former ;
and therefore the " general reader " has to be warned off
from most of Bentham's volumes ; or perhaps such warning
is hardly needed. Those, however, who study him as he
would have wished to be studied, not for literary gratifica-
tion, but for practical guidance, will feel that his fatiguing
exhaustiveness of style and treatment has great advantages.
It to some extent supplies the place of empirical tests to
his system ; at least, whatever dangers lurk in his abstract
deductive method of dealing with human beings, we certainly
cannot include among them the " dolus " which " latet in
generalibus." If in establishing his practical principles he
has neglected any important element of human nature, we
are almost certain to feel the deficiency in the concrete
result which his indefatigable imagination works out for
us. Often, indeed, the danger rather is that we shall be
unduly repelled by the mere strangeness of the habits
and customs of the new social organisation into which he
transports us.

Thus from different points of view one might truly de-
scribe Bentham as one of the most or the least idealistic of
practical philosophers. What is, immediately suggests to
him what ought to be ; his interest in the former is never
that of pure curiosity, but always subordinated to his pur-
pose of producing the latter ; there is no department of the
actual that he is not anxious to reconstruct systematically
on rational principles, and so in a certain sense to inform
and penetrate with ideas. While again his ideal is, to
borrow a phrase of John Grote's, as much as possible de-
idealised, positivised, some might say philistinised, his good

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 151

is purged of nil mystical elements, and reduced to the positive,
palpable, empirical, definitely quantitative notion of " maxi-
mum balance of pleasure over pain " ; and his conception
of human nature and its motives — the material which he has
to adapt to the attainment of this good — is not only un-ideal,
but even anti-ideal, or idealised in the wrong direction.
While he is as confident in his power of constructing a
liappy society as the most ardent believer in the moral
perfectibility of mankind, he is as convinced of the un-
([ualified selfishness of the vast maj(jrity of human beings as
the bitterest cynic. Hence the double aspect of his utili-
tarianism, which has caused so much perplexity both to
disciples and to opponents. It is as if Ilobbes or Mande-
ville were suddenly iuspired with the social enthusiasm of
Godwin. Something of the same blending of contraries
is found in Ilelvetius ; and he, perhaps, rather than Hume,
should be taken as the intellectual progenitor of Bentham.
In Helvetius, however, though utilitarianism is passing out
of the critical and explanatory phase in which we find it in
Hume, into the practical and reforming phase, the transition
is not yet complete. Still tlie premises of Bentham are all
clearly given by lielvetius ; and the task which the former
took up is that which the latter clearly marks out for the
moralist. Indeed, if we imagine the effect of LEsprit on
the mind of an eager young law-student, we seem to have
the whole intellectual career of Bentham implicitly contained
in a " pensee de jeunesse."

Helvetius puts with a highly effective simplicity, from
which Hume was precluded by his more subtle and complex
})sychological analysis, these two doctrines : first, that every
human being " en tout temps, en tout lieu " seeks his own
interest, and judges of things and persons according as they
promote it : and secondly, that, as the public is made up of
individuals, the qualities that naturally and normally gain
public esteem and are called virtues are those useful to the
public. Observation, he says, shows us that there are a few
men who are inspired by " un heureux naturel, un dcsir vif
de la gloire et de I'estime," with the same passion for justice

152 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES vr

and virtue whicli men generally feel for wealth and great-
ness. The actions which promote the private interest of
these virtuous men are actions that are just, and conducive,
or not contrary, to the general interest. But these men are
so few that Helvetius only mentions them " pour I'honneur
de I'humanite." The human race is almost entirely com-
posed of men whose care is concentrated on their private
interests. Plow, under these circumstances, are we to
promote virtue ? for which Helvetius really sedms to be
genuinely concerned, though he is too well bred to claim for
himself expressly so exceptional a distinction. It is clear,
he thinks, that the work will not be done by moralists,
unless they completely change their methods. " Qu'ont
produit jusqu'aujourd'hui les plus belles maximes de la
morale ? " Our moralists do not perceive that it is a futile
endeavour, and would be dangerous if it were not futile, to
try to alter the tendency of men to seek their private
happiness. They might perhaps gain some influence if
they would substitute the " langage d'interet " for the " ton
d'injure " in which they now utter their maxims ; for a man
might then be led to abstain at least from such vices as are
prejudicial to himself But for the achievement of really
important results the moralist must have recourse to legisla-
tion. This is a conclusion which Helvetius is never tired
of enforcing. " One ought not to complain of the wicked-
ness of man, but of the ignorance of legislators who have
always set private interest in opposition to public." " The
hidden source of a people's vices is always in its legislation ;
it is tliere that we must search if we would discover and
extirpate their roots." " ]\Ioralists ought to know that as
the sculptor fashions the trunk of a tree into a god or a
stool, so the legislator makes heroes, geniuses, virtuous men,
as he wills : . . . reward, punishment, fame, disgrace, are
four kinds of divinities with whicli he can always effect the
public good." In short, Helvetius conceives that universal
self -preference might by legislative machinery be so perfectly
harmonised with public utility that " none but madmen
would be vicious " : it only wants a man of insight and

VI BENTHAM AND P.EN7HAM/SM 153

courage, " ediauffe de la passion du I'icii general," to effect
this happy consummation.

Such, then, was the task that Jientham, at the age of
twenty-five, undertook ; and perhaps his bitterest opponent,
surveying his sixty years of strenuous performance, will
hardly blame him severely for presumption in deeming
himself to possess the requisite qualifications. The young
Englishman, indeed, with his faith in our " matchless con-
stitution "'as yet unshaken, conceives himself to bo in an
exceptionally favourable position for realising this union of
morals and legislation. " France," he writes in his com-
monplace-book for 177-1-75, " may have philosophers. The
world is witness if she have not philosophers. But it is
England only that can have patriots, for a patriot is a
philosopher in action." Such a " philosopher in action "
might hope not merely to delineate, but actually to set on
foot that reformation in the moral world which could only
come from improvement in the machine of law. But in the
moral no less than in the physical world one cannot im-
prove a machine without understanding it ; the study of it
as it exists must be separated from the investigation of what
it ought to be, and the former must be thoroughly per-
formed before the latter can be successfully attempted.
This is to us so obvious a truism that it seems pedantic to
state it expressly ; but it is a truism which Bentham found
as nnich as ])0ssible obscured in Blackstone's famous Com-
mentaries. The first thing then which he had to do was
to dispel that confusion between the expository and the
censorial functions of the jurist, which seemed to be inherent
in the official account of the laws and constitution of Eng-
land. The clearness and completeness with which this is
done are the chief merits of the Fragment on Gavernment.
In this elaborate attack on Blackstone's view of municipal
law Benthain does not as yet criticise the particulars either
of the British constitution or of British administration of
justice : his object is merely to supply the right set of
notions for apprehending what either actually is, together
with the right general principles for judging of its goodness

154 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

or badness. His fundamental idea is taken, as he says,
from Hume ; but the methodical precision with which it is
worked out is admirable ; in fact, the Fragment contains
the whole outline of that system of formal constitutional
jurisprudence which the present generation has mostly
learnt from his disciple John Austin. Among other things
we may notice as characteristic the manner in which he
throws aside the official nonsense about the " democratic
element " in the unreformed British Parliament, which half
imposed even on the clear intellect of Paley. " A duke's
son," he says, " gets a seat in the House of Commons ; it
needs no more to make iiim the very model of an Athenian
cobbler." In a similar spirit he banters Blackstone's account
of the " wisdom and valour " for which our lords temporal
are selected. He remarks that in Queen Anne's reign, in
the year 1711, " not long after the time of the hard frost,"
there seems to have been such an exuberance of these
virtues as to " furnish merit enough to stock no fewer than
a dozen respectable persons, who upon the strength of it
were all made barons in a day " ; a phenomenon, he adds,
which a contemporary historian has strangely attributed to
the necessity of making a majority. It is evident that
whatever constitution Bentham may prefer, he will not be
put off" by any conventional fictions as to the relations of
its parts ; his preference will depend entirely on what he
believes to be their actual working.

More than thirty years, however, were to elapse before
Bentham seriously turned his attention to constitutional
construction. Indeed nothing is more characteristic of the
Benthamite manner of thought, in its application to politics,
than the secondary and subordinate position to which it
relegates the constitutional questions that absorbed the entire
attention of most English politicians of the eighteenth
century. Such politicians, even when most theoretical,
seem to have had no notion that the political art properly
includes a systematic survey of the whole operation of
government, and a thorough grasp of the principles by
which that operation should be judged and rectified. Their

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 155

philosophy was made up of iiietaphysico-jural dissertations
on the grounds and limits of civil obedience, and loose
historical generalisations as to the effects of the " three
simple forms " of government, conceived as chemical elements
out of which the British constitution was compounded.
What they habitually discussed was not how laws should
be made or executed, but what the terms of the social com-
pact were, and whetlier tlie balance between Crown and
Commons could be maintained withmit corruption. It is
perhaps some survival in ]\Ir. Stephen's mind of this now
antiquated way of viewing politics which has led him, wliile
speaking respectfully of Dentliam's labours in the sphere of
jurisprudence, to refer so slightly to him in describing
the course of political thouglit. And no doubt Bentham's
determination to maintain a ])urely and exhaustively practical
treatment in all his writings on law and its administration,
render it almost necessary to leave the greater part of his
work to the criticism of professional experts. But the
general principles by which the whole course of his industry
was guided ; that government is merely an organisation for
accomplishing a very complicated and delicate work, of
which the chief part consists in preventing, by the threatened
infliction of pain or damage for certain kinds of conduct,
some more than equivalent pain or loss of liappiness result-
ing from that conduct to some of tlie governed ; that the
primary end of the political art is to secure that this work
shall be done in the best possible way with the utmost
possible precision and the least possible waste of means ;
and that the rules controlling the appointment and mutual
relations of different members of the government should be
considered and determined solely with a view to this end, —
these were surely worth mentioning among political theories.
For it is this fundamental creed tliat has given IV^nthamism
its vitality : when once these principles were clearly and
firmly apprehended by a man with the " infinite capacity
for taking trouble " which has been said to constitute genius,
though the eighteenth century, ideally speaking, was not
yet over, the nineteenth had certainly begun. A theory

156 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

that is exclusively positive and unmetaphysical, at the same
time that it is still confidently deductive and unhistorical,
forms the natural transition from tlie " Age of Reason " to
the period of political thought in which we are now living.

Wlien we consider that Bentham's early manhood coin-
cided with the intensest period of revolutionary fervour,
and that he was in close personal relations with some
influential Frenchmen of this age, it seems a remarkable
evidence of his intellectual independence that he shouhl
have so long kept his attention turned away from constitu-
tional reform. Probably the aversion he felt for the meta-
physics in which the conception of rational and beneficent
government seemed to be commonly entangled, co-operated
to concentrate his attention on that department of reform
in which alone he felt himself in full sympathy with the
party of movement. At the outset of the American war he
was altogether hostile to the colonists, owing to the " hodge-
podge of confusion and absurdity " which he found in their
Declaration of Eights. Six years later he was content to
regard the English constitution as " resting at no very great
distance, perhaps, from the sunmiit of perfection." In 1789
he went so far with his French friends as to offer the cause
of liberty his treatise on Parliamentary Tactics. Still, as
we have seen, the dry practicality of this dissertation could
hardly be surpassed ; it does not touch on a single " burn-
ing question " except Division of Chambers, wdiich it treats
very abstractly and neutrally. In 1793 whatever sym-
pathy he may have felt for the revolutionists had quite
vanished. " Could the extermination of Jacobinism be
effected," he writes to his cousin Metcalf, " I should think
no price that we could pay for such a security too dear " ;
and about the same time he tells Dundas tliat though some
of the MSS. he sends him might " lead to his being taken
for a republican," he is " now writing against even Parlia-
mentary Eeform, and that without any change of sentiment."
It is evident that he is thoroughly absorbed in schemes
of legislative and administrative improvement : his interest
in the French Revolution was due to the unexampled

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 157

opportunity it seemed to offer for new codes, new judicial
establislnnents, Panopticons, etc. ; he has no desire to quarrel
with the English Tory Government if it will find employ-
ment for his inventions in this line. Until 1791 he seems
to have hoped that Lord Lansdowne would place him in
Parliament; he even obtained a vague ])romise to that
effect, though for some reason or other the idea was after-
wards dropped. Then during the twenty years (from 1791
to 1811) in which Panopticon was in suspense, he would
naturally shrink from risking its prospects by any open
breach with the Government. Still it is pretty clear that
his opinion of the practical efliciency of the j\Iatchless Con-
stitution was growing rapidly worse during the latter part
of this period, until in 1809 he wrote his first plan of
Parliamentary Peform. This, however, remained unpublished
till 1817; and in a letter to President Madison in 1811,
in which he proposes to codify for the United States, he
takes care to say that " his attention has not turned and is
not disposed to turn itself" to changes in the form of their
government. Indeed, since the enthusiastic reception which
his Civil and Penal Codes, in Dumout's rendering, had met
with throughout Europe, his hopes of benefiting the human
race by codification had taken so wide a range as almost
necessarily to keep him neutral even towards the most
despotic kind of ride. In no country was this reception
more enthusiastic than in Paissia. Accordingly in 1814,
Panopticon being finally suppressed, and code-making being
in hand in Kussia, Bentham considers that tlie time has
come to offer his services for this purpose. The Emperor,
with every expression of courtesy and respect, requests him
to communicate with the Connnission that is sitting on
legislation. But this seems to him useless. Alone he must
do it ; and he somewhat sourly rejects all compliments not
accompanied with legislative carte hlanchc. When he is
convinced that he cannot be employed on these conditions,
his last reason for keeping terms with the traditional forms
of sovernment would seem to have vanished ; and he
prepares, when already verging on threescore and ten, to

158 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

crown the edifice of his jurisprudence with a Constitutional
Code.

It is not often that an energetic practical philanthropist
throws himself into constitutional reform at the age of
sixty-eight. When he does so, it is likely to be with the
accumulated bitterness resulting from a lifetime of baffled
attempts to benefit his fellow -men under their existing
constitution. And all that Bentham writes after 1817 is
full of the heated and violent democratic fanaticism which
is incident to the youth of many Liberals who in later
years become " tempered by renouncement," but which, as
we have seen, was conspicuously absent from the earlier
stages of Bentham's political activity. No doubt this may
be partly attributed to the spirit of the time. From 1817
to 1830 the tide of Liberalism was rapidly rising, and the
flavour of the rising Liberalism was peculiarly bitter. Still
a man of sixty-eight is not usually carried away by an
upsurging wave of opinion ; and we can hardly explain
Bentham's mood without taking into account the acrimony
of the disappointed projector. It is the persistent rejection
of Panopticon and many other fair schemes wdiich has in-
spired him with so intense a conviction that governments of
One or Few invariably aim at the depredation and oppression
of the Many. He tells us himself, in the " historical pre-
face " (published 1828) intended for the second edition of the
Fragment on Government, that it is only after the experience
and observation of fifty years that he has learnt to see in the
imperfections of the British constitution " the elaborately
organised and anxiously cherished and guarded products of
sinister interest and artifice." Had George III., any time
between 1793 and 1811, made peace with Panopticon, had
Alexander in 1814 allowed free play to the great codifier's
energies, the Constitutional Code, we may well believe,
would have remained unwritten, and the philosophy of
modern English Eadicalism would have acknowledged a
different founder.

And yet, when we examine the rational basis of his
constitutional construction, whether as given in the intro-

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 159

duction to his Flan of Parliamentary Fiefurm (1817), or
more fully and characteristically developed in the elaborate
work just mentioned, we find that it consists in a few
very natural inferences from the ethical and psychological
premises on which his whole social activity proceeded ;
inferences, indeed, so simple and obvious, that we can
hardly suppose him not to have tacitly drawn them, even
in the earliest stage of his career. If once we regard the
administration of law as a machinery indispensable for
identifying the interest of individuals with the conduct by
which they will most promote the general happiness, so
that through a skilful adjustment of rewards and punish-
ments the universally active force of self-preference is made
to produce the results at which universal benevolence would
aim, it is plain that our arrangements are incomplete unless
they include means for similarly regulating the self-prefer-
ences of those who are to work and repair the machine.
And this, of course, must be done by a combination of
rewards and punishments ; the problem is, how to apply
these so as to produce an adequate effect. It is obviously
a far more difficult problem than that with which Bentham
had to deal in regulating private relations. For what the
private man, in his view, has for the most part to do, in
order to promote the general happiness, is to consult the
interests of himself and his family ; whatever private
services it is desirable he should render to others should
rarely be made legally obligatory, except when he has
freely bound himself by special and definite contracts.
But from governors, if government is to be well performed,
we require the energetic and sustained exercise of all their
faculties in the service of their fellow-citizens generally —
even more sustained energy than most men spend on their
own affairs, in proportion as government is a more difficult
business ; while at the same time this business is of such a
nature that it is necessary to give the managers of it an
indefinite power of interfering with the liberty, property,
and even life of their fellow -citizens generally. For to
set definite limits to this power in the prescriptions of a

i6o ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

VI

constitutional code is, from a utilitarian point of view,
manifestly irrational. The only rational limits — those wliich
utility would prescribe in any case — cannot be foreseen and
fixed once for all ; hence any such constitutional restric-
tions, if observed, are likely to prevent salutary laws and
ordinances as well as mischievous ones ; while, if they are
to be overruled by the " salus populi," their announcement
was worse than useless — it was an express incitement to
groundless rebellion. The only plan that remains, and the
only one that can possibly secure the requisite junction of
interests, is to provide that government, while supreme
over individuals, shall be under the continual vigilant
control of the citizens acting collectively. Every citizen
who is not childish, insane, etc., should primd facie have a
share in this control, otherwise his interests will presumably
be neglected ; and every one an equal share, in so far as
we have no ground for considering one man's happiness of
more importance than any other man's.

We are thus led to the familiar system of Representative
Democracy, with universality and equality of suffrage ; but,
be it observed, without any of the metaphysical fictions
which had commonly been involved in the construction of
this system. Bentham's system is not a contrivance for
enabling every one to " obey himself alone " : such an end
would have seemed to him chimerical and absurd : it is
merely an arrangement for securing that every one's in-
terests shall be as well as possible looked after. To this
difference of ratmiale corresponds naturally a difference
of constitutional sentiment. Bentham's supreme legislative
assembly is not a majestic incarnation of the sovereignty of
the people ; it is merely a collection of agents, appointed
by the people to manage a certain part of their concerns,
liable, like other agents, to legal punishment if they can be
proved to have violated their trust, and to instant dismissal
if it seem probable that they have done so.

Another important difference appears at once in com-
paring the rationale of utilitarian democracy with that
based on natural rights. The former, however dogmatically

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM i6i

it may be announced, depends necessarily upon certain
psycholoj^acal generalisations, the truth of which may be
continually brought to tlie test of experience. Between
traditional legitimacy and natural freedom there was no
common ground, and therefore really no argument possible.
If I maintain that I and my fellow-citizens have an im-
prescriptible right to be governed only by laws to which
we have consented, I can find no relevancy in the answer
that certain persons have inherited a prescriptive right to
govern me. lUit if I maintain that our common interests
are most likely to be well looked after by managers whom
we can dismiss, however confident I may be in my deduc-
tion of this probability from the " universality of self-prefer-
ence," I must admit arguments from experience tending to
prove the opposite. And when these are once admitted,
the descent from the position of Bentham and James Mill,
that democracy is absolutely desirable, to John Stuart ^Mill's
relative and qualified assertion of its desirability, is logic-
ally inevitable ; though, like many other logically inevitable
steps, it took a generation to make it.

The chief peculiarities, however, in the main outline of
Bentham's constitution are due not to his conception of the
political end, but to his intense sense of the need of guard-
ing his government against the danger of perversion : a
danger which democrats of the older type, from their con-
fidence in ordinary human nature, had commonly over-
looked. If the oppressions of kings and aristocrats are
connected with the prevalence of prejudice and superstition,
it is natural to suppose that when these are removed the
business of government is as likely to go on well as any
other business. But in Bentham's view governors, xmder
however enlightened a constitution, will be ordinary human
beings exposed to extraordinary temptations, to which,
therefore, we must presume that they will certainly yield
unless very exceptional securities are provided. All the
members of government will have natural appetites for
power, wealth, dignity, ease at the expense of duty, venge-
ance at the expense of justice, which are obviously all

I62 ESSA VS AND ADDRESSES vi

forces acting in the direction opposed to the general happi-
ness. And since for the exercise of their normal functions
governors, or at least the chief among them, must have
power not definitely limited, and must have at their dis-
posal a similarly indefinite amount of wealth, it cannot but
be profoundly difficult to prevent them from satiating — if
it be possible to satiate — all their mischievous appetites.
To set one part of government to watch another will avail
little : corrupt mutual connivance is too obviously their
common interest. The utmost frequency in the elections
of the members of the legislative assembly is a desirable,
but not an adequate security : it will be the interest of
each legislator to corrupt his leading constituents by
patronage, and it will be their interest to be corrupted ;
and the claim of experience which the sitting member can
put forward will be so plausible that it will be easy for the
leading constituents to hoodwink the rest. How then shall
we prevent legislators, administrators, and leading constitu-
ents from being thus driven by the combined force of their
self-preferences into a conspiracy against the general happi-
ness ? We must do what we can by " minimising con-
fidence and maximising control," through the concentration
of responsibility, together with arrangements for securing
to the public easy and complete cognisance of all official
acts. We must " minimise the matter of corruption " by
continually keeping down the amount of wealth and power
disposable by each official : in order to reduce salaries,
Bentham proposes to institute a pecuniary competition
among the properly qualified candidates for any office, on
the principle of choosing the man who will take least, or
perhaps will even pay, to perform its functions. We must
render bargains with electors difficult by secret voting. But,
above all, we must be in a position to stamp out the virus
of corruption as soon as it appears by immediately dis-
missing— or, as he prefers to say, "dislocating" — the
peccant official. He considers that direct " location " by
the people is incompatible with good government, except in
the case of members of the legislature ; even the appoint-

VI BE NTH AM AND BENTHAMISM 163

ment of the head of the executive, who has to make or
sanction otlier administrative appointments, he would give
to tlie supreme assembly ; but " universal dislocability " by
a vote of the majority of citizens seems to him absolutely
indispensable : all other securities will be inadequate with-
out this.

After all is done, the readers of the Constitutional Code
will probably feel that, when Helvetius proposed to ardent
philanthropy the noble task of moralising selfish humanity
by legislation, he had not sufliciently considered the diffi-
culty of moralising the moralisers, and that even the inde-
fatigable patience and inexhaustible ingenuity of Bentham
will hardly succeed in defeating the sinister conspiracy of
self-preferences. In fact, unless a little more sociality is
allowed to an average human being, the problem of com-
bining these egoists into an organisation for promoting their
common happiness is like the old task of making ropes of
sand. The difficulty that Hobbcs vainly tried to settle
summarily by absolute despotism is hardly to be overcome
by the democratic artifices of his more inventive successor.

Bentham's final treatise on politics. was never absolutely
completed. Only about one half had been printed or
revised for the press when his long career of intellectual
toil was terminated. On the 6th of June 1832, there
remained for the indefatigable old man but one last coutri-
bution to the balance of human happiness, which was faith-
fully rendered : to " minimise the pain " of the watchers
round his dying bed. His treatise on private ethics, or, as
he calls it. Deontology (the place of which in his system
had been indicated fifty years before in his Treatise on
Morals and Legislation), was left a mere mass of undigested
fragments. The task of preparing it for publication was, how-
ever, at once undertaken by Bowring, the favourite disciple
of the master's later years ; and so much of Bentham's
work had been given to the world through the medium of
a disciple, that there seemed no reason why the Deontology
should not take rank with The Civil and Penal Codes as
a generally trustworthy exposition of Benthamite doctrine.

i64 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES vi

But the book had no sooner appeared than it was formally
repudiated by that section of the school whose opinions
were likely to have most weight with the public. J. S. Mill,
writing August 1838, in the London and Westminster
Review, urged that, considering its dubious origin and in-
trinsic demerits together, it should be omitted from any
collected edition of Bentham's works ; its demerits being
that instead of " plunging boldly into the greater moral
questions," it treated almost solely of " the 'petite morale,
and that with pedantic minuteness, and on the quid pro
quo principles which regulate trade." That the Deontology
corresponds to this description is undeniable ; the only
question is whether a disciple of Bentham's ought to have
been surprised at it. The surprise, at any rate, is a pheno-
menon demanding explanation ; for Bentham is not a Hegel,
to be understood by one disciple only, and misunderstood
by him ; he is commonly liable to be wearisome from ob-
trusive consistency, and unreadable from an excessive desire
to be unmistakable.

The truth is that an ethical system constructed on Ben-
tham's principles is an instrument that may be put to several
different uses ; so that it is not unnatural that his disciples,
employing and developing it each in his own way, should
insensibly be led to widely divergent views as to the really
essential characteristics of the master's doctrine. The theory
of virtue which he received from Helvetius has two aspects,
psychological and ethical. Psychologically analysed, common
morality appears as a simple result of common selfishness.
" Each man likes and approves wdiat he thinks useful to
him ; the public (which is merely an aggregate of indi-
viduals) likes and praises what it thinks useful to the pub-
lic ; that is the whole account of virtue." How, on this
theory, men's moral judgments come to agree as much as
they actually do is not sufficiently explained ; and in any
case there is no rational transition possible from this
psychological theory to the ethical principle that " the
standard of rectitude for all actions " is " public utility."
Nor does Bentham really maintain that there is : when he

VI BENTIIAM AND BENTHAMISM 165

is pressed, he explains frankly that his first principle is
really his individual sentiment ; that, in fact, he aims at the
general happiness because he happens to prefer it. Still,
for all practical purposes, he does accept " greatest happi-
ness " ^ as (to use his own words) " a }tlain as well as true
standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or
mischievous in human conduct, whether in the field of morals
or of politics." The primary function, then, of the utili-
tarian " moralist is to apply this standard to the particulars
of human lite, so as to determine by it the different special
virtues or rules of duty, so far as such determination is
possible in general terms ; and, in fact, several of the frag-
ments put together in the Deontology were written with
this aim. But suppose this has been accomplished, and the
code of duty clearly made out : we have still to ask what
the exact use of it will be. It will, of course, give a com-
plete practical guidance to persons whose ruling passion is
a desire to promote universal happiness ; but Bentham, no
less than Ilelvetius, regards such persons as so exceptional
that it would be hardly worth while to print a book for them.
What, then, is the relation of the utilitarian moralist to the
great mass of mankind, in whose breasts universal benevo-
lence holds no such irresistible sway ? This is the practi-
cally important question. One answer to it is that given
by Paley (and afterwards by John Austin), which treats
the rules of utilitarian duty as a code of Divine Law,
adequately supported by religious sanctions. Such an
answer avoids some of the objections to utilitarianism, at
the cost, perhaps, of introducing greater ones ; but in any
case it is not Bentham's, though it is not expressly excluded
by him. If we put this aside, there remain two entirely
different ways of dealing with the question, each of which,

' The plirase whicli he used duriug the greater part of his life, aud which ha.s
become current — "The greatest happiness of the greatest number" — he found,
at the age of twenty-two, in an early pamphlet of Priestley's. In the Deontology,
howi'ver, he proposes to drop the latter half of the phrase, as superfluous and
liable to luisinterprt'tation.

■ J. S. Mill tells us in his Aiitobiography that he introduced this term into
currency from one of Gait's novels. It was, however, suggested by Beuthani, in
a letter to Dumont in .Tune 1S02, as preferable to "Benthamite."

l66 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES vi

from a utilitarian point of view, is perfectly appropriate.
In the first place, the code as above deduced may be offered
to mankind as a standard for rectifying their ordinary
judgments of approbation and disapprobation, clearing them
from a certain amount of confusion and conflict which now
perplexes them, and so increasing their beneficent effect.
Even if few persons are sufficiently benevolent to take the
general happiness as the one ultimate end of their own
conduct, it may still be generally accepted as a standard for
apportioning praise and blame to others ; and much would
be gained for the general happiness if the wdiole force of
these powerful motives could be turned in the direction
of promoting it. In all Bentham says of the " moral sanc-
tion " in his Morals and Legislation, this conception of
morality as a system of distributing praise and blame is
implied ; and such, I gather, was the view taken by James
Mill of the practical function of the utilitarian moralist
(except in so far us his associational psychology led him to
recognise the love of virtue as a distinct though derivative
impulse). But this view, though not absent from the
Deontology, is certainly not prominent there ; and it is
plain from Bentham's earlier treatise ^ that he conceived
" private ethics " not merely as an art of praising and
blaming, but rather as an art of conduct generally, from the
individual's point of view — " art of self-government " he
calls it. But in counselling individuals Bentham thought,
like Helvetius, that it was useless to " clamour about duty " ;
the only effective way of persuading a man to its perform-
ance was to show him its coincidence with interest. In
such a demonstration the pleasures of pure benevolence
are, of course, not neglected : but he obviously cannot lay
much stress on them. Hence the necessity for the " quid
pro quo " treatment of which Mill complains. The errone-
ousness of the estimate which the vicious man makes of
pains and pleasures has to be shown in every possible way ;
honesty has to be exhibited as the best policy, extra-regard-
ing beneficence as an investment in a sort of bank of general

•* C'f. esp. c. xix. of the Principles of Morals and Legislation, §§ 2, 3, 6, 7.

VI BENTH AM AND BENTHAMISM 167

good-will, etc. We can see at the same time why, from this
point of view, tlie 'pdite, morale, is so prominent. For the
more important i)art of the coincidence between interest
and duty it belongs to the legislator to effect and enforce ; and
his share of the code ought to be written, to use a Platonic
image, in large print, needing no comment ; the moralist's
task is to decipher and exhibit the minor supplementary
prescriptions of duty. And that Dentham, M'hen he had
once undertaken this task, should have performed it with a
" minuteness " which a hostile critic might call " pedantic,"
can hardly have surprised any one so familiar with his
works as i\lill was.

So far, I think, there can be no doubt that Bowring has
given ns the genuine Bentham, and that the faithful
historian must refuse to follow Mill in rejecting the
Deontology. But it is one thing to hold that the moralist
ought chieHy to occupy himself in showing men how much
of their happiness is bound up with their duty : it is quite
another thing to maintain that the two notions are univer-
sally coincident in experience, and that (from a purely
mundane point of view) " vice may be defined to be a
miscalculation of chances." This latter is the ground
implicitly taken throughout the greater part of the Deonto-
logy, and expressly in one or two passages. No doubt the
step to tliis from the former position is a very natural one
for an enthusiastic and not very clear-headed disciple ; for
if it is tenable, the moralist's task can be much more
triumphantly achieved. But that Bentham himself would
ever have deliberately maintained this position is very
dilhcult to believe. Certainly in the passage of his earlier
treatise above referred to, where he defines the relation of
" private ethics " to legislation, he distinctly avoids taking
it. " It cannot but be admitted," he says, " that the only
interests which a man at all times and on all occasions is
sure to find adequate motives for consulting are his own."
All he can maintain is that " there are no occasions on
which he has not some motives for consulting the happiness
of other men." And with his purely practical view of the

i68 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vi

moralist's function, he would naturally, in writing his notes
for the Deontology, exhibit these motives without dwelling
on their occasional inadequacy, and would thus encourage
his editor to take the critical step from the actual to the
ideal, and assert that they are always adequate. But if, as
we have seen, the author of the Principles of Morals and
Legislation shrank from asserting this, we can hardly suppose
that the author of the Constitutional Code had seen reason
to change his mind. For if it is always every man's interest,
on a rational computation of chances, to promote the general
happiness, what becomes of his anti-monarchical and anti-
oligarchical deductions from the principle of self-preference ?
It may of course be said that monarchs and oligarchs may
and do mistake their true interests. But Bentham's argu-
ment goes far beyond this. He repeatedly states it as
certain and inevitable that, without such artificial junction
of interests as is provided by the Constitutional Code,
governors will sacrifice the happiness of the governed to
their own appetites for power, wealth, ease, and revenge.
There are some inconsistencies so flagrant that even a
philosopher should be held innocent of them till he is
proved guilty ; and to hold the serene optimism of the
Deontology as to human relations generally, together with
the bitter pessimism of the Constitutional Code as to the
relation of rulers and subjects, would surely be an in-
consistency of this class.

At the same time I must admit that there were other
utilitarians besides Bowring who did not perceive the in-
congruity, and that even after it had been explained to
them by a writer who generally succeeded in making his
explanations pretty clear. In the famous passage of arms
between the Edinhurgh and the Westminster in 1829-30,
Macaulay no doubt ventured into a region where he was
not altogether at home ; still his clear common sense, wide
knowledge of historical facts, and a dialectical vigour and
readiness which few philosophers could afford to despise,
rendered him by no means ill matched even against James
Mill ; in fact, both combatants, on the ground on which

VI BENTHAM AND BENTHAMISM 169

tlicy met, were better equipped for ofiensive thau for
defensive "v\ arfare ; and if the author of the Essay on
Government had himself replied to his assailant, the conflict
would probably have been bloody, but indecisive. But
"Nvheu Macaulay's article came out, the split between Bow-
ring and the Mills had taken place, and the management of
the Westminster had passed into the hands of Colonel
Perronet Thompson, who accepted to the full Bowring's
view of utilitarian ethics, and in fact regarded the coin-
cidence of utilitarian duty with self-interest properly under-
stood as Bentham's cardinal doctrine. Colonel Thompson
was a writer of no mean talents, and if he had only had to
defend his own view of the " greatest happiness principle "
he might have come off with tolerable success. Unfortu-
nately the conditions of tlie controversy rendered it incumbent
on him to defend James ^Mill's at the same time ; and
against the compound doctrine that it is demonstrably the
interest of kings and aristocracies to govern well, and yet
demonstrably certain that they will never think so, Macaulay's
rejoinder was delivered with irresistible force.

Macaulay's articles had other consequences, more im-
portant than that of exhibiting the ambiguities of the
greatest hap})iness principle. His spirited criticism of the
deductive politics of James Mill, though it was treated with
contempt by its object, had a powerful effect on the more
impartial and impressible mind of the younger jMill ; and
the new views of utilitarian method which were afterwards
propounded in the latter's Logic of the Moral Sciences^ owe
their origin in some measure to the diatribes of the Edin-
burgh. If space allowed, it would be interesting to trace
the changes that Bentham's system underwent in the
teaching of his most distinguished successor, under the
combined influences of Comtian sociology, Associational
psychology, and Neo-Baconian logic. But such an under-
taking would carry us far beyond the limits of the pre-
sent historical sketch, and rit?ht into the midmost heats
of contemporary controversy.

^ Cf. J. S. Mill's Logic, B. vi. cIk vii. viii. ; and bis Autobiography, p. 158.

YII

THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC

SCIENCE

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND
STATISTICS SECTION OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AS
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION IN 1885.

I HAVE chosen for the subject of the discourse, which by
custom has to be delivered from the chair that I am called
upon to occupy, the scope and method of economic science,
and its relation to other departments of what is vaguely
called ' social science.' If the abstract and academic nature
of the subject, together with my own deficiencies as an
expositor, should render my remarks less interesting to
the audience than they have a right to expect, I trust that
they will give me what indulgence they can ; but, above
all, that they will not anticipate a corresponding remote-
ness from concrete fact in the discussions that are to follow.
I see from the records of the Association that it has been
the custom in this department — and it seems to me a good
custom — to give to the annual addresses of the presidents
the variety that naturally results when each speaker in
turn applies himself unreservedly to that aspect of our
complex and many-sided inquiry which his special studies
and opportunities have best qualified him to treat ; and as
my own connection with economic science has been in the
way of studying, criticising, and developing theories, rather
than collecting and systematising facts, I have thought that
I should at any rate have a greater chance of making a
useful contribution to our discussions if I allowed myself to

170

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 171

deal with the subject from the point of view that is most
familiar to me.

I have the less scruple in adopting this course because
1 do not think that any who may listen to my remarks
are likely to charge me with overrating the value of abstract
reasoning on economic subjects, or regarding it as a sub-
stitute for an accurate and thorougli investigation of facts
instead of an indispensable instrument of such investigation.
There is indeed a kind of political economy which Hourislies in
proud independence of facts ; and undertakes to settle all
practical problems of Governmental interference or private
philanthropy by simple deduction from one or two general
assumptions — of which the chief is the assumption of the
universally beneficent and liarmonious operation of self-
interest well let alone. This kind of political economy is
sometimes called ' orthodox,' though it has the character-
istic unusual in orthodox doctrines of being repudiated by
the majority of accredited teachers of the subject. But
whether orthodox or not, I must be allowed to disclaim all
connection with it ; the more completely this survival of
the u -priori politics of the eighteenth century can be
banished to the remotest available planet, the better it will
be, in my opinion, for the progress of economic science.
Since, however, this kind of political economy is still some-
what current in the market-place, — since the language of
newspapers and public speakers still keeps up the impression
that the professor of ])olitical economy is continually laying
down laws which practical people are continually violating,
— it seems worth while to trv to make clear the relation
between the economic science which we are concerned to
study and the principles of Governmental interference — or
rather non-interference — which are thought to have been
of late so persistently and in some cases so successfully
outraged.

It must be admitted at once tliat there is considerable
excuse for the popular misapprehension just mentioned ;
since for more than a century the general interest taken in
the analysis of the phenomena of industry has been mainly

172 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vii

due to the connection of this analysis with a political move-
ment towards greater industrial freedom. No researches
into the historical development of economic studies before
Adam Smith can displace the great Scotchman from his
position as the founder of modern political economy con-
sidered as an independent science, with a well-marked field
of investigation and a definite and characteristic method of
reasonino-. And no doubt the element of Adam Smith's
treatise which makes the most impression on the ordinary
reader is his forcible advocacy of the " system of natural
liberty"; his exposition of the natural "division of labour"
— tending, if left alone, to become an international division
of employments — as the main cause of the "universal
opulence " of " well-governed " societies ; and of the manner
in which, in this distril)ution of employments, individual
capitalists seeking their own advantage are led " by an
invisible hand " to " prefer that employment of their capital
which is most advantageous to society."

At the same time Adam Smith was too cool and too
shrewd an observer of facts to be carried, even by the force
and persuasiveness of his own arguments, into a sweeping
and unqualified assertion of the universality of the tendency
that he describes. His advocacy of natural liberty in no
way blinds him to the perpetual and complex opposition
and conflict of economic interests involved in the unfettered
efforts of individuals to get rich. He even goes the length
of saying that " the interest of the dealers in any particular
branch of trade or manufacture is always in some respects
different from, and even opposite to, that of the public."
To take a particular case, he is decidedly of opinion that
the natural liberty of bankers to issue notes may reasonably
be restrained by the laws of the freest Governments. He is
quite aware, again, that the absence of Governmental inter-
ference does not necessarily imply a state of free competition,
since the self-interest of individuals may lead them, on the
contrary, to restrict competition by " voluntary associations
and agreements." He does not doubt that Governments,
central or local, may find various ways of employing wealth

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 173

— of which elementary education is one of the most im-
portant— wliich will he even economically advantageous to
society, tliou,f,di they could not he remuneratively under-
taken by individual capitalists. In short, however fascina-
ting the picture that Adam Smith presents to us of the
continual and complex play of individual interests consti-
tuting and regulating the vast fabric of social industry, the
summary conclusion drawn by some of his disciples that
the social production of wealth will always be best pro-
moted by leaving it altogether alone, that the only petition
which industry should make to (Government is the petition
of Diogenes to Alexander that he would cease to stand
between him and the sunshine, and that statesmen are
therefore relieved from the necessity of examining carefully
the grounds for industrial intervention in any particular
case — this comfortable and labour-saving conclusion finds
no support in a fair survey of Adam Smith's reasonings,
though it has been no doubt encouraged by some of his
phrases. To attribute to him a dogmatic theory of the
natural right of the individual to absolute industrial inde-
pendence— as some recent German writers are disposed to
do ^ — is to construct the history of economic doctrines from
one's inner consciousness.

It is true, as I have said, that among Adam Smith's
disciples there were not a few wdio rushed to the sweeping
generalisations that the master had avoided. In England,
in particular, the influence of the more abstract and purely
deductive method of Eicardo tended in this direction. It
was natural, again, that in the heat of a political movement
absolute and unqualified statements of principle should
come into vogue, since the ease and simplicity with which
they can be enunciated and apprehended makes them more
eflective instruments of popular agitation : hence it is not
surprising to find the anti-corn-law petitions declaring the
" inalienable right of every man freely to exchange the
result of his labour for the productions of other people," to

^ E.g. V. Scbeel, in Schouberg's llandbiuh der polilischen Ockonomie, p. 89,
speaks of "Die uatuirechtlicbe Wirthschaftstheorie oder der Smitbiauisiuus."

174 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vii

be " one of the principles of eternal justice." But under
the more philosophic guidance of J. S. Mill, English political
economy shook off all connection with these antiquated
metaphysics, and during the last generation has been
generally united with a view of political principles more
balanced, qualified, and empirical, and therefore more in
harmony with the general tendencies of modern scientific
thought.

If, indeed, laisser-faire were — as many suppose — the one
main doctrine of modern political economy, there can be no
doubt that the decisive step forward that founded the
science ought to be attributed not to Adam Smith, but to
his French predecessors the ' Physiocrats.' It is to them —
to Quesnay, De Gournay, De la Eiviere, Turgot — that the
credit, whatever it may be, is due of having first proclaimed
to the world with the utmost generality and without quali-
fication that what a statesman had to do was not to make
laws for industry, but merely to ascertain and protect from
encroachment the simple, eternal, and immutable laws of
nature, under which the production of wealth would regulate
itself in tlie best possible way if men would abstain from
meddling.

This doctrine formed one part of the impetuous move-
ment of thought against the existing political order which
characterised French speculation during the forty years that
preceded the great Eevolutiou. It was, we may say, the
counterpart and complement of the doctrine of which
Eousseau was the chief prophet. The sect of the Econo-
mistes and the disciples of Eousseau were agreed that the
existing political system needed radical change ; and in both
there was a tendency to believe that an ideal political order
could at once be constituted. At this point, however, their
courses diverged : the school of Eousseau held that the
essential thing was to alter the structure of government, and
to keep legislation effectually in the hands of the sovereign
people ; the Economistes thought that the all-important
point was to limit the functions of government, holding that
the simple duty of maintaining the natural rights of the

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 175

individual to liberty and property could be best performed
by an absolute uiouarcli. IJoth movements had much
justitication ; both have had ellects on the political and
social lite of Europe of which it is difficult to measure the
extent; but both doctrines — attained, as they were, by a
fallacious method — involved a large element of exaggeration,
suitable to the ardent and sanguine period that brouglit
them forth, but which gives them a curious air of absurdity
when they are resuscitated and olVered for the acceptance of
our more sober, circumspect, and empirically-minded age.
In the most civilised countries of Europe it is now a
recognised and established safeguard against oppressive laws
that an eftective control over legislation is vested in the
people at large ; but no serious thinker would now main-
tain with liousseau that the predominance of the will of the
sovereign people has a necessary tendency to produce just
legislation. Similarly, the doctrine of the I'hysiocrats has
prevailed, in the main, as regards the internal conditions of
national industry in modern civilised societies. The old
hampering privileges, restraints, and prohibitions have been
almost entirely swept away, to the great advantage of the
community ; but the absolute right of the individual to
unlimited industrial freedom is now only maintained by a
scanty and dwindling handful of doctrinaires, whom the
progress of economic science has left stranded on the crude
generalisations of an earlier period.

There will probably always be considerable disagreement
in details among competent persons as to the propriety of
Governmental interference in particular cases ; but, apart
from questions on which economic considerations must yield
to political, moral, or social reasons of greater importance,
it is an anachronism not to recognise fully and frankly the
existence of cases in which the industrial intervention of
Government is desirable, even with a view to the most
economical production of wealth. Hence, I conceive, the
present business of economic theory in this department is to
give a systematic and carefully-reasoned exposition of these
cases, which, until the constitution of human nature and

176 ESSAYS AMD ADDRESSES vii

society are fundamentally altered, must always be regarded
as exceptions to a general rule of non-interference. The
statesman's decision on any particular case it does not be-
long to abstract theory to give ; this can only be rationally
arrived at after a careful examination of the special con-
ditions of each practical problem at the particular time and
place at which it presents itself. But abstract reasoning
may supply a systematic view of the general occasions for
Governmental interference, the different possible modes of
such interference, and the general reasons for and against
each of them, which may aid practical men both in finding
and in estimating the decisive considerations in particular
cases. Thus it may show, on the one hand, under what
circumstances the inevitable drawbacks of Governmental
management are likely to be least, and by what methods
they may be minimised ; and where, on the other hand,
private enterprise is likely to fail in supplying a social need
— as where an undertaking socially useful is likely for
various reasons to be unremunerative to the undertakers —
or where private interests are liable to be markedly opposed
to those of the public, as is generally the case with businesses
that tend to become monopolies.

It would be tedious now to dwell at more length on
these generalities ; but there is one special exception to the
triumph of the system of natural liberty in the civilised
countries of Europe which has too much historical importance
to be passed over without a word in this connection. As
we are all aware, this triumph lias only been decided
as regards the internal conditions of industry and trade ; the
practice of imposing barriers on international exchange, with
a view to the protection of native industry, still flourishes
in the most advanced communities, and shows no immediate
tendency to come to an end. It is not, I conceive, reason-
able to attribute this result entirely, as some Free-traders
are disposed to do, to the incapacity of mankind to under-
stand elementary economic truths, and the interested efforts
of a combination of producers to prey in a comfortable aud
legal way on the resources of the confiding consumers. I

vir THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 177

do not deny that both these causes have operated ; but, in
view of the evident ability and disinterestedness of many of
the writers and statesmen who have su})ported the cause of
Protection on the Continent or in the United States, I cannot
find in them an adequate exphmation of the phenomenon.

A part of the required explanation is, I think, suggested
when we examine the arguments by which Free Trade was
actually recommended to intelligent Englishmen at the time
when England's policy was taking the decisive turn in this
direction, and imagine their effect on the mind of an
intelligent foreigner. Suppose, for instance, that the intelli-
gent foreigner is studying the Edinburgh Review in 1841,
when it came forward as a vigorous and decided advocate
of Free Trade. In the January number he would find the
cosmopolitan and abstract argument with which we are so
familiar ; he would learn how, under Free Trade, " every
country will exert itself in the way that is most beneficial
in the production of wealth " ; how labour and capital will
be employed in each country to produce those things which
the varieties of climate, situation, and soil enable it to jjro-
duce with greater advantage than other countries, so that
" the greatest possible amount of industry will be kept
constantly in action, and all commodities will exist in the
greatest abundance." But in the July number of the same
organ he would find a recommendation of Free Trade from
a national point of view, which, though more restricted in
its scope, would appear to contain matter no less important
for practical consideration. He would find that the imme-
diate introduction of Free Trade was held to be essential in
order to keep what remained of the manufacturing and
commercial supremacy of England. He would learn that
" the early progress of any nation that attempts to rival us
in manufactures must be slow " ; for " it has to contend
with our great capital, our traditionary skill, our almost
infinite division of labour, our long-established perseverance,
energy, and enterprise, our knowledge of markets, and with
the habits of those who have been bred up to be our
customers." He would learn that there was " no reason to

N

178 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vii

to believe that," in the " absence of disturbing causes," we
should ever lose our present command of the world's
market ; that we might have preserved our superiority for
centuries ; but that " if these difficulties were once sur-
mounted, this superiority — so far at least as respects the
commodity in which we find ourselves undersold — would
be gone for ever," in consequence of " the well-known law
of manufacturing industry that, ceteris i^ctrihus, with every
increase of the quantity produced, the relative cost of pro-
duction is diminished." It cannot be denied that a con-
sideration of this law, and of the vis inertice here attributed
to an established superiority in manufactures and commerce,
supplies an important qualification of the general argument
for Free Trade. For, along with the tendency of industry
to go where it can be most economically carried on, we have
also to recognise a tendency for it to stay and develop where
it has been once planted ; and the advantage of lea^dng this
latter tendency undisturbed wou.ld naturally be less clear to
the patriotic foreigner than to the patriotic Englishman.
The proclamation of a free race for all, just when England
had a start which she might probably keep " for centuries,"
would not seem to him a manifest realisation of eternal
justice ; to delay the race for a generation or two, and
meanwhile to apply judiciously " disturbing causes " in the
form of protective duties, would seem likely to secure a
fairer start for other nations, and ultimately, therefore,
a better organisation of the world's industry even from
a cosmoj^olitan point of view.

Nor would it seem to him a conclusive argument against
this course that protective duties impose great present
pecuniary sacrifices on the protecting nation ; especially
when he learnt, from an impartial English source, of the
great sacrifices which private capitalists in England were in
the habit of making to assist the tendency of free com-
petition in their favour. He would find, for instance, in the
Keport of a Commission published in 1854,^ an appeal to

^ See p. 20 of Report by Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, Cominissiouer appointed to
inquire into the operation of Act 5 & 6 Vict. c. 99, and into the state of tlie popu-
lation in the mining districts (Vol. XIX. of Purl. Papers for 1854).

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 179

the working-classes to consider " the immense losses which
their employers voluntarily incur in bad times, in order to
destroy foreign competition, and to gain and keep possession
of foreign markets." Should the efforts of Trade Unionists,
urges ttie writer, be successful for any length of time, they
would interfere with the " great accumulations of capital
w^hich enable a few of the most wealthy capitalists to over-
whelm all foreign competition in times of great depression,"
and which thus constitute " the great instruments of warfare
against the competing capital of foreign countries." If it
was the view of shrewd English men of business that these
great sacrifices of private wealth were needed and were
worth making, to maintain the industrial start once gained,
the intelligent foreigner would naturally conclude that the
other combatants in the industrial battle must be prepared
to make corresponding sacrifices ; that each nation must
fight with its own weapons ; and that where there were no
great accumulations of capital in private hands, the instru-
ments of warfare must be obtained by a general con-
tribution.

I have given these considerations, not because I agree
with the practical conclusion which they tend to support,
but because I think that they require to be met by a line
of argument different from that which English economists
have usually adopted. I think it erroneous to maintain, on
the ordinary economic grounds, that temporary Protection
must always be detrimental to the protecting country, even
if it were carried out by a perfectly wise and strong Govern-
ment, able to resist all influences of sinister and sectarian
interests, and to act solely for the good of the nation. The
decisive argument against it is rather the political consider-
ation that no actual Government is competent for this
difficult and delicate task ; that Protection, as actually
applied under the play of political forces, is sure to foster
many weak industries that have no chance of living with-
out artificial support, and to hamper industries that might
thrive independently, by the artificial dearness of some of
their materials and instruments ; so that it turns out a

t8o £SSA VS and ADDRESSES vii

dangerous and clumsy, as well as a costly, instrument of
industrial competition, and is not likely on the whole to
bring the desired victory, though it may give a partial
success here and there. And some such conclusion as this
is, I think, now prevalent even among those German
economists who are most decided in their rejection of the
claims of laisser-faire to absolute and unqualified validity.

So far I have been speaking of the function of economic
science in determining principles of Governmental inter-
vention in matters of industry, because this is the function
prominent in the popular view of political economy. But
I need hardly say to the present audience that this is not
the view that English economists generally have taken as to
their primary business. Indeed, during the last generation
our leading economists — even those who come nearest to
the so-called ' orthodox ' type — have gone even further
than I should myself go in declaring that economic science
had nothing to do with the doctrine of laisser-faire. No one
{e.g.) has stated this more strongly than Cairnes, whom I
select as a conspicuous and effective advocate of Free Trade.
" The maxim of laissez-faire" he says, " has no scientific basis
whatever " ; it is a " mere handy rule of practice," though
" a rule in the main sound." According to this view, the
' laws ' with which economic science is primarily concerned
are the laws that determine economic quantities — the amount
of the aggregate of wealth, its annual increase, the relative
values of its different elements, and the shares of the
economic classes that have combined to produce it — as they
would be apart from special Governmental interference ; and
not the rules for deciding when and how far such inter-
ference is justifiable.

And it is the additional light that Adam Smith threw on
the general determination of such economic quantities — and
not his advocacy of natural liberty — which in the view of
economists constitutes his chief claim to his place in the
historical development of economic science. And I may
observe that, from this point of view, the important pre-
decessors of Adam Smith are not the Physiocrats only, but

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE i8i

even more Cantillon, who wrote a generation before, to
whom Jevons drew attention some years ago in a remark-
able essay ; nor should we overlook his English predecessors
of a still earlier age such as Petty and Locke — the former
of whom has a special interest for iis as a pioneer in each of
the two lines of investigation of which we here maintain
the union, since he was the first in England to combine a
serious effort to establish tlie general relations of economic
quantities by abstract reasoning and analysis M'ith patient
endeavours to ascertain particular economic facts by statis-
tical inquiries. When we trace tlie gradual evolution of the
modern economic view as to the manner in which the play
of individual self-interests tends to determine prices and
shares — from the rude beginnings of Petty and Locke,
tlirough the more systematic and penetrating theory of
Cantillon, the fuller analysis and exposition of Adam Smith,
and the closer reasoning of Piicardo, down to the important
rectifications and additions of Jevons — we see clearly that
the progress of the theory has no necessary connection with
any doctrine as to the limits of the industrial intervention
of Government.

And it is to be observed that neither Adam Smith nor
the predecessors to whom I have referred had any design
of maintaining that the distribution which they were en-
deavouring to analyse satisfied either the claims of ideal
equity by giving each individual his deserts, or the claims
of expediency by giving him what was most conducive to
general happiness. Nor, since Adam Smith, has any lead-
ing English economist maintained the former of these
propositions ; and so far as the school of Eicardo may have
seemed to maintain the latter — so far as they certainly
have taught that direct Governmental interference with
distribution was undesirable — it has not been from any pre-
valence among them of the shallow optimism of Bastiat and
his followers. It is pessimism rather than optimism which
is to be laid to their charge ; not a disposition to underrate
or ignore the hardships that the " natural " rate of wages
might entail ; but a conviction that, however bad things

I82 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES vii

might be naturally, the direct interference of Government
could only make them worse. I am not arguing that they
did not go too far in this view ; I am now chiefly desirous
to remove a profound and widespread misunderstanding
as to the general aim and drift of their investigations, which
I find in certain German and other Continental critics of
English political economy, — and, I may add, in certain
English critics who repeat the foreign objections. Such
critics either fail to see, or continually forget, that the
English economist, in giving an explanation of the manner
in which prices, wages, profits, etc., are determined, is not
attempting to justify the result ; he is not trying to show
that in getting the market price of his services the labourer,
capitalist, or landlord gets what he deserves. Thus when
Senior called interest the " reward of abstinence," he did not
mean to imply that it was normally proportioned to the
capitalist's merit iu abstaining, but merely that capital is
increased by individuals saving instead of spending, and
that they require the inducement given by the actual rate
of interest to save to the extent to which they actually are
saving. Whether any other rate of interest would be juster
is a question of ideal politics to which the English econo-
mist has usually nothing to say so long as it is stated
in this abstract form ; it is only when the political idealist
descends to practice, and proposes a scheme for reahsing his
conception of justice, that it comes within the province of
economic science to discuss the probable effects of this
scheme on production and distribution. But it is not with
such far-reaching proposals of change that the English
economist is mainly concerned ; his primary business is to
ascertain the causes which determine actual prices of pro-
ducts and services.

Hence, when the most recent German school of econo-
mists — variously known as the ' historical,' ' ethical,' or
' social ' school — claims to have moralised political economy
by throwing over the assumption of egoism, which they
regard as characteristic of ' Smithianismus,' they usually
appear to the English economist to confound what is with

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 183

what ought to be. The assumption that egoism ought to be
universal — that the universal prevalence of self-interest
leads necessarily to the best possible economic order — has
never been made by leading English writers ; and it is an
assumption witli which tliey generally conceive themselves
in no way concerned — in that part, at least, of the science
which deals with distribution. It is the actual prevalence
of self-interest in ordinary exchanges of products and ser-
vices which constitutes their fundamental assumption.

But I admit that this reply does not end the con-
troversy. The critic may rejoin that, if egoism is not what
ought to be, the tranquil way in which the economist
treats it as universally predominant is objectionable, as
tending to give dangerous encouragement to the baser side
of human nature. And, secondly, he may deny that self-
interest actually has any such predominance as English
economists assume ; hence, he may argue, their fundamental
assumption must lead to serious errors in the analysis and
forecast of actual facts.

The first of these points I should concede to some
extent. If we regarded it as blameworthy that a man
should, under ordinary circumstances, try to get the
highest price for any commodity he sells, and give the
lowest for what he buys, then, though the analysis of
economic facts, as they exist in the present selfish and
wicked world, might still be conducted on the present
method, I certainly think its results ought to be — and
would be — expounded in a different tone. I should say,
therefore, that our economists generally do not hold to be
censurable, in a broad and general way, the self-regard
which they assume as normal. I conceive, however, that
this view is commonly held with the following important
qualifications.

Firstly, it is not implied that the right of free exchange
ought not to be legally limited in respect of certain special
commodities. Thus, when it is urged by statesmen or
philanthropists that the sale of opium, or brandy, or lot-
tery-tickets, or children's labour, ought to be prohibited or

1 84 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vii

placed under certain restrictions, the political economist,
as such, is not to be regarded as holding a brief on the other
side — at most he only throws the onus probandi on those
who advocate interference, adding perhaps a warning that the
consequences of their measure may possibly be different from
what they anticipate, owing to the play of ordinary self-regard
working under the new conditions that they aim at imposing.

Secondly, it is not implied that similar limitations may
not be effectively imposed by the force of moral opinion.
It has, indeed, to be pointed out that morality, like law,
may produce effects other than what are designed — e.g. that
the discredit attaching to usury may cause the unhappy
debtor to pay more instead of less for his inevitable loan,
since the usurer has to be compensated for the social draw-
backs of his despised employment. But it does not follow
that there are no cases in which this disadvantage has to be
faced as the least of two evils.

Thirdly, the economist does not assume that his economic
man is always buying in the cheapest and selling in the
dearest market, and never rendering services to his fellow-
creatures on any other terms. He does not lay down that
the economic distribution which it is his business to analyse
will not be supplemented to an indefinite extent by a
distribution prompted by other motives : — indeed, it should
be noted that the ordinary economic man is always under-
stood to be busily providing for a wife and children ; so that
his dominant motive to industry is rather domestic inter-
est than self-interest, strictly so-called. And it has never
been supposed that outside his private business ^or even
in connection with it if occasion arises — a man will not
spend labour and money for public objects, and give freely
gratuitous services to friends, benefactors, and persons in
special need or distress.

The political economists, it is true, have often felt called
upon to criticise the proceedings of philanthropists ; but
those who have assumed in enunciating these criticisms a
grave air of giving the results of abstruse scientific reasoning
are partly to blame, I think, for having drawn on political

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 185

economy a kind of odium which ought to have been thrown
on the broader back of plain common sense. We may say,
indeed, with special force of a great part of economic science
what Huxley has said of science generally — that it is only
" organised common-sense." lUit it needs little organisation
to show that the motives to industry and thrift are impaired
by the indiscriminate relief of the idle and improvident ;
that you help men best by encouraging them to help them-
selves, by widening the opportunities for the display of
energetic activity and enterprise, and diffusing the know-
ledge that will save it from being wasted, rather than by
diminishing the inducements that stimulate it. To appre-
hend the truth of propositions like these, a man need not
even have read a shilling handbook ; and yet these common-
places constitute the greater part of the " liard-hearted
economist's " criticism of sentimental philanthropy. If,
indeed, the economist has gone on to say that therefore no
efforts oucjht to be made to relieve distress, and raise those
who have temporarily stumbled in the struggle for existence,
or if he has prophesied failure to all larger attempts on the
part of philanthropists, to improve the condition of the
classes at the base of the industrial pyramid — if, I say, an
individual economist has here and there been found lecturing
and prognosticating in this sweeping manner, he has only
exemplified the common human tendency to dogmatise
beyond tlie limits of his knowledge ; and I trust the blame
will not be laid on the science whose exacter methods he
has deserted or misapplied.

The important question of method, then, at issue
between the English economists and their German critics is
not whether the play of the ordinary motives of self-interest
ought to be limited and supplemented by the operation of
other motives ; but whether these other motives actually do,
or can reasonably be expected to, operate in such a way
as to destroy the general applicability of the method of
economic analysis which assumes that each party to any
free exchange will prefer his own interest to that of the
other party. And in speaking of the German historical

1 86 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vii

school as antagonists on this question, I ought to say that
I refer only to what I may call their more aggressive left
wing. With the more moderate claims of the historical
method as set forth by the distinguished leader of the
school, William Eoscher, the English economists who main-
tain the tradition of Adam Smith and Eicardo have no sort
of quarrel ; and Eoscher expressly disclaims any quarrel
with them. He has sought, as he says, " gratefully to avail
himself" of the results of Eicardian analysis, and we can no
less gratefully profit by the abundant historical researches
that he has led and stimulated. It is no doubt true that
our older economists often had an insufficient appreciation
of the historical variations in economic conditions ; and, in
particular, did not adequately recognise the greater extent
to which competition was limited or repressed by law or
custom in states of society economically less advanced than
our own. But for a generation there has been no serious
dispute about this ; nor has there ever been any funda-
mental disagreement between Eicardians and Eoscherians as
to the right method of studying the history of economic
facts. The most deductive English economist has never
gone so far as to maintain that this can be constructed
d, priori, any more than any other history ; and if a
generation ago he was sometimes wont to dogmatise with
insufficient information as to the causes of industrial changes
and the economic effects of political measures in other ages
and countries, he has grown wiser, like other persons, through
the great development of historical study — and of what I
may call the common historic sense of educated persons —
which has taken place in the interval. Indeed, I think the
danger now is rather that we should go into the opposite
extreme, and not give sufficient attention to the more latent
and complicated but very effective manner in which com-
petition is found operating even in states of society where
the barriers of custom are stronG[est.

But further, even as regards the present condition of
industry in the more advanced countries, to which the
theory of modern economic science primarily relates, there

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 187

is, I conceive, no dispute as to the need of what is called a
" realistic " or " inductive " method — i.e. as to the need of
accurately ascertaining particular facts when we are inquir-
ing into tlie particular causes of particular values, or of the
shares of particular economic classes at any given place and
time. All that the deductive reasonings of English econo-
mists supply is a method of analysing the phenomena and
a statement of the general causes that govern them, and of
the manner of their operation. In this analysis, no doubt,
the assumption is fundamental that the individuals con-
cerned in the actual determination of the economic quanti-
ties resulting from free exchange will aim, ceteris paribus,
at getting the most they can for what they sell and giving
the least they can for what they buy. And when we iind
the legitimacy of this assumption, and the scientific value of
the analysis based upon it, broadly assailed by Hildebrand,^
Knies," and others, we are no doubt seriously concerned to
meet their criticism.

For my own part, I can only say that, having searched
their works with the interest and respect which are due to
the indefatigable research and the scientific fertility of the
German intellect, I am quite unable to discover what other
scientific treatment of the general theory of distribution and
exchange they propose to substitute for the treatment which
they sweepingly criticise. T cannot perceive that their
higher view of man as a moral, sympathetic, public-spirited
being, habitually rising above the sordid huckstering con-
siderations by which English economists assume him to be
governed, has any material effect on their theory of the
determination of economic quantities when it comes to be
actually worked out. When Knies,^ for instance, is discussing
the nature and functions of capital, money and credit, or
when he is arguing with more subtlety than success against

^ See two papers ou "Die gegeiiwiutige Aufgabe Jer Wisseiischaft iler politis-
cheu Oekonomie," in the first volume (1863) of Hililebramrs Jahrbuch fur
National-Oekonomie n. Slatistik\ p. 5 ff. and p. 137 ff. : especially his criticism of
J. S. Mill (p. 23), quoted with approval by Schouberg in the introduction to his
JIandltuch.

2 See his Politisdie Oekonomie vom geschichtUchen Standpunktc, iii. § 3.

3 See his Geld und Credit— in particular, Credit, pt. ii. oh. xii. § 2.

i88 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vii

the Eicardian doctrine of rent, we find tliat the capitalists
and landlords, the lenders and borrowers, whose operations
are contemplated, exhibit throughout the familiar features
of the old economic man. So, again, when, in the Encyclo-
pcedia of Political Economy ^ recently published by this
school, we examine the definitions of fundamental notions,
or the explanation of prices, or the theory of distribution,
we meet, indeed, with some interesting variations on the
old doctrines, but we find everywhere the old economic
motives assumed and the old method unhesitatingly
applied. The proof of the pudding, as the proverb says, is
in the eating ; but our historical friends make no attempt
to set before us the new economic pudding which their large
phrases seemed to promise. It is only the old pudding
with a little more ethical sauce and a little more garnish of
historical illustrations.

In saying this I should be sorry to seem to underrate
the debt that economic science owes to the labours of the
school now dominant in Germany. Much of the positive
work that they have produced is in its way excellent ; even
their criticism of the older method has been, in my opinion,
most useful ; and if I complain that they have by no means
done what they announced, with some flourish of trumpets,
that they were going to do, it is chiefliy because their ex-
aggerated phrases have led critics of a looser sort to mis-
understand and misrepresent the recent progress and actual
condition of economic thought. I fully recognise that the
elaborate and careful study of economic facts in all depart-
ments, which the historical school has encouraged and carried
out, is an indispensable aid to the due development of
general economic theory. In all abstract economic reason-
ing which aims at quantitative precision, there is necessarily
a hypothetical element ; the facts to which the reasonings
relate are not contemplated in their actual complexity, but
in an artificially simplified form ; if, therefore, the reasoning
is not accompanied and checked by a careful study of facts,
the required simplification may easily go too far or be

^ See Schonberg's Handbuch, iv. v. and xi.

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 1S9

inappropriate in kind, so that the hypothetical element of
the reasoning is increased to an extent which prevents the
result from having any practical value. And this danger is
enhanced by the great, though generally gradual, changes in
economic facts which accompany or constitute industrial
development. Thus, for instance, a theoretical investigation
of the purchasing power of money, which assumes for
simplicity that coin and bank notes form the sole medium
of exchange, might easily lead to serious practical errors in
the existing condition of industry ; and a theory of capital
which ignores the great and growing preponderance of
auxiliary over remuneratory capital is liable to be similarly
delusive. The general study of economic history is im-
portant as calling attention to this source of error ; but for
effective protection against it we must look to that patient
and systematic development of statistical inquiry which it
is one of our main functions here to watch and to foster.

I must observe, however, that the historical economists
are apt to insist too one-sidedly on the progress in economic
theory attained by studying the industrial organisation of
society in different stages of its development ; they do not
sufficiently recognise that other kind of progress which
consists in conceiving more clearly, accurately, and con-
sistently, the fundamental facts that remain without material
change. But this latter kind of progress is very palpable
to one who traces back the history of economic doctrines.
Indeed, if our active controversy on principles and method
has led anyone to think that political economists are always
wrangling, and never establishing anything, he may easily
correct this impression by turning to the older writers, and
noting the confusions they make on points that are now
clear to all instructed persons, and the inferences they
unhesitatingly draw, which all would now admit to be in
whole or in part erroneous. And by the " older writers " I
do not mean merely those who lived before Adam Smith :
what I have just said is no less true of the Wealth of
Nations and its most distinguished successors. A tiro can
now see the fallacy of Adam Smith's statement, that

190 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vil

" labour never varying in its own value " is a " universal "
and " accurate standard of the exchangeable value of all
commodities at all times and places " ; the staunchest
Eicardian would refuse to follow his master in maintaining
that a tax on corn would cause labourers " no other in-
convenience than that which they would suffer from any
other mode of taxation " ; the most faithful disciple of
J. S. Mill would not fall into the confusion between
" interest " and " profit " which seriously impairs the value
of important parts of his discussions. Much progress,
I doubt not, still remains to be made, by steadily con-
tinuing that labour of reflective analysis through which our
conception of fundamental economic facts has grown con-
tinually fuller and more exact ; but no one who examines
impartially the writings of our most eminent predecessors
can ignore the progress that has already been made.

I now pass to consider another old charge against
political economists, which has been recently revived : the
charge of confining their attention too much to the special
group of phenomena with wliich they are primarily con-
cerned, and nealecting the relations of these to other social
facts. There have, no doubt, been writers — Senior is,
perhaps, the most important — in whom such neglect was
deliberate and systematic; but their peculiar view of
economic method has long ceased to have much influence
on current thought ; and I hardly think that political
economists are now more open to the charge of systematic
narrowness than any other set of students who do not
" take all knowledge for their province," but accept the
limitations which the present state of research imposes as
the inevitable condition of thorough work in any department.
And so far as the charge hits a real defect, I doubt whether
vague generalities about the " consensus of the different
functions of the social organism," and the impossibility of
" isolating the study of one organ from that of the rest,"
will be found of much practical use in correcting the
defect ; since the relations of other social phenomena
to those which primarily concern the economist vary

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 191

indefinitely in closeness and importance ; so that the question
how far it is needful to investigate tliem is one which
has to be answered very differently in relation to different
economic inquiries. Thus, in considering generally the first
subject of Adam Smith's investigation — " the causes of the
improvement in the productive powers of labour" — the
importance of a healthy condition of social morality must
not be overlooked ; but it is not therefore the economist's
duty to study in detail the doctrine or discipline of the
different Christian churches : while any reference he may
make to the history of the Fine Arts will obviously be still
more remote and brief. If, however, we are considering
historically the causes that have affected the interest of
capital, the views of Christian theologians with regard to
usury will require careful attention; if, again, we are
investigating the share taken by a particular community in
the international organisation of industry, the higher average
of artistic sensibility among its members may be a consider-
ation deserving of notice — as in the case of France.

Or again, we may illustrate the different degrees in
which economic science is connected with different depart-
ments of social fact by comparing the chief classes of
statistics with which it has been our custom here to deal.
Some of the most important of these — such as the statistics
of taxation, trade, railways, land-tenure and the like, and a
great part of the statistics of population — supply the indis-
pensable premisses of much of the economist's reasoning, so
far as it aims at being precise and particular, and the in-
dispensable verification of many of his conclusions. In
other cases again, — as, for instance, the great departments
of sanitary and educational statistics, — the interest of the
economist is more general and limited : for though both
sanitation and education have important bearings on the
productiveness of national labour, the details of the organ-
isation for promoting either end lie in the main beyond the
scope of his investigation ; while he has manifestly still less
to do with criminal statistics, military and naval statistics,
and several other species of social facts wliich governmental

192 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES vii

or private agencies now enable us to ascertain with approxi-
mate quantitative exactness.

At this point, however, our critics %vill probably say
that it is not so much a knowledge of the separate relations
of different groups of social phenomena that the political
economist lacks, but rather a true conception of the social
organism as a whole, and of the fundamental laws of its
development ; he does not recognise that his study can only
be legitimately or profitably pursued as a duly subordinated
branch of the general science of sociology. This view was
strongly urged by Mr. Ingram in his presidential address to
this Section seven years ago in Dublin ^ ; and it was
enforced by pointing contemptuously to the limited function
which well-instructed economists at the present day are
careful to allot to their science in the settlement of practical
questions. When we explain, with Cairnes, that political
economy furnishes certain data that go towards the forma-
tion of a sound opinion on such questions, but does not
undertake to pronounce a final judgment on them, we are
told that this " systematic indifferentism amounts to an
entire paralysis of political economy as a social power " ;
and that the time has come for it to make way for, or be
absorbed into, the " scientific sociology " which is now in
the field, and which certainly seems ready to offer states-
men the dogmatic, comprehensive, and complete practical
guidance that mere economic science confesses itself inade-
quate to supply.

It appears to me that Mr, Ingram and his friends some-
what mistake the point that they have to prove. It is not
necessary to show that if we could ascertain from the past
history of human society the fundamental laws of social
evolution as a whole, so that we could accurately forecast
the main features of the future state with which our present
social world is pregnant, — it is not needful, I say, to show
that the science which gave this foresight would be of the

1 It has been recently expressed again, with no less emphasis, in Mr. Ingram's
article on " Political Economy," in the niueteeutli volume of the Encydojpcedia
Britannica.

VI 1 THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 193

highest value to a statesman, and would absorb or dominate
our present political economy. What has to be proved is
that this supremely important knowledge is within our
grasp ; that the sociology which professes this prevision is
really an estabhshed science. To deny this may perhaps
seem presumptuous, in view of the voluminous works that
we possess on the subject, which it would be quite out of
place for me to attempt to criticise methodically on the
present occasion. Fortunately, however, such methodical
criticism is not required to justify my negative conclusion :
since there are two simple tests of tlie real establishment of
a science — emphatically recognised by Comte in his dis-
cussion of this very subject — which can be quickly and
decisively applied to the claims of existing sociology. These
tests may be characterised as (1) Consensus or Continuity,
and (2) Prevision. The former I will explain in Comte's
own words : — " When we find that recent works, instead of
being the result and development of what has gone before,
have a character as personal as that of their authors, and
bring the most fundamental ideas into question " — then,
says Comte, we may be sure we are not dealing with any
doctrine deserving the name of positive science. Now, if
we compare the most elaborate and ambitious treatises on
sociology, of which there happens to be one in each of the
three leading scientific languages, — Comte's Politique Positive,
Spencer's Sociology, and Schiittie's Ban und Leben des socialen
Kbrpers, — we see at once that they exhibit the most com-
plete and conspicuous absence of agreement or continuity
in their treatment of the fundamental questions of social
evolution.

Take, for example, the question of the future of religion.
No thoughtful person can overlook the importance of reli-
gion as an element of man's social existence ; nor do the
sociologists to whom I have referred fail to recognise it.
But if we inquire after the characteristics of the religion of
which their science leads them to foresee the coming pre-
valence, they give with nearly equal confidence answers as
divergent as can be conceived. Schiiflle cannot comprehend

0

194 ESS A YS AND ADDJiESSES vii

that the place of the great Christian Churches can be taken
by anything but a purified form of Christianity ; Spencer
contemplates complacently the reduction of religious thought
and sentiment to a perfectly indefinite consciousness of an
Unknowable and the emotion that accompanies this peculiar
intellectual exercise; while Comte has no doubt that the
whole history of religion — which, as he says, " should resume
the entire history of human development " — has been lead-
ing up to the worship of the Great Being, Humanity,
personified domestically for each normal male individual by
his nearest female relatives. It would certainly seem that
the science which allows these discrepancies in its chief
expositors must be still in its infancy. And when we go
on to ask how these divergent forecasts of the future are
scientifically deduced from the study of the past evolution
of mankind, we are irresistibly reminded of the old epigram
as to the relation of certain theological controversialists to
the Bible :

Hie liber est in quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua.

I do not doubt that our sociologists are sincere in settincr
before us their conception of the coming social state as the
last term of a series of which the law has been discovered
by patient historical study ; but when we look closely into
their work it becomes only too evident that each philosopher
has constructed on the basis of personal feeling and ex-
perience his ideal future in which our present social
deficiencies are to be remedied ; and that the process by
which history is arranged in steps pointing towards his
Utopia bears not the faintest resemblance to a scientific
demonstration.

This is equally evident when we turn from religion to
industry, and examine the forecasts of industrial develop-
ment offered to the statesman in the name of scientific
sociology as a substitute for the discarded calculations of the
mere economist. With equal confidence, history is repre-
sented as leading up, now to the naive and unqualified indi-

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 195

vidualisin of Spencer, now to the carefully guarded and
elaborated socialism of SchiifHe, now to Comte's dream of
securing seven-roomed houses for all working-men — with
other comforts to correspond — solely by the impressive
moral precepts of his philosophic priests. Guidance, truly,
is here enough and to spare : but how is the bewildered
statesman to select his guidance when his sociological
doctors exhibit this portentous disagreement ?

Nor is it only that they adopt diametrically opposite
conclusions : we find that each adopts his conclusion with
the most serene and complete indifference to the line of
historical reasoning on which his brother sociologist relies.
SchiifHe, e.g., appears not to have the least inkling of the
array of facts which have convinced Spencer that the recent
movement towards increased industrial intervention of gov-
ernment in Germany and England is causally connected
with the contemporaneous recrudescence of " militancy "
in the two countries. And similarly, when Spencer ex-
plains how, under a regime of private property and free
contract, there is necessarily a " correct apportioning of
reward to merit," so that each worker " obtains as much
benefit as his efforts are equivalent to — no more and no
less," he exhibits a total ignorance of the crushing refutation
which, according to SchafHe, this individualistic fallacy has
received at the hands of socialism. The tendency of free
competition to annihilate itself, and give birth to mono-
polies exercised against the common interest for the private
advantage of the monopolists ; the crushing inequality of
industrial opportunities, which the legal equality and free-
dom of modern society have no apparent tendency to
correct ; the impossibility of remunerating by private sale
of commodities some most important services to the
community ; the unforeseen fluctuations of supply and
demand which a world-wide organisation of industry brings
with it, liable to inflict, to an increasing extent, unde-
served economic ruin upon large groups of industrious
workers ; the waste incident to the competitive system,
through profuse and ostentatious advertisements, needless

196 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES vii

multiplication of middlemen, inevitable non-employment,
or half-employment, of many competitors ; the demoral-
isation, worse than waste, due to the reckless or fraudulent
promotion of joint-stock companies, and to the gambling rife
in the great markets, and tending more and more to spread
over the whole area of production, — such points as these
are unnoticed in the broad view which our English soci-
ologist takes of the modern industrial society gradually
emancipating itself from militancy : it never enters his head
that they can have anything to do with causing the move-
ment towards socialism to which his German confrere has
yielded.^

However, whether Spencer or Schiiffle is a true prophet
— whether the decay of war will bring us to a more com-
plete individualism, or whether the increasing scale of the
organisation of industry and its increasingly marked de-
ficiencies are preparing the way for socialism — cannot
certainly be known before a date more or less distant. But
as Comte's sociological treatise was written a generation ago,
we are fortunately able to bring his very definite predictions
and counsels to the test of accomplished facts. In 1854
he announced that the transition which was to terminate
the Western Eevolution, would be organised from Paris, the
" religious metropolis of regenerate humanity," where an
" irreversible dictatorship " had just been established, within
the space of a generation. In the initial phase of the
transition, which ought to last about seven years, perfect
freedom of the press would " rapidly extinguish journalism,"
owing to the " inability of the journal to compete with the
placard." By a "judicious use of placards, with a few
occasional pamphlets," Positivism would regenerate public
opinion. The budget of the clergy, the University of
France, the Academy of Sciences, must be suppressed, and
the proximate abolition of copyright announced. By these
moderate measures Louis Napoleon's irreversible dictatorship
might be " perfected and consolidated," so that the dictator

^ See Schaffle's " Kritik der kapitalistischen Epoclie," in Baxt, und Leben des
socialen Korpers, vol. iii. pp. 419-457.

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 197

might assume complete legislative power, reducing the
Ilepresentative AssemVjly — which would sit once in three
years — to the purely financial function of voting the Budget.
In the second phase of the transition, which should last
about five years, the " dictatorial government, now un-
questionably progressive," would suppress the French army,
substituting a constabulary of 80,000 gendarmes. This
would suffice to maintain order, internal and external,
as the oppressive military establishments of neighbouring
states would everywhere fall as soon as France had put
down her army. The dictator would then break up France
into seventeen separate intendancies, as a step towards
the ultimate Positive regime, under which the peoples of
Western Europe are to be distributed into seventy republics,
comprising about 300,000 families each. The third and
last phase of the transition, which should occupy about
twenty-one years, might be expected to be opened by the
voluntary abdication of the dictator in favour of a triumvirate,
consisting probably of a banker to manage foreign affairs,
an " agricultural patrician " as minister of the interior, and
a working-man to take charge of the finances. Their names
would be suggested by the High Priest of Humanity —
indeed, Comte tells us that he had been " working for
several years at the choice of persons," in order to be ready
for this momentous nomination : for the immense influence
which Positivist doctrine ought to have gained by this time
would enable the political direction of France to be placed
completely in the hands of Positivists. This triumvirate
would transform the seventeen intendances into separate
republics : the hourgeoisic would then be gradually " elimi-
nated " by the extinction of litterateurs, lawyers, and small
capitalists, so that society would pass easily into the final
rewime.^

I need not go on to this final regime : I have already
given you more than enough of these extravagances ; but
it seemed important to show how completely the delusive

^ These details are taken from Comte's Systime de Politique Positive, vol. iv.
chap. V.

198 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES vil

belief that he had constructed the science of sociology could
transform a philosopher of remarkable power and insight
into the likeness of a crazy charlatan. I trust that our
Association will take no step calculated to foster delusions
of this kind. There is no reason to despair of the progress
of general sociology ; but I do not think that its develop-
ment can be really promoted by shutting our eyes to its
present very rudimentary condition. When the general
science of society has solved the problems which it has as
yet only managed to define more or less clearly — when for
positive knowledge it can offer us something better than
a mixture of vague and variously applied physiological
analogies, imperfectly verified historical generalisations, and
unwarranted political predictions — when it has succeeded in
establishing on the basis of a really scientific induction its
forecasts of social evolution — it will not require any formal
admission to the discussions of this Section ; its existence
will be irresistibly felt throughout the range of the more
special inquiries into different departments of social fact to
which we have hitherto restricted ourselves. It is our
business in the meantime to carry on our more limited and
empirical studies of society in as scientific a manner as
possible. Of the method of statistical investigation I have
not presumed to speak, as I have not myself done any work
of this kind, but have merely availed myself gratefully of
the labours of others. But, even so, it has been impossible
for me not to learn that to do this work in its entirety, as
it ought to be done, repuires scientific faculties of a high
order. For duly discerning the various sources of error that
impede the quantitative ascertainment of social facts, elimi-
nating such error as far as possible, and allowing for it
where it cannot be eliminated — still more for duly analysing
differences and fluctuations in the social quantities ascer-
tained, and distinguishing causal from accidental variations
and correspondences — there is needed not only industry,
patience, accuracy, but a perpetually alert and circumspect
activity of the reasoning powers ; nor is the statistician
completely equipped for his task of discovering empirical

VII THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE 199

laws \mless he can effectively use the assistance of an
abstract and difficult calculus of probabilities. It is satis-
factory to think that there is every prospect of statistical
investigations being carried on, in an increasingly compre-
hensive and systematic manner, throughout an ever widen-
ing range of civilised countries. The results of this develop-
ment cannot fail to be important from the statesman's no
less than the theorist's point of view : for though the statis-
tician, as such, does not profess to guide public opinion on
political questions, there can be no doubt — as Mr. Giffen
has recently pointed out — that the knowledge attained by
him tends to exercise on the general discussion of such
questions an iniiuence, on the whole, no less salutary tlian
profound.

VIII
ECONOMIC SOCIALISM

{Oontemporary Jlcview, November 1886)

Observers of the current drift of political thought and
practice, however widely they may diverge in their judg-
ments of its tendencies, appear to be generally agreed upon
one point — viz. that Socialism is flowing in upon us with a
full tide. Whether, like M. de Laveleye, they regard this
phenomenon complacently as a "good time coming," or
whether, with Mr. Spencer, they hold that what is coming
is " slavery," they seem to have no doubt that the political
signs are pointing to a great extension of governmental
interference in the affairs of private members of the com-
munity. And a second point on which they appear to agree
is that this socialistic movement — as it is often called — is
altogether opposed to ' orthodox political economy ' ; that
the orthodox political economist teaches us to restrict the
intervention of Government on all the lines on which the
socialistic movement aims at extending it. The object of
the present paper is not to argue directly for or against any
proposed governmental interference, but to reduce to its
proper limits the supposed opposition between orthodox
political economy and what is vaguely called socialistic, or
semi-socialistic, legislation. I admit that the opposition
really exists to some extent ; and, so far as it exists, I am
— for the most part — on the side of orthodox political
economy ; but I think that the opposition has been danger-
ously and misleadingly exaggerated for want of a proper

200

VIII ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 201

distinction of the diUbreiit grounds on which different kinds
of governiiiontal interference are reasonably based.

I will begin by stating briefly the general argument by
wliich orthodox political economy seeks to show that wealth
tends to l>c produced most amply and economically in a
society where Government leaves industry alone ; — that is,
where Government confines itself to the protection of person,
property, and reputation, and the enforcement of contracts
not obtained by force or fraud, leaving individuals free to
produce and transfer to others whatever utilities they may
choose, on any terms that may be freely arranged. The
argument is briefly that — assuming that the conduct of
individuals is generally characterised by a fairly intelligent
and alert pursuit of their private interests — regard for self-
interest on the part of consumers will lead to the effectual
demand for the commodities that are most useful to society,
and regard for self-interest on the part of producers will
lead to the production of such commodities at the least cost.
If any material part of the ordinary supply of any com-
modity A were generally estimated as less adapted for the
satisfaction of social needs than the quantity of another
commodity B that could be produced at the same cost, the
demand of consumers would be diverted from A to B, so
that A would fall in market value and B rise ; and this
change in values would cause a diversion of the efforts of
producers from A to B to the extent required. On the
other hand, the self-interest of producers will tend to the
production of everything at the least possible cost ; because
the self-interest of employers will lead them to purchase
services most cheaply, taking account of quality, and the
self-interest of labourers will make them endeavour to
supply the best paid — and therefore most useful — services
for which they are adapted. Thus the only thing required
of Government is to secure that every one shall be really
free to buy the utility he most wants, and to sell what he
can best furnish.

If the actual results of the mainly spontaneous organisa-
tion bv which the vast fabric of modern industry has been

202 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES viii

constructed do not altogether realise the economic ideal
above delineated, they at any rate exhibit, on the whole, a
very impressive approximation to it. The motive of self-
interest does, I hold, work powerfully and continually in
the complex manner above described ; and I am convinced
that no adequate substitute for it, either as an impulsive or
as a regulating force, has as yet been found by any social-
istic reformer. Still, the universal practice of modern
civilised societies has admitted numerous exceptions to the
broad rule of laisser-fairc with which the argument above
given concludes ; and it seems worth while to classify these
exceptions, distinguishing as clearly as possible the prin-
ciples on which they are based, in order that, in any novel
or doubtful case, we may at least apply the appropriate
general considerations for determining the legitimacy of the
exception, and not be misled by false analogies.

Let us begin by marking off a class of exceptions with
which political economy, as I conceive it, is only indirectly
or partially concerned ; — exceptions which are due to the
manifest limitations under which abstract economic theory
is necessarily applied in the art of government. Thus, in
the first place, the human beings with whom economic
science is primarily concerned — who, in the general argu-
ment for laisser-faire, are assumed to be capable of a suffi-
ciently alert and careful regard for their private interests —
are independent adults. The extremest advocate of laisser-
faire does not extend this assumption to children ; hence
the need of governmental interference to regulate the educa-
tion and employment of children has to be discussed on
principles essentially different from those on which we
determine the propriety of interfering with the industry of
adults. It is, no doubt, a very tenable proposition that
parents are the best guardians of their children's interests,
but it is quite a different proposition from that on which
the general economic argument for industrial non-inter-
ference is based — viz., that every one is the best guardian
of his own interests ; and the limitations within which
experience leads us to restrict the practical application

VIII ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 203

of the two principles respectively differ to an important
extent.

But, secondly, what the political economist is primarily
concerned with is the elTect on the wealth^ of the community
caused by interference or non-interference ; but we all agree
that from the statesman's point of view considerations of
wealth are not decisive ; they are to be subordinated to con-
ditions of physical or moral well-being. If we regard a man
merely as a means of producing wealth, it might pay to
allow a needle-grinder to work himself to death in a dozen
years, as it was said to pay some American sugar-planters
to work their slaves to death in six or eight ; but a civilised
community cannot take this view of its members ; and the
fact that a man will deliberately choose to work himself to
death in a dozen years for an extra dozen shillings a week
is not a decisive reason for allowing him to make the sacrifice
imchecked. In this and similar cases we interfere on other
than economic grounds : and it is by such extra-economic
considerations that we justify the w^hole mass of sanitary
regulations ; restrictions on the sale of opium, brandy, and
other intoxicants ; prohibitions of lotteries, regulation of
places of amusement ; and similar measures. It is, no
doubt, the business of the political economist to investigate
the effects of such interference ; and, if he finds it in any
case excessively costly, or likely to be frustrated by a
tenacious and evasive pursuit of private interest on the part
of persons whose industry or trade is interfered with, he
must direct attention to these drawbacks ; but the principles
on which the interference is based carry him beyond the
scope of his special method of reasoning, which is concerned
primarily with effects on wealth.

This last phrase, however, suggests another fundamental
distinction to which attention nmst be drawn. AVe have to
distinguish eil'ects in the production of wealth from effects
on its distribution. The argument for laisser-faire, as given

^ I use the terni wealth for brevity ; but I should include along with wealth
all purchased utilities — whether "embodied in matter" or not — so far as tliey are
estimated merelv at their value in the market.

204 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES viii

above, dealt solely with its tendency to promote the most
economical and effective production of wealth : it did not
aim at showing that the wealth so produced tends to be dis-
tributed among the different classes that have co-operated
in producing it in strict accordance with their respective
deserts. On this latter point there has, I think, always
been a marked difference between the general tone of English
political economists and the general tone of leading con-
tinental advocates of laisser-faire, of whom Bastiat may be
taken as a type. Bastiat and his school do boldly attempt
to show that the existing distribution of wealth — or rather
that which would exist if Government would only keep its
hands off — is " conformable to that which ought to be " ;
and that every worker tends to get what he deserves under
the economic order of unmodified competition. But the
English disciples of Adam Smith have rarely ventured on
these daring flights of optimistic demonstration : when, e.g.,
Eicardo talked of " natural wages," he had no intention of
stamping the share of produce so designated as divinely
ordered and therefore just ; on the contrary, a market-price
of labour above the natural price is characteristic, in
Eicardo's view, of an " improving society." And, generally
speaking, English political economists, however ' orthodox,'
have never thought of denying that the remuneration of
workers tends to be very largely determined by causes inde-
pendent of their deserts — e.cj. by fluctuations in supply and
demand, from the effects of which they are quite unable to
protect themselves. If our economists have opposed — as
they doubtless have always opposed — any suggestion that
Government should interfere directly to redress such in-
equalities in distribution, their argument has not been that
the inequalities were merited ; they have rather urged
that any good such interference might do in the way
of more equitable distribution would be more than out-
weighed by the harm it would do to production, through
impairing the motives to energetic self-help ; since no
Government could discriminate adequately between losses
altogetlier inevitable and losses that might be at least largely

VIII ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 205

reduced either by foresight or by promptitude and energy in
meeting unforeseen changes. If, however, we can find a
mode of intervention which will reduce inequalities of dis-
tribution without materially diminishing motives to self-
help, this kind of intervention is not, I conceive, essentially
opposed to the teaching even of orthodox political economy
— according to the English standard of orthodoxy ; for
orthodox economy is quite ready to admit that the poverty
and depression of any industrial class is liable to render its
members less productive from want of physical vigour and
restricted industrial opportunities. Now, an important part
of the recent, and the proposed, enlargement of governmental
functions, which is vaguely attacked as socialistic, certainly
aims at benefiting the poor in such a way as to make them
more self-helpful instead of less so, and thus seeks to miti-
gate inequalities in distribution without giving offence to
the orthodox economist. This is the case, e.g., with the
main part of governmental provision for education, and the
provision of instruments of knowledge by libraries etc. for
adults. I do not say that all the money spent in this way
is well spent ; but merely that the principle on which a
great part of it is spent is one defensible even in the court
of old-fashioned political economy ; so far as it aims at
equalising, not the advantages that should be earned by
labour, but the opportunities of earning them.

At this point it will probably be objected that the means
of equalising opportunities in the way proposed can only be
raised by taxation, and that it cannot be economically sound
to tax one class for the benefit of another. If, however, the
result sought is really beneficial to the production of the
community as a whole, it may, I conceive, be argued — on
the premises of the most orthodox political economy — that
the expense of it may be legitimately thrown on the com-
munity as a whole — i.e. may be raised by taxation equitably
distributed. In order to make this plain, it will be con-
venient to pass to the general consideration of a kind of
exceptions to laisscr-faire differing fundamentally in prin-
ciple from those which we have so far considered ; cases in

2o6 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES viii

which it may be shown a priori that laisser-faire would not
tend to the most economic production of wealth or other
utilities, even in a community whose members were as
intelligent and alert in seeking and guarding their private
interests as any human beings can reasonably be expected
to be. I do not argue that in all such cases Government
ought to interfere : in human affairs we have often only a
choice of evils, and even where private industry fails to
bring about a satisfactory result, it is possible that govern-
mental interference might on the whole make matters worse.
All I here maintain is, that in such cases the general economic
presumption in favour of leaving social needs to be supplied
by private enterprise is absent, or is balanced by strictly
economic considerations on the opposite side.

To give a complete systematic account of these excep-
tional cases would carry me beyond the limits of an article :
my present object is merely to illustrate the general concep-
tion of them by a few leading examples, in choosing which
I shall try as far as possible to avoid matters of practical
controversy.

We may begin by noticing that there are certain kinds
of utility — which are, or may be, economically very important
to individuals — which Government, in a well-organised
modern community, is peculiarly adapted to pro\'ide. Com-
plete security for savings is one of these. I do not of course
claim that it is an attribute of Governments, always and
everywhere, that they are less likely to go bankrupt, or
defraud their creditors, than private individuals or com-
panies. History would at once refute the daring pretension.
I merely mean that this is likely to be an attribute of
governments in the ideal society that orthodox political
economy contemplates. Of this we may find evidence in
the fact that even now, though loaded with war debts and
in danger of increasing the load, the English Government
can borrow more cheaply than the most prosperous private
company. We may say, therefore, that Government is
theoretically fit to be the keeper of savings for which
special security is required. So again — without entering

vm ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 207

dangerously into the burning question of currency — we may
at least say that if stab'diti/ in the value of the medium of
exchange can be attained at all, without sacrifices and risks
outweighing its advantages, it must be by the intervention
of Government : a voluntary combination powerful enough
to produce the result is practically out of the question.

In other cases, again, where uniformity of action or
abstinence on the part of a whole class of producers is
required for the most economical production of a certain
utility, the intervention of Government is likely to be the
most effective way of attaining the result. It should be
observed that it is not the mere need of an extensive
combination of producers which establishes an exception to
the rule of laisscr-faire, for such need can often be adequately
met by voluntary association : the case for governmental
interference arises when the utility at which the combina-
tion aims will be lost or seriously impaired if even one
or two of the persons concerned stand aloof from the
combination. Certain cases of protection of land below the
sea-level against Hoods, and the protection of useful animals
and plants against infectious diseases, exemplify this condi-
tion. In a perfectly ideal community, indeed, we might
perhaps assume that all the persons concerned would take
the requisite precautions ; but in any community of human
beings that we can expect to see, the most that we can hope
is that the great majority of any industrial class will be
adequately enlightened, vigilant, and careful in protecting
their own interest ; and in the cases just mentioned, the
efforts and sacrifices of a great majority might easily be
rendered almost useless by the neglect of one or two
individuals.

But the case for Ejovernmental interference is still
stronger where the very fact of a combination among the
great majority of a certain industrial class to attain a certain
result materially increases the inducement for individuals to
stand aloof from the combination. Take, for instance, the
case of certain fisheries, where it is clearly for the general
interest that the fish should not be caught at certain times,

2o8 ESSA YS AND ADDJ^ESSES viii

or ill certain places, or with certain instruments ; because
the increase of actual supply obtained by such captures is
much overbalanced by the detriment it causes to prospective
supply. We may fairly assume that the great majority of
possible fishermen would enter into a voluntary agreement
to observe the required rules of abstinence ; but it is
obvious that the larger the number that thus voluntarily
abstain, the stronger inducement is offered to the remaining
few to pursue their fishing in the objectionable times, places,
and ways, so long as they are under no legal coercion to
abstain.

So far I have spoken of cases where it is difficult to
render a voluntary association as complete as the common
interest requires. But we have also to consider cases where
such a combination may be too complete for the public
interest, since it may give the combiners a monopoly of the
article in which they deal. This is, perhaps, the most
important of all the theoretical exceptions to the general
rule of laisser-faire. It is sometimes overlooked in the
general argument for leaving private enterprise unfettered,
through a tacit assumption that enlightened self-interest
will lead to open competition ; but abstract reasoning and
experience equally show that under certain circumstances
enlightened self-interest may prompt to a close combination
of the dealers in any commodity : and that the private
interest of such a combination, so far as it is able to secure
a monopoly of the commodity, may be opposed to the general
interest. Observe that my objection to monopoly — whether
resulting; from combination or otherwise — is not that the
monopolist may make too large a profit : that is a question
of distribution with which I am not now concerned. My
objection is that a monopolist may often increase his profit,
or make an equal profit more easily, by giving a smaller
supply at higher prices of the commodity in which he deals
rather than a larger supply at lower prices, and so render-
ing less service to the community in return for his profit.
Wherever, from technical or other reasons, the whole of any
industry or trade in a certain district tends to fall under the

viii ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 209

condition of monopoly, I do not say that there ouglit to be
governmental interference, but at any rate the chief economic
objection to such interference is absent.

A familiar instance of this is the provision ol' lighting and
water in towns. Experience has amply shown — what might
have been inferred a iiriori — that in cases such as these it
is impossible to obtain the ordinary advantages from com-
petition. Competition invariably involves an uneconomical
outlay on works, for which the consumers have ultimately
to pay when the competing companies — necessarily few —
have seen their way to combination.

And it is to be observed that the same progress of
civilisation which tends to make competition more real and
effective, when the circumstances of industry favour competi-
tion, also increase the facilities and tendencies to combination
when the circumstances favour combination.

But again, laisser-faire may fail to furnish an adequate
supply of some important utility for a reason opposite to
that just considered, not because the possible producer has
too much control over his product, but because he has too
little. I mean that a particular employment of labour or
capital may be most useful to the community, and yet the
conditions of its employment may be such that the labourer
or capitalist cannot remunerate himself in the ordinary way,
by free exchange of his commodity, because he cannot appro-
priate his beneficial results sufficiently to sell them profitably.
Contrast, for instance, the case of docks and lighthouses. In
an enlightened community, the making of docks might be
left to private industry, because the ships that use them
could always be made to pay for them ; but the remunera-
tion for the service rendered by a lighthouse cannot be
similarly secured. Or, to take a very diiferent instance,
contrast scientific discoveries and technical inventions, A
technical invention may be patented ; but, though a scientific
discovery may be the source of many new inventions, you
cannot remunerate that by a patent ; it cannot be made a
marketable article. In other cases, again, where it is quite
possible to remunerate labour by selling its product, experi-

P

2IO ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES viii

ence shows that the process of sale is uneconomical from the
cost and waste of trouble involved. This, for instance, is
why an advanced industrial community gets rid of tolls on
roads and bridges.

It is under this last head that a portion at least of the
expenditure of Government on education, and the provision
of the means of knowledge for adults, may, I think, be
defended in accordance with the general assumptions on
which ' orthodox political economy ' proceeds ; so far as this
outlay tends to increase the productive efficiency of the
persons who profit by it to an extent that more than repays
the outlay. For it will not be denied (1) that the poverty
of large classes of the community, if left without aid, would
practically prevent them from obtaining this increment of
productive efficiency ; and (2) that even when it is clearly
worth paying for, from the point of view of the community,
the business of providing it could not be remuneratively
undertaken by private enterprise. So far, therefore, there
is a 'prima facie case for governmental interference on strictly
economic grounds.

I do not, however, contend that this defence is applicable
to the whole of the expenditure of the funds actually raised,
by compulsory taxation, for educational purposes ; still less
that it is applicable to the whole of the expense that eager
educational reformers are urging upon us. Nor do I mean
to suggest that the economic reason just given is that which
actually weighs most with such reformers. I should rather
suppose that their strongest motive usually is a desire to
enable the mass of the community to partake effectively in
that culture, which — though not perhaps the most generally
valued advantage which the rich obtain from their wealth —
is at any rate the advantage to which the impartial philan-
thropist sincerely attaches most importance. Is this desire,
then, one that may legitimately be gratified through the
agency of Government ? ' No,' say Mr. Spencer and his
disciples ; ' let the philanthropist diffuse knowledge at his
own expense as much as he likes ; to provide for its diffusion
out of the taxes is a palpable infringement of the natural

via ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 211

rights of the taxpayers.' ' Yes,' say the semi- Socialists —
if I may so call them — taking the same ground of natural
right, ' the equalisation of opportunities by education, the
free communication of culture, are simple acts of reparative
justice which society owes to the classes that lie crushed at
the base of our great industrial pyramid.'

Now this whole discussion of natural rights is one from
which, as a mere empirical utilitarian, I should prefer to
stand aloof. But when it is asserted that the prevalent semi-
socialistic movement implies at once a revolt from ortho-
dox political economy, and a rejection of Kant's and Mr.
Spencer's fundamental political principle, that the coercive
action of Government should simply aim at securing equal
freedom to all, I feel impelled to suggest a very different
interpretation of the movement. I think that it may be
more truly conceived as an attempt to realise natural justice
as taught by Mr. Spencer, under the established conditions
of society, with as much conformity as possible to the teach-
ings of orthodox English^ political economy. For what,
according to Mr. Spencer, is the foundation of the right of
property ? It rests on the natural right of a man to the
free exercise of his faculties, and therefore to the results of
his labour ; but this can clearly give no right to exclude
others from the use of the bounties of Nature : hence the
obvious inference is that the price which — as Eicardo and
his disciples teach — is increasingly paid, as society pro-
gresses, for the use of the " natural and original powers of
the soil," must belong, by natural right, to the human com-
munity as a whole ; it can only be through usurpation that
it has fallen into the hands of private individuals. Mr.
Spencer himself, in his Social Statics, has drawn this
conclusion in the most emphatic terms. That " equity does
not admit property in land " ; that " the right of mankind at
large to the earth's surface is still valid, all deeds, customs,
and laws notwithstanding " ; that " the right of private

' I s.-^.y "English " because Bastiat and other continental writers have partly,
T tliink, been led to reject the Ricanliaii theory of rent by their desire to avoid
the obvious inference that the payment of rent was opposed to natural justice.

212 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES viii

possession of the soil is no right at all " ; that " no amount
of labour bestowed by an individual upon a part of the
earth's surface can nullify the title of society to that part " ;
that, finally, " to deprive others of their rights to the use of
the earth is a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of
taking away their lives or personal liberties"; — these conclu-
sions are enforced by Mr. Spencer with an emphasis that makes
Mr. Henry George appear a plagiarist. Perhaps it will be
replied that this argument only affects land : that it doubt-
less leads us to confiscate land " with as little injury to the
landed class as may be " — giving them, I suppose, the same
sort of compensation that was given to slave-owners when
we abolished slavery — but that it cannot justify taxation of
capitalists. But a little reflection will show that tliis dis-
tinction between owners of land and owners of other property
cannot be maintained. In the first place, on Mr. Spencer's
principles, the rights of both classes to the actual things they
now legally own are equally invalid. For, ob\dously, the
original and indefeasible right of all men to the free exercise
of their faculties on their material environment must — if
valid at all — extend to the whole of the environment ;
property in the raw material of movables must be as much
a usurpation as property in land. As Mr. Spencer says,
" the reasoning used to prove that no amount of labour
bestowed by an individual upon a part of the earth's surface
can nullify the title of society to that part," might be
similarly employed to show that no one can, " by the labour
he expends in catching or gathering," supersede " the just
claims of other men " to " the thing caught or gathered."
If it be replied that technically this is true, but that sub-
stantially the value of what the capitalist owns is derived
from labour, whereas the value of what the landlord owns is
largely not so derived, the answer is that this can only affect
the respective claims of the two classes to receive compensa-
tion when the rest of the community enforce their inde-
feasible rights to the free use of their material environ-
ment ; and that, in fact, these different claims have now got
inextricably mixed up by the complicated series of exchanges

VIII ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 213

between land and movables that has taken place since
the original appropriation of the former. To quote Mr.
Spencer again, " most of our present landowners are men
who have, either mediately or immediately, given for their
estates equivalents of honestly-earned wealth " — at least as
honestly earned as any other wealth — so that if they are
to be expropriated in order to restore the free use of the
land to the human race, the loss entailed on them must be
equitably distributed among all other owners of wealth.

But is the expropriation of landlords a measure eco-
nomically sound ? We turn to the orthodox economists,
who answer, almost unanimously,^ that it is not ; that, not
to speak of the financial difficulty of arranging compensation,
the business of owning and letting land is, on various
grounds, not adapted for governmental management ; and
that a decidedly greater quantum of utility is likely to be
obtained from the land, under the stimulus given by complete
ownership, than could be obtained under a system of lease-
hold tenure. What then is to be done ? The only way
that is left of reconciling the Spencerian doctrine of natural
right with the teachings of orthodox political economy, seems
to be just that ' doctrine of ransom ' which the semi-
socialists have more or less explicitly put forward. Let the
rich, landowners and capitalists alike, keep their property,
but let them ransom the flaw in their titles by compensating
the other human beings residing in their country for that
free use of their material environment which has been with-
drawn from them ; only let this compensation be given in
such a way as not to impair the mainsprings of energetic
and self-helpful industry. We cannot restore to the poor
their original share in the spontaneous bounties of Nature ;
but we can give them instead a fuller share than they could
acquire unaided of the more communicable advantages of
social progress, and a fairer start in the inevitable race for
the less communicable advantages ; and ' reparative justice '
demands that we should give them this much.

' J. S. Mill is so far as I know, the only important exception ; anil his ortho-
doxy OQ questions of this kind is somewhat dubious.

214 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES viii

That it is not an easy matter to manage this compensa-
tion with due regard to the interests of all concerned, I
readily grant ; and also that the details of the legislation
which this serai-socialistic movement has prompted, and is
prompting, are often justly open to criticism, both from the
point of view of Mr. Spencer and from that of orthodox
economists ; but, when these authorities combine to attack
its general drift, it seems worth while to point out how
deeply their combined doctrines are concerned in its
parentage.

At this point the reader may perhaps wonder where I
find the real indisputable opposition, which I began by ad-
mitting, between orthodox political economy and the prevalent
movement in our legislation. The most obvious example of
it is to be found in the kind of governmental interference,
against which the request for laisser-faire was originally
directed, and which is perhaps more appropriately called
' paternal ' than ' socialistic ' : legislation which aims at
regulating the business arrangements of any industrial class,
not on account of any apprehended conflict between the
private interests, properly understood, of the persons con-
cerned, and the public interest, but on account of their
supposed incapacity to take due care of their own business
interests. The most noteworthy recent instance of this in
England is the interference in contracts between (English)
agricultural tenants and their landlords in respect of ' com-
pensation for improvements ' ; since no attempt, so far as I
know, was made by those who urged this interference to show
that the properly understood interests of landlords and
tenants combined would not lead them to arrange for such
treatment of the land as was under their existing circum-
stances economically best,

A more important species of unorthodox legislation
consists of measures that attempt to determine directly, by
some method other than free competition, the share of the
appropriated product of industry allotted to some particular
industrial class. The old legal restrictions on interest, old
and new popular demands for ' fair ' wages, recent Irish

VIII ECONOMIC SOCIALISM 2 1 5

legislation to secure * fair ' rents, all come under this head.
Any such legislation is an attempt to introduce into a social
order constructed on a competitive basis a fundamentally
incompatible principle ; the attempt in most cases fails from
its inevitable incompleteness, and where it succeeds, its suc-
cess inevitably removes or weakens the normal motives to
industry and thrift. You can make it illegal for a man to
pay more than a certain price for the use of money, but you
cannot thus secure him the use of the money he wants at
the legal rate ; so that, if his wants are urgent, he will pay
the usurer more than he would otherwise have done to com-
pensate him for the risk of the unlawful loan. Similarly,
you can make it illegal to employ a man under a certain rate
of wages, but you cannot secure his employment at that rate,
unless the community will undertake to provide for an
indefinite number of claimants work remunerated at more
than its market value ; in which case its action will tend to
remove, to a continually increasing extent, the ordinary
motives to vigorous and efficient labour. So again, you can
ensure that a tenant does not pay the full competition rent
to his landlord, but — unless you prohibit the sale of the
rights that you have thus given him in the produce of the
land — you cannot ensure that his successor in title shall not
pay the full competitive price for the use of the land in rent
'£ilu8 interest on the cost of the tenant-right ; and, in any
case, if you try by a 'fair rent 'to secure to the tenant a
share of produce on which he can ' live and thrive,' you
inevitably deprive him of the ordinary motives — both
attractive and deten-ent — prompting to energetic self-help
and self-improvement. I do not say dogmatically that no
measures of this kind ought ever, under any circumstances,
to be adopted, but merely that a heavy burden of proof is
thrown on any one who advocates them, by the valid objec-
tions of orthodox political economy ; and that, in the
arguments used in support of recent legislation of this kind,
this burden does not appear to me to have been adequately
taken up.

IX
POLITICAL PEOPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY

{National Review, December 1894)

" Of all the mistakes that men commit," says George Eliot,
" prophecy is the most gratuitous." The epigram is effective,
and convenient for quotation when one does not wish to
commit oneself to a forecast of events. But, unless we
take the word prophecy in a very special and narrow sense,
it is surely an audacious inversion of the truth such as
only genius could successfully venture on. It rather seems
to me that among the countless mistaken affirmations which
man makes —

Sole judge of truth, through endless error hurl'd —

those which relate directly or indirectly to the future are
the only ones which are 7iot gratuitous. When we make
positive statements as to unimportant details of past history
— e.g., as to the place at which, or the manner in which,
the Battle of Hastings was fought — we incur a risk of error
which may fairly be called gratuitous. And if this cannot
be said of all our statements as to past events, this is only
because and so far as our conception of such events may
conceivably affect some historical generalisation by which
political science — when it comes to be constructed — may
furnish guidance for the future conduct of human beings.
All rational action is based on belief of what is going to
happen : all experts in all practical callings are always
prophesying. The physician who orders a dose, the engineer
who determines the structure of a bridge, no less than the

216

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY 217

statesman who proposes a tax, can only justify what they
do by predicting the effects of their respective measures.

It may be said that these predictions are of proximate
events, and that gratuitous error comes in when we try to
prophesy far ahead, beyond the needs of practice. But it
is surely very dilhcult to draw the line. Man is an animal
of large discourse ; in an early stage of civilisation he begins
to take an interest in his posterity and in the welfare of Ids
tribe ; with advancing civilisation his interests extend, and
the further they extend the more remote becomes the future
by his conception of which his acts and feelings are in-
fluenced. It is perhaps gratuitous to trouble ourselves
about the ultimate refrigeration of the solar system, —
though I believe that the prospect of it seriously depresses
some highly educated persons, — but no one can say that the
probable exhaustion of our coal mines in the course of a
century or two is not a matter of practical concern to
Englishmen,

These reflections are, I fear, too obvious to be interesting ;
but it is somewhat less of a platitude to remark how much
the importance of prophecy has increased, for the present
generation, through the increasing prevalence of the
' historical method ' of dealing with political and social
questions. So long as imhistorical ideals are dominant —
so long as men believe in the construction of a social order
based on eternal and immutable principles of natural justice,
which determine the only legitimate form of government
and define the only legitimate sphere of its operations —
any prophecy of what is coming can only affect their view
of what ought to be done in a secondary and subordinate
way. The plan of their work is laid down independently
of all forecasts of wind and weather : it will be prudent, no
doubt, to take account of any interruptions which these
intrusive forces may cause, but they cannot modify the
architectural design on which the social edifice is to be con-
structed. But the spread of the historical method, with its
accompanying conviction of the relativity of all political
construction to the changing condition and circumstances of

2i8 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ix

society, inevitably destroys the belief in a polity eternally
and immutably just : and in many sanguine minds it tends
to substitute for this a belief in progress, which fuses the
notion of what ought to be and what will be into one
dominant conception of a ' good time coming ' — believed
to be good because it is coming, quite as much as it is
believed to be coming because it is good. And even minds
less sanguine, less confident that the process of human
history is a continual progress from worse to better, are
naturally led by the same line of thought to accept un-
resistingly a future which they cannot find altogether satis-
factory to their desires and aspirations. For no sensible
person wishes to row against the stream, unless he has a
very decided conviction that the stream is going the wrong
way ; and even then, if the stream is in the long run
irresistible, the duty of putting off the evil day is dreary
and unattractive. If we are certainly going to " shoot
Niagara," what matters it whether the catastrophe comes a
little sooner or a little later ? Let us drop the oars, enjoy
the scenery, shoot, and have it over.

In this way what Matthew Arnold called the " policy of
the jumping cat " comes to be invested by the historical
method with a certain melancholy dignity ; it presents
itself as an inevitable result of a wide vision of truth, a
refined adaptation of highly cultivated individuals to their
social environment. When this attitude of mind is widely
prevalent among educated persons generally, innovators
whose social and political ideals are really in their inception
quite unhistorical, are naturally led to adopt the historical
method as an instrument of persuasion. In order to induce
the world to accept any change that they desire, they
endeavour to show that the whole course of history has
been preparing the way for it — whether ' it ' is the recon-
ciliation of Science and Eeligion, or the complete realisation
of Democracy, or the fuller perfection of Individualism, or
the final triumph of Collectivism. The vast aggregate of
past events — many of them half-known and more half-
understood — which makes up what we call history, affords

IX POLITICAL PROrHECY AND SOCIOLOGY 219

a malleable material for the application of this procedure :
by judicious selection and well -arranged emphasis, by ignor-
ing inconvenient facts and filling the gaps of knowledge
with convenient conjectures — it is astonishing how easy it
is plausibly to represent any desired result as the last in-
evitable outcome of the operation of the laws of social
development ; the last term of a series of which the formula
is known to the properly instructed historian.

Prophesying of this kind is not by any means " gratuitous";
but it may be dangerous : it is certainly liable to fill the
mind of the confiding reader with a vain illusion of know-
ledge. The object, accordingly, of my present paper is not
to stop such prophesying — which it would be futile to
attempt, — nor to argue that one prophet is as likely to be
right as another — which would be a paradox opposed to
common experience, — but to endeavour to! make clear the
limitations within which the guidance offered by such fore-
casts may reasonably be accepted.

I will begin by remarking that prophecies are not always
put forward, even by the most highly educated prophets, as
based on a scientific grasp of the laws of social evolution.
Indeed, in the most impressive book of a prophetic nature
which has appeared in England for many years — I mean
Pearson's National Life and Character ^ — the prophecies are
not announced with any such pretensions ; they always rest
on a simply empirical basis, and only distinguish themselves
from the common run of such forecasts by the remarkably
wide and full knowledge of relevant historical facts which
the writer shows, and the masterly skill with which the
facts are selected and grouped. His predictions are almost
always interesting, and sometimes, I think, reach a degree
of probability sufficient to give them a real practical value.
At the same time, in spite of Mr. Pearson's masterly hand-
ling, or perhaps all the more on account of it, I know
no book which brings home to one more forciblv the

^ Published 1893 (Macmillnii and Co.). I must take this ojjjwrtunity of ex-
pressing my deep sense of the loss which the scientific study of politics has
sustained through the recent premature death of this remarkalile WTiter.

220 ESSA VS AND ADDRESSES ix

imperfection of all such empirical forecasts. Such predictions
may be classed under two heads, in respect of the general
procedure employed in them : they either proceed on the
assumption that what is will continue to be, or that what
has happened will happen again. Each procedure is, under
proper conditions and limitations, quite legitimate when we
are only aiming at a probable conclusion ; but each has its
own imperfections, which, though they are tolerably obvious,
I may briefly analyse and illustrate from the work just
mentioned.

I do not wish to exaggerate these imperfections. The
assumption that what is will continue to be, is, even in its
crudest form, one which the most enlightened persons con-
tinually make with practical success in their political fore-
casts : for under ordinary circumstances the amount of
change that takes place in the structure even of a modern
political society, and the functioning of its organs, is not
great in proportion to what remains unchanged within the
periods to which such forecasts usually relate. And, of
course, as our statistical knowledge increases, through the
greater amount of labour and the improved methods applied
to the ascertainment of present social facts, the degree of
precision with which we can predict these facts in the
proximate future will proportionately grow. Thus we can
predict pretty confidently about how many children will be
born next year, about how many of them wnll go to school,
about how much they will know when they leave school,
about how many will marry, about how many will be tried
for murder, and about how many will be convicted. Still,
we do not, of course, assume that any of these numerical
proportions will remain unchanged. The best knowledge
of history, even if confined to current history, prevents us
from accepting the proposition that what has been will be,
in its crudest form, in which it excludes change. It is in
the more refined form of the expectation that a process of
change in a certain direction, which we can trace in past
history up to our own time, will continue in the future in
the same direction, that this assumption is liable to be

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY 221

too easily accepted by educated persons. I think that Air.
Pearson relied on it somewhat too much. After giving
some striking instances of false and true prophecies, he con-
cludes that " the power of divination among men seems
rather to concern itself with general laws," and that we are
" fairly successful in ascertaining a general law of progress."
Accordingly, he proceeds to forecast confidently certain im-
portant changes in English national character, which, though
he does not precisely date them, must, according to his
reasoning, require a considerable time.

Now, firstly, I think that the mere ascertainment of the
direction in which society generally has been moving within
a certain period, especially in respect of important features
of national character, is more difficult than is often supposed ;
owing to the great complexity of the whole social movement
of thought and feeling and the very imperfect knowledge of
it that even the most instructed student of social facts can
possess. But grant that the direction in which our social
world has moved up to the present time has been correctly
ascertained, still, until we have grasped the law of the whole
course of development we can have no certainty that the
movement is not going to change. And I think that here
we may conveniently bring the other form of the empirical
prophecy — the assumption that what has happened will
happen again — to show the extent of the liability to error
involved in the assumption that we can infer, empirically,
the movement of change in the future from its movement
in the past.

Mr. Pearson found that in the last twenty years — I do
not think that the experience on which he based his fore-
cast goes farther back — the functions of Government have
shown a tendency to expand (especially in the colony of
Victoria) : he also found that the infiuence of religion has
shown a tendency to diminish, especially the belief in a
future life, which our age tends to regard as " nothing more
than a fanciful and unimportant probability " : and, assum-
ing these tendencies to continue, he predicted certain de-
pressing eifects on national life and character. Now, the

222 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ix

tendency to Socialism is undeniable ; and I am not prepared
to deny that a drift to secularism is traceable in what may
be in a wide sense called the educated classes ; and I should
quite agree with Mr. Pearson, that if both tendencies to-
gether continue operating long enough they are likely to
affect our national character very seriously. But I hesitate
to infer confidently that this effect will be produced, when
I reflect how short a time it is since a more fully developed
Individualism seemed to thoughtful minds " in the van of
progress," and how impossible it would practically have
been to prophesy on empirical grounds any one of the
revivals of religious sentiment that have taken place during
the history of Christianity.

As for the first point, we have only to look at our most
eminent living philosopher, Herbert Spencer, who stands
before us as an impressive survival of the drift of thought
in the first half of the nineteenth century. He formed,
before 1850, the opinion that a completed Individualism
was the ultimate goal of human progress ; and to this
opinion he remains true in 1894, regarding the Socialistic
drift of the last twenty years as a lamentable temporary
divergence from the true and main movement of political
thought and fact. It seems at least not improbable
that some of the ardent youths who are now expect-
ing the salvation of society through the triumph of
Collectivism, may, before they reach old age, find them-
selves similarly contemplating the receding tide of public
opinion.

As to the second point, let us consider the greatest
change that West-European Christianity has seen — the
Eeformation. Is it not a historical commonplace that the
tendency towards a practically secular view of human life
has rarely been more marked than it was in the educated
class — including the leading clergy of the most civilised
country in Europe — in the age that preceded Luther ? As
Clough aptly says, in an ironical passage, — Luther made a
sad mistake : he did not see how Leo X. and Co. were
quietly clearing away worn-out superstitions ;

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY zzi

He must forsooth make a fuss and distend his huge Wittenberg

lungs, and
Bring back theology once yet again in a Hood upon Europe.

Why should not another Luther, adapted to modern in-
tellectual and social conditions, have a similar effect now ?

I do not use these instances to predict either a new
Eeformation or a reaction to the Individualistic ideal ;
indeed, I regard prophecies, based on analogous historic
cases — except when they are very carefully selected from
comparatively recent history — as generally more untrust-
worthy than prophecies based on observation of current
drift and tendency. For such analogies are ahvays very
imperfect. The history of civilised man is a process of
change, usually, no doubt, gradual, but still sufficiently
rapid to establish profound differences between any two
stages separated by a considerable interval of time ; so that
even where a new phase shows an impressive resemblance
in certain characteristics to some antecedent phase, this
analogy can hardly ever be sufficient to justify a confident
prediction.

Let us take, for example, an analogy that has been ex-
tensively used in political discussions. From the time of
Montesquieu and Eousseau, down to the time of Sir Henry
Maine, a leading place has been given in such discus-
sions to the consideration of democracy, as known to us
from Greek and Eoman history. It has been apparently
assumed that a study of this previous experience is likely
to throw important light on the process of change now going
on in West-European States. Now, I am far from thinking
that such a study is not highly interesting and suggestive;
since an instructive parallel may certainly be traced between
the successive stages in the more rapid development of the
City-States of ancient Greece and Italy, and the successive
stages in the slower development of the Country-States of
modern Europe. But before we allow ourselves to draw
any practical inferences from this analogy, it is obviously
necessary to take full account of the important difierences
between Grteco-Eoman political conditions and those of

224 £SS^ VS AND ADDRESSES ix

West-European States — the difference between direct and
representative Democracy ; the change in the conditions and
estimation of industry ; the difference due to slavery, which
excluded absolutely from political rights a large portion of
the manual-labour class in the most democratic of ancient
communities ; the difierence in religious organisation, and
the yet profounder differences in the nature of the influence
exercised by religion on the life of individuals. One who
duly considers these differences may, doubtless, still find a
knowledge of the phenomena of Greek democracy useful
in the way of suggestion and warning ; but he will hardly
venture to use this knowledge as the basis of a prophecy,
unless he holds himself to have grasped the funda-
mental laws of the whole process of political and social
development.

This leads us back to the question which I first raised.
Can we ascertain from past history the fundamental laws
of social evolution as a whole ? I have tried to show that
only a positive answer to this question can justify us in
confidently forecasting the future of society for any con-
siderable way ahead. Can we give such an answer ? To
put it otherwise. Is the ' social dynamics ' of which we
have heard so much for half a century, a science really
established and constructed, and not merely adumbrated ? —
I do not, of course, mean completely constructed, but con-
structed sufficiently for prevision, fortunately there is a
simple criterion of the effective establishment of a science
— laid down by the original and powerful thinker who
must certainly be regarded as the founder of the science
of society, if there is such a science — the test of Con-
sensus of experts and Continuity of scientific work ; and,
if we accept Comte's criterion, it is easy to show that the
social science is not yet effectively constructed — at least so
far as the department of ' social dynamics ' is concerned —
since it is certain that every writer on the subject starts
cle novo and builds on his own foundation.

As evidence of this I may refer to a vigorously-WTitten
and stimulating book of which, as I understand, several

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY 225

thousand copies have been sold, and wliich has much
impressed the reviewers — I mean Mr. J>enjamin Kidd's
treatise on Social Uoolution.

Mr, Kidd begins by " confessing " — witli the frankness
with which each successive sociologist has liitherto confessed
the deficiencies of his predecessors — that " there is no science
of human society properly so-called": "From Herbert
Spencer in England," — who, in Mr. Kidd's view, has thrown
but " little practical light on the social problems of our
time " — " to Schiiifle in Germany, ... we have every pos-
sible and perplexing variety of opinion." In short, " science
has obviously no clear perception of the nature of the social
evolution we are undergoing " ; and " has made no serious
attempt to explain the phenomenon of our Western civilisa-
tion." This he considers to be, at least in part, the fault of
" the historian," who usually is depressingly reluctant to
generalise and obstinately refuses to predict. " The historian
takes us through events of the past, through the rise and de-
cline of great civilisations, . . . through a social development
which is evidently progressing in some definite direction,
and sets us down at last with our faces to the future with
scarcely a hint as to any law underlying it at all, or indica-
tion as to where our own civilisation is tending." It is thus
left for the biologist — or rather the amateur equipped with
the latest and most controverted results of biological specula-
tion— to rush in where the historian fears to tread, and tell
us what history really means, and what it is all coming to.

Now, personally I have some sympathy with the com-
plaint here brought against historians ; I often find myself
wishing that of the great volume of energy that is now
being thrown into the study of history, a somewhat larger
portion was devoted to the comparison and systematisation of
facts already known, and somewhat less to the ascertainment
of new facts, l^ut probably everyone m'Iio has done any-
thing wliich may by a stretch be called research in any
departments of history will be able also to sympathise with
the reluctance of the professional historian to perform the
task which I\Ir. Kidd demands of him. For such a student

Q

226 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ix

is likely to have gone through an experience of the follow-
ing kind. At the first stage of his knowledge, — i.e. when
he has studied his subject in one or more of the general
histories of the period, it yields to his mind an ample crop
of impressive generalisations ; he seems to know not only
what happened but why it happened, and is ready to formu-
late sociological laws in abundance. Then when he has
begun to feel more or less at home among the original
authorities, he finds his confidence in this formulation
diminish ; he notices facts which his formulae do not satis-
factorily explain, and inevitable gaps in his knowledge
which make his first insight into causes appear superficial.
This process goes on ; and ultimately the generalisations to
which he still clings appear so reduced in number, so far
from certain, so loaded with qualifications and reserves, so
inadequate to the full complexity of the facts, that he feels
inclined to postpone offering them for the enlightenment of
mankind. Now, if some such process as this is a common
experience of professional students of history, and if they
thus come habitually to distrust and severely to control
their own tendency to generalise, much more are they likely
to distrust the generalisations of the professional sociologist,
whose knowledge is apt to be distinguished rather by range
than by depth or accuracy. If I am right in thus charac-
terising the general attitude of the historian towards the
sociologist, I fear it is likely to be confi,rnied rather than
modified by a study of the remarkable chapters in which
Mr. Kidd sketches the development of western civilisation.

The historian will here learn, for example, that in
Eome occupations connected with agriculture " M^ere regarded
as unworthy of freemen," and that " the freemen of Eome
could hardly be said to work ; they fought and lived on the
produce of the fighting " ; and he will wonder what manual
of Eoman history Mr. Kidd has been using, whether it left out
the familiar story of Cincinnatus, whether it mentioned Cato,
what account it gave of the struggle between patricians and
plebeians, of the Licinio-Sextian laws, and of the colonisa-
tion system of Eome. Again, he will learn that in all the

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY 227

Greek city States " the ruliii;^ classes had a single feature iii
common — their military origin . . . they represented tlie
party which had imposed its rule by force on the rest of the
community " ; and he will perhaps envy the boldness of
conjecture which has illuminated the history of {e.g.) Attica
for the special benefit of Mr. Kidd. Passing to mediseval his-
tory, he will find that " amongst all the Western peoples there
has been a slow but sure restriction of the absolute power
possessetl under military rule by the hand of the State " ;
and will vainly try to divine what account of the feudal
system has fallen under Mr. Kidd's notice. His perplexity
will be at its height when he finds that in spite of this
absolute power of the military head of the State, Western
Europe has become in the twelfth century a vast theocracy
in which the " church is omnipotent," one result of which
is that " all the attainments of the Greek and lioman genius
are buried out of sight " : and he will ask himself — to take
one point among many — whether Mr. Kidd has really never
heard of the throng of students from all parts of Europe to
hear the teaching of Jurisprudence at Bologna in the twelfth
century, or whether he is under the impression that Irnerius
and his successors lectured exclusively on the Canon Law !

I might add similar statements with regard to more
modern times ; but I have said enough to explain why I
think that the historian, after reading Mr. Kidd, will be
more than ever inclined to draw a sharp line between his
own methods and those of the would-be sociologist ; and
will hardly take much interest in any prediction of the
future founded on such knowledge of the past as the speci-
mens above quoted exemplify. It may be replied, perhaps,
by the admirers of Mr. Kidd, that this only shows the his-
torian's pedantic habit of laying stress on details ; and that
the main argument of Mr. Kidd's historical chapters — the
demonstration of the importance of Christianity in the
growth of West-European civilisation — remains unall'ected.
Let us turn, then, to his main argument.

According to ]\Ir. Kidd the central feature of human
history is the struggle of man, " moved by a profound social

228 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ix

instinct " to keep his reason under by the aid of religion,
and thus prevent the suspension of progress which the un-
checked exercise of reason would inevitably cause. When
Christianity was born, religion in the Eoman dominion was
practically dead, and consequently Roman civilisation had
commenced to die ; but with Christianity came a " fierce
ebullition of life " of which the " amorphous vigour " " was
so great that several centuries have to pass away " before we
can see what " it was destined to build up." At length in
the twelfth century a.d. reason is effectually subdued ; and
in the " European Theocracy of the fourteenth century " the
" ultra-rational sanction " of the " altruistic ideal " — which
it was the distinctive characteristic of Christianity to exalt
— has attained " a strength and influence never before
known." \ Then in the sixteenth century the " immense
body of altruistic feeling " generated by Christianity is
" liberated into the practical life of the peoples affected by "
the Eeformation : so that henceforward the evolutionist
notes the greater development of altruistic sentiments in
Protestant nations.

There is much that is true in this historic survey and
much that is new ; the difficulty is to find anything that is
both. The fundamental importance of the Christian Church,
in the long process of building up the West-European State-
system, is a truth not left for Mr, Kidd to enforce : but I
conceive that the movement towards Theocracy in the ]\Iiddle
Ages is essentially connected with the success of the Church
in dominating the political disorder caused by Teutonic
invasions and conquests. In the fresh life of ci\ilisation
ultimately exhibited in this system of States, the influence
of Christianity is doubtless an indispensable factor ; but the
fresh material furnished by the Teutonic invaders would
appear to be no less essential. Mr. Kidd, however, seems
to treat the barbarian irruptions and their consequences as
a ' negligeable quantity ' ; but on this view he was surely
bound to show that Christianity had the vitalising effect
that he attributes to it in the older political society
in which it had its origin : and it is difficult to imagine

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY izg

how he would try to show this, with regard to either
of the two portions of the Koman Empire, whose fates, in
the fifth century a.d., begin to diverge so widely. The
extent and the causes of the process of social decline, dis-
cernible in the Western Empire before the Teutonic con-
quests, is doubtless somewhat obscure ; still it seems clear
that Christianity, if it did not contribute to it, did little or
nothing to arrest it: the process appears to go on in the
fourth and fifth centuries, unaffected by the establishment
of Christianity as the dominant religion. But the Eastern
or greater half of the Empire is perhaps more important
for our argument ; partly because Christianity had its origin
and earliest development here, but chiefly because this part
of the Empire continued to exist as an independent political
community during the centuries in which the Western
Church was developing in a theocratic direction. Now, Mr.
Lecky is one of Mr. Kidd's authorities ; but I will not ask
him exactly to accept that historian's view, that of the
" Byzantine Empire the universal verdict of history is that
it constitutes, with scarcely an exception, the most thoroughly
base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed."
This " universal verdict " is doubtless far too sweeping and
unqualified : still, when all has been done that can be done
to restore the lost character of the Byzantine Empire, its
staunchest champion will hardly refer to its history as evi-
dence of the vitalising and altnoising effect of religion.

But even as regards Western Europe in the Middle
Ages Mr. Kidd's claims seem extravagant. He tells us
that the " ultra-rational sanction " of religion had attained,
in " the European Theocracy of the fourteenth century, a
strength and infiuence never before known." Let us recall
one or two salient facts in the history of this century. It
begins, with the conflict between Philip the Fair of France
and Boniface the P^ighth when the king, with the general
support of the laity of his kingdom, defies the Pope's
authority, and publicly burns his bull " Ausculta Fili."
Then after an intervening Pope's reign has been cut short,
through his imprudence (as Yillaui suggests) in eating figs

230 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ix

untasted, with Clement the Fifth begins the " Babylonish
captivity " of the Papal Court at Avignon ; in consequence
of which, as Bishop Creighton says, " the luxury, vice and
iniquity of Avignon became proverbial throughout Europe."
Then, when the seventy years of this captivity have termi-
nated, there follows the great schism that lasts on into the
fifteenth century. Let us imagine a thinker of the fourth
century B.C. — say Plato or Aristotle, acquainted only with
the " narrow and egotistical morality " of Greece — resusci-
tated and made to read Mr. Kidd ; and then introduced to
the pair of rival popes who begin the schism, in the pages
of the cautious and impartial ecclesiastical historian whom
I have, just mentioned. He will read, among other things,
of the bargain by which in 1380 Urban the Fifth agreed
to invest Charles of Durazzo with the crown of Xaples, on
condition of his confirming the grants of " all the richest
part of the Neapolitan kingdom," which his Floliness has
made to his nephew Butillo ; — a profligate rufifian for whom
his affectionate uncle pleads the excuse of youth, when
subsequently, being forty years old, he breaks into a nunnery
and violates a sister of noble birth. Then he might turn
to contemplate Urban's rival, Eobert of Geneva, stamping
out sedition at Cesena as Papal Legate (in the year before
he became Clement the Seventh), with a barbarity that
revolted even the hardened captain that commanded the papal
mercenaries. " For three days and three nights the carnage
raged inside the devoted city ; . . . five thousand perished
in the slaughter, and the name of Cesena would have been
destroyed if the barbarous general, Hawkwood, had not been
better than his orders, saved a thousand women, and allowed
some of the men to escape." This exploit, the historian
adds, " seems to have stood Piobert in good stead, as con-
vincing his electors of the promptitude and decision which
he possessed in emergencies." ^ I think our resuscitated
philosopher, however willing to acknowledge the moral
deficiencies of his own age and country, will hardly be

^ See Creighton, History of the Papacy during the Reformation, vol. i. ch. i.
p. 65.

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY 231

much impressed Ly these evidences of the strengtli and
influence of the " ultra-rational sanction " in developing
altruism in mediteval Europe.

Let me not be misunderstood ; I do not deny that, in
spite of the facts just mentioned — and many others of the
same kind — there is still an important element of truth in
Mr. Kidd's arguments ; but the truth, as he presents it, is
distorted by exaggerations and omissions not only into
error, but into absurdity. And there is similar exaggeration
in what he says of the superior altruism of I'rotestant
nations since the Ueformation. England, no doubt, took
the lead in abolishing the slave-trade and slavery ; but we
have also to remember the prominent part that it took, after
the Reformation, in developing the slave-trr.de and negro
slavery ; moreover, in tracing the wave of philanthropic
sentiment that swells gradually through the eighteenth
century and prepares the way for the movement of Clarkson
and Wilberforce, we must not forget the important contri-
bution made to this tide of feeling by the free-thinking
writers of Catholic France. Certainly I know nothing
written on slavery in English before 1750 that stings and
penetrates like the irony of Montesquieu,^

As for the general moral superiority of the Anglo-Saxon
in his dealings with inferior races — I think that any
Anglo-Saxon who will study with strict impartiality the
" wretched details of ferocity and treachery which have
marked the conduct of civilised men in their relations

^ I will quote a few senteuces from the chapter to which I refer {Esprit des
Lois, Book XV. chap, v.) : "Si i'avais a souteair le (b'oit que nous avons eu de
reiulro les ucgres esclaves, voici ce que je dirais :

" Les peuples d'Europe ayant exteriniui- ceux de I'Amerique, ils ont dfi mettre
eu esclavage ceux de I'Afrique, pour s'eu servir k deiVicher taut de terres.

" Le Sucre serait troji clier, si Ton ue laisait travailler la jdaute qui le produit
par des esclaves.

" Ceux dout il s'agit sent noirs depuis les pieds jusqu'a la tete ; et ils ont le nez
si ecras('' qu'il est presqu'impossible de les jjlaindre . . .

" II est impossible que nous supposions que ces gens-la soient des honinies ;
parce que, si nous les supposions ties homnies, on comniencerait a croire que nous
ne sonimes pas uous-niOnies chnHiens.

" De petits esprits exagtrent trop I'injustice que Ton fait aux Africains : car, si
elle 6tait telle qu'ils le disent, ne serait - il pas venu daus la tete des princes
d'EuroiH', qui font entre eux tant de conventions inutiles, d'en faire une
geuerale eu favour de la niisi-ricorde et de la pitit- '.'"

232 ESS A VS AND ADDRESSES ix

with savages," ^ is not likely to rise from the study thanking
heaven that he is not a Frenchman or a Spaniard ; but
rather with a humble hope that the page of history record-
ing these details is now turned for West-European nations
generally, and that the future historian of the Europeanisa-
tion of Africa will have a dili'erent tale to tell.

But this is a subject which my limits do not allow me
to discuss : and I have perhaps said enough to explain
why I think that Mr. Kidd has left the science of society
where he found it — unconstructed, so far as tlie laws of
social development are concerned. It is permissible to
hope that progress is being made towards its construction :
and doubtless the study of biology would be a valuable
preparation for any thinker who may attempt to further
its progress. But I think that the biologist who is to
succeed in this attempt will have to know a little more
history than Mr. Kidd : and in auy case some time must
be expected to elapse before it will afford a solid basis for
confident prophesying. It must be remembered that Sociol-
ogy labours under many difficulties which we do not find
in Biology. For instance, the organisms with which the
latter deals are well-defined and mostly quite separate or-
ganisms, which normally pass through a tolerably uniform
series of stages from infancy to death, the nature and dura-
tion of which only vary within narrow limits ; while, though
they are subject to diseases of which the incidence is not
similarly uniform, we can at any rate usually distinguish
their normal from their morbid conditions with approximate
accuracy. Neither of these statements are true of the
organisms which sociology studies. Mr. Kidd, indeed, thinks
otherwise ; in speaking of Eome under the Empire before
Christianity, he says that " we have only to watch the progress
of those well-marked and well-known symptoms of decay and
dissolution which life at a certain stage everywhere presents."
And here, I admit, he might shelter himself behind historical
authority more respectable than any he could find for some

' This is the language of Merivale. Colonisation and Colonies, Lect. xviii. ; and
Merivale is not a writer who indulges in heated rhetoric.

IX POLITICAL PROPHECY AND SOCIOLOGY 233

of his statements before quoted. Still, I think, that in all
such phrases an essentially vague analogy is strained to
produce. a false semblance of definite knowledge : since there
is really no adequate reason for supposing that the Koman
Empire could not continue to exist for an indefinite time if
there had been no barbarians to invade it. And it is to be
observed that though States, in a certain sense, come to an
end through conquest, they are not thereby disintegrated,
as the living organisms with which Biology deals are disin-
tegrated by death natural or violent ; the change they go
through is always far less, and varies indefinitely in nature
and extent. So again, in the case of the social organism
there is no well-defined distinction between conditions
properly morbid and beneficial processes of change. For
example, Comte ultimately came to think that the whole
condition of Western Europe between the Mediaeval pre-
dominance of the Catholic Church and the proximate estab-
lishment of the Positive Eeligion must be regarded as a
morbid and abnormal condition ; and, though this is an ex-
treme case, it sufficiently shows how unsettled our common
conceptions of normal and morbid are, in their relation to
social phenomena. Now, I suppose, that if biologists were
hopelessly disagreed as to whether a given animal was
healthy or diseased, and if they had no reason to think
that it would ever die unless it was eaten by another
animal, their power of prophesying its future would be
confined within very narrow limits ; and I conceive that this
parallel accurately describes the present condition of the
social science.

I conclude, then, that in the present state of our know-
ledge it is for most practical purposes wise to " take short
views " of the life of civilised society : not quite so short as
those of the ordinary politician, — who can hardly be described
as an "animal of large discourse" except in the modern
popular sense of the term : but certainly short compared
with those of the aspiring constructors of social dynamics,
from Auguste Comte downwards. Not that we are to dis-
card as useless either historical enquiries, or the systematic

334 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES ix

ascertainment of present movements of change : such studies
will point out dangers against which we should be on our
guard, and cheer us with hopes which it is legitimate to
indulge. But these fears and hopes may prove dangerously
misleading, if they beguile us into imagining ourselves able
to forecast scientifically the future stages of social develop-
ment. Scientific prevision of this kind will perhaps be
ultimately attained, as the slow fruit of long years of labour
yet to come ; — but even that is one of the things which it
would be rash confidently to predict.

[In reprinting this essay one or two sentences Lave been omitted as
repeating too closely what has already been said in the essay on the Scope
and Method of Economic Science. — Ed.]

X

THE ECONOMIC LESSONS OF SOCIALISM

(The Economic Journal, September 1895)

By " Socialism " 1 mean the practical doctrine, that it is
desirable to abolish private property completely or to a
great extent, with a view to increasing the ordinary remuner-
ation of labour, and thus increasing happiness by producing
a greater equality of incomes. By Political Economy I mean
the theory of the natural and right mode — or the natural and
the right modes — of arranging the production, distribution,
and exchange of wealth in political or governed societies of
human beings. My paper is concerned with the relations
between the two.

The present unmistakable drift towards Socialism in
Western Europe is a fact of great interest, and a reasonable
source of alarm to some, and perhaps of hope to others, from
the political and economic changes to which it tends. But
I am not now concerned with it in this aspect ; — in which
probably most educated persons are now as well acquainted
as thev desire to be with the ar<j;uments on both sides. I
propose to treat Socialism from a special point of view,
somewhat less familiar.

Socialism as a political ideal is very ancient ; but as a
practical ideal for the modern state, it was born about the
same time as modern political economy — Morellet's Code de
la Nature was even a year or two earlier than Quesney's
Tableau ^conomique. And though it was for a generation
quite dreamy and feeble — politically a negligeable quantity

235

236 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES x

— it became formidable before the end of the century in
the conspiracy of Babeuf (1795); when the desire for
"egalite reelle," " egalite de fait" — instead of mere "equality
before the law " — became a demand and a menace. Since
this time, for a hundred years, the life of Socialism has run
side by side with that of Political Economy. It is obvious
that two systems or modes of thought, so close in their
subject-matter — for the aim of both, so far as Political
Economy has a practical aim, is to establish the production
and distribution of wealth on a right basis — can hardly have
lived side by side for a century without exercising an im-
portant influence on each other. I propose to examine this
influence from the point of view of Political Economy, i.e.
to inquire not what Socialism has learnt from Political
Economy, but what Political Economy has learnt from
Socialism. I take this point of view, partly because I am
writing for Political Economists rather than for Socialists, —
partly because, of the two, Political Economy has the more
manifest and palpable continuity of life and progressive
development during the century in question, in spite of the
differences of its schools. Socialism, on the other hand,
appears to die out and be born again : its leading ideas
are indeed few and comparatively simple, but they seem to
undergo a kind of transmigration from system to system,
rather than continuous development.

And this transmigration carries the ideas that are at the
root of Socialism not only from sect to sect, but from
country to country. In fact the century with which we are
concerned divides itself naturally into two approximately
equal parts : in the first half of which Socialism is mainly
French or English ; while in the second half it is pre-
ponderantly German. I find that German writers — and
some English writers who have learnt from them — are apt
to distinguish the two periods differently : they call the
Socialism of the first half of the century " unscientific," and
that of the second half " scientific." There is some justi-
fication for this ; but, on the whole, the antithesis appears
to me misleading. It is a natural tendency of Teutons,

X THE ECONOMIC LESSONS OF SOCIALISM 237

justly proud of the primacy that they have attained in the
pursuit of truth, to assume that even the fallacies and
Utopias produced by the Teutonic intellect are superior in
quality to the similar products of other nationalities. I
submit that the superiority is overrated, in the present case;
and that, at any rate, it does not amount to a distinction in
kind. All modern Socialism has been based on some theory
of the effects on the production of wealth that would follow
from the total or partial abolition of private property, and
none, 1 conceive, has been based on a souvd theory. So far
as I know, no positive contribution of importance has been
made to Economic Science by any Socialist writer throughout
the century : the lessons of Socialism to Economic Science
have been mainly in the way of criticism — criticism partly
direct and purposed, partly indirect and unintentional ; by
drawing extravagant inferences from accepted economic pre-
mises it has suggested shortcomings in these premises by an
undesigned reductio ad ahsurdicm. In this latter way, espe-
cially, the instruction derived from the German Socialists
has been obtained from fallacious reasoning of a more
elaborate kind, and showing a greater grasp of economic
method. On the other hand, the earlier Socialism, though
indefinitely more fantastic and obviously ' cranky ' than the
later, seems to me also more original, in the best sense of
the word : Saint-Simon, in particular — though it was perhaps
not without reason that his disciple and collaborator Auguste
Comte, spoke of him as a " demoralised mountebank "
(jongleur ddprave) — has certainly more claim to be called a
man of genius than Karl Marx. And the leading ideas with
which the later Socialism operates are all found in the earlier,
though in somewhat vaguer forms. That the liberty which
seemed to the eighteenth century a completely satisfying
ideal really leads, in industry and commerce, to anarchy and
contiict and the " exploitation " of the many by the few :
that the problem for the nineteenth century is therefore
social and industrial organisation, based upon a scientific
study of society, and having for its end the amelioration
moral, physical, and intellectual of the condition of the poor

238 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES x

masses : that history, scientifically grasped, shows this end
to be only attainable by a comprehensive association of
labour, and by taking the instruments of industry — land
and capital — out of private ownership and placing them
under the control of associated labour, — so that every mem-
ber of society, labouring according to his capacity, may
receive the due reward of his labour, and no one may enjoy
the " impious privilege " of living on the labour of others ; —
all this was emphatically declared by Saint-Simon and his
disciples. That, again, the industrial reorganisation of society
has been rendered at once more imperative and more prac-
ticable by the great development of macliinery, the gain of
which now goes to the few at the expense of the many :
that labour, being the source of all wealth, is the only true
measure and standard of value, and that therefore a currency
based on labour is the proper medium in the reorganised
system of exchange which society needs ;— these were cardinal
points in Owen's preaching and practical efforts. Put these
ideas together and compare them with doctrines of later
German Socialism, which piques itself on being scientific,
and acknowledges no connexion with Saint - Simon or
Owen: it will be found that there is, after all, little funda-
mentally new in the later scheme ; only the older ideas
have gained in precision, articulation, and coherence, by
being brought into closer relation to the reasonings of
Political Economy.

Let us begin, then, by considering the lessons learnt by
Political Economy from the earlier Socialism, before we pass
to the later. In order to make these clear, we must recall
the original view of the nature and aims of Political
Economy, It was, as the meaning of the word suggests, a
part of the Art of Public Finance : its object was to make
the people as rich as possible, in order that the funds
required by Government might be obtained as amply and as
easily as possible. And these two objects, "enriching the
people " and " enriching the sovereign," are retained in
Adam Smith's definition of the study ; though by this time
the first object has come to be conceived as independent of,

X THE ECONOMIC LESSONS OF SOCIALISM 239

and prior to, the second. " Political Economy," he says,
" proposes two distinct objects : first, to provide a plentiful
revenue or subsistence for the people, or, more properly, to
enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence lor
themselves ; and secondly, to supply the state or common-
wealth with a revenue sufficient for the public service."
But in the view of Adam Smith — as in that of the Physio-
crats his predecessors — the first object was best attained by
what lie calls " the obvious and simple system of natural
liberty " ; the true answer to the question, " how to make
tlie nation as rich as possible," was " by letting each member
of it make himself rich in his own way " — only protecting
him against invasion of property and breach of contract.
Tn order to establish this conclusion, the new school of
Tolitical Economy had to trace the processes by which
wealth was or would be produced, distributed, and ex-
changed, apart from governmental interference : and it is
with this task that the greater part of Adam Smith's book
is occupied.

Thus it came about that Political Economy, as taught by
the disciples and successors of Adam Smith, was a body of
doctrine consisting of two distinct parts : one part being an
analysis of the process by which wealth was, or tended to
be, produced, divided, and exchanged, apart from govern-
mental interference ; the other being a demonstration that
this process led to the best attainable result. It is obvious
that these two pieces of reasoning have no necessary logical
connexion ; it is also to be observed that while in the former
the subject of the distribution of wealth among diti'erent
classes of producers tended to occupy an increasingly pro-
minent place, the original aim of I'olitical Economy so far
dominated the latter as to leave the question of distribution
rather in the background there. The original aim, as we
saw, was to answer the question ' how to make the people
as rich as possible,' not ' how to secure to individuals their
proper share of wealth'; — the sovereign and his finance
minister having naturally a keener interest in the former
question. Hence, when the new school succeeded in obtain-

240 £SSJ VS AND ADDRESSES x

ing acceptance for their new answer — ' laissez-foAre' — to
the old question, it was primarily as a solution of the
problem of National Production — not Distribution — that it
was accepted. No doubt the more enthusiastic adherents
of the new doctrine were prepared to prove that laisser-faire
led to the best possible results in distribution as well as in
production ; and that in an economic world properly let
alone every individual would actually earn what he deserved.
But I think that the leading English economists from Adam
Smith downward kept clear of this extreme optimism ; and
in resisting governmental interference to raise wages were
mostly content to argue that such interference, by hamper-
ing the production of wealth, would in the long run do
more harm than good to the class that it was designed
to benefit.

The first effect, then, of the collision with Socialism, and
of the Socialistic criticism of the actual distribution of
incomes, was to bring Political Economy to a clearer con-
sciousness of the essential difference, from a scientific point
of view, between the two parts of its teaching. It was thus
led to treat the strictly scientific part — the analysis of the
processes of social industry, considered as let alone by
Government, and the ascertainment of their laws — as its
primary business ; and to maintain its traditional justifica-
tion of the results of these processes in a more limited and
guarded way. At any rate this change took place in
English Political Economy, to which, for the sake of sim-
plicity, I shall confine my attention in the present paper.
It was admitted by Senior, as early as 1827, that a broad
distinction had to be drawn between the " theoretical " and
the " practical branch of the science," and that the conclu-
sions of the latter must be regarded as " more uncertain."
Ultimately the difference between the two branches seemed
to the same writer to be even more marked ; and he
confined the term " Science of Political Economy " to the
theoretical part, relegating the practical part to the Art of
Government — an art, he is careful to point out, which aims
at objects to which the possession of wealth is only a sub-

X THE ECONOMIC LESSONS OF SOCIALISM 241

ordinate means. A similar view is taken by J. S. Mill, who
— in express verbal contradiction of Adam Smith — declared
that " Political Economy does not itself instruct how to
make a nation rich " : it was also adopted by Cairnes, and
became in short the accepted view of English economists.
Along with this, among the practical problems to which the
Science of I'olitical Economy was now conceived as furnish-
ing data, the problem of ameliorating distribution was more
distinctly recognised as important. Thus Seiuor makes the
noteworthy statement that " diffusion of wealth " such that
" all the necessaries and some of the conveniences of life
may be secured to the labouring class, alont entitles a people
to he called rich." ^ J. S. Mill went much further : indeed,
in his case we have the remarkable phenomenon that the
author of the book which became, for nearly a generation,
by far the most popular and influential text-book of Political
Economy in England, was actually — at any rate when he
revised the third and later editicms — completely Socialistic
in his ideal of ultimate social improvement. " I look
forward," he tells us, in his Autohiography, " to a time when
the rule that they who do not work shall not eat will be
applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all ; and
when the division of the produce of labour, instead of
depending, in so great a degree as it now does, on the
accident of birth, ivill he made hy concert on an acknowledged
principle of justice." ^ Having this ideal, he "regarded all
existing institutions and social arrangements as merely pro-
visional, and welcomed with the greatest pleasure and
interest all Socialistic experiments by select individuals."
In short, the study planted by Adam Smith and watered by
Eicardo had, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century,
imbibed a full measure of the spirit of Saint-Simon and
Owen, — and that in England, the home of what the Germans
call " Mauchesterthum."

I do not mean to sugMst tliat those who learnt Political
Economy from Mill's book during this period went so far
as their teacher in the adoption of Socialistic aims. This,

* The italics are mine.

R

242 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES X

no doubt, was far from being the case. Indeed — if I
may judge from my own experience — I should say that
we were as much surprised as the ' general reader ' to
learn from Mill's Aittohiography that our master, the
author of the much -admired treatise "On Liberty," had
been all the while looking forward to a time when the
division of the produce of labour should be " made by
concert." But though Mill had concealed from us the
extent of his Socialism, we were all, I think, conscious of
having received from him a certain impulse in the Socialistic
direction : we had at any rate ceased to regard the science
of Political Economy as opposing a hard and fast barrier
against the Socialistic conception of the ideal goal of economic
progress.

In the region, then, of practical ideals and ultimate aims
the lesson learnt from Socialism had been very important :
still the main part of the analysis and reasoning which
constituted what was now called the Science of Political
Economy remained prima facie unaffected by the inter-
penetration of ideas that I have described. The old division
of those who share the produce of industry into landlords,
capitalists, and labourers, receiving respectively rent, profit,
and wages, was substantially retained ; and the improve-
ments introduced by Senior and Mill into the definitions
of rent, profit, and wages, and into the theory of the
determination of their amounts, appeared to relate to points
of subordinate importance. But on looking closer a marked
change in tone, pai'tly attributable to the influence of
Socialism, is clearly discernible in Mill's treatment of the
landlord. Adam Smith, indeed, had pointed out that the
landlord's rent " costs him neither labour nor care," and is
" not at all proportional to what the landlord may have laid
out on the improvement of the land " : and Eicardo, dis-
tinguishing rent proper, as the price paid for the use of the
" original and indestructible qualities of the soil," from the
interest on the capital laid out in agiicultural improvements,
had represented the former as iuevitably growing continually
larger with the " natural advance of society " ; and had thus

X THE ECONOMIC LESSONS OF SOCIALISM 243

fixed on the landlords the invidious character of a useless
class levying an ever-increasing tribute on the useful classes.
But it was left for Mill to emphasise the claim of society to
the ' unearned increment ' of value thus continually gene-
rated by the industrial process ; and though ' land-national-
isation ' is not one of the practical measures definitely
advocated by Mill in his treatise, it looms, if I may so f^^ay,
on the horizon.

Still, the share of produce wliich falls to the landlord as
such is, after all, small compared with that which falls to
the owners and employers of capital ; and here the
economists of the early Victorian period, no less than their
predecessors, maintained a view of the laws determining the
capitalist's share which seemed to offer a firm barrier
against Socialistic ideas. Senior and Mill recognised that a
portion of the gross profit of the employer of capital must be
regarded as remuneration for his labour, " wages of superin-
tendence " ; but the main part of the capitalist's share —
after allowing insurance for risk — was explained by Senior,
and by Mill after him, to be " remuneration for the
abstinence " exercised by the capitalist in employing his
wealth productively instead of consuming it. On this view,
the Socialist contention, that labour, being the source of all
wealth, ought to be remunerated with the whole of its
produce, was met by a simple and apparently cogent
argument : — ' Labour requires capital to be productive, and
capital is due to abstinence : unless the possessor of wealth is
remunerated for abstaining, abstinence and therefore capital
will cease or be much diminished. Hence if associated
labour were to refuse to remunerate capital it would —
ultimately if not at once — diminish instead of increasing
the individual labourer's share : for the loss of the aid
afforded by capital to labour would diminish the total
produce by an amount far exceeding the share now allotted
to capital,'

This was, I think, the current argument of persons who
had read Political Economy, in the third quarter of the
century ; and it may be found even later in organs of

244 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES x

opinion whose age and dignity tend to keep them somewhat
in the rear of the movement of thought.^ But it involved,
as I am about to show, an elementary confusion of ideas ;
and I believe that the clearing away of this confusion has
been due to the collision of orthodox Political Economy with
the later — the German — phase of Socialism, in which Marx
is the most influential teacher. I do not mean to suggest
that this elimination of confusion was due to the superior
clearness of Marx's economic insight ; on the contrary,
Marx's elaborate argument to show that the labourers
naturally and properly should divide up the whole produce
of labour among themselves appears to me to involve a still
more fundamental muddle — which the English reader, I
think, need hardly spend time in examining, as the more able
and influential among English Socialists are now careful to
give it a wide bertli. But here, as sometimes happens in
controversy, the collision of two muddles ultimately brought
the truth out clear and unmistakable ; and the truth was
substantially on the Socialists' side.

The fallacy in the argument above summarised was due
to a confusion between the need of capital — in the form of
instruments, etc. — as an aid to labour in production, and the
demand of the private owners of capital, based on this need,
for a share of the product. As things are, the labourer's
share of consumable commodities is less than it would be if
his labour could be equally effective without instruments,
because he has to devote a part of it to the making of
instruments ; and it is further less than it would otherwise
be, because he has to devote another part of it to the making
of the commodities on which the owner of capital spends that
part of his interest which he does not save. The two
diminutions are separate and distinct, though the political
economist, used to individualistic conditions, naturalh' thinks
of them together ; and it is only the former that depends
on conditions of production which Socialism could not
alter. A Socialistic State would have to exercise absti-
nence, but it would not have to be paid for exercising it ; the

' See e.q. the Edinburgh Revieu; July 1878, p. 174,

X THE ECONOMIC LESSONS OF SOCIALISM 245

associated lal^ourers would liave to devote labour no less
than now to the making of instruments : but — assuming the
labour unchanged in quality and efficiency — they might
divide what the private capitalist now consumes (so far as it
is not remuneration for the skilled labour of the capitalist
employer) without any further abstinence.

The clearing away of this fallacy seemed likely to affect
rather seriously the individualist position in the controversy
with Socialism. So much stress had been laid on the indis-
pensability of the saving of the private owner of wealth and
on the inexorable necessity of remunerating his abstinence
with interest, that the admission that this latter necessity
would not exist in a Socialistic State seemed at first serious.
But need, controversial as well as physical, is the mother of
discovery ; and in this case it served to open the eyes of
economists to important shortcomings in the traditional view
of the function of capital and the law of its increase. In
Mill's chapter on the " Law of the Increase of Capital,"
attention is entirely concentrated on saving : we are told
that " since all capital is the product of saving, the increase
of capital must depend on two things : the amount of the
fund from which saving can be made, and the strength of
the dispositions prompting to it " : — and these, in fact, are
the only topics dealt with in the chapter to which I refer
(I. xi.). Now no doubt if we ask how the mass of instru-
ments aiding labour that England possesses — the factories
and machines, ships, steam-engines, railroads and their
rolling stock, etc., — came to be accumulated, one part of the
answer is that persons were found sufficiently sup))]icd with
wealth not required for immediate consumption to be able to
pay for the production of these articles, and disposed to
spend their money in this way in view of the prospective
interest or profit. But this answer is obviously incomplete :
it is through saving that capital is there to be employed, but
it is through invention that there is a field of employment
for it : Watt and Stephenson are at least as important factors
in the causation of our railway system as the good people
who were willing to put their money in railways. Of course

240 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES x

this aspect of the matter was not ignored by Mill : but it is
certainly left too much in the background in his discussion
of the laws of production ; and the fuller light thrown on it
in more recent treatises is partly, I think, due to the influ-
ence exercised by the controversy with Socialism. It should
be added that in considering invention as a part-cause of the
increased efficiency which labour derives from the aid of
capital, we must not limit the notion to technical inventions ;
we must include all expedients for saving labour or augment-
ing its utility, not only by improved instruments, but by
improved processes, in the organisation of business and trade
no less than in manufacture.

This leads me to another shortcoming in the older view
of the capitalist's function, to which attention was directed
by the controversial crisis above described, — the inadequate
recognition by the older writers of the importance of business
ability. A reader of Eicardo would be inclined to suppose
that any owner of capital would be likely to earn average
profits on his capital, — unless he suffered from a want of
average intellect : and Mill's phrase above quoted — " wages
of superintendence " — suggests that the skilled labour re-
quired from an employer of capital in business is on a par
with that required from a superior clerk. And no doubt in
certain businesses at certain quiet times this may be true :
but where change is active — i.e. in a continually increasing
part of modern business — a much higher quality both of
skill and energy is needed for success. And the higher
profit which the skill and energy obtains is not merely got
out of the unsuccessful competitors : it is, speaking broadly,
obtained by an economic service to society : the successful
man of business has through acumen, promptitude, and
resource, commonly been able to provide a given utility to
the consumer more economically than it would have been
provided without his efforts.

This completer analysis of the process of accumulating
and employing capital, bringing into prominence inventive
and industrial skill, is, I conceive, the latest important
lesson for which Political Economy has been in some

X THE ECONOMIC LESSONS OF SOCIALISM 247

measure indebted to the controversy with Socialism. Per-
haps the next lesson of importance will come through
experiment rather than reasoning. This leads me to my
last remark.

My readers may think that, in what I have said, I have
spoken too exclusively of the lessons learnt from reasoning,
criticism, and controversy, and not said enough of experi-
ment. I should have much liked to be able to say more of
the instruction derived from Socialistic experiment. But the
truth is that there is very little to say : the reason being ,
that while the earlier Socialists were much disposed to
experiment, their experiments were mostly such palpable
failures that their only effect was to harden the orthodox
economist in his prejudices as well as his sound conclusions.
It is true that the success of the artisans' co-operative stores
— and, in a much more limited degree, of attempts at
co-operative production — may be partly set to the account
of Socialism ; as, without the impulse given by Owen to the
co-operative movement, the venture of the Eochdale Pioneers
would probably never have been made. But the successes
of these co-operative stores, though they have taught us
something worth knowing, have not taught the lesson that
Socialists have desired to teach : they have not demonstrated
the great capitalist or great employer to be superfluous, but
only that competition does not tend to the most economical
supply of the services of the ordinarily humble and
struggling retail tradesmen of the poor.

The tendency of the later school has been to dis-
courage all voluntary essays in Socialism : on the pretext
that no instructive experience can be gained except
through the action of the State. From a scientific point
of view this attitude is to be regretted, but I can quite
understand that it is politic in those who aim at producing
an immediate and far-reaching movement in a Socialistic
direction : since a study of the broad results of previous
experiments of the kind certainly does not tend to en-
courage such a movement. At any rate it seems at present
that if we are to derive important economic instruction

248 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

from Socialistic experimentation, the corpus vile will have
to be a West-European nation. One nation will probably
be found sufficient: and I trust that we shall all agree to
yield the post of honour to Germany, in this branch of the
pursuit of knowledge.

XI

THE KELxVTIOK OF ETIUCS TO SOCIOLOGY

A PAPER READ BEFORE THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ETHICS
AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

{International Jouriud of Ethics, October 1899)

In selecting the subject of my lecture this evening I was
influenced by the title of the body to whose invitation I
responded — the London School of Ethics and Social Philo-
sophy. For I take this title to imply that the studies of
the school are not concerned only with ethics in the narrow
sense : — i.e. with the inquiry into the principles and
method of determining what is right and wrong in human
action, the content of the moral law, and the proper object
of rational choice and avoidance. This is, indeed, a vast,
comprehensive, and difficult subject, even if we pursue it,
so far as possible, as a separate and independent inquiry ;
still, I take it to be the aim of your school not to confine the
work of your students to the theory of what ought to be —
of the ideal relations of human beings living in society ;
but rather to combine with this the scientific study of the
actual relations of men regarded as members of societies,
as they have been, are, and will be. For it is only by a
combination of the two studies that we can hope to attain
that wider view which belongs to philosophy as distinguished
from science ; from which we endeavour to contemplate
the whole of human thought — whether concerned with
ideas or empirical facts — as one harmonious system. It
is as a contribution to social philosophy thus understood

249

2SO ESSA VS AND ADDRESSES xi

that I offer the observations that follow on the relation of
ethics to sociology.

But at the outset I find myself in some perplexity. In
order to examine closely the relation between the two
studies, we ought to be able to bring the general character
and outline of each in turn clearly before our minds. Now,
I may assume that my avidience can do this in the case of
ethics ; or, at least — as the range of the subject is somewhat
vaguely and variously conceived — the brief description that
I just now gave will suffice to indicate to you the body of
systematic thought that I have in my mind when I use the
term. But it is not so clear that I can assume this with
regard to sociology ; since, though the educated world has
heard of sociology for about three-quarters of a century, it
can hardly be said, in England at least, to have yet attained
the rank of an established science, — at any rate, if academic
recognition can be taken as a criterion of the establish-
ment of a science. There is, so far as I know, no chair
of sociology in any English university ; it is not formally
included in any academic curriculum ; there is no elementary
manual of English manufacture by which a student may
learn to pass an examination in sociology with the least
possible trouble. It is otherwise in the United States,
where sociology has already got both professorial chairs and
handbooks. Perhaps in intellectual as well as industrial
matters the Anglo-Saxons across the Atlantic are more apt
than we are to seize and effectively apply new ideas. Still,
the leading English philosophers of the latter half of the
nineteenth century, J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer, have
both devoted an important part of their energies to the
exposition of the subject, — which, indeed, occupies three out
of the ten volumes of Spencer's great system of synthetic
philosophy. And, largely under their influence, in spite
of the cold shade of official neglect in which it still lingers,
the ideas of sociology have more and more tended to pene-
trate and pervade current ethical discussion. Take, as an
instance of this, the following statement made some years
ago by a writer of repute : —

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 251

A man's first and last duty is to see and do those things
which the social organism of which he is a member calls upon
him to do.

" The social organism " is essentially a sociological con-
ception ; and if we admit this statement in its lull breadth,
we implicitly admit the claim — -which the young science
lias in fact been making since its birth from the brain of
Auguste Comte — to dominate the older subject of ethics and
even to reduce it to a department of itself.

This claim I propose to examine in the present lecture ;
but, for the reasons I have just indicated, it seems best that
before proceeding to examine it I should briefly sketch the
aims and method of sociology as presented by the leading
writers whom I have named.

Sociology, as conceived by Comte and Spencer, may be
briefly described as an attempt to make the study of human
history scientific by applying to it conceptions derived from
biology, with such niodilicutions as their new application
requires. We have, however, for tliis purpose to include,
along with history in the ordinary sense, a large part of
what is commonly known as anthropology, — that is, the
comparative study of the contemporary social conditions,
and recent social changes so far as ascertainable, of those
parts of the human race that have not arrived at a suffi-
ciently advanced stage of civilisation to have a history m
the ordinary sense.

To begin, we may definitely conceive the objects which
sociology studies as a number of groups of human beings
which at the outset I shall consider to be each an inde-
pendent political or governed society, though this view must
be taken subject to important modifications later on. Each
such society may be to a great extent properly regarded —
and I shall begin by regarding it — as having an organic
life of its own, distinct from the lives of the individuals
composing it. It is in this view that I call it an ' organism,'
meaning by the term first that such a group is not a mere
aggregate of individuals, but an aggregate of which the
members have definite relations that, though themselves

252 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

XI

subject to change, remain comparatively constant while the
individuals change ; and that these relations bind the
individuals together into mutually dependent parts of a
larger whole, performing mutually dependent functions.
The society has thus a structure which so far resembles the
structure of a living animal that its existence depends on
its functioning ; it cannot cease to function and retain its
structure, as a machine can. I further mean to imply
that such a society goes through processes of growth and
change which are at any rate largely caused — as the changes
of a plant or animal — by interaction with its environment,
physical and social : and especially changes by which it
adapts or adjusts itself to its environment, — i.e. tends to
preserve itself amid changes in environing conditions even,
if need be, by the occasional sacrifice of the lives of in-
dividual members. With this definite meaning, finding in
such societies these characteristics, we may agree to call them
organisms in spite of their unlikeness in other important
respects to the organisms which biology studies.

Then, following Spencer and combining the results of
history and archa:;ology with the study of less advanced
societies now existing, somewhat as the biologist combines
the results of geology with those of zoology and botany, we
may note how the prevalent type of social oi-ganism, like
the prevalent types of animals or plants, tends, as evolution
goes on, to grow in mass both by multiplication of units
within each group and by union of groups. We may note
further how along with increase of mass goes development
of social structure, by which the differentiation of its
mutually dependent parts becomes continually more com-
plex ; until from the simplicity of a little tribe of hunters,
with hardly any division of functions except wdiat is con-
nected with sex, we arrive ultimately at the complexity
of a modern industrial society, with its vast diversity of
occupations.

Spencer proceeds to draw an instructive parallel be-
tween the sociological and the biological differentiation of
organs. He bids us observe in each case —

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 253

(1) A "sustaining system," alimentary in tlic animal
and industrial in the society,

(2) A "distributing system," carrying about nutriment
in the animal and commodities in the society, and

(3) A " regulating and expending system." liy this last
notion he represents an analogy between the apparatus of
nerves and muscles in an animal which carries on conflict
with other animals and the governments and armies of
political society ; taking the governmental system as ulti-
mately developed to correspond to the brain and nervous
centres, the supreme deliberative assembly being analogous
to the cerebrum.

So much for the resemblances between the social organ-
ism and the animal or plant. As we should expect, they
belong primaril}' to the physical life of human societies ;
but when we turn to note the ditleiences, we shall be led
gradually to contemplate their intellectual life.

"We may begin by observing that a political society has
not, like an animal, a normal period of life and a normal
series of vital changes from infancy to senility and death.
Indeed, the political societies historically known to us do
not ordinarily die unless they are assailed and structurally
destroyed by other societies ; and when death, in a certain
sense, thus befalls any such society, it does not entail the
death of the human beings composing it. Some of them,
no doubt, perish in the collision, but tlie bulk of them are
absorbed alive by the conquering society. Even in peace
an important mingliug of units from different societies goes
on, as is most conspicuously illustrated at the present time
by the comparatively new societies formed in America.
They are largely made neither by " multiplication of units "
nor by " union of groups," but by composition of imits from
a number of groups.

But it is still more important to observe that the social
organism to which an individual is found to belong, through
the social relations binding him to other men, becomes very
different in its ran^e as we pass from one set of relations
to another. There is nothing corresponding to this in the

254 £SSA VS AND ADDRESSES xi

case of an animal. Each animal has its own sustaining
system, its own distributing system, and its own regulating
and expending system, quite unconnected with the corre-
sponding systems of other animals. The alimentary organs
of one animal do not provide, nor its blood-vessels convey,
nutriment to the organs of other societies, nor does its brain
co-operate in directing their movements, except indirectly
by producing external movements of its own organs. The
case is quite otherwise with the organic life of societies.
The channels of communication by which commodities are
carried run, as we know, not only within States, but across
States, almost ignoring their boundaries ; and the same is
true of the process of differentiation which localises parti-
cular branches of industry in situations specially favourable
to it, and thus tends to Ijind the inhabitants of the districts
in question into one economic whole. We all know that
England forms part of an economic system extending far
beyond the limits of the British empire.

But again a very similar set of cross-divisions, lines of
separation that cut across the boundaries of States, is found
in what we cannot but regard as an important part of
the regulative apparatus of social organisms : I mean the
ecclesiastical systems. We all know how, throughout the
civilised world, members of the same States are divided from
one another, and members of different States are united,
by communities formed for the purpose of religious in-
struction and worship. No fact is more striking in the
history of regulating social agencies than the manner in
which religions claiming to be world-religions — Buddhism,
Christianity, Mohammedanism — have arisen and spread and
overleaped all the lines of separation of political societies ;
binding their converts, through the most powerful ties of
common beliefs and common worship, into organisms quite
different from States, though they come to have an elabo-
rately differentiated quasi-political organisation. Now, in
studving these ecclesiastical organisms from the outside, we
miglit of cours3 dwell on the social differences and relations
between priests or monks and laymen, and the organisation

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 255

of ecclesiastical government. But it would be a very shallow
insight that did not penetrate further, and recognise as the
most essential social relation wliich binds human beings
together on this side of their life community of thought
and sentiment — a common stock of ideas and convictions
about the universe, its ground and end, and human destiny.
Hence, when the sociologist studies these ecclesiastical bodies,
it is to the laws of change and growth of this intellectual
and emotional context, this common body of ideas and
sentiments, that his deepest attention should be directed.

And this is true also of the political regulation of social
man. Mr. Spencer, as we saw, compares the brain of an
animal with the supreme deliberative assembly of a nation.
But surely the political brain of England is not limited to
the six hundred and seventy respectable gentlemen who
chiefly make our laws : it is to be found wherever political
thought is going on which will take effect in determining
the action of the English Government. And if so, the
history of political ideas shows that no modern nation has
a brain strictly and entirely its own. If \ve insist on keep-
ing the analogy, we have for the main movements of political
thought to trace the operation and development of at least
a West-European brain ; whose range of influence in modern
times has not only extended to European colonies in other
parts of the globe, but has even included a people so alien
in its origin and previous history as the Japanese.

And, Anally, what I have said of religious and political
ideas is equally true of moral ide?.s and sentiments. Indeed,
throughout the history of European civilisation morality has
had an intimate connexion both with religion and with polity.
Still, the study of the development of morality and its con-
ditions and laws of growth and change may be pursued, no
less than the study of religious or political thought, as a
partially independent branch of sociological inquiry ; and
when we so pursue it we soon find that the aggregate of
human beings bound together spiritually by sharing a com-
mon moral life is not to be identified with any one of the
political societies which we began by regarding as social

256 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xi

organisms. And the same may be said in modern times of
the possession of a common body of scientific knowledge ;
indeed, science is less modified by national differences than
morality ; and European science has united the educated
portion of the Japanese people more completely with our
educated world than European political ideas. Thus, in
contemplating the continual enlargement of these spiritual
bonds of social union we are irresistibly led — as the founder
of sociology, Comte, was led — to an ideal future, when the
whole population of the globe will form, from an intellectual
point of view, a single social organism. There is a striking
passage, remarkable in a writer who claims to expound a
purely positive method, in which Comte tells us that Sociol-
ogy, reading the future into the past, " represents the whole
human race, past, present, and future, as constituting a vast
and eternal social unit, where different organs, individual
and national, concur in their various modes and degrees in
the evolution of humanity."

To sum up, as we pass from one aspect to another of the
many-sided social life of man, we are led gradually from the
conception of an indefinite number of social organisms, sub-
ject, like plants or animals, to the struggle for existence as
a main factor in their development, — a conception which
physical analogies and the contemplation of the earlier stages
of human history combine to press on us, — to the idea of
a single social organism, which a study of later civilised
history, especially in its spiritual aspect, renders no less
inevitable.

I turn now to examine the relation of sociology to ethics,
and especially the claim of the former study to absorb the
latter and reduce it to a subordinate department of itself. I
may perhaps say that I come to the examination of this
claim in an impartial spirit. Speaking as a professor of
ethics, I do not consider myself as holding a brief for the
independence of my subject. It is for the true good of
any department of knowledge or inquiry to understand as
thoroughly as may be its relation to other sciences and
studies, to see clearly what elements of its reasonings it has

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 257

to take from tlieiii, and wliat in its turn it may claim to
give them ; and the vahie of this insight becomes greater
in proportion as the steady growth of human knowledge, tlie
steady extension of the range of human inquiry, l)rings with
it a continually more urgent need for a clear and rational
division of intellectual labour. If, therefore, the relation of
ethics to sociology is truly one of suljordination, it is im-
portant that students of ethics should fully recognise this
truth and render due obedience to the superior authority.

Of course, in order that this authority, however ideally
unquestionable, should be actually unquestioned, sociology
must have become an established science, and be not merely
struggling towards this position. And if I were speaking as
an advocate of the claims of ethics to actual independence, I
should have nmch to say on this topic ; and my brief would be
stulfed with quotations from very recent treatises on sociology,
whose authors — to quote a well-known epigram — show them-
selves most emphatically " conscious of one another's short-
comings." But this advocate's work is not now my affair. I
wish to assume for the purposes of my present discussion that
the struggle of sociology to become an established science, a
struggle carried on now for three-quarters of a century, has
been crowned with the success which I hope will ultimately
crown it. I will assume that it has attained as much con-
sensus as to principles, method, and conclusions, and as
much continuity of development, as the physical sciences
dealing with organic life, and as much power of prevision as
Comte hoped for it ; — for he was not sanguine enough to
suppose that sociology could ever predict with the exactness
and minuteness of astronomy, and foretell the stages of a
political revolution as astronomy foretells the stages of a
solar eclipse. Let us suppose this consummation attained,
and consider how far this scientific prevision of social effects
will so far determine ethical reasonings as to reduce ethics
to a subordinate department of sociology.

I think it must be admitted that this effect will be pro-
duced to a considerable extent, upon any view of ethics ex-
cept the ultra-intuitional, in respect of the deduction of

258 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES XI

particular rules of morality from fundamental principles.
For all schools, except that which takes the immediate
judgments of conscience as infallible guides in all questions
of conduct, admit that the application of moral principles
to practice must be largely governed by foresight of con-
sequences, and must therefore admit that rules of social
behaviour will properly l^e determined in detail by the
scientific prevision of social consequences so far as such
prevision is available. We may compare, as a parallel case,
the relation of the moral duty or virtue of temperance to
human physiology, including pathology ; the ethical maxim
that the bodily appetites ought to be strictly obedient to
the regulation of reason must receive its practical application
from a forecast of consequences ; and this, with the develop-
ment of physiological knowledge, must change from a merely
empirical to a more or less scientific forecast. We com-
monly recognise that the diet scientifically known to be
promotive of health and efficiency is the truly temperate
diet ; and the most ascetic moralist has to admit that self-
denial, no less than self-indulgence, must be limited and
guided by medical prevision. Similarly we must admit that
our social affections and sentiments will have to yield to the
control and obey the guidance of sociological previson when
sociology has become a really established science.

Indeed, some effect of this kind has already been pro-
duced on current ethical notions and habits by the branch
of sociology which has been separated from the general
science of society, and received a development in advance of
the rest under the name of political economy. For instance,
under the influence of the economic forecast — deductively
and inductively established — of the bad consequences of
indiscriminate almsgiving, the old and eminent virtue of
charity, in its narrower signification, has materially changed
its practical content for the modern educated man, while
retaining its principle and motive unchanged. Its applica-
tion to conduct has become more complex and exacting ;
it is recognised as demanding thought and care, besides
the mere altruistic preference of the satisfaction of others'

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 259

desires to the satisfaction of our own, and as imposinf^
restraints on sympathetic impulses as well as on self-
regarding ones.

A similar effect of economic forecast on ethical concep-
tions and accompanying sentiments is traceable in the case
of justice ; but with the difference that in this case we have
marked ethical divergences resulting from divergences in the
economic or sociological prevision of consequences. Suppose
we take the principle that desert ought to be requited as
expressing the abstract essence of distributive justice. Its
practical application cannot but be different, on the one
hand, for the individualist who holds that any important
relaxation in the competitive struggle for existence must
result in the arrest and decline of human improvement,
through the equalising of the prospects of survival of the
unfit along with the tit ; and, on the other hand, for the
socialist who forecasts a more rapid and effective improve-
ment under the stimulus of altruistic aifection, sympathy,
and public spirit, when these nobler impulses are no longer
starved and depressed by the egoistic habits and sentiments
that necessarily result from the present competitive struggle.
The former will tend to interpret the requital of desert to
mean securing to each man the precise social value of his
services ; the latter will tend to interpret it to mean securing
him what he requires for the most efficient performance
of his social function. Of course, as sociological prevision
extends in range and increases in exactness, we must suppose
fundamental divergences of this kind to diminish and a
more decisive effect to be produced.

I have said enough to show the import of my admission,
as a representative of ethics, that if we suppose sociology
an established science, we must suppose its forecast of social
consequences to exercise a fundamentally important eflect
on the practical application of general ethical principles or
maxims, and on the deduction of subordinate rules of conduct
i'rom these.

I now turn to the more important and more disputable
element of the claim of sociology to absorb and subordinate

26o ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xi

ethics, — i.e. the claim not merely to modify the practical
application of ethical principles, but to determine these very
principles themselves.

Here, first, I quite admit that the connexion of sociology,
supposing it an established science, with the subject-matter
of ethics must necessarily be so intimate and so compre-
hensive, that its claim to dominate and subordinate ethics is
natural and almost inevitable ; and we cannot be surprised
that it should appear irresistible to students of sociology
who have never made a systematic attempt to purge their
moral notions of the confusions of popular thought. For,
as we have seen, sociology undoubtedly comprehends in its
subject-matter the study of morality as a social fact, and
this study must include morality as a whole, the principles
accepted in any age and country, no less than the accepted
and current application of the principles to particular con-
crete problems of conduct. It is a part of the business of
sociology — at least as important, from a purely sociological
point of view, as any other part — to ascertain first the facts,
and then, as far as possible, the laws of the development of
moral opinions and sentiments, as one element in the de-
velopment of human society as a whole : to show how it
has influenced and been influenced by other elements in the
whole social evolution : to trace it back, if possible, to its
origin : and — always supposing sociology to have arrived
at the stage of scientific prediction — to foretell its future
conditions.

It is natural to infer that a sociology supposed able to
accomplish all this — and I am willing, for the sake of argu-
ment, to make the supposition — would reduce ethics to a
subordinate department of itself. I do not, however, think
that this inference is logically sound. Indeed, I think that
in most cases it arises from a confusion of thought that a
little reflection ought to dispel.

To show this, let us suppose ethics and sociology as inde-
pendent and established systems of thought, and then try to
imagine a conflict between them, a conflict such as some-
times takes place between established sciences, — e.g. there

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 261

was one some time ago between physicists and geologists as
to the time of duration of the earth.

We shall lind that we cannot really suppose sucli a
conflict possible. No ethical proposition can possibly con-
tradict a sociological proposition, since they cannot relate to
the same subject-matter, — that is, so long as ethics is under-
stood in the limited sense that I have defined [see p. 249],
and so long as sociology keeps strictly within the bounds of
its domain as a positive science. Sociology thus conceived
is strictly incapable of answering any ethical question, and
ethics thus understood is strictly incapable of answering
any sociological question, — for ethics is only concerned with
what ought to be, and sociology, even when it deals with
ethical judgments, is only concerned with what is, has been,
and will be judged, and not at all with the question whether
it is, has been, or will be truly judged. So far as any
sociologist expresses any opinion on the latter point, he
assumes a knowledge which the method of his science,
regarded as a study of empirical fact, is quite incompetent
to supply.

I do not think that this is likely to be disputed, so far
as sociology is concerned with the mere ascertainment of
particular facts, past and present ; but it may be disputed
in respect of the general truths which sociology as a science
must be supposed to have established. And I admit that
if we examine this dispute with care we shall find, not
indeed a possible conflict between ethics and sociology, but
a possible coincidence so close as, if actually accepted, to
justify the view that sociology is destined to absorb ethics.

But here, again, I must point out that the dispute some-
times arises from mere confusion of thought. It is rightly
seen that the aim of sociology is not merely to ascertain,
but to explain, the variations and changes in social morality,
and that this explanation must lie in reducing to general
laws the diversity of moral opinions prevalent in different
ages and countries ; and it is vaguely thought that these
general laws, at any rate when brought to a sutficiently high
degree of generality, must coincide — if they do not clash —

262 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xi

with ethical principles. But not only is there no prima
facie reason why they should coincide, but primd facie every
reason why they should not. For the sociological laws must
explain, and be manifested in, the erroneous moral judgments
that have been prevalent in human society no less than in
true moral judgments; they must explain the prevalent opinion
of certain groups of primitive men that successful thieving
is honourable and virtuous, or that the revenge of a blood-
relation is the holiest duty that man can perform, no less than
the opposite moral opinions now prevalent in Europe.

There is, however, a subtler form of the same view which
cannot be so decisively put on one side. It may be urged
that the subject-matter of sociology, no less than the subject-
matter of animal or vegetable biology, is a kind of organic
life ; and that as the varied structures and functions of
animal or vegetable organisms can only be understood if we
regard them as adapted or adjusted to the preservation
either of the individual organism or its type, so sociology
requires the same conception of adaptation to the end of
social preservation in its explanation of social facts. Accord-
ingly, morality, prevalent moral opinions and sentiments,
being an important complex of relations among the members
of a society, must be brought under the same general con-
ception ; so that the most comprehensive and fundamental
sociological law, explaining the development of morality,
will consist in just this statement of Preservation of the
Social Organism as the end to which morality is normally
and broadly a means, — though in any particular society at
any particular time details of positive morality may not be
perfectly adapted to this end. If this is so, it may be said,
the moralist must adopt this sociological end as his ultimate
ethical end, since otherwise he would be setting up an ideal
opposed to the irresistible drift of the whole process of life
in the world, which would be obviously futile.^

^ Some writers would substitute " welfare" or "health " for " preservation" in
this reasoning. But unless " welfare " or " health " is interpreted to mean merely
preservation in a condition favourable to future preservation, in which case simple
preservation is still the ultimate end, the terms seem to me to introduce an ethical
conception which cannot be arrived at by any strictly sociological method.

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 263

Now, supposing a con&en&us of sociologists to declare that
the preservation of the social organism is the one all-
comprehensive end, by continual adjustment to which the
actual evolution of morality may be simply and completely
explained ; and supposing a cunse'iisus of moralists to accept
this sociolofrical end as the ultimate good to the attainment
of which all human action should be directed, then, 1 admit,
it would be broadly true to say that ethics was absorbed by
sociology. For on these hypotheses there would, firstly, be
a complete coincidence between the sociological and the
ethical end ; and, secondly, as 1 have already explained, the
working out of the rules conducive to the end must, so far
as social morality is concerned, consist in an application of
sociological knowledge. Ethics would not, indeed, even so,
be exactly a branch of the science, but it would be an art
based on the science and having as its fundamental principle
the highest generalisation of the science, modified so as to
take on an ethical import.

It would still, I think, be formally important to insist
that this fusion of studies can only be rationally effected by
the judgment that identifies the sociological and the ethical
ends ; and that this judgment is not one to which the moralist
can be cogently driven by any sociological arguments. For
the argument that if he declines to accept it he places him-
self in opposition to the process of nature is only forcible if we
introduce a theological significance into our notion of nature,
attributing to it design and authority ; and this introduc-
tion of theology carries the sociologist beyond the limits
of his special science. But, though it would be formally
important to insist on this, the fusion would still be com-
plete on the two hypotheses, sociological and ethical, above
stated.

But neither of these hypotheses can be accepted as more
than partially true.

Take the ethical question first — can we regard the mere
preservation of the life of a human being, or of any number
of human beings combined in a society, as an ultimate and
paramount end and standard of right action, apart from any

264 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES xi

consideration of the quality of the life preserved ? I appeal
confidently on this point — it is the only appeal possible —
to the deliberate judgment of thoughtful persons, when the
question is clearly set before it. Doubtless a fundamentally
important part of the function of morality consists in main-
taining habits and sentiments preservative of individual and
social life ; but tins is because, as Aristotle said, in order to
live well we must live. It does not follow that life is
simply the iiltimate end ; since if all life were as little
desirable as some portions of it have been in the experience
of most of us, we should judge anything tending to its pre-
servation as unmitigatedly bad. It is not life simply, but
good or desirable life, that is the ethical end ; and though —
as all students of your school will know — there is still much
controversy as to the precise content of the notion " good "
in this application, it is a controversy which ethics has got
to work through, and in settling which it cannot derive any
material aid from sociology.

But, again, the sociological hypothesis seems to me
equally unacceptable when put forward as a complete ex-
planation of the facts to which it relates.

The view that morality has been developed under the
influence of the struggle for existence among social organ-
isms as a part of the complex adaptation of such organisms
to the conditions of their struggling existence is, I think,
a probable conjecture as regards the earlier stages of its
development in prehistoric times. It is reasonable to suppose
that the observance of duties to fellow-tribesmen within a
primitive tribe tended to the survival of the tribe in the
struggle for tribal existence, by increasing the internal
coherence of the tribe and the effective co-operation of its
members. But it is not reasonable to accept this as the
main explanation of the evolution of morality even in
primitive ages, because it is certainly not a cause that has
had any great effect on the important changes in moral
beliefs that have taken place in historic times. Take one
of the greatest of such changes — that resulting in the con-
version of the Greco-Roman civilised world to Christianity.

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 265

Not only would it be obviously absurd to attribute this
change to the struggle for existence among civilised societies;
there is not even any adequate evidence that it had a pre-
servative effect on the political society in which the conver-
sion took place. I should conjecture that before Constantine
its operation was the other way, considering the passive
alienation of primitive Christians from the secular society
in which they lived, over which they believed a swift and
sudden destruction to be impending. And, though this
split between religion and the State was healed by Con-
stantine, it is difficult, even after this, to see any tendency
in Christianity to preserve the Roman empire, or even
arrest its decline and fall. The Christian empire seems
simply to continue the process tending towards surrender
to the barbarians outside.

In short, the sociological hypothesis that I am now
considering — so far as it is offered as a complete explana-
tion of moral evolution — seems to me due to the one-
sidedness of view which 1 before noted as a source of
sociological error : the concentration of attention on the
physical side of social life and its primitive conditions,
unduly ignoring its spiritual side and the later stages of its
development. And this is true, not of morality only, but
of the development of knowledge, of art, — indeed of all the
chief elements of that ideal good which we most deeply
value in what we call the progress of civilisation. "We
cannot say of the most signal contributions to this progress
that they are always decisively preservative of the parti-
cular nation in which they are made ; if we are to view
them as adjustments of means to a social end, it can be no
lesser or more limited end than the welfare of humanity at
large.

I now turn to consider an objection that may be taken
against the whole line of thought that I have adopted. I
may be asked, ' Why insist on this artificial separation
between the subjects of ethics and sociology ? "Wliy not
allow the development of both to be influenced by the
natural play of thought between the two ? Why attempt

266 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xi

tlie impossible task of keeping different portions of our
thought on human relations in separate water-tight com-
partments ? '

To objections of this kind my answer is, — First, that I
fully recognise the propriety of the demand that our ethical
and our sociological thought should be brought into clear
and consistent relations : indeed, I regard the harmonising
of different sciences and studies as the special task of
philosophy. I think, however, that the impulse to put
together different lines of thought requires methodical
restraint, because one of the most fruitful sources of error
in philosophy has been over-hasty synthesis and combina-
tion without sufficient previous analysis of the elements
combined. But, secondly, in order to avoid this error, I by
no means wish to prevent altogether mutual influence, in-
terpenetration of ideas, between the two studies I am now
considering. I only urge that it should be carefully watched
and criticised, in order that it may not be the source of
confusion, which is especially dangerous in the condition of
controversy and conflict of opinion on fundamental points
from which neither sociology nor ethics has as yet success-
fully emerged. To illustrate this, let me consider first
the current influence on ethics of sociological concep-
tions. I will take the fundamental conception of the social
organism.

Although as a utilitarian I cannot regard mere preserva-
tion of the social organism as the ultimate end and supreme
standard of right action, I recognise the value of the concep-
tion in making our general view of duty, whether framed on
utilitarian or any other principles, fuller and truer. In any
case it is important for an individual that he should not
conceive himself merely as a member of an aggregate,
capable of benefiting or injuring by his actions other indivi-
duals as such, but also as a member of a body formed of
individual human beings bound into a whole by complex
mutual relations ; a whole of which the parts, whether
individuals or groups, have functions diverse and mutually
dependent. Adopting this conception, he will, whatever

XI THE K ELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 267

view he takes of the ultimate ethical eud, judge actions
largely by their effect iu promoting or impeding the co-
herent and harmonious co-operation of different organs of
society, and in strengthening or weakening habits and
sentiments that tend to the efficient performance of social
functions.

All this is highly important. But some writers seem
drawn by the interest of the novel conception to regard it
as supplying a complete determinant of duty. That is, it
seems to be supposed that adequate guidance to particular
duties is 2:iven in all cases bv the facts of social relations.
' A man,' it is said, ' finds himself as a member of a society
in certain relations to other human beings. He is son,
brother, husband and father, neighbour, citizen. These
relations are all facts, and his duties lie in fulfilling the
claims that are essential parts of these relations.' Now, no
doubt the claims or conscious expectations connected with
these relations, and the common recognition of these claims
by other members of the society than those primarily con-
cerned are important social facts. But it can hardly be
maintained that it is an absolute duty to fulfil all such
expectations, as they are to a certain extent vague, varying,
liable to conflict with each other, sometimes unreasonable,
sometimes sanctioned by custom, but by custom " more
honoured in the breach than in the observance." In short,
so far as these claims are actual facts they are not indisput-
ably valid, and do not form a harmonious system, and the
study of them as facts does not give a criterion of their
validity and a means of eliminating conflict. In consider-
ing which of the demands made on us by our fellow-men
have to be satisfied and which repudiated, and, when two
conflict, which is to be postponed, we require a system of
principles of right conduct which the study of social facts
as such cannot alone give, but which it is the business of
ethics to give.

On the other hand, just as this wide and quasi-
architectonic use of sociological conception in ethics leads
to a mistaken attempt to get the ideal out of the actual, so

268 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xi

the converse influence of ethics on sociology leads to equally
mistaken attempts to get the ideal into the actual,— ie. to
predict a future state of society in harmony with ethical
ideas without any adequate support in scientific induction
from the known facts of past social evolution.

In criticising this ' evolutionary optimism,' as we may
call it, I ought to explain that I am not opposing optimism
as a philosophical doctrine. I am not myself an optimist ;
but I have a great respect for the belief that, in spite of
appearances to the contrary, the world now in process of
evolution, is ultimately destined to reveal itself as perfectly
free from evil and the best possible world. What I would
urge is that, in the present state of our knowledge, this
belief should be kept as a theological doctrine, or, if you
like, a philosophical postulate, and that it should not be
allowed to mix itself with the process of scientific inference
to the future from the past.

The sociologist who brings his optimism into his socio-
logical reasonings must, I think, find the tendency almost
irresistible to give a one-sided prominence to those facts in
the past history of society which make for a favourable view
of its future progress, and to ignore those facts which make
for the opposite conclusion. It is only in this way that I
can account for Mr. Spencer's belief, regarded by him as a
strictly scientific inference from a survey of historical facts,
that the evolution of human society will ultimately bring
about a condition of social relations in which the voluntary
actions of normal human beings will produce " pleasure
unalloyed by pain anywhere." And, similarly, I think that
his hypothetical conclusion that " there needs but a continu-
ance of absolute peace externally, and a vigorous insistence
on non-aggression internally, to insure the moulding of men
into a form naturally characterised by all the virtues," has
not really been reached by a strictly sociological method;
but that the sociological reasoning which has led him to it
has been influenced and modified throughout by an in-
dividualistic ideal formed prior to systematic sociological
study.

XI THE RELATION OF ETHICS TO SOCIOLOGY 269

I seem to liml this confusing effect of 'evolutionary
optimism' in an even more extreme though vaguer form
in a good deal of popular discourse about progress. The
heliever in ' a good time coming ' often seems inclined to
believe that what is coming is good because it is coming, no
less than that what is good is coming because it is good.
Now, granting the latter proposition to be well founded, it
does not in any way imply the former ; granting that man
is destined to unalloyed bliss, still his road to this bright
goal may be in parts very devious and distressful ; and
some of the most distressful turns that would otherwise be
found in it may be avoidable evils, but only avoidable by
vigorous resistance to present tendencies of change. Tliis
seems obvious enough : but it is an obvious truth which is
liable to be missed because the opposite error is not ex-
plicitly propounded, but lurks in a vague acquiescence in
the drift of events.

[In reprinting this essay one or two sentences ha\e been omitted as
repeating too closely what has already been said in the essay on the Scoipe
and Method of Economic Science : but mere repetition of phrases (like the
epigram in the last paragraph about 'a good time coming,' which appears
also on p. 218) it seemed needless to remove. — Ed.]

XII

THE THEOEY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION

(From Essays on a Liberal Education, edited by F. W. Farrar.
Macmillan and Co., 1867.)

It is my wish to examine, as closely and completely as I
am able to do within the limits of an essay, the theory
of classical education : meaning thereby the body of reasons,
which, taken together, may be supposed to persuade the
intelligence of the country, that the present course of
instruction in the Greek and Latin languages and literature
is the best thing that can be applied in the minds of
English boys, in the year 1867 A.D., — or at least better
than anything that it has been proposed to substitute for
it. Such a theory is somewhat difficult to extricate and
expound in the case of this as of other institutions
established long ago, in obedience to an impulse that has
ceased to operate, under intellectual and social conditions
which have since been profoundly modified. It is always,
I think, a shallow view of history which represents such
institutions as existing by vis i7ierticc alone ; vis inertice is a
blind and irrational force, which we have to calculate and
allow for in explaining to ourselves why institutions exist •
but it is powerless (especially in an age like our own),
unless combined with a respectable array of more rational
forces. These forces are found in the convictions of intelli-
gent and open-minded men who work the system, that it is
supplying actual needs of the present age, is doing good
work which the existing society wants done. But since it
has never been incumbent upon any set of men, as a

270

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 271

distinct and inevitable duty, to set forth what these needs
and this work are ; since it is evident to tlie most super-
ficial inqiiirer that the system was originally established —
or grew up — to meet very different needs, and to do very
different work, its real raison d'etre as an existing institution
has to be elicited in the irregular, and, to a speculative
mind, unsatisfactory way of volunteer conservative advocacy.
The reasoning of advocates is generally apt to be A-ague,
sweeping, rhetorical : but the arguments constructed to
support what exists are perhaps the worst, as they are
constructed under less pressure, witli less felt need of
intellectual exertion, and are inevitably addressed to the
more docile and less critical portion of the public. A good
reason, no doubt, is none the worse for being made to order;
still it is natural to regard such reasons witli suspicion, and
the suspicion is often justified by closer examination. For,
whatever be the cause, the arguments for classical education
are often stated, even by able men, in a manner hardly
worthy of their ability. They seem often so trivial and
shallow, so partial and fragmentary, so vague and sweeping ;
they seem to suggest such narrow views of culture, such
imperfect acquaintance with the intellectual development ot'
mankind, so slight an effort to comprehend all the conditions
of the infinitely important ])roblem with which they deal.
At the same time, the advantage that experience gives
can hardly be too highly estimated. The result of handing
over education to the most comprehensive theorist, with
whatever gifts of lucid expression, would be, I doubt not,
disastrous. The history of education is the battle-ground
and burial-ground of impracticable theories : and one who
studies it is soon taught to al)ate his constructive self-
confidence, and to endeavour humbly to learn the lessons
and harmonise the results of experience. But a teacher's
experience must be measured not by the length of time that
he has been engaged in his work, but by the amount of
analytical faculty and intellectual labour that he has applied
to the materials with which it has furnished him ; by the
way in which he has availed himself of the opportunities of

272 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

observation and experiment which he, beyond all other men,
has possessed. It not unfrequently happens — and perhaps
it is not surprising — that even successful schoolmasters,
immersed in the business of their profession, are found to
have learned the theory of what they are doing casually and
long ago from other men, and to have let it remain in their
minds in undigested fragments, not really brought to the
test of, and therefore not modified by, experience. When
such men become advocates, we soon detect their incapacity
to give us any real instruction. Of course, many of a
very different stamp have written in defence of classical
education, and probably in the works and pamphlets that
now exist on the subject, amounting to a considerable
literature, all possible arguments have been brought forward.
Still the wish that forms itself in the mind on the perusal
of these works is, that the period of advocacy should if
possible now close, and that not one or two, but a number
of intelligent educators should take the arguments pro-
vided for them, revolve them carefully, and by close, sober,
accurate observation, obtain their exact value ; and then
express this in carefully guarded and limited statements.
The very mistakes and contradictions of sucli observers
would elicit truth, and we should soon feel a legitimate
confidence, which we can hardly feel now, that our
systematic treatment of youthful intellect, if not absolutely
the best conceivable, was at least approximately the best
attainable.

In beginning to treat of classical education, it is perhaps
desirable to make a protest against the notion which seems
to prevail in some quarters, that the course of instruction
which now bears that name is an organic whole, from which
it is impossible to cut oif any part, without converting the
rest into something of very inferior value. A boy is con-
sidered to have been made a complete classical scholar when
he has been taught to translate elegantly and correctly from
Latin and Greek into English prose ; to compose correct
and elegant Latin and Greek prose, and Latin and Greek
verse. Classical study, the result of which does not include

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 273

all these accomplishments, is supposed to be deficient in
thoroughness.

Now there seems no adequate reason why Latin and
Greek should be regarded as a sort of linguistic Siamese
twins, which nature has joined together, and which would
wither if separated. No doubt, the study of the one is a
good preparation for the study of the other ; but it has no
special need of it for its own completeness. The qualities
of the two languages, and the reasons for which it is
desirable to study them, are in many respects very different:
and it is only by a palpable looseness of thought that they
can be joined together in discussion as frequently as they are.
^\Tien, for instance. Dr. Woolley ^ says these two languages
are the " master-keys that unlock the noblest tongues of
Europe," he forgets how little Greek has to do with any of
these tongues, except in forming their scientific terminology.
When again the " severe regularity " of both languages is
eulogised, it is forgotten how strong the tendency is in
Greek to deviate from the normal type of the sentence, and
to frame constructions which are not diflticult to understand,
but which can be brought under no grammatical rules.
Moreover, the assumption is often made that, because there
are strong arguments to prove that the thorough learning of
one dead language is a valuable element of education, and
that this language ought to be either Greek or Latin, there-
fore there is justification for teaching both Greek and Latin
— I will not say thoroughly, but so as to engross the lion's
share of time and trouble.

Again, it seems undeniable that a person may learn to
read even a dead and ditticult language with correctness and
ease combined, without ever attempting to compose elegantly
or even idiomatically in it ; without, in fact, writing more
than a sufficient number of exercises to fix thoroughlv in his
mind the more important part of the grammar. ^Many
students of Sanskrit, Hebrew, and other languages do not do
as much as this, and yet obtain a sufficiently firm grasp, for
their purposes, of the languages they study. The fact

^ Late Principal of the University of Sydney.

T

274 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES xii

seems to be, that if the sole end in learning a language be
to read it easily, with correct apprehension of its meaning,
the only means absolutely necessary is to read a great deal,
and take care that the meaning is correctly apprehended.
But perhaps the most singular assumption is, that it is an
essential part of the study of Greek and Latin to cultivate
the faculty of writing what ought to be poetry in these
tongues. No one of the large and increasing body of
students, who concentrate their energies upon other
ancient languages : no one of the professors, who elucidate
with the most subtle and delicate apprehension the most
obscure and difficult poems in these languages — ever
dreams of trying to develop such a faculty, except as the
merest pastime. The composition of verses, and of elegant
prose, may, or may not, be a desirable element of education;
but these exercises must be defended independently on
their own merits, not as forming an essential part of
instruction in Greek and Latin.

In the discussions on classical education, we find
debated, and decided generally, though not always, in the
same way, a preliminary question of great importance —
namely, whether education ought to be natural or artificial.
I use these as the most convenient words, but they require
some explanation. By a " natural " education is meant,
that which teaches a boy things in which, for any reason
whatever, he will be likely to take an interest in after life.
It may be, that for comm.ercial or professional reasons only,
he will be forced to take an interest in certain subjects ; in
that case his education must at some time, and to some
extent, begin to be commercial or professional, and not
liberal. One can hardly be content that any human being
should be trained entirely for his metier, and have no share of
what may be called a liberal education, — for every human
being will have at least so much leisure, as to make it im-
portant for himself and for others, that he should be taught to
use it rightly. But taking the term in its ordinary sense, and
applying it to those who are able to defer the period of
professional study till at least the close of boyhood, a liberal

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 275

educati(jii has fur its object to impart tliu hii^'hest culture, to
lead youths to the most full, vigorous, and harmonious exer-
cise, according to the best ideal attainable, of their active,
cognitive, and aesthetic faculties. What this ideal, this
culture may be, is not easy to determine ; but when we
have determined it, and analysed it into its component
parts, a natural education is evidently that which gives the
rudiments of these parts in whatever order is found the
best ; which familiarises a boy with the same facts that it
will be afterwards important for him to know ; makes him
imbibe the same ideas that are afterwards to form the
furniture of his mind ; imparts to him the same accom-
plishments and dexterities that he will afterwards desire to
possess. An artificial education is one which, in order that
a man may ultimately know one thing, teaches him another,
which gives the rudiments of some learning or accomplish-
ment, that the man in the maturity of his culture will be
content to forget. This is the extreme case, but in pro-
portion as the system of education approximates to this, in
proportion as the subjects in which the boy is instructed
occupy a small share of the thoughts of the cultivated man,
so far that system may be called artificial, rather than
natural. Now I think it must be allowed that, however
much, historically and actually, the onus inohandi may
rest on those who oppose an artificial system of education,
and wish to substitute a more natural one, yet, logically,
the position of the combatants is reversed, and the onus
prohancli rests on those who maintain the artificial system.
If a boy is to be taught things which, it is distinctly under-
stood, are to be forgotten, the good that they do him during
the time that they remain in his mind ought to be very
clearly demonstrated. In order to escape the severity of
this demonstration, the advocates of classical education are
sometimes inclined to make an obviously unfair assumption.
They assume that " training the mind " is a process
essentially incompatible with " imparting useful knowledge."
And no doubt the attack on classical education has
frequently been of so vulgar and ignorant a character, that

276 £SSA VS AND ADDRESSES Xli

this assumption might be, if not fairly, at least safely,
made. The clamour has been, ' useful knowledge at any
rate, and let the training of the mind take care of itself.'
Against assailants of this sort the defence of classics was, and
deserved to be, victorious. But the question is now posed in a
suitable form. It is now urged that the process of teaching
useful knowledge affords as valuable a training in method
as any other kind of teaching. However difficult it may be
to appraise exactly two different kinds of training, this task
distinctly devolves on those who would teach knowledge
that they admit to be useless.

But in the case of classics the uselessness is by no means
admitted. Though I think it may be fairly said that
classical education is supported chiefly as an artificial
system, it is supported partly as a natural system.
Though many of its advocates would urge that it ought to
be maintained for the training alone, even though the
knowledge imparted were all to be forgotten, the majority
urge also that this knowledge is in various ways of per-
manent value. In estimating the utility of the results of
classical study, we naturally range these results under two
heads : the knowledge of language gained, and the acquaint-
ance w^ith literature. The latter is the more splendid
result, that which affords more scope to the eloquence of
advocates, and is more impressive to the outside world ; but
the former is the more certain and universal acquisition,
and the one upon which most stress is laid by educators.
Whatever else is denied, the bitterest reformer cannot deny
that boys do acquire some knowledge of two dead languages.
We may therefore fitly commence our examination by
inquiring what this knowledge is worth.

In the first place, although the classicists are, on the
whole, the staunchest supporters of a liberal as opposed to a
professional education, they also point out that a knowledge
of Greek and Latin is useful professionally. This line of
argument has been taken by able and accomplished men ; ^

^ I may mention Sir W. Hamilton [Edinbunjh Review, October 1836. See his
Discussions on Philosophu, etc.), and tlie Kev. W. G. Clark [Cambridge Essays, 1855).

xn THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 277

but I am not sure that it has, ou the whole, been of service
to the cause. The professional advantages are found to be
unequally distributed among the different professions; and in
some cases there is an almost comical discrepancy between
the labour expended and the utility acquired. A clergyman
has to interpret the Greek Testament, and therefore it is
iiaportant that he should be able to read it in the original.
It might, perhaps, from a professional point of view, be
better that he should be familiarised a little less with the
Attic, and a little more with the Hellenistic dialect ; but
still Greek is, after all, Greek.' When, however, this point
is strongly pressed, we cannot avoid contrasting the great
anxiety shown that a clergyman should know Greek, with
the complacent indifference with which his total ignorance
of Hebrew is usually contemplated.

We may admit, again, that a lawyer — even an English
lawyer — ought to be able to read Eoman law in the
original. It is not clear that he is likely to advance
himself in his profession by the study, but it is for the
benefit of society that he should engage in it. He ought,
therefore, to be acquainted with Latin grammar, and a
certain portion of the Latin vocabulary. As to doctors,
can we gravely urge that they ought to understand the
language in which their prescriptions are written, and
that they find it instructive to read Galen and Hippocrates
in Greek ? ' To men of science, it is pointed out that
their ever-increasing technical terminology is systematically
formed from Greek and Latin words. This is true ; and
it is also true that a man of science might obtain a perfect
grasp of this terminology by means of a list of words that
he would learn in a day, and the use of a dictionary that he
might acquire in a week. It may be further remarked,

' Some writers seem to extend the necessity of learning Greek, for the purposes
of religion, much more indefinitely. " No religious nation," says Mr. Thring, "can
give up Greek." I do not suppose that Mr. Thring means more than that it is
desirable that there should be, besides the clergy, a body of learned persons
studying Greek (and Hebrew), so as to keep the study safe from any professional
narrowness. In this I should heartily agree. But it is a very aristocratic view
of religion that makes it depend in any degree on a knowledge of Greek.

* See Cambrid'je Esmys, 1S55.

278 £SSJ YS AND ADDRESSES Xli

that though a clergyman might conceivably dispense with
Latin, a learned clergyman, one from whom original
research in the field of ecclesiastical tradition is expected,
cannot dispense with it ; and generally every antiquarian
student, every one who inquires into the early history of
any European nation, or of any department of modern
science, will require to read Latin with ease. Science has
at length broken its connexion with what was so long the
learned language of Europe ; but it is still the key to what,
in contradistinction to science, is usually called erudition.
To sum up : Greek is of use (we may say indispensable) to
clergymen : Latin to lawyers and learned men. The
other infinitesimal fragments of utility may be disregarded
for our present purpose ; and finally, in all these cases, it is
only the power of reading that is of use, and not that of
writing the language.

Much more importance is claimed for the knowledge of
the classical languages as an element of a truly liberal
culture : as the best introduction to the study of Philology,
as including the best instruction in the universal principles
of Grammar, and as indispensable to a real knowledge of
English and of other modern languages. It seems rather
important to attach as clear and precise ideas as we can to
the words " Philology " and " Grammar " : as the looseness
with which they are sometimes used creates an inevitable con-
fusion of thought. Grammar is sometimes regarded as either
an introduction to, or an extension of, Logic. It is called
" the logic of common speech." ^ Now it would appear that
Grammar, in this sense, includes only a small portion of
Avhat is taught as the grammar of any particular languages.
It teaches some of the facts and laws of thought and
expression wluch Logic also teaches (both studies being
united by a common root), and also certain other facts and
laws, which the theory of syllogistic reasoning is not obliged
to notice, but which are equally universal, and — if I may
use the term without provoking a controversy — equally
necessary. Such are — the distinctions of substantives and

^ Report of the Public Schools Commission, published in 1864.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 279

adjectives, of transitive and intransitive verbs, the existence
and classification of the relations expressed by the other
parts of speech, the distinctions of tenses and voices, of
principal and subordinate, declarative and conditional
sentences, etc. It is clearly impracticable to separate this
part of any particular grammar from the rest : because it is
difticult to say what is, and what is not, universal : since
each man is biassed in favour of the distinctions which his
mother tongue brings into prominence ; and since there
are many distinctions, which, when they are once pointed
out, we not only see to be true, but cannot conceive how
we could ever have overlooked. The most philosophical
branch of Philology is that which busies itself with such
real but not indispensable (what we may call potentially
universal) distinctions of thought : collecting them when
they lie scattered in the grammar of particular languages,
and clearly defining, arranging, and comparing them. This
seems a study both extremely interesting in itself, and
intimately connected with — we may even say a branch of
— mental philosoi)hy. And, no doubt, in learning Latin
or Greek many such distinctions are taught to an English
boy, of which the closest observation of his mother tongue
would leave him ignorant. But it cannot be denied that
nine-tenths of his time is occupied in storing up facts which
in no sense belong to universal grammar : in learning, not new
shades and distinctions of thought, but simply special ways
of expressing old shades and distinctions, facts which are so
patent in his own language, that Latin instruction is an
extremely tedious and circuitous process of teaching him to
observe them. In learning the usage of a new language
we always find some things which seem to us convenient
and rational, and which we should like if possible to incor-
porate into our own : but the greater part of what we learn
appears accidental and arbitrary, while a good deal we
regard as provokingly useless and troublesome. There is
probably always a scientific explanation of this last, as the
result of ages of growth, but there is often no philosophical
explanation of it as belonging to a present instrument of

28o ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

thought. When, therefore, we are told that " the principles
of universal grammar which are necessary as the foundation
of all philosophical acquaintance with every language, carry
the young scholar forward till his mind is deeply imbued
with the literature,"^ etc., we see what large deductions
must be made from this statement. A boy does no doubt
learn principles of universal grammar which he will always
desire to retain : but he learns them along with a large
assortment of formulae which, when he has once ceased to
study Latin, he will be willing as soon as possible to forget.
By Philology is generally understood the study of
language historically, of its changes, its laws of growth and
development. It deals chiefly with the vocabulary and
accidence of languages, as distinguished from the philoso-
phical study of Grammar, of which I have spoken, that
deals chiefly with the syntax. It is a study to which the
thorough learning of either Latin or Greek forms an
excellent introduction ; but Latin from its relation to
English possesses peculiar advantages in this respect ; and
these advantages would be much increased if French were
learnt along with Latin, and every opportunity taken of
pointing out the mutual relations of the three languages,
Latin, French, and English. No cultivated man can fail to
feel the interest and charm of Philology, or would wish to
say a word in its disparagement. Its materials are abun-
dant, its processes productive, the aid it affords to History
and Anthropology most valuable. Still it must be classed
among the sciences that are studied from " pure curiosity " ^
alone ; and however noble an impulse we feel this to be,
however true it is that any great increase of its force marks
a step in human progress, yet such studies must be ranked,
in importance to society, below sciences like Physics,
Chemistry, Astronomy, animal and vegetable Physiology,
which (besides the gratification they afford to curiosity)
have had, and promise still to have, the greatest influence
on the material welfare of the human race. And if we cannot

^ Dr. Moberly.

2 I use the word in the more elevated signification which the corresponding
term in French bears.

XII 'J HE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 281

(as we certainly cannot) include all the sciences in the
curriculum of general education, it seems (from this point
of view) that those studied from pure curiosity are precisely
those that ought to be left to students of special bias and
faculty, e\ery care being taken to yield to this bias and
foster this faculty. If then it appear desirable on other
grounds that boys should learn Latin (or Greek), the fact
that they will be thereby initiated into the study of
Philology is a real additional advantage ; but taken by
itself it does not constitute a very strong reason for learn-
ing either language.

We are told, however, in the strongest and most
unqualified terms, that we cannot understand our own
language without a knowledge of Latin and Greek : and
this in two ways — both in respect of its grammar, and in
respect of its vocabulary. This claims to be so cogent a
proof of the direct utility of these ancient languages, that
it deserves our most serious consideration. We shall find,
I think, that it has been urged by the advocates of classics
with more than usual exaggeration. The limit of extrava-
sjance seems to be reached in the following utterance of
Professor Lilians (which is quoted with approbation in the
Eeport of the Public Schools Commission) : " It (English)
is, besides, so uncompounded in its structure, so patchwork-
like in its composition, so broken down into particles, so
scanty in its inflections, and so simple in its fundamental
rules of construction, that it is next to impossible to have a
true grammatical notion of it, or to form any correct ideas of
grammar and philology at all, without being able to compare
and contrast it with another language, and that other of
a character essentially different." ^^^ly the rules of a
language should be hard to teach because they are simple,
because the character of the language is analvtical and
not synthetical, because in it the relations of words and
sentences are expressed almost entirely by particles,
without the aid of inflection : why in such a language it
should be " impossible " to convey " correct ideas," not only
of the facts and principles of universal grammar (which are

282 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

ex vi termini ^ common to all languages), but also of the
formulae in which its special usage is summed up, is not
attempted to be shown. That a person who had learnt
English grammar only would have a very limited idea of
grammar is undeniable, but it is obvious that his idea might
be correct as far as it went. The learning of the rules of Latin
usage, would, no doubt, sharpen our perception of the rules of
English usage ; and this indirect utility (which belongs rather
to the second part of our subject) I do not wish to undervalue.
And it may be advantageous to excite a boy's interest in the
laws of language first, by making him feel that, without the
observation of these laws, he cannot obtain the results that
are demanded from him. But to assert that Grammar could
not be taught analytically, instead of synthetically, seems
contrary to common sense and experience alike."

When we take the vocabulary, as well as the grammar,
of English into our view, we find still more startling state-
ments as to the difficulty of mastering our mother tongue.
Mr. Thring tells us that " it is scarcely possible to speak
the English language with accuracy or precision, without a
knowledge of Latin and Greek." " It is not possible to
have a masterly freedom in the use of words, or a critical
judgment capable of supporting its decision by proof without
such knowledge." These are the words of a vigorous
writer, and their substance I find stated, though less
extravagantly, by several others. They seem to me well to
illustrate the ignorance of the real nature of language, and
the laws of its apprehension, in which our long tutelage to
Latin and Greek has left us.

1 As the word universal is generally used, I have indicated another application
of it, in the signification, as I have expressed it, of " potentially universal."

■^ Some persons have a vague idea that it is not worth while trying to teach
English and some other modern languages systematically, because they are
"hybrid" ; as if a language could be "hybrid" in its grammar, however mixed
in its vocabulary, aud as if Latin was not hybrid, in the same sense, though not
to the same extent, as English. Others cannot divest themselves of the notion
that familiar phenomena must be simple, and seem almost irritated when shown
how varied and complex are the rules of using their vernacular. For instance,
a French writer complains "I'on rafline la gr-ammaire fraucaise : on questionne
un enfant . . . sur des distinctions subfiles auxquelles Pascal et Bossuet
n'ont jamais songe " : as if Vii-gil ever thought of a tertiary predicate, or
Thucydides of the peculiar usage of ottws m';.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 283

The fact is, that the study of Latin (for Greek, except in
respect of scientific terminology, has much less to do with
the question, and would hardly have been placed on a par
with Latin here, but for the hasty and random way in which
the stock argumerits on this suljject are continually repeated)
cannot tell us what the English language is — it can only
help us to understand how it has come to be what it is. In
order to learn to speak English with accuracy and precision,
we have but one rule to follow, — to pay strict attention to
usage. The authority of usage, the usage of cultivated
persons, is in all disputed points paramount. The history
of language is the history of continual change, and just as
in learning Latin and Greek (or any other language), the
tiro finds a knowledge of derivation frequently puzzling and
misleading, the usage of words having often strayed from
their original signification by long routes that can be only
conjecturally traced : so in the case of words that we have
derived from the Latin, the meaning of the Latin term has
often been so modified, that it would be the merest pedantry
to pay attention to it. No doubt we are all liable to make
mistakes in our own language, especially in the case of terms
which we meet with so rarely that the natural process by
which we learn the rest of our mother tongue cannot com-
pletely operate. And as these words are often derived from
the Latin, a Latin scholar has a certain additional protection
against such mistakes : he will naturally fall into them
rather less than another man who pays no particular
attention to the subject. But he is liable to fall into a
different set of errors if he ever attempts, as pedants have
attempted, to make his knowledge of Latin override English
usage. Mr. Thring regrets the loss of the original meaning
in the case of words like " edify " and " tribulation " ; and
no doubt the historic interest in the derivation of these
words is very great, and the non-classical reader has
every reason to be grateful to books like those of
Archbishop Trench, that open this new field of interest to
him. But for a man in search of accuracy and precision,
seriously to try and shackle himself by attention to these

284 ^SSA YS AND ADDRESSES xil

lost siguificatious — to refuse, for instance, to use the word
" tribulation " except \\'hen the idea of " threshing " seemed
suitable, would be pedantic frivolity. To the masters of
English style, natural instinct and unconscious tact as to the
living force of language is the chief and primary guide ;
while English dictionaries and English classics are the only
corrective and court of appeal in case this tact breaks down.
In short, the application of Latin to the historical interpre-
tation of English is a branch of Philology — a most enter-
taining and instructive branch — which I should be glad to
place within the reach of every one, but which must be
regarded, like the rest of Philology, as an intellectual luxury.
When we are threatened, that, without a knowledge of Latin
and Greek, our language would be to us " a strange
collection of inexpressive symbols," ^ we are at first alarmed ;
but on reflection, we perceive that our verbal signs would
become " inexpressive," in the sense that they would only
express the things signified ; and the menace does not seem
so terrible. We reflect also, that the historical study of
language is of very modern growth, and that Greek and
Latin must have been " strange collections of inexpressive
symbols " to the writers of the master-pieces and models
which we are invited to cherish."

Some exception to what I have said ought to be made
in the case of scientific nomenclature ; because, as this is
the one part of our language of which the growth is
deliberate, and determined by the learned — not natural, and
determined by the mass of the nation — it has a living and

^ Edinburgh licvieiv, cxx.

^ Mr. Joseph Payne, in a pamphlet remarkable for sobriety of statement,
breadth of view, and close observation of the educational process, brings forward
a somewhat difl'ereut argument to show the advantage a Latin scholar has in
reading English. He quotes several uses of English words derived from the
Latin, in our older authors (such as 'civil,' 'resentment,' 'prevent'), which
a classical scholar understands at a glance, but which puzzle or mislead a man
uneducated in classics. But these uses ought to be found in dictionaries, and
noticed by commentators. Every man reading older authors in his vernacular
ought to know that a part of their vocabulary is archaic, and ought to be on the
watch for the archaic terms. I cannot think that the trouble is verj^ considerable
of acquiring as complete an acquaintance with these archaisms as is necessary
for literary purposes. A knowledge of Latin would only save a part of this
trouble ; much more would be done by the direct teaching of English literature
which I advocate in this essay.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 285

progressive connexion with Latin and Greek which no other
part of the Language has. But even liere it is necessary to
make distinctions. It seems too sweeping to say that " no
man can expound any subject-matter with scientific precision
unless he is acquainted with the ctijmolugies of the terms he
employs." ^ The newer terms of scientific phraseology have
been formed generally in a systematic way, upon fixed
principles, and we may assume that, for the future, all
additional technical terms will be so formed. Therefore,
though it is not absolutely indispensable to the scientific
student to possess the key to this phraseology (as he can
learn the meaning of each word from its usage and place
in the system to which it belongs), it will save him a great
deal of useless trouble if he does possess it. But in the
case of many of the older terms of science, formed irregularly
or on false principles, a knowledge of the derivation will be
useless or misleading. They have often great interest for
the historical student : to the scientific man, the sooner they
become mere counters the better. I have already indicated
with what ease men of science might learn all the Greek
and Latin words necessary to give them the required key.
Instruction in such words ought to form a distinct part of
the direct teaching of English, to which all these arguments
for learning Latin and Greek seem to point as an educa-
tional desideratum.

I have said that Latin was important chiefly with a view
to the historical study of our own language, and not in order
to obtain a complete grasp of it, as a living instrument of
thought. It ought to be added, that though Latin forms
one element in this historical study, it forms only one
element, and that the other elements — and, indeed, we may
say the study itself — have been surprisingly neglected in
our educational system. Hardly in our Universities does
any one dream of learning Early English, and though we
teach some French and German in our schools, we teach
them merely colloquially and practically, without any
reference to their historical development or their linguistic

^ Cainbridge Essays, 1855.

286 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES

XII

relations. This neglect (which some efforts have been made
to repair during late years) will be commented upon more
in detail elsewhere in this volume.-^ I have referred to the
point here chiefly because it affords an example how the
arguments for learning classics, being " made to order," are
found, as far as they are worth anything, to prove more
than they were intended to prove, and to support, not the
existing course of instruction, but something of which that
would form only one part.

In the eyes of many persons, however, the most important
of the direct utilities supposed to be conveyed by a classical
education is still that for which a classical education was
originally instituted — acquaintance with the Greek and Latin
literatures. In the first place, just as the ancient languages
were called a master-key to unlock all modern European
tongues, so the ancient writings are said to be indispensable
to the understanding of all the best modern books. " If,"
says Dr. Donaldson, " the old classical literature were swept
away, the moderns would in many cases become unintelligible,
and in all lose most of their characteristic charms." A
moment's reflection will show this to be a most strange and
palpable exaggeration. For instance, ]\Iilton is the most
learned of our poets : nay, as a poet he is generally said
to be obtrusively learned — learned to a fault. Yet how
grotesque an absurdity it seems to assert that Paradise
Lost would " lose most of its characteristic charm " to a
reader who did not understand the classical allusions and
similes. The real state of the case seems analogous to that
which we have just discussed. A knowledge of classics is
indispensable, not to the general reader, but to the historical
student of modern authors : without it he can enter into
their ideas and feelings, but not the antecedents which
determined those ideas and feelings. He cannot reproduce
the intellectual milieu in wdiich they lived ; he can under-
stand what they said, but not how they came to say it.
But for the general reader, who has no wish to go so deep,
classical knowledge does not do much more than save some

' [Tlie volume in whicli this essay originally appeared. — Ed.]

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 287

trouble of referring to dictionaries and histories, and some
ignorance of quotations which is rather conventionally than
really inconvenient. i\Iany allusions to the classics explain
themselves ; many others are explained by the context ; and
the number of those that remain incomprehensible to a
person who has read histories of Greece and liorae, and
knows as much about the classics as he must inevitably
pick up from a good course of P^nglisli literature, is not very
considerable. We may grant that " literature can only be
studied thoroughly by going to its source." ^ But the con-
ception conveyed in this word thoroughly assumes an exalted
standard of reading, which, if carried out consistently,
would involve an overwhelming encyclopedic study of
literature. For the modern authors whom the stream of
fame has floated down to us, and whom we do read, contain
numerous allusions to preceding and contemporary authors
whom we do not think of reading, and require, in order to
be thoroughly understood, numerous illustrations from pre-
ceding and contemporary history which we have no leisure
to procure. We content ourselves with the fragmentary
liuhts of a casual commentator. I do not see that it would
be so dreadful if classical allusions were apprehended by
the general reader in the same twilight manner. It may
be very desirable that we should read everything more
accurately and thoroughly ; but let us have one weight and
one balance. The historical study of literature, for the
completeness of which I allow classics to be indispensable,
is a most interesting and improving pursuit, and one which
I hope will gain votaries yearly. But, after all, the branch
of this study which seems to have the greatest utility, if the
space we can allot to it is limited, is surely that which
explains to us (as far as is possible) the intellectual life of
our own age ; which teaches us the antecedents of the ideas
and feelings among which, and in which, we shall live and
move. Such a course, at this moment of history, would
naturally contain a much larger modern than ancient
element : it would be felt in framing it more imperatively

1 Dr. Temple.

288 ^5^,-^ VS AND ADDRESSES xii

necessary to represent French, German, and English thought
of recent centuries, than to introduce us to any of the older
influences that combined to deterndne our immediate
intellectual antecedents.

But the intrinsic value of Latin and Greek literatures
seems to many to outweigh all other considerations. It is
true that these literatures are no longer supposed to contain
all knowledge ; even their claim to give the best teaching
in mental, ethical, and political philosophy, the last relic
of their old prestige, is rapidly passing away : still they
rmdeniably convey, with great vividness, a knowledge of
what the Greeks and Eomans were, how they felt, thought,
spoke, and acted ; and some persons of great eminence
consider it of the highest importance that Greek and Roman
life in all its phases should be kept continually before the
mind of the modern world. ^ Persons of very opposite views
agree in inculcating this. Clerical advocates tell us that to
feel the real force of Christianity, we must acquaint our-
selves with the vices of the ancient world, and learn how
impotent, ethically speaking, the unassisted human intellect
is ; while enthusiasts of a different stamp point to the narrow
rigidity, the withering pettiness, the complacent humdrum
of our modern life, and urge that ancient literature teaches
just that passionate love of country, love of freedom, love of
knowledge, love of beauty, for which they pant. I do not
wish to undervalue either kind of instruction, but I cannot
say that I see the absolute want of either : 1 cannot but
think that if we were debarred from Latin and Greek, a
careful teaching of modern history and a careful selection
of modern literature would supply our youth with all the
stimulus, example, and warning that they require. Further,
even if it be granted that we cannot dispense with the
lessons of the ancient world, it is easy to exaggerate the
disadvantages of learning them through the medium of modern
languages. We must remember how many excellent
translations we have of ancient authors, some of which

^ This has been urged by Mr. Mill with his usual inipressiveness, and is illus-
trated in a beautiful essay of Villemaiu's, called Demosthenes et le General Foy.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 289

take rank a.s English classics ; and how much of our very
highest historical ability has been devoted to this period of
history. Of course, every student who takes up the period
as a speciality, will desire to know the languages thoroughly
well, in order to have an opinion of value upon disputed
points ; and even the general reader always feels the
additional vividness, and, therefore, the additional pleasure
and stinnilus and improvement, that a knowledge of the
original gives. But it would be absurd to say that an
Englishman (particularly if he can read French and
German) has any difficulty in accurately and thoroughly
informing himself what sort of people the Greeks and
Romans were. And it might, I think, be truly asserted,
however paradoxically, that even under our classical
system, the greater part of the vivid impressions that most
boys receive of the ancient world are derived from English
works ; from Pope's Homer, Macaulay's Lays, the English
Plutarch (if they have the good fortune to get hold of that
delightful book), and afterwards from Arnold, Grote, and
Merivale.

But the aesthetic importance of ancient literature is even
more insisted on than the value of its moral teaching. If
we do not teach a boy Latin and Greek, it is said, we cut
him off from the highest literary enjoyment, and we prevent
him from developing his taste by studying the best models.
It would avail little to call in question (had I space and
inclination to do so) the surpassing excellence of ancient
literature. For my present purpose, I must regard this
point as decided by an overwhelming majority of persons of
culture. But it will not be denied that in the English,
French, and German languages ^ there is a sufhciency of
good literature to till the leisure of a person engaged in any
active calling, a suMciency of works calculated to give a
high kind of enjoyment, and to cultivate, very adequately,
the literary taste. And if such a person was ever visited
by a painful hankering after the time-honoured volumes

^ I ouly omit Italian becaxise it is rarely taught at schools, and I am not
prepared to recommend that it should be more generally taught.

U

290 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES xii

that were sealed to him, he might console himself Vjy taking
note how often his contemporaries who had enjoyed a com-
plete classical education, were in the habit of taking down
these masterpieces from their shelves. For I cannot help
thinking that classical literature, in spite of its enormous
prestige, has very little attraction for the mass even of
cultivated persons at the present day. I wish statistics
could be obtained of the amount of Latin and Greek read in
any year (except for professional purposes), even by those
who have gone through a complete classical curriculum.
From the information that I have been able privately to
obtain, I incline to think that such statistics, when com-
pared with the fervent admiration with which we all still
speak of tlie classics, upon every opportunity, would be found
rather startling. I am willing to admit that those who
have a genuine preference for the classics are persons of the
purest, severest, and most elevated literary taste ; and I
cannot conceive that these relics will ever cease to be
reverently studied by those who aspire to be artists in
language. But this by no means proves that they ought
to occupy the place they do in the training of our youth.
" It is admitted," says a Quarterly reviewer (summing up
very fairly the Eeport of the Public Schools Commission),
" that education must be literary, and that of literary
education, classical learning must be the backbone."
Whether I should agree with this or not, depends upon
the sense in which " backbone " is interpreted : at present
classical learning forms, so to say, the whole skeleton ; and
the result is, that, to a very large number of boys, what is
supposed to be a purely literary education, what is attacked
as being exclusively a literary education, is, paradoxical as
it may sound, hardly a training in literature at all. For
surely it is essential to the idea of such training that it
should have some stimulating power ; that it should inspire a
fondness for reading, educe the capacity for enjoying eloquence
and poetry, communicate an interest in ideas ; and not merely
guide and chasten such taste and interest if they already
exist. The instruments of literary training ought to be

XII rilE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 291

not only absolutely admirable, but relatively attractive.
If we wish to educate persons to enjoy any kind of art,
I do not say that we are not to put before them things
hard to appreciate, but we must certainly put before them
also things that they will find easy to appreciate. I feel sure
that if the schoolmaster is ever to be, as I think he ought
to be, a missionary of culture, — if he is to develop, to any
extent, the icsthetic faculties of other boys than those who
have been brouglit ujj in literary homes, and have acquired,
before they come into his hands, a taste for English classics,
— he must make the study of modern literature a substantive
and important part of his training. It may be said that
some part of ancient literature, especially Greek, is ever
young and fresh ; and no doubt, in most good schools, some
boys are made to feel this, and their path becomes flowery
in consequence. But the majority want, to stimulate their
literary interest, something that can be read with more ease,
in larger portions : something, moreover, that has a visible
connexion with the life of their age, which exercises so
powerful a control over their imaginations. I do not
know that, if difficulties of language were put aside, some
ancient historians, such as Herodotus, might not be more
attractive to boys from their freshness and naiveU, than
any modern ones. But just when the difficulties of lan-
guage are beginning to be got over, boys cease to relish this
naivete. They want something that speaks to their opening
minds and hearts, and gives them ideas. And this they are
seldom able to find to a great extent in the ancient works
they read. This is true, I know, of some at least among the
minority who study classics at school and college with all
the stimulus of uniform success ; much more is it true of
the majority who fail or are but indifferently successful.
If such boys get imbued with literary culture at all, it is
not owing to the classical system ; it is due to home
influence, to fortunate school friendships, to the extra-
professional care of some zealous schoolmaster. In this
way they are taught to enjoy reading that instructs and
refines, and escape the fate of the mass, who temper small

292 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xii

compulsory sips of Virgil, Sophocles, Tacitus, and Thucy-
dides, with large voluntary draughts of James, Ainsworth,
Lever, and the translated Dumas.^

I wish this occasional and irregular training to be made
as general and systematic as possible ; and I feel sure that
whatever classical teaching was retained would become
more efficacious by the introduction of the new element ;
and this not merely because every new mental stimulus
that can be applied to a boy is immediately felt over the
whole range of his work, but because the boy would gain
a special motive for learning Latin and Greek, which he
had hitherto been without, and the want of which had made
his studies (to use the words of a Quarterly reviewer) " a
prolonged nightmare." He might not at once begin to
enjoy the classics : his progress might be still so slow, and
his attention so much concentrated on the form of his
authors, as to allow him but a feeble interest in their
substance. But he would be cheered by the hope of this
interest becoming daily stronger : he might distinctly look
forward to the time when Sophocles would be as dear to
him as Shakespeare, when Cicero and Tacitus would stir
him like Burke and Macaulay. Again, some modern litera-
ture has a direct power of revealing to us the charm of
ancient literature, of enabling us to see and feel in the older
masterpieces what the diU of each generation could see and
feel for themselves when the language was once understood,
but what for the mass requires an interpreter. Some, for
instance, would perhaps be ashamed to confess how shallow
an appreciation they had of Greek art till they read Goethe
and Schiller, Lessing and Schlegel. Xo doubt there are
boys who find out the beauties for themselves, just as there
are some to whom it would be a feast to be turned into a
room full of fragments of antique sculpture. But our system
is framed for the mass, and I feel convinced that the mass
require, to appreciate both the one and the other, a careful
preparation, the most important part of which would be

^ I must be pardoned for using the names familiar to my generation. I have
no doubt there are other favourites now.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 293

supplied by a proper introduction into education of the
element I am advocating,^

Further, I am disposed to think that the literary educa-
tion of even the best boys is liable to suffer from the narrow-
ness of the existing system. In the first place, there is a
great danger in the predominance that classics are made to
gain over their minds, by the indiscriminate eulogy and
unreserved exaltation of the ancient authors en masse,^ which
they frequently hear. They are told, dogmatically, that
these authors " are perfect standards of criticism in every-
thing that belongs to mere perfect form," that " the laws that
regulate external beauty can only be thoroughly known
through them," tliat " they utterly condemn all false orna-
ment, all tinsel, all ungraceful and unshapely work " ; and
the more docile of them are apt to believe these dogmas to
a degree that warps and oppresses the natural development
of their critical faculties. The truth is, that the best
classical models only exemplify certain kinds of perfection of
form, that several writers that boys read exemplil'y no parti-
cular perfection at all, and that some illustrate excellently
well the precise imperfections that the enthusiast I have
quoted enumerates." How can it be said, for instance, that
there is no " false ornament " in JEschvIus, no " tinsel " in
Ovid, no " ungracefulness " in Thucydides, no " unshapely
work " in Lucretius ? In what sense can we speak of
finding " perfect form " and " perfect standards of criticism "
in such inartificial writers as Herodotus (charming as he is)
or Xenophon ? Tliere is perhaps no modern thinker, with
equal sensitiveness to beauty of expression, who (in those

^ Tlie Quarterly Review, a journal that does not often clamour for rash and
premature reforms, saj's (vol. cxvii. p. 418) : —

" Much more is it a thing to wonder at and be ashamed of, that, with such a
literature as ours, the Eudis^h lesson is still a desideratum in nearly all our great
places of education, and that the future gentry of the country are left to pick up
their mother tongue from tlie periodical works of fiction wliich are the bane of our
youth, and the dread of every conscientious schoolmaster."

We may add that the question whether native literature is to be systematically
taught, has long been decided in the aflirin.ative both in France and in Gernnmy.

- I allow that there are some exceptions to this statement ; for instance, one
of the most exquisite artists in language, Euripides, has been perhaps unduly
depreciated. Still I think I have fairlv described the general tendency.

=* Mr. Thriug.

294 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

works of his which liave been preserved to us) has so
neglected and despised form as Aristotle. Auy artist in
words may learn much from Cicero, and much from Tacitus ;
but the profuse verbosity of the one, and the perpetual
mannerism of the otlier, have left the marks of their mis-
direction on English literature. I am simply repeating
what are now the commonplaces of cultivated criticism,
which can no longer be charged, on the whole, with being
servile towards antiquity ; but education is less emancipated,
and as long as these sweeping statements of the perfectness
of ancient literature are reiterated, a demand for careful
limitation seems necessary.

But secondly, it can hardly be said that the artistic
training which might be given by means of ancient litera-
ture (whicli I should be sorry to seem to undervalue) is
given under our present educational system. A few attain
to it self-taught : and even these are liable to all the
errors and extravagances of such self-education. But what
effort is made to teach literary criticism to the great
majority in our schools (or even in our universities) ? Are
they encouraged to judge as wholes the works that they so
minutely analyse ? to attain to any synthetical apprehension
of their excellence ? The point on which the wisest admirers
of ancient art lay most stress is the completely organic
structure of its products and the instinct for complex and
finely articulated harmony that is felt to have guided the
production. But in so far as schoolboys (with a few
exceptions) are taught to feel the beauty of these products
at all, it is the beauty of parts, and even of minute parts,
that they are taught to feel. And, from the mode in which
these beauties are studied for purposes of composition it is
not only a partial, but generally a perverted appreciation
that is attained. In the effort to prepare his mind for
composition, a boy is led to contemplate his authors under
conditions as unfavourable to the development of pure taste
and sound criticism as can possibly be conceived. He is
led to break the diction of great masters into fragments for
the purpose of mechanical ornamentation, generally clumsy

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 295

and often grotesque. His memory (as an advocate exultingly
phrases it) is " stored with precious things " : that is, it is
stored with long words, sounding epithets, imposing circum-
locutions, salient extravagances and mannerisms : so that
his admiration is directed to a great extent to what is
hizarrc, fantastic, involved, over-decorated in the admirable
models he studies : and even of what is really good he is apt
to spoil his delicacy of apprehension, by the habit of imitating
and introducing it unseasonably. I am aware how much
careful training may do to correct these vicious tendencies :
but they are likely to exist in overwhelming force as long
as the imitative instinct is so prematurely developed as it is
now, and applied to a material over which so imperfect a
command has been gained.

This forms a convenient transition to another part of my
subject : the examination in detail of the existing instruction
in Latin and Greek, regarded primarily as a species of
mental gymnastics, a method of developing the intellectual
faculties : without reference to the permanent utility of the
knowledge conveyed. When, however, the methods of
classical instruction are spoken of as a " fine training," the
word " training " may be used in two senses, which it is
necessary carefully to distinguish. Sometimes, merely a
rhetorical training is intended ; the boy, it is said, is
taught not only a special dexterity in the use of particular
languages (his own included), but a complete grasp of lau-
suaire in general: he learns to dominate the instrument of
thought instead of being dominated by it : " his mind is
enabled to conceive form as an object of thought distinct
from the subject-matter, and vice versd, and hence generally
to judge of the application of the one to the other in litera-
ture, with a degree of accuracy which is never attained
except by those thus trained." ^ Sometimes, again, it is
claimed that classics supply a complete general training to
the mind : that, in the words of ]\I. Cournot : " " Puen ne se
prete mieux que I'etude gramma ticale et litteraire d'une
langue au developpement graduel et methodique de toutes

^ Rev. W. G. Clark. - De I' Instruction publique.

296 ESSA VS AND ADDRESSES xii

les facultes intellectuelles de I'enfance et de I'adolescence.
Cette etude exerce la memoire, la sagacite, le gout, le
jugement sous toutes les formes, logiques ou non logiques,
c'est-a-dire, soumises ou non a des classifications, a des
deductions et a des regies precises. Elle forme Thomme
toute entier." It will be convenient to take the narrower
of these pretensions first : and examine whether composition
in the ancient languages, and translation from them into
our own, appear to form a complete course of instruction in
the art of speech.

I think that few who have considered the subject can
deny, that translation from a Latin or Greek author into
Englisli prose, under the guidance of a competent teacher,
is a very vigorous and efficacious training in the use of our
language, and gives very considerable insight into the nature
of speech, and its relation to thought and fact. Our only
doubt will be, whether the training and insight is not, by
itself, one-sided ; whether we do not require something else
as a supplement, to give us a complete view and a complete
grasp of language. " The art," says Dr. Moberly, " of
throwing English with facility into sentence-moulds made
in another language . . . what is this but to learn to have
the choicest, most varied, words and sentence-frames of our
language constantly at command, so that, whatever varieties
of thought and meaning present themselves to a man's mind,
he will never be at a loss for expressions to convey them
with an accuracy at once forcible and subtle to the mind of
his hearers." This is no over-statement : but it leaves out
of sidit the dilemma in which even the matured scholar,
and therefore infinitely more the tiro, is perpetually placed
between exact English and elegant English, between the set
of words that represents the precise meaning of the origi-
nal (and is endurable in the vernacular), and the nearest
English phrase that can be called tasteful. A schoolmaster
must inevitably sacrifice accuracy or style, and he, as a rule,
wisely determines to sacrifice style for the time. But if
style is sacrificed here, it becomes desirable to cultivate it
carefully in another part of the education. The result of

xii THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 297

laboriously forcing our language into " moulds " unnatural
to it, will not be to give us an easy flow of it in natural
moulds. Even when the process is carried further, as in
the case of the more advanced students, and style is gradu-
ally more and more regarded, still the translator's dexterity
remains a special dexterity, and does not amount to the
whole art of composition. Translation is continually strain-
ing and stretching our faculty of language in many ways,
and necessarily imparts to it a high degree of a certain
kind of vigour ; but the i)vecise power that will be of
most use to us for the purposes of life it does not, by
itself, give, and it even causes us to form habits adverse to
the ultimate acquirement of that power. Teaching the art
of Rhetoric by means of translation only, is like teaching
a man to climb trees in order that he may be an elegant
dancer.^

I have allowed the efficacy of translation in teaching
English expression ; it must also be said that it develops
very sufficiently the sense of one kind of excellence of form
in all the more intelligent and appreciative minds : I mean
of minute excellence, the beauty of single words and phrases.
It does this simply because it enforces a close and reverent
examination of masterpieces. "We are apt to neglect many
excellences in writings that we read with ease, simply
because we read them with ease ; and as we are forced in
these times to read much hastily, we find some trouble
in forming a habit of reading worthy things as they
deserve. The best training for such a habit is to read
fine compositions in some foreign language. But it must
be remarked that it is only at a certain stage in a youth's

^ The conclusions of a thorongli-going advoc;itf of classical eihic.ition in
(rermany art^ as follows : " Das Uebersetzen der autiken Meisterwerke ist eine
Scliule fiir die Gewandtheit und Geilietrenbeit des Ausdrncks. wie es keiue
zweite gibt. Die Vcrirrinig aber, zu der diese Uebungen verkehit betrit-ben
fiihren kcinnten, die steife Naclibildung des griechiselien und rdiiiisclien Sj>rach-
geistcs, mit Verletzung des Deutschen, diese Verirrung winl verhiltet durcb
das Leseu unserer deutschen Klassiker. . . . Uni den Schiiler ziir richtigen
Ordnung der Gedanken anzuleiten, werden zu den Uebersetzungen aus den
alteu Versucbe in eignen deutschen Ausarbeitungen liiuzutreten niiissen." —
Raiimer, Oeschichte der Fddagogik. And this seems to me a well-balanced view
of the question.

298 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xii

progress that Latin and Greek begins to give this training.
In many cases the boy (and even the undergraduate) never
becomes able to extract and feed on the beauties of his
authors. A mind exhausted with linguistic struggles is not
in a state to receive delicate literary impressions : instead
of being penetrated with the subtle and simple graces of
form, it is filled to the brim with thoughts of gender,
quantity, tertiary predicates, uses of the subjunctive
mood.

The training in sesthetic perception is thus by no means
general, and it is, as I have before pointed out, very incom-
plete. But such as it is, it seems to me to be conveyed
much more satisfactorily in the process of translation,
than in that which is generally supposed to teach it, com-
position in Greek and Latin. We are told that a boy
" cannot have appreciated the delicacy, taste, or the feeling
of his models in literature, if he have not in some degree
learned, from his own clumsy efforts and occasional better
successes, at how almost immeasurable distance they stand
from the rude rough things which otherwise he might be
led to compare with tliem." I have spoken of the false
and distorted view of literary excellence that this gives. A
thoughtful boy feels the hardship of being made to imitate
persons who have so unfair an advantage over him as the
writers in a language now dead. An ambitious boy often
loses all delicacy and truth of taste in the effort to assimi-
late all " useful " words and phrases which, however bad in
taste they may be, will at least decorate and set off his own
" rude rough things." The assertion that masterpieces can-
not be appreciated without an effort to imitate them seems
to me contrary to common sense, to our experience in
our own laim'uao-e, to our universal practice in studving
foreign literatures, and to the analogy of other arts.^ And
the imitation that is encouraged at schools in the process
of verse-writing is the very worst sort of imitation ; it is

^ Tliere is some reason for Tirgiiig that a counoisseiir in painting should have
handled the pencil and the brush. But this is surely not in order to improve his
taste, but to teach him closeness and correctness of observation, without which, in
so directly imitative an art, a sense of beautiful effect may be misleading.

xn THE THEORY Of CLASSICAL EDUCATION 299

something which, if it were proposed in respect of any other
models than these, we should at once reject as intolerably-
absurd.

There is much more to be said for the exercise of writing
elegant Latin prose, though I am not sure that it is not
prematurely attempted in our present system of education.
I do not think, as I have before said, that even this accom-
plishment is at all essential to the most accurate and com-
plete knowledge of the Latin language. It cannot be too
much insisted, that the faculty of reading a language and
that of composing in it are almost entirely distinct, and
have to be acquired separately. A development of the
latter faculty tends, no doubt, to improve the former to a
certain degree ; but it is a very roundabout way of improving
it ; if our object is to learn to read and translate, the time
would be much better spent in reading and translating. I
quite admit that by simply reading, without much sustained
effort to translate, a language so remote from our own in its
idiom as the Latin, a habit of loose apprehension is formed,
and not only the refinements of expression are lost, but
many mistakes are made in the substantial signification of
sentences. But I should urge that written translation
carefully looked over is, as a remedy for lax habits of
reading, very far superior to any amount of composition.
Perhaps also too much has been made of the rhetorical
utility of writing Latin prose : and too little of the logical
training given to maturer students by the process of trans-
lation from English into Latin. The close and prolonged
meditation over familiar words and expressions, which the
effort to reproduce their full substance in an alien and ditiicult
tongue entails, imparts a very delicate discrimination of the
exact import of these current phrases. Moreover, the effort
to write so extremely synthetical a language as the Latin
is very beneficial to an Englishman, as teaching him much

^ I have previously noticed the only function for which composition seems
to me prt- feral )K' to any other exercise — that of fixing firmly in the miml the
grammar and the commoner rules of usatre, whioh we require to have firmly
fixed l)efore we can read with ease and security. It does not seem to me indis-
pensable even for this function ; but it is probably a distinct abridgment of labour-.

300 ESS A VS AND ADDRESSES Xll

about the real connexions of thought, the logical inter-
dependence of sentences, which the analytical tendencies of
his own language prevent his noticing. With reference to
the rhetorical utility of this exercise, I will quote some
remarks of Dr. Moberly, with which I partly agree, but
which seem to me much too unqualified. " It is a very
great part of the benefit to be derived from writing Latin
prose, that a boy learns thence to write prose in any lan-
guage. . . . He is taught what constitutes a sentence ; how
much meaning he may put into a sentence ; how many
clauses a sentence will bear. . . . One of the most common
faults in composing English is that of stringing clauses upon
clauses, without heeding the necessary rules of periodic
structure, ... I do not wish to recommend the building up
of elaborate sentences after the manner of the writers of the
seventeenth century, but I wish to observe that the shpshod
style of modern English, with its loose clauses and involved
parentheses, would be greatly corrected by a careful course
of original composition in Latin. . . . Loose ungoverned
clauses, dissimilar nominatives, and verbs hung together by
unmeaning ' ands,' no less than mixed metaphors and
impossible figures, will not go into Latin. ' Try it in Latin,'
might often suggest to a young writer the absurdity of what
may seem to be rather fine in English. . . . The boy (who
can write Latin) has obtained a master -secret which he
can apply to many a difficult lock besides." There runs
through all this the erroneous idea, which is pointed in the
last sentence, that Latin style forms a kind of skeleton-key,
or universal touchstone, for all other styles. Xo doubt by
teaching any style thoroughly, we also teach, to a certain
extent, how to penetrate the mysteries of any new style.
But each language requires its own art of rhetoric ; the
" rules of periodic structure " are special for each : the
questions, " What constitutes a sentence?" etc., are answered
as differently as possible in different languages. In some
important points (mentioned by Dr. Moberly) practice in
Latin forms a specially useful corrective to faults in English
— it is like showing blemishes by a magnifying-glass : some

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 301

things that aru bad in Enghsh are clearly seen tu be
inadmissible in Latin. Dut precisely the same is true of
French. Either language, properly used, may be made to
improve our style iu our own ; any language (and not least
these two), if carelessly used, may spoil it. It is indis-
pensable that practice in writing the vernacular should
proceed imri imsm with the practice in an alien tongue,
and receive as careful attention.

Again, Latin is a language in which the rhythmical effects
are broad, palpable, easy to apprehend. This is also true
of English, and (however hopeless it is in our broken utter-
ance to emulate the continuous music of the more syn-
thetical language) we might educate the ear very thoroughly
by a careful study of our own masters of eloquence. Still,
writing Latin, at a stage when elegance can be made a
prominent object, seems well adapted to assist this educa-
tion ; and of course we attain a larger view of melody in
general, by the study of literary models so widely different
from our own.

Hardly any of the reasons that I have enumerated can
be urged in favour of writing Greek prose. Useful as the
Greek language is to teach subtlety and delicacy of thought,
it is so much more lax in its laws of expression and structure
than the Latin, that it has very little of the corrective
effect of this latter upon English composition. Besides, one
or two most charming and impressive Greek writers are
exceedingly bad models. It will sound a paradox to
mention Plato. Still, a style which is an intentional imita-
tion (often an exaggeration) of the flexible and irregular
movement of conversational utterances, can hardly be a
good pattern for ordinary prose. Thucydides, again, with
all the wonderful weight and pregnancy of his words, is the
product of what few will deny to have been a thoroughly
vicious school of rhetoric ; and I think the unqualified
admiration with which docile boys are, by many educators,
led to regard his writing, frequently tends to injure or perplex
the natural development of their taste. Besides, we are
naturally very little sensible to the rhythm of Greek prose

302 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

(which may perhaps be accounted for by our manner of
reading it). It is hard for a boy even to pretend to
himself that he appreciates the melody of even Demo-
sthenes.

But, if it were granted that Greek composition supplied
as valuable a training as Latin, there would be very little
to be said for adding the one accomplishment to the other.
We thereby burden the memory with much additional
material, while we give the logical and rhetorical faculties
but little additional training. It is becoming more and more
evidently important in classical education to save time,
without lowering the standard of excellence in the work
required. One easy method of doing this is to reduce the
number of the kinds of composition cultivated.

On the whole, we are led to the conclusion that all these
processes form a one-sided and incomplete training in the
use of English, and require to be supplemented by some
careful and independent teaching of English composition.
It seems equally true that, in order to insure that complete
view of the relation of language to thought, which, if we
spend so much time in linguistic studies, we may fairly
expect to insure, we can hardly dispense with some
direct teaching of English. The immediate task set before
a boy in all tiie processes of classical education is to ascer-
tain exactly the equivalence of two languages, not the
relation of either to thought and fact. It is impossible that
he should not indirectly gain much insight into this rela-
tion ; but it is not impossible that in the case of many
scattered words and phrases, he may learn to fit one lan-
guage to another without expressing a really clear idea in
either. Moreover, he reads at a time such small portions of
the ancient authors, that there is very little opportunity for
teaching him to grasp a long and elaborate argument as a
whole ; for training him quickly to apprehend the bearing
not only of sentence on sentence, but of paragraph on para-
graph. Again, just as it was urged that the appreciation of
English literature, though it might perhaps be left to nature
in the case of boys brought up by intellectual parents in a

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 303

literary atmosphere, requires to be directly taught to boys
witliout these advantages : so it may be said that the same boys
are in danger of never learning a considerable portion of the
English vocabulary. I do not exactly mean teclmical terms,
but the half-technical, the philosophical, language which
thoughtful men habitually use in dealing with abstract sub-
jects. Of some of these terms such a boy may pick up a
loose and vague comprehension from ordinary conversation,
novels, and newspapers ; but he will generally retain
sufficient ignorance of them to make the perusal of all diffi-
cult and profound works more weary and distasteful than
their subject-matter alone would make them. II" English
authors were read in schools so carefully that a boy was
kept continually ready to explain words, paraphrase sen-
tences, and summarise arguments ; if the prose authors
chosen gradually became, as the boy's mind opened, more
difficult and more philosophical in their diction ; if, at the
same time, in the teaching of natural science, a gi-eat part
of the technical pliraseology (from which the main stream
of the language is being continually enriched) was
thoroughly explained to him, — then we might feel that, by
direct and indirect teaching together, we had imparted a
complete grasp of what is probably the completest instru-
ment of thought in the world.^ I have admitted that, in the
first stage in the analysis of language (assuming that we are
right to begin it as early as we do now) the intervention of
a foreign language may be valuable, in order that each step
in knowledge may be felt as an increase of power. But I
think that the last and crowning stage of this analysis,
where the learner's view of the relation of language to
thought is to be made as complete and profound as possible,
being abstract and difficult, and involving a considerable

^ Mr. Johnson, of Eton, in liis interesting evidence before the Public Schools
Commission (see Report, vol iii. p. 159), expresses the opinion that, in the
process of more careful cultivation of French, the English language might be
(as he phrases it) "used, up," and all its terms explained; whereas it is
impossible to use it up in translation from Greek and Latin. Tliis suggestion
seems to me valuable and important, but I should still rely more on the direct
teaching I .speak of. tliough there is no reason why the two should not be
combined.

304 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xil

strain on the reflective faculty, is generally best taught
in the most familiar language, and therefore in the
vernacular.

I hope that I have shown my anxiety not to underrate
the power over language developed by learning a foreign
tongue, and especially one very alien in its laws and
structure to our own. But I do not think it has been ever
shown that this mode of development of our faculty of
speech is absolutely necessary, or even, with reference to
the place which language occupies in our life, obviously
desirable. The normal function of language is not to
represent another language, but to express and communicate
facts. Scientific men are justly told by the classicists that
all their discoveries would be useless without lan^uacre ; and
the answer that the most inarticulate discoverers have
generally found means to communicate their message to
mankind, though a natural rejoinder, is not complete for
our present purpose, for this inarticulateness is precisely the
sort of evil which education ought to remedy. To describe
a fact or series of facts methodically, accurately, perspicu-
ously, comes by nature to some people, just as eloquence
does ; but it requires to be taught carefully to others. Only
it is hard to see why the study of language, in this sense,
should be separated at all from the study of subjects ; why,
as " things " cannot be taught without " words," the use of
words should not be learnt pari imssu with the knowledge
of things. Indeed, it must be so learned to some extent.
The only question is, whether care and attention shall be
bestowed on the process ; whether the scientific teacher
shall be content that his pupil should make it evident to
him that his mind has grasped ideas, or whether he shall
insist on those ideas being adequately expressed. If he
does this latter, he will give gradually a training in language
sufficient, not only for the ordinary uses in life, but even
for the purposes of most professional students. The delicate
perception of subtle distinctions which a good classical
education superadds is an intellectual luxury that ought not
to be despised, but may easily be overvalued.

xn THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCAl^IOX 305

We have now to consider whether, in the acquisition of
linguistic and literary knowledge, and linguistic and literary
dexterity, by the various processes that we have been con-
sidering, there is really given to all the mental faculties a
most complete and harmonious training ; — and, if not, where
the training appears defective and one-sided, and what the
natural supplement is. There can be no doubt, I think, that
the training, as far as it goes, is strong and eflective, and there
is no doubt, too, that it is much more varied than its
depreciators are willing to allow. Indeed, it is curious
that so many men of science fail to perceive that the study
of language up to a certain point is very analogous in its
effect on the mind to the study of any of the natural history
sciences. In either case, the memory has to be loaded with a
mass of facts, which must remain to the student arbitrary
and accidental facts, affording no scope to the faculties of
judgment and generalisation. This is the weak point of
either study, regarded as an exercise of the reason, and
makes it desirable that the initiation into either should take
place early in life. But, as in natural science, so in lan-
guage, there is a large amount of material that not only
exercises the memory, but enforces constant attention and
perpetual close comparison : rules and generalisations have
to be borne in mind, as well as isolated facts ; habits of
accuracy and quickness in applying them are rapidly
developed, and the important faculty of judgment is per-
petually educed, trained, and stimulated. And the remark I
quoted from a French writer is most just, that the judgment
is exercised " in all its forms, both logical and non-logical."
In applying each newly learnt rule, it acts at first deliber-
ately, by an express process of reasoning, afterwards instinct-
ively, by an implicit process. I think, however, the common
statement, that in learning a language the mind is exercised
in induction, requires much qualification. The mind of the
matured, the professional scholar, is so exercised, because he
stands on a level with the authors of his grammars and
dictionaries, and from time to time observes new rules of
usage which they have not noted. But the boy, or youth,

X

3o6 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES xii

learning his lesson with ample grammar and dictionaries, is
not, or is very rarely, called upon to perform any such
process. For each doubtful case that comes before him his
books and memory combined soon furnish him with an
abundance, a plethora of formulae : ^ he has only to choose
the right one. In making this choice, besides close attention
and delicate discrimination, an unconscious tact, a trained
instinct, combines to guide him, and, by applying a mental
raagnifying-glass to this tact or instinct, we may discover in
it rudimentary inductive processes ; but we might find the
same in the mental operations of every skilled artisan, and
it is perhaps misleading to dignify them by the name.
Besides this training of the cognitive faculties, the c^eati^'e
are also, as we have seen, developed. In composition, the
boy applies the same rules, by the aid of which he has
analysed complex products of speech, to form similar pro-
ducts for himself ; and as in the former case he acted under
the guidance of a gradually developing scientific tact, so in
this he works under the influence of a slowly educed
sesthetic instinct. He is taught to make an effort to be an
artist in a material hard to manipulate, and the benefit of
this training will, it is presumed, abide with him in what-
ever material he has afterwards to work.

If, then, say the advocates of classics, we offer a study
of literature which at the same time combines scientific and
artistic training, why is not the completeness of our system
admitted, and why are we asked to introduce any new
element except for the vulgar reason that it would be more
useful ? Simply because each element of the training is
not (at any rate taken alone) the best thing of its kind or
the thing we most want. We may allow that the education
is many-sided : still, if it is defective on each side, this many-
sidedness will not count much in its favour. And the very
fact that the same instrument is made to serve various educa-
tional purposes, which seems at first sight a very plausible

^ If a boy could be more debarred from grammars and dictionaries, there would
naturally be more induction in the process of learning the language. But the
efforts that have been made in this direction (though deserving of all attention)
do not seem as yet to have been conspicuously successful.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 307

argument in its favour, is really, tur the uiajoriLy of boys, a
serious disadvantage. in the actual process of education
one or other of the purposes is continually sacrificed. Some
boys with strong taste fur literature and natural power
of expression pass with moderate success through their
classical work by means of their literary tact alone, and
get, after the first rudiments of grammar are acquired, very
little training in close observation or accurate reasoning.
But with the greater number (especially of boys who do not
go to the University) the case is reversed. The mind,
exhausted with the labours of language, imbibes miserably
little of the lessons of literature. And here I may observe
that some educational reformers have committed a most
disastrous error — an error that might have been fatal, if
anything could be fatal, to their cause, in allowing the
notion to become current, that there is a sort of antagonism
between science and literature, that they are presented
as alternative instruments of education, between which a
choice has to be made. It is so evident that if one or other
must be abandoned, if we must inevitably remain either
comparatively ignorant of the external world, or compara-
tively ignorant of the products of the human mind, all but a
few exceptional natures must choose that study which best
fits them for communion with their fellow-men. But I
absolutely deny this incompatibility : nor do I think it
would ever have occurred to any one except for the
strange illusion that in the age in which we live classics
must necessarily be the " substratum," " basis," " backbone "
(or whatever analogous metaphor is used) of a literary
education : and that therefore we must leave on one side
every other form of literature with the view of imparting
as much classics as possible. The consequence is that half
the undergraduates at our Universities, and a larger propor-
tion of the boys at all (except perhaps one or two) of our
public schools, if they have received a literary education at
all, have got it for themselves : the fragments of Greek and
Latin that they have struggled through have not given it
them. If so many of our most expensively educated youth

3o8 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

regard athletic sports as the one conceivable mode of enjoy-
ing leisure : if so many professional persons confine their
extra-professional reading to the newspapers and novels : if
the middle-class Englishman (as he is continually told) is
narrow, unrefined, conventional, ignorant of what is really
good and really evil in human life ; if (as an uncompro-
mising writer ^ says) " he is the tool of bigotry, the echo of
stereotyped opinions, the victim of class prejudices, the great
stumbling-block in the way of a general diffusion of higher
cultivation in this country " — it is not because these per-
sons have had a literary education, which their " invincible
brutality" has rendered inefficacious : it is because the educa-
tion has not been (to them) literary : their minds have been
simply put through various unmeaning linguistic exercises.
It is not surprising that simple-minded people have thought
that since a complete study of Latin and Greek was felt by
some ' of those who had successfully pursued it to have been
(along with the other reading that they had spontaneously
absorbed) a fine literary education, therefore half as much
Latin and Greek ought to produce about half as much of
the same kind of effect ; and that when they see the
education on the whole to be a failure, instead of demand-
ing more literature as well as more science, they cry for
less literature. But the time seems to have come for us to
discern and repair this natural mistake. Let us demand
instead that all boys, whatever be their special bent and
destination, be really taught literature : so that as far as is
possible, they may learn to enjoy intelligently poetry and
eloquence : that their interest in history may be awakened,
stimulated, guided : that their views and sympathies may
be enlarged and expanded by apprehending noble, subtle,
and profound thoughts, refined and lofty feelings : that some
comprehension of the varied development of human nature
may ever after abide with them, the source and essence of
a truly humanising culture. Thus in the prosecution of

' Dr. Doualdson.

"^ I say advisedly "some." Many successfully trained scholars feel very
differently witli regard to their training.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 309

their special study or runction, while their energy will be
even stimulated, their views and aims will be more intel-
ligent, more central ; and therefore their work, if less
absorbing, not less effective.

If this be done, it is a subordinate question what parti-
cular languages we learn. We must allow all weight to the
advantages which a dead and diflicult language has, as an
instrument of training, over a modern and easy one,^ But
we must remember that it is a point of capital importance
that instruction in any language should be carried to the
point at which it really throws open a literature : while it
is not a point of capital importance that any particular
literature should be so thrown open.

The defects of the usual exercises in Greek and Latin
composition, as an artistic training, have been incidentally
noticed ; and the disadvantages of verse composition in
particular are pointed out elsewhere in this volume.^ We
must not forget, however, that the place w^hich these exer-
cises fill in education must be filled iw some way or other ;
the boy must be taught to exercise his productive faculty,
and to exercise it in a regulated, methodical manner.
In the later stage of education, when discursive thought on
general and abstract themes may properly be demanded,
essays and careful answers to comprehensive questions seem
to constitute the best mode of developing this faculty, as
attention may thus be paid to style and substance at the
same time. In the earlier stages we require easier exercises

^ I think there would be a great advantage in combining a difficult with an
easy lanjjuage. The more facile conquest a boy would make over one, might
encourage him in his harder struggle. Of course, for this, or any other
valuable result to be attained, the easy language must be studied with xs
much attention and respect as the hard one. This is one of the numerous
reasons for selecting French and Latin as the languages to be taught in early
education. Another re;xson for teaching them together is their relation to
each other and to English. (See Professor M. Miiller's evidence before the
Public Schools Commission, vol. iv. p. 396.) This eminent scholar there illus-
trates the way in which the ru^liments of Comjiarative Philology might be
taught by comparing wonls in the tliree languages, and ventures to assert that
'•an hour a-week so .-jient, would save ten hours in teaching French and
Latin."

- [The volume in which this essay originally appeared. The essay referred
to in the text is that On Greek and Latin Verse Conijiosifi'^n as a General Branch
of Education, by the Rev. F. W. Farrar. — Ed.]

3IO ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

in English prose, such as narratives and descriptions, drawn
from experience or imagination, or freely compiled from
authors read ; the teaching of physical science would give
occasion to descriptions of a different kind ; the history
lesson would suggest orations and declamations at appro-
priate points, so that rhythm and melody might be naturally
taught. It is a doubtful point whether all boys should be
exercised in producing poetry ; it is hardly doubtful that
they should be exercised, if at all, in a material less difficult
than Latin or Greek is, up to a very advanced stage of its
acquisition. Perhaps translations into English poetry of
fine passages in foreign authors might be occasionally
required from all ; and original poetry, encouraged only
by prizes. If, too, it is once admitted that production of
the kind that develops tlie .Tsthetic faculty is to be encour-
aged, if the boy is to be stimulated to produce beautiful things,
there seems no adequate reason why the brain alone should
be exercised in such production ; the training of the hand
and eye which drawing affords is probably desirable for all
boys up to a certain point ; while after this point, boys who
are absolutely unproductive in language, may develop their
sense of beauty in pictorial art.

Then remains the training of the cognitive faculties
which the process of mastering the classical languages
supplies. We have seen that this training is in many
respects very efficacious, and that it (unlike many supposed
utilities of classics) is really given, to some extent, to most
boys.^ As I have said, it appears to me very similar to
that which would be supplied by one or more of the
physical sciences, carefully selected, limited, and arranged
for educational purposes. It is clear that this latter
study develops memory (both in extent and accuracy), close
attention, delicate discrimination, judgment, both instinctive
and deliberate, the faculty of rapidly applying the right
general formula to the solution of any particular problem.

^ If the pernicious influence of Bohn's Library could be entirely excluded,
this might be stated more strongly. But it must never be forgotten, in dis-
cussing this question, that the training afforded by classics read with translations
is very diflfereut from that aflbrded by classics read without them.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 311

1 iua not in a position to institute a close comparison of
the efficacy of the two kinds of study in educating those
faculties of the mind which both in common call into exer-
cise.^ But the study of lanj^^uage seems to have certain
distinct advantages. In the first place, tlie materials here
supplied to the student are ready to liand in inexhaustible
abundance and diversity. Any page of any ancient autlior
forms for the young student a string of problems sufliciently
complex and diverse to exercise his memory and judgment
in a great variety of ways. Again, from the exclusion of
the distractions of the external senses, from the simplicity
and definiteness of the classification which the student has
to apply, from the distinctness and obviousness of the points
that he is called on to observe, it seems probable that this
study calls forth (especially in young boys) a more concen-
trated exercise of the faculties it does develop than any
other could easily do. If loth the classical languages were
to cease to be taught in early education, valuable machinery
would, I think, be lost, for which it would be somewhat
difficult to provide a perfect substitute.

But the very exclusions and limitations that make the
study of language a better gymnastic than physical science,
make it, on the other hand, so obviously inferior as a pre-
paration for the business of life, that its present position in
education seems, on this ground alone, absolutely untenable.
The proof of this I cannot attempt adequately to develop ;
but it seems appropriate to indicate the more obvious
reasons, as they are still ignored by many intelligent
persons. One point the advocates of the classical system
sometimes admit by saying " that it does not develop the
faculties of external observation " ; and the more open-
minded of them would desire that these faculties should be
somehow or other exercised, without interfering with the

^ It U much to be wished tliat some competent person, equally aciiuainteil
with languages and science, and with equal experience in teaching the rudiments
of both, would carefully make such a comparison. At firesent, the Ijest
exponents of the effect of either study generally speak' of the other with com-
parative ignorance. It is, perhajjs, an indirect testimony to the ailviuitages of
scientific education, that this ignorance is more frequently combined with con-
temptuous dogmatism in the case of the classical advocate.

312 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xn

" more important part of education." But this is a most
inadequate view of the question. It is not enough that the
intelligence should be trained at one time and in one way,
and the senses exercised separately ; we require that the
intelligence should be taught to exercise the important
functions of which we have spoken in combination with the
senses ; and we require this, because this is the normal
mode of the action of the intelligence in human life. It is
not enough that we should learn to see things as they are,
important as this is : we must also train the memory to
record accurately, and the imagination to represent faith-
fully, the facts observed : we must learn to exercise the
judgment and apply general formuhe to particular phe-
nomena, not only when these phenomena are broadly and
clearly marked out (as they are when we come armed with
complete grammars and dictionaries to the interpretation
of foreign speech), but also when they are obscure, hard to
detect, " embedded in matter," mixed up with a mass of
other phenomena, unimportant for our purpose, which we
have to learn to neglect. The materials on which our
intelligence has ordinarily to act, even when we are think-
ing, and not observing, are ideas of the external world,
mixed products of our mind and senses : and it must never
be forgotten that the training of the eye and hand given by
the various branches of physical science, tlie development
of our sense of form, colour, weight, etc., is not merely a
training of these external organs, but of our imaginative
and conceptive faculties also, and will inevitably make our
thinking more clear and effective. Similarly, the training
in classification which most immediately fits us for life is
that which the natural history sciences afford. In learning
them the student is taught not only how to apply a classifi-
cation ready made, but also, to some extent, how to make a
classification. He is taught to deal with a system where
the classes merge by fine gradations into one another, and
where the boundaries are often hard to mark ; a system
that is progressive, and therefore in some points rudimentary,
shifting, liable to continual modification ; along with the

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 313

immense ^•alue of a carefully framed technical phraseology
he is also taught the inevitable inadequacy of such a jjhrase-
ology to represent the variety of nature ; and these are just
the lessons that he requires to bear in mind in applying
method and arrangement to any part of the business of life.^
And finally, above all, the study of language does not in the
least tend to impart the most valualjle and important of all
the habits that we combine under the conception of scientific
training : the habit, as is generally said, " of reasoning from
eflects to causes, and from causes to effects " ; it nught be
more distinctly defined as the habit of correctly combining
in imagination absent phenomena (whether antecedent or
consequent) with phenomena present in perception. Physics
and Chemistry are the most natural and efficacious way of
teaching boys from some part of any of the invariable series
of nature to infer and supply the rest ; their place could not
be adequately occupied by History and Literature, if ever so
philosophically taught ; as History and Literature are taught
at present, this training is simply absent from the classical
curriculum.

Asain, the advanta^ that the minds of the educated
might obtain from a sufficient variety of exercise is lost
under the present exclusive system. This absence of
variety is indeed sometimes claimed as a gain ; we are
solemnly warned of the paramount necessity of studying
one thing well. And certainly the encyclop;edic courses of
study which some theorists have sketched out have given
practical men an easy victory over them : it is so easy to
show that tliis encyclopaedic instruction would impart a
great deal of verbal, but very little real, knowledge. But
" est quadam prodire ten us, si non datur ultra." No doubt
the studies of boyhood must be carefully limited and
selected ; but they may be representative of the diversity of

1 Cuvier, speaking of his own study, says: — "Every disLnission wliich sup-
poses a cla.ssilication of facts, every research which reiiuires a distribution of
matters, is performed after the same manner ; and he who has cultivated this
science merely for amusement, is surprised at the facilities it aftbrds for dis-
entangling all kinds of affairs."

1 iio not think a student of languages could honestly claim an analogous
advantage for his own pursuit.

314 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xil

the intellectual world in which men live. A boy must not
be overwhelmed in a mass of details : he ought to be forced
by all possible educational artifices to apprehend facts and
not to repeat words; but in order that he may attain a
thoroughly cultivated judgment according to the standard
of our age, his education must be many-sided, he must be
initiated into a variety of methods.^ And it may be observed
tliat under the present system neither the advantages of
concentration, nor the advantages of variety, are gained. A
boy, in passing from Greek to Latin, has not sufficient
change to give any relief to his faculties, but he has
sufficient to prevent him from making as rapid progress
in either language as he would make if he studied either
alone. The transition from the study of language to the
study of external nature would give so much relief, that it
would be possible for a boy to spend more time in his
studies on the whole, without danger of injurious fatigue.
A still more important advantage of variety of studies is
its certain effect in diminishing the number of boys who
take no interest in their school-work : a net is spread that
catches more ; and it is generally found that if a boy
becomes interested, and therefore successful, in one part of
his work, a stimulus is felt throughout the whole range of
his intellectual efforts.

In general the advocates of classical education, while
they rightly insist that educational studies should be
capable of disciplining the mind, forget that it is equally
desirable that they should be capable of stimulating it.
The extreme ascetics among them even deny this. Thus
Mr. Clark ^ says, " it is a strong recommendation to any
subject to affirm that it is dry and distasteful." I cannot

' When people talk of "training the memory, judgment," etc., they often
ignore the difference between a general and special development of these
faculties. There is great danger lest, if trained to a pitch in one material
only, they will not work very well in any other material. The mind acquires,
as Mr. Faraday says, a certain bent and tendency, a desire and \villingness
to accept ideas of a certain kind, while it becomes slow and languid in deal-
ing with ideas of a different kind. Mr. Faraday's evidence of the inferiority
of educated men to children in apprehending scientific ideas, is very int^eresting
and impressive. (See Report of Public Schools Commission, vol. iv. p. 377.)

- Canibridge Essays, 1855.

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 315

lielp thinking that there is some confusion here between
" dry " and " hard." No doubt tlie faculties both of mind
and body must be kept a sufficient time in strong tension
in order to grow to their full strength : but we find in the
development of the body that this tension can be longest
and most healthily maintained by means of exercises that
are sought with avidity.^ Those who have argued that the
pursuit of knowledge might be made agreeable to boys, have
been somewhat misunderstood by the apologists of existing
institutions. They never meant that it could be made
pleasant to him as gingerbread is pleasant, but as a football
match in the rain, or any other form of violent exercise
under difficulties. The " gaudia " of the pursuit of know-
ledge are necessarily " severa " : but there seems to be no
reason why the relish for them should not be imparted as
early as possible. The universality and intensity of the
charms of science for boys have been sometimes stated, I
admit, with almost comical exaggeration. But it will not
be denied that the study of the external world does, on the
whole, excite youthful curiosity much more than the study
of language. The intellectual advantage of this ought to be
set against whatever disciplinary superiority we may attri-
bute to the latter instrument. On the moral advantage of
substituting, as far as possible, the love of knowledge, as a
nobler and purer motive, for emulation and the fear of
punishment, I have not space to dilate : but it seems
difficult to exaggerate the importance, though we may
easily over - estimate the possibility, of developing this
sentiment.

And the superior efficacy of natural science in evoking
curiosity is not due entirely, though it is due partly, to the
exercise it gives to the external senses as well as the
brain. It is due also to the fact that education in physical
science is (in the sense in which I have previously used
the word) a natural education in the present age. The

^ It is curious in contemplating English school life as a whole, to reflect how
thoroughly we believe in natural exercises for the body and artificial e.rercises for
the mind.

3i6 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

book which it opens to the student is not one which he
will ever shut up and put by : it is not one that he could
easily have ignored. In the age in which we live the
external world forces itself in every way, directly and
indirectly, upon our observation ; we cannot fail to pick
up scraps of what is known about it : sciolism is inevitable
to us, unless we avoid it by becoming more than sciolists.
The boy's instinct feels this : so that, besides the obvious
and primary advantages that a natural system of education
has over an artificial one, there is this in addition : it not
only teaches what the pupil will afterwards be more glad to
know, but what he is at present more willing to learn. We
may admit that a knowledge of the processes and results of
physical science does not by itself constitute culture : we
may admit that an appreciative acquaintance with literature,
a grasp of the method as well as the facts of history, is a
more important element, and should be more prominent in
the thoughts of educators ; and yet feel that culture, without
the former element, is now shallow and incomplete. Physical
science is now so bound up with all the interests of mankind,
from the lowest and most material to the loftiest and most
profound : it is so engrossing in its infinite detail, so exciting
in its progress and promise, so fascinating in the varied beauty
of its revelations : that it draws to itself an ever-increasing
amount of intellectual energy; so that the intellectual man
who has Ijeen trained without it must feel at every turn his
inability to comprehend thoroughly the present phase of
the progress of humanity, and his limited sympathy with
the thoughts and feelings, labours and aspirations, of his
fellow-men. And if there be any who believe that the
summit of a liberal education, the crown of the highest
culture, is Philosophy — meaning by Philosophy the sus-
tained effort, if it be no more than an effort, to frame a
complete and reasoned synthesis of the facts of the universe,
— on them it may be especially urged how poorly equipped
a man comes to such a study, however competent he may
be to interpret the thoughts of ancient thinkers, if he
has not qualified himself to examine, comprehensively and

xu THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 317

closely, the womlerful scale of methods by which the human
miud has achieved its various degrees of conquest over the
world of sense. AVheii the most fascinating of ancient
philosophers taught, but the first step of this conquest had
been attained. We are told that Plato wrote over the
door of his school, " Let no one who is without geometry
enter here." Tn all seriousness we may ask the thoughtful
men, M'ho believe that Thilosophy can still be best learnt
by the study of the Greek masters, to consider what the in-
scription over the door should be in the nineteenth century
of the Christian era.

In conclusion, it seems desirable to sum up brieHy
the practical changes (whether of omission or supplement)
which have been suggested from time to time by a detailed
examination of the arguments for the existing system : and
at the same time to add one suggestion which, if 1 do not
over-estimate its practical value, will very much facilitate
the introduction of such other changes as I desire. I think
that a course of instruction in our own laniruacre and
literature, and a course of instruction in natural science,
ought to form recognised and substantive parts of our school
system. 1 do not venture to estimate the amount of time
that ought to be apportioned to these subjects, but I think
that they ought to be taught to all, and taught with as
much serious eftbrt as anything else. I think also that,
partly for reasons which I have indicated and partly with
a view to practical advantages, more stress ought to be
laid on the study of French. While advocating these new
elements, I feel most strongly the great peril of over-
burdening the minds of youth, to their intellectual or
physical detriment, or both. From Germany, where the
system is now more comprehensive than ours, we hear
complaints which show that this evil has arisen. I do not
know which is its worst form, that the brains of boys
should be perpetually overstrained, or that a number of
things should be taught, all inadequately and superficially,
so that verbal memory is substituted for real apprehension.
A certain amount of time will be gained by the omission of

3i8 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xii

verses as a general branch of education (so that only the
few who have a special capacity for such exercises be
encouraged to pursue them). But I do not think the time
thus gained will suffice ; especially as it is desirable that
the study of every language that is studied should be made
more complete than it is now. I have before hinted at
what appears to me the obvious remedy for the evil I dread
— namely, to exclude Greek from the regular curriculum,
at least in its earlier stage. The one thing to be set against
the many reasons that exist for choosing Latin (if a choice
between the two languages is, as I think, inevitable), is the
greater intrinsic interest of Greek literature. But I do not
think that, if this change were made, Greek literature would
be thrown really open to fewer boys. I think that if Latin
(along with French and English) was carefully taught up
to the age of sixteen (speaking roughly), a grasp of Greek,
sufficient for literary purposes, might be attained after-
wards much more easily than is supposed ; particularly if
at that period (when in the case of all schoolboys the
stringency of the general curriculum ought to be considerably
relaxed) a proper concentration of energy were insured in
the first assault on the rudiments of the language. It is
supposed that there is a saving of time in beginning the
elements of Greek early. I am inclined to think that very
much the reverse is the case, and that if several languages
have to be learnt, much time is gained by untying the
fagot and breaking them separately. There are two classes
for whom the present system of education is more or less
natural, — the clergy and persons with a literary bias, and
the prospect of sufficient leisure to indulge it amply. The
former ought to read Greek literature as a part of their
professional training, the latter as a part of a comprehensive
study of literary history. Boys with such prospects, and a
careful previous training of the kind I advocate, would, on
the average, feel, as they approached the last stage of their
school life, an interest in Greek strong enough to make
them take it in very rapidly. I believe there are one or two
living instances of eminent Greek scholars who have begun

XII THE THEORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 319

to learn the language even later than the time I mention.
The experience of students for the Indian Civil Service shows
how quickly under a stimulus strong enough to produce the
requisite concentration, languages may be acquired more
remote from Greek and Latin than Greek is from Latin.
The advantage that young children have over even young
men in catching a spoken language has led some to infer
that they have an equal superiority in learning to read a
language that they do not hear spoken : an inference which,
I think, is contrary to experience.

Of the benefit of such a change to all other boys now
taught in our public and grammar schools, I need say no
more than I have said already. Without such a change
their interests (even if the recommendations of the Public
School Commissioners be carried into effect generally) will
still be sacrificed to the supposed interests of the future
clergy and literary men — a great clear loss for a very
illusory gain.

XIII
IDLE FELLOWSHIPS^

{Contemporary Review, April 1876)

That a real and — within certain limits — a final settlement
of the question of University Organisation is seriously
contemplated by Her Majesty's Government, is evident
from the Bill that has just been introduced for Oxford,
and the speeches of the minister introducing it. It is true
that the weakness of merely permissive legislation has not
been altogether avoided ; and such weakness is peculiarly
dangerous here, where the problem is to bring into effective
co-operation the action of several distinct and nearly inde-
pendent corporations. Still, if the new Commission is
united and firm, it can easily provide that the Colleges,
while allowed to determine the details of their own reform,
shall yet be reconstructed in such a manner as to constitute
them harmonious members of one coherent academic system.
And the main lines of the reform, towards which public
opinion in both Universities has long been steadily tending,
have been laid down by Lord Salisbury with much clearness
and decision. The " Idle Fellowship " is to become a thing

^ [It is with some liesitation that this essay lias been rejjrinted, as the circum-
stances under which it was written have changed, and the evils of which it complains
have greatly diminished. It was written on the eve of the appointment of the Uni-
versity Commission, of which one result has been a great reduction in the number
of prize fellowships ; the value of those that remain has been greatly reduced by
agi'icultural depression ; and there is now less tendency than there was to give
to mathematics and classics an advantage over other subjects in the distribution of
fellowships. Still it cannot be said that prize fellowships and the waste of funds
involved have altogether disappeared, or that the general educational considera-
tions discussed in the essay are less true than they were, so that, on the whole,
it has seemed well to republish it. — Ed.]

320

XIII IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 32 1

of tlie past ; academic endowments are to be restored to
academic uses. How urgently the need of this restoration
is felt, in Cambridge at least, is as yet hardly realised by
the world outside. This University has for years been
struggling and starving in the most pitiable manner, unable
to provide decently for the most indispensable functions ;
while what are commonly talked and thought of as " her
rich endowments " have been distributed among thriving
schoolmasters, school-inspectors, rising journalists, barristers
full of briefs, and barristers who never look for briefs.
Many important branches of study are not represented at
all within the limits of the University : several more are
inadequately and precariously represented by college lecturers
only. The Professorships that do exist, outside the sacred
and fruitful precincts of theology, are supported by incomes
varying in amount from a third to a fifth of the salary of
a county court judge. The utmost economy is unable to
provide Cambridge with a sutticieucy even of the ugliest
buildings required for scientific teaching and research in
the present stage of the progress of knowledge. How these
deficiencies are to be supplied, how the different grades of
academic teachers and investigators are to be appointed and
paid, how the co-operation of University and Colleges is to
be organised on a stable and satisfactory basis, are questions
requiring much further discussion and much skill and
judgment to settle. It would be impertinent in a paper
like the present to anticipate summarily the results of the
seven years of labour appointed for the new Commission.
The task that I have proposed to myself is the much
humbler one of examining the actual results of the existing
distribution of college endowments ; in order that while its
shortcomings and the positive evils that How from it are
traced to their proper sources, whatever good is really done
by it may be as far as possible secured in the impending
redistribution of the fund. For the sake of clearness and
precision, I have thought it best to confine the discussion
to Cambridge ; though the greater part of it is obviously
applicable to both Universities alike.

Y

322 ESSA yS AND ADDRESSES xiii

There is no doubt that the Fellowship fund was origi-
nally designed for the maintenance of learned leisure : and a
considerable part of the confusion of thought that exists
on the subject of Fellowships arises from the difficulty of
ascertaining how far the original, historical raison d'etre of
the institution has actual application and force at the present
time ; a difficulty which commonly arises in the case of old
institutions of which the working has been subjected to a
long gradual process of indefinite customary change, with or
without an intermixture of abrupt legal changes. No one
of course is so ignorant as to suppose that the majority of
existing Fellows of Colleges are persons employing an un-
broken leisure in the cultivation of learning. Still there is a
vague idea current that resident Fellows at least are in some
degree bound to devote themselves to the cultivation of
learning ; not legally bound, but morally, as a parish clergy-
man is morally bound to take care of the spiritual welfare of
his parishioners, though his legal obligation extends only to
the performance of certain religious services. All who hold
with the present writer that this obligation ought to be
made far more stringent and definite, and enforced by more
substantial sanctions, cannot but rejoice that even a vague
sense of it is still generally recognised. At the same time,
it seems impossible consistently to maintain this sense of
obligation together with that other view of a Fellowship
which regards it as a legitimate assistance in the earlv
struggles of a practical career. The duty cannot, without
obvious absurdity, be made to depend on the mere choice of
residence in Cambridge. If a Fellow who goes to London
is employing his time legitimately in writing for news-
papers and magazines, how can a Fellow living in Cam-
bridge suffer the slightest moral condemnation for giving
himself up to similar avocations ? And if any kind of
work is morally open to him, however remote from the
original purpose of his Fellowship, how is it possible to
blame him, qud Fellow, if he prefers polite idleness to all
kinds of work ? And hence the obligation to learning has
now almost faded from men's minds in spite of tradition.

XI 11 IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 323

and is only felt by the few who cherish what Mr. Disraeli
once called a historical conscience. Under the existing
system, the broad common-sense even of academic persons
cannot but regard a resident Fellow as a man who, having
won the great prize of successful juvenile study, has since
in the exercise of a perfectly legitimate choice preferred a
limited income, unlimited leisure, and the innocent pleasures
of college life to a struggle with the world. If he is
advancing knowledge, he is doing so as an amateur, not
as his recognised professional work ; if, again, he is not
advancing knowledge, the fact may be regretted, but can
hardly be charged against him, under the existing conditions
of tenure, as a dereliction of duty.

It is to be observed, however, that the resident Fellows
who do not form part of the educational stafi' of the
University or the Colleges are a comparatively small
minority — so small, indeed, that not a few persons take a
difl'erent view from that which we have just discussed ; and
conceive Fellowships to be intended, and actually to be
operating, as part payment for the service of academic
instruction. In a certain sense this view is net incom-
patible with the former ; in fact, it must be a prominent
feature in any scheme of University reform, that at least
the higher part of academic education should be in the
hands of persons who are also engaged in independent
study and research ; and that their income should consist
in part of College Fellowships. If this principle were
carried out, it would be almost iudiflerent whether the
Fellowships were primarily regarded as salaries for investi-
gators or for instructors, as the two functions would be
normally combined. At present, however, it is only to a
comparatively slight extent true that Fellowships are em-
ployed as salaries for teachers. In some Colleges, under
the statutes approved by the former Commission, Fellow-
ships are allowed to be retained by members of the edu-
cational staff of a College, after the time at which their
tenure would under ordinary circumstances have terminated.
Such Fellowships as are actually held on these terms may

324 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xiii

legitimately be regarded as endowments used for the pay-
ment of teachers ; and the same view may be taken of a
few other Fellowships held by University Professors as
such ; though since these latter are not regularly and
systematically connected with Professorships, but only
bestowed on particular Professors by the somewhat arbi-
trary and accidental selection of the Colleges, they produce
the minimum of effect in the M-ay of attracting able men to
the posts. But these two classes taken together form a
small minority even of those Fellowships which are held by
resident academic teachers. In most cases the remunera-
tion that the Fellow receives for his work as a teacher
consists entirely in a salary paid over and above his
Fellowship, from a fund provided by the fees of under-
graduates (with some very trifling supplement from endow-
ments). It is the actual and prospective amount of this
salary — apart from his Fellowship — which the Fellow
compares with the income that could be obtained in some
other career, in considering whether or not it is his interest
to take part in academic teaching.

At the same time it must undoubtedly be admitted that
the services of the able and highly educated men who form
the educational staff of Colleges are obtained at a cheaper
rate than would be possible without Fellowships — even
apart from the exceptional tenure above noticed, under
which the Fellowship is definitely converted into a salary
for teaching. In many Colleges certain allowances are
regularly made to residents as such : and, even independ-
ently of these allowances, a Fellow who has no sj^ecial
ground for living elsewhere regards his College as his
natural home ; and if he resides there, the most natural
thing for him to do, and the easiest way to make a little
money, is to take part in teaching. And since his Fellowship
alone — as long as it lasts — enables him to live there a Kfe
of dignified comfort, with little or no increase of income, it
is natural that he should often be content with a compara-
tively scanty remuneration for the not very laborious work
which it lies in his way to do. Still it must be observed

XIII IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 325

that this method of organising academic instruction has
serious and inevitable (h-awbacks. It is obviously in-
expedient that the majority of academic teachers should be
appointed by selection not from the whole range of the
available educational talent in the country, on the ground
of special fitness for their respective departments of the
work, but from the small number of persons who constitute
in each case the selecting body. The Fellows who become
lecturers thus rather choose their work than are chosen for
it ; and it may often be said that they choose it rather
negatively than positively. Partly the restriction of celi-
bacy, and partly the very smallness of the salaries to which
I have referred, have commonly prevented college tuition
from being regarded as a regular profession. Hence a large
proportion of those employed in it have taken it up as a
stop-gap, to fill the interval between the completion of their
education and their entrance on the main business of their
life; and thus can hardly bring to it the intensity and
concentration of energy which a vigorous man throws into
whatever he has deliberately chosen as his life's work.

We may conclude then that the existing distribution of
Fellowships, while it produces a few amateur students, and
enables society to obtain, more cheaply than would other-
wise be the case, the services of college tutors and lecturers,
yet cannot be held to provide a satisfactory endowment
either of learning and research, or of teaching; and still
less of that complete academic career which consists in the
combination of the two. It is necessary to make this
plain, because the proposal to employ the funds of the
Colleges in constituting such a career appears to excite
surprise in the minds of many who have vaguely supposed
that at least a great portion of them were already used for
this purpose. Well-informed advocates of the existing
svstem are, however, quite aware that — history and tradi-
tion notwithstanding — Fellowships are now normally be-
stowed not as payments for any present services to society,
but as rewards to young men for the past trouble that they
have taken in receiving a good education. They maintain

326 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xiii

such rewards to be desirable in the first place merely as
prizes, to draw youths of talent to the Universities, and
stimulate and sustain their industry when there ; and
secondly, as affording to such youths pecuniary support
during the first years of their struggle with the world.
This latter argument seems to be the one on which most
stress is laid ; and in so far as it is valid at all it seems to
become of more importance in proportion as we conceive
the distribution of the rest of our educational endowments
to reach the ideal perfection which reformers contemplate.
In the ladder wdiich is to bear the child of talent upwards
from the gutter, the College Fellowship presents itself as
the last step ; and it is not unnatural for academic re-
formers no less than conservatives to imagine that a serious
hiatus would be left if this step were taken away. I think,
however, that it will appear on careful consideration that
this last round of the ladder is nearly if not quite super-
fluous ; and that even if it ought to be constructed at all,
it certainly is not the function of academic endowments to
furnish it.

First, however, it is important to remove a certain
ambiguity as to the nature of this step. The University
does not at present provide a complete preparation for any
profession (with the doubtful exception of the profession of
education) ; and though it seems desirable that it should
adapt its curriculum somewhat more than it at present does
to the practical needs of its alumni, there will always be a
certain part of the training necessary for any profession
which can only be got by serving some kind of apprentice-
ship to persons who are actually engaged in it. Hence,
even in the case of the ablest men, destined for practical
careers, an interval must normally elapse after the taking
of their degree, before their education is really completed ;
and there are the same grounds for supporting poor men of
merit during this period out of educational endowments as
there are for giving them exhibitions and scholarships at
school and college. I do not now consider whether these
grounds are adequate : I merely urge that if eleemosynary

xiii IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 327

training is to be given at all, it should be given completely.
It is a very different thing to continue paying them pensions
for some years, when the yiensioners have or ought to have
already entered on the work of life, after the most complete
training that society can provide. If we consider the
matter in the abstract, apart from the historic names and
associations which lend, as it were, a picturesque and time-
honoured naturalness to the present composition and state
of collegiate corporations, it must surely appear very doubt-
ful whether such an expenditure of money — not merely of
academic funds, but of any funds whatever — is at all
desirable in the interests of society ; however agreeable it
may be for the young men themselves, who are thus
temporarily placed in comfortable circumstances. We can
hardly conceive such a distribution of funds coming into
existence, except through that slow historic perversion of
endowments from their original uses which has actually
occurred in the case of our colleges.

It is urged, as I have said, that young men of talent
require the support of these pensions, on account of the diffi-
culty they find in earning a livelihood during the early part
of their professional career. But this argument, if it is
intended to cover the whole case, affords a curious illustration
of the fallacy of generalising from a few striking instances.
Most university men have heard of one or two prosperous
barristers who would not have been able to go to the bar
without their Fellowships ; and they have probably never
asked themselves how large a proportion of College Fellows
have actually adopted careers which in the absence of this
peculiar institution would have been closed to them. And
yet the argument is eminently one of which the force cannot
be ascertained without some quantitative estimate of the
results to which it refers. In order to obtain such an
estimate, careful statistics ^ have been obtained of the careers
of the Fellows of Colleges elected in Cambridge from 1857

^ These statistics have been collected by the Rev. H. A. Morgan, Fellow and
Tutor [now, 1901, Master] of Jesus College, who has kiudly permitted me to use

tlieni.

32S ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xiii

to 1868 inclusive — more than 300 in all. It appears that
ratlier more than a fourth of these Fellows have adopted an
academic career; most of these are now resident in Cam-
bridge, either as holders of college offices or as private tutors,
while a few others have obtained professorships elsewhere ;
about another fourth have become schoolmasters ; others
again have obtained employment not strictly educational but
connected with education, as inspectors of schools or clerks
in the Privy Council Oftice, or are serving the State as
astronomers or geologists. To these cases, which amount to
more than half of the whole, the argument just mentioned is
obviously inapplicable, because in the competition for these
posts the academic distinction for which a Fellowship is
given is itself an amply sufficient advantage. The men who
are made Fellows are precisely those for whom, however the
University were organised, an academic career affording from
the outset a sufficient income would be at once open; they
are the men for whose assistance the headmasters of our
chief public schools compete ; in any decent administration
of the public service they are naturally selected for all posts
for which academic attainments are required. Thus they
are sure of obtaining from the first a better income than
their less distinguished contemporaries who still manage to
live by their employment ; and there is a peculiar and
palpable absurdity in supporting them further by a pension
of £300 a year from academic endowments. A few other
Fellows, again, join the ever - increasing profession of
journalism and magazine-writing — a highly honourable and
useful function, but one which no one would wish to support
artificially by Fellowships. A few others have been received
into houses of business or solicitors' offices ; for them, too,
no extraneous source of livelihood seems to be necessary,
when once they have entered upon their work. No doubt
this entrance cannot be effected without either capital or
connexion ; but to suggest that the college revenues should
furnish the former would surely be regarded as a redudio ad
absurdum of the principle that we are considering. About
sixteen per cent of the Fellowships are occupied by parochial

xiii IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 329

clergy/ whether as holders of college livings or otherwise.
The case of these is somewhat different, as it niav he
plausibly urged that the incomes of curates (at least) are too
small, and that it is an advantage to supplement them from
any source. Still even here it seems a rather paradoxical
method of remedying the deficiency, to select a few of the
more talented of the younger clergy for pensions of about
twice the amount of a curate's average salary. Probably
no one at the present day would maintain that it is desirable
to draw young men of ability into the service of the Church
by giving them this large pecuniary advantage over their
colleagues ; since the gain to religion of the intellect thus
purchased must appear to be very doubtful. The relation
of the Church to the Universities is, however, a burning
question, which I hardly like to mix up with the present
discussion ; but perhaps it will be agreed, on dispassionate
consideration, that the University owes to the Church the
maintenance, by endowment or otherwise, of tlieological educa-
tion and learning in as good a condition as possible, rather
than a small contribution of money to the incomes of the
parochial clergy, however this contribution may be distributed.
There remain the professions of the Bar and Medicine, in
which this difficulty of obtaining employment during the
early years of the professional career certainly exists, even
for men of talent, completely trained and industrious. And
if we are considering the actual results obtained by sinecure
Fellowships, we may almost neglect Medicine, as not more
than one or two per cent of the Fellows of Colleges in Cam-
bridge enter upon this profession. The Fellows, then, who
are actually supported in careers from which they would
otherwise have been excluded, turn out to be almost entirely
barristers. An argument for sinecure Fellowships which
finds its only solid basis in the special circumstances of a
single profession — entered by not more than sixteen per
cent of the Fellows of Colleges, as far as our statistics go —

' Clerical posts in the University and Colleges rest, of course, on a different
footing, and would always receive, as they do at present, their full share of
academic endowments.

330 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES xiii

must be admitted to be in an unstable condition. But we
must observe that even of this number only a small fraction
represents the real gain of society in the way of additional
legal talent through the institution of Fellowships. We have
to subtract first the not inconsiderable quota of those who.se
" call to the bar " does not imply a real vocation for the legal
profession ; and, secondly, we have to subtract the genuine
barristers who would equally have become such if they had
been thrown on their own resources or those of their parents,
and who, it may be remarked, would perhaps have thrown
themselves into their work with more energy and decision if
they had had no Fellowships ; for it is in many cases a doubt-
ful l30on to remove from a young man the stimulus supplied
by straitened means or the sense of dependence upon others.
But even if we confine our attention to the funds distributed
among the small residuum of Fellows who go to the bar to
become lawyers, and really do become lawyers, and would
not have done so except for their Fellowships, it does not
seem after all clear that these funds are wisely bestowed, if
we consider the matter from the point of view of society,
and not of the fortunate individuals who receive them. In
fact, the very reason why they are needed seems also a
ground for doubting whether their effect is on the whole
beneficial. Why is it difficult to obtain employment at the
Bar ? Obviously because the profession is so attractive that
it is crowded by a throng of able competitors competing
eagerly for employment. Why, then, it may fairly be asked,
should we spend money in artificially swelling the crowd
and increasing the keenness of competition ? It will perhaps
be answered that, though there may be at present no lack,
or even a superfluity, of competitors quite adequate to the
ordinary work of advocacy, there is certainly no super-
abundance of men possessing at once legal attainments and
the general intellectual grasp which ought to be combined in
the lawyers who reach the highest posts in the judiciary and
become the legal advisers of the Crown. A few thousand a
year, it may be urged, is a small price to pay for the
advantage of having the best ability of the whole nation to

XIII IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 331

choose from in selecting Attorney-Generals, Chancellors, and
Chief Justices. That there is some force in this I would
not deny : in fact, it seems to me that we have here the one
solid grain of argument in all the plausihle talk about
" supporting young men in their careers." But granting it
to be desirable that one or two pensions tenable for a few
years should be given away annually to young lawyers of
exceptional ability and scanty means, it hardly falls within
the province of the University to distribute these pensions.
The corporations charged with the supervision of the Bar,
who have funds, and lately at least have shown a laudable
desire to spend them in promoting the best interests of the
legal profession, appear the proper bodies to make this dis-
tribution. They are better able than the Universities to say
from time to time how far they are needed, and they ought
to be better able to secure in the recipients of the pension
the special talents and knowledge which it is desirable they
should possess. Again, if distributed by them, such pensions
need not be exactly sinecures. They could easily be given
on condition of performing some light educational duties, so
arranged as not to hamper the pensioner in the competition
for professional employment, while at the same time they
might be an inducement to him to resign his pension when
his time began to be fully occupied in ordinary legal work.^
But whatever may be the best way of providing for the
interests of the Bar, it seems clear that the allotment of £300
a year apiece to all the successful competitors in University
examinations, of whom about sixteen per cent go to the Bar,
is not a good adaptation of means to this end. And we have
seen that in the case of the great majority of Fellows no
similar need exists for giving this eleemosynary sujtport
after their education is completed. I pass, therefore, to con-
sider the other argument by which these gifts are defended
— that, namely, which points to the attractive and stimulative
influence which they exercise as prizes for study. This
argument, I am aware, appears strong to many ; but I must

^ Similarly, a .soiiiewliut ampler remuneration of medical teaching might surely
do all that is necessary for the support of talented young physicians.

332 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xiii

confess that twenty years' experience of University life has
gradually led me to regard it far more unfavourably than the
one just discussed. Considered as a means of support after
education has been completed, the prize-fellowship has (as
we have just seen) a partial justification, though w^ithin a
very limited range. In a small number of cases it does meet
a definite need, and there is at least a probability of its pro-
ducing a certain amount of gain to the community; and
even in the great majority of cases, where there is no such
need, we have little ground for attributing to the institution
any positively bad effects. There is no reason to believe
that the pension drawn from academic endowments by (e.^.)
a young schoolmaster at Eton or Harrow is spent in any
worse way than any other portion of the superfluous wealth
of the community. But as a prize by which students may
be attracted to the University, and sustained in their industry
when there, the Fellowship operates in a manner which must,
I think, be pronounced positively pernicious. It places the
University in a radically false relation to the community,
and seriously impairs its performance of its proper function
as a centre of intellectual life. In saying this I do not wish
to propose any impracticably high standard as to the spirit
in which study ought to be carried on by undergraduates
generally ; but all will admit that the highest ideal of such
study requires that knowledge should be cultivated for its
own sake, and that it should be the aim of academic teachers
to maintain this ideal as far as possible — that the University
should be, as it were, a shrine in which the noble ardour of
disinterested curiosity is kept ever burning, and communi-
cated in each generation of students to all who are in any
degree capable of receiving it. No one who knows the
German universities can doubt that, whatever their defects
may be, they do perform satisfactorily this invaluable service
to the community : and probably no one who really knows
Cambridge would deny that, speaking broadly, she fails in
tins respect. And the blame of this failure cannot, I think,
be fairly thrown, as it sometimes is, on the exclusively
practical character of the English people ; when we consider

XIII IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 333

the amount of disinterested study that is being carried on all
over England, sometimes under the greatest possible dis-
advantages and by persons who have to earn a livelihood
in some laborious trade or profession. It would be more
apparently reasonable to throw the blame on the teaching
body of the University, and 1 am not prepared to repudiate
the charge altogether. But I would urge those who are dis-
posed to censure us harshly fur this failure to rellect how
difficult it is to resist the strong perpetual pressure exercised,
on the minds of teachers and jtupils alike, by this fatal
possession of large pecuniary prizes for successful study as
tested by examinations. It is almost inevitable that the
pursuit of knowledge should be gradually turned into a
training for an intellectual wrestling-match. The possibility
of gaining such large immediate rewards by examinations
naturally concentrates the student's attention on the attain-
ment of the particular kind of knowledge and skill by which
this success may best be won. And thus the proper relation
of instruction and examination is inverted. Examination,
instead of being merely the means of testing the thorough-
ness with which a subject has been taught and learnt,
becomes the end to which teaching and learning are directed,
and the standard to which reference is naturally made in
determining both the matter to be learnt and the method of
learning it. The student feels himself under the necessity
of limiting his reading to those subjects and parts of subjects
on which questions are likely to be set ; he has to check
himself from pursuing any interesting inquiry too far, for
fear it should occupy an amount of time disproportioned to
the amount of ' marks ' he may hope to gain by it in
examination. His object is not so much to know truth as
to be able to write it out rapidly in fragments of a certain
size. This species of intellectual discipline has doubtless
some advantages ; but it must be allowed that, regarded as
a means of conveying either actual present knowledge, or the
habits of thought and feeling which will lead to the acquisi-
tion of knowledge in the future, it is open to very serious
objections. There is no kind of study which does not sufler

334 ^-^SA YS AND ADDRESSES xiii

to some extent from being pursued in this frame of mind ;
at the same time, some subjects are much more liable to
deterioration from this cause than others, as the difference
between the rational and — if I may coin a word — the
examinational manner of studying a suljject varies very much
in different cases. Thus we are led to notice another bad
result of the undue influence at present exercised by
examinations, which is strongly felt by those who have
charge of education at Cambridge — viz. that they are
seriously hampered in choosing subjects and framing courses
of study by the necessity of adapting them to examinational
reading and teaching. They cannot merely consider, even
in the case of the most intelligent pupils, what would be the
most desirable subject of study if the student were supposed
to be simply seeking for knowledge or intellectual training :
they must assume that their pupils will, speaking generally,
read witli a view to examinations, and therefore must choose
subjects which admit of being examined in satisfactorily.

In saying this I am anxious not to exaggerate either the
existing defect or the extent to which it might be expected
to be removed by a change in the distribution of endow-
ments. No doubt even now there are many disinterested
students at our Universities and not a few teachers, who
earnestly foster the impulse towards study for its own sake ;
but I think any one who knows Cambridge will admit that
students and teachers of this class have to set themselves
against the general tendency of the system. Again, it must
be admitted that the influence of examinations does not de-
pend entirely on the Fellowships : the immediate pleasure
of success in an intellectual competition, and the various
professional and social advantages that may be expected
from it, would in themselves exercise a powerful attractive
force on the minds of students generally. Still it is due to
the large pecuniary prizes that this influence becomes an
almost irresistible control. How can one persuade a poor
man not to concentrate his energies on success in a given
competition, when the possession of £300 a year for a long
term of years may depend upon it ? And it is only this

XIII IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 335

overwhelming influence that depresses and demoralises ; for
lip to a certain point the guidance and stimulus of examina-
tions is highly heneticial. But though a good servant, the
examination is a bad master ; and the prize- fellowships
inevitably make it master.

It may be urged that the number of students in whom
disinterested curiosity could be made to operate effectively
as the sole or chief motive for study form but a small
minority of the whole contingent that the country annually
sends to Cambridge. It must be remembered, however, that
this minority is likely to be found chiefly — though not en-
tirely— among the more gifted and well-trained students :
that is, it coincides to a great extent with the equally small
class that is directly affected by the competition for Fellow-
ships. But the influence of the tone and spirit in which
study is carried on by the intellectual dite of any place of
education extends, in varying degrees of intensity, far beyond
the limits of the class itself It depends not a little on the
system which is brought to bear on these whether the whole
U'sneration of students ^ shall receive whatever measure of
truly academic culture they are capable of receiving, or
whether they shall in after-life look back upon the Uni-
versity (apart from its social advantages) as an institution
for giving them a certain amount of intellectual drill. And
even if we confine our attention to the alumni of the most
exclusively practical turn of mind, we shall find that their
interests suffer considerably under the present system. For
the desire of obtaining a Fellowship is not only not the best
possible motive by which to stimulate and direct youthful
study : it is out of several alternatives almost the worst.
Under its influence the " practical " youth is often led to
devote the precious years of his University life to a course
of reading which is equally out of relation to his intellectual
tastes and needs, and to his professional prospects : he
studies in a thoroughly utilitarian spirit what he yet regards

' I use this term advisedly, as my remarks do not a]iply to the " residuum "
of undergraduates who are in no sense students : which would probably be uniu-
lluencud by any system.

336 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES xiii

as useless for all purposes, except that of obtaining academic
prizes. No doubt the education may turn out to be of
more use to him than he anticipates : still it may easily
happen that it is not the course of training which his
teachers and advisers, any more than himself, would have
selected, excej^t for the one decisive consideration that it
offers him the only or the surest road to a Fellowship. It
may be said that the blame of this rests upon the Uni-
versity, or rather on the corporations of the Colleges, who
ought to distribute their Fellowships with more judgment.
But the truth is that to all the other forces of academic
conservatism, already sufficiently strong, the system of prize-
fellowships inevitably adds golden weights, which operate
independently of the deliberate choice of any College
authorities. Of late years the University of Cambridge has
consistently shown the greatest possible liberality and im-
partiality in offering her alumni a free choice among the
different branches of learning and science. She has yielded
to every proposal that has been supported by names of any
weight for the establishment of a new ramification of the
curriculum, with new examination, board of studies, selected
books, class-list of honours, etc. — in short, with all the
apparatus with which the University can commend a de-
partment of study to the attention of undergraduates. In
this way there are now no less than seven courses of study
thus distinguished and recommended, and ranged by the side
of the older classical and mathematical courses on a footing
of apparent equality. And many at least of the Colleges
are sincerely desirous of being equally comprehensive and im-
partial in the distribution of their rewards ; but, as was just
said, the present Fellowship system encloses both the electors
and the candidates for Fellowships in a sort of vicious circle
of old customs, which it requires exceptional independence
and enterprise on either side to break through. The College
wishes to elect the ablest of the youth that it has trained,
whatever course of study they may have adopted : a youth
of talent, very likely, would prefer on other grounds to enter
for one of the new Triposes ; but lie is led to choose one of

XIII IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 337

the older lines of study, because he rightly thinks he is more
sure of obtaining a Fellowship by distinction in these ; and
he is more sure of this because the College rightly thinks
that the competition in these older lines is more keen, and
tliat there is consocjuently more security that the men who
attain distinction in them will be men of real ability. Each
of these opinions is justified, as long as its counterpart
is maintained : and accordingly each tends to maintain its
counterpart. There is no logical emergence from this circle ;
and so, generally speaking, it can only be broken down on
either side when the undergraduate is prepared to run some
risk for the sake of a favourite study, and the College is
prepared to accept a somewhat less complete guarantee of
ability.

If then we may conclude that it is inexpedient
to employ, as a stimulus to the study of undergraduates,
a system of pecuniary prizes so large that they inevitably
become the end and goal of such study, and deter-
mine its nature and direction, it still remains to be con-
sidered whether — as is sometimes urged — these prizes are
necessary to attract young men to the University. It would
need a good deal more evidence than I have ever seen
adduced to render this probable ; and if it were proved,
it would only be more clear that the relations between the
University and the country are in need of radical alteration.
What parents ought to seek from the University for their
sons is knowledge and intellectual training, and not money.
Let them be as watchful and exacting as they please in their
demands for the former commodity : it is surely desirable
that their vigilance, and the efforts of the University, should
be as little as possible distracted by the distribution of the
latter. I am not now speaking of the case where the one
gift is necessary to place the student in a condition to re-
ceive the dther. Let it be conceded that academic education
is a benefit, the communication of which, in certain cases,
may be made nearly or quite eleemosynary. Let the en-
dowments be used as liberally as possible in providing sup-
port for poor youths of real talent during the whole period

z

338 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xm

of education. This species of alms certainly does not de-
moralise the recipient ; and it seems a gain to the community
that he should receive it. But I can hardly acquiesce in
regarding academic education as a serious burden, which
must be offered along with heavy bribes, if it is to be
accepted by able men. If this view be really prevalent, I
should hold that there must be something wrong either
in the education itself, or in the estimate generally set upon
it ; and it seems clear that the continuance of the system of
bribes is not calculated to remedy either defect.

But I cannot believe that Cambridge would to any im-
portant extent diminish the range of its influence, if the
prize-fellowships were abolished. I doubt whether even
now these rewards occupy a very prominent place in the
deliberations of parents who are considering the wisdom of
sending their sons to the University. That they have some
weight is, of course, undeniable ; comparatively few parents
could afford to disregard two or three thousand pounds ;
especially when our educational system tends so much to
foster the belief that the most valuable gift that Cambridge
has to bestow is money. But if we conceive a reconstructed
University, concentrating its attention on its proper function
of acquiring the best knowledge on all subjects and impart-
ing it in the best manner, and relying for attraction solely on
its excellent performance of this function, I see no reason
to believe that its work would not be rated at its true
value by the country generally. We are justified, I think,
in inferring this from the experience of neighbouring countries
on the same level of civilisation as ourselves, who have never
felt the need and never entertained the idea of alluring their
youth to literary or scientific culture by thus directly con-
necting it with cash. We might infer it even without look-
ing outside England, from the abundant zeal manifested
throughout the country in the case of education generally,
and especially of the most advanced portion of it : one
evidence of which is furnished by the recent remarkable
success of the Cambridge scheme of University extension.
And all experience combines to show that the faith of Eng-

XIII IDLE FELLOWSHIPS 339

lishmen in the efiicacy of their educational institutions is
hardy enough to stand very rude shocks, and generally errs
by excess rather than defect. To suppose that even a
temporary decrease in the numbers of Cambridge would
result from the restoration of her endowments to learnin"
and research seems a most groundless alarm.

XIV
A LECTURE AGAINST LECTUEING

(New Review, May 1890)

I HAVE for mauy years held the opinion that the traditional
method of academic teaching needs a radical alteration. I
have hitherto kept this opinion private, because I found that
it was not shared by most of the persons whose experience
gave them adequate means of forming a judgment ; but as
my own experience and reflection have continually strength-
ened it, I think it now desirable to publish it — giving due
warning to the reader that it is a heresy. My object is
primarily to obtain sympathy : there may possibly be others
who have long been secretly cherishing similar views ; and
perhaps, if we could communicate and combine, we might
at any rate call the attention of persons interested in educa-
tion to the gravity of the question, and stimulate some kind
of movement in the direction of the required change. But
I also partly wish to obtain advice : since — except in a very
limited part of the whole subject — I seem to see more
clearly the general direction in which improvement is needed
than the precise nature of the changes of method that
should be recommended.

In speaking of " method " I mean simply the way in
which instruction is imparted ; I am not concerned with
the questions (1) where University teaching should be
carried on, or (2) what subjects should be selected for
study, or (3) how the student's industry should be stimu-
lated and tested. These appear to be the points in which,

340

XIV A LECTURE AGAINST LECTURING 341

in England, most University reformers are interested : they
are either for having academic centres in large cities, instead
of small provincial towns like Oxford and Cambridge ; or
they are for modern languages and experimental science
as against classics ; or they are opposed to the tyranny of
competitive examinations, and the degrading influence of
pecuniary bribes to learning. All these are most interesting
topics, on which there is much to be said on both sides. But
the change that I am now to advocate relates to a much more
simple and fundamental question : viz., how, when we have
located our teacher, and selected his subjects, and collected
a class of intelligent and industrous youth — with or without
the stimulus of prospective gain and glory — the instruction
should be imparted which the class may be presumed to be
fairly eager to acquire.

The answer — or at least the main answer — to this
question appears to be thought by most persons so simple
as hardly to require a moment's consideration. All that
seems to them necessary is that the teacher and the class
should be brought together in a room at a certain hour on
certain days in the week — varying usually from two to six
— and that the teacher should expound his subject in a
series of lectures, varying from forty-five to sixty minutes
in length. This is the traditional, time-honoured, almost
universal practice of University professors, ordinary or
extraordinary, in the countries that share European civilis-
ation : it is supported by an overwhelming consensus of
opinion and practice, and most persons with whom I have
spoken on the subject hardly seem able to conceive it as
either needing or admitting fundamental alteration. I do
not mean that what I have just described is universally
held to constitute the whole of a professor's educational
function. In England, at any rate, it is generally thought
that academic teaching, to be effective, must include some
kind of exercises written by the student and looked over by
the teacher, and some kind of oral communication between
the two, in the way of question and answer. In Germany,
however, the instrument of academic instruction is — in

342 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xiv

most departments of study, and so far as the majority of
students are concerned — simply the lecture ; and even in
England it is commonly thought to be the main if not
the sole educational business of a professor to expound his
subject in a course of lectures.

It is this opinion that appears to me radically erroneous.
I regard the ordinary expository lecture — in most subjects,
and so far as the most intelligent class of students are
concerned — as an antiquated survival : a relic of the times
before the printing-press was invented : maintained partly
by the mere conservatism of habit and the prestige of
ancient tradition, partly by the difficulty — -which I quite
admit — of finding the right substitute for it.

This, then, is the heresy that I have to defend ; but
before defending it I wish carefully to limit it, in order not
to present too broad a front to an orthodox opponent; and
I therefore wish to except from condemnation various classes
of lectures on various grounds. Thus, I except lectures of
which the method is dialectic and not simply expository ;
and lectures on science or art, in which the exhibition of
experiments or specimens forms an essential part of the
plan of instruction ; and again, lectures on art or literature,
so far as they aim at emotional and iesthetic, not purely
intellectual, effects ; and lectures on any subject whatever
that are intended to stimulate interest rather than to con-
vey information. For all these purposes I conceive that the
use of lectures will increase rather than diminish as civiHsa-
tion progresses. Further, I have only in view the elite of
academic students : the intelligent and industrious youth,
who have been trained from childhood in the habit of
deriving ideas from books, and are able and willing to apply
prolonged labour and concentrated attention to the method-
ical perusal of books under the direction of their teachers.
My remarks have no reference to that large part of the
community that has never had the opportunity of acquiring
a thorough mastery of the art of reading books ; nor do
they refer to the class of — so-called — academic students who
require the discipline of schoolboys. It may be necessary to

XIV A LECTURE AGAINST LECTUKING 343

drive these latter into lecture-rooms in order to increase the
chance of their obtaining the required instruction somehow.
I say " increase the chance " because it is by no means
certain that young people of this turn of mind will actually
drink of the fouutaiu of knowledge, even if they are led to
it daily between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. But the compulsion
may, no doubt, increase the chance of their imbibing know-
ledge, since it is difficult to find amusement during a lecture
which will distract one's attention completely from the
lecturer ; although I have known instances in which the
difficulty has been successfully overcome by patient in-
genuity.

Leaving, then, out of account exhibitory lectures, dialectic
lectures, disciplinary lectures, as well as lectures primarily
designed to produce an effect on the emotions, let us con-
tine our attention to the ordinary expository lecture, in
which the lecturer's function is merely to impart instruction
by reading or saying a series of words that might be
written and printed. My view is that this species of
lecture, when addressed to students who have duly learnt,
and are willing to use, the art of reading books, is, in most
cases, an unsuitable and uneconomical employment of the
time of the teacher and the class. In giving the arguments
for this view I shall first assume that an adequate exposition
of the lecturer's subject either is already obtainable in print,
or might be provided in this form by the lecturer himself,
if it were considered to be his professional duty to provide
it. This being granted, it seems to me obvious that the
class of students whom I have in view had better obtain the
required instruction by reading the print. The student who
reads has two capital advantages over the student who
listens : he can vary the pace at will, and he can turn
back and compare passages ; and, according to my experience
as a student, these advantages altogether outweigh the
counter -advantage of the additional intelligibility which
discourse acquires from the inflections of the human voice
and the variations of the speaker's emphasis. For in learning
anything it seems to me fundamentally important to be able

344 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES xiv

to take in rapidly what is easy or familiar, and pause to
reflect as loner as one likes on what is novel or difficult.
No doubt a competent lecturer will always try to vary the
length of his treatment and the fulness of his illustrations
in different parts of his subject, according to his conception
of their comparative difficulty. But no lecturer can be
sufficiently acquainted with the nature and causes of the
transient hesitations and perplexities which beset the in-
tellectual progress of any individual mind ; and even if his
sympathetic insight were ever so keen and subtle, the
diversities in previous knowledge and faculty of appre-
hension which are commonly found among the members of
an actual class render it impossible for him to adapt his
exposition closely to the intellectual needs of any individual.
Besides, the one thing that the lecturer cannot allow is the
pause for reflection : he must go on talking.

Nor, again, can a lecturer give anything that corresponds
to the advantage of comparison of passages. It is funda-
mentally important that anyone systematically studying a
new subject should keep as clear as possible in his mind
the relation of what he is now reading or hearing to what
he has read or heard before. But it must continually
happen that this relation becomes temporarily obscured :
the student feels that he is assumed to remember distinctly
something that he only remembers vaguely, and perhaps
finds what is now said difficult to reconcile with what has
been said before. It is verv desirable that this va^eness
and difficulty should be at once removed by a reference to
the half-remembered statements and arguments ; this he
who reads can do, but he who listens has to listen on with
a perplexed and dubious mind.

It may, perhaps, be said that the listener can perform
this process after the lecture is over ; he can read over his
notes and compare them with books or with the notes of other
lectures. This I admit ; but then, if a lecture is treated in
this way — as something to be taken down at the time and
understood afterwards — the advantages of oral exposition
are largely lost : the process is nearly reduced to one of

XIV A LECTURE AGAINST LECTURING 345

mere dittation. For the most intelligent pupil feels that if
he does not get down on paper the whole substance of the
lecture, he may possibly omit some statement of vital
importance for the work of reflection and comparison which
he has to postpone.

I remember well the occasion on which the view that I
am now expressing first presented itself to me in a clear
form, nearly tliirty years ago. It was the first time that I
attended a lecture — by an eminent professor — in a German
university. I went at the hour announced ; the small
lecture-room gradually filled, becoming even fuller than was
quite agreeable in the heats of July ; and I waited in
expectant curiosity. The eminent man came in, according
to custom, punctually at the quarter ; he carried in his
hand a manuscript yellow with age ; he did not seem to
look at his audience, but fixing his eyes on his manuscript
he be<][an to read it aloud with slow monotonous utterance.
I glanced round the room ; every pupil that I could see was
bending over his notebook, writing as hard as he could.
The uniamiliar surroundings and the unfamiliar language
stimulated my imagination, and I fancied myself back in a
world more than four centuries old, in which it had not yet
occurred to Coster or Gutenberg that it would be a con-
venience to use movable types for the multiplication of
copies of MS. I have since listened to many other lectures in
German university lecture-rooms, some of which have been
admirably delivered ; still, the effect of this first experience
has never been entirely effaced.

And it is to be observed that so far as the task of a
lecturer's class is reduced to a process of multiplication of
copies it is a task that might be performed through the
medium of a printing-press, not only more economically,
but more accurately. It is one more disadvantage of
expository lectures as compared with books that they are
often not taken down quite correctly. Some important
words are misheard, as is very natural when what is
written down is imperfectly understood at the time ; and
the work of subsequent comprehension is thereby needlessly

346 ESS A YS AND ADDRESSES

XIV

and perhaps seriously confused. I once heard of a man
who spent six hours in endeavouring to understand the
notes of a lecture that had occupied a single hour ! It is
true that the lecturer was a bad lecturer, in form and style,
but he was not phenomenally bad, nor was the pupil
exceptionally unintelligent. Again, I was once told in an
Oxford common-room of the sad fortune of a student of
philosophy, who had succeeded in reproducing with toler-
able fidelity the doctrines of a Transcendentalist meta-
physician whose lectures he had been attending, until, in
his very last answer, he had occasion to refer several times
to the " universal I " which constitutes the centre of the
Transcendentalist world. Unluckily he always designated
this all-important entity as " universal eye," — an unauthor-
ised variation which blasted his fair prospects of success.
I admit it to be doubtful whether this gentleman would
have fathomed the mysteries of Transcendentalism if they
had been presented to his eye — I mean his individual eye
— instead of his ear ; but he would certainly have had a
better chance of comprehending them.^

My opponents will perhaps reply that all my argument
is based on the unwarrantable assumption that what the
lecturer has to say — or an adequate substitute for it — is
obtainable in print. But, they will say, if the lecturer is
worth his salt this will not be the case ; he will always
have something to say which is not in print and which will
yet be important for the student to know, and it will be
worth the latter's while to go through some trouble to get
tliis. I do not deny that this is to some extent true; an
active -minded man, however many books and papers he
may liave printed, is likely always to have something to
say on a subject on which his thoughts are strenuously at
work, which may convey the truth as he sees it more
exactly or more comprehensibly than he has yet managed
to express it in print. I admit, therefore, that there must

^ I do not vouch for the literal truth of this story — as truth is sometimes
mingled with fiction in Oxford — but I have myself had experiences somewhat
similar, though less striking.

XIV A LECTURE AGAINST LECTURING 347

always be some, place left for the expository lecture. All I
contend is, that the need for it might be very much
reduced, and ought to be reduced, by giving every possible
encouragement to the teacher to disseminate his doctrine
through the medium of the press. My complaint against
the existing system is that it has the precisely opposite
effect. It gives the utmost inducement to a teacher to
keep the most indispensable part of his teaching un-
published. For since law or custom requires him to
deliver a certain number of lectures on a given subject,
when he has once published a systematic treatise on this
subject he finds himself in a dilemma resembling that pre-
sented by the Omar of tradition to the Alexandrian Library.
What he says in his lecture is either in his book or it is
not ; if it is there, it is superfluous to say it over again ; if
it is not there, he cannot regard it as very important unless
his views have changed, or some new discovery has been
made since he wrote his book. It is easy for him to avoid
this dilemma by not printing ; and thus — always assuming
that what he has to say is of real value — the students
elsewhere who cannot go to his lectures are deprived of
useful instruction, and the students who do attend them
have to receive it in an inconvenient form, in order that
the professor may be enabled to fulfil with Mat the
traditional conception of his functions.

I do not wish to degrade the tone of this discussion by
laying stress on sordid pecuniary considerations ; but I
must mention that I have heard of a professor whose class
diminished very markedly after his systematic treatise was
published ; and it seems obvious that, where there is an
active competition among teachers, a man who is conscious
of having attracted an audience rather by his matter than
by his manner may reasonably fear and avoid this result.
And it is surely a serious economic drawback in the
organisation of any kind of labour that the labourer has a
strong interest in diminishing, or hampering with incon-
venient conditions, the utility that he is appointed to
render to society.

348 ESSAYS AxVD ADDRESSES XIV

My conclusion, then, is that it ought to be regarded as
the primary duty of an academic teacher, in relation to the
class of students for whom advanced teaching is mainly
provided, to supply the best possil^le instruments of self-
instruction in the form of printed books or papers. These
ought to be partly his own work, if he is worthy of his
position ; but the extent to which this ought to be tlie case
will vary with circumstances. To the study of this printed
matter his oral teaching ought to be frankly and completely
subordinate and supplementary.

In saying this I am anxious not to undervalue oral
teaching, or to overlook the counterbalancing advantages
which the listener's position has as compared with the
reader's. I quite admit that oral delivery must be very
bad if the inllections of voice and variations of emphasis do
not materially add to the intelligibility of the sentences
uttered. Also it may be fairly urged that the line which I
have tried to draw, between lectures designed to arouse
interest and lectures designed to give information, is onlv
partially tenable ; since a good lecture will stimulate while
informing, more than the same discourse would do if
printed, through the effect of personal presence and utter-
ance in stirring intellectual sympathy. I should be dis-
posed to admit this as a general rule, though I think that
there are important exceptions. For instance, having heard
J. S. Mill speak, I rather doubt whether, if he had delivered
his Liberty in oral discourses from a professorial chair,
their effect would have been as stimulating as the perusal
of the book actually was. Still, on the whole, I allow the
advantages claimed for oral teaching in both the respects
that I have just mentioned ; but I venture to think that
both the gain in facilitating comprehension and the stimulus
through intellectual sympathy would be more effectually
secured if the lecture were used as I desire it to be, as
frankly secondary and supplementary to the perusal of
printed matter. For in this case the lecturer would be
free to devote the larger part of his time and labour to the
work of explaining over again wliatever parts of the subject

XIV A LECTURE AGAINST LECTURING 349

liis hearers had been unable adequately to learn from the
printed matter which he had placed in their hands.

The precise nature of the supplementary explanations
which would thus constitute the main material of ordinary
lectures would differ imptntantly with different subjects,
and probably also with dilferent teachers and different
classes. The general principle would have to be applied
in somewhat diverse ways to linguistic studies, historical
studies, mathematics, and moral sciences ; and I feel that it
would be presumptuous in me to make detailed suggestions
with regard to any subject except moral sciences or philo-
sophy, to which my own practical experience has long been
almost entirely confined.

In moral sciences, in their present state of uncertainty
and controversy, the student must expect — even after the
most careful selection of books for his perusal — to find
much that will perplex him in all the earlier stages of his
progress. Indeed, I may say that if he does not find this,
he is either above or beneath our present consideration ; he
either does not need oral teaching or is not likely to derive
much profit from it. Assuming him to be intelligent
enough to feel difficulties, and as yet without the grasp of
method necessary for solving them, the chief service that
the oral teacher can render is to assist in their solution :
first by mildly but firmly pressing the pupil to state his
difficulties as clearly as possible ; and secondly, by giving
his own mind to the task of comprehending and answering
them. I think that both parts of this indispensable process
are liable to be performed without adequate care. Especi-
ally I have found it hard to convince my pupils of the
importance, for progress in philosophy, of stating per-
plexities clearly and precisely. The art that has to be
learnt in order to achieve this result has been called the
art of " concentrating fog." In the earlier stages of philo-
sophical study, fog is sure to arise from time to time, in
the perusal even of the best attainable books ; from the
obscurity of some statements, or their inconsistency with
other statements of the same or other writtM'S, or with the

350 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xiv

reader's previous beliefs. An intellectual fog, like a physical
fog, is very pervasive, and liable rapidly to envelop large
portions of a subject even when its original source really
lies in a very limited and not very important difficulty.
The great thing, therefore, is to concentrate it ; and the
most effective way of concentrating it is for the student to
force himself to state the difficulty on paper. Sometimes,
in the mere process of writing it down, the difficulty will
disappear like the morning mist, one does not know how ;
but when this result does not follow, the difficulty has at
any rate been brought into the very best condition for being
removed by a teacher. And the step gained by such
removal of a difficulty, so prepared, is hardly ever lest
again.

But though this precise and definite statement of diffi-
culties is always to be recommended, to require it always
would be impracticable : the worst confusions and mis-
understandings are those of which one is only dimly con-
scious, in the vague form of a lack of perfect comprehension.
A teacher, therefore, while urging precise statement as an
ideal to be aimed at, should give ungrudging welcome even
to vague and tentative statements of difficulties : he should
count it a gain if a pupil will merely tell him that he does
not quite understand page 5 of chapter iv., or the second
paragraph of page 156. Even if the teacher cannot guess
the exact point of the difficulty he will at any rate know
on what parts of the subject he should direct his faculty of
elucidation. Having thus received all available information
as to the intellectual needs of his class, the teacher will be
in a position to make his lecture effectively supplementary
to the reading of printed matter, by giving a second
exposition on the subject, specially framed to fill up the
gaps of apprehension left by the first. He must not
flatter himself that this second exposition will completely
attain his end, but he may hope that the difficulties which
remain will not be too extensive to be adequately dealt
with in conversation with the students individually after
the lecture is over.

XIV A LECTURE AGAINST LECTURING 351

This, then, is the practical conclusion to which experi-
ence has led me : tliat in tlie teaching of piiilosophy
provision should be regularly made for explaining any
important argument, if necessary, three times over — first,
in books and printed papers which the student is to read
in his own room ; secondly, in a supplementary lecture,
framed in view of written statements of difhculties received
from the students ; and thirdly, if necessary, in subsequent
informal conversation. These three times ought, I think,
normally to suffice to make clear to students who are really
fit to study the subject anything which the lecturer really
understands. A cynic may say that the practical question
for a professor of philosophy is more often how to explain
what he only half understands to a class of which at least
half had better be studying something else. There may be
some truth in this ; but from the investigation of the new
practical problem presented by these conditions the in-
dulgent reader will permit me to recoil.

XV

THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE AS AN IDEAL

[The following paper is part of a lecture delivered in 1897 to the students
of the University College of Wales, Aberystwith. The portion omitted here
— -which discusses more fully^the nature of culture and Matthew Arnold's
definitions of it — also formed part of a paper read about the same time to
the London School of Ethics and Social Philosophy, which has already been
published under the title " The Pursuit of Culture," in a collection of essays
by Henry Sidgwick, entitled Practical Ethics (Swan Sonnenschein, 1897).
"We the more readily omit this portion here, as the subject is also dealt wath
in the essay on The Prophet of Culture, printed above. — Ed.]

When I selected "The Pursuit of Culture" as the subject of
my address this evening, it was my desire to choose a topic
falling within the range of my habitual thought, which
should at the same time have an interest, not for stu-
dents of moral philosophy alone, but for academic students
generally. On the one hand, culture is recognised as a
fundamentally important part of the human good that it is
the business of practical morality to promote ; and the
recognition of this has grown during the last generation
with the enlargement of our conception of the future of
human life to be lived on this earth. The problem of
making that life a better thing has become more and
more clearly the dominant problem for morality ; and in the
doubtless imperfect conception we form of tliis betterment,
mental culture — which, according to usage, I shall simply
call culture — has an increasingly prominent place. When
thoughtful persons ask themselves what social end is served
by the luxurious expenditure of the wealthy, the most
persuasive answer is that this expenditure is largely

352

XV THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE AS AN IDEAL 353

indispensable to the promotion of culture. Again, -when
the same persons ask themselves what of the goods that the
rich enjoy, it is really important for human happiness to
difi'use among the poorer classes — at any rate after the
elementary needs of physical existence are satisfied — the
answer again is ' culture.' When, finally, we ask, ' How,
then, is this element of human well-being to be adequately
promoted and diffused ? ' an obvious and familiar answer is,
' By founding schools and universities, and keeping them in
a condition of full efficiency.' It seems, therefore, to con-
cern us all deeply to obtain as clear a conception as possible
of the ideal aim, which we find thus presented from so
many different points of view.

Since the most essential function of the mind is to think
and know, a man of cultivated mind must be concerned for
knowledge : but it is not knowledge merely that gives
culture. A man may be learned and yet lack culture : for
he may be a pedant, and the characteristic of a pedant is
that he has knowledge without culture. So again, a load
of facts retained in the memory, or a mass of reasonings got
up merely for examination — these are not, they do not give
culture. It is the love of knowledge, the ardour of scientific
curiosity, driving us continually to absorb new facts and
ideas, to make them our own and fit them into the living
and growing system of our thought ; and the trained faculty
of doing this, the alert and supple intelligence exercised
and continually developed in doing this — it is in these that
culture essentially lies. But how to acquire this habit of
mind, and to acquire along with it the refinement of sensi-
bility, the trained and developed taste for all manifestations
of beauty which no less belongs to culture — this is the
practical problem for all who pursue this ideal good : and
in a special manner and degree for academic students.

• «•••••

And for academic students there is one question of deep
interest — Is the specialist a man of culture, even so far as
the knowledge-element of culture is concerned ? And the

2 A

354 £SSA YS AND ADDRESSES xv

answer, I think, must be No, so far as he is a mere
specialist— so far as his intellectual interests and sympathies
are confined within the limits of his specialty. If the root
of true culture is in him, he will resist and react against
this limiting and cramping of his thought — which yet, as I
have said, the progress of science renders in some degree
inevitable ; and there is nothing that can strengthen and
stimulate him more to this noble conflict than the habit of
taking delight in the best literature.

It is this intellectual function of literature — to maintain,
in spite of the increasing specialisation inevitably forced on
us by the growth of knowledge, our intellectual interests
and sympathies in due breadth and versatility, while at the
same time gratifying and exercising our sense of beauty — it
is this that partly justifies the one-sidedness of modern
education in respect of the fine arts. This one-sidedness —
the fact that we make so little systematic effort, in school
and college, to educate the taste and judgment in music,
painting, sculpture, architecture — has sometimes been criti-
cised by those who feel strongly the importance for human
life of adequately developing the sense of beauty. I am not
sure that the criticism can be completely answered ; and
possibly the twentieth century will set itself to remedy this
defect. But there are other considerations, besides the one
I have mentioned, which must always give a special pro-
minence to literature in aesthetic education.

First, literature alone of the arts shows us the highest
excellence in a kind of productive activity in which we all
take some part. We do not only, as the hmirgeois of comedy
puts it, talk prose all our life without knowing it, but when
eager to communicate experiences, ideas, and feelings, we
talk or write as impressive prose as we can ; thus the tech-
nique of the great artists in words is only a glorified form of
a skill that we all seek, and in some humble degree learn to
exercise. Perhaps if, in the infancy of civilisation, picture-
writing had not passed into hieroglyphics and been lost in
the dull symbolism of alphabets, we should now be in the
same position in respect to painting; but, as it is, literature

XV THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE AS AN IDEAL 355

is unique in this relation to life. Secondly, literature is the
only art in which the greatest works can be at little cost
completely presented to the minds of all students every-
where. The products of the genius of Sophocles or Dante
are within the reacli of the scantiest purse, if only its owner
has learnt Greek or Italian; but more or less costly travel is
required to bring us similarly face to face with the masterpieces
of Greek sculpture or Italian painting. And, finally, literature
is, if I may so say, the most altruistic of the fine arts. I
mean it is an important part of its function to develop the
sensibility for other forms of Ijeanty besides its own. I
wonder how many of my generation have learnt to love
not only the beauties of nature more, but also painting,
sculpture, architecture, through the literary genius of John
Euskin.

But here I come upon a fundamental question, which
some of you may think I ought to have raised long ago.
I have assumed that it is a main aim of a liberal education
to impart culture, but it may not unreasonably be asked
— Can culture be really taught ? We can doubtless acquire
knowledge through teaching, but can we acquire the love
of knowledge, the ardour for seeing things as they are, which
I have assumed to be an essential element of culture ? So,
again, the technique of the fine arts may in some measure
be taught ; but can we really learn taste for fine works of
art, susceptibility to things of beauty ? It is rather like
the old question of the age of Socrates — Can virtue be
taught ? And the same answer applies, I believe, in both
cases. Virtue can be taught by a teacher who loves virtue,
and so can culture, but not otherwise ; since, as Goethe
sings : — " Speech that is to stir the heart must from the
heart have sprung." ^ Experience shows that the love of
knowledge and beauty can be communicated through in-
tellectual sympathy : there is a beneficent contagion in the
possession of it ; but it must be admitted that its acquisition
cannot be secured by any formal system of lessons. No

* [Perhaps Faust, i. 101 — Doch werilet Ihr nie Herz zu Ilerzen schatl'en,

Weuu es euch nicht von Ilerzen geht.]

356 ESSA VS AND ADDRESSES xv

recipe for it can be enclosed in a syllabus, nor can it be
tested by the best regulated examinations.

And it has further to be observed that school methods
of studying a great writer — with dictionary or glossary,
and grammar, and learned notes, and inevitably snail-like
progress — are somewhat antagonistic to the realisation of
the culture-value of the study. I remember once, when a
reformer was advocating the study of native literature in
English schools, a friend of mine — himself a lover of books
— implored him to abandon the idea. He said — ' You
will destroy the public schoolboy's last chance of literary
culture if you make him hate Shakespeare as he now hates
a Greek play.' The paradox, I need hardly say, is not
even a half truth ; still, there is some truth in it, at least
as regards languages other than the vernacular. In many
— perhaps most — cases, Sophocles and Virgil will only be-
come instruments of culture after they have ceased to be
consciously and prominently instruments for learning foreign
grammar and idioms. How to deal with this situation is a
difficult question, which it is fortunately not my business
now to answer : but from the point of view of culture there
is one condition to lay down, and one consolation to offer.

The condition is laid down on behalf of that large and
increasing class of students, who are led by the bent of
their tastes and faculties, or the requirements of their
chosen profession, to make science, not literature, the main
object of their academic study ; and here I would take
science in the widest sense, to include not only mathe-
matical and physical sciences, but moral and political
sciences, and history as providing data for the latter. I
think it fundamentally important for this class of students
that any teaching of languages which is applied to them —
whatever language may be chosen — should be carried to the
point at which they can read with ease when they leave
school ; and that it is indefinitely better that they
should reach this point in any one of the great culture-
languages of Europe than that they should be carried half-
way to it in two. Unless this is tlie case, if they are still

XV THE rURSUIT OF CULTURE AS AN IDEAL 357

liable, wliile reading, to be perplexed in every page by dilli-
culties of grammar, idiom, and vocaljulary, they will not be
able to use the language at the University — and still less,
generally speaking, in after life — cither as a means of gain-
ing knowledge (other than philological) or as a source of
literary enjoyment. In this case, their chief gain from
learning the language will be in the way of intellectual
gymnastic — the training in special kinds of observation,
discrimination and inference, and in the accurate expression
of shades of thought. I do not undervalue this educational
gain ; but I think the main part of it may be obtained from
the study of any one language other than the vernacular, if
properly taught ; and surely it is a sad pity that this should
be the sole gain from the labour of years spent upon a great
historic tongue.

I am aware that the condition I am laying down is
practically hard to realise in the case of languages so
difficult as Latin or Greek ; and, therefore, I hasten on to
my consolation. It is that for the essential needs of
literary culture — for learning to grasp great and subtle
thoughts, to share fine emotions, to taste with fulness and
delicacy the beautiful expression of both, to follow with
ready and versatile sympathy the varied manifestations of
man's spiritual life — any one of the great national litera-
tures of which I have spoken, properly studied, would
suffice ; the travel into other literatures is a luxury, not
indispensable, however justly valued. Take English : sup-
pose a man acquainted with the best works of the best
writers, from Chaucer to the present time ; able to learn
what they have to teach, to feel with due discrimination
their special beauties and at the same time their limitations,
to understand their aims and antecedents and judge their
achievements — so far as this can be done without knowing
of other literatures more than he can now know through
good English translations ; suppose him to have the know-
ledge of history that this would involve, and at the same time
to be duly trained by and instructed in science ; — surely the
pedant who would dispute such a man's claim to culture

00

8 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES xv

would only show his own ignorance of that gift. I do not
of course say that a lover of literature ought to he content
with this : I only offer this indisputable truth as a consola-
tion to anyone who finds his working time absorbed in
scientific or professional study before he has got sufficient
hold of Latin or Greek or French or German to read it in
hours of relaxation. In the house of culture there are many
mansions ; and to exhaust the lessons and the delights
that English literature by itself can offer would take con-
siderably more than the leisure that most busy lives can
afford for reading M'hat is not in the newspapers.

One word more before I sit down. So far I have spoken
of culture as something to be communicated by teachers or
acquired by solitary study. But when men of my age look
back on their University life, and ask themselves from what
sources they learnt such culture as they did learn, I think
that most would give a high place — and some the chief
place — to a third educational factor, the converse with
fellow-students. Even if we did not learn most from this
source, what we so learnt was learnt with most ease and
delight ; and especially the value of this converse in broaden-
ing intellectual interests, and keeping alive the flame of
eager desire to know truth and feel beauty, is difficult to
over-estimate. Indeed, this always appears to me one
great reason why we have Universities at all, as at present
organised.

Forty-five years ago a fine intellect, continually engaged
in swimming against the stream — John Henry Xewman —
set before the world an ideal of University education, in
which all students, whatever else they learnt, should give
the first place to the royal and ruling study of philosophy —
universal knowledge of things mundane and divine, sought
as its own end, in disregard of all sordid utilities. In
defending this ideal, he referred contemptuously to some
bygone Edinburgh reviewers who " wish one student of a
University to dedicate himself to chemistry, and another
to mathematics." " Now," says ISTewman, " if half-a-dozen
systems of education are to go on on the same spot, unity

XV THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE AS AN IDEAL 359

of place is but an accident, and I do not see what is the
use of a University at all." W(^ all know how the develop-
ment of all sciences and studies, and especially the expansion
of our ideas of the preparation required for different profes-
sions and callings, have inevitably driven English University
education to develop in the direction opposed to Newman's
view. This has more or less been the case everywhere ;
Ijut — to my regret I confess — it has been most prominently
the case in the University from which I come. Certainly
a Cambridge man must admit that lie is bound to find an
answer to Newman's question : " AVhat is the use of a Uni-
versity if all that it means is that half-a-dozen " — I might
say a dozen — "systems of education are to go on in the same
place ? " Why, at any rate, it may be asked, when we are
making a new University, should we not — instead of the
present local colleges — have a great school of science in one
place, a great school of history in another, and so on ?

I was interested to find that Newman had supplied an
answer himself in the discourse preceding the one from
which I have quoted. " When," he says, " a multitude of
young persons, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and ob-
servant as young persons are, come together and freely mix
with each other, they are sure to learn from one another,
even if there be no one to teach them ; the conversation of
all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for them-
selves new ideas and views and fresh matter of thought day
by day." That is so, no doubt ; and that is an important
part of the reason why " unity of place " is more than an
" accident " for the students of diverse courses ; it tends to
produce a general breadth of intellectual sympathies and
interests among the students which could not otherwise be
obtained. I do not mean that this is the sole answer to
Newmian's question ; for the teachers similarly learn from
each other, and of course the separation of studies is no-
where so complete as his caricature supposes. Still this
informal mutual education of students will always be an
important factor in the work of the University ; and it
is one on which the thoughts of any academic teacher,

36o ESSA VS AND ADDRESSES xv

conscious of the limitations and defects of his own labours
in the service of culture, will always gladly dwell.

This, then, is my last w^ord to the younger part of my
audience : that it rests largely with themselves, and with
the use they make not only of hours of w^ork but of hours
of leisure, to determine whether they will make the gifts
of culture their own. And the burden that this lays on
them is not a heavy one; it is not — as so many moral
precepts necessarily are — an injunction to endure and
refrain. It is simply a direction to live, in the fullest
manner, those higher modes of mental and social life from
which our finest human pleasures most directly and spon-
taneously spring.

SUPPLEMENT

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLEi

(Maanillan's Magazine, November 1861)

In the cluster of great writers who were swept from the world
in the fatal year 1859, Alexis de Tocqueville holds a distin-
guished place. Perhaps there is no foreign author of this cen-
tury whose works have been received in England with so universal
an echo of applause and assent. His first and only complete
Avork — the Democracy in America — was, from the nature of its
subject, one which especially excited English interest and ap-
pealed to English judgment : and the unique and strongly
defined position which he occupies, as a political thinker, in
France, gives him at once a peculiar value as a teacher for us,
and a peculiar claim on our sympathy. He himself ever mani-
fested a more than stranger's interest for England, where, as his
correspondence will show, he had many friends : his admiration
for our institutions and character was no mere theoretic en-
thusiasm, Imt was founded on a close acquaintance and a temperate
ap})reciation of our merits and faults alike : and he attached so
much importance to the estimate formed in England of his
writings, that in one letter he speaks of her as "almost a second
fatherland intellectually." It was only a fit testimony to these
close relations, that English voices should join in the tribute of
regret paid by his countrymen to his memory.

The recent publication, by M. Gustavo de Beaumont, of his
friend's remains, has been the signal for some utterances of Eng-
lish feelins;. M. de Beaumont's collection has been received, both
in France and in Englnnd, with an eagerness fully merited. In
the case of a man who wrote so little and so carefully as Tocque-

^ IJemoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from

the French hy the translator of A^apolean's Correspimdence with King Josrph,
with large additions. Two vols. Macmillau and Co., Cambridge and London.

361

362 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES supplement

ville, the few fragments left behind unpublished are of peculiar
value ; while the letters that M. de Beaumont has given
to the world seem to have l^een selected and arranged with
skill and good taste ; and the short memoir which forms a
prelude to the collection is gracefully written, and shows
an enlightened appreciation of Tocqueville's character, as well
literary as personal.

The faults of the work are chiefly those of omission. In the
first place, I think M. de Beaumont's refusal to publish anything
that has not received the author's last touches, displays an
excessive scrupulousness, an exaggerated sensitiveness for his
friend's fame. It is tantalising to learn how large and hoAV
valuable a portion of the fruits of Tocqueville's studies is kept
from us for this reason. When we read those letters of Tocque-
ville, in which we are admitted, as it were, into his literary
workshop ; when we see the eager determination with which
he ensures his originality, the laborious patience with which he
gathers his ideas one by one in their native soil ; — we feel that
thoughts so slowly and carefully obtained ought not lightly to
be withheld from the world, because they have not been com-
pletely arranged and polished. M. de Beaumont himself notices
how he " observed much and noted little " ; how rarely he found
himself mistaken in those original notes ; how rarely he did more
than develop them ; how frequently they were incorporated
verbatim into the substance of the ultimate work. We cannot
but regret that these cogent reasons did not induce his editor to
modify his rigid resolution.

Nor is the brief memoir prefixed to the collection quite
satisfactory. The sketch is flowing and interesting ; the indica-
tions of character good as far as they go ; the criticisms of
Tocqueville's writings just and appropriate. But M. de Beau-
mont does not show us the man himself at all ; he envelops
him in a veil of vague phrases and general expressions of
praise, which leave no idea behind. He tells us, for in-
stance, that " the striking features of Tocqueville's political life
are firmness combined with moderation, and moral greatness
combined with ambition." Is not this worthy of Sir Archibald
Alison ?

There is another omission, for which, however, no blame is
due to M. de Beaumont. The political life of Tocqueville, which
began in 1840, and died at the death of French liberty, could
necessarily only be sketched with the faintest touches. To have
gone into detail with reference to the earlier part would have
been, as M. de Beaumont says, to revive antagonisms now buried in

SUPPLEMENT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 363

a common mourning ; while a more definite and obvious restraint
compels the curtailing of the more recent letters. This forced
imperfection in the i)icture is strongly felt. For, whether in
puljlic life or not, Toc(|Ueville was eniincutly a politician. Hi.s
patriotism was no intermittent enthusiasm, no latent fire — it M-as
the guiding principle of his whole life. His sole profession was
to devote the rare powers of thought that nature had bestowed
on him to his country's service.

Fortunately this omission has been to a great extent supplieil
in the English translation, recently published, of M. de Beaumont's
book. This translation is enriched with several new frat^ments
of correspondence, and some valuable extracts from the journal
of Mr. Senior, one of Tocqueville's numerous English frieiitls.
Besides filling up the blank we have mentioned, these addi-
tions serve another important end ; they give us the talk of
Tocqueville to compare with his writings. Both are marked
by exactly the same traits ; the same e.iger activity of mind ;
the same energetic originality ; that rich fertility in epigrams,
Avhich is not uncommon among the countrymen of Voltaire,
but which in Tocqueville Avas kept in perfect restraint, so
that the puinted phrase always served to make some truth
more clear and impressive. Indeed he might himself have
adopted a boast of Voltaire's that he quotes, "Madame, je
n'ai jamais fait une phrase de ma vie " ; so free and natural are
his most piquant sayings. That rare faculty of illustration, that
fixes in the memory so many isolated passages in his writings,
shows even more exuberantly in his conversation ; while the
rapidity with which his clear and ready mind seized every new
fact, to systematise and generalise, contrasts well with the patient
soberness of judgment that kept sifting and examining his first
conclusions, till it evolved that calm and lucid exposition of
causes and eflects which his books contain.

The difficulties of translation, in respect of the letters, have
been well overcome l)y the English translator. It is always a bold
undertaking to translate French memoirs or correspondence, as
the French language is so peculiarly adapted by nature to this
kind of composition. And Tocqueville's stjde is one that brings
into play all the resources of his native tongue. The more we
examine any of his most careless efi'usiuns, the more we are
struck with the exactness and subtlety of his expressions : we
feel the difficulty of altering any of them without .spoiling the
sense. It must have cost more troulile than appears «>n the
surface to preserve so much of their character in an English
dress.

364 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES supplement

I have said enough to show my admiration for these letters.
Indeed they seem to me to bear comparison in most respects
Avith any similar collection, ancient or modern. They bear testi-
mony to the truth of the old saying, " that politeness is but the
best" expression of true feeling." The warm affection that
breathes in them shows beautifully through the dress of delicate
compliment, varied by most genial humour, in which it is
clothed. M. de Beaumont observes on " the immense space that
friendship occupied in his life." The same fact will strike every
reader of the letters. Tocqueville's heart and mind shared the
same restless activity. He could not, therefore, be happy without
a wide field of personal relations. It was as impossible for him to
rest satisfied with that abstract philanthropy, which, absorbed in
plans for the general good, neglects individual ties, as it was
to assent to the "modern realism" (as he called it), which
ignores all individual rights in behalf of the general utility of
society. His hatred of this tendency seems to spring from a
one-sided experience, and one may feel it exaggerated ; but he
calls it himself one of his "central opinions," and it was curiously
in harmony with many others of his ways of feeling and think-
ing. Another thing that strikes one in the correspondence is
the perfection with which he adapts both matter and style, ap-
parently without effort, to suit correspondents of the most various
opinions, and the most various degrees of intellectual culture.
A comparison of the two first series of letters in the book, those
to his two oldest friends, Louis de Kergorlay and Alexis Stoffels,
will afford an excellent example of this. At the same time this
happy versatility never involves the sacrifice of the smallest tittle
of his individual convictions. A sensitive hatred of insincerity
is one of the most marked features of his character. "You
know," he writes to M. de Corcelle, " that I set a particular value
on your friendship. ... I have always found that you believed
what you said, and felt what you expressed. This alone would
have been enough to distinguish you from others." The same
sentiment recurs in more than one of his letters. He expresses
his general feeling on the point in a letter to INIadame Swetchine,
— warmly, but with his usual avoidance of exaggeration. "I
am not one of those," he writes, " who think all men false and
treacherous. Many people are sincere in important affairs and
on great occasions, but scarcely any are so in the trifles of everj?-
day. Scarcely any exhibit their true feelings, but merely those
which they think useful or popular ; scarcely any, in ordinary
conversation, seek and express their real opinions, instead of
searching for what Avill sound ingenious or clever. This is the

SUPPLEMENT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 365

kind of .sincerity which is rare — particularly, I must say, among
women and in drawing-rooms, where even kindness has its
artifices." Sincerity, such as he hero longs for, was not merely
a principle with Tocqueville : it was a necessity. Without it,
correspondence would have lost its whole ciiarm for him. There
are two or three letters in which he endeavours to smooth awav,
if possible, the dissent which some opinion of his has evoked.
Here we see the eager desire for sympathy combined with the
resolution not to modify or disguise his sentiments in the smallest
point. In compo.sitions of all kinds, dcscri])tion as well as dis-
sertation, this love of truth is paramount with him. He com-
plains that " people say the ruins of Ptestum stand in the nn'dst
of a desert ; Avhereas their site is nothing more than a miserable,
badly-cultivated country, decaying like the temples themselves !
Men always insist on adorning truth instead of describing it.
Even M. de Chateauln-iand has painted the real wilderness in false
colours." His own Fminirjht in the Wildeiiiess wijl interest even
those who are sated with pictures of wild life. The fire and
vivacity, the susceptil>le imagination and the keen observation,
may be met with elsewhere ; but hardl}' ever controlled by a
reason so sober and truthful, or enlightened by such breadth of
view.

When, however, in analysing the picture of character which
Tocqueville's letters leave upon my mind, I try to seize the
ground-colour that gives the tone to the whole, it seems to me
to consist in a child-like elevation of feeling. In one passage
of the memoir, M. de Beaumont observes that " intellectual
superiority would hardly be worth having if the moral feelings
and the character were to remain at the ordinary level." This
outburst of naif enthusiasm strikes one as almost comic, in the
mouth of an elderly politician ; but it suits Tocqueville exactly.
The lofty moral ideal, which in the case of so many men shines
clearly in youth, and then gradually fades away before the com-
monplaces of practical life, exercised over Tocqueville a pei-petual
and harmonious influence. This seems to have been partly due
to the delicate balance that he always preserved between reason
and feeling. Neither enthusiasm, passion, nor vanity, of all
which he "had his fair share, ever hindered him from seeing
things exactly as they were ; and this striking soberness of judg-
ment protected his youthfid enthusiasm, and prevented it from
being too rudely shaken by a contact with the realities of the
world. Consequently, his letters indicate remarkably little de-
velopment of character, considering the period over which they
extend ; and what little they do show is very calm and equable.

366 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES supplement

Nor is there any exaggerated mock -maturity in his youthful
wisdom, or forced vivacity in the outbursts of his later years.
We see, indeed, that his unbounded ambition — that Promethean
fire which is needed to impel the most finely compounded
characters into proper action — was calmed gradually into a
quieter and more hidden feeling ; yet even this amljition had
never made him over-estimate the success towards which it
strove. He writes at the age of thirty to his most intimate
friend : " As I advance in life, I see it more and more from the
point of view which I used to fancy belonged to the enthusiasm
of early youth, as a thing of very mediocre worth, valuable only
as far as one can employ it in doing one's duty in serving men.
and in taking one's fit place among them." And, fifteen years
later, he writes to M. de Beaumont : "I consoled myself by
thinking that, if I had to live this quarter of a century over
again, I should not on the whole act very differently. I should
try to avoid many trifling errors, and many undoubted follies ;
but as to the bulk of my ideas, sentiments, and even actions, I
should make no change. I also remarked how little alteration
there was in my views of men in general during all these
years. Much is said about the dreams of youth, and the awak-
ing of mature age. I have not noticed this in myself. I was
from the first struck by the vices and weaknesses of mankind ;
and, as to the good qualities which I then attributed to them, I
must say that I still find them much the same." It is truly
refreshing to us whose ears are filled with the painful cynicism
of premature experience, to find that even now, to some favoured
souls, is granted the privilege of perpetual youth.

If any lack of interest should be felt in these letters, it will
be, I think, from a cause which is not altogether a defect. There
are no shadows, in one sense, in the picture. It is all clear sun-
shine in Tocqueville's life, both inner and outer. The perfect
healthiness of his nature excludes the charm that is sometimes
derived from an element of morbidity. But one may also say
with truth, that there is a want of depth. Perhaps the most
interesting element in the lives of great thinkers is their im-
perfect utterance of deep truths only half-grasped ; their con-
sciousness of enveloping mystery and darkness, into which the
light that shines from them throws only dim suggestive rays.
We find nothing of this in Tocqueville. " Shallow " and " super-
ficial " are the last epithets that could be applied ; and yet we
cannot call him profound, either in character or intellect. Earnest
as he was in the search after truth, he was destitute of one power,
necessary in the pursuit of the highest truth ; he could not endui^e

SUPPLEMENT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILl.E 367

to doubt. M. (le lieiiumont extracts fruin his early notes this
remarkable passage : " If I were desired to classify human miseries
I should do so in this order : — (1) Sickness, (2) Death, (3) Doubt."
In respect, therefore, of the deepest interests of humanity he
was content to l)e guided. He was devoutly attJiched to Ro-
manism ; but rather from the felt necessity of having a religion,
than from a deliberate conviction in favour of the particular
creed. He had acutely observed some of the more particular
mutual influences of religions and forms of government ; but his
remarks on the more general relations of religion to humanity
seem to me to constitute the weakest part of his writings. To
metaphysics he had a dislike which he frc(iuently shows. He
sends M. de Corcelle a coj^y of Aristotle, with the rcmai-k that it
is "much too Greek to suit him"; and in the second part of his
Democracy in America we can detect, here and there, that his
acquaintance with philosophy is somewhat superficial. It is no
contradiction to this, that Tocqueville disi)lays considerable skill
in psychological analysis. He shows the same superiority in
everything th;it depends only or chiefly on individual observation
and reflection. His insight was always both keen and wide, his
analysis both ingenious and sound ; but systematic abstract
thought was not to his taste, and he never i)ursued it with his
full energy. We may sum uj) much by saying that Tocqueville
applied to the study of politics a mind that, l)oth in its merits
and in its defects, was of the scientific rather than the philosophic
kind. We notice in him many traits peculiar to students of
physics. Thus, he early chose and ahvays adhered to a special
and definite subject of study ; his method was purely inductive ;
he always went straight to the original documents, which fonned,
as it were, the matter whose laws he was investigating ; he vrrote
down only the results of long and laborious observation ; and
these results were again rigorously winnowed before they saw the
light. " For one book he published," says M. de Beaumont, " he
wrote ten." And this is corroborated by the glimpses into his
laboratory that his letters from time to time allow. Thus at the
outset of his preparation for his last work he says : " I investigate,
I experimentalise : I try to grasp the facts more closely than has
yet been attempted, and to vrring out of them the general truths
which they contain." And again, three years later: "1 make
the utmost efforts to ascertain, from contemporary evidence, what
really happened ; and often spend great labour in discovering
what was ready to my hand. When I have gathered in this toil-
some harvest, I retire, as it were, into myself : I examine with
extreme care, collate and connect the notions which I have

368 ESSA VS AND ADDRESSES supplement

acquired, and simply give the result." As an example of his con-
scientious labour, I may mention that he learnt the German
language at the age of fifty, read several German books, and
travelled in Germany for some months, for the sake of obtaining
information Avhich he compressed into a few paragraphs of his
Ancien lle'gime. While taxing thus the resources of his observation
to the utmost, he depended upon it too entirely ; his avoidance of
other writers on his own sul:)ject caused him, as he allows, great
waste of power ; his treatment of economical questions strikes
one often as too empirical and tentative ; political economy, when
he first wrote, had not taken rank as a true science, and his was
not the mind to labour at systematising and correcting a mass of
alien generalisations. But, while this diminishes occasionally the
intrinsic value of his speculations, it adds to the harmonious
freshness of his writings ; and, his observation being unerring, his
most hasty generalisations are always partially true.

The writings of Tocqueville mark an era in the study of
political science. Hitherto writers on this subject have laboured
under defects of two different kinds. Their science was only
struggling into birth, and their own insight was rarely clear from
the mists of partiality. For a long time, it is true, the study of
man will lag far behind the study of nature, but Tocqueville's
books indicate a transition to a better phase. The pioneers in
the van of all sciences will be men rather of a strong imagination
than a sober reason ; they have need of the former to fight the
various obstacles that an unknown country presents. Conse-
quently, their view will be wide and indefinite ; their assertions
confused, yet violent ; they will not be content to trace the
development of a few principles out of many, but they will make
their own poverty the measure of Nature's variety, and group all
the facts they meet with round the few principles they have
strongly grasped. Such men are necessary to make the first move
in any science, but they must pass aAvay and give place to others.
The early Greek physicists, the founders of science, bear, of
course, this character. In the study of external nature we have
now attained to a learned modesty which smiles at their
ignorant rashness ; but in the more difficult study of man we
are still taught by thinkers who, for hastiness of generalisa-
tion and audacity of assertion, may be compared to the well-
known Greek philosopher, who held that " all things were made
of water."

But what has most hampered political thinkers in all ages is
the little free play that has been alloAved to their intellects,
by passion, prejudice, and interest. These have warped uncon-

SUPPLEMENT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 369

sciously the speculations of the nobler souls, and consciously those
of the ignobler. Not that the slavery has been complete ; but
the extraneous influence has fixed in the field of inquiry impass-
able limits and unassailable posts. Where men have overcome
the promptings of selfishness, they have been unable to throw off
early beliefs, cramped by the narrowness of a caste : or they have
fallen into the equally fatal bondage of a n iolent reaction from
these beliefs. In the latter case, however, where the restraints
have been merely negative, where the reason of men has been
free to choose anything except certain received opinions, the
philosophy of politics has always made greater progress. This
was the case with the French philosophers who preceded '89.
The natural wildness of awakening speculation was enhanced by
their negative position, their sweeping antagonism to an effete
system. This extravagance, however, will always be gradually
corrected, either by the bitter teachings of experience, or less
painfully by the progress of science, and the bloodless contests of
the pen. The first half-discoverer of a truth is apt to shout out
arrogantly his half-discovery ; his successor, to equal enthusiasm,
joins greater modesty of assertion. Not that the cast-off
chimeras fall immediately to the ground ; but they are taken up
by men of inferior intellect, and with smaller following. In free-
dom, however, from the defects I have noticed, Tocqueville has
outstripped his age, and his works will long remain models both
in style and matter. They are not made to strike or startle, but
they powerfully absorb the attention and convince the reason.
Their excellence often conceals their originality ; the perfect
arrangement of facts makes the conclusions drawn from them
appear to lie on the surface ; the ideas are so carefully explained,
defined, and disentangled, the arguments are strained so clear,
that we are cheated into the belief that we should have thought
the same ourselves if we had happened to develop our views on
the subject. Thus conviction steals in unawares, and it is only
by carefully comparing our views before and after perusal that
we find how much we have gained.

Tocqueville may be considered from another point of view as
an embodiment of the spirit of the age. As civilisation progresses,
unless patriotism decays, the votaries of politiail science will in-
crease very rapidly in number. Not only will the men think
who are thinkers liy nature, but the men of action will be forced
into the study of first principles. As the barriers between castes
are effaced, and national prejudices fade before increasing mutual
communication, every honest and sincere patriot will find it more
and more impossible to submit, in any degree whatsoever, to

2 B

370 ESSA ys AND ADDRESSES supplement

political leading-strings. If he is without independence of mind,
he will become a disciple ; if he possesses it, he will study widely
and impartially for himself. In any case he will not be the
partisan he would in another age have been. The bent of
Tocque\alle's mind was eminently practical and patriotic : he did
not enter into study so much for the sake of abstract truth as for
the sake of his country. He was an aristocrat by birth and senti-
ment, whose education and experience had enabled him to get rid
of aristocratic prejudices without contracting opposite ones. His
impressible mind had early conceived a strong enthusiasm for
liberty ; and his common sense accepted social equality as in-
evitable. His unique position is due to his clear discrimination
between the two — liberty and equality ; between the motives for
which they are sought, and the results that follow their attain-
ment. He was one of the first to tear the sophism that the
tyranny of the majority is freedom, and the sophism that popular
election of an omnipotent government constitutes the government
of the people. But this article is not the place for an analysis of
Tocqueville's writings, and without such an analysis I could not
do justice to his opinions on this subject — for the investigation
of the mutual relations of liberty and equality occupied the
whole of his literary life ; it forms the guiding thread of both
his books.

Before the time comes for writing the history of the period of
Tocqueville's public life, we may hope that a more copious selec-
tion from his correspondence will be vouchsafed to the world.
The additions, however, in the English collection are of consider-
able value, especially in following Tocqueville through the
troubled years 1848-52. At first sight it seems surprising that
Tocqueville did not make more impression as an active politician.
It is not, of course, his mere literary pre-eminence that would
cause this surprise ; but practicality, as I have shown, is one of
his chief characteristics as a thinker. Clearness, soberness, and
shrewdness, together with breadth and originality of views, form
a perfect combination for a statesman. He was, however, always
in circumstances unfavourable to the display of his talents ; and
he had not the egotistic force of character which overcomes un-
favourable circumstances. At the outset of his political career,
in an interesting correspondence with Count Mole, he displays an
exaggerated moral sensitiveness ; and his very ambition was of
the kind that hampers rather than sustains a man. He was not
content that his motives should be elevated and his conduct pure ;
he desired to excel in purity and elevation. To this overstrained
purism we must attribute his remaining in opposition during the

SUPPLEMENT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 371

years 1840-48. It is true that his disagreement with the
Diichatel-Guizot policy was sufficient to justify parliamentary
opposition in ordinary times ; but a patriot so sober and enlight-
ened as Tocqueville might have discerned the necessity of
sacrificing minor differences at that crisis, in the general cause of
order and constitutional government. As it was, he attached
himself to a composite party, with many of whose heterogeneous
elements he must have had far less sympathy than with the
ministry. Thus his oratory, far more adapted to exposition than
attack, found no scope ; his moderation kept him unnoticed among
men more bold, more captious, or more unscrupuloius than him-
self : altogether he gained respect rather than influence, and
came to be considered rather as a useful adviser than a cjipable
leader.

The Revolution of 1S48 came. Tocqueville had predicted a
similar event a month before, but he was not deceived as to its
factitious nature. The more we examine this "sham lievolution,"
the more perfect an instance it appears of the irony of history.
Never were causes more disproportionate to effects. It was the
mere sound of the names " French " and " Revolution " combined
that shook the thrones of Europe; the resemblance between the
different movements of the year is thoroughly superficial. The
cry for social reform at Paris is echoed by a cry for national
union at Berlin, a cry for national independence at Pesth and
Milan ; and this Parisian cry for social reform was steadily
repudiated by France. "The nation," says Tocqueville, in a
letter to Mr. Grote, " did not wish for a revolution, much less
for a republic." And he argues "That the whole of the year
1848 has been one long and painful effort on the part of the
nation to recover what it was robbed of by the surprise of
February." He shows that it Avas only by a decision and
rapidity of action worthy of a better cause that the house of
Orleans contrived to lose the throne. The monarchy yielded to
an (Uaeute far less formidable than that which the feeble and
ephemeral Provisional Government quelled in June. Tocque-
ville describes, from his own experience, how an hour's delay
might have saved it.

With a heavy heart, but with undiminished zeal, Tocqueville
addressed himself to the task of supporting the Republic.
Grieved and disgusted as he was with the Revolution and the
follies of the Provisional Government, he saw in the Republic the
last chance of constitutional freedom. He was not slow in esti-
mating how fatal a wound the frenzy of a day had inflicted
on the country. The revolution, executed in the name of the

372 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES supplement

masses, had stirred among those masses only a feeling of dull
distrust and languid fear, hardly chequered by a little vague hope
and curiosity. Had the Provisional Government had any real
work to do, any desired social improvement to effect, it might
have regained public confidence. But, as it was unable at all to
counterbalance the necessary evils of a revolution, while it showed
marked incompetence in the ordinary business of administration,
affairs grew daily worse. The peasant proprietors of France,
to whom appeal had to be made, have the ordinary character-
istics of their class. They are well-meaning and intelligent, but
selfish and narrow : very shrewd on all matters within their
ken, very ignorant upon all without : entirely absorbed in their
individual struggle for prosperit}^, and desiring peace, order,
stability, above all other goods. They had never appreciated the
advantages of government by parties; before the close of 1848
they were decidedly prejudiced against it, and longing to repose
on one strong arm. Such were the men to whom universal
suffrage confided the fate of France.

It is melancholy to follow, under Tocqueville's guidance, the
details of the long death-struggle of French freedom. He had
the pain of seeing clearly the present and future evils, while
totally unable to heal the one or prevent the other. Even had
he possessed more influence, his peculiar talents were hardly
fitted for such troublous times ; he would always have shrunk
from the slightest violation of forms, though hampered by one
of the worst constitutions ever framed, and face to face with an
unscrupulous foe. In truth, the struggle was most unequal. On
the one side were the debris of old parties, disunited by long
habit, disorganised by the entire change in their position, stunned
by the rapid succession of political shocks, confused by the work-
ing of their new constitution, vacillating between the desire to
deal fairly with their President and the desire to protect them-
selves from his attacks, distrustful of each other and distrusted
by the nation. To the uncertain and inconsequent action of this
heterogeneous body, Louis Napoleon opposed an egotism pure
and simple, a calm and complete self-confidence, chequered by no
doubts and hampered by no scruples. The constitution brought
him into continual collisions with the Assembly, in which he had
all the advantage given by singleness of ynW and purpose. The
patience and dissimulation which his exile had sufficiently taught
him were all he required for the development. He had but to
profess the profoundest unselfishness, and seize every opportunity
for self- aggrandisement : he could thus, while gradually con-
solidating his own power, and bringing the Assembly into con-

SUPPLEMENT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 373

tempt, contrive always to be or appear in tlie right. Perhaps
the greatest blot in his selfish policy was the dismissal in
October 1849 of the ministry in which Tocqueville held a
portfolio. The step was necessary for his ends ; but it was
impossible to find a plausil>le excuse for it. Tlic ministry had
passed successfully through a period of great difhculty ; and,
as Tocqueville says, there was actualh- a danger of constitutional
government again becoming popular. Imperialist writers tell us
that " the elected one responded to the national wish that he
should have more freedom of action " — a reason at once felicitous
and frank.

At length Tocqueville's worst expectations were realised by
the 2nd of December. He was at his post in the National
Assembly on that day ; and from a letter he wrote to 77('' Times
soon after (republished in the English edition), supplemented by
his conversations, we get a vivid idea of those memorable scenes.
The noble indignation he expresses in the letter at that signal
outrage to law and liberty Avas shared by many ; but there were
few who mourned its effects so deeply and so long. He com-
plains aflfectingly in his later letters of the state of moral isolation
in which he finds himself : that his contemporaries have ceased to
care for what he still loves passionately : that they solace them-
selves for its loss with tranquillity and material comfort, while
he is destitute even of sympathy in his sadness — sympathy,
which was to him almost a necessity of life. It moved him
especially to see the coldness with which England, the nurse of
liberty, looked on the enslavement of France : the arrogant con-
tempt of his countrymen, as though unworthy to be free, or even
happier as slaves : the selfish indifference at the tyranny, followed
in a year or two by blind approval and applause of the tyrant.
" Et tu, Brute," is the tone of several of Tocqueville's later letters
to England.

Reduced to political inaction, Tocqueville adopted the only
method left him of serving his country. He chose a period of
the past, fraught with instruction for the pi-esent, and devoted to
its study all the powers of his ripened intellect. The result of
this work, the volume on L'Ancien Regime, is but a fragment;
yet it shows a decided improvement on his former book, both in
style and matter, and is equally likely to have an enduring
reputation. From the midst of this work he was snatched away
by a sudden illness, in the spring of 1859. He left behind him,
besides his writings, an example bright in itself, and especially
valuable to the present generation — the example of one who com-
bined the merits of the man of thought and the maii of action ;

374 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES supplembnt

of one who, possessing all the graces and refinements of modern
civilisation, its enlarged knowledge, its enlightened moderation,
its universal tolerant philanthropy, yet fashioned his life accord-
ing to an ideal with mediaeval constancy and singleness of purpose,
and displayed a passionate patriotism and an ardent love of
freedom worthy of a hero of antiquity.

NOTE ON BENTHAM'S DEONTOLOGY
A footnote to page 168, end of first paragraph.

[In the preface to the tliird edition of his Outlines of the History of Ethics,
published in 1892, Professor Sidgwick says: "I have . . . changed my
opinion on a point of some importance in the history of Utilitarianism :
I am now disposed to accept the posthumously published Deontology of
Bentham, as giving a generally trustworthy account of his view as to the
relation of Virtue to the virtuous agent's Happiness." And on p. 244 of
the same work he says : "In the Deontology ... it is distinctly assumed
that, in actual human life as empirically known, the conduct most con-
ducive to general happiness always coincides with that which conduces
most to the hapjjiness of the agent ; and that ' vice may be defined as a
miscalculation of chances ' from a purely mundane point of view. And
it seems probable that this must be accepted as Bentham's real doctrine,
in his later days ; since he certainly held that the ' constantly proper end
of action on the part of every individual at the moment of action is
his real greatest happiness from that moment to the end of life, ' without
retracting his unqualified acceptance of the ' greatest happiness of the
greatest number ' as a ' plain but true standard for whatever is right and
wi'ong in the field of morals ' (see Bentham's Works, vol. x. {Life), pp. 560,
561, and 79) ; and the assumption just mentioned is required to reconcile
these two convictions, if the empirical basis on which his whole reasoning
proceeds is maintained." — Ed.]

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