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THE NEW

PRINCETON REVIEW.

62d Year. MARCH, 1887. No. 2.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

In trying to explain to ourselves the meaning of an edifice we
take into account whatever opposed or favored its construction, the
kind and quality of its available materials, the period, the opportu-
nity, and the urgency for it ; but still more important is it to consider
the genius and taste of the architect, especially whether he is the
proprietor, whether he built it to live in himself, and, once installed
in it, if he takes pains to adapt it to his way of living, to his necessi-
ties, and to his purposes. Such is the social edifice erected by Na-
poleon Bonaparte, its architect, proprietor, and principal occupant
from 1799 to 1814; it is he who has made modern France; never
was an individuality .so profoundly stamped on any collective work,
so that, to comprehend the work, we must first study the character
of the man,

I.

He is not only out of the common run, but there is no standard
of measurement for him ; through his temperament, instincts, facul-
ties, imagination, passions, and moral constitution he seems cast in a
different mould, composed of another metal than that which enters
into the composition of his fellows and contemporaries. Evidently,
he is not a Frenchman, nor a man of the eighteenth century ; he be-
longs to another race and another epoch ; we detect in him, at the
first glance, the foreigner, the Italian, and something more apart and
beyond these, surpassing all similitude and analogy. Italian he was
through blood and lineage ; first, through his paternal family, which

is Tuscan, and which we can follow down from the twelfth century ;

10

146

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

at Florence, then at San Miniato ; next at Sarzana, a small, backward,
remote town in the state of Genoa, where, from father to son, it rubs
along obscurely in provincial isolation through a long line of notaries
and municipal syndics. “ My origin,” says Napoleon himself, “ has
made all Italians regard me as one of themselves.” When the Pope
hesitated about coming to Paris to crown Napoleon, the Italian party
in the Conclave prevailed against the Austrian party by supporting
political arguments with the following slight tribute to national
amour-propre : “A fter all, we are imposing an Italian family on the
barbarians to govern them. We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls."
This significant expression illuminates the depths of the Italian na-
ture, the eldest daughter of modern civilization, imbued with its
right of primogeniture, persistent in its grudge against the trans-
alpines, the rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique
patriotism.

Leaving Sarzana, one of the Bonapartes emigrates to Corsica,
where he establishes himself, and lives after 1529. Thus, just at the
moment when the energy, the ambition, and the vigorous and free
sap of the Middle Ages began to run down and then dry up in the
shrivelled trunk, a small, detached branch roots itself in an island not
less Italian, but almost barbarous, amidst institutions, customs, and
passions belonging to the primitive mediaeval epoch, and in a social
atmosphere which is rude enough to preserve all its vitality and
harshness. Grafted, moreover, by marriages, and repeatedly, on the
wild stock of the island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his
grandmother and mother, is wholly indigenous. His grandmother,
a Pietra Santa, belonged to Sart^ne, a Corsican canton par excellence,
where, in 1800, hereditary vendettas still maintained the regime of
the eleventh century, where the permanent contests of inimical fam-
ilies were suspended only by truces, where, in many villages, nobody
went out except in armed bodies, and where the houses were crenel-
lated like fortresses. His mother, Laetitia Ramolini, from whom in
character and in will he derives much more than from his father, is a
primitive soul on which civilization has taken no hold ; simple, all of
a piece, unsuited to the refinements, charms, and graces of a worldly
life ; indifferent to comforts and even cleanliness ; as parsimonious as
any peasant woman, but as energetic as the leader of a band ; power-
ful, physically and spiritually, accustomed to danger, ready in des-
perate resolutions ; in short, a rustic Cornelia, who conceived and
gave birth to her son amidst the risks of battle and of defeat, during

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

U7

the thickest of the French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horse-
back, nocturnal surprises, and volleys of musketry. He passed his
youth “ amidst precipices, traversing lofty summits, deep valleys, and
narrow defiles, enjoying the honors and delights of hospitable enter-
tainment,” treated everywhere as a brother and compatriot. At
Bolognano, where his mother, pregnant with him, had taken refuge,

“ Where hatred and vengeance extended to the seventh degree of relationship,
where the dowry of a young girl was estimated by the number of her cousins, I
was feasted and made welcome, and everybody would have died for me.”

Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated
at the expense of the king in a French school, he became rigid in his
insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against
whom his relations had declared themselves. Throughout his youth
he is at heart anti-French, morose, “ bitter, liking very few and very
little liked, brooding over a painful sentiment,” like a vanquished
man, always suffering and obliged to serve. At Brienne he keeps
aloof from his comrades, and unbosoms himself only to Bourrienne
in explosions of hate: “I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I
can ! ” “ Corsican by nation and character,” wrote his professor of

history. Leaving the academy, and in garrison at Valence and
Auxonne, he remains always hostile. Addressing himself to Paoli,
he writes:

“ I was born when our country perished. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited
on our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood — such was the
odious spectacle which first greeted my eyes ! ”

A little later, his letter to Buttafuoco, principal agent in the
French annexations, is one long strain of concentrated hatred which,
after some effort at self-restraint in cold sarcasm, ends in boiling
over, like red-hot lava, in a torreht of scorching invective. From
the age of fifteen his imagination seeks refuge in the past of his
island ; he writes about it, dedicates his book to Paoli, and then,
unable to get it published, makes an abridgment, which he dedicates
to Abb6 Raynal, recapitulating in it, in a strained style, and with
warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community. And
the style, far more than the feeling, denotes the foreigner. Un-
doubtedly, in this work, as in other youthful writings, he follows
as well as he can the authors in vogue — Rousseau, and especially
Raynal ; he gives a schoolboy imitation of their tirades, their senti-
mental declamation and their humanitarian grandiloquence. But

148

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

these borrowed clothes, which incommode him, do not fit him ; they
are too tight, and the cloth is too fine ; they require too much cir-
cumspection in walking ; he does not know how to put them on,
and they rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned orthog-
raphy, but he does not know the true meaning, connections, and re-
lations of words, the propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact
bearing of imagery ; he strides athwart incongruities, incoherences,
and barbarisms, stumbling along in inexperience and impetuosity ;
his eager, eruptive thought, overcharged with passion, indicates the
depth and temperature of its source. Already, at this early date,
the Professor of Belles Lettres in the Academy notes that “ in the
strange, incoherent grandeur of his amplifications it seems as if he
saw granite fused in a volcano.” Ill adapted to the society of his
comrades, it is clear beforehand that current conceptions which have
weight with them will take no hold of him.

Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each
other, it might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to
the other, although accepting neither. Pensioner of the king, who
supported him at Brienne, and afterward in the Military Academy ;
who also supported his sister at St. Cyr ; to whom, at this very time,
he addresses entreating or grateful letters over his mother’s signa-
ture, it does not enter his mind to draw the sword in his patron’s
behalf; in vain is he a certified gentleman, endorsed by D’Hozier,
reared in a school of noble cadets — he has no noble and monarchical
traditions. Poor, restless, and ambitious, a reader of Rousseau,
patronized by Raynal, he is not dazed with democratic illusions ;
he entertains no feeling but disgust for the Revolution as it is carried
out, and for the sovereignty of the people. At Paris, in April, 1792,
when the struggle between the monarchists and the revolutionists
is at its height, he tries to find “ some useful speculation,” and thinks
he will hire and sublet houses at a profit. On the 20th of June he
witnesses, only as a matter of curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries,
and, on seeing the king at a window place the red cap on his head,
exclaims, so as to be heard, “ Che Coglione ! ” Immediately after
this: “ How could they let that rabble enter! Mow down four or
five hundred of them with cannon-ball and the rest would run
away.” On August loth, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the
people and the king with equal contempt, and “ views, at his ease,
the occurrences of the day.” He has no inward Jacobin or royalist
impulse ; his countenance is so calm as to often excite hostility. In

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

149

like manner, after the 31st of May and the 2d of June, his souper de
Beaucaire shows that if he condemns the insurrection it is chiefly
because he deems it fruitless. None of the political or social con-
victions which then exercise such control over men’s minds have
any hold on him. Previous to the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to
be a “ republican montagnard ” ; or follow him for months in Pro-
vence, “ the favorite and confidential adviser of young Robespierre,
admirer of the elder Robespierre, intimate at Nice with Charlotte
Robespierre.” After the 9th of Thermidor he is arrested as a
Robespierrist, then set free, when he is entirely without occupation,
“ idling about the streets of Paris,” until he attaches himself to
Barras, who had overthrown and killed his two protectors. “ Robes-
pierre was dead,” says he, later on, “ and Barras played a part ; I
had to attach myself to some one and to something.”

Among the fanaticisms which succeed each other he remains
indifferent to every cause, and devoted wholly to his own interests.
On the I2th of Vend^miaire, leaving the theatre in the evening and
seeing the preparations of the sectionists, “ Ah,” he exclaims to
Junot, “if they would only put me at their head, I am sure that in
two hours I would plant them in the Tuileries and drive out those
wretched conventionalists!” Five hours later, summoned by Barras
and the conventionalists, he takes “ three minutes ” to decide what
he will do, and, instead of “ making the representatives jump,” it is
the Parisians whom he mows down. But he is to become a veritable
condottiere, that is to say, leader of a band, more and more inde-
pendent, and pretending to submit under the pretext of the public
good ; looking out solely for himself, aiming at his own interest,
general on his own account and for his own advantage in his Italian
campaign, before and after the i8th of Fructidor; but still 2. con-
dottiere of the first class, already aspiring to the loftiest summits,
“with no stopping-place but the throne or the scaffold,” “ determined
to master France, and Europe through France, ever occupied with
his own plans, and without distraction, sleeping three hours during
the night,” making playthings of ideas and of people, religions and
governments, managing mankind with incomparable dexterity and
brutality, the same in the choice of means as of ends, a superior
artist, inexhaustible in prestiges and seductions, in corruption and in
intimidation, wonderful, and yet more terrible than any wild beast
suddenly turned in on a herd of browsing cattle. An able diplomat
who was, at that time, a friend, called him the little tiger.

150

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

At this same date we have two portraits drawn from life, one
physical, painted by Guerin, and the other moral, traced by a
superior woman, who, to the completest European culture, added
tact and worldly perspicacity — Madame de Stael ; each seems to
interpret the other.

"I saw him for the first time,” says the latter, "on his return to France after
the treaty of Campo-Formio. I soon found, in the various opportunities I had of
meeting him during his stay in Paris, that his character was not to be described
in ter7Hs comtnonly employed j he was neither mild nor violent, nor gentle nor
cruel, like certain personages we happen to know. A being like hhn, wholly un-
like anybody else, could neither feel nor excite sympathy ; he was both more and
less than a 7>ian j his figure, understanding, and language bore the impress of a
strange nation; . . . far from being reassured on seeing Bonaparte oftener he
intimidated me more and more every day. I had a confused impression that he
was not to be influenced by any emotion of sympathy or affection. He regards a
h7t77ian bemg as a fact, a7i object, a7td not as a fellow-creature. He neither hates
nor loves, he exists for himself alone j the rest of humanity are so many ciphers.
The force of his will consists in the imperturbable calculation of his egoism ; he is
a skilful player, with the human species for an antagonist, whom he proposes
to checkmate. . . . Every time that I heard him talk I was struck with his

superiority J it bore no resemblance to that of men informed and cultivated
through study and social intercourse, such as we find in France and England ;
his conversation indicated the tact of circu77istances, like that of the hunter in
pursuit of his prey. His spirit seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes
while it wounds. I felt a profound irony in his mind which nothing great or
beautiful could escape, not even his own reputation, for he despised the nation
whose suffrages he sought. . . . With him, everything was means to ends ;

the involuntary, whether for good or for evil, was entirely absent ; he examined
things only with reference to their immediate usefulness ; a general principle was
repugnant to him, either as so much nonsense or as an enemy.”

Now, contemplate in Gu6rin the spare body, those narrow shoul-
ders under the uniform wrinkled by a sudden movement, that neck
swathed in its high twisted cravat, those temples under long,
smooth, straight hair, exposing only the mask, the hard features
intensified through strong contrasts of light and shade, the cheeks
hollow up to the inner angle of the eye, the projecting cheek-bones,
the massive, protuberant jaw, the sinuous, mobile lips, pressed to-
gether as if attentive, the large, clear eyes, deeply sunk under the
broad, arched eyebrows, the fixed, oblique look, as penetrating as a
rapier, and the two creases which extended from the base of the nose
to the brow, as if in a frown of suppressed anger and determined will.
Add to this the accounts of his contemporaries who saw or heard
the curt accent or the sharp, abrupt gesture, the interrogating, im-
perious, absolute tone of voice, and we comprehend how, the moment

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

151

they accosted him, they felt the dominating hand which lays hold of
them, presses them down, holds them firmly, and never relaxes its
grasp.

Already, at the receptions of the Directory, when conversing
with men, or even with ladies, he puts questions “ which prove the
superiority of the questioner to those who have to answer them.”
“Are you married? ” says he to this one, and “ How many children
have you ? ” to another. To that one, “ When did you come here ? ”
or, again, “ When are you going away ? ” He places himself in front
of a French lady, well known for her beauty and wit, and the viva-
city of her opinions, “ like the stiffest of German generals, and says:
‘ Madame, I don’t like women who meddle with politics!”’ Equality,
ease, and familiarity — all fellowship vanishes at his approach. On his
appointment to the command in Italy Admiral Deeres, who had
known him well at Paris, learns that he is to pass through Toulon,
and proposes to introduce his comrades. “ I am about to press
forward,” he afterward wrote, “ when the attitude, the look, and the
tone of voice suffice to arrest me. And yet there was nothing
offensive about him ; still, this was enough. I never tried after that
to overstep the line thus imposed on me.” A few days later, at
Alberga, certain generals of division, and among them Augereau, a
vulgar, heroic old soldier, vain of his tall figure and courage, arrive
at headquarters, not well disposed toward the little parvenu sent
out to them from Paris. Recalling the description of him which
had been given to them, Augereau is abusive and insubordinate.
“One of Barras’ favorites! The Vend^miaire general! A street
general! Never in action! Hasn’t a friend! Looks like a bear
because he always thinks for himself ! An insignificant figure! He
is said to be a mathematician and dreamer ! ” They enter, and
Bonaparte keeps them waiting. At last he appears, with his
sword and belt on, explains the disposition of the forces, gives them
his orders, and dismisses them. Augereau is thunderstruck. Only
when he gets out of doors does he recover himself and fall back on
his accustomed oaths. He agrees with Massena that “ that little

of a general frightened him.” He cannot comprehend the

ascendency “which overawes him at the first glance.”

Extraordinary and superior, made to command and to conquer,
singular and of an unique species, is the feeling of all his contem-
poraries ; those who are most familiar with the histories of other
nations, Madame de Stael and Stendhal, go back to the right

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NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

sources to comprehend him, to the “ petty Italian tyrants of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” to Castruccio Castracani, to the
Braccii of Mantua, to the Ticcimini, to the Malatestas of Rimini,
and the Sforzas of Milan. In their opinion, however, it is only a
chance analogy, a psychological resemblance. Really, however, and
historically, it is a positive relationship. He is a descendant of the
great Italians, the men of action of the year 1400, the military
adventurers, usurpers, and founders of life-governments ; he inherits
in direct affiliation their blood and inward organization, mental and
moral. An offshoot of their forest before the age of refinement,
impoverishment and decay is transplanted to a similar and remote
nursery, where the tragic and militant regime is permanently estab-
lished ; the primitive germ is preserved there intact and transmitted
from one generation to another, renewed and invigorated by inter-
breeding. Finally, at the last stage of its growth, it springs out of
the ground and develops magnificently, blooming the same as ever,
and producing the same fruit as on the original stem. The soil of
France, however, which has been broken up by revolutionary tem-
pests, is more favorable to its growth than the worn-out fields of
the Middle Ages ; and there it grows by itself, without being sub-
ject, like its Italian ancestors, to rivalry with its own species.

II.

“ The man-plant,” says Alfieri, “ is in no country born more
vigorous than in Italy,” and never, in Italy, was it so vigorous as
from 1300 to 1500, from the contemporaries of Dante down to those
of Michael Angelo, Caesar Borgia, Julius II., and Macchiavelli. The
first distinguishing mark of a man of those times is the integrity of
his mental instrument. Ours has lost somewhat of its temper, sharp-
ness, and suppleness ; in general, a compulsory, special application
of it has rendered it one-sided ; the multiplication, besides, of ready-
made ideas and acquired methods has made it fit only for a sort of
routine ; finally, it is much worn through excess of cerebral action.

It is just the opposite with those impulsive spirits of new blood
and of a new race. Roederer, who sees Bonaparte daily at the
meetings of the Council of State, and who notes down every even-
ing the impressions of the day, is carried away with admiration.

“Punctual at every sitting, prolonging the session five or six hours, discussing
before and afterward the subjects brought forward, always returning to two ques-
tions, ‘Is that just?' ‘Is that useful?’ examining each question in itself, under

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

153

both relations ; next, consulting the best authorities, the actual moment, and ob-
taining information about bygone jurisprudence, the laws of Louis XIV. and of
Frederick the Great. . . . Never did the council adjourn without its members

knowing more than the day before, if not through knowledge derived from him, at
least through the researches he obliged them to make. Never did the members
of the Senate, of the Corps Ldgislatif, or of the tribunals pay their respects to him,
without being rewarded for their homage by valuable instructions. He cannot
be surrounded by public men without being the statesman. What characterizes
him above them all is the force, flexibility, and constancy of his attention. He can
work eighteen hours at a stretch, on one or on several subjects. I never saw him
tired. I never found his mind lacking in inspiration, even when weary in body,
nor when violently exercised, nor when angry, I never saw him diverted from
one matter by another.”

He says himself, later on, that

“ Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of
drawers. When I want to take up any special business I shut one drawer and
open another. None of them ever get mixed, and never does this incommode me
or fatigue me. If I feel sleepy I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.”

Never has brain so disciplined and under such control been seen,
one so ready at all times for any task, so capable of immediate and
absolute concentration.

" His flexibility is wonderful, in the instant application of every faculty and
energy, and bringing them all to bear at once on any object that concerns him,
on a mite as well as on an elephant, on any given individual as well as on an
enemy's army. . . . When specially occupied, other things do not exist for

him ; it is a sort of chase from which nothing diverts him.”

And this hot pursuit, which nothing arrests save capture, this
tenacious hunt, this headlong course by one to whom the goal is
never other than a fresh starting-point, is the spontaneous gait, the
natural, even pace which his mind prefers.

" I am always at work, I meditate a great deal. If I seem always equal to the
occasion, ready to face what comes, it is because I have thought the matter over a
long time before undertaking it. I have anticipated whatever might happen. It
is no genius which suddenly reveals to me what I ought to do or say in any
unlooked-for circumstance, but my own reflection, my own meditation. ... I
work all the time, at dinner, in the theatre. I wake up at night in order to resume
my work. I got up last night at two o’clock. I stretched myself on my couch
before the fire to examine the army reports sent to me by the Minister of War. I
found twenty mistakes in them, and made notes which I have this morning sent
to the minister, who is now engaged with his clerks in rectifying them.”

Whether consul or emperor, he demands of each minister a full
statement of the slightest details. It is not rare to see them leave

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NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

the council-room overcome with fatigue, due to the long interroga-
tories to which he has subjected them ; he disdains to take any
notice of this, and talks about the day’s work simply as a relaxation
which has scarcely given his mind exercise. And what is worse, it
often happens that, on returning home, they find a dozen of his
letters requiring immediate answer, for which the whole night
scarcely suffices. The quantity of facts he is able to retain and
store away, the quantity of ideas he elaborates and produces, seems
to surpass human capacity, and this insatiable, inexhaustible, un-
changeable brain thus keeps on working uninterruptedly for thirty-
two years.

Through another result of the same mental organization, it never
works in vain ; and this, at the present day, is our greatest danger.
For the past three hundred years we have been more and more los-
ing sight of things in their full and complete sense ; subject to the
constraints of a domestic, many-sided, and extended education, we
fix our attention on the symbols of objects rather than on the ob-
jects themselves ; instead of on the ground itself, on a map of it ; in-
stead of on animals struggling for existence, on nomenclatures and
classifications, or, at best, on stuffed specimens displayed in a mu-
seum ; instead of on men who feel and act, on statistics, codes, his-
tories, literatures, and philosophies ; in short, on printed words, and,
worse still, on abstract terms difficult to understand, and deceptive,
especially in all that relates to human life and society. In this do-
main the object, indefinitely expanded and complex, now eludes our
grasp ; our vague, incomplete, incorrect idea of it badly corresponds
with it or does not correspond at all ; those who may desire some sig-
nificant indication of what society actually is, beyond the teachings
of books, require ten or fifteen years of close observation and study
to re-think the phrases with which these have filled their memory, to
substitute for the more or less empty and indefinite term the fulness
and precision of a personal impression. We have seen how ideas of
Society, State, Government, Sovereignty, Rights, Liberty, the most
important of all ideas, were, at the close of the eighteenth century,
curtailed and falsified ; how, in most minds, simple verbal reason-
ing combined them together in dogmas and axioms ; what an off-
spring these metaphysical simulacra gave birth to, how many life-
less and grotesque abortions, how many monstrous and destructive
chimeras. There is no place for any of these chimeras in the mind
of Bonaparte ; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of politi-

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

155

cal abstraction goes beyond disdain, even to disgust ; the ideology
of that day is, through the necessity and instinct for the real, repug-
nant to him, as a practical man and statesman, always keeping in
mind, like the great Catherine, “ that he is operating, not on paper,
but on the human hide, which is ticklish.” Every idea entertained
by him had its origin in his personal observation, and it was his per-
sonal observation which controlled it.

If books are useful to him it is to suggest questions, which he
never answers but through his own experience. He read very little,
and hastily ; the literature of elegance and refinement, the philosophy
of the closet and drawing-room, with which his contemporaries are
imbued, glided across his intellect as over a rock ; nothing but ma-
thematical truths and positive notions about geography and history
found their way into his mind and deeply impressed it. Everything
else, as with his predecessors of the fifteenth century, comes to him
through the original, direct action of his faculties in contact with
men and things, through his rapid and sure tact, his indefatigable
and minute attention, his indefinitely repeated and rectified divina-
tions during long hours of solitude and silence. Practice, and not
speculation, is the source of his instruction, the same as with a me-
chanic brought up amongst machinery.

" There is nothing relating to warfare that I cannot make myself. If nobody
knows how to make gunpowder, I do. I can construct gun-carriages. If cannon
must be cast I will see that it is done properly. If tactical details must be taught,
I will teach them.”

Hence his competency at the outset ; general in the artillery,
major-general, diplomatist, financier, and administrator, all at once
and in every direction. He takes in at a glance every piece of every
human machine he fashions and manipulates, each in its proper place
and function ; the generators of power, the organs of its transmission,
the extra working gear, the composite action, the speed which en-
sues, the final result, the complete effect, the net product ; never is
he content with a superficial and summary inspection ; he penetrates
into obscure corners and to the lowest depths, “ through the techni-
cal precision of his questions,” with the lucidity of a specialist, and,
in this way, borrowing an expression from the philosophers, his idea
is found adequate to its object.

Hence his eagerness for details. In each ministerial department
he knows more than the ministers, and in each bureau he knows
as much as the clerks.

156

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

" I have my reports on situations always on hand ; my memory for an Alexan-
drine verse is not good, but I never forget a syllable of my reports on situations. I
shall find them ready in my room this evening, and shall not retire until I shall
have read them through.”

It is the same in the financial and diplomatic services, in every
branch of the administration. His topographical memory and his
geographical conception of countries, places, ground, and obstacles
culminate in an inward vision which he evokes at will, and which,
years afterward, revives as fresh as on the first day. His calculation
of distances, marches, and manoeuvres is so rigid a mathematical
operation that, frequently, at a distance of two or three hundred
leagues, his military foresight turns out correct, almost on the day
named, and precisely on the spot designated. Add to this one other
faculty, and the rarest of all ; if things turn out as he foresaw they
would, it is because, as with famous chess-players, he has accurately
measured not alone the mechanical moves of the pieces, but the
character and talent of his adversary ; he has added to the calcula-
tion of physical quantities and probabilities the calculation of moral
quantities and probabilities. In fact, no one has surpassed him in
the art of defining the various states and impulses of one or of many
minds, either prolonged or for the time being, which impel or re-
strain man in general, or this or that individual in particular ; what
springs of action may be touched, and the kind and degree of pres-
sure that may be applied to them. This central faculty rules all the
others, and in the art of mastering man his genius is found supreme.

No faculty is more precious for a political engineer; for the
forces he acts upon are never other than human passions. But
how, except through divination, can these passions which grow out
of the deepest sentiments be reached ; and how, save by conjecture,
can forces be estimated which seem to defy all measurement ? On
this dark and uncertain ground, where one has to grope one’s way.
Napoleon moves with almost absolute certainty ; he moves promptly
and, first of all, he studies himself ; indeed, to find one’s way into
another’s soul requires preliminarily that one should dive deep into
one’s own. “ I have always delighted in analysis,” said he, one day,
“ and should I ever fall seriously in love I would take my sentiment
to pieces.” “ Why and how are such important questions one cannot
put them to one’s self too often.” “ It is certain,” writes an observer,
“ th&t he, of all men, is the one who has most meditated on the why
which controls human actions.” His method, that of the experi-

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

157

mental sciences, consists in testing every hypothesis or deduction by
some positive fact which he bars observed under definite conditions;
a physical force being ascertained and accurately measured through
the deviation of a needle, or through the rise and fall of a fluid,
this or that invisible moral force can likewise be ascertained and
approximately measured through some emotional sign, some de-
cisive manifestation, consisting of a certain word, tone, or gesture
It is these words, tones, and gestures which he dwells on ; he detects
inward sentiments by the outward expression ; he figures to himself
the internal by the external, by some physiognomical trait, some
striking attitude, some summary and topical circumstance, so perti-
nent and with such particulars as will afford a complete indication of
the innumerable series of analogous cases. In this way, the vague,
fleeting object is suddenly arrested, brought to bear, and then
gauged and weighed, like some impalpable gas collected and kept
in a graduated transparent glass tube. Accordingly, at the Council
of State, while the others, either legists or administrators, adduce
abstractions, articles of the code, and precedents, he looks into
natures as they are — the Frenchman’s, the Italian’s, the German’s ;
that of the peasant, the workman, the bourgeois, the noble, the
returned emigre, the soldier, the officer, and the functionary — every-
where the individual man as he is, the man who ploughs, manufac-
tures, fights, marries, generates, toils, enjoys himself, and dies.

Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the dull,
grave arguments advanced by the wise official editor and Napoleon’s
own words, caught on the wing, at the moment, vibrating and teem-
ing with illustrations and imagery. Apropos of divorce, the princi-
ple of which he wishes to maintain :

" Consult, now, national manners and customs. Adultery is no phenomenon ;
it is common enough — une affaire de canape . . . There must be some curb

on women who commit adultery for trinkets, poetry, Apollo and the muses, etc.”

But if divorce be allowed for incompatibility of temper you un-
dermine marriage ; the fragility of the bond will be apparent the
moment the obligation is contracted ; “ It is just as if a man said to
himself, ‘ I am going to marry until I feel different,’” Nullity of
marriage must not be too often allowed ; once a marriage is made it
is a serious matter to undo it.

" Suppose that, in marrying my cousin just arrived from the Indies, I wed an
adventuress. She bears me children, and I then discover she is not my cousin — is

158

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

that marriage valid ? Does not public morality demand that it should be so con-
sidered ? There has been a mutual exchange of souls, of transpiration."

On the right of children to be supported and fed although of
age, he says :

“ Will you allow a father to drive a girl of fifteen out of his house ? A father
worth 60,000 francs a year might say to his son, ‘ You are stout and fat ; go and
turn ploughman.’ The children of a rich father, or of one in good circumstances,
are always entitled to the paternal porridge. Strike out their right to be fed, and
you compel children to murder their parents.”

As to adoption :

“ You regard this as law-makers and not as statesmen. It is not a civil con-
tract nor a judicial contract. Analysis leads to vicious conclusions. Men are
governed by their imagination only ; without imagination they are brutes. It is
not for five cents a day, simply to distinguish himself, that a man consents to be
killed ; if you want to electrify him touch his heart. A notary, who is paid a fee
of twelve francs for his services, cannot do that. It requires some other process
than a legislative act. What is adoption ? An attempt of society to imitate na-
ture. It is a new kind of sacrament. . . . Society ordains that the bones and

blood of one being shall be changed into the bones and blood of another. It is the
greatest of all legal acts. It gives the sentiments of a son to one who never had
them, and reciprocally those of a parent. Where ought this to originate ? Above,
like a clap of thunder ! ’’

His words are scintillations flashing out one after another. No-
body, since Voltaire and Galiani, has poured out such volleys of
them, on society, on laws, on government, on France and the French,
expressions which, like those of Montesquieu, penetrate to and sud-
denly illuminate the darkest recesses ; they are not hammered out
laboriously, but burst forth, the outpourings of his intellect, its natu-
ral, involuntary, and constant gesticulation. And what adds to their
value is that, outside of the council meetings and of intimate con-
verse, he does not use them ; he employs them solely for thinking ;
at other times he subordinates them to his end, which is the practi-
cal effect ; generally he writes and speaks another language, the lan-
guage which is suited to his audience ; he eliminates surprises, the
fits and starts of the imagination and of improvisation, the outbursts
of genius and of inspiration. Those which he allows himself are
simply employed to dazzle this or that personage whom he wants
to accept one of his grand ideas, Pius VII. or the Emperor Alexan-
der; his conversational tone is then caressing, familiar, expansive,
and pleasing ; he is before the footlights, and when on the stage he
plays in turn all parts, tragedy and comedy, with the same spirit.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

159

whether fulminating or insinuating, and even with humor. With his
generals, ministers, and principal agents he restricts himself to a
concise, positive, technical, business style; any other would spoil
matters ; the impassioned sentiment is apparent only in the impe-
rious brevity, force, and dryness of his accent. For his armies and
the common run he has his proclamations and bulletins ; that is,
sonorous phrases purposely composed for effect, the facts as they are
stated being designedly simplified, arranged, and falsified ; in short,
so much good champagne for arousing enthusiasm, as well as an ex-
cellent narcotic for maintaining credulity, a sort of popular mixture
retailed out by him just at the proper time, and whose ingredients
are so well proportioned that the public drinks it with delight, and
becomes at once intoxicated. His style on every occasion, whether
affected or spontaneous, shows his wonderful knowledge of the
masses and of individuals ; except in two or three cases, on one
exalted domain, of which he always remains ignorant, he has ever
hit the mark, applying the appropriate lever, giving just the push,
weight, and degree of impulsion which accomplishes his purpose. A
series of brief, accurate memoranda, corrected daily, enables him to
frame for himself a sort of psychological tablet whereon he notes
down and sums up, in an almost numerical valuation, the mental and
moral dispositions, characters, faculties, passions, and aptitudes, the
strong or weak points, of the innumerable human beings, near or
remote, on whom he acts.

Let us try for a moment to form some idea of the grasp and ca-
pacity of this intellect ; we should probably have to recur to Caesar
to find its counterpart ; but, for lack of documents, we have nothing
of Caesar but general features — a summary outline ; of Napoleon we
have, besides the perfect outline, the features in detail. Read his
correspondence, day by day, then chapter by chapter ; for example,
in 1806, after the Battle of Austerlitz, or, still later, in 1809, after his
return from Spain, up to the peace of Vienna ; whatever our tech-
nical shortcomings may be, we shall find that his mind, in its com-
prehensiveness and amplitude, largely surpasses all known or even
credible proportions.

He has mentally within him three principal atlases, always at
hand, each composed of “ about twenty note-books,” each distinct
and each regularly posted up. The first one is military, forming a
vast collection of topographical charts as minute as those of an
itat-niajor, with detailed plans of every stronghold, with specific in-

i6o

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

dications and the local distribution of all forces on sea and on land —
crews, regiments, batteries, arsenals, storehouses, present and future
supplies of men, horses, vehicles, arms, munitions, food, and cloth-
ing. The second is civil, and may be compared with the heavy,
thick volumes published every year, in which we read the state of
the budget, and comprehend, first, the innumerable items of receipt
and expenditure, ordinary and extraordinary, internal taxes, foreign
contributions, the products of domains in France and out of France,
the fiscal services, pensions, public works, and the rest ; next, all
administrative statistics, the hierarchy of functions and functionaries,
senators, deputies, ministers, prefects, bishops, professors, judges, and
those under their orders, each where he resides, with his rank, juris-
diction, and salary. The third is a vast biographical and moral dic-
tionary, in which, as in the pigeon-holes of the Chief of Police, each
notable personage and local group, each professional or social body,
and even each population, has its label, along with a brief note on its
situation, needs, and antecedents, and, therefore, its demonstrated
character, eventual disposition, and probable conduct. Each label,
card, or strip of paper has its summing-up ; all these partial summa-
ries, methodically classified, terminate in totals, and the totals of the
three atlases are combined together, so as to furnish their possessor
with an estimate of his disposable forces. Now, in 1809, however
full these atlases have become, they are clearly imprinted on Na-
poleon’s mind ; he knows not only the total and the partial sum-
maries, but also the slightest details ; he reads them readily and at
ever)'^ hour ; he comprehends in a mass, and in all particulars, the
various nations he governs directly, or through some one else ; that
is to say, 60,000,000 of men, the different countries he has con-
quered or overrun, consisting of 70,000 square miles. On the
psychological and moral atlas, besides a primitive omission which
he never will supply, because this is a characteristic trait, there
are some estimates which are wrong, especially with regard to
the Pope and to Catholic consciences ; in like manner he rates the
energy of national sentiment in Spain and Germany too low ; he
rates too high his own prestige in France and, in the countries an-
nexed to her, the balance of confidence and zeal on which he may
rely ; but these errors are rather the product of his will than of his
intelligence ; he forges them ; left to himself his good sense would
rest infallible. As to the other two atlases, the topographical and
the military, they are as complete and as exact as ever ; it is in vain

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

l6l

that the reality which they present to him has become swollen and
complex ; however monstrous at this date, they correspond to it in
their fulness and precision, trait for trait.

But this mass of notations forms only the smallest portion of the
mental population which fills this immense brain; on the idea he
has of the real, germinate and swarm his conceptions of the possible.
Without these conceptions there would be no way to handle and
transform things, and that he did handle and transform them we
all know. Before acting, his plan is decided on, and if this plan is
adopted, it is one among several others, after examining, comparing,
and giving it the preference ; he has, consequently, conceived the
others. Behind each combination he has adopted we detect those
he has rejected. It is certain that among his diverse faculties, how-
ever great, that of the constructive imagination is the most powerful.
At the very beginning we feel its heat and boiling intensity beneath
the coolness and rigidity of his technical and positive instructions.

“When I arrange a military plan,” said he to Roederer, "no man is more
pusillanimous than I am. I magnify to myself all the dangers and all the evils
that are possible under the circumstances. I am in a state of agitation that is
really painful. But this does not prevent me from appearing quite composed to
people around me ; lam like a girl giving birth to a child."

He thus grows passionate in the throes of the creator, absorbed
with his creation that is to come ; he already anticipates and delights
in occupying his imaginary edifice. “ General,” said Madame de
Clermont-Tonnerre to him, one day, “you are building behind a
scaffolding which you will take down when you have done with it.”
“Yes, madame, that’s it,” replied Bonaparte; “you are right. I am
always living two years in advance.” His response came with “ in-
credible vivacity,” as if an eruption, the outburst of a spirit affected
in its inmost fibre. Accordingly, on this side, the power, the
rapidity, the fecundity, the play, and the jet of his thought seem
immeasurable ; what he has done is astonishing, but what he has
undertaken is much more so ; and whatever he may have undertaken
is far surpassed by what he has imagined ; however vigorous his
practical faculty, his poetical faculty is stronger; it is even too vigor-
ous for a statesman ; its grandeur is exaggerated into enormity, and
its enormity degenerates into madness. In Italy, after the i8th of
Fructidor, he said to Bourrienne :

" Europe is a molehill ; never have there been great empires and great revolu-
tions, except in the Orient with its 600,000,000 of men.”

II

NAPOLEON- BONAPAPTE.

162

The following year, at St. Jean d’Acre, on the eve of the last as-
sault, he added :

“ If I succeed I shall find in the town the pacha’s treasure and arms for 300,000
men. I shall stir up and arm all Syria. ... I shall march on Damascus and
Aleppo ; as I advance in the country I shall increase my army with the discontented.
I shall proclaim to the people the abolition of slavery, and of the tyrannical govern-
ment of the pachas. I shall reach Constantinople with armed masses. I shall
overthrow the Turkish Empire ; I shall found in the East a new and grand empire,
which will fix my place with posterity, and perhaps I will return to Paris by the
way of Adrianople, or by Vienna, after having annihilated the house of Austria.”

Become consul, and then emperor, he often recurs to this happy
period, when, “ rid of the restraints of a troublesome civilization,”
he could imagine at will and construct at pleasure.

" I created a religion ; I saw myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an ele-
phant, with a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran, which I composed
to suit myself.”

Confined to Europe, he thinks, after 1804, that he will reorganize
Charlemagne’s empire.

“The French Empire will become the mother country of other sovereignties.
. . . I mean that every king in Europe shall built a grand palace at Paris for

his own use ; on the coronation of the Emperor of the French these kings will come
and occupy it ; they will grace this imposing ceremony with their presence, and
honor it with their salutations. The Pope will be there ; he came to the first one ;
he must necessarily return to Paris, and fix himself there permanently. Where
could the Holy See be better off than in the new capital of Christianity, under Na-
poleon, heir to Charlemagne, and temporal sovereign of the Sovereign Pontiff?
Through the temporal the emperor will control the spiritual, and through the Pope,
consciences.”

In November, 1811, in a high state of excitement, he says to
De Pradt :

“ In five years I shall be master of the world ; only Russia will remain, but I
will crush her. . . . Paris will extend out to St. Cloud.”

To render Paris the physical capital of Europe is, through his
own confession, “ one of his constant dreams.”

" I would like to see her a city of two, three, four millions of inhabitants, some-
thing fabulous, colossal, unknown down to our day, and its public establishments
adequate to its population. . . . Archimedes proposed to lift the world if he

could be allowed to place his lever ; for myself, I would change it wherever I could
be allowed to place my energy, perseverance, and budgets.”

This, at all events, he believes; for however lofty and badly sup-

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

163

ported the next story of his structure may be, he has always ready
a new story, loftier and more unsteady, to put above it. A few
months before launching himself, with all Europe at his back, against
Russia, he said to Narbonne :

“ After all, my dear sir, this long road is the road to India. Alexander started
as far off as Moscow to reach the Ganges ; I said this to myself after St. Jean
d’Acre. ... To reach England to-day I need the extremity of Europe, from
which to take Asia in the rear. . . . Suppose Moscow taken, Russia subdued,

the czar reconciled, or dead through some court conspiracy, perhaps another and
dependent throne, and tell me whether it is not possible for a French army, with
its auxiliaries, setting out from Tiflis, to get as far as the Ganges, where it needs
only a thrust of the French sword to bring down the whole framework of that In-
dian commercial grandeur. It would be the gigantic expedition of the nineteenth
century, I admit, but practicable. Through it France, at one stroke, would secure
the independence of the West and the freedom of the seas.”

While uttering this his eyes shine with strange brilliancy, and he
keeps on accumulating motive after motive, calculating obstacles,
means, and chances ; the inspiration is under full headway, and he
gives himself up to it. The master faculty finds itself suddenly free,
and it takes flight ; the artist, encased in politics, escapes from his
trammels ; he is creating out of the ideal and the impossible. We
take him for what he is, a posthumous brother of Dante and Michael
Angelo ; in the clear outlines of his vision, in the intensity, the co-
herency, and the onward logic of his reverie, in the profundity of his
meditations, in the superhuman grandeur of his conceptions, he is,
indeed, their fellow and their equal. His genius is of the same
stature and the same structure ; he is one of the three sovereign
minds of the Italian Renaissance. Only, while the first two operate
on paper and on marble, the latter operates on the living being, on
the sensitive and suffering flesh of humanity.

Henri Taine,

SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE

TARIFF.

A TARIFF, in SO far as it is intended to be protective, is a tax
levied on the community to indemnify a certain number of persons
for their losses in carrying on certain kinds of business ; or, rather, if
any one likes it better, to furnish them with a fair profit in certain
kinds of business. There is, perhaps, no tax which may not be
properly submitted to the popular judgment, if it be submitted in
its true shape, without disguise. This requires a distinct defini-
tion both of its object and of its amount. This rule is rigidly applied
to all taxes except the protective tax. It is applied rigidly in all
appropriations for the expenses of the Government, such as the
salaries of its civil and military servants, the cost of the navy, of
fortifications, of the river and harbor improvements, of the public
buildings, of subventions to railroads, and of the redemption of the
public debt. For none of these things is an appropriation either
left indefinite in amount or hidden away in another for entirely
different objects. But in voting funds for the creation or promo-
tion of certain branches of industry, the rule is totally disregarded.

In the first place, the money levied on the tax-payer for this
purpose is mixed up with the money levied for the general expenses
of the Government. How much of the taxes goes for the protec-
tion of native industry is never known or specified, and no pains
are taken to find it out. One may really approve of protective tax,
and yet be totally unable to approve of any tax levied in this way
for any purpose whatever. Granting that it is expedient for the
Government to spend money in the maintenance or the promo-
tion of the iron manufacture, for example, it must be expedient,
also, for the public to know the exact amount which it costs
annually; just as it is expedient that it should know exactly how
much the army and navy costs, or how much the annual improve-
ment of rivers and harbors costs. No view, however broad, of the
province of government can furnish an excuse for concealing the
expense of any great national undertaking. The question “ how
much,” is a question which every tax-payer has a right to ask, as

SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 16$

regards all branches of the public expenditure, and which every
Secretary of the Treasury ought to be able to answer. There is not a
single good reason for concealing the national expenditure in protec-
tion, any more than for concealing the national expenditure in any-
thing else. But there is no trace of this expenditure in the national
accounts. Everybody knows it must be large, but nobody knows
how large. The only sources of information on this subject are the
guesses made in free-trade books and pamphlets, which, of course,
possess but little authority in the popular eye. The debates be-
tween free-traders and protectionists on this point are the most
bewildering part of the controversy. Every now and then a free-
trader, home or foreign, undertakes to foot up the amount of the
contributions which American consumers, and especially the farm-
ers, make to the maintenance of the various branches of domestic
industry. Such attempts always excite great indignation among
protectionists. A pamphlet containing calculations of this sort, by
an Englishman named Montgredien, was published in this country
a few years ago, and has been denounced by various protectionist
writers with great bitterness, as if it were a sort of impertinent
prying into somebody’s private affairs. I dare say it was incorrect.
I do not, indeed, see how such calculations can come anywhere near
correctness. But what a curious state of mind about the national
finances that is, which treats as illicit all efforts to discover the exact
amount of the national outlay, on what is admittedly an object of
the highest national importance.

Next, it must be said that any fund of large amount, raised and
distributed in this way, must of necessity prove a corruption fund.
By this I do not mean a fund distributed in bribes to individuals or
organizations, but a fund the existence of which must be constantly
present to the mind of the lazy, the improvident, or incompetent,
as something to fall back on if the worst come to the worst. Sup.
pose the national appropriations for the purpose of protecting manu-
facturing industry were made in the ordinary way by a distinct
vote of Congress ; were made, for instance, as the appropriations
for the promotion of the carrying trade — the steamship subsidies, as
they are called — are made, in the shape of an annual maximum sum.
Suppose this sum were paid over to the corporations, or individuals,
engaged in each manufacture, on their giving proof that they were
carrying on a bona fide business. Suppose that to each were given
as much as would meet the loss, as shown by his books, incurred by

1 66 SOA/E POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.

him in competing with foreigners in the home markets. I am not
advocating this. Any one can see its difficulties. I acknowledge
how much less troublesome it is to protect by levying duties on
foreign goods at the port of entry. But the political objections to
the protective system, as now administered, cannot be made so clear
in any way as by inquiring how the plan of distributing the money
directly by the public Treasury would work.

The measure of each manufacturer’s needs would, of course, be
the amount lost in his business through foreign competition. It
would hardly be possible to restrict the number of participators in
the bounty, because one of its great objects would be the multipli-
cation of manufactures. We should have to invite as many people
as possible to set up mills and furnace.s, and then to come to us for
help. But see what an amount of inspection we should need to pre-
vent the distribution of the fund becoming a gross job. It would be
impossible, for instance, to pay the subsidy or indemnity on a simple
statement of the loss sustained. We should have to inquire how the
loss was sustained ; whether really by foreign competition, or by lax
or inefficient or dishonest methods of doing business ; whether by
simple misfortune, or insufficiency of capital, or want of experience.
We would never consent that the Treasury should furnish insurance
against loss from any cause whatever ; that the same measure
should be dealt out to the idle, the improvident, and the slow, as to
the industrious, the energetic, and the ingenious. No government
would undertake to help in the same degree, through direct sub-
sidies, every one who chose to go into the iron or cotton business.
It would investigate and discriminate. It would not treat all men’s
complaints as equally respectable. Indiscriminate protection, if it
were given directly, would speedily be felt to have all the evils of
indiscriminate charity. A manufacturer who said, “ I am not able
to go on with my business and must have more state aid,” would be
met in the same way as a man who said, “ I must have relief, be-
cause I have got no money.” The latter, before receiving relief,
would surely be asked ; “ Why have you no money ? Is it because
you are lazy or because you are unfortunate ? ” In like manner, the
manufacturer who demanded more protection, simply because the
amount he received was not sufficient to save him from bankruptcy,
would be asked: “Why is the amount you receive insufficient? Is
it the fault of the market, or your own lack of fitness for the business
in which you have engaged ? In the former case you are entitled

SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 1^7

to relief. In the latter it would be a waste of the tax-payers’
money, and a waste of your own life, to start you again.”

That such a system could long prevail in any country without
damage to the moral constitution of those who were benefited by it,
all experience of human nature forbids us to expect. The effect of
the possession of money, or of a rich father, on a young professional
man, is well known. It is only the men of very strong character
who make their mark in spite of it. In all walks of life, indeed, it
is generally those who have burnt their bridges who make the stiff est
fight. Manufacturers would need to be more than human to make
the very best use of their faculties, while knowing that they had in
Congress a protector of boundless wealth and indulgence, who, when
the allowance was exhausted, asked only one question, namely, how
much more was needed?

Looking at the protective system, as it now exists, from the side
of legislation, the political objections to it under our form of gov-
ernment are still stronger. The only governments fitted to deal
with votes of money of an indefinite amount, for an ill-defined
purpose, if any be fitted, are governments of the parliamentary
type, in which the finances are managed by a responsible minis-
ter, and all the appropriations collected in a systematic whole called
the budget. Even in such hands, the support of industry, through
indirect taxation, is open to immense abuse. But such a minis-
ter, responsible to the public for the whole financial system, can
make some attempt to reconcile the conflicting claims of the great
industries. Under our system — the presidential system, as it is called
— nobody in particular is responsible for the financial scheme of the
year. There is, in fact, no official scheme, in the strict sense of the
term, submitted to Congress. The Secretary of the Treasury puts
into his report a mass of multifarious information about the public
finances, but the recommendations with which he follows it up are
rarely heeded by the Legislature. The real work of what is called in
other countries a Minister of Finance, is done by a committee of the
House of Representatives, which makes the first draft of the appro-
priation bills. But these bills, including the tariff bill, never pass the
House in the shape in which they are drawn up, or anything ap-
proaching to it. Each member feels himself fully entitled to pro-
pose, and, if he can, to carry modifications in them, and many
members do carry modifications in them ; so that when a bill is
finally passed it is generally impossible for any one, in or out of

1 68 SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.

the House, to say who its author is. And so numerous are the
influences which are brought to bear on the framing of it, that
the most powerful of them is hardly ever known. The commit-
tee is beset by hundreds of manufacturers from all parts of the
country, representing every variety of industry, and each claiming
to be the final authority on his own subject. Each, too, demands
that Congress shall either alter, or shall not alter, the duty on some
particular article of foreign importation, and supports his demand
with an array of figures, the correctness of which nobody attempts to
dispute, if for no other reason, for want of time. Failure to influ-
ence the committee, too, rarely discourages any tariff lobbyist. He
transfers his labors to the House, and attacks the bill through indi-
vidual members, who, being generally much more ignorant of the
subject than the members of the committee, fall an easy prey to
him. The general result is apt to be that the bill, as finally passed,
has but little, if any, resemblance to the bill as it issued from the
committee-room. It is often, when examined, found to be some-
thing very different in its operation, not only from what its first
projectors intended it to be, but from what everybody else at the
end thought that it really was. There is hardly a more pitiable
spectacle in politics than the vexation and amazement of the coun-
try, after a new tariff bill has been passed, over the discovery that
nobody can tell what its effect on industry is likely to prove.

There is, however, one other reason of the unfitness of Congress
for the proper working of our protective system besides the absence
of a responsible ministry charged with the management of the
finances. It has been the American policy from the beginning, and
a wise policy, to provide, by paying the members, that the legisla-
tures of the country shall be a fair representation of the plain people
who compose the bulk of the population. The bulk of the popu-
lation has but little money, but is keenly alive to the use of the
money, and eagerly engaged in the pursuit of it. We send to the
Legislature, both State and Federal, men who are generally poor
and generally honest when they go there, but not unwilling to be
rich if a respectable occasion offers, and are very apt to have their
imagination touched by the history and condition of millionaires.
In plain and simple communities, such as two or three of the New
England States still remain, in which capital is scarce and great
capitalists unknown, the relation of these legislators to their con-
stituency leaves little to be desired. But in States in which great

SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 1 69

accumulations of wealth have taken place, in which great capital-
ists frequently have great favors to ask of the State, and in which
legislators are constantly called on to deal with measures which
contain, or are thought to contain, as Johnson said of the Thrale
brewery, “ The potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of
avarice,” these relations leave a great deal to be desired. The be-
lief of the great capitalists in the venality of legislators in some
States, if not in many, is well known, and is one of the most un-
pleasant political phenomena of the day. In fact, they make hardly
an attempt to conceal it. I have never talked with one who had ever
found himself in the power of a State Legislature, or had to ask
anything of it which seriously affected his interests, who was afraid
to avow his belief that the members were venal, and who did not pre-
tend to hold proofs of their venality; who had not stories to tell, not
only of his having to pay in order to get what he sought, but of his
having to pay in order to escape a tax on what he possessed already.
In the New York Legislature, certainly, the practice of introducing
bills simply for the purpose of frightening rich men, or “ striking
them,” as it is called, is by no means uncommon. Nor is the practice
unknown of delaying the passage of measures in which rich men are
interested, until they are forced to inquire what it is that stops the
way. One hears the same stories of all States in which there are
large corporations or great capitalists exposed in any manner to
legislative action. Doubtless there is in all this much exaggeration,
but any one who is determined to gain his ends with the State
government through corruption, is pretty sure, if he cannot succeed,
at all events to find many ways of spending money in the attempt.

All this is an illustration of the growth of a political evil which
is both novel and peculiar to our time. In all past states of society
with which we have any acquaintance, the governing class has
been the wealthy class. The military or feudal states were ruled
by the men who had the most land. The great commercial re-
publics, like Venice and Genoa, were ruled by the men who had the
most money. It is in our day and generation, and in this country,
that the Government has for the first time, both in its legislative and
administrative branches, passed into the hands of the poor, in a rich
community. I say the poor in a rich community, for there have
been states before now in which poor men filled all the offices ; but
these were states, such as some of the Swiss cantons, in which the
rulers and ruled were, as regards this world’s goods, pretty much

I/O SOME POLITICAL AEID SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.

on a level, and in which the absence of temptation made it easy
for everybody to be virtuous. Here, on the other hand, we are try-
ing the novel experiment of governing a commercial community,
during a period of rapidly growing wealth, by the instrumentality of
men without fortunes. This will probably, hereafter, continue, for
better, for worse, to be the democratic way. No other way is pos-
sible. The rule of the many must always be the rule of the com-
paratively poor, and, in this age of the world, the poor have ceased
to be content with their poverty. They seek wealth, and, in times
when wealth is accumulating rapidly, they seek it eagerly. We can-
not change this’state of things. We must face the problem as it is
presented to us. That problem is, I do not hesitate to say, the
great problem of government in every civilized country — how to
keep wealth in subjection to law ; how to prevent its carrying elec-
tions, putting its creatures on the judicial bench, or putting fleets
and armies in motion in order to push usurious bonds up to par.

There is only one way of meeting this difficulty. We cannot at
will put down corruption by a sudden increase of human virtue. In
other words, we cannot protect legislators against wealthy specula-
tors, by making them either suddenly purer, or more contented.
The way to arm them against temptation is to leave them as little
as possible to sell of the things which capitalists are eager to buy.

I do not mean to say that the tariff has produced, or is produc-
ing, definite, ascertainable, or provable corruption in Congress ; that
is, that manufacturers go down to Washington and pay members for
raising the duty on this, or not lowering it on that. But I do say
that the state of things is vicious through which Congress has the
chance every year of increasing or lessening the incomes of thousands
of rich men, of threatening to ruin great industrial enterprises or
largely to increase their profits, and this through changes in legisla-
tion so slight as not to be perceptible to the great mass of the public,
yet so intricate as to be comprehensible only to a small portion of it.
Every time the tariff comes under discussion — and it comes under it
every year — hundreds of wealthy corporations or individuals either
fear a loss or expect a gain. This puts every member of Congress
in the position toward them of a possible enemy or a possible
benefactor; in the one case to be bought off, in the other to be re-
warded. The lobby which looks after the tariff every winter in the
protectionists’ interest is not composed of speculative economists,
occupied with the effect of legislation on the general weal. It is

SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OP THE TARIFF. I/I

composed of shrewd, practical business men, engaged in procuring
or hindering legislation which will increase or diminish their bank
account by an amount which they can readily figure out, and which,
if called on, they freely submit to the committees.

The protectionist answer to much of what is said with regard to
the changeableness of congressional policy about the tariff is, chiefly,
that if the tariff were not attacked incessantly by free-traders and
their allies, in one disguise or another, these changes would never take
place. If, in short, the people who are hostile to the protective sys-
tem would refrain from criticising the tariff in which it is embodied,
there would be as much stability in the policy of the Government
with regard to import duties as any one could desire. Unfortu-
nately, however, tariffs have to be made for the community, such as
it is, and not as protectionists would desire to see it. There has
always been in this country a considerable body of persons who are
opposed to any protection at all ; there is another body, also con-
siderable, opposed to high protection. As long as speech is free
they will continue to exert an influence, more or less pronounced,
upon Congress and the voters. If they do not always have
their way in legislation, they are always able, at every election, to
diffuse among manufacturers the fear that they will have it. The
effect of this fear on business is, manufacturers say, almost as pre-
judicial as actual legislation.

The problem which protectionists have to solve, therefore, touch-
ing the relations of the Government to industry in this country,
would seem to be the production of a tariff which nobody will at-
tack— a very difficult task, we must all admit, if it is to be such a
tariff as extreme protectionists really desire. As long as there ex-
ists, about the amount of protection needed, the doubt and mys-
tery which we now witness ; as long as the classes for whose protec-
tion the tariff is intended are as numerous and as clamorous as they
now are, it will be impossible to satisfy them all by any protective
tariff whatever. There is only one rule known to us by which a
tariff can really be measured and defended. If the principle of rais-
ing duties for revenue only were once adopted, every one would
know at a glance how high the tariff ought to be. There might be
disputes about the distribution of its burdens among different com-
modities, but there would be none about the sum it ought to bring
in. If there were in any year a surplus, every one would agree that
the tariff ought to be lowered. If there were a deficit, every one

1/2 SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.

would agree that it ought to be raised. We should thus, at least,
get rid of the perennial contention about the weight of the duties,
and we should no longer be dependent for stability on the wisdom
of Congress.

Now let me^ consider another, and, from a social point of view,
perhaps the most important, aspect of the tariff question. Can any
one find, in the work of any American author, or in the speech of
any American orator — I mean, of the free States — prior to the civil
war, any intimation that we should have, fully developed on Ameri-
can soil, within the present century, what has long been known in
Europe as " the labor question ”? Of course, we can all recall that
sometime famous letter of Lord Macaulay’s, in which he predicted
the speedy triumph in this country of poverty over property, and
the periodical division among the have-nots of the goods and chat-
tels of the haves. But some of us can remember, too, the mocking
and proud incredulity with which that dismal prediction was re-
ceived. He was told, in hundreds of newspaper articles, that Euro-
pean experience furnished no proper materials for forecasting the
economical future of the United States; that no such division of
classes as he foresaw could take place here. I do not need to say
that his predictions have not been fulfilled, and are never likely to
be. I am one of those, too, who believe firmly that property will
always, in every country, be able to take care of itself. It will al-
ways have the superiority in physical force, as well as in intelli-
gence, on its side. The great bulk of the population is, in every
country, and, above all, in this, composed of those who have prop-
erty or expect to have it ; and so it will always be, as long as our
civilization lasts. But certainly, all the answers to Macaulay have
not stood the test of time and experience. » In i860 nobody here
was seriously troubled by the condition or expectations of the
working classes. In fact, Americans were not in the habit of think-
ing of working-men as a class at all. An American citizen who
wrought with his hands in any calling was looked on, like other
American citizens, as a man who had his fortunes in his own keep-
ing, and whose judgment alone decided in what manner they could
be improved. Nobody thought of him as being in a special degree
the prot^g^ of the State. In fact, the idea that he had a special and
peculiar claim on State protection was generally treated as a piece
of Gallic folly, over which Anglo-Saxons could well afford to smile.
There was no mention of the free laborer in political platforms at

SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 173

that day, except as an illustration to Southern slave-holders of the
blessings of which their pride and folly deprived their own society.

We have changed all this very much. Under the stimulation
of the war tariff, not only has there been an enormous amount of
capital invested in industrial enterprises of various sorts ; not only
have mills and furnaces and mines and protected iterests of all
sorts greatly multiplied, but there has appeared in great force, and
for the first time on American soil, the dependent. State-managed
laborer of Europe, who declines to take care of himself in the old
American fashion. When he is out of work, or does not like his
work, he looks about, and asks his fellow-citizens sullenly, if not
menacingly, what they are going to do about it. He has brought
with him, too, what is called “ the labor problem,” probably the
most un-American of all the problems which American society has
to work over to-day. The American pulpit and the American press
are now hammering away at it steadily. Commissions, both State
and Federal, are nearly every year appointed to collect facts bearing
on it, and working-men are invited to come before them and explain
it. Popular attention to it is stimulated by occasional riots and
huge strikes, in which thousands take part, and which every now and
then strain to the uttermost the State powers of protecting life
and property. Its leading features are, however, well known. The
rate of wages paid in the protective industries is seldom as high as
working-men think they ought to have, and is often, if not most of
the time, greater than their employers think they can afford to pay.
And then employment in these industries is somewhat precarious.
Every now and then there is a reduction, or a lock-out, simply be-
cause the protected market is not good enough. In fact, we have
to-day before our eyes, at all the great centres of industry, as they
are called at the mills and mines and furnaces — most of the phe-
nomena which “the pauper labor of Europe” now furnishes for
the perplexity of European statesmen and philanthropists. Nor
must I be told that this is an exceptional state of things, arising
out of a brief and transient depression of industry. It has lasted
from 1873, with a very brief interval of two years, until the present
year.

Now, this labor problem, which so many statesmen and philan-
thropists and economists are trying their teeth on, is every day
made more difficult, every day further removed from solution, by
that fatal lesson of government responsibility for the condition of

1/4 SOM£ POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF.

a particular class of a community, which every believer in high
tariffs, every manufacturer who depends on the tariff, is compelled
to preach. Of all the novelties which the last twenty-five years
have introduced into American politics and society, decidedly the
most dangerous is the practice of telling large bodies of ignorant
and excitable voters at every election that their daily bread depends
not on their own capacity or industry or ingenuity, or on the capa-
city or industry or ingenuity of their employers, but on the good-
will of the Legislature, or, worse still, on the good-will of the Ad-
ministration. In other words, the “ tariff issue,” as it is called in
every canvass, is an issue filled with the seeds of social trouble and
perplexity. Anything less American and more imperialist than
the regular quadrennial proclamation that if the presidential elec-
tion results in a certain way the foundations will be knocked from
under American industry, the factories closed, and the workers
thrown out of employment, could hardly be conceived. And yet,
as long as a large number of industries exist through the tariff, and
could not exist without it, and men’s eyes are turned, whenever
there is a depression in business, not to the market of the world or
to the resources of their own ingenuity, but to the lobbies of the
Capitol, this announcement is inevitable. Every canvass thus be-
comes a lesson in dependence on the State. It becomes a sort of
formal acknowledgment by the leading men of both political par-
ties that one class of the community, at least, is composed of gov-
ernmental protdg^s ; for the party which denies that its coming into
power will derange industry makes this acknowledgment, just as
effectually as the party which brings the charge.

The truth is, that the first field ever offered for seeing what the
freedom of the individual could accomplish, in the art of growing
rich and of diversifying industry, was offered on this continent. It
was blessed with the greatest variety of soil and climate, with the
finest ports and harbors, with the greatest extent of inland naviga-
tion, with the richest supply of minerals, of any country in the world.
The population was singularly daring, hardy, ingenious, and self-reli-
ant, and untrammelled by feudal tradition. That opportunity has,
under the protective system, been temporarily allowed to slip away.
The old European path has been entered on, under the influence of
the old European motives ; the belief that gold is the only wealth ;
that, in trading with a foreigner, unless you sell him more in specie
value than he sells you, you lose by the transaction ; that diversity

SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE TARIFF. 1/5

of industry being necessary to sound progress, diversity of individual
tastes, bent, and capacity cannot be depended on to produce it ;
that manufactures being necessary to make the nation independent
of foreigners in time of war, individual energy and sagacity cannot
be trusted to create them.

The result is that we have, during the last quarter of a century,
deliberately resorted to the policy of forcing capital into channels
into which it did not naturally flow. We thus have supplied our-
selves with manufactures on a large scale, but in doing so we have
brought society in most of the large towns, in the East, at least, back
to the old European model, divided largely into two classes, the one
great capitalists, the other day laborers, living from hand to mouth,
and dependent for their bread and butter on the constant mainte-
nance by the Government of artificial means of support. Agriculture
has in this way been destroyed in some of the Eastern States, and,
what is worse, so has commerce.

Had individuals in America been left to their own devices in the
matter of building up manufactures, it is possible that the gross pro-
duction of the country in many branches would have been less than
it is now ; but it is very certain that American society would have
been in a healthier condition, and American industry would have
been “taken out of politics,” or, rather, would never have got into
it. An agricultural population, such as that of the Northern States
sixty years ago, was sure not to confine itself to one field of indus-
try exclusively. Enterprise and activity, love of work and love of
trying all kinds of work, were as marked features of the national
character then as they are now. The American population could
boast of much greater superiority over the European population
than it can now. There was sure, therefore, to have been a constant
overflow from the farms of the most quick-witted, sharp-sighted, and
enterprising men of the community, for the creation of new manu-
factures. They would have toiled, contrived, invented, copied, until
they had brought into requisition and turned to account — as, in
fact, they did to a considerable extent in colonial days — one by one,
all the resources of the country, all its advantages over other coun-
tries in climate, soil, water-power, in minerals, or mental or moral
force. Whatever manufactures were thus built up, too, would have
been built up forever. They would have needed no hothouse legis-
lation to save them. They would have flourished as naturally and
could have been counted on with as much certainty as the wheat

17^ SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OP THE TARIFF.

crop or the corn crop. Instead of being a constant source of uncer-
tainty and anxiety and legislative corruption, they would have
been one of the main-stays of our social and political system.
American manufactures would then, in short, have been the legiti-
mate outgrowth of American agriculture. They would have grown
as it grew, in just and true relations to it. They would have ab-
sorbed steadily and comfortably its surplus population, and the
American ideas of man’s capacity, value, and needs would have
reigned in the regulation of the new industry.

The present state of things is one which no thinking man can
contemplate without concern. If the protectionist policy is per-
sisted in, the process of assimilating American society to that of
Europe must go on. The accumulation of capital in the hands of
comparatively few individuals and corporations must continue and
increase. Larger and larger masses of the population must every
day be reduced to the condition of day laborers, living from hand to
mouth on fixed wages, contracting more and more the habit of look-
ing on their vote simply as a mode of raising or lowering their wages,
and, what is worse than all, learning to consider themselves a class
apart, with rights and interests opposed to, or different from, those
of the rest of the community.

What, then, is to be done by way of remedy? Nothing can be
done suddenly ; much can be done slowly. We must retrace our
steps by degrees, by taking the duties off raw materials, so as to
enable those manufactures which are nearly able to go alone, to get
out of the habit of dependence on legislation, and to go forth into
all the markets of the world without fear and with a manly heart.
We must deprive those manufactures which are able to go alone
already of the protection which they now receive, as the reward of
log-rolling in Congress, in aid of those still weaker than themselves.
And we must finally, if it be possible, by a persistent progress in the
direction of a truly natural state of things, prepare both laborers
and employers for that real independence of foreigners, which is
the result, simply and solely, of native superiority, either in energy
or industry or inventiveness or in natural advantages.

E. L. Godkin.

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

Eloquence may be defined to be the utterance of convictions
or emotions in such a way as to produce corresponding convictions or
emotions in others ; and in the history of the world it has been one
of the most powerful agencies for the advancement of liberty, civili-
zation, and religion. It existed before there could be any analysis of
its nature, or any rules for its exercise. Just as there was speech
before there could be grammar, and men reasoned before there could
be any science of logic, so there were orators before eloquence
could be made itself an object of study, or any rules could be laid
down for the guidance of those who desired to excel in its manifes-
tation. Judah knew nothing, presumably, at least, either of logic or
of rhetoric, and the laws of elocution, we may believe, were utterly
undreamed of by him; yet the pleading pathos of his intercession for
Benjamin won its way to the heart of Joseph, and to this day sends
a responsive thrill through every one who reads it with attention.

But though eloquence existed thus, before it could be analyzed,
we must not suppose that the analysis of it is of no importance.
Anatomy is not life, but it has taught many things which enable men
to live more healthily; and, in the same way, though the analysis of
eloquence is not eloquence, it may yet be of great practical service to
those who are called to make verbal appeals on any subject to their
fellow-men. Looking, then, thus at eloquence, and seeking to resolve
it into its elements, we find this tripartite division — namely, matter,
manner, and spirit. The matter is the argument or substance of the
subject treated, and includes all those things which are comprised in
the science which is technically known as logic ; such as invention,
reasoning, arrangement, the exposure of fallacies, and the like. The
manner comprehends external things, such as style, illustration, and
all that comes under the head of rhetoric, together with appropriate
utterance, in suiting the tone and gesture to the thought, and all the
details which belong to the department of elocution. The spirit is
that in the man himself, which lifts the matter and the manner up
for its own purposes, fuses them into a white heat in its own glowing

forge, and runs them into the mould of the occasion so that the result
12

178

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

is attained, in an address which carries with it the intellectual con-
viction, the prompt decision, and the fervid enthusiasm of all who
hear. Of these three, thus described, the spirit is by far the most
important, and we must seek for the essence of eloquence more
especially in that. You may have the matter clearly arranged and
cogently expressed, and you may have the manner possessed of the
negative quality of faultlessness, yet there may be no eloquence.
While, again, there have been cases in which the matter has been
crude and ill-digested, and the manner rough, uncouth, and almost
ludicrous, but both of these have been lost sight of, as the speaker
bore everything before him on the torrent of resistless earnestness
and impetuosity. The proof of a thing is in its power ; and there-
fore, with such facts before us, we are forced to conclude that we
must seek for the essentials of eloquence mainly in that spirit, which
gains its object, even when the matter and the manner are compara-
tively neglected or disregarded.

But while we make that admission, we are very far indeed from
alleging that these other things are of no importance whatever.
Because they are not of the essence of eloquence it does not by any
means follow that they have nothing to do with it. On the contrary,
if, without regard to them^ certain men have produced such astound-
ing effects by their words, we may well ask how much more they
might have accomplished if they had been thoroughly trained in
logic, rhetoric, and elocution, so as to have been able to call up at
will, and, as it were, automatically, all the advantages which thorough
discipline in these departments, at the proper stage in their deve-
lopment, would have secured. Just here, indeed, comes in the bene-
fit of preliminary training in the departments of logic, rhetoric, and
elocution, before one enters upon the career either of the minister,
the statesman, or the barrister. It gives opportunity for the cultiva-
tion of those things which may make true eloquence more effective,
and the absence of which may mar the force of what otherwise
would be the most successful oratory ; and it does so at a time
when the mastery of them may become so thorough, so much a
part of the man himself, that he will act upon them with the uncon-
sciousness that is characteristic of habit. “ How can people remem-
ber to turn out their toes at every step all their lives?” was the
question of a little fellow to his mother, when she was seeking to
impress upon him the duty of attending to his “walk ” ; and he had
to be told that they do not remember, but that they get into such a

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

179

strong habit of doing what she recommended, that it would be un-
natural for them to do otherwise. But it is quite similar in matters
of more importance ; so it is only when the student is caught early
enough, and trained thoroughly enough, that the right matter and
manner of discourse will become habitual with him, and he will be
able to use all the finest qualities of style and all the best graces
of elocution unconsciously, and as matters of course ; and it is only
then that they will be of the highest service to him.

Mark the qualifications, however. He must be caught early
enough. Attention to these things, as ends in themselves, will do him
grievous harm at a later stage in his history ; when, for example, he
is in the thick of his duties as a preacher and pastor, or in the midst
of multitudinous engagements at the bar. The effect then will be to
spoil nature, while yet he never can acquire such ease as to make art
natural. It will make him stilted, self-conscious, and manneristic.
If we wished to injure a preacher who is in actual work, one very
sure way of doing so would be to set him, then, to the study of these
things ; but, on the other hand, if we desired to prepare a young man
for doing effective service as a speaker, we should take care that
while he is as yet in his formative stage, and, so to speak, in the
gristle, with his habits yet to be acquired, he should be committed
to the care of a wise teacher, to learn the arts of reasoning and com-
position; and, if possible, to that of a still wiser teacher, to take
lessons in elocution. Dr. Thomas Guthrie tells us that during his
student life in Edinburgh he “attended elocution classes winter after
winter, walking across half the city and more, fair night and foul, and
not getting back to his lodging till about half-past ten. There he
learned to find out and correct many acquired and more or less awk-
ward defects in gesture ; to be, in fact, natural ; to acquire a command
over his voice so as to suit its force and emphasis to the sense, and
to modulate it so as to express the feelings, whether of surprise or
grief, or indignation or pity. ” * Thus these acquirements became
part and parcel of himself. He used them with just as little con-
sciousness of deliberate purpose and intention at the moment, as one
uses his limbs in walking or his tongue in articulation, and every one
who ever listened to his sermons from the pulpit, or his speeches
from the platform, will attest that they lent a charm even to his
eloquence.

♦ Autobiography and Memoir of Thomas Guthrie, Vol. I., p. 158.

l8o the essentials of eloquence.

Again, our student must be trained thoroughly enough. In
these two departments of the matter and the manner of eloquence,
it is very specially true that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”
It will, in fact, be worse than none ; for it will be just enough to
make the man conscious that he must attend particularly to cer-
tain things, and that will be fatal to the highest eloquence. In the
heat of composition or of speech everything of that subordinate sort
must come so spontaneously that special attention is not diverted to
them, from the main purpose which the orator has in view. At such
a time his motto must be “This one thing I do.” He must be
emptied and lost and swallowed up in his purpose to carry the con-
victions of his audience with him, on the great theme which he is
treating. Self in every form must drop out of his consciousness, for
the instant that he is recalled to the recollection of himself his power
departs, and he begins to flounder and to fail. If one hesitates as to
the correct spelling of a word he is almost sure to spell it wrongly ;
but those which he spells unconsciously, as he writes, he generally
spells correctly. In like manner, if the rules of logic or rhetoric or
elocution are ever recalled to the consciousness of a man when he is
speaking, he will miss the mark which most of all he desired to strike.
A great popular orator some time ago told us that a friend, in the
kindest possible manner, remonstrated with him in regard to a pe-
culiarly infelicitous gesture of which he seemed, at some particular
parts of his discourse, to be specially fond ; and that on the next oc-
casion when he discovered that he was about to use it, and tried to
do without it, the effect was that in his eagerness to keep from
yielding to his impulse he lost his point completely, and failed to
impress it on his audience. So let all who are prosecuting the
study of elocution — and we rejoice to know that in so many of
our colleges there is special provision made for studying it — see that
they train themselves so thoroughly in it that they may conform to
its rules automatically ; for, as in morals, whenever a man thinks him-
self humble then is the moment of his most insidious pride, so in
eloquence, whenever a speaker becomes conscious in any measure of
himself, and is led to think of how he is doing that which he is speak-
ing, or how he is to do that which is still before him, he loses that
w’hich, most of all, the true orator desires to attain. But when one
has so completely mastered the principles of logic, rhetoric, and
elocution that he acts upon them without thinking either of them or
of himself, then the manner is to the matter as the powder is to the

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE. l8l

ball, and the spirit is the spark by which the might that was in the
powder is exploded for the propulsion of the ball, and sends it with
tremendous impact against the wall of the fortress which he is seek-
ing to bombard.

But now we come face to face with the question. What is that
spirit which is thus identical with the soul of eloquence ? And
here it must be confessed that it is much more easy to propose such
an inquiry than it is to give to it a distinct or satisfactory reply. It
is like asking “ What is life? ” and any answer which we can give may
be just as vague and disappointing as that of the Teutonic biologist
when, in reply to the question just named, he said, “ Life — Life — Life
is the ego of the organism. ” Anatomy cannot seize life ; science
cannot produce it, or define it ; all any one can do is to recognize
it, nourish it, and train it. Just so the spirit of eloquence cannot be
caught by any analysis ; neither can it be conferred by any teacher.
All we can do with it is to recognize, foster, educate, and direct it
so as to fit its possessor for taking advantage of the opportunities
that may come to him, and do thereby the service which God has
fitted him to render to his generation.

But though we cannot distinctly define it, though we cannot
give material expression to that which is in itself impalpable as an
essence, we may yet, by the help of analogy, get some idea of its
nature. It is that in the man which enables him to see the occasion
for his utterance, and which inspires him to say the fitting word to
meet that occasion. It is a natural aptitude for the perception of the
“ time to speak, ” combined with a spontaneous and irresistible im-
pulse to seize that time, and a special gift for laying hold of the right
things to meet the requirements of the occasion. It corresponds in
the orator to genius in the poet or the painter ; or to that in the
mathematician which draws him to his science, and enables him to
rise to eminence therein. It is thus, in its origin, a special endow-
ment from God, and does not belong to every man. All are not
orators, and all cannot be orators, any more than all can be poets,
or sculptors, or musicians, or metaphysicians. Where the gift exists
it may be cultivated or developed. But it cannot be imparted. In
a most important sense orator nascitur ; and there are some men
who never could be eloquent, just as there are others who could never
produce a painting. You might teach them to draw and show them
how to use the brush : but they could never do anything that would
give them a claim to be ranked among artists. Opie was, perhaps, a

1 82 THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

little too sarcastic, when, to one who said,“ Pray, may I ask what you
mix your colors with,” he answered, “With brains, sir”; and Mozart
was similarly satirical to a youth who came asking him how he was
to begin musical composition, when he told him to “ Wait.” “ But,”
said his visitor, “you composed much earlier.” “ True,” was the re-
ply, “ but then I asked nobody about it.” So, again, we all remember
the story told by Dr. John Brown,* concerning Sir Joshua Rey-
nolds, to this effect : “ He was taken by a friend to see a picture.
He was anxious to admire it, and he looked over it with a keen and
careful, but favorable eye. ‘ Capital composition, correct drawing ; the
color, tone, chiaroscuro excellent, but it wants — it wants, that^ snap-
ping his fingers ” ; and, wanting that, though it had everything else,
it was worth nothing. Now these three great men, each in his own
way, thus indicated that genius for painting or music is needed by those
who would attain to real excellence in either. And the same is true
of eloquence. There must be in the man a genius for oratory, else
he will never be an orator. The inventor indicates his bent or bias,
even in his earliest years, by his mechanical contrivances. Faraday’s
home-made electrical machine, when he was a bookseller’s apprentice,
was the prophecy of his future greatness in electro-magnetism. The
boy Stephenson’s clay engines and Liliputian mills, set up in the small
streams running into Dewley Bog, were the predecessors of his loco-
motive. And Pope tells us that even as a child he “ lisped in numbers,
for the numbers came.” Now, precisely in the same way, the genius
for eloquence shows itself even in earliest years, and Daniel Webster
had no truer triumph in his later life than that which he achieved in
his boyhood, when his father yielded to the power of his plea for the
captive rodent, and said, “ Zeke, let that woodchuck go! ” Here, then,
in that natural aptitude for the use of argument and appeal in arti-
culate speech, and the impulse to employ it on every fit occasion,
which will show themselves in the sports of boyhood or in the dis-
cussions of the debating society, if they can reveal themselves no-
where else, we have the evidence of the possession of that which
is akin to what Reynolds missed in the picture and Mozart in the
inquirer, namely, the genius for eloquence, without which all else is
vain. If one has that, then let him go on in the study of oratory, for
that will dominate all his acquirements, and mould them all to its
purpose ; but without that, he may become a “ neat speaker,” able

* Hora Subseciva, 1st series, p. i66.

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE. 1 83

to express his meaning fluently, correctly, even perhaps elegantly,
but nothing more. Life must precede organization ; but organiza-
tion will not produce life. Nay, rather it is life that organizes. So
training will not make an orator ; but a genius for oratory will ma-
nipulate and utilize the training and make the man truly eloquent.

Taking, now, another step forward, and presuming that one has
this special gift, what more is required for the highest eloquence ?
I answer, in the first place, a good character. The ancient rhetori-
cian laid it down as a fundamental principle that the orator must
be a good man ; and we are conscious that any suspicion which we
have of a speaker’s character or sincerity takes a large discount from
the power of his words. Just here, indeed, we come upon a clear
distinction between eloquence and music, painting, sculpture, or
others of what are called the “ fine arts.” Incidentally, indeed, and
unconsciously, the flaw in the man, in any department, will reveal
itself in his work, but you can abstract the picture or the statue
from the artist, and admire or the reverse, without any regard to his
moral standing in the community. It is different, however, with the
orator. You cannot separate the speech from the speaker. The
painting stands upon its own merits, and is judged simply and solely
as a work of art. But the oration needs character behind it, to make
it powerful in the highest degree. Character gives force even to the
utterances of a stammering tongue, while the lack of it will make the
most glowing appeals comparatively ineffective. If there be any
reasonable ground for believing that the speaker is insincere or im-
moral, then his oration has no more influence upon the hearers than
the representation of an actor on the stage has on the spectators, or,
rather, it has just the same kind of influence, for they admire it as a
performance, and nothing more. If anything were needed to prove
the truth of these statements, we might point to what has recently
occurred in England, where the exposures in a late trial have with-
drawn one of the most rising of its Parliamentary orators from
public life, and blighted a career which was full of richest promise.
But when the speaker is one whose life for years has been known and
read of all men, and who has proved himself to be a pure, disinter-
ested, and consistent man, then the weight of all that gives momen-
tum to his words, they have in them what the Abb6 Mullois has so
felicitously called “ the accent of conviction,” and they tell with
power upon his audience. His character is thus to his speech as the
reflector is to the lamp behind which it is placed, intensifying its

1 84 THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

lustre, and widening the area of its illuminating influence. In this
way ethics, as well as logic and rhetoric, connects itself with elo-
quence, and here, also, purity is an element of power. And if this
be true, as a general principle, I cannot forbear from adding that it
is especially true of the eloquence of the pulpit. Chaucer said of his
good parson :

" The lore of Christ and his apostles twelve
He taught, but first he followed it himselve ; ”

and anything suggestive of insincerity in the preacher must kill the
effectiveness of his sermon.

But, as another thing needed, even when a genius for eloquence
is present, I name a cause worthy of its exercise. Nothing would
be more ludicrous than for a man to make an ordinary statement
with all the fervor and earnestness with which he would plead for
the life of one whom he believed to be innocent. But when a
great cause is imperilled, then the orator sees the occasion and
rises to it, and, forgetting himself in the interests at stake, he car-
ries everybody with him on the full tide of his impassioned utter-
ance. It is in this way that we account for the paucity of orators
at one time and the number of them at another. In many men
the gift of which we have spoken remains dormant, because there
has been in their history no call for its development. Like the
“ mute inglorious Miltons ” of whom the poet sings, they have had
nothing to evoke out of them that which was latent in them. But a
great cause rouses the sleeping energies of a people, and awakes to
the full exercise of their powers the men whom it needs for its ad-
vancement. In a sense — like Him whose cause is the greatest of
all — it makes “ the dumb to speak ” ; for it brings into prominence,
as leaders of the people, by their words, those who, but for it, might
never have been heard, or heard of, by their fellow-men as
orators. Every great war makes its own generals, and every great
movement calls out its own orators. Thus it is that epochs of re-
formation or revolution, or controversy on great and important
truths, have been made illustrious by the eloquence of men developed
by themselves. We need do no more, in this connection, than name
such men as Athanasius, Luther, Latimer, Knox, and others, or al-
lude to such epochs as those of the American Revolution, the passing
of the Reform Bill and the Anti-Corn-Law Crusade, in England ;
the Disruption of the Scottish Church, the Anti-Slavery Struggle in

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

185

this country, and the like. Each of these had its own orators, whom
it called to the front, and who have left behind them words which
even yet stir our pulses, as we read them, and compel us to say,
with the great rival of Demosthenes, “ What must it have been to
have heard them from their own burning lips?”

But it is not enough that there be a great cause. For the de-
velopment of eloquence like theirs, we must have, also, in the men
themselves, a strong conviction of the rectitude and importance of
that cause, and an intense perception of its urgency. These, indeed,
are the very elements of that earnestness whose praise is in the
mouths of so many, but whose real nature so few comprehend. Mul-
titudes confound it with rant. They seem to say of it, as Bottom
did of the lion’s part in the Midsummer Night's Dream, “You may
do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.” But a true view of
the matter is vastly different from that. Earnestness consists in a
positive conviction of the truth in the case, and of the urgent im-
portance of that truth at the moment, so that the man “ cannot but ”
speak out what is burning in him to find expression. If a man has
no settled convictions about the matter in hand, let him keep si-
lence until he gets them, for speech, in these circumstances, will be
worse than useless. But conviction is infectious, and the very re-
cognition of it in a man of moral integrity, intellectual force, and
emotional fervor, will often of itself produce the effect which the
orator desires. Again, if a man can keep any utterance back let
him do so, for usually such an utterance is not yet ripe for being
sent forth. Let him dam up the current, therefore, for a time,
until it force itself over the barrier, and then its power will be im-
mediately perceived. And, in general, when some great cause is
concerned, when he has something to say which he cannot hold
back, when, like the old prophet, the “ word is as a burning fire shut
up in his bones, and he is weary of forbearing and cannot stay,”
then let him give it outlet, and the genius of eloquence will bear
him on, so that it shall be said of him :

“ His words did gather thunder as they ran,

And, as the light’ning to the thunder
Which follows it, riving the spirit of man.

Making earth wonder.

So was their meaning to his words.”

But to the highest development of eloquence a great occasion is
as essential as a worthy cause. Indeed, we may say that sometimes

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

1 86

a great occasion is itself eloquent, and strikes the key-note to which
the oration, as it were, sets itself. The truth is felt by the audience
before the speaker opens his lips, and all that he has to do is to give
voice to emotions which are already struggling to find expression in
the hearts of those who are to hear him. Then, as feeling grows
by being uttered, the orator will kindle as he moves on ; will, as the
saying is, rise to the occasion ; whereas, in point of fact, it might be,
perhaps, more accurate to say that the occasion lifted him.

So, again, there is much of eloquence in an audience. No doubt
it is not yet eloquence ; but it is there, as steam is in water, and
the born orator supplies the heat which is needed for its generation
into steam. If the hearers are in sympathy with the speaker, then
their responsiveness to his arguments and appeals will carry him on
to loftier flights ; these, again, will make a still deeper impression on
the audience, and that, in its turn, gives him an additional stimulus.
“ Give him a cheer,” said one, in a crowd gathered round a great con-
flagration, as he saw a fireman falter for a moment at the final effort
that was needed to save a life. “ Give him a cheer,” and, as the
admiring huzza was raised, the heart of the brave hero gathered new
courage, so that he succeeded in his noble endeavor. Just in the
same way the applause of a sympathetic and responsive audience
bears up a speaker as the water does the ship that rides upon the
waves. There is a constant action and reaction between the orator
and his hearers. As Mr. Gladstone once put it, “He gets from them
in vapor that which he gives back to them in flood,” and when they
have got it they return it to him with interest. Thus, between them,
they zigzag up the mountain pathway until they reach the summit,
whereon are conviction, decision, and enthusiasm.

But even if the audience be antagonistic rather than sympathetic,
it still has a great part to play in the production of eloquence. For,
in that case, the orator is put upon his mettle. Like a wary athlete,
he takes care how he begins the conflict. With cool deliberation he
chooses his ground. Then, after fencing awhile in light and playful
fashion, he sees his opportunity, and, taking up his adversary in his
unyielding grasp, he summons all his strength for the encounter,
throws him at his feet, and stands supreme. Only those who have
enjoyed a triumph of this sort can have any idea of the excitement
of the conflict or of the joy of the victory, for such things are ac-
corded but to few, and not often even to them.

An audience, then, as well as a cause and an occasion, are needed

THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOQUENCE.

187

for the generation of eloquence. For eloquence is not a thing which
an orator carries about with him, as a “ reader ” carries his recitation,
which he can bring out in solitude or before a few as well as before a
multitude. It needs the presence of the multitude, as well as the great
cause and the fitting occasion. Henry Clay must have been greatly
tickled when his rustic host, after entertaining him with the best
which his house afforded, said: “ Now, Mr. Clay, wouldn’t you make
just a little speech to me and my wife } ” But he could not make an
oration then. He needed the surroundings of the Senate chamber,
the stimulus of antagonism, the support of sympathizers, and, above
all, a cause worthy of himself and his country, and then his oratory
was as genuine as it was effective.

If, then, these principles be correct, it will follow that orators of
the highest sort must always be comparatively rare. Eloquence can
never be a common thing. It must, to say the least, be as excep-
tional as poetic genius or artistic excellence. It is not to be ex-
pected from every man, or even from the same man at all times.
Every preacher cannot be an orator, nor even the same preacher, in
every sermon ; and the same thing holds equally of pleaders at the
bar and statesmen in the Senate. It is, therefore, only an unthinking
clamor that would demand such an impossibility, and complaint of
that sort very frequently springs from unreasonable expectation.

But give us a man with the stirrings of oratorical genius in his
soul ; let him be early and thoroughly trained in the mastery of elo-
cution and the management of action ; make him familiar with the
setting forth of an argument after a logical fashion, and in such
style as rhetoric shall approve ; let him be known for high-toned
principle and genuine moral excellence; give him such practice in
public speaking as may be gained through taking interest in the
affairs of his Church, his city, or his State ; then let him be placed in
the thick of some tremendous conflict for truth, or law, or liberty, or
religion ; let him be brought out by some such occasion as Webster
had in his reply to Hayne, or Lincoln had in his conflict with Doug-
las, or Gladstone had in his opposition to Beaconsfield in his famous
Mid-Lothian campaign, and he will speak in language which will
echo round the world and reverberate through all coming ages.

Wm. M. Taylor.

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

It has long been an open secret that there is war amongst the
political economists. John Stuart Mill no longer receives universal
homage, but has to bear much irreverent criticism ; even Adam
Smith might be seriously cavilled at were not the habit of praise
grown too old in his case. He is still “ the father of political econ-
omy ” ; but, like other fathers of his day, he seems to us decidedly
old-fashioned. The fact is, that these older writers, who professed to
point out the laws of human business, are accused of leaving out of
view a full half of human nature ; in insisting that men love gain,
they are said to have quite forgotten that men sometimes love each
other — that they are not only prehensile, but also a great many other
things less aggressive and less selfish.

Those who make these charges want to leave nothing human out
of their reckonings ; they want to know “ all the facts,” and are
ready, if necessar}'-, to reduce every generalization of the older writers
to the state — the wholly exceptional state — of a rule in German
grammar. Their protest is significant, their purpose heroic, beyond
a doubt ; and what interesting questions are not raised by their pro-
gramme ! How is the world to contain the writings, statistical, histori-
cal, critical, which must be accumulated ere this enormous diagnosis
of trade and manufacture shall be completed in its details ; and after
it shall have been completed in detail who is to be born great enough
in genius and patience to reduce the mass to a system comprehensi-
ble by ordinary mortals ? Moreover, who is going surety that these
new economists will not be dreadful defaulters before they get
through handling these immense assets of human nature, which Mill
confessed himself unable to handle without wrecking his bookkeep-
ing ? Are they assured of the eventual collaboration of some Shaks-
pere who will set before the world all the standard types of eco-
nomic character ? Let it be said that the world hopes so. Even
those who cannot answer the questions I have broached ought to
bid these sturdy workers “ God speed ! ”

The most interesting reflection suggested by the situation is, that
political economists are being harassed by the same discipline of ex-
perience that, one day or another, sobers all constructors of systems.

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

189

They cannot build in the air and then escape chagrin because men
only gaze at their structures, and will not live in them. Closet stu-
dents of politics are constantly having new drill in the same lesson :
the world is an inexorable schoolmaster in these courses ; it will
have none of any thought which does not recognize it. Sometimes
theorists like Rousseau, being near enough the truth to deceive even
those who know something of it, are so unfortunate as to induce
men to rear fabrics of government after their aerial patterns out of
earth’s stuffs, with the result of bringing every affair of weight crash-
ing about their ears, to the shaking of the world. But there are not
many such coincidences as Rousseau and his times, happily ; and
other closet politicians, more commonly cast and more ordinarily
placed than he, have had no such painful successes.

There is every reason to believe that in countries where men vote
as well as write books, political writers, at any rate, give an honest
recognition of act to these facts. They do not vote their opinions,
they vote their party tickets; and they are the better citizens by far
for doing so. Inside their libraries they go with their masters in
thought — mayhap go great lengths with Adolph Wagner, or hold
stiffly back, “ man versus the state,” with Spenser — outside their
libraries they “ go with their party.” In a word, like sensible men,
they frankly recognize the difference between what is possible in
thought and what is practicable in action.

But the trouble is, that when they turn from voting to writing
they call many of their abstract reflections on government studies of
politics, and thereby lose the benefit of some very wholesome aids to
just thought. Even when they draw near the actual life of living
governments, as they frequently do, and read and compare statutes
and constitutions, they stop short of asking and ascertaining what
the men of the street think and say of institutions and laws ; what
little, as well as what big, influences brought particular laws into ex-
istence ; how much of each law actually lives in the regulation of
public function or private activity, and how much of it has degene-
rated into “dead letter”; in brief, just what things it is — what
methods, what habits, what human characteristics and social condi-
tions— that make the appearance of politics outside the library so
different from its appearance inside that sanctum ; what it is that
constitutes “ practical politics ” a peculiar province. And yet these
are the questions most necessary to be answered in order to reach
the heart of their study.

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

190

Every one who has read great treatises on government which
were not merely speculative must have been struck by their ex-
haustive knowledge of statutes, of judicial precedents, and of legal
and constitutional history, and equally by their tacit ignorance of
anything more than this gaunt skeleton of institutions. Their best
pages are often those on which a modest asterisk, an unobtrusive
numeral, or a tiny dagger sticking high in the stately text, carries
the eye down to a foot-note, packed close in small print, in which
some hint is let drop of the fact that institutions have a daily as
well as an epochal life, from which the student might “ learn some-
thing to his advantage.”

The inherent weakness of such a system is shown by the readi-
ness with which it is discredited when once a better one is put
beside it. What modern writer ,on political institutions has not
felt, either directly or indirectly, the influence of De Tocqueville
and Bagehot ? Both these inimitable writers were men of extra-
ordinary genius, and, whatever they might have written about,
their writings would have been admiringly preserved, if only for
the wonder of their luminous qualities. But their political works
live, not only as models of effective style, but also as standards of
stimulating wisdom ; because Bagehot and De Tocqueville were
not merely students, but also men of the world, for whom the only
acceptable philosophy of politics was a generalization from actual
daily observation of men and things. They could see institutions
writ small in the most trivial turns of politics, and read constitu-
tions more clearly in a biography than in a statute-book. They
were men who, had they written history, would have written the
history of peoples, and not of courts or parliaments merely. Their
methods have, therefore, because of their essential sanity, gone far
toward discrediting all others; they have leavened the whole mass
of political literature. Was it not Bagehot, for instance, who made
it necessary for Professor Dicey to entitle his recent admirable work
The Law of the Constitution, that no one might think he mistook it
for the Life of the Constitution ?

Who has not wished that Burke had fused the permanent
thoughts of his splendid sentences of wisdom together into a
noble whole — an incomparable treatise whereby every mind that
loved liberty might be strengthened and fertilized ? He had
handled affairs, and could pluck out the heart of their mystery
with a skill unrivalled ; he spoke no word of mere hearsay or

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

I9I

speculation. He, it would seem, better than any other, could
have shown writers on politics the difference between knowledge
and insight, between an acquaintance with public law and mastery
of the principles of government.

Not that all “ practical politicians ” would be the best instruc-
tors in the deep — though they might be in the hidden — things of
politics. Far from it. They are too thickly crowded by daily
detail to see permanent outlines, too pushed about by a thousand
little influences to detect accurately the force or the direction of
the big and lasting influences. They “ cannot see the forest for the
trees.” They are no more fitted to be instructors because they are
practical politicians than lawyers are fitted to fill law-school chairs
because they are active practitioners. They must be something
else besides to qualify them for the high function of teaching —
and must be that something else in so masterful a wise that no
distraction of active politics can for a moment withdraw their vi-
sion from the great and continuous principles of their calling.

The active statesman is often an incomparable teacher, however,
when he is himself least conscious that he is a teacher at all — when
he has no thought of being didactic, but has a whole soul full of
the purpose of leading his fellow-countrymen to do those things
which he conceives to be right. Read the purposes of men like
Patrick Henry and Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, men un-
tutored of the schools — read their words of leadership, and say
whether there be anything wiser than their home-made wisdom.

It is such reflections as these — whether my examples be well
chosen or not — which seem to me to lead directly to the right
principle of study for every one who would go beyond the law and
know the life of States. Not every State lets statutes die by mere
disuse, as Scotland once did ; and if you are going to read constitu-
tions with only lawyers for your guides, be they never so learned,
you must risk knowing only the anatomy of institutions and never
learning anything of their biology.

“ Men of letters and of thought,” says Mr. Sidney Colvin, where
one would least expect to find such a remark — in a Life of
Walter Savage Landor —

" Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to declaiming at
their ease against the delinquencies of men of action and atlairs. The inevitable
friction of practical politics generates heat enough already, and the office of the
thinker and critic should be to supply not heat, but light. The difficulties which

192

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

attend his own unmolested task, the task of seeking after and proclaiming salutary
truths, should teach him to make allowance for the still more urgent difficulties
which beset the politician — the man obliged, amidst the clash of interests and temp-
tations, to practise from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain and
at the same time the most indispensable of the experimental arts.”

Excellent! But why stop there? Must the man of letters and
of thought observe the friction of politics only to make due allow-
ance for the practical politician, only to keep his own placid con-
clusions free from any taint of scorn or cavil at men whose lives
are thrown amidst affairs to endure the buffetings of interests and
resist the tugs of temptation? Is not a just understanding of the
conditions of practical politics also an indispensable prerequisite to
the discovery and audible proclamation of his “salutary truths?”
No truth which does not on all its sides touch human life can
ever reach the heart of politics ; and men of “ unmolested tasks,” of
mere library calm, simply cannot think the thoughts which will
tell amidst the noise of affairs. An alert and sympathetic percep-
tion of the infinite shifts of circumstance and play of motive which
control the actual conduct of government ought to permeate the
thinking, as well as check the criticisms, of writers on politics.

In a word, ought not “ man of the world ” and “ man of books ”
to be merged in each other in the student of politics? Was not
John Stuart Mill the better student for having served the East India
Company and sat in the House of Commons? Are not Professor
Bryce and Mr. John Morley more to be trusted in their books be-
cause they have proved themselves worthy to be trusted in the
Cabinet ?

The success of great popular preachers contains a lesson for stu-
dents of politics who would themselves convert men to a saving doc-
trine. The preacher has, indeed, an incalculable advantage over the
student of politics in having as his text-book that Bible which speaks
of the human heart with a Maker’s knowledge of the thing he has
made ; by knowing his book he knows the deep things of daily life.
But the great preacher reaches the heart of his hearers, not by
knowledge, but by sympathy — by showing himself a brother-man to
his fellow-men. And this is just the principle which the student of
politics must heed. He must frequent the street, the counting-house,
the drawing-room, the club house, the administrative offices, the halls
— yes, and the lobbies — of legislatures. He must cross-examine the
experience of government officials ; he must hear the din of conven-

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

193

tions, and see their intrigues; he must often witness the scenes of
election day. He must know how men who are not students regard
Government and its affairs ; he will get many valuable suggestions
from such men on occasion ; better than that, he will learn the
available approaches to such men’s thoughts. Government is meant
for the good of ordinary people, and it is for ordinary people that
the student should elucidate its problems ; let him be anxious to
keep within earshot of such.

This is not to commend the writer on politics to narrow “ practi-
cal ” views and petty comment ; it is not to ask him to find a philo-
sophy of government which will fit the understanding and please the
taste of the “ ward politician ” ; it is only to ask him to keep his
generalizations firmly bottomed on fact and experience. His phi-
losophy will not overshoot the hearts of men because it is feathered
with high thought, unless it be deliberately shot in air. Thoughts
do not fail of acceptance because they are not commonplace enough,
but because they are not true enough ; and in the sort of writing
about which we are here speaking, truth is a thing which can be
detected better by the man who knows life than by the man who
knows only logic. You cannot lift truth so high that men cannot
reach it ; the only caution to be observed is, that you do not ask
them to climb where they cannot climb without leaving terra firma.

Nor is the student, who naturally and properly loves books, to
leave books and sit all his time in wiseacre observation amidst busy
men. His books are his balance — or, rather, his ballast. And of
course the men of his own day are not the only men from whom he
can learn politics. Government is as old as man ; men have always
been politicians ; the men of to-day are only politicians of a particu-
lar school ; the past furnishes examples of politicians of every
other school, and there is as much to be learned about government
from them as from their successors.

Carlyle had the sort of eye for which one should pray when seeking
to find men alive and things actual in the records left of them. Who
has not profited by his humorous familiarity with the foibles and
personal habits of the men who lived about the court of the Hohen-
zollerns? Who has not learned more than any other man could have
told him of Prussian administration under its first great organizer by
looking with Carlyle into the sociable informalities of Frederick Will-
iam’s “ tobacco parliament ” ? Carlyle knew these men well enough
to joke with and rail at them. He twitted them with their family
13

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secrets, and, knowing what clay they were of, was not awed by their
state ceremonials. Yet he saw them, as he himself bitterly com-
plains, only through the medium of crabbed documents and dry-as-
dust books, with no seer like himself to help him in his interpreta-
tions. It was hard straining of the eyes to see so far back through
the dense and murky atmosphere of formal record and set history ;
but he saw, nevertheless, because he did not need to be told all in
order to know all ; the dryest of historians could hardly avoid drop-
ping some hint which would suffice Carlyle more than would tomes
of “profane history.”

If you know what you are looking for and are not expecting to
find it advertised in the newspapers, but lying somewhere beneath
the surface of things, the dullest fool may often help you to its dis-
covery. It needs a good nose to do the thing, but look how excel-
lent is the game to which a casual scent may bring you in such a
domain as the study of politics. There are whole worlds of fact
waiting to be discovered by inference. Do not expect to find the
life of constitutions painted in the great “ standard authorities,” but,
following with becoming patience their legal anatomy of institutions,
watch their slightest movement toward an illustrative foot-note, and
try to find under that the scent you are in quest of. If they cite an
instance, seek the recital of the same case elsewhere, where it is told
with a different purpose ; if it promise well there, hunt it further
still, and make sure you catch every glimpse it affords of men’s actual
dealings with Government. If your text mention names of conse-
quence, seek them out in biographies, and scan there the personal
relations of men with affairs for hints of the methods by which gov-
ernments are operated from day to day. You will not need any
incentive to read all their gossip, in letters and journals, and so see
governors as men ; but do more ; endure official interviews and ses-
sions of Parliament with them ; collate their private letters and their
public despatches — there’s no telling when or where you will strike
fresh trails of the game you seek. Interview judges off the bench,
courtiers away from court, officers off duty. Go to France and live
next door a prefect in the provinces ; go to London and try to find
out how things of weight are talked about in the smoking-room of
the House of Commons.

Such excursions must, of course, lead the student far afield ; he
will often get quite out of sight from his starting-point, the “ stan-
dard authority ” ; but he will not, on that account, be lost. The fact

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

195

is, that all literature teems with suggestions on this topic of politics.
Just as the chance news item, the unstudied traveller’s reminis-
cence, the passing social or financial scandal,* and every hint of
any present contact of men with law or authority, illumines directly,
or by inference, the institutions of our own day, similar random rays
thrown across the pages of old books by the unpremeditated words
of writers quite guiltless of such instructive intent may light up, for
those who are alert to see such things, the most intimate secrets of
state. If it be beyond hoping for to find a whole Greville for every
age of government, there may be found Grevillian scraps, at least,
in the literature of almost every time. From men as far back and
as well remembered as Cicero, down to men as recent and as easily
forgotten as several who might be named, politicians have loved to
explain to posterity the part they took in conspicuous affairs ; and
that portion of posterity which studies politics by inference ought
to be profoundly thankful to them for yielding to the taste.

Approach the life of states by such avenues, and you will be
convinced of the organic nature of political society. View society
from what point you will, you always catch sight of some part of
government; man is so truly a “political animal” that you cannot
examine him at all without seeing the points — points of his very
structure — whereat he touches and depends upon, or upholds, the
State.

In 1850, while Governor-General of Canada, Lord Elgin writes
to Lord Grey :

“ Our Reciprocity measure was pressed by us in Washington last session, just
as a railway bill, in 1845 or 1846, would have been passed in Parliament. There
was no Government to deal with, ... it was all a matter of canvassing this
member of Congress or the other.” f

How? “ No Government to deal with”? Here’s a central truth
to be found in none of the “ standard authorities,” and yet to be
seen by a practised diplomatist all the way from Canada. About
the same date M. Bacourt came to this country to represent the
French Government and be made wretched by the crude deport-
ment of the Americans. His chief concern was to get away to
some country where people were less unconventionally at their
ease in drawing-rooms ; but he turned, when necessary, to the

* Did not the Dilke trial, in London, for instance, help us to understand at least one
influence that may sometimes make a lawyer Home Secretary ?

t Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 121.

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business of his legation ; and whenever he did so he found
that “ here diplomafic affairs are not treated as everywhere else,
where we communicate with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and
arrange the matter with him alone.” He must “ arrange ” the
matter with several committees of Congress. He must go to see
Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Winthrop, whose “ husbands are members
of the House of Representatives, and on the committee having
charge of commercial affairs, in which ” he “is interested,” for “ they
say that these gentlemen are very particular about visits from for-
eign ministers to their wives.” * Just Lord Elgin’s testimony.
Again the “standard authorities” are added to, and that in a
quarter where we would least expect to find them supplemented.
We need despair of no source.

These are only near and easily recognized illustrations of the
errant mode of study I am expounding and advocating. Other
systems, besides our own, receive similar chance illumination in the
odd corners of all sorts of books. Now and again you strike mines
like the Mdnioires of Madame de Rhnusat, the Letters of Walpole, or
the Diary of a Pepys or an Evelyn ; at other periods you must be
content to find only slender veins of the ore of familiar observation
and intimate knowledge of affairs for which you are delving ; but
your search will seldom be altogether futile. Some new-opened
archive office may offer cahiers, such as revealed to De Tocqueville,
more than all other records, the ancien regime. Some elder Hamer-
ton may tell you of the significant things to be seen “ round his
house.” All correspondence and autobiography will repay perusal,
even when not so soaked in affairs as the letters of Cromwell, or so
reminiscent of politics as the Memoirs of Samuel Romilly.

Politics is the life of the State, and nothing which illustrates
that life — nothing which reveals any habit contracted by man as a
political animal — comes amiss in the study of politics. Public law
is the formal basis of the political life of society, but it is not always
an expression of its vital principle. We are inclined, oftentimes, to
take laws and constitutions too seriously, to put implicit faith in
their professions without examining their conduct. Do they affect
to advance liberty, for instance? We ought to go, in person or in
imagination, amongst the people whom they command, and see for
ourselves whether those people enjoy liberty. With reference to
laws and constitutions of our own day we can learn such things best

* Souvenirs of a Diplomat, pp. i8g, 281.

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197

by supplementing books and study by travel and observation. The
best-taught class in modern public law would *be a travelling class.
Other times than our own we must perforce be content to see
through other men’s eyes.

In other words, statute-books and legal commentaries are all
very well in the study of politics, if only you quite thoroughly
understand that they furnish only the crude body colors for your
picture of the State’s life, upon which all your finer luminous and
atmospheric effects are afterward to be worked. It is high time to
recognize the fact that politics can be effectually expounded only
by means of the highest literary methods. Only master workers in
language and in the grouping and interpretation of heterogeneous
materials can achieve the highest success in making real in words
the complex life of states. If I might act as the interpreter of the
new-school economists of whom I have already spoken, I trust with
due reverence, I should say that this is the thought which, despite
their too frequent practical contempt for artistic literary form, is
possessing them. John Stuart Mill and Ricardo made a sort of
logic of political economy ; in order to simplify their processes, they
deliberately stripped man of all motives save self-interest alone, and
the result was evidently ^'■doctrinaire" — was not a picture of life,
but a theorem of trade. Hence “ the most dismal of all sciences ” ;
hence Sidney Smith’s exhortation to his friend not to touch the
hard, unnatural thing. The new-school economists revolt, and say
they want “ a more scientific method ” ; what they really want is a
higher literary method. They want to take account of how a man’s
wife affects his trade, how his children stiffen his prudence, how his
prejudices condition his enterprise, how his lack of imagination
limits his market, how strongly love of home holds him back from
the good wages that might be had by emigration, how despotically
the opinion of his neighbors forbids his insisting upon a cash busi-
ness, how his position in local society prescribes the commodities he
is not to deal in ; in brief, how men actually do labor, plan, and get
gain. They are, therefore, portentously busy amassing particulars
about the occupations, the habits, the earnings, the whole economic
life of all classes and conditions of men. But these things are only
the raw material of poetry and the literary art ; and without the
intervention of literary art must remain raw materials. To make
anything of them, the economist must become a literary artist and
bring his discoveries home to our imaginations — make these in-

198

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

numerable details of his pour in a concentrated fire upon the centre-
citadels of men’s understandings. A single step or two would then
bring him within full sight of the longed-for time when political
economy is to dominate legislation.

It has fallen out that, by turning its thoughts toward becoming
a science, politics, like political economy, has joined its literature to
those books of yiatural science which boast a brief authority, and
then make way for what is “latest.” Unless it be of the constitu-
tion of those rare books which mark an epoch in scientific thought,
a “ scientific work ” may not expect to outlive the prevailing fashion
in ladies’ wraps. But books on politics are in the wrong company
when they associate with works among which so high a rate of mor-
tality obtains. The “ science ” proper to them, as distinguished
from that which is proper to the company they now affect, is a sci-
ence* whose very expositions are as deathless as itself. It is the sci-
ence of the life of man in society. Nothing which elucidates that
life ought to be reckoned foreign to its art ; and no true picture of
that life can ever perish out of literature. Ripe scholarship in his-
tory and jurisprudence is not more indispensable to the student of
politics than are a constructive imagination and a poet’s ey^ for the
detail of human incident. The heart of his task is insight and inter-
pretation ; no literary power that he can bring to bear upon it will
be greater than he needs. Arthur Young’s way of observing, Bage-
hot’s way of writing, and Burke’s way of philosophizing would make
an ideal combination for the work he has to do. His materials are
often of the most illusive sort, the problems which he has to solve
are always of the most confounding magnitude and variety.

It is easy for him to say, for instance, that the political institu-
tions of one country will not suit another country ; but how infinitely
difficult is it to answer the monosyllables How? and Why? To
reply to the Why he must make out all the contrasts in the histories
of the two countries ; but it depends entirely upon what sort of eye
he has whether those contrasts will contain for him vital causes of
the effect he is seeking to expound. He may let some anecdote es-
cape him which gleams with the very spark needed to light up his
exposition. In looking for grave political facts only, he may over-
look some apparently trivial outlying detail which contains the very
secret he would guess. He may neglect to notice what men are
most talked about by the people ; whose photographs are most fre-
quently to be seen on the walls of peasant cottages, what books

OF THE STUDY OF POLITICS.

199

are oftenest on their shelves. Intent upon intrigue and legislation,
he may pass over with only a laugh some piquant gossip about leg-
islator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a
whole scheme of government. He may admire self-government so
much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive,
and so may really never know anything valuable about it. The man
who thinks the polls disagreeable, uninteresting places has no busi-
ness taking up a pen to write about government. The man who de-
spises the sheriff because he is coarse and uncouth, and who studies
the sheriffs functions only from the drawing-room or the library,
will realize the life of government no better than he realizes the
vanity of “ good manners.”

If politics were to be studied as a great department of human
conduct, not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of
the world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the
imagination. There might then enter into it that individuality
which is immortality. That personal equation which constitutes the
power of all books which have aught of power in them would then
rescue books on politics from the dismal category of “ treatises,” and
exalt them to the patriciate of literature. The needed reaction
against the still “ orthodox ” methods of discoursing upon laws and
constitutions, like that already set afoot against the “ orthodox ”
political economists, should be a “literary movement” — a movement
from formalism to life. In order really to know anything about
government, you must see it alive ; and the object of the writer on
politics should be nothing less than this, to paint government to the
life — to make it live again upon his page.

Woodrow Wilson.

THE COURSE OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.

“The tendency of American architecture,” said an honored
American, some time ago, “ is to the fantastic.” He was not with-
out warrant. The desire to have one’s own way, unchastened by
law, by knowledge, or by the sense of congruity, is sure to lead to
the extravagant ; and if a desire to be conspicuous is added, it issues
in the fantastic. This is what we see in the most American of our
architecture. We have been told that the late Mr. James Lick pro-
posed to exalt his memory by building in California a pyramid
higher than that of Cheops, and that only practical difficulties
averted this and substituted for it a public benefaction. Where the
aim is art, especially if it includes ornament, the fantastic tendency is
strongest. Americans like to be conspicuous, and they like ornament.
If we wish to see their natural tendencies displayed to the fullest
and freest, we may look through our public cemeteries. There we
shall find individual license, the desire for conspicuousness, and the
cacoethes of ornament, on a small scale, to be sure, but enforced by
condensation, like the high colors in the photographer’s camera.

These are popular influences with which our architecture has to
reckon. To them we must add the impulse due to our enormous
growth in population and wealth, producing an enormous and prob-
ably lasting demand for new building ; the stimulus, still more
effective, of new occupations, wants, ways of living, which call upon
our architects for new methods and new forms. These things give
American architecture the first essential to a healthy development ;
it is alive, and is likely to continue so. But when we look to the pub-
lic for guidance as well as impulse, the case is not so favorable. The
instinct for display does nothing but harm to any art, and it has a
dangerous ally in an insatiable craving for novelty. When a young
architect some years ago left his master, to begin work for himself,
the master’s parting advice was : “ Whatever you do, astonish peo-
ple ; that is what they like.” The master has been very prominent
among our architects, and has followed his own precept ; others who
have come later have followed it further, and have found their profit
in it, it must be said.

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201

Popular interest, then, while it gives the motive and life to archi-
tecture, gives as yet no trustworthy guidance, and, being unskilled,
is of little value for criticism. The minority which possesses taste
and judgment has its helpful influence, but is not the power which
fills streets with houses and warehouses, and which in larger under-
takings is represented by building committees. So far as the pub-
lic is concerned, its artistic sympathies are chiefly for two qualities
— realism and vivacity. In architecture realism is out of the ques-
tion, and there remains, apart from the likings of association, only
the vivacity. This is an admirable element in a growing art, if prop-
erly I'estrained and subordinated to higher qualities ; but, unchecked,
and seconded by our native inventiveness, has given us the cream
of the fantastic. On its mischievous effect in our literature there
is no need to descant. In architecture, where quiet should be the
ruling mood, and the use of vivacity is to light this up by effective
contrast, its excess has been more disastrous than in literature.
Moreover, the architect, appealing as he does to the rather languid
and uncertain tastes of his clients, as well as to their wants, is under
temptation, like their tailor and their milliner, to ply them with
novelties.

To insure a true artistic form, the insistence on the practical
should be enough, by some theories, if it were obediently followed.
But the practical does not shape the beautiful, as every artist
knows. It is enough if it can point out a safe way for the beautiful,
and can walk in its company. The public, while it applies a pretty
definite pressure and guidance to the development of forms of build-
ing to suit its practical wants, has no parti pris in questions of art or
style, but has followed very contentedly in these matters wherever
its architects have chosen to lead it. So the architect has made his
way in his art, unaided by any general criticism of force or value, but
also unimpeded by it. Given the conditions I have cited, vivacity,
variety, a sufficiency of ornament — as much, that is, as it was will-
ing to pay for — and a fair share of display, the public has taken
all that was offered it with complacency that soon settled into indif-
ference. There has been no popular control of architecture since
the time of the Renaissance, when a body of artists and amateurs
took it out of the hands of the people and remodelled it. The gen-
eral interest in the form of architecture as an art, and the general
understanding of it, have declined together; most of all, perhaps,
among democratic communities, where the public is used to concern

202

THE COURSE OF AMERICA JV ARCHITECTURE.

itself only in order to control, and conspicuously among English-
speaking people.

This interest in having an architecture, and this indifference to
its form, have been, in a way, the most stimulating influences that
architects could work under. They have given the spur to enter-
prise, self-reliance, and invention, till there are few wants for which
we have not provided a suitable form, few adventures in design
before which we have quailed. American architecture has been
charged with want of originality or invention, but this has been by
persons who have not understood the natural limits of originality in
architectural form. On the contrary, we have more originality than
we have known what to do with, and we have expended it in a thou-
sand vagaries. What our architects have needed has not been a
spur to invention or a demand for novelties, but some influence to
check their waywardness and hold them steadfastly to one manner
of design till their work acquired consistency, and the public got in-
struction. And here we lack a balance-wheel which most older na-
tions have. The want of an old architecture, by which the taste of
the intelligent is insensibly formed, means the want of a very impor-
tant guiding influence. In its absence the public, however intelli-
gent, can take its cue only from what the profession gives it, aided
by what dim reflected light it may get from cultivation in other di-
rections. And if the people need such an old architecture for their
education, it is also valuable to architects for giving a healthy de-
cision to their preferences and a solid starting-point for their de-
velopment. As it is, our architects have never held long enough or
firmly enough to any one manner of design to master it, much less
to educate their public, or to bring the architecture of their country
to consistent excellence. Their vacillations have been so many
stumbling-blocks in the way of their constituents, so many hinderan-
ces to real appreciation of their own work. These offences have cut
two ways, and have been, I think, the most serious of the obstacles
in the way of American architecture.

It is our misfortune that just where we might have looked for a
steadying influence our architects have found a most contagious ex-
ample of fickleness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries the English had been stumbling along in the pursuit of one and
another derivative from the Renaissance. Early in the nineteenth,
stimulated by a group of enthusiasts, and, I must believe, by a right
sense of their own real aptitude, they turned again to the mediaeval

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203

models. Though they began, as all the modern Gothic revivals
have begun, at the wrong end, they worked back, clearing themselves
of the false habits in which two centuries of working against the grain
had involved them, until they had recovered a fair grasp of the prin-
ciples and forms of their old style. The movement grew popular;
conservatism — even Lord Palmerston as Premier — could make no
head against it. When, twenty years ago, the competition for the
new Law Courts stirred up the whole architectural profession, only
one classic design was submitted, and that as alternative to a Gothic.
An enormous increase of building stimulated the revival ; the Vic-
torian Gothic was everywhere. English architecture was raised in
quality, and became animated, inventive, picturesque, and vigorous,
as it had not been for three hundred years. The success was due,
not so much to the style chosen as to the fact that, having found a
style which suited them, the English followed it unitedly and persist-
ently. Here seemed to be a national movement, strong, deep, and
promising to endure. It lasted some fifty years — not long enough to
fulfil its whole promise of excellence. Then suddenly, at the signal
of two or three restless and clever young^ men, whose eyes had
caught something else, the English architects with one accord threw
the whole thing away ; as a boy, after working the morning through
at some plaything, with a sudden impulse of weariness drops his un-
finished toy to run after the first butterfly.

This was very discouraging — more discouraging to those who
have the progress of architecture at heart than any other phenome-
non of modern days. It is not that the Victorian Gothic was a bet-
ter style than many others that were or might have been on trial ;
to some persons it might seem better, to others not. The hope
of modern architecture does not lie in any anointed style or such
other patentable device as has been offered us of late — the turning
of bricklayers into architects, or vice versa, or the use of iron, or
the Eastlake system ; but, after due artistic schooling, in the sin-
cerity, the unity, and the continuity of effort of those who practise
it. We had looked to the English as the inheritors of an admirable
past, as men of sincere conviction, conservators of tradition, models
of persistence and staying power. But they have seemed to show
us that their progress was at the impulse of whim rather than con-
viction, ruled rather by fashion than by tradition. It is the mobile
Frenchman who in this century has set us an example of steadiness.
If his work, like all the rest in our day, lacks some of the higher

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THE COURSE OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.

qualities of older and greater styles, it has, more than any other
modern work, the coherency and firmness that are at the bottom of
all style. His course has been the only consistent progress among
modern nations. If the infection of fashion, the corruption of
wealth, frivolity, and display have, latterly, left their mark in his
work, in this the Frenchman is a warning, but our most instructive
warning is the apostasy of England.

This is the more unfortunate for us in that English example has
told more on our own architectural development than any other.
Our young architects, it is true, have not gone to England to learn
their profession, because there is no architectural instruction in
England. A few have gone to Germany to study, and a good many
Germans have immigrated to us. But, of American students who
have been fortunate enough and wise enough to secure the advan-
tage of a European training in architecture, all but a fraction have
found it in Paris, where alone they could find a well-digested, system-
atic course of study, seconded by all the best appliances for learn-
ing, by a steady artistic tradition, an artistic environment, and the
best-trained body of practising architects that now exists. They have
come back full of zeal, and of the traditions of the French school.
This French training has been furthered by the fact that the best
of our architectural schools, all of recent growth, have modelled
their teaching on that of Paris, and imported its traditions, so that
here we have apparently enough to make the French influence the
determining one in our architecture. At one time it seemed to be
so. The public buildings in most of our cities took on a reflex of the
French style, and one convenient form, adopted or perverted from it
— the so-called French roof — was seized upon by every architect and
every carpenter, and oppressed every house in the land. Yet, in the
long run, the French influence, with every appearance in its favor,
has, in respect to style, been completely overborne by the English,
has faded away almost as if it had never been, and that in spite of
the fact that the ificole des Beaux Arts continues to be the nursery
of our best architects. Our young men go to Paris, spend their
one, two, three, or more years in one of her ateliers, see, think, and
breathe nothing but French architecture. They come home and do
their first work possibly under the dominion of the old impulse, but
in a year or so their building is, in its elements and character, as if
they had studied in England, and not in France.

The reasons for this phenomenon are intricate, and hard to trace

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205

out fully. In painting, the tendency has been curiously opposite.
Our painters owe scarcely anything to England. The young paint-
ers coming home do not leave Paris behind ; their French habit is
always with them. For this the reason is comparatively clear. The
men who have developed modern painting, especially landscape —
which, for all our efforts in other directions, is the real domain of
modern painting — are the French; and in this I do not forget that
Constable and Turner sounded its key-note. But English archi-
tecture has never been superior to French, and in the subversion of
the last ten years it has dropped below itself. The causes of its su-
premacy with us are for the most part, I think, not artistic. The
instinct of race counts for something — perhaps a great deal ; Anglo-
mania, pure and simple, also something ; constant intercourse and a
common professional literature weigh a great deal more in the scale.
The facts that in both countries men live in their own houses, built
for themselves, and that the people of both nations live much in
the country, or in that suburban limbo which outdoes the country
in its rural tastes, with their accompanying fondness for an easy-
going picturesqueness, are also influential. In truth, their fondness
for the picturesque seems to be their artistic common feeling.
After the French flush had passed over, Americans seized on the
Victorian style, and in their own fashion made it almost as much at
home here as in England, finding it lend itself most kindly to that
passion for the fantastic of which I have spoken. A taste for the
picturesque, and even the homely, in opposition to what is sub-
dued or formal, sympathizes with the exaggerated craving for per-
sonal independence which characterizes Englishmen and Americans.
French architecture never appears in undress, and this has prevented
our welcoming it heartily for domestic use, though we accepted it for
public buildings. Indeed, I have heard an American, who claimed
acknowledgment as a critic, dismiss the whole architecture of Paris
with contumely because it was not picturesque. Finally, when we
consider that the four English building-papers send us every week,
for a small sum, a score of well-drawn illustrations of the best work
that is done in their country, while French architectural periodicals
are meagre and costly, it is easy to see how professional literature
brings great weight into the scale.

So, in the long run, the English influence has distinctly prevailed,
even over those of us who were born, as it were, to another manner.
After the Boston and Chicago fires it looked as if the Victorian

2o6

THE COURSE OF AMERICAH ARCHITECTURE.

style, or some offshoot from it, would be ours, and we were in the way
of a permanent, wholesome growth. If the English had shown the
steadfastness with which we commonly credit them, their example
might have held us to our course. The two nations, working per-
sistently together in the line they had fixed, might have wrought
out a style, not better than another, but with a character of its own,
and apt to supply all the wants of our people or to express all the
ideas of our architects. But at the critical point our English leaders
faltered, and then stampeded. American architects followed them
as fast as they could, and there was an end of modern Gothic. The
Queen Anne phase followed in England, and was immediately imi-
tated here ; but it has not the qualities of a large style, and we
shall soon tire of this too. The “ Colonial ” fashion has divided our
attention with it. Both of them have had this special merit, that
they have somewhat chastened the spirit of the fantastic, though
they have not subdued it. Already there is a movement toward the
more classic forms of the Italian Renaissance, and our next lurch
may be back to Vignola and Palladio.

It may be asked — it is often asked, directly or implicitly — why
should architects, especially American architects, who have no past
to trammel them, cling to precedent? Why do we not cast off con-
ventionalism, and set to work to form a style of our own, out of our
own materials? But this is against the order of nature, and as im-
practicable in art as it is in science. It would be no more preposte-
rous to set out to develop geometry anew from the start, avoiding
the Pythagorean Proposition and the rest of the geometer’s elements,
than to create an architecture by ignoring the styles that have gone
before. The thing was done once, ab initio, before the beginning
of history, and it took thousands of years to develop a tolerable
architecture. Continuity is the condition of success and of progress
in this, as in every other line of human endeavor. Every great
architecture has been the fruit of persistent effort by many genera-
tions laboring to perfect the same forms. It took two hundred and
fifty years to advance from the Doric style, as it appears in the old-
est temples at Selinus, to its perfection, as we see it in the Theseum
and the Parthenon. The evolution of the finished Gothic of the thir-
teenth century had required two centuries of a multitudinous effort
to which our modern building activities are child’s play. Architec-
ture languished in unskilled hands between these periods ; but the
continuity of its development was never broken through all the

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207

range of history till the time of the Renaissance, and then only to
take a new grip of the old line farther back.

It has been argued that the only architecture possible to us now
is eclectic. Perhaps this is true. We have already tried it freely.
But, unfortunately, eclectic design, while it looks temptingly easy,
and so is the natural recourse of the undisciplined, is extremely dif-
ficult, perhaps the most difficult of all design. Men of small ac-
quirement may work safely in a formed style, but such men are
eclectic at their peril. It takes much knowledge, a keen and sensi-
tive eye, to search out among various examples the forms which
have natural affinities. It takes a great deal of skill to add the deli-
cate adjustments, the modifications, slight, perhaps, but indispen-
sable, which are needed to make them fit happily together. The
eclecticism to which we are used is like the packing of beech nuts
into chestnut burrs. And the fatal weakness of eclectic skill is
that it does not propagate itself, as does the power of a finished
style. It takes long to acquire it, and, once acquired, it is an indi-
vidual faculty which dies with its possessor. Nor is it cumulative.
Every man’s line of progress is his own ; what he accomplishes does
not ally itself with what his neighbor is doing. The result, as we
see it, is in most individual cases failure, and in the mass confusion.
The only eclecticism which can lead to permanent good is one in
which architects shall come to agreement as to what forms they
shall select, and set to work in common to shape these selec-
tions into a harmonious whole. But the moment this happens
eclecticism is crystallized into development, and ceases to be
eclectic.

Our very riches have betrayed us. In the multitude of examples
before them architects have forgotten the great advantage which
early builders had in their comparative poverty of available forms;
Instead of frittering away their labor and emasculating their fancy
among a multitude of unrelated details, not used continuously
enough for real intimacy, they worked with comparatively few, and
these closely allied, but enough for all practical uses. With these
they wrought steadily, the whole community together, refining, de-
veloping, adjusting them, till they thought in them as readily as in
their speaking language, not tiring of them any more than of their
own children. Then they used them currently to express their ideas,
and the forms changed only as the forms of language change in pro-
cess of growth. With us the language overloads the ideas. It is not

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that ideas are lacking to us. Those who think so misunderstand the
case. We have abundance of ideas ; it is with the language that we
struggle, not holding to one form of speech long enough to make it
our own. We are always laboring with grammatical exercises, like a
college student in his Latin oration ; or else we scramble on, h tort et
a travers, like a tourist at Paris, disfiguring the idea by spoiling the
speech. That with all this disadvantage we at times find an utter-
ance in which both the thought and the language are acceptable, is
to the credit of our pains-taking and of our intelligence, but not of
our method.

Now architecture, even more than the other fine arts, is an art of
ensemble — an art, that is, of broad effect, wherein by far the most
Important consideration is the relation of the different factors of a
design to the whole, and the unity of the impression which they pro-
duce. The cardinal virtues of good architecture are proportion,
concordance of parts, and subordination. (I speak of technical ex-
cellence ; at present the expressive qualities of art are beside our
purpose.) In comparison with these virtues, beauty of detail is of
secondary importance, vital though that also is to really good
achievement. Architecture may be very bad with very good detail,
but even very bad detail cannot ruin architecture in which the
larger virtues which I have mentioned are present. From this
condition it follows that architecture is at its best when those
qualities have widest sway, that it shines in large combinations —
not necessarily in bigness of scale, though that too is telling, but in
designs which give scope for the harmonious coordination of many
members. A well-combined group of buildings is better than one
of better parts, but ill-combined ; the finest street architecture is
that in which the separate buildings help each other to a fine
general effect, rather than that in which their designs have most
individual charm. But this is the view of the art which Americans
have been slowest to accept. It does not suit the shape of the
Anglican mind, nor does it chime in with the American habit. It
has not made any impression on the public, and although archi-
tects themselves recognize it after a sort, it has not had a real
effect even on them. Every man for himself, is the working theory
of both client and architect, and our building goes on with scarcely
a serious effort either for unity in the present or consistency in the
long run. Yet unity and the steadfastness that works consistency
are the indispensable conditions to general excellence. The lack of

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209

these tends more even than ignorance to make architecture the slave
of whim and the servant of fashion.

So, while the eclectic habit may, in its way, enable the individual
to refine his own practice, and may deliver our architecture piece-
meal from many faults, it is the longest imaginable road to unity.
In spite of great improvement in the last fifteen years, in which even
the fantastic character is wearing off, at least in the eastern half of
the country, we are as far as ever from any broad excellence. It is
in city architecture that we fail most. The good effect of this de-
pends much less on the quality of design of its individual buildings
than on the breadth, harmony, and repose, the continuity of surface
and sweep of line, that are got by their association. Of these best
qualities our recent building shows hardly a trace. Our street
frontages are sliced up into pitifully narrow lots. Every man builds
to suit himself alone, and the houses, to use the slang of the French
studios, are all swearing at each other. Their tumultuous architecture,
as a whole, has scarcely more artistic effect than the strings of cabs,
carts, wagons, and horse-cars that struggle through them. If we walk
through the new streets of one of our wealthy cities — Boston, for
instance — we see handsome fagades, rich and often elegant in detail,
and even in general design, and we think our building has improved
wonderfully in a generation. Perhaps we compare it complacently
with t!ie street architecture of a dull city like London. But we cast
our eyes down the length of the street, and the impression is gone ;
the elbowing fagades, discordant lines, and broken colors pervert the
whole effect not only to confusion, but to absolute meanness. We
could sigh for the broad surfaces and swinging lines which excuse
the paltry monotony of Regent Street and its Quadrant, to say
nothing of the splendid vistas of the avenues of Paris. Really the
best ensembles are in those older streets where building contractors
have built whole blocks in uniform — poverty-stricken in design, but
borrowing breadth and the dignity of repose from their union. So
a well-drilled regiment of even shabbily uniformed soldiers will make
a better show on parade than a crowd of gentlemen in fancy dresses —
and our streets are always on parade.

Though the architecture of a city is more important than that of
its buildings, yet among us there is no one to look out for it. If
there were even a pervading style in the work of our architects, the
general effect would in some degree take care of itself. The fault
of this lies with the architects themselves, as I have said of another
14

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fault, for it is they that set the mode. They give their clients, sub-
stantially, what they please, and the clients accept it. If they had
any positive convictions in respect to style, these might lead to
steadfastness, and that, in the end, to agreement. But for convic-
tion we have whim ; and so, for style we have fashion. Within one
human life we have had the pseudo-classical fashion, the Downing
fashion, the Victorian fashion, the French fashion, the Queen Anne
fashion, and now we have two or three fashions at once. A dyspep-
tic hunger for novelty has taken hold of us.

There are those who argue seriously that uniformity of style
would bring in a tiresome monotony. . This is like arguing that the
English language is monotonous because we have to talk and write
it constantly. It is sameness of thought that breeds monotony, not
persistence of language. A Gothic town is not monotonous. No
one would be comforted by introducing the Bourse and the Made-
leine of Paris among the picturesque Renaissance of Nuremberg;
nor would a sprinkling of Victorian architecture improve Parisian
streets. We all recognize the excellence of a well-sustained type of
architecture when we see it embodied in a foreign city — we admire it
and honor it. But when we get to our own work we are at sixes and
sevens. We forget our debt to our community and to each other.

In this unstable condition of things the influence of single men
of unusual force or attainment goes for much, though it is difficult
to dissociate the influence of the individual from that of the circum-
stances which determine his own bent. A number of years ago,
Mr. Richard M. Hunt returned to New York after a long profes-
sional schooling in Paris. His study in the Ecole des Beaux Arts
and in the office of M. Lefuel, who had succeeded Visconti as archi-
tect of the new Louvre, gave him an advantage over his fellow-
architects; the vigor and quality of his professional work, as well as
its novelty, attracted attention at once, and drew to him as pupils a
number of aspiring young men, the best of material for the making
of architects. This group furnished an unusual proportion of the
men who have since taken the lead in their profession. His influ-
ence and theirs gave, I think, the main impulse to the French move-
ment of which I have spoken. Since then the extraordinary power
of the late Mr. H. H. Richardson has drawn many of the strongest
of our young men after him into the practice of a form of Roman-
esque. Whether its example would have had its full effect without
the attractive novelty of the style in which it was embodied, we may

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2II

doubt. It is, unfortunately, easier to attract a following by a fashion
than by an excellence. Yet the real value of Mr. Richardson’s
example lay not in the style he chose, but in the use he made of
it ; and the thing which commended the style to him was doubtless
its adaptability to the qualities of design at which he aimed.
Though the power of the man is incommunicable, the qualities of
breadth, subordination, simplicity, and repose which he put into his
work have made themselves felt, and can be reproduced by his fol-
lowers in their degree. His style can be copied, and it must be
greatly perverted from his use of it before these embodied virtues of
his can be eliminated from it. Wherever it prevails it extinguishes
the fantastic as a rising tide puts out fire. Mr. Richardson’s career
is in itself an invaluable example of conviction and steadfastness, of
an unflagging effort to express certain high qualities of design, which
we have for the most part neglected, in a language which he per-
sisted in mastering, and which he never changed after he had found
it. Many, whom his conviction has not reached, make haste to imi-
tate his manner. The drawback is that this new departure, like the
rest, comes as a fashion ; the inevitable question is : When will it go
as a fashion, and what will take its place ?

We have gained a good deal in the last generation. We have
done much work that is respectable, and some that is excellent ; but
the interval between our best work and our ordinary is abnormal —
our average is far below that of other great nations. Will our pres-
ent disjointed efforts lift us much higher? Our architectural forms,
our means of expression, do not improve and become more pliant in
our hands, as they should ; they simply change. Here is no ques-
tion of a national architecture — a thing for which many people have
sighed. If we ever get any architecture that is consistent and last-
ing, it will be national enough for the wants of those who like to set
their pride of country on so small a pedestal as mere national pecu-
liarities. But it is more important that it be good ; and where are
we to look for the unity and steadfastness without which no nation
ever attained excellence ? Shall we have to write of our architec-
ture as Jacob said of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not
excel ?’’

W. P. P. Longfellow.

VICTOR HUGO.

III.

What has been said of the dramas will, with little adaptation,
apply to the novels; to such an extent, indeed, that it scarcely seems
worth while to speak of them separately at all. There is the same
inflation of proportions, the same displacement of moral centre, the
same motley choice of heroes and villains, the same diseased love of
antithesis, the same tendency to insist that his nightmares are reality ;
we shall have occasion, therefore, to add but very little to what we
have already said.

One of the series, Le dernier Jour d'un Condamni, a “ powerful
work of poetic psychology,” ought not to be regarded as a narrative.
It was a plea for the abolition of the pain of death, the beginning
of an advocacy which lasted as long as the poet’s life, and, pursued
in season and out of season, was gradually merged in an unreason-
ing humanitarianism, where the moral sense and sympathies were
perverted to hopeless confusion. Already, in 1834, a second work
of similar tendency, Claude Gueux, was issued, the “ palpitating
narrative of an excusable assassination, a frequent enough case
where the victim is less interesting than the criminal.” We borrow
these words from one of the poet’s “ inspired ” biographers.* They
might have been from the poet himself, who has given us, both in
drama and novels, an almost endless array of interesting criminals.
It may be permitted to doubt whether humanitarianism had any-
thing to do originally with the composition of the Dernier Jour. The
early editions, between 1829 and 1832, were preceded by a simple
preface, in which the reader was allowed his choice between two
assignable causes for the romance ; either the writer had access to
papers chronicling the sensations of some condemned wretch (we all
know such papers well enough in the English literature of the period),
or his work was simply an exercise of insight “ in the interest of art.”
Toward 1832, however, the Chamber of Deputies was much occupied
with the question of capital punishment, and then appeared a new
edition, with a preface long as a pamphlet, claiming, in the most
sonorous language, the most serious intentions for his “plaidoirie."

Other romances of those early years, Bug-Jargal and Han

* Barbou. Victor Hugo et son Temps, p. 312.

VICTOR HUGO.

213

d'Islande, are merely the crude fancies of a boy, without knowledge
of the world or of men. In their undaunted evolution of everything
necessary for the story from the unaided consciousness of the
writer, in their excesses, their nightmare creations, and in their joy in
rhetoric pure and simple, they have a certain value as showing ten-
dency. In L' Homme qui Rit and Quatrevingt-treize we are shown what
such a tendency, after many years of indulgence, may produce. They,
however, had the advantage of the author’s vogue as a political
martyr, and did more for his reputation among uneducated French-
men than the best work of his best years had ever accomplished.

In 1831 was Notre Dame de Paris, \iox\i which has

given a great deal of honest pleasure to the world. It is written
with the happy swing of youth, it is full of picturesque descriptions,
it is a mine of the sort of erudition possible at that day with regard
to mediaeval Paris, and it has qualities as a story of the romantic
school. The only characters with any resemblance to life in them
are the minor ones of Gringoire and Phoebus, and there is exceed-
ingly little in either.

The story of stories, however, of Victor Hugo is incontestably
Les Miserables. We may confess to something such a weakness for
it as Thackeray had for Monte-Cristo. It is hardly so wholesome
reading as the marvel of Dumas’ creation, but still it is a very good
book when one wants to get out of the world into an atmosphere of
romance. At such times it is a comfort to be told of such goodness
as that of Bishop Myriel — you do not care for the fact that he is
only the product of two antitheses, humility with grandeur, and
Victor Hugo’s conception of what a priest ought to be as against all
that he is not — you are content to wonder at him, and to follow the
story of the relations to society of other antitheses, christened Jean
Valjean, Fantine, and the like. The narration has about it an in-
credible force, which imparts to it even an air of conviction. There
are moments when you are tempted by some touch of observation
of nature to believe in the reality of the mighty dream. A minor
character, a corner of Paris, a trait of manners, is sketched in a few
simple words that give an air of truth to a whole page. In point
of fact, these minor characters produce illusion only in the first rough
sketch of them. As soon as they open their mouths you see they
are but puppets, for even Tholomyfes chez Bombarda, or Grantaire,
drunk at the Caf6 Musain, talk to revellers of incredible patience in
a way that would have left Eviradnus or Charles V. breathless. Yet

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VICTOR HUGO.

we fancy that, after all, there are few people who, for once in a way,
will not enjoy Les Mis&ables in spite of all its faults, perhaps even
a little also by reason of some of them. Its five volumes constitute
such a formidable mass, and represent the romancer in Victor Hugo
so completely, that they leave us nothing to say about its successor,
Les Travailleurs de la Mer.

There were published, in 1834, two volumes of Littcrature et
Philosophie Meldes, consisting oi two parts; a journal of ideas, opin-
ions, and reading of a young Jacobite of 1819, and a similar journal
of a revolutionist of 1830. The first part pretended to give arti-
cles written, chiefly for the Conservateur litteraire, when the author
was seventeen years of age, all entire and absolutely unchanged from
their original form, giving to those wishing to study the poet’s de-
velopment a faithful picture of his royalist “ salad-days,” The sec-
ond part gave the opinions of a full-blown liberal. As a matter of
course, in two volumes of Victor Hugo there are many good things
well said, though the value of the essays is rather in their form than
in their substance. They are still literary green fruit, and such
value as they might have had would have been as documents for
the possible student of the poet’s development, and that is pre-
cisely what they are not. In spite of the express declaration to the
contrary, the early articles have been tampered with in every con-
ceivable way. They are neither given entire, nor as they were origi-
nally written. To make them accord with the poet’s later taste or
interest, they have been docked or added to; early judgments have
been suppressed or distorted. The author’s vanity made him cover,
as a wet pasture with mushrooms, the simple style of his youth with
a profusion of antithetical embellishments, and his liberalism of
1834 was of a sort that made it seem necessary to him to falsify the
record of his earlier opinions. This fact has been established by two
critics, independently of one another, who took the pains to compare
the soi-disant youthful articles with the originals in the forgotten and
very rare Conservateur litter air e.'*'

Afterward, in 1875, Victor Hugo published a volume of Actes et
Paroles, purporting to be the record of his political life in the Cham-
ber of Peers, and in the two Assemblies, constituent and legislative.
This volume also fails in purpose, for the same reason as the two just
spoken of. It shows how much mendacity may go along with the

* Gustave Planche, in his Nouveaux Portraits litt&aire, Vol. I., and Ed. Eire in Victor
Hugo avant 1830.

VICTOR HUGO.

215

loftiest pretensions. Its authority as to what Victor Hugo really
did say or do in any given situation is absolutely null.

IV.

These last two works lead us to look more nearly at the character
of the man. The effort to judge the art of the poet by the light of
his life is very often misleading, and results generally in nothing
but a confusion of antitheses. Still, rightly viewed, the man is the
key to much that is in the work, just as, on the other hand, the
work, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, reveals much of its
maker. For example, the enormous, the unbounded, self-conceit
of Victor Hugo is evident in the most casual reading of his books.
He is continually comparing himself with the greatest names in
literature ; he gives you to understand that he is, in the world of
modern thought, what Napoleon was in the world of action. The
instances of this ludicrous self-appreciation, to be found in every
volume he ever wrote, are too numerous to be cited. He can
scarcely write a serenade to a young lady without intimating to her
that she is fortunate in being celebrated by such a poet.

Let us be candid and allow that here, at least, he might plead
the example of Ronsard, and that in 1830 poets in general were given
to thinking themselves of finer clay than the rest of mankind.
But in Victor Hugo the grace that should supplement this aristo-
cratic view is entirely wanting, and his sense of superiority is so
little disguised that it becomes an offence to humbler mortals. Worse
than that, it corrodes his own heart. In the Voix intirieureSy for in-
stance, he has a poem on the death of Charles X., where, after for
some time alternately celebrating the misfortunes of the king and
his own virtues, he quits his royal subject altogether in order to
preach in his own name the duties of poets and the office of poet-
ry. The same volume affords a yet stronger example, in the poem
on the death of his brother, Eugene, in which he suddenly turns
from the remembrance of their youth in common to the thought
of his own solitary greatness, and straightway, during several stanzas,
there is no longer question of his brother, but only a good deal of
sufficiently undisguised self-laudation. A tone of falsity is thus given
to the whole poem, as, indeed, to nearly all the poems commemorat-
ing lost friends, where there is plenty of talk about angels and flow-
ers, plenty of elaborately fine thoughts, but almost never a trace of
genuine feeling. Is it, then, too much to say that the defect we

2I6

VICTOR HUGO.

have noted in the dramas — the inability of the personage ever to
rise to a heat of passion such that they could not stop willingly to
shape an epigram or a pretty conceit — is the direct outcome of a
corresponding defect in the author’s own character ?

If there were any doubt in the matter there would still be the
record of the poet’s life to enlighten us. Biographers are not want-
ing, There are, first, the particulars of his youth, communicated by
Victor Hugo to Sainte Beuve, and published finally in the Portraits
Contemporains ; then there is Victor Hugo raconte par un T^moin de
sa Vie., from his infancy to 1841, nominally by his wife, but included in
the Edition d^fi.7iitive oi the poet’s works. After these come Asseline’s
Victor Hugo ititime, Challamel’s Souvenirs d'un Hugoldtre, and Bar-
bou’s Victor Hugo, Histoire co^npVete, and Victor Hugo et son Te^nps.
But all these, more or less directly inspired by the poet himself, have
quite as much need of being controlled as the Littdrature et Philoso-
phie. Various means exist of sifting the true from the false; curi-
ous things may be learned by comparing Victor Hugo with himself.
For instance, in 1875, in the introduction to Actes et Paroles, he
recounts that he and his brothers had for their tutor an aged priest,
“ still trembling from ’93,” who taught them much Latin, a little
Greek, and no history. He was called the Abb^ de la Riviere.
Then follows an attack on clerical education, which was to be ex-
pected from Victor Hugo, with the principles he then professed.
Note, however, the private instruction and the noble particle to the
abb6’s name. We may find further on something to illustrate that.
In Victor Hugo raconti we are told that there was a little day-school
in the Rue Saint- Jacques, kept by a worthy man and his wife, named
Larivi^re, chiefly for the sons of workmen. There Victor and his
brothers were sent. The man had, it is true, been a priest before
the revolution, and married to save his head ; at least, that is the
way the poet told it in 1841.

The curious book of M. Edmond Bir6, Victor Hugo avaiit 1830, is,
however, the document that is absolutely necessary for any one who
cares to get at the real biography of the chief of romanticism. Alas
for hero worship ! the glories of the official revelations come out badly
tarnished from M. Bird’s examination. We find there established
beyond a doubt that the vagaries of the poet’s imagination with
regard to himself were by no means confined to the statements in
the Actes et Paroles and Littlrature et Philosophie. As M. Bird’s
book may not be readily accessible, we may be pardoned for borrow-

VICTOR HUGO.

217

ing from it a few facts that may tend to justify what we have al-
ready said.

The care with which the poet invented and entertained a legend
about himself, always to his own aggrandizement, shows that he
added the talent of a Barnum to all his others. This had a curi-
ous effect against the background of the immensities, and the apos-
tleship of freedom and humanity. One wonders why the poet, in
his emancipation from prejudices, should have thought it necessary
to filch the genealogy of a very noble family of the name of Hugo,
to which he bore no relation whatever, at the cost of the suppres-
sion of the honest carpenter, his grandfather, and of various uncles
and aunts, equally honest, but of positions occasionally even more
humble ! We can understand why a man who intended to pose as a
republican should choose to forget that he had once been recipient
of a royal pension, but was it necessary to add mendacity to ingra-
titude, and accuse Louis XVIII. of misconceiving General Hugo’s
services to the extent of relieving him of command, when, in point
of fact — the memoirs of General Hugo are the witness — the king
did exactly the opposite, and confirmed him in the honors he had
won under Napoleon? We can understand that Victor Hugo
should suffer in vanity when a play he produced after Cromwell,
Amy Robsart, adapted from Scott’s romance, failed conspicuously,
but what can one think of the fact that for many years he allowed
Paris to believe that the luckless drama was written by his brother-
in-law, at that time a lad of eighteen ? The greater part of his
fables, like that of the enfant sublime, merely ministered to his own
vanity — though in this case Chateaubriand thought the use of his
name an unwarrantable liberty — but occasionally, as when, after the
death of the author, he asserted, more than once, that M. de Neuf-
chateau’s* preface to Gil Bias was written by himself at the age of
sixteen, he reveals a moral obliquity that may throw light on some
of the eccentricities of his drama. It is of lesser account that he
antedated many of his earlier pieces in their later editions, in order
that his political opinions of those days might seem of less conse-
quence to his liberal friends and followers ; but the fact that he
entered into an agreement with his publishers, with regard to one,
at least, of his books, for the manufacture of several editions out
of one, by change in titles, or that after 1840 he published the Ori-
entales with two prefaces, one dated January, 1829, preface to the

* Fran9ois de Neufchateau was the creator of the Museum of the Louvre.

2I8

VICTOR HUGO.

first edition, and the other, preface to the fourteenth edition, Febru-
ary of the same year (when, in fact, in March, 1830, the book was
really at its sixth edition!), that, again, is unpleasant.

Nearly all these unjustifiable deeds, even to most of his meanest
actions, had this in common, that they were done in the interest
of a boundless self-conceit and egotism. His self-worship ordina-
rily injured him rather than others. As a liar he was modest com-
pared with Voltaire ; as a charlatan he was not, like Rousseau, des-
picable ; but his shortcomings were, if we are not much mistaken,
more prejudicial to the quality of his work than were theirs. As a
general fact, a poet may be guilty of a great degree of moral ob-
liquity, or of courses seriously evil, without detriment to the exercise
of his genius. There are failings and failings, however, and among
them all there is one, precisely that of self-worship, which seems to
us sure to injure the perfection, to take off the bloom, as it were, of
any pretension of universal tenderness and sympathy. Where the
fault is less exaggerated than in Victor Hugo, who often cannot
finish even a lyric of love without stopping to make a genuflexion
before his own image, it imparts a false ring to harmonies otherwise
pleasing, but in this case, where it is undeniable, flagrant, and flaunt-
ing, the most sonorous words, the finest sentiments, may be heaped
together in thousands of well-turned verses, and the impression left,
after all, will be one of emptiness. That is the reason why the dust
is left to gather even on the volumes containing his finest poems.
Critics find it easier to allow that Victor Hugo was the greatest arti-
ficer in rhymes and metres, the greatest rhetorician in verse of this
century, than to read him.

There is, however, another cause for the neglect in which the
works of Victor Hugo are left — a cause with which he cannot be
reproached, and which attaches equally to the school to which he
belonged. In opening these volumes we find that their erudition,
their ideals, their reasoning, are no longer ours. Matthew Arnold
somewhere said of Byron that his fault, and that of his time, was
that he did not know enough ; meaning, we suppose, that his informa-
tion, with regard to subjects on which he wrote, was not sufficient to
make his representation of them of lasting value. This would be true,
to a yet greater extent, of Victor Hugo. In his Orientales, his pic-
tures of any past time, or foreign people — due account being made of
the poet’s aims — we must reproach him with not knowing enough,
and not knowing rightly. It is true, he is forever laying claim to the
most rigorous historical accuracy. The description of the decadence

VICTOR HUGO.

219

of Rome {Lcgcnde dcs Steeles) contains not a detail that may not be
verified ; the expenses of the queen’s establishment, cited in Ruj Bias,
to the uttermost figure, are, equally with the armorial bearings, of scru-
pulous exactitude. You see how far his conscience reaches ; its pains
are given entirely to the bric-a-brac of his pieces; if the costumes be
copies, the figures that stalk about in them are absolutely fantastic.

A word, by the way, as to this accuracy. In his travels on the
Rhine, the poet gives a formidable list of ruined castles, with the
dates of their foundation and the names of their builders — a proof
at once of erudition and of memory, as he boasts, in his preface, that
his notes are given just as they were written at the close of the day’s
tramp, in the village inns, without the aid of books. Let the boast
pass. There is scarcely a castle in the list about which he has not
made some blunder. For any one who cares to examine further, in-
stances of similar looseness of statement abound. For us they serve
simply to demonstrate that the lyric poet had not the faintest idea
of what is justly required of the historian. This sort of superficial
erudition, busying itself solely with picturesque details, and leaving
the men and women of history to be revived according to the whim
of the poet’s imagination, results in nothing but sham Mussulmans,
sham knights-errant, a sham Lucrezia, a sham Mary Tudor, and so
on — creatures that our generation cannot help regarding with more
curiosity than respect. The entire romantic machinery, mediaeval, re-
naissance, Oriental, or Spanish, as it was used fifty years ago, appears
to us as antiquated as the Castle of Otranto. Its most considerable
outgrowth, the Gothic revival, in the light of which the monuments
of the Middle Ages were not only preserved but restored, has passed
away, and we look at its work — well, not with entire approval.

In short, the great intellectual movement which gave the roman-
tic school to the world has done what it could, and must make way
for something else. We scarcely credit M. Zola when he exalts him-
self as the representative of the literary life of the future, but we
agree with him that romanticism is dead, and that it had in it from
the beginning the seeds of premature decay. It was, as we have
said before, essentially a period of transition ; it had the force to
change, but not to produce the finished type. It was like those mag-
nificent churches of the twelfth century, at the moment when the
Abb6 Suger was accomplishing his revolution at Saint-Denis ; fine
as they are, they are weighted by the traditions of the style they left
behind them, and they reveal but imperfect notions of anything
which could take its place. JOHN Safford FiSKE.

GEORGE MEREDITH.

At the foot of Box Hill, in one of the lovely valleys of the Sur-
rey downs, a cottage stands, half hidden by encircling trees. A little
space of flowers spreads before it, an old yew hedge screens the
garden from curious passing eyes. Within, for the privileged who
pass the gate, an apple-bordered walk leads up the slope to a terrace
underneath some hanging woods, where Mr. Meredith has built him-
self a study. Here, toward sunset, the fortunate may meet Mr. Mere-
dith himself coming down between the apple-trees. He is service-
ably shod, he usually carries a stout stick in his hand, the head —
iron-gray now — is held erect, the eyes kindle to light beneath
thoughtfully knit brows, the mouth, for those who know him, seems
ever ready to break into sonorous speech. He has come down pre-
pared to walk and talk. These walks and talks are among the great
enjoyments of his friends, and as round the neighborhood of Rydal
Water in an older generation, so round the neighborhood of Box
Hill now must hang many a lasting association of intellectual pleas-
ure.

It was my good-fortune to find myself in his company on the
turf back of Box Hill one brilliant, breezy morning. Our eyes tra-
velled over the valley where park woods, russet with the changing leaf,
clustered beneath the box and juniper of surrounding slopes, and
threw into vivid contrast the yews of Norbury, which are asserted to
have held their place for upward of two thousand years. West of the
valley the greens and range rolled skyward, bearing a tower solitary
upon its highest point. Southward, the Weald of Sussex rolled under
light October mists to Brighton downs, and legendary glimpses of
the sea. And while we mounted, with the horizon widening beneath
us, we spoke of the share the intellect has had in human develop-
ment. Our talk was of the nature of Socratic dialogue, slight and
tentative remark on one side serving only to mark the paragraphs
of full discourse upon the other. Mr. Meredith held the intellect to
be the chief endowment of man, and that in him which it is most
worth while to develop. By intellectual courage, he said, we make
progress. Intellect is the guide of the spiritual man. Feeling and

GEORGE MEREDITH.

221

conduct are to be thought of as subordinate to it. Intellect should
be our aim. It can be developed by training. The morbid and sen-
timental tendencies in the ordinary healthy individual can be cor-
rected by it. Starting wrongly, a man can be brought right by it.
The failure of many eminent men in old age is to be attributed to
the habit of looking at life sentimentally rather than intellectually.
Truth seeks truth ! And we find truth by the understanding. Let
the understanding be only fervid enough, and conduct will follow
naturally. When we consider what the earth is and what we are,
whither we tend, and why, we perceive that reason is, and must be,
the supreme guide of man. Perceive things intellectually. Keep
the mind open and supple. Then, as new circumstances arise, man
is fit to deal with them, and to discern right and wrong.

“ But Socrates ” — and I ventured here to quote Professor Clif-
ford’s “ Virtue is habit.”

“ Unquestionably that applies to the moral truths already con-
quered. Virtue is the habit of conforming our actions to truth, once
perceived. But in the life of every man and nation unforeseen cir-
cumstances arise, circumstances which are outside the ordinary, al-
ready decided laws. It is by the intellect, by the exercise of reason,
that we can alone rightly deal with these. The man whose intellect
is awake will conquer new domain in the moral world. It is our only
means of spiritual progress. Habits of conduct, though excellent,
are insufficient. They guide us in the beaten track ; when new mat-
ter presents itself they are evidently unable to deal with it.”

I wish I could recall the vivacity, the keen vigor, the wealth of
wit and illustration with which he sustained his theme. As we
walked along a stretch of turf on the summit of Box Hill, with the
southern landscape lying pearly beneath us, and a south-east wind
boisterously singing through the reddening woods upon the hill, he
seemed to raise our spirits to corresponding heights, rough, pure,
and keen, where footing was not easy, but invigorating, and every
breath was sharp and good to draw. We spoke of death. He said,
“ It should be disregarded. Live in the spirit. Project your mind
toward the minds of those whose presence you desire, and you will
then live with them in absence and in death. Training ourselves
to live in the universal, we rise above the individual.” The noonday
sun gained power on the plain, and church spires glistened between
village trees. Thought turned naturally also to books, and to the
public they address.

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GEORGE MEREDITH.

I have no thought of offering here a review of Mr. Meredith’s work.
But in connection with our talk the thought presented itself that
there might be interest in considering how far the perception of the
need for intellectual development, which furnished the text of the talk
upon Box Hill, has been also the text and inspiration of the philo-
sophy which we find in his books. His poetry appeals to a narrower
public than his prose. We will therefore speak only for the moment
of the latter. The Shaving of Shagpat, which was his first prose
work, appeared in 1855. Since then we have had in the following
order Farina, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Evan Harrington,
Emilia in England — now published again, under the title of Sandra
Belloni — Rhoda Fleming, Vittoria, Harry Richmond, Beauchamp' s
Career, and last, but by no means least esteemed by his admirers,
Diana of the Crossways. That is, in a space of thirty years, eleven
volumes of prose. These, though published now each in one volume,
vary in length as well as in other qualities, and we therefore fall into
the usual rough incorrectness of averages when we say that each may
have taken nearly three years to produce. But the general fact is
not incorrect, that they have been produced slowly, with much
thought on the writer’s part, and are to be accepted as the ripe fruit
of his mind. “ I have brooded over them,” he once said to me, “ and
the thoughts with which the best of them were written remain with
me vivid as at the moment of production. Such thoughts are the
keenest part of spiritual life. Narrative is nothing. It is the mere
vehicle of philosophy. The interest is in the idea which action
serves to illustrate. Without action’ the mind fails in grasping the
idea ; therefore, action becomes necessary, but the understanding
must be fixed upon what lies behind.” Let me say here that in
reproducing what Mr. Meredith has at various times said to me, I do
but reproduce the translation of his speech, as it has passed through
my mind. A verbal memory must be very accurate which will guar-
antee the exact phrases occurring in lengthened conversations, and
the alteration of a word or two may sometimes so change the mean-
ing which was in the speaker’s mind that I must guard Mr. Meredith
from being held responsible for a possible misconception on my part
or failure to render what has been received.

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Emilia, Vittoria, Beauchamp' s
Career, and Diana of the Crossways are the books of which the
author seems most willingly to speak. He expels Farina from the
new edition, and though there is fine tragic work in Rhoda Fleming

GEORGE MEREDITH.

223

and comedy in the Egoist, though some of his admirers esteem
Harry Richmond as a triumph of romantic adventure, and Evan
Harringto7i is perhaps the book which a reader new to Mr.
Meredith’s work would do well to begin with, the five first-mentioned
are assuredly those which illustrate most completely the richness,
the vigor, and originality of the mind in which they were conceived.
It can surprise no attentive reader to learn that the thoughts which
accompanied their creation are still vivid as in the day that the
books were written. Notwithstanding the length of time which has
elapsed between the first and the last of these human studies the
continuity of intention in them is no less remarkable than the
variety of subject. From Richard Fever el to Diana, the progress
has been steadily in one direction. As toward a star shining above
earth’s common lights, Mr. Meredith has kept his face set toward
the development of man’s understanding. In his philosophy brain
stands on one side and sensation on the other. “ Their sense is with
their senses all mixed in,” he says of women in one of his earlier
poems :

" Destroyed by subtleties these women are.

More brain, oh Lord ! more brain ; or we shall mar

Utterly this fair garden we might win. ”

In the moral world there is no such thing as fact, there is only
proportion, and the maintenance of balance demands vitality. No
dead hand can hold the scales. For this reason, as creeds stiffen into
forms, they must become after a time insufficient, and in an age which
may, both by its fruition and decay, be fitly called the autumn of
many creeds, the development of the understanding has become
urgent. We all recognize this in a general way, but we have each a
secret court where, under the ranks of vanity, prejudice, and custom,
invisible flatterers hover round us, and when a perception of truth
orders general execution among those, we are apt, like Nelson, to put
a blind eye to the telescope. Mr. Meredith has affixed to this pro-
cess the name of sentimentalism. “ A happy pastime,” he describes
it, “ and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless,
but a damning one to those that have anything to forfeit.” He
wages war against it in many forms. The words quoted are from
Richard Feverel, and the sentimentalist in that book fares badly.
By the time Emilia in Engla?id was written sentimentalism had dra-
matized itself still further, and the story is almost a study of simple
fervor on the one side and the ‘‘ Nice Feelings and Fine Shades ” upon

224

GEORGE MEREDITH.

the Other. It is here the ordinary feminine development which is
lashed in the persons of the Miss Poles and their elect. In Rhoda
Fleming we have the two young men, Algernon and Edward Blan-
cove. . Algernon, the mere creature of sensation, is described in one
of his phases by this sentence :

“ Adolescents who have the taste for running into excesses enjoy the breath of
change as another form of excitement ; change is a sort of debauch to them.
They will delight infinitely in a simple country round of existence — in propriety
and church-going — in the sensation of feeling innocent. There is little that does
not enrapture them if you tie them down to nothing and let them try all.”

Edward was “ in reality the perilous companion.”

“ He had a fatally serious spirit, and one of some strength. What he gave
himself up to he could believe to be correct in the teeth of an opposing world
until he tired of it, when he sided as heartily with the world against his quondam
self.”

These two act as the Uncle Hippias and the Adrian Harley of
Richard Feverel might have acted in similar circumstances, though
the final repentance of Edward Blancove makes it perhaps hardly
fair to bracket him with the “Wise Youth.” The sentimentalist
dashed with the cynic appears again in the Cecil Baskelett of
Beauchamp' s Career, in the person of the Egoist himself, and in
the frigid Dacier of Diana. His last, perhaps his best, appearance
in the sensuous form is the Sir Lukin Dunsterne of the latter book,
who, with the serenest absence of conscience, was ever ready to
believe that “there was something not entirely right going on.”
The individuals, indeed, do not resemble each other, but the same
enemy is exposed and attacked in their persons. Feminine fol-
lowers of the Miss Poles are to be found among the minor charac-
ters of every story. The figure of Mr. Richmond Roy, in Harry
Richmond, stands alone for a colossal representation of sentimen-
talism which takes the astounded reader so by storm that, after
ranging over every note in the scale from farce to pathos, after
suffering dim misgivings that the heroic hero is being missed, after
inclining to love the attractive good-for-nothing, and to bow be-
fore the opening of a genius always in the bud, it is still impossi-
ble to recall the bronze statue of Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth
figuring on horseback on the Bella Vista, without an inclination
both to tears and laughter. It is a wonderful creation, in which
there is so much of statue and so much of man that, when the end
comes with a simple “ I am broken,” we scarcely know if it is man

GEORGE MEREDITH.

225

or the image of him that has disappeared. He is literally and figura-
tively shattered, the whole deception falls to pieces under our eyes,
yet when we examine the fragments, we admit, “ It is of this ma-
terial that we are made.” There is not one book of Mr. Meredith’s
in which sentimentalism goes free. The class described in Richard
Feverel as “ seeking to enjoy without incurring the immense debtor-
ship for the thing done,” is the same that Diana despises for
“ fiddling harmonics on the sensual string.” Epigrams might be
culled in dozens from his pages as specimens of the shafts he draws
against this common tendency, but they are only as straws upon the
wind, serving to show a general direction. There is, as he says in
description of his latest heroine, a broad thought significant of an
attitude of mind opposed to the sentimental. This attitude of mind
is his. The problems of life present themselves to him as problems
to be solved intellectually, and the reader who would follow him at
all must follow him with the intellect. No one can read a volume
of his without very considerable exercise of brain.

The natural result has been to lay him open to two charges. It
has been said, on the one hand, that he is a cynic ; on the other, that
he writes over the heads of the public, and is unreadable. With re-
gard to the first accusation, it is the lot of every one who wars against
sentimentalism, especially where the strokes are delivered with the
Homeric vigor of Mr. Meredith’s; but it is altogether unfounded.
He says of himself : “ I never despair of humanity. I am an ardent
lover of nature. It is therefore impossible that I should be a cynic.”
The business of the novelist who aims at truth is to illustrate the
variability of the human species. He must take men and women as
they are, not by any means all commonplace, but with human liabil-
ity to error, which heroism does not necessarily eradicate. The best
men are still imperfect. To recognize this is not cynicism, while we
perceive that the imperfect may also be the best. Take The Ordeal
of Richard Feverel, and consider what it is that the author satirizes
in it. Assuredly not nature nor humanity, but the attempt to keep
a growing creature in bonds when the time has come for him to walk
alone. The “ system ” of Sir Austin Feverel is typical of all systems,
profoundly pondered, instinct with the spiritual life of its author,
full of wise and elevated maxims, excellent, necessary even, perhaps,
in moral childhood, but ruinous when forced upon the vigorous
adult mind. In the struggle between Richard and the system one
had to be destroyed. So it must ever be. Richard represents the
15

226

GEORGE MEREDITH.

young generation fighting with what is dead in the forms of those
that have gone before. The subject has a classic breadth. Think
of the spirit in which it is treated, the faith in the future which that
spirit implies, and the charge of cynicism is answered at once. The
cynic has no sympathy for processes of nature. He is described in
the person of Adrian Harley :

“To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character was the wise
youth’s problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the
society of those fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it
had been and was, a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of gods in the back-
ground. Why not laughter of mortals too ? Adrian had his laugh in his comfort-
able corner.”

Turn from this to the description of Austin Wentworth, in the
same book, or to Tom Bakewell in prison.

“ There lay Tom Hobnail. Tom ! A bacon-munching, reckless, beer-swilling
animal, and yet a man ! a dear, brave, human heart, notwithstanding, capable of
devotion and unselfishness.”

Or this glimpse of Sir Austin Feverel when, at the end of certain
boyish adventures which form the first act of the drama, Richard
has conquered the promptings of his lower nature and taken the
upright course. The boy has gone to do the painful right, the father
waits for him, and, while he waits,

“ The solemn gladness of his heart gave Nature a tongue. Through the deso-
lation flying overhead — the wailing of the Mother of Plenty across the bare, swept
land — he caught intelligible signs of the beneficent order of the universe from a
heart newly confirmed in its grasp of the principle of human goodness, as mani-
fested in the dear child who had just left him ; confirmed in its belief of the ulti-
mate victory of good within us, without which nature has neither music nor mean-
ing, and is rock, stone, tree, and nothing more,”

Instances will multiply in the mind of every reader. The “ two
poor, true women jigging on their wretched hearts to calm the child ”
in the midst of the final catastrophe, and the whole last chapter of
Richard Feverel., are among them. I dwell rather specially upon
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, but only because it happens to be
the first of 'this series of books, and what is found in it is to be fol-
lowed through the subsequent work of the author. There is never
anywhere a mockery of feeling. What Mr. Meredith thinks of
those who indulge themselves in such jeering is shown tolerably
plainly by his treatment of Cecil Barkelett, who was, he tells us,

" Gifted with the art, which is a fine and a precious one, of priceless value in so-
ciety, and not wanting a benediction upon it in our elegant literature, namely, the

GEORGE MEREDITH.

227

art of stripping his fellow-man, and so posturing him as to make every movement
of the comical wretch puppet-like, constrained, stiff, and foolish. He could pre-
sent you heroical actions in that fashion.”

It is not the author’s fashion, Emilia, Vittoria, Beauchamp' s Career,
attest his reverence for the heroic. Satire is mixed with all of them,
but it is satire of the affectations, not of the simplicities of feeling.
Satire of that kind is a wholesome salt, not always pleasant to the sen-
sitive palate, but opposite in every property to the poison of cynicism.
His presentation of woman is a subject which offers itself naturally
here, but it would lead too far for the limits of the present article.
The most striking feature of it is the frankness with which he takes
them on their merits. He surrounds them with no halo, he wraps
them in no mystery, but, approaching them as simply as he ap-
proaches man, he lays the strength and the weakness open before
us. The perceptive quality of the intellect is well marked here :

“ Alas for us,” he boldly complains, “ this, our awful baggage in the rear of
humanity, these women who have not moved on their own feet one step since the
primal mother taught them to suckle, are perpetually pulling us backward on the
march.”

The embryonic condition of their reasoning powers, the reliance
on the senses, which long process of evolution has made almost in-
stinctive to them, are facts which he very honestly calls on them to
recognize and remedy. He entirely refuses the doubtful form of
homage which consists in putting them on a plane other than that
of the understanding, but no living writer of English has done higher
honor to the qualities which they possess. The friendship of Emma
and Tony, in Diana of the Crossways, is one among many instances.
His gallery of heroines speak for themselves. Lucy, Emilia, Rose,
Jenny, Diana, Emma, imperfect every one, still send us seeking for
comparison to Shakspere. And Ren^e, graceful Ren6e, cannot, for
all her faultiness, be omitted.

“ She chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the gondoliers; she was like
a delicate cup of crystal, brimming with the beauty of the place, and making one
of them drink in all his impressions through her. Her features had the soft irreg-
ularities which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light ; mouth, eyes,
brows, nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly ; thought
flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night light-
ning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed : her age was but
newly seventeen, and she was French.”

Humanity is not passing as an ironic procession before eyes

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GEORGE MEREDITH.

which have rested comprehendingly on these bright figures. The
difficult task of their creator has been to show that feeling, however
sweet and good, is insufficient. If immeasurable love were perfect
wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate Providence to
another. Alas ! love, divine as it is, can do no more than lighten
the house it inhabits — must take its shape, sometimes intensify its
narrowness ; can spiritualize, but not expel, old life-long lodgers
above stairs and below.

The second charge, of writing over the heads of the public and
becoming obscure, cannot be so easily disposed of. “ It is a terrible
decree,” we are told in Diana of the Crossways, “ that all must act
who would prevail, and the more extended the audience the greater
the need for the mask and buskin.” Mr. Meredith permits himself,
perhaps too often, to forget this “ terrible decree.” He looks at life
intellectually, and assumes that the public will do the same to an
extent which no general public ever yet has done, or, in our concep
tion of it, will do. It may be that he forgets to act ; it may be that
he disdains ; it may be that nature is too strong for philosophy to
conquer. Whatever the reason, he writes as he talks, presupposing
intellectual equals who will run with him along the lines of thought.
And his style is so concentrated that he gives, at times, only the
shortest indications of the way. “ The art of the pen,” he some-
where says, “ (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, in-
stead of laboring with a drop-scene brush as if it were to the eye ;
because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description.
That is why the poets, who spring imagination with a word or two,
paint lasting pictures.” He trusts much to his reader, and counts
upon a light of inward vision which is not always present. The
great general public is neither intellectual nor imaginative in any
high degree, and it expects to have its thinking and its seeing done
for it. To sit down to a novel and find that the novelist has counted
the brains of the reader as one factor in the profit and enjoyment
to be drawn from the reading, is a shock which the majority resent
as a totally unfair displacement of common conditions. With this
majority Mr. Meredith has literally nothing to do. He can bid it
“ be wary of the disrelish of brain stuff.” He can assure it that mat-
ter “ that is not nourishing to brains can help to constitute nothing
but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish heaps ” ; that brain
stuff is not lean stuff, and that the brain stuff of fiction is internal
history, “ to suppose it dull the profoundest of errors.” The ma-

GEORGE MEREDITH.

229

jority very naturally does not listen. The work of the intellect is
too severe for it. Only the other day I heard of a butcher’s wife,
living not far from Mr. Meredith, who requires the circulating library
to furnish her with a three-volume novel daily, and confessed to her
doctor that, having nothing else to do, she lies on the sofa and reads
it. She is interesting, because typical of a class numerous in all civil-
ized communities, namely, the class which has conquered the material
and as yet scarcely perceives the spiritual problems offered for man’s
solution. What could such a consumer of fiction make of the fol-
lowing sentence ?

" And how may you know that you have reached to philosophy ? You touch her
skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of sentimental-
ism. You are one with her when — but I would not have you a thousand years
older. Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental route — that very winding
path which again and again brings you round to the point of original impetus,
where you have to be unwound for another whirl : your point of original impetus
being the grossly material, not at all the spiritual. ... A thousand years !
You may count full many a thousand by this route before you are one with divine
philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will reach and embrace her, give
you the savor of truth, the right use of the senses, reality’s infinite sweetness. To
such an end let us bend our aim to work, knowing that every form of labor, even
this flimsiest, as you esteem it, should minister to growth.”

The love of nature which breathes through his pages might be
made the subject of a separate article. Who, that has read of it,
ever forgets the meeting between Richard Feverel and Lucy Des-
borough, in the meadow above the weir, or the hour spent by Ren^e
and Nevil Beauchamp, side by side, under Adriatic dawn, or, for an-
other instance, the description of his own county of Surrey, and the
reviving effects of a natural life, which occur in Diana of the Cross-
ways ?

For the direction of his whole work, so far as it can be com-
prised in one sentence, I would like to take this quotation from the
last pages of his last work :

“ Who can really think and not think hopefully ? When we despair or dis-
color things it is our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their
drudge. I heard you whisper with your very breath in my ear ; ‘ There is nothing
the body suffers that the soul may not profit by.’ ”

Flora L. Shaw.

DON FINIMONDONE.

A CALABRIAN SKETCH.

The comare cleaned with her apron a place on the doorstep, so
that the signora, who came from so far away, could sit down without
soiling her dress. Then “With permission,” said she, and sat down
herself, to tell the story of Don Finimondone.

It is an ugly thing to keep Lent twelve months in the year ; but
when the olives are scarce, and the sheep, because of the drought
that burns up the pastures, are reduced so that they are a pity to
see, and the earth cracks between the blades of buckwheat, it is a bad
prospect for the next carnival. So they found it, when the winter
was over, and in the village they began to think of the coming carni-
val time. It was not a great city — anything but that — yet it was a
town like another, with a church and a priest and a mayor and a
piazzetta, and an honest people that were not heathen, and wanted
a little carnival in honor of their blessed faith.

At the inn, every evening, there gathered a group of massari,
massarotti, the greater and the less, to arrange the ways and means
for the celebration of the carnival. In the great cities, where they
waste money by the shovelful, they have not to spoil their brains
with thinking of every lira that is spent. The committee talked
like so many windmills ; and those of them who had been to the
cities had the best of it, for they could say what they had seen there.
But all could speak with reason of the hard times and the bad year,
and say that little could be done.

It might have been that nothing was done but for compare Vin-
cenzo, the son of an old massaro who was reputed rich for those
parts, for he had fields, and a house and a stable, and sheep and
poultry, and some cafisioi oil that came from the oliveto, where at noon
the trees made it almost as dark as it is at Ave Maria in autumn.
No one could say that they had ever seen him spend two tari at
once without making wry faces, as if they had pulled so many of his
teeth. There was only one thing of which he was prodigal, and that
was predictions of evil. He was never content ; he would say his
say about everything, and never finished talking ; he would dispute

DON FINIMONDONE.

231

about the shadow of a donkey. His family led a sorry life, and more
than once his wife wished herself dead.

Everything, according to him, was going to the bad. Did it rain,
there would be another flood for the sins of the world, and that with-
out the ark to put two beasts in. Did the sun shine, the grass was
burning up, and the geese would die with their mouths open for
thirst. If the olives were scarce, there would not be enough oil to
fry the good things of heaven ; and if it were a good year, he said
that it was a pity to see the branches loaded till they broke, and
olives so cheap that it was indeed ruin, it was.

From his habit of foretelling the ruin of everything, he had
gained the name of Don Finimondone ; and it is not certain that he
would not have had some satisfaction to see the world come to an
end, provided he could have the opportunity to say to the mayor
and people of the village, “ I always told you so ! ” And since the
sun shone and the rain fell in their accustomed measure, year after
year, Don Finimondone became more and more discontented with
the earth and the heavens. If he had been there when the world
was made, it would have been a different thing!

His son, Vincenzo, was of quite another stuff ; he was all his
mother, good soul, that sang when she worked, and listened when
her husband scolded, as if he were counting so many beads of the
rosary, and when he beat her she only said, “ Better the hand than
the stick.”

If Vincenzo had only had his father’s money to spend there
would have been a carnival worth seeing ! But Vincenzo was a
blacksmith, and, though he had a house and a forge, and four furrows
under the sun to sow beans and some handfuls of maize and buck-
wheat, he had no more than was needed to keep his wife and chil-
dren. Every year there was another baby ; and while the grand-
mother said, “ Another soul gained for Paradise,” the grandfather
grumbled, “ Another mouth to eat, and poverty enough for ten.”
But Vincenzo and Mariangela and the children throve and were
happy. Cola, the biggest boy, could already blow the bellows while
his father beat the hot iron ; the mother, with the baby on her back
and the little ones hanging to her skirts or running beside her, sowed
the field and pulled up the weeds that were choking the buckwheat ;
or, if it were winter, spun and wove the cloth to make the garments
of the family.

When the carnival was at hand Vincenzo had had greater ex-

232

DON FINIMONDONE.

penses than usual, for his mule had died when the days were short-
est, and the earth was frozen, so that it was hard to dig the hole to
bury the poor beast. Some weeks later Vincenzo had bought a new
mule, a fine bay ; and in honor of this animal had painted his cart a
bright blue, with Sant’ Antonio, that preached to the fishes, the
large, the middle-sized, and the small, upon one side ; and upon the
other were represented the souls in purgatory. There was not a
finer cart, one might wager, not even in Messina, where they make
such beautiful ones ; and when Vincenzo had given the last touch to
the red and yellow flames, it seemed that one might warm his hands
at them. And the parish priest, Don Giuseppe, was so pleased with
the appearance of the cart that he said, when the images of the
blessed saints in the church should need a new coat of paint, Vin-
cenzo should give it to them.

The first thing needful for a carnival procession is at least one
cart, for the masks to ride in, and Vincenzo offered his for that pur-
pose. They would also have had another cart, and have trimmed
it with green cloth and cotton-wool to represent the waves and the
foam of the sea, with three sirens to sit and sing in it, that were the
daughters of compare Mariano, the sacristan — handsome figures of
girls, with long, long hair — while the blue cart, with a mast and a
sail in it, should carry the little monk that stopped his ears with
cotton-wool and tied himself with his rope girdle to the mast, and,
blessed be the saints ! was deaf as a bell for all that the sirens sang
so loud, and so was saved. But Don Giuseppe, the priest, said that
it was not a monk, but, on the contrary, a pagan ; and that they
could not have the daughters of the sagrestano, and still less his cart,
that carried people to the campo santo, for sirens are only a profane
fable.

Finally it was decided to have only Vincenzo’s cart and the bay
mule ; and, because this would cost nothing or little, the committee
should wear false heads made of pumpkins, with holes for eyes and
mouth and nostrils, and they should ride in the blue cart between
the pious fishes and the souls of purgatory.

The day before the carnival was to begin there were great
doings at the forge. Vincenzo was shaping a new set of shoes for
the bay mule, and compare Carmenio, who was also of the committee
of the carnival, blew the bellows until the hot iron was red as
coral. The others of the committee sat in the doorway, over which
were nailed a horseshoe and two pieces of thin iron bent in the form

DON FINIMONDONE.

233

of a pair of horns, and between them, written with charcoal, were the
figures 8 and 9, so that if the witches should come — may they be far
from us! — they could not cross the threshold. Don Finimondone
came along the road, from the sheepfold, and stopped to look at the
bay mule, that was tied by the halter near the door of the forge.

“ Is not that a fine mule that your son bought at the fair ? ” said
compare Q,zxx(\e.x)\o. “ Look what legs; and he will draw double the
load of the other one.”

“ Say fora-fascino and benedica ! ” cried Vincenzo, for fear of the
evil eye.

But compare Carmenio did not hear him, as he walked up the
road with Don Finimondone, to whom he paid great court, because
he wished to marry the daughter Filomena, that had great black
eyes, and a mattress, and a box of linen that she had spun and woven
for herself, besides the little dowry that her father would give to her.

Whether it was the witches that put a hand in, despite the horse-
shoe over the door, or whether it was the unlucky praises spoken
by compare Carmenio, with one thought for the mule and ten for
Filomena, who can say? But the fact is, that when Vincenzo
stooped to lift up the hind foot of the mule to shoe him, the beast
put him in one of those kicks of which two would leave nothing for
the doctor to do, only for the priest. Vincenzo cried out that the
mule had broken his bones, and he fell to the ground like a fig-tree
under the axe. The men took him up gently and carried him home
on their arms, while little Cola ran on before to tell his mamma that
the bad mule had killed poor papa. Mariangela came to the door
with the great tears running down her face, that was white as a washed
rag. “ My man, they have killed my man ! ” she screamed.

Behind her came the mother, zia Agnese, with the corners of the
handkerchief on her head trembling as if she had the fever. Vin-
cenzo said that he was anything but dead — though not all the neigh-
bors believed that he spoke truly. Then they took him into the
house, laid him upon the bed, and sent for the doctor.

“ But even the doctors do not know everything ; and for all that
they write who knows what words on a scrap of paper, and the
apothecary reads it, and then puts a little of this and of that into a
phial that you pay for like the best wine, when the witches or the
evil eye come into the affair,” said Mariangela, “ there is more than
the signor dottore that is wanted.”

So she put a little water and salt in a dish, and dipped her finger

234

DON FINIMONDONE.

in it, and made three crosses on her husband’s forehead, and said
otto nove and benedica, to draw out the evil eye, as if it had been a
nail that was stuck into his foot ; and poor Vincenzo said he already
felt better.

“ For it was all my fault,” observed Mariangela ; “ stupid that I
am, I heedlessly swept the house last evening, so as to have every-
thing ready for the carnival, and forgot to lay the broom across the
doorway.”

Whoever sweeps at night steals the horse of a witch, for — as
every one knows — they ride on broomsticks, and those that lack the
broomstick have to walk, and are too late to dance the ridda, which
makes them angry.

Filomena, who had heard of the misfortune, came in from the
field ; and taking the new red tassels which she had made for the
mule, to keep him from the evil eye, she threw them out of the door
and said, “ May the devil cbme and take his own mule ! ”

Don Finimondone sat upon a bench by the hearth, with his
elbows resting on his knees, his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and
his chin between his palms.

“ I said that the bay mule would play some ugly trick,” he re-
peated.

The doctor came, and said that for three broken ribs one must
have patience ; and he wrote in his pocket-book so fast it was a
pleasure to see the words crawl like flies over the paper, and then he
tore out the page, and Cola ran with it to the apothecary.

And who would believe it ! it was not the pain of the broken
bones that most troubled Vincenzo, it was the thought of the carnival
that gnawed his mind and gave him no peace. He turned this way
and that, as if the bed were full of thorns, and although, as luck
willed it, a sheep had died the night before, so that his mother could
make him some broth, he would eat nothing, for all that she begged
him, “ My little heart, eat two spoonfuls, it will do you good.”

The thought of the blue cart and the pumpkin heads tormented
him ; he had it fixed in his mind, and he ground it over and over
like flour. Mariangela offered to put on, herself, the great cloak and
the pumpkin head, and go in his place in the cart, to pacify him ;
but he would not hear of it.

“ Oh, why should you go in the cart ? ” said he. “ It is of no use.
Moreover, there is witchcraft in the matter, and you would go to
break your neck, besides doing an unsuitable thing.”

DON FINIMONDONE.

. 235

Then Vincenzo would have wished that compare Carmenio should
go in the blue cart and take his place as leader of the carnival. But
Don Finimondone said that it should not be so; it was enough that
the mule had spoiled his son for the holidays, without ruining the
cart and breaking the bones of any other Christians, and neither mule
nor cart should go out of the stable the next day. Vincenzo could
not content himself, and Mariangela cried, and Filomena scolded,
and zia Agnese, poor old woman, did not know to which saint to
make her vows, for trouble of mind. And Don Finimondone went
into the stable, with ever so long a face and in the worst of humors ;
and he drew the cart into its place, and tied the mule by the halter
to the stall, and locked the stable door upon the inside, and passed
the night in the hayloft, “ With women and geese there is no
peace,” observed Don Finimondone.

At sunrise the next morning, which was the first day of the car-
nival, compare Carmenio betook himself to the house of Don Fini-
mondone to ask for news of his friend Vincenzo. Filomena came
down the door-yard with a stick in her hand, to drive the geese to
the pasture, that was little better than stubble.

“ Good-day, comare Filomena,” said Carmenio ; “you are up early
to help the sun to light the world.”

“ It is because I must take these little beasts to the pasture that
I am here to have the pleasure of seeing you, compare Carmenio,”
she replied.

“ If I were a great gentleman, comare Filomena,” went on Car-
menio, “ you should know nothing of geese but the feathers in cush-
ions. You should have a silk dress for every day in the week, and
a pair of gold ear-rings. Meanwhile, here is a handkerchief that I
bought for you at the fair.”

Filomena took the scarlet handkerchief and knotted it around
her neck. “ So many thanks, compare Carmenio,” said she ; “ it is
a consolation to have those who care for us.”

“ And if you have more than one who cares for you,” observed
compare Carmenio, “ it is true that I shall split his head as if it were
wood. If there is another that you prefer to me, say so quickly and
I will go away. If not, I love you from my soul, as I have said, and
as I will say before the priest.”

“ There is no one else ; no, compare Carmenio,” she answered,
“ and I have my box of linen, and a mattress, and some pennies of
dowry.”

236

DON FINIMONDONE.

The soft little rings of black hair curled around Filomena’s ears,
and her coral ear-rings were so red that compare Carmenio could not
contain himself ; he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and
kissed- Filomena under the ear. She became as red as the coral ear-
rings, and said :

“ We do wrong to think of such things when my brother is in so
bad a state.”

Carmenio also became very serious at once. “Tell me, how is
Vincenzo ? ” he asked.

“ Badly, badly,” replied Filomena. “ My sister-in-law says he did
not close his eyes all night. The thought of the carnival weighs on
his mind like so much lead. ‘ If it had been a little later,’ he com-
plains ; ‘ if that mule would have kept his feet to himself until after
the carnival, it would have made me a good penance for Lent.’
Poor thing, there he is kept in bed, and my father makes it worse
with his words.”

“ It has been said that in praising the mule, benedicaP said Car-
menio, “ I cast the evil eye on compareY mc^nzo. If I believed that
I could never forgive myself for my heedlessness.”

“And who says it?” asked Filomena, indignant. “Tell me
quickly, for I will scratch his face with my hands for speaking ill of
you ! ”

“ It was — saving respect — it was Don Finimondone.”

“ A-ah ! ” screamed Filomena, “ the spiteful old man ! He tells
stories too big for the mouth of an oven, and he leads my mamma
the life of a soul in purgatory. More than once I have been just
ready to put my hands on him, to see my poor, little, old woman cry.
And now he speaks ill of you!”

Here Filomena sat down upon the ground, threw her apron over
her head, and cried like a fountain.

“ See, comare Filomena,” said Carmenio, “ words are not stones.
If we love each other, when once we are married we can go to an-
other village, and Don Finimondone will no longer come into the
matter. I have a few lire laid by, to buy the roof and a little piece
of land, and there is the black donkey, with her colt, that, when he
is grown, will draw me a cart like a horse.”

“ That is well,” answered Filomena, “ but take care that my
father knows nothing of it. The trouble is, we never can say a little
word to each other, like honest people, for my father comes to dis-
turb us, and says that you come buzzing around me like a bee among

DON FINIMONDONE.

237

the buckwheat ; and that when the lover talks the spindle is silent ;
and that you are a simpleton and a good-for-nothing, and that I am
a silly thing to let myself be taken with such airs. And now you
must go, for I have to attend to my geese.”

“ Good-by for now,” said Carmenio ; “ shall you come into the
piazzetta ? "

“Yes,” she replied, “ I can come there, for my father has shut
himself into the stable, and says he will not come out until the fool-
ishness is at an end.”

And so the lovers parted ; she went about her business and he
about his, while the fresh March wind that blows at sunrise lifted
the dust of the road like a little cloud.

Carmenio went to the committee of the carnival and told them
how Vincenzo was, and that Don Finimondone had said that they
should not have the bay mule and the blue cart. Everybody said
his say about Don Finimondone, and there was not a dog that gave
him a good word.

“Without Vincenzo and the blue cart,” said one, “ we shall have
to do without the good and the best. But so it is, and we must
have patience.”

Then was heard a noise as of trotting hoofs that came nearer and
nearer, and soon there appeared the wicked mule, caparisoned with
red cloth, and upon his back there rode a horrid figure, like a man,
but with a disproportionate head, over which was wrapped a great
black cloak that left to be seen only the long nose of an ugly false-
face, and covered the whole body down as far as the knees. The
mule seemed uneasy, as if he carried an evil burden.

“ I am come to ride at the head of your procession,” said the
black man.

The committee were like stone, for fear.

“ I was called to come and take my mule, and here I am,” he pro-
ceeded, in a terrible voice, that seemed as if he had his head in an
empty wine-cask.

There was nothing to be done about it — the procession must
move. They went through the streets like so many monks, they
crossed themselves continually, and dared not speak for dread of the
black man, who might be, if not the devil himself, at least a witch,
for, as is well known, witches can take whatever shape they please.
The whole village was out to see the carnival procession pass ; the
infirm old people had crawled out like flies in the first warm sun-

238

DON FINIMONDONE.

shine of spring ; the women held their babies in their arms ; the chil-
dren stood and stared with their fingers in their mouths, or hid their
faces in their mammas’ skirts for fear of the masks, as they came
near. Don Giuseppe came out of the church, and waited to see the
procession.

Pom, po7n — that was the bass-drum, beaten by compare Carmenio,
who sat, with the others of the committee, in the cart of the sagres-
tano — for since there were to be no sirens, or other heathen, they
were permitted to have the horse and cart that were used to go upon
consecrated ground. And in front of them rode the black man upon
the bad mule.

Oh ! he had an evil tongue that never rested, and it struck every-
where. Whoever had stolen as much as a handful of beans heard of
it ; and whoever had quarrelled with his neighbor got a solemn rep-
rimand for it, as if he were before the judge. To poor old comare
Marta, who lived by plain sewing, and whose son was in the prison
for shooting a man, such things were said, because she had brought
up her boy to commit mortal sin, that the poor creature covered her
face with her hands, and ran into her house, all in tears. The black
man reproved the sagrestano for having stolen a little piece of candle
from the altar of the blessed Sant’ Antonio, who could very well do
without it, to light himself home, one stormy night when there was
not a ray of moonlight, and whoever went through the streets risked
his neck, it was so dark. The women ran here and there, like hens
when the fox is outside the coop, for the black man blamed this one
for a bad housewife, and that one for speaking ill of her neighbor,
and another for idleness — and there was not a living soul that dared
to contradict him. He was like a second conscience — he stuck his
nose in everywhere and had no pity.

Finally, he spoke to comare Filomena, who stood with a group of
young girls in a corner of the piazzetta.

“ Ah ! even the civetta comes to the snare at last, according to
the proverb ; and for all your pursed-up mouth, and your playing the
dead pussy-cat, it is known that you go to the threshing-floor to talk
in the evening with Carmenio the carpenter.”

Every one looked to see comare Filomena fall and faint away.
Anything but faint away ! She knew how to give him bread for his
cake, and answered him before all the people :

“ Thanks for so many compliments. I am used to such, and
worse, for when it is a question of evil speaking my papa can give

DON FINIMONDONE.

239

points to the devil. Go and take lessons of him if you want to
know how the thing is done.”

The black man had nothing to say. He struck his mule and
went off at a gallop, and those who had gotten out of it without
blame could laugh at the unlucky ones. Some persons said there
was a smell of sulphur in the air, and Don Giuseppe judged it pru-
dent to bless all the people together, to make it quite safe. There
was no more sport of any kind, and they all went home.

“ It will be at least a little consolation to Vincenzo,” observed Car-
menio, “ that if the festa had to end badly, he was not there to see it.”

That same evening he went to see his friend Vincenzo, to tell
him how things had gone. Zia Agnese opened the door for him.
“ We are unfortunate,” she said to him ; “ my husband would not
listen to reason, and this afternoon he came out of the stable, lead-
ing the bay mule by the halter, and then he sold him for twenty lire
less than my son paid for him fifteen days ago.”

“ That mule eats up money like grain,” added Don Finimondone,
from the corner of the hearth, where he sat upon a bench ; “ he has
made us lose twenty lire, to say nothing of the broken bones and the
doctor’s bill. A world of trouble, say I.”

“ It was a sorry sight, the procession,” said Carmenio, by way of
changing the subject. “ Every one was like stone for fear of the
witch, except my brave Filomena. Whoever got a reproof swallowed
it in holy peace; but Filomena was as shrewd as the devil himself,
and gave him an answer that was suited as cheese to macaroni.
‘Grazie tante,' says she ”

“ A-ah, the evil tongue that she has in her mouth,” interrupted
Don Finimondone, “to tell me, before all the people, that I am worse
than the devil ! ”

“You ! ” they exclaimed in chorus.

“I knew very well that it was my papa,” remarked Filomena;
“ witch or not, there were the very same patches on the knees of his
trousers that I sewed with my own hands last Sunday to make him
decent to go to hear mass. And if I have talked at the threshing-
floor with compare Carmenio, it is because I shall marry him in an-
other month, and in this house one cannot say two words in peace.
If you give me my cassa of linen and the mattress, I will go away
without one tari of dowry.”

“ And I will take her without anything in her hands,” said Car-

memo.

240

DON FINIMONDONE.

“ Have you no fear of her tongue ? ” asked Don Finimondone.
“ When you bring her back to me and say, ‘Take your daughter,
for there is no living with her,’ I will shut the door in her face, and
leave her in the middle of the road.”

“ He who has a log can have chips,” observed Vincenzo, from his
bed, “ and if my sister knows how to open her mouth upon occasion,
it is because she is the daughter of her father.”

“ As for me,” said zia Agnese, “ I don’t complain of my daughter
Filomena ; she is a good girl, and sweeps the house for me, and
kneads the bread and tends the poultry, and sews and spins with a
good will. And with a good man she will be a good wife.”

“ And I shall be a good man to her, I shall,” promised compare
Carmenio, and meant what he said.

“ When she has the cares of a house,” said comare Mariangela,
“ you will see that she will not talk so much. When hens have to
live by scratching they have no time to peck each other, and you
will find her good and gentle enough. And you can see, from Vin-
cenzo and me, how two that love each other can live on little and be
content.”

“ And I tell you plainly, once for all,” said Carmenio, “ that I shall
marry your daughter ; and if you forbid the marriage I will speak,
and let the whole town know that it was you who spoiled the festa,
so that it was like a penance — you, that made Lent of our carnival.”
And, therefore, rather than have the story told to all the people,
Don Finimondone consented that Filomena should marry compare
Carmenio, and even gave him the dowry, so many heads of the king,
counted into his hands.

“You will repent your marriage, compare Carmenio, you will re-
pent it,” prophesied Don Finimondone, “ but you will still have the
consolation of the money.”

* * * * * * *
“And were they happy together, Filomena and Carmenio?”
asked the signora.

“ Oh ! cara signora, who can tell ? They had their troubles, like
the rest of the world, but they never have ceased to love each other,
and they are content. There comes old Carmenio now, from his
work in the field.”

“ And how did you know so much about it ? ” pursued the signora.
“ Eh ! I was Filomena ! ”

E. Cavazza.

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

Saturday, the iitk. — Here we are, on board the Royal Mail Steam-
ship Barataria, gliding down the muddy Mersey on our way home
to America. The Barataria is perhaps the fastest boat afloat, and a
first favorite with the travelling public. So it is that we are five
hundred and thirty first-class passengers. All sorts and conditions
of men we are, homeward bound, nearly all of us. There may be a
scant dozen Britons on board and perhaps as many more Germans ;
and the rest — more than five hundred of us — are Americans.

We untied our steamer-chairs, wisely painted a visible green,
that they might be picked out with certainty from the hundreds of
others not distinguished by this academic color. Then we sat us
down to take stock of our fellow-passengers before we should run
into the jaws of the Irish Channel. There were not a few people
we knew. We saw a young couple from Chicago, bent on enjoying
the few final days of their wedding journey — he was boiling over
with energetic activity ; and she was as pretty as a bride should be,
with a pleasant, bird-like manner. We recognized a gentleman from
Philadelphia, the owner of an authenticated great-grandfather, of
whom he was not prouder than a man might well be. He was walk-
ing with a Scot Abroad, a North Briton who had tried life and made
a good living in almost every one of the British colonies on which
the sun never sets. Not far off we discovered a clever man from
Boston, the author of the satirical story. None of Your Busmess, who
was understood to have spent the summer in applying the finishing
touches to a brilliant international novel, Princes, Americans, and
Fools. We saw a perky little parson from Brooklyn, who — so our
friend Brown told us — had just been appointed Professor of Homeo-
pathic Theology in a New England fresh-water college. Then there
was our friend Brown himself, who knew everybody and whom
everybody knew, who took an interest in all things and who had al-
ways the latest news.

Before we had been in our chairs ten minutes, and just as the Ba-
rataria passed the Rock Light, our friend Brown spied us out and
came and stood before us. He had a cigarette in his mouth and his
hands in his pockets.

i6

242

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

“ Don’t you give thanks that you are quit of that miserable
apology for a town, called Liverpool?” he asked. “Once I heard a
man call it a semi-detached suburb of New York — but he was a Bos-
tonian, and jealous. New York isn’t very clean, I know, but it is not
the marvel of ugly dirt and of dirty ugliness that Liverpool is. Just
look at the sky now, it is as dingy as the river — and I can’t say
more than that. The highest proof possible of the beauty and
charm of England is that the wandering American is willing to
pass through this gateway of gloom to attain it. To my mind there
is nothing satisfactory about Liverpool — except the facilities for
leaving it ; and I confess I do not see how any one ever stays over-
night, who can borrow enough to pay his fare to London. Why, do
you know” — and here the voice of our friend Brown took on ac-
cents of unspeakable scorn and loathing — “ do you know that Liver-
pool has an obscure and probably obscene suburb called Bootle ?
Bootle! Just think of it! And how could a white man live in a
town where the horse-cars run past his door to Bootle? Liverpool
always strikes me as a sort of huge and oppressive practical joke that
the nineteenth century has played on mankind. And I am not in-
clined to forgive nature for wasting an earthquake on an inoffensive
city like Charleston when it could have been used over here to so
much better advantage in ridding the earth of Liverpool ! ”

Our friend Brown knows full well that we do not share his extra-
vagance ; and his delivery of this last appalling sentiment was at
once defiant and interrogative. We answered that we did not agree
with him at all, and that Liverpool was a monument to the enter-
prise of the Englishmen of the last hundred years.

“ It rs all very well for you to say that,” our friend Brown replied,
“ but I am the victim of a scurvy trick, and I hold Liverpool respon-
sible, and all its inhabitants. I find that I have a man in my state-
room with me, and he is little Mat Hitchcock. Now, you know
whether or not that is a cheerful prospect.”

We agreed that if we had to choose a companion for an ocean
voyage it would not be Mr. C. Mather Hitchcock.

“ He is a bore of the utmost perseverance,” returned our friend
Brown, with a recurrence of his heat, “ he is a conversational styptic.
If Erasmus were to-day to publish his Praise of Fools., Mat Hitch-
cock would be capable of writing to thank him for the compliment.”
Here our friend Brown seemed to have fallen again into extrava-
gance ; and we said so.

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

243

“ That is because you don’t know what he has been trying to
do,” said our friend Brown. “ He has started twice to tell me the
ancient and honorable tale of Captain Judkins and the fog on the
Banks. I headed him off by the bold assertion that I was in a hurry,
as I was going with one of the engineers to take a little walk through
the boilers.”

We expressed our doubt that even Mat Hitchcock should believe
that.

“ But he did,” our friend Brown answered. “ He is very credu-
lous indeed — he even beliewes in himself. I’m going to beg the chief
steward to give me a seat at table as far from his as possible.”

Just then a very pretty girl passed by, engaged in an earnest
discussion of comparative literature with the perky like parson. We
caught only a fragment of a single sentence — “but Jane Austen is
so minute.”

“ That girl was on the boat going over,” said our friend Brown ;
“ she’s from Baltimore, and all those terrapin girls are pretty. We
used to call her the pocket Venus, but now she has taken to talking
about Miss Austen, I think I shall call her Jane, for she too is ‘so
minute.’ You see how she has already carried the parson into camp.
Just let her give you one good glance, and she has you on a string
for the rest of the trip. And I think her mischievous mouth is
quite as fetching as her soulful eyes. She has a very taking way,
and she flirts gently, with an innocent manner most consummate
and masterly. I believe almost any pretty girl, who happens to be
clever also, is capable of filling the chair of Applied Histrionics in
a girl’s college — that is, if there were ever any need of such a course
of instruction.”

The rattling reverberations of a Cathayan gong notified us that
dinner was about to be served. When we took our seats at table,
we saw afar off, at the other end, the young lady whom our friend
Brown had called Jane Austen; and we saw also that our friend
Brown had a place exactly opposite to hers, and that Mat Hitch-
cock was removed from him by at least two tables.

Sunday, the \2lh. — Soon after breakfast we dropped anchor off
Queenstown, where the Barataria waited for the London mails. A
few passengers went ashore, either to attend church or to taste the real
old Irish whiskey on Irish soil. As we were not at sea, there was no
service on board. To lie at anchor is very relaxing to the morals,
and it was well-nigh impossible even to make believe that this was

244

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

Sunday morning. The New England conscience has been sharp-
ened by the east wind of Boston and by inherited dyspepsia, but it
was not sharp enough to cut the lethargy engendered by the sun-
shiny quiet of the Baratarid s decks, as the boat lay at anchor in
Queenstown harbor, and we were not surprised to see the clever man
from Boston lying back lazily in his steamer-chair, with a yellow-
covered novel in his hand, bearing a most naturalistic title. We ob-
served that ladies of the strictest bringing up, who would shrink
from the thought of entering a shop on Sunday, did not now dis-
dain to dicker with the aquatic pedlars, whose boat-loads of Irish
lace and Irish bog-oak ornaments encompassed the ship about.
These pedlars were mostly pleasant-faced Irishwomen, with tongues
as ready as an Irish tongue is expected to be.

So the morning glided away imperceptibly until the tender came
out to us again, with the six hundred and more sacks of the mails
and a dozen or two belated passengers. Among these passengers
was one whom we could not but remark. He was a young English-
man, tall and blond, with a full beard ; he was not yet thirty, and he
walked like one sure and proud of his youth and his strength and
himself. He was a handsome, manly fellow, and the only peculiarity
of manner we noted was a certain vague shyness, equally removed
from diffidence and from defiance — the two extremes into which a
shy man is liable to fall.

After luncheon, as the Barataria was gliding past the bleak coast
of the Green Isle, our friend Brown took one of our chairs.

“ Did you see a young Englishman,” he asked, “ who came on
board at Queenstown — a fine-looking fellow, and a gentleman every
inch of him ? Well, he had the seat next m.e at table, and we got
talking, of course. He is a university man — used to be Fellow of
Merton, at Oxford, you know — and he’s a barrister. But his interest
seems to be rather in politics than law. He’s a high-and-dry Tory
of the fine old crusted kind, and he has a deep admiration for the
conservatism of our Constitution. He is going over now to investi-
gate the workings of our institutions on the spot. And he seems to
know something of our institutions, though he is as ignorant as most
of them about our geography. He actually asked me what were the
great lakes of America, adding that, of course, he knew Wenham
Lake, but he couldn’t always remember the names of the others.
Yet I like him ; he’s genuine, he’s sterling, hall-marked, 925 fine.
He tells me that he is going straight to Salt Lake City, to look into

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

245

the Mormon Problem. I’m inclined to think that he has his mind
set on doing a book about us — like the rest of the bold Britons who
see the broad United States from the windows of the parlor car, as
they rush from Sandy Hook to the Golden Gate.”

Later in the day, shortly before dinner, as we were taking our
three-mile walk — twenty-seven times around the upper deck — we saw
the young Englishman sitting in a most elaborate life-saving steam-
er-chair, with beautiful leather cushions, and with a great variety of
devices for raising and regulating the foot-rests and the head-rests.

Our friend Brown nudged us as we passed, and said : “ Neat
thing in chairs, isn’t it ? And did you note his initials painted on
the back — ‘ H. R. H.’ I don’t know’ his name yet, but I feel that it
is my duty hereafter to call him His Royal Highness.”

Just then the pretty girl from Baltimore came out on deck from
the ladies’ cabin.

“ I’ll leave you to finish your constitutional alone,” said our friend
Brown, “ for I’ve promised to take Jane Austen for a walk before
dinner.”

Holiday, the i^th. — In general, the travelling Scotchman is good
company, but the Scot Abroad, who happened to have a seat oppo-
site to us at table, was an exception to this rule. He was a rumbling,
grumbling creature, a contemner of the United States, and a most
voracious eater. When we came down to luncheon a little late, we
found him in serried argument with the gentleman from Philadel-
phia, who had also a proper fondness for the good things of this life,
and who was speaking of Pennsylvania as a land flowing with milk
and honey.

“There’s no market like Philadelphia,” he was saying. “ Further
East they don’t know what a terrapin is, or a canvas-back, either.
You hear people talk about canvas-back in New York, who don’t
know a canvas-back from a red-head — not but what a red-head is
a good enough duck. And I like teal.”

“ Those ducks are the best things you have in the States, per-
haps,” said the Scot Abroad, “ but they’re not as good as the ducks
in China. I’ve eaten two at a time there.”

“ I can eat two canvas-backs,” returned the gentleman from
Philadelphia, “ and without a great appetite either. I’m not hun-
gry now — I’m only eating because I’ve nothing else to do.”

“ There’s nothing in the States equal to green turtle, as you get
it in the City,” the Scot Abroad remarked.

246 IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

“ You say that because you’ve never tasted terrapin in Philadel-
phia,” was the triumphant retort. “ And it must be done by a darkey
cook, too. A white man doesn’t know anything about terrapin ;
he hasn’t any right to touch it. But a darkey deals with Br’er Ter-
rapin gently, like an artist and a lover. Why, if I ever found a
white man who could really cook terrapin, I’d bet there were kinks
in his hair.”

The Scot Abroad changed his tack but not his tactics.

“ These American apples,” he said, “ that you are exporting from
the States now are poor stuff.”

“ Sometimes they are,” confessed the gentleman from Philadel-
phia ; “ there’s odds in them, I know. And there’s nothing worse
than a bad apple, just as there’s nothing better than a good apple.
By-the-bye, do you make your apple-pie as we do — with a pint of
sweet champagne ? ”

The Scot Abroad was cornered, but he met the difficulty boldly.

“ I never made an apple-pie,” he said, “ but I’ll cook a mutton
chop with you.”

“ Then I should have to broil you a steak,” replied the gentleman
from Philadelphia, with calm self-confidence.

“ Have you ever noticed,” whispered our friend Brown, who had
come down to lunch with us, “ how the Philadelphians seem to have
modified Wordsworth’s boast? They pride themselves on good liv-
ing and no thinking.”

It is needless to say that our friend Brown is a New Yorker.
We told him that he made a mistake in saying so many malicious
things.

“ But just think of the many more I don’t say,” he urged in ex-
tenuation.

“ Did you ever try cream with your buckwheat cakes ? ” asked the
gentleman from Philadelphia.

But before the Scot Abroad could gather his forces, our friend
Brown remarked, “ I can’t listen to any more of this — I must have
air. On board ship our gastronomic sins have a habit of rising up
and bearing witness against us. I had an au revoir breakfast this
morning ; and if I don’t get on deck in a minute I may be seized
again with nassau, as the old lady called it.”

As we mounted to the upper deck, our friend Brown asked, “ Have
you seen His Royal Highness this morning? I had a little chat with
him before breakfast — I warned him not to let that Hitchcock tell

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE. 247

him the tale of Judkins in the fog. I like H. R. H. — he’s genuine
and simple and manly.”

We paused opposite our chairs and invited our friend Brown to
sit down for a little chat.

“ I’m sorry,” he answered, “ but I can’t wait now. I’m bespoken.
I’ve promised to play shuffleboard with Jane Austen.”

Just then the young couple from Chicago passed before us, and
the lady whom our friend Brown called Jane Austen came up from
the lower deck and joined them. Before our friend Brown had
taken leave of us to unite himself to this little party, H. R. H. hap-
pened within hail of the Chicago bridegroom, who seized him at once
and took him up, nothing loath, to be presented to the Chicago
bride and to Jane Austen.

“ I’ll give His Royal Highness just five minutes to get ac-
quainted,” said our friend Brown, “and then I’ll sail in and claim my
game of shuffleboard.”

But before the five minutes were up, the little quartet at the
other end of the boat, the young couple from Chicago, Jane Austen,
and His Royal Highness, had gone down to the lower deck to play
shuffleboard, without a thought of our friend Brown.

“ She is a pretty girl,” said our friend Brown, “ but she has left
me out in the cold, hasn’t she? If I wasn’t a religious man, as the
deacon said, I could swear with the best of you.”

The run that day was just four hundred miles.

Tuesday, the \/^th. — There came up a sudden spurtle of rain,
early in the afternoon, which drove most of the Barataria' s passen-
gers in-doors. When we went into the music-room for a minute we
found the pretty American girl at the piano, singing “In the Gloam-
ing,” while the young Englishman was turning the leaves for her.
As we came out our friend Brown stopped us.

“His Royal Highness takes to it kindly, doesn’t he?” was his
greeting to us. “ I’m glad to see it. He’s a fine fellow, and it’s for-
tunate that he has fallen into the hands of a sample girl like Jane
Austen. You see, he is coming over to study our institutions, and
I like to see him at work on so favorable a specimen of the most
fascinating of them all — the American girl.”

The sentiments of our friend Brown were excellent, but there
was perhaps a shade of annoyance in his voice. We asked him how
he had been wasting his morning.

“ I’ve been talking to that Scotchman,” he answered; “trying to

248

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

trepan a merry jest into him ; but it was love’s labor lost. I told
him I went over on the Dalmatic, of the Blue Ball Line, you know,
and I praised the discipline of that boat, saying that whenever I
might go on deck I always found somebody on the lookout, if it
wasn’t one of the officers, it was an engineer or a steward or a cook.
And, would you believe it ? that North Briton took this seriously,
and told me he thought there must be some exaggeration, as he
could hardly think that they would put a cook on the bridge of any
one of these Atlantic liners. He’s quite impervious to a joke. If I
get to talking much with him I shall lose my specific levity. Isn’t
it curious that these Britishers don’t recognize mendacity as an ele-
mentary form of humor? ”

We expressed sympathy with our friend Brown.

“ There’s more back,” he went on. “ I changed the subject and
we began discussing sight-seeing. At last, when I happened to say
that the Paris Opera was a magnificent monument of the Second
Empire, that Scotchman floored me with an enthusiastic query as to
whether I had ever seen Holyrood. But I had my revenge on him.
I called up Mat Hitchcock and I introduced them, and I begged
Mat to tell that interesting anecdote of Captain Judkins, and then I
escaped with my life.”

We asked our friend Brown what he was going to do after dinner.

“I don’t know what to do,” he replied; “perhaps I can get a
chance to turn over Jane Austen’s music for her. Otherwise I don’t
know where to go. That’s the worst of life on board ship ; if it
rains, you can’t gather around the fire and swap stories. I couldn’t
stand a sailor’s life, not because of the hardships and dangers but
because of the deprivations. You see, a sailor at sea has no chance
to sit down before his hearth and enjoy the pleasant loquacity of a
hickory log. I set great store by an open fire. Now, a sailor is de-
prived of one of the highest of human pleasures — he can’t build
a fire, any more than he can play billiards or ride horseback ; he
has never a chance to acquire these accomplishments, poor fellow.
Even on shore I suppose he has to stand by and see the other man
poke the fire — and that’s an open confession of inferiority. I may,
perhaps, acknowledge that you can edit a newspaper better than I
can, or conduct a prayer-meeting better than I, but I will not con-
fess inferiority in the making of a wood-fire.”

We took occasion to say that we had noticed the lofty bearing of
a man making a fire.

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

249

“ It is true enough,” our friend Brown continued ; “ and no won-
der. Prometheus was proud, you know, and so have been all fire-
makers since his time. I have wondered sometimes if the first mur-
der— Cain and Abel quarrelled over a burnt offering, didn’t they ? —
did not arise out of a prolonged discussion of rival theories of build-
ing a wood-fire on the altar. But I hate to think that there should
be any stain on the purity of the crackling flame — even historically.
That’s what makes me so angry when I see a miserable set of cast-
iron logs, adorned with stray sprigs of asbestos mistletoe ! Did you
ever see anything more indecent than that shallow sham, blazing
with unsatisfying gas ? It is a mere immoral mockery of one of
nature’s greatest gifts, all very well on the stage, of course, where all
is imitation and suggestion only, but at home it is a soul-destroying
device of the devil, for it tends to kill the love of truth at what
should be its altar — the family hearth.”

We suggested that perhaps this was pushing the Parsee doctrine
a little too far.

“ No,” insisted our friend Brown, “ I’ll stand by what I have said,
and go to the stake for it, if need be. A cast-iron imitation of a
wood-fire is degrading, disgusting, indecorous. A hickory stick
across the andirons, hissing and blazing, is the first element of win-
ter hygiene and of youthful morals. Spare the log and you will
spoil the child. Are you aware that the return to the open fireplace
is coincident in our country with the recent remarkable revival of
public interest in political purity?”

We acknowledged that this curious coincidence had hitherto
evaded us.

“You see it now,” our friend Brown continued ; “ fire is the cen-
tre of the world and of life and of society. That’s why I am always
sorry for the sailor ; he cannot warm his hands by the cheery crackle
of the back-log. His case is almost as hard as that of the unfortu-
nate wretch who lives in a boarding-house and who has to huddle
over a register. It makes me sad to think of the thousands of homes
without hearths — where the little children at Christmas have to hang
their stockings over against a mere empty hole in the wall, with the
hope that Santa Claus will come down a flue. And the sailor is but
little better off.”

We remarked that there were fiery furnaces, seven times heated,
deep down in the bowels of the boat.

“Did you ever go down there? ’’asked our friend Brown.

250

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

“Well, I have done it, and it is not a pleasant recollection. I’d
just as lieve not know that there are more than a hundred poor
devils down under our feet now, almost naked, grimy with soot and
half choked with fine coal dust. Out of sight out of mind. But a
stoker has no sinecure. If it wasn’t a cheerful sight for me to see,
what must it be for him to live ? Did I ever tell you about Cable J.
Dexter, the great Chicago grain speculator? He was stranded in
’Frisco in 1870 without a cent between him and starvation, and he
shipped as stoker on a Pacific Mail Steamer. He made the round
trip and then he quit ; starvation was shorter and not surer. Only a
year ago, after he had engineered the big boom in winter wheat, he
told me that sometimes he waked up at midnight to feel at his side
for the coal-shovel — just as though all his wealth were a dream and
the hard labor a present reality.’’

Just then the clever man from Boston sauntered along by us,
and our friend Brown suggested that we four should settle down to
whist until such time as it might please the clerk of the weather to
turn off the rain.

The run that day was four hundred and twenty miles.

Wednesday, the i^tk. — The little skurry of wind on Tuesday had
raised a slight swell, and, with the increase in motion, there were
fewer people on deck in the morning.

“ I have to take great care of my internal equilibrium,’’ said our
friend Brown ; “ if I make the slightest error of judgment in my
conduct or my diet, then I suffer for it all the rest of the trip. I’ve
discovered a great remedy, and I tried it again last night successfully.
It’s to take a poached egg on toast after you have gone to bed, and
wash it down with a little hot Scotch whiskey. It’s sovran for sea-
sickness. Going over I gave it to a man who was feeling despe-
rately miserable, and who was doubly despondent because he couldn’t
take care of his wife and baby. Well, it cured him. I mixed it
pretty stiff and it did its work. But he told me the next morning
that, for nearly an hour after he took it, he thought he was a biga-
mist and the father of twins.”

We remarked that intemperance was doubly dangerous on ship-
board.

“Yes,” our friend Brown went on ; “ I suppose a sailor, when he
takes a drop too much, sees sea-serpents climbing in over the bow.
Did you ever hear about the girl down in Maine, who wrote her
lover a quadruple temperance letter ? ”

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

251

We expressed our ignorance of this anecdote.

“ ’Tisn’t much of a story,” said our friend Brown, “ but it shows
what queer things a girl will do sometimes. Well, down at Casco,
in Maine, there was a young fellow who had worked his way up
from before the mast until he was captain of a new ship, and part
owner, too. Then he asked his girl to marry him, and she took him.
The first cruise of the new ship was to be the young skipper’s last
voyage, for he’d had an offer of a partnership. After he’d been
gone about a week the girl got over the sorrow of parting, and began
to take stock of his character. He was good, healthy, kindly, intel-
ligent, long-headed, and keen-witted. She had every chance of hap-
piness with such a husband. So far as she could see, he hadn’t a
fault, nor even a failing which might ripen into a fault. It was true
that sometimes he went on a ‘ tear ’ when he came off a cruise. The
more she thought about this, the more she feared that this might
grow to be a habit, and land him in a drunkard’s grave. You see,
she got morbid about the one possible speck. At last, she sat down
and wrote him a letter, telling him just how she felt, and begging
him, by the love he bore her, not to touch another drop, and, above
all, not to go on a spree when he came off cruise. When she’d got
her letter written she felt better — merely writing it had relieved her
mind. But she didn’t know where to address it. It was too late to
reach her lover at Liverpool, which was the first port the new ship
was bound for, and it was quite uncertain where he would go next.
He had told her that his course depended entirely on freights, and
on the advices he should get in Liverpool, and that he might go
to Havre or to Bordeaux, or to Marseilles or to Genoa, he didn’t
know which. She solved the difficulty by making four copies of the
letter and sending one to each port. Now, it so happened that her
lover sailed from Liverpool for Havre, and from Havre to Bordeaux,
and from Bordeaux to Marseilles, and from Marseilles to Genoa ;
and he got all four copies of that letter. And, when he read the
fourth copy, he was just too mad to hold in, so he sat right down
and wrote her a short note, breaking off the engagement, and telling
her that a woman who hadn’t any more confidence in a man than
to treat him that way had better be released from the obligation of
marrying him.”

We inquired whether this lover’s quarrel had not been mended
when the sailor came home.

“ He wasn’t that kind of man at all,” answered our friend

252

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

Brown. “ If he was set, he was set. When he got back from the
cruise he didn’t go on a spree. I believe he never touched another
drop of liquor. But he never went to see the girl. He sold out his
share in the ship and accepted the partnership, and, in less than
two years, he married the senior partner’s daughter. About that
time an old aunt of his wife’s died, and left her the house next door
to the captain’s first girl ; and they set up housekeeping there, right
under that girl’s eyes, and she’s seen his family growing up around
him year by year, while she lived on, a little old maid, all alone by
herself. Women are kittle cattle, arn’t they?”

Then our friend Brown rose and shook himself. “ I think there’s
a good moral in that story for all girls,” he said, “ and I guess I’ll
go and tell it to Jane Austen.”

A pleasant laugh rang out as the young Englishman and the
American girl threaded their way through the double rows of
steamer-chairs on the shady side of the steamer.

Our friend Brown glanced up, and it was with a certain acidity
that he said, “ Fine teeth are a great incentive to gayety.”

He watched the young people as they walked away. “ His
Royal Highness seems to be taking notice,” he said; “I think I’ll
go into the smoking-room.”

The run that day was four hundred and fifty miles.

Thursday, the i6th. — Shortly after midnight we ran into a dense
bank of fog. As we were likely at any moment to meet detach-
ments of the fishing fleet, the Barataria' s engines were slowed down.
The harsh voice of the fog-horn was to be heard at frequent inter-
vals during the night, and it waked us before cock-crow in the morn-
ing. When we went on deck the air was thick and moist ; and
the dampness settled on the rigging and dripped gloomily on the
deck.

“ I think this drip, drip, drip of the fog is quite as demoralizing
as the fog-horn is disheartening,” said our friend Brown, as we joined
him on the lower deck, where we could find shelter from the moist-
ure of the mist. “ And the wild notes of the fog-horn have every
vice a sound can have.”

The young couple from Chicago came up to us, and the bride
seemed to be uneasy in her mind.

“ My wife sat up half the night, looking through the porthole for
fear something might happen,” said the bridegroom, jocularly.

“ I didn’t do anything of the sort,” she replied, indignantly.

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

253

“ But this fog is terrible, isn’t it? Do you think the captain knows
where he is ? ”

“ We’re within a mile of land now,” our friend Brown answered,
“ only we are not going that way,” and he pointed down.

The bride tried to smile at this feeble jest.

\

“ Don’t you harrow up your young soul with anticipatory disas-
ter,” our friend Brown continued, consolingly. “ It isn’t good for
people’s nerves on board ship to get talking about the wreck of the
Oregon or reading the Wreck of the Grosvenor. It’s much more
amusing to read the Wreck of the Thomas Hyke, which was alto-
gether more remarkable.”

” But if we should run into something?” she returned, despond-
ently.

“ ‘ It would be bad for the coo,’ as Stephenson said,” our friend
Brown rejoined. “ Our enlightened selfishness may rejoice that we
could run over any ordinary boat and scarcely feel it. So you need
not worry about the summer styles in life-preservers, and the most
fashionable ways of wearing them. You must remember that the
captain is the ship’s husband, and he can’t afford to lose the boat
unless he wants to be the ship’s widower.”

“ The captain has a good many lives to care for,” said the Chi-
cago bridegroom ; “ no other boat carries five hundred first-class
passengers.”

“But other boats carry fifteen hundred steerage, sometimes, be-
sides first-class passengers,” retorted our friend Brown. “ Really,
though we seem to be a great many, there are fewer souls on board
now than most big boats carry. I confess, I don’t like to cross on a
ship that takes steerage passengers ; in case of danger, they would
have the bad taste to think their lives as valuable as mine.”

The pretty American girl looked out of the door, not far from us,
and the Chicago bride called her. Our friend Brown volunteered to
bring down from the upper deck the chairs of the party. We
offered to assist him. When we came down with the chairs we
found that the handsome young Englishman had also joined the
gathering. While our friend Brown was tucking the rugs and wraps
about Jane Austen, as he called her. His Royal Highness went after
his steamer-chair also. Thus we formed a compact little group on
the lower deck, partly sheltered from the thick dampness of the fog
and from the enervating roar of the fog-horn.

For a while the conversation was general ; and when it flagged

254 /Z»Z^ J\rOT£S OF AJV UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

our friend Brown suggested “Twenty Questions,” offering to take His
Royal Highness on his side and explain the game to him if Jane
Austen would lend her aid. The young couple from Chicago had
become engaged the summer before at Narragansett Pier, and they
were practised in the art. Although we should have preferred to
stand afar off and take no part in the quarrel, the young couple
from Chicago enlisted us on their side. Thp perky little parson
joined us, and Mat Hitchcock thrust himself among our opponents.
And the rest of the afternoon glided away in acrimonious discussion.

Our run that day was only three hundred and ninety miles. But
toward evening the fog was blown away by a fresh breeze.

Friday, the lyth. — There was a cloudless sunrise this morning, as
glorious a sight as a man may see. But when we reproached our
friend Brown for having missed it, he was quick to explain.

“ I hope I’m too good a Christian,” he said, “ to have part or lot
in the Parsee ceremony of getting up to see the sun rise. Besides, I
was suffering from a singularly acute attack of marine inertia, per-
haps a reaction from the mental activity of yesterday’s ‘Twenty
Questions.’ Don’t you fall into a condition of sloth sometimes at
sea, when you don’t want anything but just to be let alone? ”

We acknowledged that this phase of feeling was easy to under-
stand.

“ I have been moved to liken a long day at sea to a tirade in a
French tragedy, when the watery Alexandrines roll over you in most
exasperating monotony,” he proceeded. “There’s a great deal of
tautology about the ocean ; it’s always saying ditto to itself. You
tire of seeing the waves follow each other, almost as though they
were drilled in platoons, with now and then a top-lofty one riding
ahead proudly like an ensign.”

We quoted the jest about Britannia ruling the waves and not
ruling them straight.

“You tell that imported joke to His Royal Highness and he’ll
laugh at it,” said our friend Brown. “When I can catch Jane
Austen alone I’ll quote to her the French saying that ‘Women are
like the waves of the ocean — always the same and yet never alike.’ ”

We remarked that she was probably preparing for the concert
which was to take place that night.

“Yes,” he replied, “ His Royal Highness and Jane Austen are to
sing a duet. The perky little parson is getting up the show. I
think it would be a good scheme to have a theatre on board ship.

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

255

regularly fitted up. You may remember that Noah, the founder of
the P. and O. line, when he went to sea, took his menagerie with
him. I think that must have relieved the monotony of the voyage
not a little. A really enterprising steamship company nowadays
would make proper arrangements so that its boats on every voyage
would receive a hail from the Flying Dutchman and get a glimpse
of the sea-serpent rearing its horrid head.”

Although there was not a theatre on board the Barataria, there
was a printing-press for the purpose of preparing the daily bills-of-
fare, and capable of printing also the bill-of-the-play of the Grand
Entertainment and Concert which was given that evening in the
main saloon. The programme of the Grand Entertainment and Con-
cert was divided into two parts ; in the first part the Scot Abroad
sang“ Auld Lang Syne,” the Chicago bridegroom recited “ Buck Fan-
shaw’s Funeral,” the Chicago bride sang “ In the Gloaming,” the perky
little parson read “ The Raven,” the handsome young Englishman
sang “ The Vagabond,” and the pretty American girl sang “ Let me
Dream Again.” The final number of the first part, so the pro-
gramme informed us, was the singing of “The Star Spangled Ban-
ner,” “by the 530 Barataria chorus.” This began well enough, but
as barely a dozen of the five hundred and thirty knew the words
of the American anthem, it “ rather petered out toward the end,”
as our friend Brown put it.

Our friend Brown had no part or lot in the Grand Entertainment
and Concert. He sat in the music-room and made sarcastic remarks.
The chief numbers of the second part were what the programme
declared to be a “ Banjo Solo, by Messrs. Knox and Decker,” and a
duet by Jane Austen and His Royal Highness. As the music of
this duet was as emotional as the words were warm, our friend
Brown got up and went out on deck for a walk in the dark. Thus
he missed the final item on the play-bill, the singing of “God Save
the Queen,” “by the 530 Barataria chorus,” a failure even more la-
mentable than that of “ The Star Spangled Banner,” and for the
same reason.

Between the two parts the plate had been passed around, and
nearly seventy-five pounds had been collected, to be divided be-
tween the Sailors’ Orphan Asylum at Liverpool and a hospital in
New York.

Our run that day was four hundred and sixty-five miles.

Saturday, the \%th, — This was to be the last day of our voyage.

256

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

Shortly after noon it was announced that the run was four hundred
and sixty-two miles, and that we were then a little less than two hun-
dred miles from Sandy Hook. A certain half-suppressed excitement
began to be perceptible among the passengers, and it increased as
the hours passed, and we drew nearer and nearer to our native land.

Four steamer-chairs had been taken right up into the bow, and
here the young couple from Chicago, Jane Austen, and His Royal
Highness had sat all the afternoon. Our friend Brown had joined
the group twice or thrice. He had been made welcome, yet he was
uneasy and soon wandered away again. The three Americans were
engaged in telling the young Englishman all about America, the
United States in general, and the cities of Chicago and Baltimore in
particular. Probably our friend Brown, as a New Yorker, had no
need for the information, which the young Englishman accepted
with pleasure.

He joined us as we stood under the bridge, after dinner, just as
the Baraiaria, to the great joy of its five hundred and thirty pas-
sengers, was rapidly gliding ahead of a steamer of an opposition line
which had left Queenstown two days before us.

“What is the use of all this excitement about seeing land?” he
asked. “ I’ve seen the sacred soil of Long Island before now — in
fact, I was born there.”

We told him that most of the passengers were probably rejoic-
ing at the swiftness of our homeward voyage — almost the quickest
on record.

“ The Barataria is really fast,” he returned, “ but few people
have discovered a little trick of the steamship companies to re-
duce the apparent length of the voyage. Once the time was taken
from Liverpool to New York; then, it was counted from Queenstown
to Sandy Plook ; and now they are beginning to reckon it from
Fastnet to Fire Island. By this fictitious shortening they can save
a day seemingly, even if the boats were no faster.”

We remarked that the voyage was now so short that the old so-
ciability among the passengers was dying out. The gentleman from
Philadelphia had told us Captain Kitchener complained that it
was no longer worth while to get acquainted with his passengers, and
that he had given up all attempt at friendly overtures ever since a
passenger, to whom he had been explaining things, had offered him
a shilling.

“ That passenger must have been on his return trip,” said our

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

257

friend Brown ; “ after a fellow has spent six weeks in England, he
stands ready to tip an archbishop half-a-crown.”

While we were talking the clouds had blown away from the moon,
and the soft rays bathed in silver splendor the watery pathway of
the boat. Snatches of song came fitfully from two or three little
groups gathered in pleasant corners. We saw that the young couple
from Chicago were half concealed behind a boat, and that he had
his arm around her and that she had laid her head on his shoulder.

We drew Brown’s attention to the young moon, shedding its
silent sympathy over the lovers.

“ It’s the same old moon, you know,” he retorted, “the same old
moon, gut en a vu Men d'autres”

Our friend was not given to quoting French, and this seemed
to us to be the outward and audible sign of an inward and spiritual
dissatisfaction. His pace, as we walked the deck, was violent and
irregular. At last he stopped abruptly.

“ Ah,” he said, “ there’s His Royal Highness making the most
of his last evening with Jane Austen. Perhaps he’s wondering if he
is going to find in Salt Lake City any girls as agreeable as she is.”

We remarked that she was a good type of the pretty American
girl.

“ All cats are gray at night,” he replied, sharply, “ and every girl
is pretty by moonlight.”

A few minutes after it struck four bells. Then the Barataria
was abreast of Fire Island Light, and the firework signals were let
off, which made known our presence to the men ashore, who were
searching the horizon for incoming steamers. Long before we
reached Sandy Hook the news of our arrival in America had been
flashed under the ocean to London and Paris.

Sunday., the igth. — When we waked in the morning, before day-
break, the Barataria was at anchor in the lower bay, off Quarantine,
We went on deck and saw the electric lights twinkling in the dawn
along the Brooklyn Bridge, which makes Siamese Twins of the two
great cities on the East River.

By the time the health officer had given the Barataria a clean
bill, the deck had begun to fill up ; and, as the boat started, at least
half the passengers were gazing at the green shores of their native
land.

As we passed Bedloe’s Island our friend Brown gazed up at M.

Bartholdi’s colossal figure, and smiled as he said : “ There she
17

258

IDLE NOTES OF AN UNEVENTFUL VOYAGE.

stands, you see, holding the torch of liberty now, after having so
long extended the palm of charity.”

We noted that something had given a tinge of acerbity to our
friend Brown’s remarks, and that his humor was more saturnine.

“ You will observe,” he continued, “ that I have emerged from
my stateroom this morning crowned with the high hat of civilization,
although it looks as rough as the buffalo-robe of barbarism. Ob-
serve, also, our fellow-passengers of the female persuasion. There’s
a modern Jewish adage, I believe, that a man should clothe himself
beneath his ability, his children according to his ability, and his wife
above his ability. Judging from the clothing of the wives on this
boat the past week, one would think ill of the ability of the men on
board. But just look at the women now. It is only at sea that a
woman doesn’t care how she looks, and as soon as she gets in sight
of land she makes up for lost time. I’d give a picayune to see the
face of His Royal Highness when he gets his first glimpse of Jane
Austen this morning.”

But this pleasure was denied him, as the young Englishman had
met the American girl before we caught sight of either of them. She
had donned a most becoming dress of a most coquettish simplicity.
As they passed us she was apparently expressing to him her resolute
determination to attempt varied violations of the revenue laws.

When the Barataria had been warped alongside the dock, and
the baggage was beginning to be examined by Uncle Sam’s white-
capped officers, we saw them again for a moment. He was taking
his leave. They shook hands heartily. The American girl, already
surrounded by the spoils of her summer campaign, abstracted her
attention from her ten trunks long enough to bestow on him a bril-
liant smile of farewell.

Not far from us was the young couple from Chicago ; they ac-
costed His Royal Highness as he passed ; and, in answer to some
question of the bridegroom’s, we heard the young Englishman say:

“ I’ve changed my mind, you know. I don’t think I shall go
there just yet a while. They tell me that St. John Hopkins College
is no end of an interesting place, and I’m thinking of going there
first.”

Brander Matthews.

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

THE LAND AND LABOR PARTY.

That able writer and leader, Mr. Henry George, has put before the
public an issue, which should, if possible, be fully unmasked. It is not a
mere economic measure v.'hich he has broached, but also a new ethical spec-
ulation ; and it is not a legitimate political reform which he is attempting,
but a sweeping social revolution, fraught with the gravest moral and^reli-
gious effects. In the guise of a philanthropic statesman, however unwit-
tingly, he is leading an assault upon divine laws and institutions, which no
legislation can touch without peril, as all history has shown.

Hebrews and Christians, Roman Catholics and Protestants, alike find
the right of private property clearly set forth in Holy Scripture. In the
Old Testament it is exhibited as a positive command of the Creator ; and in
the New Testament as a sacred trust from the sovereign Proprietor of all
things. No distinction whatever is made between property in land and in
other goods. The proposed exemption of the soil from private ownership
is a notion not to be found anywhere in the Bible, and as little based in
divine as in human law. To deprive the individual of such property, with-
out his consent, would be no more scriptural and right than to deprive him
of any other property as justly acquired and duly sanctioned ; and though
it were done by a popular vote, under all the forms of legislation, and on
pretence of the public good, it would still be but legalized theft in the view
of every Christian man.

It need not be concealed that, on one occasion, some of the early Chris-
tians voluntarily sold their lands and houses, and for a time held the pro-
ceeds in common. But, in the very act of constituting this charity fund, the
indestructible right of private property in land, as well as in other goods,
was still recognized and sanctioned by the apostles : “ While it remained,
was it not thine own ? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power ? ”
Moreover, the exceptional incident was but an ideal example to the Church,
not to the State ; and to plead it now as a precedent in our legislatures and
courts would be too hypocritical for a moment’s thought. The worst type
of socialism is known to be that which thus borrows Christian ideas as a
mask for infidelity and atheism.

Without charging Mr. George with any such perverseness, it ‘must be said
that his economic views, though sometimes devoutly expressed, are opposed to
the Christian doctrine of property, as well as to the interests of the individual,
of the family, and of the State, to say nothing of the Church. In particular.

26o

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

it will be found that his specious scheme for enriching the laboring class
by impoverishing the land-holding class would begin with legal and moral
injustice ; that it would strike back through the past, at an original right
of the first land-holder, without whom an acre in New York, with all its po-
tential wealth, was once worth no more than an acre in the moon ; that it
would take from thousands of innocent individuals, not merely their social
importance, but their justly earned means of subsistence and beneficence ;
that it would unsettle the family homestead, ever to be prized as a corner-
stone of the republic ; that by making the State the sole landlord, it would
render popular government a sort of feudal despotism of the poor over the
rich, and breed the worst vices of a crude democracy ; in a word, that it
would lead logically to the public confiscation of all private wealth, and to
an inversion of social classes, with the dominance of the one least fitted for
leadership in the higher spheres of civilization, such as learning, art, science,
and religion. In fact, could such views ever be fully carried out, the Chris-
tian Church would become impossible, and civilized society swiftly relapse
to anarchy and barbarism.

Mr. George might disclaim the logical issues of his reasoning, but its
premises are too plainly and boldly put forth to be misunderstood, as
will appear by a few chance extracts from his work called Progress and
Poverty :

“ Private property in land is a bold, bare, enormous wrong, like that of chattel
slavery. ”

“ Historically, as ethically, private property in land is robbery.”

“ Though the sovereign people of the State of New York consent to the landed pos-
sessions of the Astors, the puniest infant that comes wailing into the world, in the squalid-
est room of the most miserable tenement house, becomes at that moment seized of an equal
right with the millionaires. And it is robbed if the right is denied.”

“ But it will be said ; there are improvements which in time become indistinguishable
from the land itself ! Very well : then the title to the improvements becomes blended with
the title to the land ; the individual right is lost in the common right.”

“ Herbert Spencer says ; ‘ Had we to deal with the parties who originally robbed the
human race of its heritage, we might make short work of the matter.’ Why not make
short work of the matter anyhow ? ”

“ By the time the people of any such country as England or the United States are suffi-
ciently aroused to the injustice and disadvantages of individual ownership of land to induce
them to attempt its nationalization, they will be sufficiently aroused to nationalize it in a
much more direct and easy way than by purchase. They will not trouble themselves about
compensating the proprietors of land.”

“ I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The
first would be unjust ; the second, needless. It is not necessary to confiscate land ; it is
only necessary to confiscate rent.”

“ The homestead owner will be a loser only as the man who has bought himself a pair
of boots may be said to be a loser by a subsequent fall in the price of boots. His boots
will be just as useful to him, and the next pair of boots he can get cheaper. . . . The

Duke of Westminster, who owns a considerable part of the site of London, would still
have all he could by any possibility enjoy, and a much better state of society in which to
enjoy it.”

‘ ‘ This revenue arising frqm the common property could be applied to the common

CRITICISMS, NOTTS, AND REVIEWS.

261

benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. We might not establish public tables — they would
be unnecessary.”

“ We should reach the ideal of the socialist, but not through governmental repression.
Government would become merely the agency by which the common property was admi-
nistered for the common benefit.”

“ All that is necessary to social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian
patriots sometimes called Nihilists — ‘ Land and Liberty.’”

To lay bare all the fallacies underlying these statements would be no
easy task. At the outset, land is vaguely defined as the source of all wealth
and a common bounty of nature, which no man creates or may appropriate,
whereas mere land in itself is worthless except as some man does appro-
priate it and make it his own, as it were, a very part of himself, by possession
and use. Through this false definition, land is morally distinguished from
produce, the land-holder from the laborer, and it is held right to own goods
or houses, but wrong to own the bare ground. On the assumption that all
men have equal rights in this common bounty of the soil, it is asserted, in
no figurative sense, that the people still own the land, as if the people had
not already, for the public good and upon known conditions, conceded an
individual right of land-ownership, which has ever been sanctioned by law
and guarded with the very sword of justice. As a further inference, it is
even maintained that society could now have the same right to land made
valuable by individual labor as to land from which it had not parted, but
left in a state of nature, undeveloped and worthless. It is also still more
strangely argued that any increased value of land which may come with the
growth of the community must rightfully belong to the wealth-producing
laborer of to-day, and not to the laborer of yesterday, who has become a
land-owner, and whose land has itself been earned by other laborers and
held at risk and expense for generations. Because decreasing wages some-
times coexist with increasing rent, it is fancied that this growing land value
is a tax upon the present earnings of labor, rather than the fruit of past earn-
ings invested in land. Throughout the whole reasoning it is forgotten that,
in this country at least, with its clear legal titles, private land-ownership is
itself but rewarded labor, not defrauded labor, and to destroy it would be
the very suicide of labor. All the ills of the workingman are thus unfairly
charged to an abstract land-owner, rather than to the capitalist, with whom
he is in close practical relations, or to other well-known causes of poverty.
Then, to cap this absurdity, the various cures of labor distress, such as
public economy, education of workingmen, trades unions, partnerships with
employers, governmental aid, more equal distribution of public lands, are
severally treated as but so many aggravations of the mere imaginary wrong
of private property in land. This vague, scarecrow monopoly, it is at
length maintained, can only be aboli^ed by seizing all land as State pro-
perty, and collecting the rent into the public treasury for the relief of the
laboring classes. It is then shown, very clearly and boldly, how such legis-
lation, as by a stroke of the pen, would equalize wealth and make the rich

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CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

poorer and the poor richer. The largest share might go to workingmen
and artisans, as the chief producers of wealth ; but farmers could live on their
homesteads without owning them, as serfs of the sovereign people, and
reduced millionaires would at last have to pay tribute as vassals to Knights
of Labor. And thus is to be set on foot, in the midst of our advanced civili-
zation, under the forms of law, a course of open land-robbery and pillage
which hitherto has only been achieved by barbarian hordes in an age of
lawless violence.

In plain opposition to such vagaries stands the Christian doctrine at
every point of view. A few only of its elements need here be stated :

First. The private ownership of land, as of other property, is a divine
right expressed in the very constitution of man by his Creator. It is fos-
tered by an innate desire as imperious as the desire for aught else which
can be exclusively owned and used. It is asserted by a moral sense, which
as spontaneously condemns violations of it by ourselves or others. It is
more or less clearly enforced by the usages and laws of all peoples, savage
and civilized ; and it can be called in question only by some sophistical rea-
soning or perverted judgment. Primarily, the right inheres in the very
relation of man to the earth, upon which he depends, and which, so far as
occupied and utilized by him, becomes attached to his personality, or belongs
to him alone. If it be wrong for him to own such land, because it is a part
of nature, then it is wrong for him to own his horse or his house, which are
also parts of nature. Though such land were, indeed, originally a divine
creation, yet he has produced therein a value as much his own as anything
else of human production, and thus acquired a special right in the common
bounty of the Creator. The mere abstract general right of mankind, could
it now override his acquired special right, would simply call for an indis-
criminate distribution of all private wealth among men, wholly regardless of
their endowments, needs, and deserts. Even on the theory of the social con-
tract, existing individual rights in land must have been acquired by common
consent, and society could not now go back upon its own agreement without
new consent, as the State does not exercise the right of eminent domain
except in cases of public necessity, and then only upon a fair valua-
tion and reimbursement of the land-owner. Without, however, discuss-
ing here any of the ethical theories of property in general, such as self-
interest, utility, the general good, the law of the land, it is enough to say
that from each of them might be brought arguments for the natural jus-
tice of individual proprietorship in the soil. Every reason which proves the
right of a man to any property at all may prove his right to property in
land.

Second. The private ownership of land has ever been sanctioned by
divine law, since the day that Adam, as the first land-holder, was given
dominion over the earth. Under the Jewish theocracy it was not only
allowed, but made inalienable by the agrarian jubilee, or repossession of
homesteads every fifty years, and fixed by solemn tenure from Jehovah him-

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

263

self as the one supreme Proprietor : “ The land shall not be sold forever ;
for the land is mine.” The decalogue also clearly includes it. As traced,
like other property, to the primary right which every man has to himself and
to the fruit of his labor, it has the same ground in the commandment which
forbids violations of property rights. To take from its owner land which
has been justly acquired by discovery, purchase, inheritance, or gift, and
which he has enriched with his own toil, would be as plain stealing as to
take from him the wares wrought by his skill or the home built with his
earnings. And to do this by law, on a plea of justice, would simply assail
all law and justice as seated in the bosom of God and voiced in the hearts
of men.

Third. The private ownership of land, viewed as a divine trust under
human law, has the same checks and safeguards as other property. If the
law be broken or the trust be violated, then the land is legally or morally
forfeited. The land-holder simply becomes a criminal, who is made to give
up his false title, or an unfaithful steward, from whom shall yet be taken
even that which he seemeth to have. The gigantic abuses of landlordism
in the British Islands, as of land speculation in the United States, furnish
no reasons for abolishing this kind of property, but only for better laws
of entail and monopoly. And the few land-holders in either country who
are like the slothful servant, hiding his lord’s money in the ground, cannot
detract from the many who, on their own estates and the world over, are
maintaining churches, charities, missions, schools, colleges, libraries, mu-
seums, and countless other institutions for social well-being and human
progress.

Fourth. The private ownership of land is as consistent with Christian
neighborship, or love of mankind, as other forms of wealth. It is rooted in
the same first duty of every man to provide for his own household, without
which, so far from being a Christian, he is said to be worse than an infidel,
and it may have its flower and fruitage in the same beautiful and noble cha-
rities of home, kindred, country, and humanity. The distinction is not less
false than invidious by which the land-owner, on his well-tilled acres, is de-
picted as selfishly monopolizing the Creator’s gifts to his creatures, any more
than the laborer himself monopolizes them with his manufactured stores of
the same raw material, as controlled by his skill and capital. If distinctions
must be made, it might seem that the land-holding class, the great commu-
nity of homestead owners, would best keep the family as a seated institu-
tion, uphold the State with patriotic roots in the soil, and maintain the
Church in its strength and freedom ; rather than the laboring class in our
large cities, especially the foreign refuse, who literally have no attach-
ment to our native land, but have come hither to menace our social peace
with alien views of property, marriage, and religion, and false cries of liberty,
equality, and fraternity. No such distinctions, however, are needed in a
country of freemen, where the laborer and the land-owner are so often com-
bined in the same person and so continually changing places. True Chris-

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CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

tian patriotism would rather dictate that the legislative rule of any one class,
laborer or land-owner, without regard to its virtue and intelligence, is to be
deprecated as dangerous alike to the State and to the Church. And true
Christian philanthropy, instead of arraying laborer against land-owner, in
a world-wide conspiracy against civilization, seeks ever to knit together all
classes in all nations as one brotherhood of mankind.

Fifth. The Christian ideal of wealth, as set before the young ruler and
illustrated at Pentecost, calls for the highest personal and social virtue, but
does not distinguish land as common property, to be forfeited or confis-
cated, any more in charity than in equity. Even its surrender to the
Church by a vow of poverty has ever implied the right to have withheld it
for other uses ; and its seizure by the State, in the name of Christian charity,
has not hitherto been even proposed. History is, indeed, full of sad attempts
to revive the communism which for a while illumined the golden age of
Christianity. But they have only shown, with few exceptions, that the aboli-
tion of private property in land has ever tended to the dissolution of society.
The Roman Catholic communities of monks and nuns have simply pre-
cluded such results by connecting the vow of celibacy with that of poverty.
The various Protestant communities of mystics and perfectionists, by merg-
ing homesteads in a common estate, with a common table and dwelling,
have sooner or later destroyed all family life and purity, or only averted
such disaster by retaining individual estates, and holding the mere produce
in common. Some communities of socialists, claiming a sort of new Chris-
tianity, have sought to openly abolish the family and reorganize the State
by abnegating individual land-ownership. But Mr. George espouses none
of these doctrines. Though he seeks an ethical basis for his project of land-
nationalization, and ever throws over it a warjji color of sympathy for the
toiling masses, yet he does not offer it as Christian doctrine. He merely
proposes, in the name of political economy, to confiscate all the landed
property of the country, as it stands, by popular and legislative action,
through the short and easy method of taxation. The people have only to
vote back to themselves the land for the good of the workingman. It is
well that the scheme can thus stand out in its stark simplicity^ Had it been
invested with any Christian sentiment, it might have seemed as if Mercury
had at last stolen the very robe of Charity.

Sixth. It remains to add, that the only radical cure of our social evils
must be moral and Christian, rather than merely economic and political ;
striking at the roots of poverty in ignorance and vice, and of avarice in self-
ishness and pride ; binding together the laborer, capitalist, land-owner, in
bonds of charity ; and ever nobly diffusing culture with wealth, virtue with
intelligence, and religion with knowledge. Other remedies, however needful
and praiseworthy, are but palliatives, or in themselves worse than the dis-
ease. The nationalization of land would no more heal our wounds than the
organization of labor. Neither higher interest nor higher wages would bring
us higher morals. The dreams of our philanthropy must get substance in

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS. 265

Christianity. The republic of Plato and the utopia of More can only be
chastened and fulfilled in the kingdom of Christ.

In this article it has not been designed to defend the Christian doc-
trine of property, but simply to state it, and lift it into view as the real issue
involved in the “ Land and Labor ” movement. The sooner this issue is
clearly perceived the better will it be for all parties. As masked in the
brilliant sophisms and humane sentiments of Mr. George, it is hidden from
multitudes who are reading his works, and already in haste to apply his
teachings at the polls. When such a covert attack is made upon the very
foundations of Christian civilization, it is time for all Christian citizens to
rally to the common defence.

At the same time, in meeting this issue, it should not be forgotten that
property has its duties as well as its rights, its responsibilities as well as its
privileges, its penalties no less than its rewards. The growing misuse of
property should also be frankly acknowledged as one great aggravation of our
social evils and an occasion of discontent ; and the chief remedy should be
sought in a more kindly Christian care, as well as sounder instruction of the
working masses, now in so much danger of being misled by blind guides
and false teachers.

FRUIT FROM AN OLD TREE.

In the quiet garden of Christ’s College, at Cambridge, there is a mul-
berry-tree of which a fond tradition tells that it was planted by the hand of
John Milton. The tree is banked with earth about its roots and bound
with iron about its trunk ; the outward spread of branches, which was
once the sign of youthful vigor, has become the downward curve of limbs
bending to decay and leaning heavily upon their crutches. It is a living
symbol of venerable age. But its leaf is still green, and, as we stood beneath
it last summer, my friend picked a mulberry from the lowest bough, and said:
“ You see it is fulfilling the words of the Psalmist.” Whereupon we fell into
discourse upon the bringing forth of fruit in old age, and talked of Landor’s
Last Fruit Off an Old Tree, which was published in his seventy-eighth year,
but was not by any means his last, and of Victor Hugo’s L^gende des Siecles,
and of Longfellow’s Aftermath, and wondered much at the rarity and
beauty of such a prolonged fertility in poets.

Doubtless this feeling of personal interest and surprise is the first that
rises in the mind when one takes up the new Locksley Hall, and remembers
that its author is seventy-six years old. The inclination to regard it as a
curiosity rather than as a work of art, to dwell more upon the mere circum-
stance of its production than upon its meaning and value, to use it either as
an illustration of the longevity of genius or as the text for a lamentation over
the inevitable decay of mortal powers, is natural and almost irresistible.
But we question whether, from a critical standpoint, this inclination ought
not to be regarded as a temptation. At least, we may be sure that if the in-

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terest exhausts Itself upon mere personalities, it will come far short of the
obligations and the opportunities of true criticism. For the appearance of
this poem is, in fact, one of the most significant literary events of this decade.
Its author stands among the few living men who are justly entitled to be
called distinguished, rather than merely celebrated. Perhaps there are not
more than three others in the world, certainly there are not so many as three
in England, whose claim to distinction, in the highest sense of the word, is
so clear and unquestionable. And one of these others — a master of men
and leader in practical affairs — has thought the poem worthy of a review so
careful and so earnest as almost to deserve the name of a reply. The real
importance of what is sometimes scornfully called mere literature, the value
and power of poetry as a criticism of life, have seldom been acknowledged
more emphatically than by the simple fact that Mr. Gladstone, the most
influential personage in English politics, has seen fit to pay the new Locksley
Hall the highest possible compliment of a serious answer. The tone and
manner of his article in the Nineteenth Century ought to be a sufficient rebuke
to our shallow newspaper writers, absurdly called critics, who hastened, on
the strength of an incorrect telegraphic report, to dismiss Lord Tennyson’s
latest production with a few vulgar jests and a general chorus of “ Go up,
thou bald-head ! ” Such work almost makes one regret that since the days
of Elisha the bears have allowed one of their most beneficent functions to
fall into neglect.

The first Locksley Hall was beyond a doubt the strongest and most im-
mediately successful thing in the volumes of 1842, which gave Tennyson his
place as a popular poet. The billowy rush of the verse, the romantic in-
terest of the story, the vigorous spirit of hope and enthusiasm which
throbbed through the poem and made it seem alive with the breath of a
new age, at once captivated all readers. It was this poem, more than any
other, which lifted Tennyson beyond the admiration of a narrow circle and
opened to him the heart of the world. And it is worthy of notice that, even
in its outward form, this poem is one of the few which his scrupulous self-
criticism has suffered to remain unchanged. There are but four slight
verbal variations between the first and the last editions.

Forty-five years have passed ; and now the poet takes up the thread of
his youthful dream once more, and follows it to the end. There was a pro-
phetic hint of this sequel in the earlier poem. We heard the eager young
soldier complaining the loss of the “ harvest of his youthful joys,” and dimly
foreseeing his own image in the unconsolable sadness of old age :

" Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,

Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest."

But that picture could not be filled out until the experience had really
come. The result of the bitter personal disappointment which then seemed
to have shattered his life forever, the value of the glowing hopes for the
future of his country and the world in which he sought a refuge from him-

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267

self, could not be fairly estimated until they had been tested by time, until
he knew what life was in its entirety. Not until now would it have been
possible for Tennyson to complete the life-drama of Locksley Hall. The
dramatic nature of the poem must not be forgotten, for it is this which gives
unity and significance to the two parts. They are not disconnected strings
of brilliant metaphors and comparisons, or trochaic remarks upon human
life and progress. They are the expression of a character, the lyric history
of a life ; they form a complete and rounded whole. They are two acts in
the same play. The hero, the scene, remain the same. Only the time is
changed by half a century.

It seems quite evident that Tennyson was not willing to leave his hero
as he stood in the first act. For with all his attractive, not to say “mag-
netic,” qualities, there was something about him that was unlovely and
repellent, almost absurd. He made too much of himself, talked too loudly
and recklessly, was too much inclined to rave and exaggerate. He was
conscious himself of a tendency to “ bluster ” ; and that most suggestive and
wholesome critic, Mr. R. H. Hutton, was not far out of the way when he
called him a “ grandiose and somewhat bumptious lover.” Tennyson doubt-
less wished to do for him what time really does for every man whose heart
is of true metal — make him wiser and kinder and more worthy to be loved.
The touches by which this change has been accomplished are most delicate,
most marvellous, most admirable. Compare the rejected lover’s jealousy of
the baby rival whose lips should laugh him down, and whose hands should
push him from the mother’s heart, with the old man’s prayer beside the
marble image of Amy,

“ Looking still as if she smiled,”

sleeping quietly with her little child upon her breast. Or turn from the
young man’s scornful and unjust description of the man who had carried off
his sweetheart, to the noble and generous tribute which he lays at last upon
the grave of him who

“ Strove for sixty widow’d years to help his homelier brother-man."

Or put his first wild complaint of the worthlessness and desolation of his
life beside his later acknowledgment of the joy and strength which had
come to him through the larger, deeper love of Edith. Surely, if words
have any meaning, the poet means to teach us by these things that not only
youthful jealousy, but also youthful despair, is false, and that for every one
who will receive its moral discipline and hold fast to its eternal hopes, life is
worth the living.

So far, then, as the story of the two poems is concerned, so far as they
present to us a picture of an individual human character, and trace its
development through the experience of joy and sorrow, their lesson is
sweet and sound and full of encouragement. It shows the frailty of the
exuberant flowers of romance, exaggerated feelings of passion, born in an

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atmosphere of tropical heat and unable to endure the cooler air of reality.
But it shows also that the garden of life has better and more lasting blos-
soms, affections which survive all shock and change, a man’s love which is
stronger than a boy’s fancy, a man’s reverence for honest worth which can
overcome a boy’s resentment for imagined wrongs,

“ A sober certainty of waking bliss,”

which makes divine amends for the vanished dreams of boyhood. It re-
minds us of the story of the “ child-wife,” Dora, and the woman-wife, Agnes,
which Dickens has told in David Copperjidd, or of Thackeray’s history of
Henry Esmond.

But when we come to consider the sequel of the poem in its other as-
pect, as a commentary on modern England, as an estimate of the result of
those buoyant, bounding hopes which seemed to swing the earlier verses
onward in the full tide of exultation toward a near millennium, we shall find
room for a great difference of opinion. There are some who regard the new
locksley Hall as a veritable palinode, a complete recantation of the poet’s
youthful creed, a shameful desertion from the army of progress to the army
of reaction, a betrayal of the standard of hope into the hands of despair.
There are others, among them Mr. Gladstone, who think that though the
poet has not really deserted the good cause, he has at least yielded too far
to despondency, and that he is in danger of marring the jubilee of Queen
Victoria’s reign with unnecessarily “ tragic tones.” It seems to me that
both of these views are unjust, because they both fail to go far enough
beneath the surface. They leave out of sight several things which are
necessary to a fair judgment of the poem.

First of all is the fact that the poet does not speak for himself, but
through the lips of 2. persona, a mask; and what he says must be in character.
Mr. Gladstone has, indeed, noted this fact ; but he has failed to take fully
into account the peculiar and distinctive qualities of the character which the
poet has chosen. The hero of Locksley Hall is a man in whom emotion is
stronger than thought ; impulsive, high-strung, supersensitive ; an idealist
rather than a practical reformer ; one to whom everything that he sees must
loom larger than life, through the mist of his own overwrought feelings.
This is his nature. And if in youth he took too bright a view of the future,
it is quite as inevitable that in age he should take too dark a view of the
present. If there be any exaggeration in his complaints about the evils of
our times, it is but fair to set them down to the idiosyncrasy of the charac-
ter, and not to the sober conviction of the poet.

But suppose we put this plea of dramatic propriety aside, and make
Tennyson answerable for all that his hero says. We shall find that there
were some things in the first rhapsody quite as hard and bitter as any in the
second. Take the vigorous imprecations against the social wants, the social
lies, the sickly forms, by which the young man is oppressed and infuriated.
Hear him cry :

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269

“What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these ?

Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys.’

See his picture of the hungry people, creeping like a lion toward the sloth-
ful watcher beside a dying fire. Here, at least, even in the first outflow of
hopeful music, are the warning notes. And though there may be more
severity in the old man’s condemnation of the iniquities and follies of soci-
ety, in one point at least he has grown milder. He does not indulge in any
more “ cursing.”

Observe, also, if we are to hold Tennyson responsible for a retraction in
the second poem of anything that he taught in the first, just what is the
point to which that retraction applies. He does not deny his early hope
for the future of England and the world ; he denies only the two false
grounds on which that hope was based. One of these grounds was the
swift and wonderful march of what is called modern improvement ; meaning
thereby the steamship, the railway, the telegraph, and the advance of all the
industrial arts. Of these he says now :

“ Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space.

Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace.”

And is not this true ? Have we not all felt the shrinkage of the much-
vaunted miracles of science into the veriest kitchen utensils of a comfort-
worshipping society? Physical powers have been multiplied by an unknown
quantity, but it is a serious question whether moral powers have not had
their square root extracted. A man can go from New York to London now
in seven days. But when he arrives we find him no better man than if it
had taken him a month. He can talk across three thousand miles of ocean,
but he has nothing more, nothing wiser, to say, than when he sent his letter
by a sailing-paeket. All the inventions in the world will not change man’s
heart, or

“ Lift him nearer godlike state.”

The other ground of hope in the old Locksley Hall was the advance of
modern politics, through the freedom of speech and the extension of suf-
frage, which seemed to promise at no distant date a sort of universal “ Par-
liament of Man,” a “ Federation of the World.” In the new Locksley Hall
the poet confesses that this ground also has failed him. He no longer
thinks so highly of Parliament that he desires to see it reproduced on a
larger scale. The virtues of talk as a panacea for human ills appear to him
more than dubious. He hazards the conjecture that

“ Old England may go down in babble at last."

And he breaks out in fierce indignation against the “rivals of realm-
ruining party,” who care more for votes than for truth, and speak more for
the preservation of their own power than for the preservation of the Empire.

Now, what is all this but the acknowledgment of the truth which most

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sober men are beginning to feel ? Fifty years ago material science and
political theory promised large things. The promise has been kept to the
ear and broken to the hope. The world has gone forward — a little — but it
has not gone ringing down the grooves of change, it has not swept at once
into a brighter day — not by any means. There are heavy clouds upon the
sky. The moral condition of humanity in general, and of England in
particular, is certainly not free from elements of degradation and serious
threats of danger. Let me quote two sentences, from writers who deserve
at least an attentive hearing.

“British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-
swamp of reeking pestilence, physical and moral ; a Uving Golgotha of souls
and bodies buried alive ; such a Curtius’ gulf communicating with the
nether deeps as the sun never saw till now.” Thus spoke the Sage of
Chelsea. And, after the same fashion, Ruskin says : “ Remember, for the
last twenty years, England and all foreign nations, either tempting her or
following her, have blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly ;
and have done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice
to his brother as it is in his power to do.”

These utterances, like the darker verses in Mr. Tennyson’s poem, are
not meant to be taken as complete pictures of the present time. They are
only earnest and vigorous warnings against the easy-going, self-complacent
optimism which talks as if the promised millennium had already dawned.
To reply to them by an enumeration of the inventions which have been
made, and the political measures which have been passed, during the last
half-century, is quite beside the point. The question remains. Is human
life really higher, holier, happier I

The answer, if it is thoughtful as well as hopeful, must be, A little. But
still the strife, the shame, the suffering, endure. Still

“ City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime ;

There among the glooming allies Progress halts on palsied feet,

Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.”

If we ask when and how these things shall cease, the reply comes not
from the fairy-tales of science nor from the blue-books of politics, but from
the heart of Christian charity and from the promise of Christian faith. And
this is the reply which Tennyson has given, in words as pure and clear and
musical as he has ever uttered :

“ Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine,

Forward, till you learn the highest Human Nature is divine.

“ Follow Light and do the Right — for man can half-control his doom —

Till you see the deathless Angel seated in the vacant Tomb.

“ Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.

I that loathed have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last."

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

271

The last line recalls us once more to the personal interest of the poem,
which, after all, is the strongest. The hero of Locksley Hall is bidding us
farewell. He has played his part through. The drama of life is ended.

In the first act we saw the youth seeking to forget his private sorrow in
the largest public hopes ; turning from the lost embraces of his “ faithless
Amy,” to lay his head upon the vast bosom of the age, and listen to the
deep throbbing of cosmic hopes.

In the second act we see the old man seeking to forget his public dis-
appointments in his private affections ; turning back from that hard and
unrestful world-bosom, wJipre he has heard nothing better than the clank of
machinery and the words of windy oratory, to find rest in the soft, sweet
memories of Amy and Edith, and the man whom time had changed from
his enemy into his friend ; and looking forward to the promise of Christianity
for the fulfilment of his hopes in an age not yet revealed.

Who that understands anything of a young man’s or an old man’s heart
can question the truth of these two pictures ? And who will venture to say
that the true philosophy of life does not lie somewhere between optimism
and pessimism, in that steadfast and chastened meliorism to which the
Gospel of the Incarnation makes its appeal and gives its promise ?

THE HALF-CENTURY OF VICTORIA’S REIGN.

The Victorian epoch in English history can hardly fail to stand out
as distinct, if not as illustrious, as the Elizabethan, the Cromwellian, or any
other. What it will stand for, it is perhaps too soon to pronounce. Only
we may be sure that it will not be recognized as a refluent wave in the tide
of civilization, but an era of steady, though not always rapid, advance in
every department of human interests. The coronation bells of fifty years ago
rang in, unconsciously,

“ the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.”

But our object is not to moralize nor philosophize, but simply to recall
some of the leading political and social events of a reign as exceptional in
its character as in its length.

There have been some fifteen changes of administration, under Lord
Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Lord Derby, the Earl of
Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Earl of Salisbury,
none of them lasting over six years. Derby was premier three times, and
the office was held twice by Russell, Palmerston, Disraeli, and Gladstone.
The entire term of the latter has been eleven years, Palmerston coming next
with nine years. The fifty years have been almost equally divided between
the ascendency of the Conservative and of the Liberal parties.

In 1839 the repeal of the Com Laws began to be vigorously agitated by

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CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

the Anti-Corn-Law League, under Richard Cobden ; it was finally settled
by the bold and sudden action of Sir Robert Peel, who, as premier, brought
in a bill for the repeal in 1846, impelled and aided thereto by a threatened
famine occasioned chiefly by the failure of the potato crop in Ireland.
Under the momentum of this act England in three years had fully adopted
the principle of free trade, which has been unshaken to this day. In the
same year (1839) began the Chartist agitation, culminating in the year of
revolutions, 1848, when the “ monster petition ” was presented to the House
of Commons. Unwise leadership and riotous proceedings led to its speedy
collapse, but two of its six demands have since been embodied in legislation,
namely, the ballot, and the abolition of property qualification for members
of Parliament. A third, universal suffrage, has been almost conceded.
The other three were annual parliaments, the equalization of parliamentary
districts, and payment of the members.

On February 10, 1840, the Queen was married to Prince Albert of Saxe-
Coburg-Gotha, a union which contributed much to the wise and harmo-
nious relations of the Crown with the Parliament and the people. In 1840,
Sir Rowland Hill successfully proposed his plan of cheap postage, whereby
all rates for letters were reduced to one penny, resulting in an enormous
increase both of correspondence and' of revenue, and setting the example
which has been followed by all nations.

At the beginning of this reign Daniel O’Connell was agitating the Repeal
of the Union, both in Parliament and by means of “ monster meetings.”
During his lifetime a comparatively peaceful policy was pursued by the
Irish people, but under the revolutionary impulses of 1848 a rebellion was
fomented by John Mitchel, Smith O’Brien, and others. There have been
similar uprisings at various times, especially on the part of the Fenian
Brotherhood, which was superseded five years ago by the National League.
Among the concessions which have been successively extorted by the Irish
are courts for the sale of encumbered estates, the establishment of a Roman
Catholic university, a reform bill extending the suffrage, a bill entitling out-
going tenants to compensation for their improvements, the disestablishment
of the English Church in Ireland, and the Arrears of Rent Bill, all of which
have led steadily up to the point now in abeyance, designed to lift the
crushing weight of foreign landlordism from the soil, and to place in the
hands of the people the control of their domestic affairs by an Irish Parlia-
ment. Two of the notable events of Victoria’s reign were her visits to Ire-
land in 1849 and 1853, the latter for the purpose of attending the great
Irish Industrial Exhibition.

In 1842, the north-eastern boundary of Great Britain and the United
States was fixed by the Ashburton Treaty, and four years later the north-
western boundary was similarly settled. Except in the temporary stimulat-
ing of the Chartist movement and of the Irish agitation, England rode out
the revolutionary storms of 1848-49, when every other European government
was rocked to its centre, and in some cases wrecked. In 1851 the system

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273

of international expositions was inaugurated, and the return of peace was
celebrated by the great World’s Fair in the Crystal Palace at London. In
the same year the gold deposits in Australia were discovered, giving rise to
an immense immigration, and to the rapid transformation of a convict settle-
ment into an Oriental sub-empire. In 1867 the American provinces were
formed into a federal union, known as the Dominion of Canada, which
(especially since the acquirement of its vast north-western territory, equal in
area to three-fourths of Europe, and since the completion of the Northern
Pacific Railroad) has advanced swiftly in population and resources.

Following the lead of the United States, a treaty of commerce was con-
cluded with Japan in 1854. Four years later, treaties were concluded with
China. In the same year Parliament transferred the rule of India from the
East India Company to the Crown ; and in the same year also, the disabili-
ties of the Jews in Great Britain were removed. During our civil war the
sympathy of the Queen, and of the Prince Consort, so long as he lived, was
understood to be on the side of the Union. The sympathy also of the great
middle class, and the wise and conciliatory diplomacy of Lord Palmerston,
and Messrs. Seward and Adams, happily frustrated the intrigues of the
Confederate Government, and, with the exception of the cases growing out
of the spoliations by rebel cruisers, since amicably adjusted, prevented any
serious complications between the two nations. The second International
Exposition, much greater though less significant than the first, was held in
1863. In 1867 transatlantic telegraphic communication was established
between Ireland and Newfoundland. Seventeen years earlier, submarine
cables had been laid between London and Dublin, and between Dover and
Calais. The first English telegraph line was on the Blackwall Railroad, in
1837, used for the conveyance of railway signals. In 1869 the Suez Canal
was completed ; and, six years after, England obtained control of it by the
purchase of the shares of the Khedive of Egypt.

In 1870 the statistics of illiteracy, showing that not one-half of the popu-
lation could read, bestirred Parliament to organize a system of compulsory
public education, supported partly by local taxation and partly by a Govern-
ment grant, the result of which was an increased school attendance of at
least 1,500,000. Soon afterward a great reform in the British Army was
accomplished by abolishing the purchase system. Beneficent legislation
has been enacted since the Queen’s accession in reform of the criminal
code, which was still cruel and unequal ; also in forbidding women and
children to work in mines and collieries, and regulating and limiting em-
ployment in this kind of labor. The compulsory payment of church rates
by dissenters was abolished in 1868. In the opening year of Victoria’s
reign the first complete report of registration was made, followed in the next
year by an investigation in the direction of sanitary reform. Among the re-
sults were the abolition of the window tax, compulsory vaccination, a system
of drainage and sewerage and water in towns, street cleaning and paving,
the enforced removal of refuse and nuisances, and a number of other vital
18

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CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

sanitary improvements. These were mainly secured by the establishment,
in 1848, of a General Board of Health for the kingdom. In forty years
the death rate of England and Wales has been lowered from over 22 per
thousand to about 19^, and the deaths by zymotic diseases from 4^4 to
about 2^.

On the 28th of April, 1876, Queen Victoria assumed, by authority of
Parliament, the title of Empress of India. It was two hundred and seventy-
six years since the East India Company began to trade with “ the Indies.”
Forty years later they began to fortify their trading-posts. In 1757 Clive
had completed his successful contest with France for supremacy, and had
brought Bengal, with a population of 30,000,000, under the British rule.
Under successive governor-generals, province after province was annexed or
made tributary — Benares, the Cameatic, Mysore, Malabar, Hyderabad, a
part of Burmah, Scinde, the Punjaub, and Oude, till in 1857 the Indian
Empire comprised a population of 250,000,000, and a territory as large as
Europe, exclusive of Russia.

Then came the great explosion, known as the Sepoy Rebellion, in 1857,
which threatened to blow the whole fabric into atoms. The sepoys, or
native troops, had been the dependence of the British for their conquests
and the maintenance of their power, but an impression that the Government
had deliberately adopted a policy of extirpating their religion and caste dis-
tinctions created a sudden and universal panic, and they raised anew the
standard of the Great Mogul at Delhi. Led by Nana Sahib, a deposed
Indian king, they held the country for several months, committing number-
less atrocities. The tide was first turned by the advance of Havelock upon
Cawnpore and Lucknow, followed by Sir Colin Campbell, but it was nearly
a year before the British control was reestablished. And with it the entire
administration of affairs was transferred from the'East India Company to the
Crown and Parliament. Another result was the adoption of a wiser and
more conciliatory policy toward the natives, and a steadily advancing
system of enlightenment, industrial and commercial development, and pre-
paration for local self-government.

During the reign of Victoria, England has waged a couple of wars with
Afghanistan, one of them as disastrous as any in her history ; and wars with
China in 1840, 1856, and i860, the first being known as the Opium War, in
resistance to the efforts of the Chinese Government to prevent the importa-
tion of that drug from India, and resulting in the cession of the island of
Hong- Kong to Great Britain, and the opening of the ports of Canton, Amoy,
Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai to British commerce. She also took a
hand, in 1840, in subduing Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, who had re-
volted against the Sultan, and by her naval victories under Lord Napier
contributed largely to the result. There has been occasional fighting in
South Africa with the Boers, Caffres, and Zulus. A brief war occurred in
1856-57 between Persia and the Indian Government, and another with Abys-

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

275

sinia in ths following year. Five years ago occurred the exciting episode
of the revolt of El Mahdi, with the brief but heroic career of General Gor-
don, and the withdrawal of the British forces from Upper Egypt. Forcible
possession was taken of the seaport of Aden, on the south coast of Arabia,
in 1839. But the only foreign war of magnitude was that in the Crimea,
1853-55, from which England reaped the chief glory. This arose from the
demand of Russia for a protectorate over the Greek Christians in Turkey.
England and France united with the Turks in resistance. After much ne-
gotiation and some fighting the contest was concentrated at Sebastapol, the
Russian port and fortress on the Black Sea. The investment lasted for a
year, lacking a few days, and its evacuation by the Russians practically
ended the war. The sufferings and losses of the besiegers by disease and
exposure were frightful, seven times as many of the English dying in the
hospital as in battle ; and it was this exigency which called forth Florence
Nightingale, and the system of sanitary and Christian work which has done
so much to mitigate the horrors of war. The famous battles were those of
the Alma, Balaklava, Tchemaya, Inkerman, and the storming of the Malakoff
and the Redan. The generals who won most renown were the English Lord
Raglan, who was killed, and General Todleben, who directed the defence.

The reign of Victoria has been as remarkable for its adventurous enter-
prise in exploration and discovery, in various regions of the world, as the
reign of Elizabeth. The most daring of these expeditions have been
directed toward the North Pole. Sir John Franklin’s last voyage began
in 1845. In 1854 Commander McClure returned after a three years’
imprisonment in the ice of the polar seas, having accomplished the North-
west passage ; McClintock, however, afterward ascertained that Franklin
had discovered it as early as 1846. In 1872 Captain Hall’s expedition
reached latitude 82°i6', and four years later Captain Nares reached 8^°2o',
north of Greenland, with a sledging party. Livingstone discovered Lake
Ngami in 1849, and the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi in 1855. Richardson,
with Barth and Oberweg, discovered Lake Tchad in 1850. Two years
after. Burton and Speke discovered Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria
N’yanza, and the Victoria Nile in 1862. Two years later still, Baker dis-
covered Lake Albert N’yanza. In 1871 Stanley made his memorable expe-
dition in search of Livingstone, and in 1877 established the identity of the
Lualaba and Congo rivers, Cameron having crossed Africa a year or two
before, thus opening up the “ Dark Continent ” to the world.

Our space will not allow us to even outline the scientific events of the
reign, or the innumerable applications of science to the utilities and comforts
of life. We may mention the beginning of transatlantic steam navigation in
1838. War steamers were first used two years after, in the Egyptian war.
The Thames Tunnel was opened, with great demonstrations, in 1843. There

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has been an enormous increase in commerce, and in manufacturing and
mining industries, so that, in the former, England leads the world, with
hardly a good second. There has been a still more remarkable extension of
railways in the United Kingdom. Since Victoria’s accession these have
grown from between one and two thousand miles, carrying 33,000,000 pas-
sengers annually, to between seventeen and eighteen thousand miles, carry-
ing, probably, seven or eight hundred millions. The telegraph system, in
1868, came into the hands of the Government, and was thereby greatly ex-
tended. The patents taken out by inventors have increased from about a
hundred to several thousands. The condition of the insane, the pauper, and
the prisoner has been immeasurably improved. Agriculture has been quite
transformed, both in its methods and productiveness. The cities were
destitute of many of the most important sanitary and police and other
arrangements for the comfort and convenience of the people, which are
now a matter of course. One out of every eleven persons was a pauper, a
fact which was largely due to unwise poor-laws, whose whole effect was to
promote pauperism and to support the dram-shops.

In reference to the fine arts, we must content ourselves with quoting
Liibke, that England “has shown the working of an independent artistic,
creative power as never before in her history” ; and his editor, Mr. Clarence
Cook, claims that it is to England even more than France that we owe the
revival of art in our days. Her greatest architectural achievement has been
the new Parliament Houses, completed in 1847; A style called the “ Victorian
Gothic ” took its rise from this structure. Among the painters and engravers
who have adorned the reign are Turner, Eastlake, Millais, Watts, Leigh-
ton, Leslie, Landseer, Maclise, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Whistler, Holman
Hunt, Leech, Cruikshank, Doyle, Webster, and Linton. The most famous
sculptors have been Gibson, Wyatt, Westmacott, Woolner, Macdowell, and
Thornycroft. Some of the best-known architects have been A. W. Pugin,
Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, Waterhouse, Donaldson, Scott, and Barry.

At the time of Victoria’s coronation the Pickwick Papers were coming
out, and Carlyle published his French Revolution. The University of London
was just established. It is a remarkable fact that the three most representative
literary epochs of England, except perhaps that which immediately followed
the introduction of printing, were in the reigns of her female sovereigns. The
productiveness of this period has been common to all departments, though
the special development has been in history, fiction, and the literature of
science. It has been the era of Milman, Macaulay, Carlyle, Grote, Merivale,
Stanley, Freeman, Froude, Kinglake, Layard, Wilkinson, and Maine. It has
produced Thackeray, Dickens, Kingsley, George Eliot, Reade, Trollope,
Black, Collins, Borrow, Macdonald, and some of the best work of Bulwer and
Disraeli. Among its writers on science have been Faraday, Murchison,

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS. 2^7

Darwin, Lyell, Owen, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Carpenter,
Proctor, Lewes, Max Muller, Lubbock, Tylor, Buckland, Mivart, Wallace,
Whewell, Hugh Miller, John Pye Smith, and the Duke of Argyll. We may
add, as writers upon philosophy and art. Sir William Hamilton, James Mar-
tineau. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Buckle, McCosh, Ruskin, Gladstone,
James Fergusson, Hamerton, and Frances Power Cobbe. The roll of Vic-
torian poets includes Tennyson, the Brownings, Keble, Faber, Matthew
Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Lord Houghton, Aytoun, Bailey, Swinburne,
William Morris, and the Rossettis. Among essayists and critics we may name
John Wilson, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey, Helps, Douglas Jerrold, Dr. John
Brown, Peter Bayne, and John Morley. Invaluable service has been done
to literature by such workers as Robert and William Chambers, Charles
Knight, John Kitto, J. Payne Collier, Alexander Dyce, Halliwell-Phillips,
Samuel Smiles, William and Philip Smith, and W. W. Skeat. Is it more than
a coincidence that this reign has developed almost a complete literature by
women ? Witness the names of Mary Somerville, Harriet Martineau, Frances
Power Cobbe, Mrs. Betham-Edwards, Mrs. Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke,
Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Ingelow, Mrs. Oliphant,
Mrs. Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Mrs. Ritchie, Mrs. Craik, and Miss Yonge.

Some of the ecclesiastical landmarks in the history of this reign have
been the culmination of the Tractarian movement in Oxford, the seces-
sion of Newman, Manning, Faber, and others to the Roman Catholic
Church, and the rise of the Broad Church party ; the establishment of a
Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1859, and the disestablishment of the Irish
Church ; the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, the Revision
of the English Bible, at the instance of the Convocation of Canterbury, and
the great development of missionary work both at home and abroad. Note-
worthy names connected with these latter movements have been Lord
Shaftesbury * and Samuel Morley, and the missionaries, Livingstone, Duff,
and Robert Moffatt. Among theological and ethical writers we may specify
Maurice, Newman, Pusey, Bishops Wilberforce and Colenso, Archbishop
Trench, Dean Alford, Principal Tulloch, Conybeare and Howson, Isaac
Taylor, Doctor Chalmers, Fairbairn, and Henry Rogers.

THE REFORM OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY.

Last winter there appeared in Leipsic an anonymous pamphlet, Zur
Reform des akademischen Lebens,\ which attracted considerable attention in
the newspapers, and fairly expressed the character of the agitation now in

*The Duke of Argyll has recently said in Parliament, that “the social reforms of the
last half century have been due mainly to the influence, character, and perseverance of one
man — Lord Shaftesbury.”

t Zur Reform des akademischen Lebens, Wider Duellzwang und Verbindungstyrannei.
Verlag von Alexander Dunker in Leipzig. 1885.

278

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

progress against the abuses of German university life. The attack is a
strong and general one upon the student societies, and we may read between
the lines that the principal animus of the author is against the smaller
universities, since it is well known that the students attending these are, pro-
portionately, more given to the traditional customs, das Raufen und Saufen,
than those of Berlin or Leipsic. The author first dwells upon the stim-
ulating effect of scientific and literary societies where, in the evening, the
student, having sat before his professors during the day, renews the dis-
cussion of his chosen subject with fellow-students whose tastes are similar
and whose knowledge and ability are on a par with his own. From such
motives and from the social instinct, as well as for political purposes, have
sprung from time to time the existing societies. But, unfortunately, in many
societies founded centuries back, the original purpose has become a dead
letter, and the written constitutions, instead of advancing, are overgrown with
a mass of antiquated laws in which a false code of honor, retaliation, and
social exclusiveness are the most prominent features, embodying all that is
worst from the past and none of the spirit of the present. Here belong
most of the color-bearing {Farben tragende) or duelling societies, in the first
rank of which are the Corps. They are recruited partly from the wealthiest
commercial class, partly from members of similar organizations in the
schools, while the better element are men of moderate means from the
best strata of society. To the Fuchs, fresh from the gymnasium, the mem-
bers of these societies, surrounded by a halo of secrecy, with their color
insignia and bravado, pass for the ideal and only genuine students ;
under pressure of solicitation he joins their ranks, ignorant of the bind-
ing nature of the entrance pledge, or that he must conform to a set of tra-
ditional ideas and practices which may be wholly foreign to his previous
tastes and training. He finds it the fashion to abuse Bismarck and the
Government, and make light of “ patriotism.” He must carefully look after
his dress, never carry a book through the streets, hold aloof from “ second
class ” students, and, as for lecture-going and study, they are laughed at as
“philistine exertion,” for which, in fact, he has no time. Touches of con-
science are quieted by the immediate round of dissipation and the “ duties ”
of the Corps which he enters ; Friihschoppen, Nachmittagsbummel, and Abend-
kneipe leaving leisure only for the cultivation of fencing.

The remarkable influence, amounting to despotism, enjoyed by the
duelling societies, which generally comprise not more than one-seventh of
the whole student body, is in part their inheritance from the period when
they embraced much larger numbers, in part it is due to the passive en-
durance of the non-society majority, but chiefly to the terrorism of the duel.
Spreading from the Corps, this duel-coercion {Duellzwang) has gradually
compelled other student societies, in defence of their good standing, either *
to adopt the honor code and the duel, or to forego the public wearing of
their colors and thus retire into a subordinate position in the estimation of
the university. The absurd principle of this honor code is well known.

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

279

It is not necessary to follow the author into the details of the three kinds of
duels — the genuine duel, which is not peculiar to, or even common in, the
university, and the distinctively university forms, the Bestimmungsmensur,
between friends or friendly societies, which keeps the student in practice for
the more serious Kontrahage, between members of rival societies. These
are parodies of the real duel, rarely ending fatally, the most serious effects
of which are not bodily injuries, but the baser qualities of character they
cultivate, the brutal type of student which they raise to leadership, and the
prominence given to physical over moral courage. Is the student, who is
brought up under this false code to a stoical indifference to pain, training for
the sympathetic art of the physician, for the statesman, with his feeling for
the sufferings and needs of the people, for the teacher who shall train younger
minds ? True, among the best elements of the Corps are men with the spirit
and independence to issue from this ordeal of dissipation and duelling unhurt,
but the larger number never recover from the long stifling of true and ele-
vation of false ideals, and carry the mark into the professions and society.
The author tacitly admits that the best material of the university is largely in
the Corps. Among the passive majority of non-members is found the other
extreme class, composed of the model students, the Musterschiiler, who go
through the university as through a treadmill of daily lectures with the ex-
amination at the end, neither looking to the right nor left at the questions of
the day ; they obtain their degree and pass to the monotony of business and
the beer table. The reform of academic life must be in the regeneration of
the societies, in their breaking away from the mass of traditional practices
which now encumber them.

Happily, in Bonn, Konigsberg, Strasburg, Heidelberg, and elsewhere
a reaction is gathering strength, which promises sooner or later to free the
societies of these fetters. This is seen, first, in the revival of interest in the
distinctively scientific and literary societies ; second, in the fact that ques-
tions in the foreground of public life are also beginning to take hold upon
student circles ; third, the almost extinct flame of national feeling is
brightening. The national union is a reality, the highest ideal of the Ger-
man Student Society should now be to forward the progress of reform in
home government.

LOWELL’S DEMOCRACY AND OTHER ADDRESSES.*

The distinguished and ever welcome author of My Study Windows
and Among My Books again invites us to his study and his library. The
series of essays before us suggestively opens with such a paper as we might
expect from an American minister at the Court of St. James, and closes, as
well, with an article rightfully expected from an accomplished scholar and
author. Within the limits of these two discussions, entitled, respectively,

* Democracy and Other Addresses. By James Russell Lowell. Houghton, Mifflin &
Co., New York and Boston, pp. 245, 1887.

28o

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

“ Democracy ” and “ Harvard Anniversary,” are included two specifically
memorial addresses, “Garfield” and “ Stanley,” while the five remaining
papers, “ Fielding,” “ Coleridge,” “Books and Libraries,” “Wordsworth,”
and “ Don Quixote ” are more distinctively literary, and are thus finely in
keeping with the governing quality of the author’s mind.

In the opening paper it is interesting to note the signal illustration pre-
sented of what Mr. Whipple has termed Literature and Life. As we turn
the pages, we are at a loss to determine which is the more apparent, the
practical political wisdom of the man of affairs or the delicate scholarly dis-
cernments of the man of letters. From first to last, the discussion is as fine
an example of conciliatory address as there is extant. Fearless in its utter-
ance of what the author felt at the time to be the truth, it is, yet, so hap-
pily conceived and expressed that every Englishman who heard it thought
better of the British Constitution than ever before, and better, also, of that
great democratic commonwealth across the sea, of which the invited speaker
was an official representative. Of the two memorial addresses, “ Garfield ”
and “ Stanley,” suffice it to say that nothing could have been more graceful
and appropriate. Tender in tone and overflowing with that heartfelt sym-
pathy so germane to the hour of common international sorrow, just enough
was said to hallow the memory of the distinguished dead, and once again to
seal more firmly than ever the growing comity of the two English peoples.

To the critical judgment of Fielding and his place in English letters we
find it difficult to give our fullest assent. Agreeing, in the main, with what
the author states as to his sincerity, humor, keenness of observation, and ex-
cellence of style, we cannot accord him that possession of genius which Mr.
Lowell sees fit to accord, while we emphatically dissent from what seems to
us to be a somewhat studied attempt to justify before the world of letters
the so-called literary morality of the author of Tom Jones. The paper on
Coleridge, brief as it is, presents him in his true light as poet and proser,
translator and critic, philosopher and man, and but expresses our oft-re-
peated experience when it speaks of the abiding impress that Coleridge
has made upon all those who aim to understand him. The monograph that
follows on “ Books and Libraries ” is packed to the full with common sense
and educated sense, and is to be especially commended to American under-
graduates as a helpful guide in literary reading. We are told, only as a
lover of books can tell us, what we are to find in them and do with them ;
that, in the phrase of Wordsworth, they are “ a substantial world ” ; that
literature is one thing and printed matter quite another ; that books are
useless save as they make thinkers, and that it is only “ the supreme books ”
of any literature that should attract and absorb us. In his review of Words-
worth he states, in a few terse sentences, the very secret of his limitations
when he says, that he was “too insular and parochial,” “great in passages,”
possessing more of “the vision, than of the faculty divine.” With equal
terseness he gives us the secret of his strength, as he states that he will always
“allure the finer natures of every generation,” and have something for them

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

281

in their hours of spiritual need which no other English bard can so well
supply. In “ Don Quixote,” the critic becomes the veriest enthusiast as he
sits entranced in the view of the exuberant richness of Spanish romance.
With all his superb wealth of imagery and diction, he is scarcely able to
express what he owes and what the world of letters owes to the gifted
Cervantes. Once again, Sancho and Rozinante are as real as life, and the
serio-comic is at its climax.

It is in the closing paper of this series, however, that Mr. Lowell is at his
best. Home again at Harvard, in the presence of as notable an audience as
the living generation of Americans has seen, with two centuries and a half of
Harvard’s history behind him, and midway between the old and the new in
American education, he speaks as a man of letters to men of letters, as an
educator to educators, and under a profound conviction of the gravity of the
hour. As he reviews in graphic detail the bitter struggles of the early colo-
nists in their efforts to establish Christian institutions ; as he offers fitting trib-
ute to those “ simple and godly men ” who, with all their faults and possible
narrowness, may well put to the blush the best of their descendants, we feel
bound, on the one hand, to reverence their memory as never before, and, on
the other hand, we receive a new and deeper stimulus to take up the work
that they laid down, and reassert the vital union of Christianity and culture.

Of the literary style and spirit of these collected essays nothing better
can be said than this, that Mr. Lowell wrote them. Clear, cogent, and manly
in their utterances, they are marked throughout by that peculiar fineness of
touch and beauty of form that are as natural to their author as fragrance is
to the flower. As we read them, we understand in full what Mr. Stedman
means when he terms Mr. Lowell “ our representative man of letters,” and
what Mr. Lowell himself means when he speaks “ of that exquisite some-
thing called style.” A literary artist in the best sense, when he utters his
thought he utters it in its final form, and we marvel as we read. He has
done in prose what Tennyson and Swinburne have done in verse, carried
the art of expression well-nigh to its possible perfection, and has done, more-
over, what neither of the English poets has so well done, evinced the in-
separable relation of literary art to what Bacon has quaintly termed “ the
mental stuff ” behind it. James Russell Lowell is more than a writer. He
is the expresser and interpreter of ideas in the choicest forms of his na-
tive tongue. He has been called by his critics and is known among us as
a master of English speech and style. Is he not, we may add, in academic
phrase, the Head Master in our American School of Literary Art ?

ALEXANDER’S PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY.*

A POSITIVE service may be rendered to philosophy by a clear and
satisfactory statement of its problems and the difficulties which beset

* Problems of Philosophy. Archibald Alexander, Professor of Philosophy in Columbia
College. New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1886.

282

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

their solution. This service Professor Alexander attempts in his little
volume of one hundred and seventy pages. There are three possible
methods of treating metaphysical questions, says the author in his intro-
duction, the sceptical, the dogmatic, and the critical. The last alone is
free from fatal defects and capable of fruitful application. The volume
then passes in review a number of the great problems of contemporary phi-
losophy, and closes with a suggestive chapter on “ The Doctrine of Cause
and Effect.”

We believe that Professor Alexander has succeeded in throwing light
on many of the questions discussed. His book is marked, however, by
certain minor defects, which it is our ungracious task to point out. The
disjunctive method which he employs so extensively is a keen and effective
weapon. But its value depends on an exhaustive statement of alternatives.
Here, we think, the author fails in several instances. In the discussion of the
human will he says : “ If the will is free, it is not conditioned by any ante-
cedent motive. If the presence or absence of any motive affects the action
of the will, there is no freedom.” As a matter of fact the profoundest
ethical thinking of the time has been called forth by a third alternative,
namely, the possibility of freedom under the law of motive. Again, in treat-
ing of “ God and the Principle of Right,” the author says ; “ If we assert
that the holiness of God conditions his will, we must conclude that the
essence of holiness is independent on the divine volition, and that God
must will according to the principle of holiness, which elevates that prin-
ciple to supremacy and dethrones Deity.” But surely the dilemma may be
avoided by identifying holiness with the divine nature. Willing according
to the principle of holiness is, in that case, willing according to the divine
nature, and Deity is not dethroned. These logical slips detract somewhat
from the value of the discussions, and impart to the book a slight tinge of
dogmatism. Other faults of less importance are the meagreness of some
of the discussions, and an occasional tendency to over-subtlety in logical
distinctions.

These faults are greatly outweighed, however, by the positive merits of
Professor Alexander’s book. Those who have learned to associate philos-
ophy with obscurity will be agreeably disappointed by the crystal-like clear-
ness of the author’s thought. There is never any room for doubt as to his
meaning. The style of the book is a model of simplicity and precision.
One derives a positive pleasure from such clear-cut sentences. Every
page betrays the well-trained reasoner and the lucid thinker. In his
concise statement of problems Professor Alexander has performed a good
service to philosophy. His discussions are remarkably free from hack-
neyed phrases, and are highly suggestive throughout. We hope that the
author will not stop here, but that he will in a future volume devote his
trained intelligence to the solution of some of the problems he has so clearly
stated.

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

283

RICHARDSON’S AMERICAN LITERATURE,*

Histories of literature have won an honorable place in the great his-
toric field. Under the application of a true philosophy of history, they
have become valuable adjuncts to historic studies in their broader aspects
and relations. In place of dry manuals crammed with mere statistics about
authors and their works, we have now a vitally historic treatment of all
great literary movements, ancient or modern, which, by a free use of all
side-lights from race, climate, political, social, and religious conditions,
secures for literature its true recognition as a factor in the problem of civili-
zation.

Professor Richardson’s work follows this line of literary investigation. It
is evident that, in his opinion, his predecessors, as historians of American
literature, have not always employed a true “ perspective.” His introduc-
tory chapter is, accordingly, a discussion of what should be the “ perspective
of American literature.” “ . . . Does it not remain true,” he says, p. xvii.,
“that some critics have bestowed an unwarrantable amount of time upon
writers of humble rank and small influence, simply because they were
early ? ” Designed or undesigned, so far as this criticism has force, it bears
directly upon Professor Moses Coit Tyler’s earlier work in the same field.
And while commending Mr. Edmund Stedman’s Poets of America, as mark-
ing a period in the literary progress of the country, the comment is made on
his work that “ he has partly failed to indicate our emergence from colonial-
ism and provincialism by his too kindly insertion of many names of little
rhymers and poetesses, who are beginning to be covered by the cloud of
oblivion or who have never emerged from obscurity.” There is force un-
doubtedly in this criticism. As Professor Richardson says very well, “ the
history of literature is one thing, bibliography is quite another.”

We may go further, and say, the history of intellectual development in
America is one thing, the history of American literature is quite another.
The tendency in writing such histories has been too strong for claiming
as literature what does not really belong to it. The lines need to be more
sharply drawn, and the classification made more exact. The work under
review has been undertaken with truer conceptions of what a history of
literature should be than have often prevailed. Still, while commending
earnestly the limitations which Professor Richardson has put upon his his-
toric method, our query would be whether he has narrowed the scope of
his own work sufficiently. If, as he says, “ practically our literature is only
about eighty years old,” the question will be asked, “ Does it then need two
volumes of 500 pages each in order to give its history ? ” And when he in-
cludes the name of Samuel Sewall among the authors whom it is necessary
for the student to know thoroughly for the purpose of comparative criticism,
has he not erred in making the pages of that garrulous old diarist of any

* The Development of American Thought. By Charles F. Richardson. New York;
G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1886.

284

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

consequence whatever as a condition precedent to the growth of our
literature ?

There is too much of irrelevant matter, or matter, if not wholly irre-
levant, too remotely connected with any genesis of our literature. Thus, in
his discussion of the race-elements in American literature, the American
Indian is introduced. We have specimens of what is called his “intellectual
output,” i. e., his poetry or his legends, preceded by a discussion of his char- ^
acter. But Professor Richardson has failed to show how, save as a theme
for our novelists or poets, the Indian has had anything whatever to do with
the development of American literature. If his claim is true for the Amer-
ican Indian, why not for the Southern negro ? He, too, has a place in the
pages of our writers, not less conspicuous than that of the Indian. Witness
Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mr. Harris’s Uncle Remus. Again, we have, pp.
142-145, a somewhat extended estimate of Edwards’s doctrine of the Will —
in a history of philosophy or theology quite in place, but somewhat irrelevant,
to say the least, in this history of literature. We must question, also, the ac-
curacy of the statement that Edwards’s fame now rests wholly * on the famous
treatise (p. 141). Even if Chapter VIII., “ Religion and Philosophy in Later
Years,” be desirable as bringing out the connection of religion and philosophy
with our literary development, we see no reason for not having made it the
closing part of Chapter IV. The unity of discussion is broken, and there is
an introduction of names which have certainly as slight a connection with
literary movements as any in Professor Tyler’s or Mr. Stedman’s histories.
The closing chapter of the volume, “ Border-lands of American Literature,”
is, however interesting, only another instance of yielding to the temptation
which seems to beset all historians of literature. It is these excursions into
border-lands of literature which have diminished the value of their work.
The one thing needful for historians of literature is to distinguish sharply
between the history of thought in the departments of theology, philosophy,
science, and that of literature, properly so-called.

There are also some serious blemishes of the style. Far-fetched and
strained comparisons or allusions like the following disfigure the book :
Characterizing Nathaniel Ward, for his Simple Cobbler (p. loi) as an “Early
New England Sartor Resartus,” a “ pseudo Hans Sachs in prose ” ; Increase
Mather’s “ style [as] inferior to that of the author of the Religio Medici ” (p.
129) ; Cotton Mather as “rivalling John Stuart Mill in early acquaintance
with many books and subjects,” as “in talk ... a sort of lesser Johnson
or Coleridge,” and “in literature a Puritan Burton without his wit” (pp.

1 3 1-2), verges, to say the least, on a serious fault. Sometimes, however, he
drops into the cheap and easy method of estimating men by pointing out
what they were not. Thus, he says of Franklin (p. 175) that he “ possessed
not a spark of the fire which burned in Dante or Savonarola ” ; of Edward
Everett (p. 237), that he “ was not a great creator, not an irresistible destroy-

* The italics are ours.

CRITICISMS, NOTES, AND REVIEWS.

285

er ” ; speaking of Mr. Bancroft’s method in writing history, he says Buckle and
Carlyle would have written very differently. Of course, and so would Gibbon
or Hume or Freeman. To say (p. 359) of “ the literary style in which Emer-
son wrote, that it was not Bacon’s, nor Addison’s, nor Macaulay’s, nor Car-
lyle’s,” is mere surplusage. We note also a coinage of epithets from proper
names which is questionable — “ Edwardsian,” “ Matherian,” “ Landorian,”
and a use of words hardly correct ; “ untidy piece of work ” (p. 134), “wt?-
describers ” (p. 133), “ conditions ” (p. 8), P.D. Gott (p. 399),

possibly a misprint for Ph. D., “ nor with the creeds or convictions ” (p. 142),
“ till toward ” (p. 377). What is a “ chemical trace of Chaucer ” in Holmes
and Lowell, after which we are bidden to ask ? Professor Richardson, in his
literary estimate of such writers as Irving and Emerson, writers in whom
the literary element is chief — shows often a rare and happy insight. In fact,
his book is at its best when pure literature and not its adjuncts, is treated.
Though his style is popular rather than severely classical, it is vigorous,
clear, and never dull. Some will think he has rated Emerson’s poetry too
highly in putting it “among the choicest achievements of American litera-
ture,” and some will think that he has given scant praise to Mr. Parkman’s
histories. But in the main he has shown a discriminating insight and lit-
erary judgment in the treatment of our American literary work, so far as it
has come under his notice in this volume. We shall wait with some inter-
est for the forthcoming volume. We may add that the typographical execu-
tion of the work is excellent.

BOOK NOTICES.

THE STANDARD ORATORIOS. A
Handbook, by George P. Upton. Chi-
cago ; A. C. McClurg & Co. 1887.

More than a few professed oratorios and
other works labelled as sacred music are la-
mentably misnamed. The sanctities of de-
votion which make and enkindle real mas-
ter works in religious music are replaced in
other instances, which lack this spirituality
of impulse, by theatrical effects. The altar,
the cathedral, the worshippers, the religious
reverence vanish, and the glare of footlights
takes their place. In such a work as Ros-
sini’s Stabat Mater, for example, there is
absolutely nothing “sacred” except its li-
bretto— its Latin text and title. The music is
secular. It is opera masquerading in church
costume. To call this “ sacred ” is injurious,
for it leads to a loss of religious appreciation
in art. In fact, as Wagner observed in his
letter on the music of the future, it was the
rise of Italian opera which historically de-
stroyed the old religious Italian music.

Mr. Upton has the one thing most need-
ful for a critic who is to deal with sacred
music. He has appreciative insight into
that devotional spirit which is the deep im-
pulse interior to all truly religious music,
and by which such music must be interpreted
if it is to be intelligible. He is not blind-
ed by all the blare of Berlioz’s four brass
orchestras in the Requiem, but, with full
sympathy for Berlioz’s daring invention and
surpassing technique, still stands by the se-
vere judgment of Hiller against a musician
who “believed neither in a God nor in Bach,”
and yet ventured to call his music religious.
Mr. Upton’s book is inviting in every way,
and unerring in its delineation of the cha-
racteristic features of the standard oratorios.
For those who wish a convenient manual
filled with accurate portraitures it will prove
very useful. Only one mistake, if it be a
mistake, needs to be noted, and that is the
occasional classification of masses under ora-
torios. Mozart’s Requiem Mass is certainly
not an oratorio : if it were, then Mr. Up-
ton ought to have included such other masses
as those of Cherubini and Beethoven.

AMERICAN COMMONWEALTHS.
CALIFORNIA. By Josiah Royce, As-
sistant Professor of Philosophy in Har-
vard College. Boston and New York :
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1886.

Professor Royce has given us a very good
history of California for the period which it

covers — about 1846-1855. He has given a
full account of the conquest, marred by a
somewhat controversial excursus as to Fre-
mont’s connection with it, and of social con-
ditions as they were during the early fever
of gold-mining. With the exception of cer-
tain odd and persistent blemishes of style,
the volume furnishes an excellent record of
the early commonwealth of California.

LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOEL BAR-
LOW. By Charles Burr Todd. New
York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1886.

The comparatively few who have read Bar-
low’s Hasty Pudding know that he was a
poet who would have made for himself a
place in American literature if he had not
been willing to cramp his action by assum-
ing the ponderous armor of which the Co-
lutnbiad is one of the most wearisome ex-
amples. He was a many-sided man — not
only a poet, but a man of business and a
politician ; and this volume is written largely
for the purpose of clearing his character as
a politician. Unluckily, his character as a
man of business is closely dovetailed with his
character as a politician. How did he make
the fortune with which he returned to the
United States? The volume before us ig-
nores the question, but it is a vital one. If
he made it by the surreptitious favors of the
French emperor, there is fair ground for the
accusation that he returned to the United
States as the emperor’s agent ; if not, not.
This volume leaves Barlow’s reputation as
hazy as it found it.

TALKS WITH SOCRATES ABOUT
LIFE. Translations from the Gorgias
and the Republic of Plato. New York :
Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1886.

Any one who makes Plato known to the
masses of the American people does an
immeasurable service in a good cause. Any
translation will not do justice to that won-
derful implement of the human mind, with
its condensed expression and its words fi’’l
of original power — the Greek language ; but
if any style could convey the racy talk of
Socrates or the naive myths and eloquent
sentences of Plato, it is the simple, pure,
idiomatic, quaint Saxon of the translator of
this little volume. The anonymous author
— a lady well known throughout the country
for her charities and her culture — has already
published two little books, cheaply and
beautifully issued by the Scribners, which

BOOK NOTICES.

287

contained the defence and death of Socrates
(The Apology and Crito), his conversations
with Protagoras (entitled A Day in Athens).
These have had a wide circulation, espe-
cially in the rural districts.

The present volume surpasses even the
others in ease and flexibility of style and Sax-
on vigor. We have carefully compared the
Greek with this and Jowett’s translation, and
find this often racier and easier, and always
equally correct.

The book will be useful to the young.
The Gorgias is much more than a treatise
on rhetoric, though even on that trite theme
it has invaluable lessons for our future
lawyers and politicians. It touches on the
highest subjects which can interest the
human mind. Its great question is, ttcSS
fiioorsoy, “ What is the best way of life?”

Plato’s or Socrates’ argument in these
discussions rests on the highest inference or
intuition in moral science known to man :
namely, that the greatest conceivable happi-
ness and health of the human soul arise
from benevolence and truth and justice
and purity ; and, therefore, that the Maker
and Source of this soul must be of like na-
ture. Therefore, if these be axioms, suc-
cess won by wrong is not success, but fail-
ure. Wickedness, however high or gilded
or triumphant, is always and everywhere a
disease and wound and misfortune. And
upon these principles are built, by Socrates,
three theses of transcendent importance :

(i) That it is better to suffer wrong than
to do wrong. (2) That it is better for the
wrong-doer to be punished than to escape
punishment. (3) That it is better always
to be than to seem, and that rhetoric and all
arts should be used only for truth, and not
falsehood.

But, as earthly life does not always prove
these principles, the Divine Prototype has
•constituted a final assize where truth alone
appears, and the soul is judged as it really
is, and goes to that life which is harmonious
to its nature here. There sin appears in its
true light, as a disease and injury, and works
out its natural effects. Such a philosophy is
harmonious with the Christian system.

THE MORALS OF CHRIST. By Aus-
tin Bierbower. Colegrove Book Co.
Chicago: 1885.

It is refreshing to come across a volume
showing so little of the art of the profes-
sional bookmaker, but written in such sim-
ple, nervous, and straightforward English as
Bierbower’s Morals of Christ. Christ’s
moral teachings are considered from a
threefold standpoint, as a departure from
the Mosaic morality, the morality of the
Pharisees and the Graeco-Roman morality.
Christ’s morality departs from that of the
Old Testament in substituting for the neg-
ative restraints of an external law, the free.

positive and spontaneous morality which
springs from an internal principle. It
insists on essentials, such as justice, truth,
kindness and love against the ceremonial
requirements of the Pharisees, and it aims
to substitute a humane, non-resistant, cos-
mopolitan, and unselfish ideal for the ag-
gressive selfishness of the Greeks and
Romans. The morality of Christ was for
the poor and the rich, for the many and
the few, for the weak and humble,
the proud and strong. The author em-
ploys the antithetic method throughout his
book; many of his contrasts are vivid and
striking. He is somewhat disposed to mag-
nify differences and overlook points of agree-
ment, but he has given, on the whole, a fair
outline of Christian morality, which is
brought into more distinct relief by the back-
ground of current morality, in relation to
which Christ’s teachings were so novel and
revolutionary.

KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. Su-
preme Head. An historical sketch, with
an introduction and notes. By Frede-
rick George Lee, D.D. Bums &
Oates, London. Catholic Publication
Society, N. Y. : 1886.

One who did not know something of the
personal history and present status of Dr.
Lee, might be puzzled to find a book written
by a clergyman of the Church of England,
published by a Roman Catholic House in
London and New York, and dedicated to the
memory of Cardinal Fisher.

The fact is. Dr. Lee is a sort of ecclesias-
tical enthusiast, and has a hobby of his
own about “ Corporate Reunion,” a plan by
which he hopes to join together in one — by
secret ordination — the Church of England
and the Church of Rome. To accomplish
this, his darling purpose, he is ready and
willing to give up all that was gained by
the Reformation. He is without doubt a
Roman Catholic in heart and in fact, while
with easy conscience, and without scruple,
he holds his living in the Church of England.

In the light of such facts it is easy to
understand his motive in writing this history
of Edward VI.

All the changes wrought in the Liturgy
or government of the Church were grave
blunders, that should be speedily reformed
backward. The supremacy of the Bishop of
Rome over all Christendom must be acknowl-
edged by all as a Catholic dogma. The
book is written and published in the interest
of such views, and facts are skilfully used,
perverted sometimes, to strengthen his po-
sition and his argument.

Every great social or moral revolution has
its attendant evils, though its results may be
wholly good. The reign of Edward VI. was
a period of intellectual and spiritual revolt.

288

BOOK NOTICES.

And he would be an unwise man who would
stand sponsor for everything that was said
and done in the heats of controversy or pas-
sion. Dr. Lee has seized upon some of the
worst features of the time, and labelled it
history. Only the ignorant and unlearned
can be deceived by it.

SOME PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
OF CARLYLE. By Andrew James
Symington. Alex. Gardner, Paisley,
and 12 Paternoster Row, London. 1886.
i2mo.

A few days ago the writer heard a lady,
who had been reading the Life of Longfel-
low, remark that he was not the kind of a
man whom she most admired — there was too
much sweetness, and not enough spice in
him. Fortunately the world is large enough
to contain people of all possible tastes, and
this lady is representative of a class who are
born to be admirers of men like Carlyle.
Probably three-fourths of his friends derived
three-fourths of their pleasure, when with

him, from that very element of spice in his
conversation, which, since his death, has
been criticised as if it were merely spite. A
wholly-sweet Carlyle would not have been
Carlyle, nor have attracted to his side those
who became his friends. They liked him
for what he was. To show just what he
was, and how he talked, by giving extracts
from his conversations, is the chief object of
Mr. A. J. Symington’s book entitled, Some
Personal Reminiscences of Carlyle, and as
such it forms an interesting addition to the
Carlyle literature. The reader may be
pleased to hear what Mr. Symington, who
knew both Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, has to say
of the relations between them. "If," he
says, of Mrs. Carlyle, “her husband, from
dyspepsia, sleeplessness, or absorption in
study, was sometimes thought by outsiders
to be difficult to live with, there was no if in
her case ; she was difficult to live with, and
manifestly, with a considerable difference for
the worse. Carlyle, first to last, was ever
patient and kind to her . . . whenever

he found out what her wishes really were ;
for with heart and hand he never ceased
loyally to love, honor, and admire her.”

BOOKS RECEIVED,

Of which there may be critical notice hereafter.

Adams. — The Emancipation of Massachusetts, pp. 382. Boston, 1887 ; Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Allison AND Penrose. — The City Government 0/ Philadelphia, pp. 72. Baltimore, 1887: Johns Hop-
kins University.

Bigg. — The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, pp. xxvii., 304. Bampton Lectures, 1886. New York,
z886 : Macmillan & Co.

Bugbee. — The City Government of Boston, pp. 60. Baltimore, 1887 ; Johns Hopkins University.

Channing. — Passages from the Unpublished Manuscripts of William Ellery Channing, pp. no. Bos-
ton, 1887 : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Clark.— The Philosophy of Wealth, pp. xii., 235. Boston, 1886 ; Ginn & Co.

Egleston. — The Land System of the New England Colonies, 66. Baltimore, 1886: Johns Hopkins
University.

Fischer. — Descartes and His School, pp. xvi., 589. Translated by J. P. Gordy and edited by Noah Por-
ter. New York, 1887 : Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Fullerton. — The Conception of the Infinite, pp. 131. Philadelphia, 1887 : J. B. Lippincott Co.

Haweis. — The Story of the Four, pp. xitiv., 203. New York, 1886 : T. Y. Crowell & Co.

The Picture of Jesus, pp. xvi., 271. New Yorfc, 1886 : T. Y. Crowell & Co.

Jewett. — The Normans, pp. xv., 373. New York, 1887 : G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

McCosh. — Realistic Philosophy. Vols. I. and II., pp. 252 and 325. New York, 1887 : Charles Scribner’s
Sons.

MacCulloch. — From Dawn to Dusk, pp. 134. Philadelphia, r887 : J. B. Lippincott Co.

Mommsen. — Provinces of the Roman Empire. Vols. I. and II., pp. xiv., 397 and 396, with eight maps
by Kiepert. Translated by William P. Dickson. New York, 1887 : Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Newton. — Social Studies, pp. 379. New York, 1887 : G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Rylance. — Orthodoxy and the Heathen, pp. 12. New York, 1887 ; James Pott & Co.

Saltus. — The Anatomy of Negation, pp. 226. New York, 1886 : Scribner & Welford.

Taylor. — The Parables of Our Saviour, pp. 445. New York, 1887 : A. C. Armstrong & Son.

Whedon. — Essays, Reviews and Discourses, pp. 352. New York, 1887 : Phillips & Hunt.

Statements, Theological and Critical, pp. 400. New York, 1887 ; Phillips & Hunt.