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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Studies in Literature and History, by Sir
+Alfred Comyn Lyall
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Studies in Literature and History
+
+
+Author: Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 30, 2008  [eBook #25937]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND
+HISTORY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Stacy Brown, Thierry Alberto, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY
+
+by the Late
+
+SIR ALFRED C. LYALL
+
+P.C., G.C.I.E., K.C.B., D.C.L., LL.D.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.
+1915
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In the Second Series of his _Asiatic Studies_ the late Sir Alfred
+Lyall republished a number of articles that he had contributed to
+various Reviews up to the year 1894. After that date he wrote
+frequently, especially for the _Edinburgh Review_, and he left amongst
+his papers a note naming a number of articles from which he considered
+that a selection might be made for publication.
+
+The present volume contains, with two exceptions, the articles so
+mentioned, together with one that was not included by the author.
+
+A large number of Sir Alfred Lyall's contributions[1] to the Reviews
+deal, as might be expected, with India--with its political and
+administrative problems, or with the careers of its statesmen and
+soldiers. He appears, however, to have regarded such articles as not
+of sufficient permanent value for republication, and his selection was
+confined almost exclusively to writings on literary, historical or
+religious subjects. He made an exception in favour of an essay on his
+old friend Sir Henry Maine; but as the limitations imposed by the
+publisher made it necessary to sacrifice one of the larger articles,
+this essay was, with some reluctance, excluded. It dealt chiefly with
+Maine's influence on Indian administration and legislation; and would
+more appropriately be included in a collection of his writings on
+India, should these ever be published.
+
+While Indian official subjects have been excluded, readers of the
+earlier 'Studies' will recognise that many of the writings in this
+volume follow out lines of thought suggested in the earlier works, or
+apply in a larger sphere the results of observations made when the
+author was studying Indian myths and Indian religions in Berar, or the
+'rare and antique stratification of society' in Rajputana. The two
+addresses on religion placed at the end of the volume form the most
+obvious example, but there is a close connection between a group of
+the other articles and the views developed in _Asiatic Studies_.
+
+In the last edition of that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was
+inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views
+'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that
+may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid
+survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through
+the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At
+their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and
+again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and
+there is always an element of history in one particular sort of
+fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of
+'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further
+illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another
+standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'--a short
+address, which it has been thought worth while to reprint, though it
+was not specially indicated by the author for publication.
+
+Several of the other articles contain criticism of a more purely
+literary character; the article on 'Frontiers,' which recounts
+exciting but little-known episodes in the Russian advance in Asia, has
+an important bearing on a branch of Indian policy in which Sir Alfred
+Lyall to the end of his career took a deep interest, and of which he
+had a profound knowledge; and 'L'Empire Libéral' may, it is thought,
+be found to contain much that is of special interest at the present
+time.
+
+These articles have not had the benefit of any general revision by
+their author, but in a few cases he had indicated in the printed
+copies alterations or additions that he desired to be made.
+
+    _The Quarterly._
+    _The Anglo-Saxon._
+    _The Edinburgh._
+    _The Fortnightly._
+
+Except that the two essays on 'Race and Religion' and 'The State in
+its Relation to Religion' have been brought together at the end of the
+volume, the chronological order of original publication has been
+observed. The source from which each article is drawn has in all cases
+been indicated, and this opportunity is taken of acknowledging the
+permission to republish that has courteously been accorded by the
+editors or proprietors of the Reviews concerned.
+
+Permission has also been given to publish the article on 'Sir Spencer
+Walpole' written for the British Academy, and the address on the
+'Reading of History.'
+
+John O. Miller
+
+_December 1914._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                               PAGE
+
+NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS                                   1
+
+ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY                 34
+
+THACKERAY                                                        76
+
+THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST                                       121
+
+HEROIC POETRY                                                   155
+
+THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON                                         177
+
+THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS                                        210
+
+CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY                       263
+
+FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN                                    291
+
+L'EMPIRE LIBÉRAL                                                328
+
+SIR SPENCER WALPOLE                                             368
+
+REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY                               377
+
+RACE AND RELIGION                                               399
+
+THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS      427
+
+INDEX                                                           454
+
+
+
+
+NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS[2]
+
+
+Mr. Raleigh[3] very rightly goes back to mediæval romance for the
+origins of English fiction. In all countries the metrical tale is many
+generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a
+refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has
+become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of _memoria
+technica_ used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the
+heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an
+audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of
+saints--love, fighting, and theology--form the subject matter of these
+stories in verse. They are, as Mr. Raleigh says, epical in spirit
+though not in form: 'they carry their hero through the actions and
+adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds
+done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability
+of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle
+and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came
+Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward
+perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth
+century both of the ancestors of the modern novel--that is, the
+novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and
+the romance of chivalry--appear in an English prose dress.' But the
+genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory
+and pedantic moralisation; and in the _Gesta Romanorum_, the most
+popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated
+from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are
+mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediæval thought and
+mediæval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover
+the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the
+closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'
+
+The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist,
+insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our
+author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the
+seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and
+fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its
+vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves
+skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading
+public--a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a
+self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and
+portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that
+these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for
+the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable
+reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two
+centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and
+developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back
+to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century,
+Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the
+service of her fiction, she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr.
+Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with
+contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and
+character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh holds, however, that
+this attempt was abortive; that it failed at the time; and that the
+great eighteenth-century school of English novelists, with Richardson
+and Fielding at their head, took its rise, quite independently of
+predecessors in the seventeenth century, out of the general stock of
+miscellaneous literature--plays, books of travel, adventures, satires,
+journals, and broadsides--which had been drawn at first hand from
+observation and experience of the various forms of surrounding life.
+
+We are quite ready to agree that the eighteenth-century Novel of
+Manners belongs to a family distinct from that of the Romantic story,
+or is at any rate very distantly connected with it. But when Mr.
+Raleigh goes on to say that the heroic romance died in the seventeenth
+century and left no issue, although it was revived again in the latter
+half of the eighteenth century, to this view we are much inclined to
+demur. Such complete interruptions in the transmission of species are
+as rare in the intellectual as in the physical world; and we prefer to
+maintain that the romance, although it was for a time eclipsed by the
+brilliancy of the writers who described the manners and sentiments of
+contemporary society, was never extinguished, but became transformed
+gradually, by successive modifications of environment, into the modern
+novel of adventure. It is true that Defoe entirely rejected the
+marvellous, while Horace Walpole, fifty years later, dealt
+immoderately in the elements of mystery and wonder; yet,
+notwithstanding these violent oscillations of style and method, we
+believe that the great historical novels of the early nineteenth
+century, and the tales of stirring incident which flourish at the
+present day, descend by an unbroken filiation from the fabulous
+romance of elder times.
+
+Mr. Raleigh does not carry his brief yet instructive history of the
+English novel beyond the time of Walter Scott, with whom, he says,
+'the wheel has come full circle,' the Romantic revival was victorious,
+prose finally superseded verse as the vehicle of adventurous story,
+and realism was wedded to romance. We trust that in some future work
+he will carry on up to a later date his survey of the course and
+currents of imaginative fiction. In the meantime, it may not be
+irrelevant to follow up further and a little more closely the ruling
+characteristics and the formative influences that have contributed
+toward the production of English light literature as it exists at the
+present day.
+
+The novels with which our fortunate generation is so abundantly
+supplied may be divided broadly into two classes, overlapping and
+interlaced with each other, yet on the whole distinguishable as
+separate species--the Novel of Adventure and the Novel of Manners. The
+former class has a very long pedigree. The early romance writer drew
+his incidents from the field of heroic action and marvellous
+enterprise; he revelled in noble sentiments, astonishing feats, and
+the exhibition of all the cardinal virtues in tragic situations; his
+mission was to preserve and hand down to us magnified figures of
+mighty men, or the pictures of great events, as they had impressed
+themselves upon the popular imagination. For such material he was
+obliged to travel abroad into remote countries, or backward to bygone
+ages; but if his images of gallant knights and fair damsels were well
+modelled, if the language was superb, and the deeds or sufferings
+sufficiently astonishing, no one cared about anachronisms,
+incongruities, or improbabilities.
+
+But as the heroic romance dwindled and withered under the dry light of
+precise knowledge and extending erudition, the purveyors of fiction,
+accommodating themselves to a more exacting taste, applied themselves
+seriously to the reproduction of famous scenes and portraits by the
+aid and guidance of historic documents and antiquarian research. The
+modern romantic school, of whom the master, if not the founder, is
+Scott, represented a clear step forward to what is now called Realism,
+and a proportionate abandonment of the classic convention, or the
+method of drawing from traditional or imaginary models. To Scott may
+be ascribed the authoritative introduction of descriptions of
+landscape, of storms, sunsets, and picturesque effects; not the
+artificial scene-painting of Mrs. Radcliffe, but artistic delineations
+of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky which gave depth and atmosphere
+to his dramatic situations. From this period, also, may be dated the
+practice, so entirely contrary to the spirit of true romance, of
+verifying by documentary evidence the details of a story. It was Scott
+who, in the first years of this century, set prominently the example
+of appending copious notes to his stories in verse or prose, wherein
+he displayed his archæologic lore and produced his authorities for any
+striking illustration of manners or characteristic incident. This
+practice, which was largely adopted by others, was at least an
+improvement upon the old unregenerate system of seasoning the
+conversation of warriors and peasants with uncouth phrases picked up
+at random, or trusting to mere fancy or accepted formula for the
+description of battles or of the ways of folk in mediæval castles and
+cottages. But the process savoured too much of the workshop. A novel
+or poem that required an appendix of notes and glossaries must be of
+high excellence to avoid suspicious resemblance to an elaborate
+literary counterfeit, since open and avowed borrowing from
+dictionaries of antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the
+illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's
+fantastic metrical romance of _Lalla Rookh_ the system was carried to
+an extent that now seems ridiculous, for certain passages are loaded
+with outlandish phrases or metaphors that are unintelligible except by
+reference to the notes. Nevertheless the English public, being then
+quite ignorant of the true East, tolerated Moore's sham Orientalism,
+even though Byron's fine poems were just then exposing the difference
+between working up the subject in a library and wandering in Asiatic
+countries. Byron's language seems in the present day turgid, and his
+Greeks and Turks may have a theatrical air, but his splendid
+descriptive passages were drawn by a master hand straight from nature,
+while his colouring, landscape, and costume are usually excellent; so
+that his work also is a distinct movement in the direction of realism.
+Yet it is to be observed that after Byron and Scott the metrical
+romance, that most ancient form of tale-telling, fell rapidly into
+disuse. The fact that Byron's latest poem, _Don Juan_, belonged
+essentially to the coming realistic school, is a significant
+indication of transition; and Scott's abandonment of poetry for prose,
+which was a necessary consequence of his advance toward realism, gave
+its death-blow to the earlier fashion.
+
+By this time, indeed, the conventional writer of adventures, though he
+held his ground up to or even beyond the middle of the century, was in
+a state of incurable decadence. He was losing the confidence of the
+general reader, who had picked up some precise notions regarding
+appropriate scenery, language, and costume in sundry periods and
+divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that
+mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who trampled
+even upon a commonplace book well filled with references to standard
+authorities, insisting upon careful study of the whole environment,
+the dexterous incorporation of details, and delicate blending of local
+colours. Severe pedagogic handling of a historic novel, as if it were
+a paper done at some competitive examination, was too much for the old
+school, which finally subsided into cheap popular editions, making way
+for a new class of writers that adapted the Novel of Adventure to the
+requirements of latter-day taste, to the widening of knowledge, and
+the diversified expansion of our national life. The prevailing
+tendency was now to confine the range of scene and action more and
+more approximately to the contemporary period, to insist on genuine
+materials, and to observe a stricter canon of probabilities, wherein
+the discriminating reader fancied himself to be a judge. The use of
+notes was discarded as contrary to the high artistic principle that in
+fiction everything must resemble reality while nothing must be
+demonstrably matter of fact. The appearance of famous personages must
+be occasional, after the manner of gods in an epic poem; they must not
+be, as formerly, the leading characters and chief actors in the drama.
+And great battles, instead of marking the grand climacteric of a
+story's development, were now merely traversed, so to speak, on their
+outskirts, or were only approached near enough to throw a glowing
+sidelight on certain groups and situations. The gradual adoption of
+these limitations may be traced back to the naval and military novels
+that reflect the traditions of the great French war. No one even then
+thought of writing a romance with Nelson or Bonaparte as the hero, or
+of finishing off in the full blaze of Trafalgar or in the rout of
+Waterloo; although with Marryat and Lever the English reader revelled
+in the dashing exploits or bacchanalian revels of sailors and
+soldiers. Lever did indeed give glimpses of Wellington or Napoleon;
+but his business was with Connaught Rangers and French guardsmen;
+while Marryat and Michael Scott gave us daring sea-captains and
+reckless sailors with inimitable vigour and animation.
+
+But as the echo of thunderous battles by sea and land died away, this
+particular offshoot of modern romance ceased to flourish, and has
+never had any considerable revival. The tale-teller of adventure, like
+his ancestor the epic poet, requires a certain haziness of atmosphere;
+he must have elbow room for his inventive faculty; and he is liable to
+be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let
+loose upon recent events in our day by complete histories, personal
+memoirs, public documents, war correspondence, and all-pervading
+journalism. This is probably the main reason why the Crimean War and
+the Indian Mutiny, which broke for brief intervals the long peace of
+England, have furnished no fresh material contribution of importance
+to the romance of war, either in prose or poetry, to stamp the memory
+of a long weary siege, or of a short and bloody struggle, upon the
+popular imagination. Another reason must be, of course, the
+non-appearance in England of the _vates sacer_; for Tolstoi has shown
+us that within and without Sebastopol there might be found material
+for work of the highest order. However this may be, it is a remarkable
+fact that just about that time the novel of adventure turned back for
+a moment, in Kingsley's hands, to the spacious times of great
+Elizabeth, to the Armada and the legends of filibustering on the
+Spanish main; and at the present time we may observe that the leading
+writer of this school goes back at least a hundred years for the field
+of his best stories. The eighteenth century, whose politics,
+philosophy, and literature seemed to Carlyle's somewhat bookish
+conception to be flat, prosaic, and comparatively uninteresting, was
+in truth for Englishmen pre-eminently the age of energetic activity,
+which touched the high level of romantic enterprise at two points, the
+Scottish rebellions and the exploits of famous buccaneers. Mr.
+Stevenson has reopened, with great skill and success, these mines of
+literary ore that had been discovered but only partially worked by
+Walter Scott. His rare artistic instinct divined the rich veins which
+they still contained; while in other stories his intimate acquaintance
+with actual life and circumstance on the coasts and islands of the
+Pacific Ocean has provided him with those elements of distance and
+unfamiliarity which are essential, as we have suggested, to the
+composition of the novel of adventure. Other less original writers
+have travelled in search of these elements to the Australian bush or
+the outlying half-explored regions of South Africa.
+
+This very cursory survey of the main influences and circumstances that
+have shaped the course and set the fashion of our modern novel of
+adventure may be useful in explaining its actual position at the
+present moment. Scepticism and research have effectually retrenched
+the very liberal credit formerly assigned to romance writing; the art
+now consists in spinning a long narrative out of authentic materials
+which must be disguised or kept hidden; while its leading features are
+a delight in elaborate accessories and that very modern sentiment, a
+horror of anachronism. A few living artists, like Mr. Shorthouse and
+Mr. Stevenson, can still excel under these difficult conditions,
+which have driven a crowd of second-rate novelists into the extreme of
+minute realism. Into this retreat, however, they have been followed by
+a host of readers; for in these days of universal instruction and flat
+uneventful existence nothing satisfies the average mind like
+photographic detail, which is a commodity to be had of every
+industrious or studious composer. As the range of accurate information
+extends, as the dust heap of old records, private as well as public,
+is sifted more narrowly, as the antique habit of taking things readily
+for granted disappears, the novel becomes more and more an arrangement
+of genuine facts and circumstances, interleaved by such fiction as the
+skill and imagination of the author can produce. It may be worth
+observing that this demand for exact verification has affected the use
+of the early chronicles in two contrary ways; they are relied upon
+implicitly or they are arbitrarily discredited, in proportion as the
+facts stated appear credible or not credible to critics or professors
+who are working upon them. All the particulars of a great battle or of
+some famous event that can be gleaned out of some ancient monkish
+annalist, who must always have collected his information by hearsay
+and often after many years, are treated as authentic so long as they
+do not sound improbable; but if they offend against the canon of
+probability set up by a library-hunting student, they are liable to be
+summarily rejected. We may venture upon the conjecture that the true
+result of this process is to assimilate the work of the critical
+historian much more nearly than he would for a moment allow to that of
+a skilful historic novelist. A romancer of insight and imaginative
+power, who studied his period, would be quite as likely to make a
+lucky selection of real incidents, motives, and characters, in a story
+of the Roman Empire or of England under the Plantagenets, as an
+erudite writer of history. Perhaps the best measure available to us of
+what we may believe in regard to far-off times is afforded by
+observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places;
+and this test the novelist is rather more apt, on the whole, to employ
+than the historian.
+
+In the novels, as upon the stage, this demand for minute accuracy of
+scenic or historical details has necessarily elicited an abundant
+supply; though whether the entire picture is rendered much more
+natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be
+questioned. 'La recherche exagérée du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It
+is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a
+life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its
+ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter
+studies archæology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local
+colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The
+result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be
+great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be
+undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of
+motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern
+novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his
+time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is
+moulded by the environment of ideas and circumstances within which he
+lives. The Myth, the Romance, the Historic Novel, each in its
+successive period, did at least this service to later generations:
+they preserved and handed down to us the popular impressions, the
+figures or pictures of great men and striking events, as they were
+reflected upon the imagination of subsequent ages. It can never be
+discovered, and it does not very much matter, whether these images
+have any close resemblance to the lost originals; it may be that some
+artists in some periods saw far more clearly than in others. The true
+criterion for estimating the true value of romantic fiction, of tales
+of action and adventure, must be always its artistic and intellectual
+qualities, the question whether it succeeds in filling a broad canvas,
+in dealing with masculine sentiment and stirring action, in striking
+the deeper chords of human emotion and energy.
+
+But the historic novel of our day strives principally after exact
+reproduction, as may be seen even in a book of such incontestable
+talent as _Marius the Epicurean_, and very notably in Archdeacon
+Farrar's book, _Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero_
+(1891), which may stand as the type and complete specimen of Erudite
+Fiction. In his preface he tells us that
+
+     'those who are familiar with the literature of the first century
+     will recognise that even for the minutest allusions and particulars
+     I have contemporary authority. Expressions and incidents which to
+     some might seem startlingly modern, are in reality suggested by
+     passages in the satirists, epigrammatists, and romancers of the
+     (Roman) Empire, or by anecdotes preserved in the grave pages of
+     Seneca and the elder Pliny.'
+
+Here we have reached, in this conscientious explanation of method, the
+extreme point of remoteness from the original spirit of historic
+romance. Archdeacon Farrar's figures and descriptions are worked out
+upon the pattern of a mosaic, by piecing together the loose
+fragmentary bits of our knowledge regarding life and society under
+Nero. A glance at these books shows that they belong to the latest
+school of nineteenth-century fiction, to a period when careful
+scholarly accumulation of accessories and adroit adaptation of history
+have taken the place, not only of convention and clumsy invention,
+but also of the free untrammelled handling of types and traditions
+which gave freshness and originality to the simpler forms of early
+romance.
+
+We believe, then, that these attempts at exact reproduction, this
+method of the multiplication of particulars, involve a fallacy, and
+are detrimental to the more enduring forms of art. But the people is
+willing to be deceived; the general reader has acquired a taste that
+must be gratified; with the result that the elder romancers in prose
+and verse, including Scott and Byron, are falling out of fashion with
+the middle classes, though Scott holds his own in the sixpenny
+edition. The rule of Realism is becoming so despotic that the story of
+adventure is reverting more and more to that shape which lends itself
+most completely to life-like narrative, the shape of a Memoir. And it
+may be pointed out accordingly that in France the Editor of Memoirs
+has lately entered into substantial rivalry with the Novelist of
+Adventure.
+
+It must have been noticed by those who attend to the course of French
+literature, that of late years the publication of Memoirs relating to
+the period of the Revolutionary war, and especially of the First
+Empire, has rather suddenly increased. The causes are undoubtedly to a
+considerable degree political, connected with the reorganisation of
+the French army and navy, which has revived the military ardour of the
+nation, and has given an edge to the deep-seated spirit of rivalry
+with Germany on land and with England at sea. Whatever immediately
+interests a nation gives a sharp turn to its literature, and the
+immense success of General Marbot's book, containing the extraordinary
+personal experiences of one who passed through the most famous scenes
+of the heroic era, exactly hit off the public taste at a moment when
+various motives combined to revive the Napoleonic legend. The
+historians of that era had done their harvesting; the crop had been
+reaped, raked, and gleaned; the time was too near and too thoroughly
+known for fiction; and yet there never was a finer field for the
+production of romance. No one can doubt that if Napoleon Bonaparte had
+conquered half Europe, won his tremendous battles, and founded his
+empire in an illiterate prehistoric age, he would have taken
+everlasting rank with Alexander the Great and Charlemagne as the
+central figure of a third world-wide cycle of heroic myths; nor is it
+necessary to read Archbishop Whately's _Historic Doubts_ to perceive
+how readily Napoleon's real story lends itself to extravagant
+myth-making. At a later period he might have been the leading
+character in some prolix and pedantic romance, and still more recently
+his life and deeds would have been built up into the scaffolding
+within which the historic novelist used to construct his love idylls,
+his tragic situations, or even his illustrations of some social
+theory. All these methods and devices have become obsolete; and though
+the spirit of hero-worship that animated those who listened to the
+ancient tales still possesses mankind at certain seasons, Romance must
+now submit to the hard conditions of modern Realism. In this
+predicament it finds a new and satisfactory embodiment in the form of
+Memoirs concerning the great Emperor and his companions, which
+dispense copious anecdotes of his court and camp, his sayings and
+doings, his domestic habits, his private manners and peccadilloes. If
+these particulars can be served up as sauce to the description of
+mighty events, the contrast renders them all the more savoury. But
+there is now a large class of readers who care less about Jena and
+Austerlitz than for such books as _Napoléon Intime, Napoléon et les
+Femmes_, which have all the attraction always possessed by the
+intermixture of love and war, and by the blending of arms with amours
+in the conventional style of historic fiction. The lowest depth is
+reached when the reminiscences of an Emperor's valet, to whom he is
+still a kind of hero, are served up with that succulent dressing of
+vivid particularity which is swallowed with relish because it brings
+down a great man to the level of the most trivial experience.
+
+How far these Memoirs are genuine in the sense which makes them so
+attractive--that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great
+man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by
+his intimates--must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True
+reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose
+together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent,
+clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and
+setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a
+solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of
+them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the
+very latest type, such as Zola's _Débâcle_, which contains a very
+strong and pervading mixture of pure historical fact.
+
+But whatever may be the exact proportion of authenticity which this
+class of Memoirs can justly claim, they completely fulfil the prime
+conditions of popularity prescribed for the modern novel, which must
+work out minute details with the greatest possible resemblance to
+actual life and circumstance. Upon this ground, indeed, the ablest
+professors of fiction might despair of competing with those who
+exhibit a mighty man of valour in undress, who lead us where we may
+hear him talk, watch him eat or shave, and study his conjugal
+relations. It is to be feared that if the multiplication of such
+Reminiscences continues, they will seriously trench upon the province
+of the novelist, who will be left no scope for the employment of his
+craft in a field that has been thoroughly ransacked, and who must
+inevitably retire before writers who have discovered the art of making
+truth quite as amusing as fiction, than which it must always be more
+interesting. The brilliant success of Marbot's Memoirs, which were
+undoubtedly written by himself, seems to have warmed into activity and
+circulation various other volumes of similar reminiscences that must
+have been hibernating for one or two generations in the family
+archives, or have otherwise fallen into temporary oblivion; for in
+many cases one is inclined to wonder why authentic documents of such
+value and interest were not sooner produced.
+
+The latest example of this class of Memoirs, belonging to the
+Revolutionary or Napoleonic cycle, is to be found in the _Adventures_
+of A. Moreau de Jonnés, who died in 1870 at the age of ninety-two,
+having been for fifty years a member of the Institut and a great
+authority on statistics. 'We should never have supposed,' says M. Léon
+Say in his preface to this book, 'that Moreau had been the hero of
+warlike adventures, or that he might possibly have been placed in a
+line with Marbot.' The men of M. Say's generation who knew Marbot were
+quite unaware, he adds, that here was a naval and colonial Marbot,
+whose fighting life was one of the strangest of stories. M. Say's
+preface seems to be intended as a guarantee of this story's
+authenticity, though he notices casually the remarkable fact that 'on
+every occasion when Moreau is on the brink of destruction, it is his
+luck to be saved by a pretty girl'; also that 'a charming
+portrait-gallery might be made of the women who, between 1793 and
+1805, rescued this hardy rover, who was both sailor and soldier, from
+death by sword or sickness in divers parts of the world,' from the
+West India Islands to the banks of the Thames. His guarantee must be
+accepted; yet if this book had not been the genuine autobiography of a
+known personage, there would really be nothing to distinguish it from
+the historic novel, in which an imaginary person, such as Thackeray's
+Esmond, describes well-known scenes of history as an eye-witness and
+actor in them. Moreau was present at the great naval engagement of
+June 1, 1794; at the hanging of Parker, the ringleader of the famous
+mutiny at the Nore, when he was saved by Parker's widow; he was in
+Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed
+with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some
+marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion
+of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony
+in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in
+competition with literature of this class.
+
+'Times are changed,' observes M. Léon Say in his preface. 'The taste
+of the public of our own day grows more and more keen for the romance
+of the cloak and rapier, when the heroes relate their own adventures.
+The authentic Memoirs of the d'Artagnans of our own century are now
+preferred even to the works of Alexandre Dumas, so dear to our youth.'
+Undoubtedly they must be preferred, for being more real than the most
+realistic novel, and just as full of fascinating adventures, the
+Memoir is superior precisely at those points which have given the
+modern romance an advantage over its more conventional predecessors.
+There may be consolation for the novelist in the reflection that the
+fund from which these Memoirs are drawn must soon be running low,
+whereas the resources of fiction are comparatively inexhaustible. In
+the meantime one result, already perceptible, will be that the novel
+will tend more and more to imitate the personal memoir, by reverting
+to the autobiographical form which, since Defoe's day, has always been
+fiction's most effective disguise, permitting the author to efface
+himself completely, while it gives the whole composition an air of
+dramatic vigour. It will have been observed that the most vivid
+modern English romances, from _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_ to
+_John Inglesant_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Master of Ballantrae_,
+are all written as the direct narratives of men who have taken a
+comparatively secondary or even humble share in great transactions. On
+the other hand, the famous characters who stand in the foremost line of
+history, and who were the delight and ornament of the elder romances,
+must now be struck out of the repertory of the modern story-teller,
+since the public now will no longer tolerate ancient or mediæval heroes,
+while the great men of recent times have been too often photographed.
+The only novelist of our own day who has attempted with some success to
+draw thinly-veiled portraits of contemporary celebrities is Disraeli,
+and his whole style and treatment show him to be a true-bred
+descendant of the old romantic stock.
+
+Our argument is, therefore, that various causes and tendencies, the
+change of environment, the limitation of the average reader's
+experiences, his taste for accuracy, his rejection of tradition,
+convention, anachronism and improbabilities, the extension of exact
+knowledge and the critical spirit, have all combined to limit the
+sphere of the Novel of Adventure and to check the free sweep of its
+inventive genius. To these conditions the first-class artist can
+accommodate himself; but for the average writer they serve fatally to
+expedite his descent into the regions of everyday life, among all the
+emotions known to middle-class folk, from murders, bankruptcies, and
+railway accidents down to their religious doubts and the psychology of
+their love-making.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Against all these adverse circumstances the Novel of Adventure strives
+gallantly, and, of late years, with such conspicuous success, that it
+is difficult to decide whether the tide of popular inclination has not
+turned against the Novel of Manners. This branch of the great
+story-telling family has, as we know, a long descent and an
+illustrious pedigree, although for our present purpose we need not go
+back further than the eighteenth century, to _Gil Blas_ in France and
+_Tom Jones_ in England. It will be found that these masterpieces
+consist principally of a series of scenes and comical or semi-tragical
+situations, rather loosely strung together on the thread of the
+experiences undergone by the principal personages. The main object is
+not so much ingenuity of plot as the presentation with much humour,
+some strokes of caricature, and a touch of pathos, of morals and
+manners, of public abuses and private vices, the way of living and
+standard of thinking, the distinctive prejudices and ingrained
+beliefs, that characterised different classes at a time when their
+ideas and habits were often in sharp contrast. The sketches are
+admirably done, the conversation is full of wit, the whole work may be
+relied upon as a faithful though coarsely drawn picture of
+contemporary society. Fielding constantly makes a halt in his
+narrative to moralise and discourse ironically with the reader, in a
+vein that was reopened a century later by Thackeray, and by him pretty
+nearly exhausted, for at any rate it has since been closed.
+
+Mr. Raleigh's book contains a just and discriminating appreciation of
+Fielding's place in the line of great novelists, and of the strong
+formative influence that his work exercised over the early development
+of what is now called Naturalism. This note is struck, as he points
+out, in the invocation at the beginning of the thirteenth book of _Tom
+Jones_, addressed to Experience, to the inspiration which is derived
+from what one has actually seen and known among all sorts and
+conditions of men:
+
+     'Others before him had seen and known these things, but in
+     Fielding's pages they are for the first time introduced, with no
+     loss of reality, to subserve the ends of fiction; common life is
+     the material of the story, but it is handled here for the first
+     time with the freedom and imagination of a great artist.'[4]
+
+And here, we may add, is the fruitful and vigorous stock out of which
+has since radiated that immense growth of realistic novels which now
+tends to overshadow and supersede the earlier species of romance
+literature.
+
+But Fielding's style is unblushingly masculine; his scenes are in the
+street, the tavern, the sponging-house, and other places
+unmentionable. By the end of his century the Novel of Manners had
+fallen into very different hands, and to these it owes mainly the
+shaping, both as to tone and subject, that decisively laid down its
+course of future development. The electricity of that stormful period
+which comprises the last years of the eighteenth and the opening of
+the nineteenth century seems to have generated an efflorescence of
+high original capacity in the department of imagination as well as of
+action. Nevertheless nothing is more remarkable, probably nothing was
+less expected, than the sudden accession of women to the first rank
+of popular novelists. Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen (not to
+mention Miss Ferrier), entered upon the same field from different
+points and divided it among them. They may be said to have virtually
+created the decent story of contemporary life, the light satirical
+pictures of familiar folk, the representation of ordinary society in
+the form of a delicate comedy, which rose to the pitch of racy humour
+when the scenes and characters were Irish. Under the touch of this
+feminine genius convention vanishes altogether; the painting is direct
+from nature; the plot and incidents are saturated with probability;
+the personages might be met at the corner of any street in town or
+village; the very voice, gesture, and language are almost ludicrously
+familiar. No heroics, not much use of the pathetic; very slight
+landscape-painting and background; no psychology; there is no
+systematic attempt to introduce, under the story's disguise, the
+serious discussion of social, political, or polemical questions.
+
+For an artist who deals so largely with country life, the absence of
+landscape-painting in Miss Austen is very noticeable. The fine vein of
+satire that pervades all her work, the constant presence of the human
+element, leave her no room for expatiating on the aspects of nature;
+and indeed she was manifestly impatient with enthusiasts over the
+picturesque. She only touched upon such tastes in order to bring out
+character:
+
+     '"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape
+     scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and
+     tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first
+     defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind;
+     and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could
+     find no language to describe them in but what was worn and
+     hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."
+
+     '"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the
+     delight in a fair prospect which you profess to feel. But, in
+     return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I
+     like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; I do not
+     like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if
+     they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
+     tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath
+     blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a
+     watch-tower, and a troop of tidy happy villagers please me better
+     than the finest banditti in the world."'[5]
+
+There can be no doubt, indeed, that in the novels of this period two
+main features of the modern story, the word-painting of scenery and
+the analysis of subjective emotions, are conspicuously absent. Yet
+among the manifold causes to which may be ascribed the wide recent
+expansion of the Novel of Manners, we may well reckon the decisive
+impulse that it received from these famous authoresses. They were, in
+fact, the founders of the dominion which women bid fair to establish
+over this class of fiction, where they are already extending it to a
+degree that threatens to evict the men. Various circumstances have
+co-operated toward this curious literary revolution. The conventional
+romance, though apparently flourishing, was in their time on the brink
+of a decline; and as women have never succeeded in the Novel of
+Adventure--for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences
+are opposed to success--they had no difficulty in abandoning a
+decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and
+subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited
+their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and
+writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine
+novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that
+has joined the camp of Manners, to which alliance it may be noticed
+that, with very few exceptions, the women have faithfully adhered. For
+although in the last century Mrs. Radcliffe had revived, as Mr.
+Raleigh observes, the Romance proper, and Miss Jane Porter claimed in
+the first years of this century the honour of having invented the
+historical romance, women have been practically superseded in this
+class of literature, so far as it survives, by men, George Eliot's
+_Romola_ being the only notable exception. The true representatives of
+female novelists are now the leaders of that school which confines
+itself to minute observation, whether of outward facts or inward
+feeling, and which is above all things devoted to the close
+delineation of contemporary society. The analysis of character within
+the range of ordinary experience, the play of civilised emotion, the
+vicissitudes of grief or joy in the parsonage, the ball-room, and the
+village, the troubled course of legitimate love-making, have all
+contributed the congenial material whereby the Novel of Manners
+treated realistically, as the phrase goes, has been moulded by the
+adroit hands of women.
+
+We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have
+appeared in this century were male authors--Thackeray and Dickens. But
+we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English
+fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament.
+Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have
+produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of
+the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think,
+proportionate to the rare and original value of their work. Both of
+them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time
+afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of
+loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty
+that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying
+effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar
+qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary;
+and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the
+popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an
+enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great
+proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the
+lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their
+type and forerunner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example,
+follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion
+and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured
+descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and
+occasionally in the higher walks of society--they are always decorous
+and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or
+adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's
+literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever
+but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations
+and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by
+phonograph, is essentially feminine.
+
+Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished
+for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did
+for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped
+its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure
+as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has
+been since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of
+convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from
+the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts
+and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of
+everyday existence. In _Le Roman Naturaliste_, by M. Brunetière, one
+chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares
+that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of
+_Adam Bede_, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says,
+has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school.
+Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a
+faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her
+mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I
+can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating
+my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious
+quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.'
+But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her
+power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a
+poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital
+relations of common things. In Charlotte Brontë, again, we have
+Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality;
+the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who
+strives against adverse circumstance upon an ordinary, often an
+humble, plane of society, never travelling for a moment beyond the
+possibilities of everyday existence. This ominous dismissal of the
+male hero from his previous position in the centre of the story's
+movement may be taken as a sign that he is not of so much account in
+the sphere of domestic fiction as he was erst in the arena of perilous
+adventure. It is true that mankind is still glorified by Ouida, a
+lady who may yet be occasionally found sitting, almost alone, by the
+shores of old Romance; but with Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss
+Broughton, and even Miss Braddon, the majority of their leading
+characters may be said to be female. And the most deservedly popular
+of our latest novels by women is _Marcella_.
+
+We must not be understood to maintain that the Novel of Manners has
+been, or is being, completely monopolised, as a department of light
+literature, by women, for of course there are many men who are
+achieving success in that field, among whom Henry James holds a high
+place for distinction and delicacy of workmanship. And among certain
+special branches in which women have not as yet competed at all, we
+may mention the Sporting Novel, where provincial manners and the
+humour of the coverside have been portrayed by Surtees with wonderful
+exactitude and a kind of coarse yet irresistible comicality that
+remind one of Fielding. It is true that he never moralises, as
+Fielding does; but then the interjection by the author of moral
+reflections went out, as we have said, with Thackeray. The description
+of landscape drawn from nature occupies large and extending space in
+the latter-day novel of manners, where it is used very sparingly as
+subservient to character or situation, but commonly as an illustration
+or pictorial background. Let us compare the two following extracts.
+The first is from Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_:
+
+     'Now we shall have no more rough road, Miss Crawford; our
+     difficulties are over. The rest of the way is such as it ought to
+     be. Mr. Rushworth has made it since he succeeded to the
+     estate.--Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a
+     disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am
+     glad the church is not so close to the great House as often happens
+     in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There
+     is the parsonage, a tidy-looking house, and I understand the
+     clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are
+     almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the
+     steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to
+     the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still.
+     It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber,
+     but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it
+     for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an
+     ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'
+
+The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+_Marcella_:
+
+     'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care
+     of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some
+     Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow
+     selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing
+     here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there
+     the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing
+     back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent
+     indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of
+     the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular
+     avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last
+     in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate of some
+     importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the
+     trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
+     avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
+     steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
+     lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried
+     with them a confused general impression of well-being and of
+     dignity. Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at
+     the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the
+     end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on
+     either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting
+     the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'
+
+In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the
+writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human
+character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece
+of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture,
+from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is
+excellently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected
+estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and
+might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut.
+Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic
+feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised
+finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element
+of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened
+by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight
+account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that
+may be roused by using language as an instrument for the
+interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself,
+as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are
+told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon
+pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote[6]
+proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and
+vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how
+'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes,
+buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by
+reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river
+winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number
+of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the
+leading lines of the mental picture produced by the words. The
+drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been
+confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the
+pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this
+fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing
+methods.
+
+Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who
+exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one
+can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this
+ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed,
+lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance,
+which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and
+action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it
+reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the
+street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the
+commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in
+writing as in painting; nor can very clever dialogue, ingenious
+situations, variety of style and subject, or even a high average
+morality, preserve such literature from triviality and gradual
+degradation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is the saying of a French writer, that the novel of to-day has
+abjured both the past and the future, and lives wholly in the present.
+We are so far of his opinion in regard to the past, that we doubt, for
+reasons already given, whether the reading public can be induced to
+travel backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even
+though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be
+scrupulously and historically exact. The future is a domain upon which
+the novelist has rarely trespassed; but in close propinquity to it
+lies theologic speculation, and we have not long ago witnessed the
+fascination that can be exercised over a multitude of readers by a
+novel which described the unhappiness brought upon the peaceful home
+of an Anglican clergyman who was driven forth from his parsonage by
+imbibing some tincture of modern Biblical criticism. The sensation,
+for so it must be called, produced by _Robert Elsmere_, illustrated
+the degree to which in these days popularity depends on hitting the
+intellectual level of the general reader, and on touching the fancy or
+the conscience of that very numerous class whose culture is of the
+medium sort, neither high nor low. For while it seems certain that to
+a great many people the views and arguments which overthrew Elsmere's
+orthodoxy and brought him to martyrdom must have seemed profound,
+daring, and novel, to others they are but too familiar and by no means
+fresh. To some of us, indeed, the overpowering effect produced on
+Elsmere's mind by his remarkable discoveries may be not unlike the awe
+and gratitude with which an African chief receives the present of an
+obsolete cannon. But the main reason why the future is no better field
+than the distant past for the modern novelist, is that in both cases
+there is a want of actuality, and that the positive temper of the age
+requires in either case something more definite and verifiable.
+
+It may be affirmed, moreover, as a general observation, that the
+spirit of realism is hostile to the Novel with a Purpose, whether it
+be that species which undertakes to argue or instruct under the cloak
+of agreeable fiction, or that other species, much cultivated by
+Dickens in his later works, which attacks antiquated institutions and
+public abuses in a story so contrived as to expose their absurdity and
+injustice. There is an air of artificiality about such compositions
+which damages the artistic illusion, the photographic rendering of
+actual life, upon which the author relies, because it throws over the
+stage a shadow of his own personality. For one tendency of excessive
+realism is to encourage an approximation between literary and
+theatrical effects, since the whole interest becomes concentrated upon
+figures acting and moving under a strong light in the foreground of
+scenes carefully adjusted, so that anything which betrays the author's
+presence interrupts the performance.
+
+Yet although our contemporary novelist is thus subjected, in respect
+of his period and his repertory, to limitations from which his
+predecessors were free, there has never been a time when English
+fiction has exhibited, in competent hands, greater fertility of
+invention and resource, or so high an average proficiency in the art
+of writing. The vastly increased demand for amusement in modern life
+has stimulated the production of light literature, which is now
+cultivated far more widely than heretofore, like tea, and the market
+is flooded with an article of sound moderate quality. At this moment
+we have in very truth a democracy of letters, for while no mighty
+masters overtop the rest, the number of writers who stand on an
+equality of merit, who can produce one or more excellent stories, is
+very large. Their field has widened with the expansion of British
+enterprise; they can draw their plots, descriptions, and characters
+from the colonies, from Africa, from the South Sea Islands, or from
+India; and it will be observed that not only the tale of adventure,
+but also the quiet story of domestic interiors and family troubles, is
+easily acclimatised, and gains something from a sparing use of variety
+of dialect and landscape. As for the Novel of Adventure, it is drawing
+copious sustenance from these outlying regions. For although it is
+only from first favourites that the home-keeping reader will tolerate
+an elaborate romance about Africa or the Pacific, he has taken a very
+strong liking to short stories of scenes and actions strictly
+contemporaneous, written in a rough, vigorous, and utterly
+unconventional style, which convey to his mind impressions as
+distinctly as a set of pictorial sketches.
+
+We believe that this style, which retains a strong flavour of its
+American origin (it can hardly be dated earlier than Bret Harte), may
+be reckoned to be peculiar to the light literature of the English
+language. We are not aware that it prevails to any extent in other
+countries; for although the short story of love, intrigue, and manners
+in general has flourished from mediæval times, and at this moment is
+almost exclusively confined to these subjects in France, the class of
+works to which we are now referring differs entirely in subject and
+style. In England and America the roving life of the colonies, the
+backwoods, the Western States, and the Indian frontiers has created an
+unique school of realistic fiction in which Mr. Kipling is at this
+moment the chief professor. There is moreover a manifest affinity
+between these short prose narratives and the strain of racy strenuous
+versification upon the quaint unvarnished notions and hardy exploits
+of the bush, the prairie, or the frontier, by which Bret Harte,
+Lindsay Gordon, and again Kipling have attained celebrity. As these
+poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture
+to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to
+modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its
+picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in
+its long evolution. Such a tale will squeeze into fifty or a hundred
+pages what Fenimore Cooper or G. P. R. James would have distended into
+three volumes of slow-moving narrative, whereby infinite labour is
+saved to the hasty and indolent reader of these railroad days.
+
+Here, in short, we perceive the influence of that very characteristic
+school of contemporary art, which we know to have always existed, but
+to which men have recently given the exceedingly modern title of
+Impressionist,--the school of authors who desire to strike the
+imagination vividly and with a few sharp strokes, grouping their
+figures in a strong light, rounding off their compact story upon a
+small canvas, and rejecting every detail that is not strictly
+accessory to the main purpose. Already it is beginning to be said in
+France that Zola with his laborious particularism has passed his
+climacteric of fashion, and that the swift impressionist is sailing in
+on a fair wind of spreading popularity. Now in France, though no
+longer in England, the critics still do their duty; they are not
+merely, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge, the eunuchs who guard the
+temple of the Muses; they are often prolific authors who exercise
+great influence upon public opinion, so that their forecast of the
+course and tendencies of fiction is worth bearing in mind. We
+ourselves are ever a restless, bustling, far-wandering folk, great
+lovers of fiction and travel, who not only carry forth the English
+language into the uttermost parts of the earth, to be moulded in
+strange dialects to queer uses, but also bring back fresh ideas and
+incidents, and various aspects of a many-sided world-ranging life. If,
+as has been often asserted, literature be the collective expression of
+the ideas and aspirations, the tastes, feelings, and habits of the
+generation which produces it, we may not be altogether wrong in
+treating the short highly finished story, whether of adventure or
+manners, as the impress and reflection of modern English society. But
+no operation is more delicate than the endeavour to trace the subtle
+connection between constant modifications of literary form and the
+pressure of its ever-changing moral and material environment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The list of these contributions at page 477 of his _Life_ is not
+complete.
+
+[2] (1) _The English Novel._ By Walter Raleigh. Being a short Sketch
+of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of
+'Waverley.' London, 1894. (2) _Aventures de Guerre au temps de la
+République et du Consulat._ Par A. Moreau de Jonnés. Préface de M.
+Léon Say. Paris, Guillaumin et Cie., 1893.--_Quarterly Review_,
+October 1894.
+
+[3] Now Sir Walter Raleigh.
+
+[4] Page 179.
+
+[5] _Sense and Sensibility._
+
+[6] _The Art of Illustration_, by Henry Blackburn, 1894.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[7]
+
+
+The preservation and posthumous publication of private correspondence
+has supplied modern society with one of its daintiest literary
+luxuries. The art of letter-writing is, of course, no recent
+invention; it reached a high level of excellence, like almost every
+other branch of refined expression in prose or verse, in the older
+world of Rome. Nevertheless, the exceeding rarity of the specimens
+that have come down to us from those times is an important element of
+their value; while in our own day the letters of eminent persons fill
+many book-shelves in every decent library, and their quantity
+increases out of all proportion to their quality.
+
+It may be said, generally, of fine letter-writing that it is a
+distinctive product of a high civilisation, denoting the existence of
+a cultured and leisurely class, implying the conditions of secure
+intercourse, confidence, sociability, many common interests, and that
+peculiar delight in the stimulating interchange of ideas and feelings
+which is one characteristic of modern life. The language of a country
+must have thrown off its archaic stiffness, must have acquired
+suppleness and variety; the writer's instrument must be a style that
+combines familiarity with distinction, correctness of thought with
+easy diction. It is from the lack of these conditions that the Asiatic
+world has given us no such letters; the material as well as the
+intellectual environment has been wanting. For similar reasons the
+middle ages of Europe produced us none of the kind with which we are
+now dealing; the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries have left us
+very few samples of them; and since in this article we propose to
+treat only of English letter-writers, we may affirm that the art did
+not flourish in England until the eighteenth century, when according
+to certain authorities it rose to something like perfection. It is a
+notable observation of Hume's that Swift is the first Englishman who
+wrote polite prose; and Swift is one of the earliest, as he is still
+one of the pleasantest, writers of private correspondence that has
+taken a permanent place in our literature.
+
+We can understand without difficulty why the eighteenth century was a
+period favourable to the growth of excellent letter-writing. There
+were very few newspapers, and those which appeared were low in tone
+and ill-informed--political pamphleteers abounded and the essayists on
+morals and manners were numerous--but it was chiefly by private hands
+that accurate information and ideas were circulated in a small and
+highly cultivated society with an exquisite taste in literature, with
+a keen interest in public affairs, and a very strong appetite for
+philosophic discussion. Side by side with the intellectual conditions
+we may take into account the national circumstances of that age. The
+post was expensive, with a slow and intermittent circulation, so that
+letters, being infrequent, were worth writing carefully and at
+length; while correspondents were nevertheless not separated by
+distances of time and space sufficient to weaken or extinguish the
+desire of interchanging thoughts and news. For it is within the
+experience of most of us that the difficulty of keeping up regular
+correspondence increases with distance; that friends who meet seldom
+write to each other rarely; and that, although letters are most valued
+by those who are far from home and long absent, yet it is precisely in
+the case of prolonged separation that the chain of friendly
+communication is apt gradually to slacken until it becomes entirely
+disconnected. So long, indeed, as men depended for news on private
+sources, there was always a kind of obligation to write; but the
+telegraph and the newspaper have now monopolised the Intelligence
+Department. On the whole, it may be concluded that the art of
+letter-writing flourishes best within a limited radius of distance,
+among persons living neither very near to each other nor yet far
+apart, who meet occasionally yet not often, and who are within the
+same range of social, political, and intellectual influences. Its best
+period is probably before the advent of copious indefatigable
+journalism, before men have taken to publishing letters in the morning
+papers, and when they have not yet acquired the economical habit of
+reserving all their valuable ideas and information for signed articles
+in some monthly review.
+
+It was under these conditions that the letters of eminent men in the
+eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century were
+generally written. In the former century letter-writing was
+undoubtedly a recognised form of high literary workmanship, with close
+affinities on one side to the diary or private journal, and on another
+to the essay. Long, continuous, and intimate correspondence, as in the
+case of Swift and Walpole, gravitated toward the journal;
+dissertations on literature, politics, and manners were more akin to
+the essay; while in the hands of the novelist the journalistic series
+of letters took artificial development into a method of story-telling.
+On the other side, the tendency of epistles to become essays reached
+its climax in the letters of Burke, some of which are only
+distinguishable from brilliant pamphlets by the formal address and
+subscription.
+
+With the nineteenth century begins an era of amusing and animated
+letter-writing. The classic and somewhat elaborate style of the
+preceding age falls into disuse; the essayist draws gradually back
+into a department of his own; the new school reflects, as is natural,
+the general tendency of English literature toward a livelier and more
+varied movement, with a wider range of subjects and sympathies. In his
+letters, as in his poetry, the precursor of the Naturalistic school
+was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy
+and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his
+reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and somewhat commonplace
+society in the English midlands. That poets should usually have been
+good letter-writers is probably no more than might have been expected,
+for imagination and word-power must tell everywhere; yet the list is
+so long as to be worth noticing. Swift, Pope, Gray, and Cowper in the
+last century, and in the present century Scott, Byron, Shelley,
+Coleridge, and Southey, have all left us distinctive and copious
+correspondence. Wordsworth may, perhaps, be classed as a notable
+exception; for Wordsworth's letters are dull, being at their best more
+like essays or literary dissertations than the free outpouring of
+intimate thought. They have none of the charm which comes from the
+revelation of private doubt or passionate affection that is
+ordinarily stifled by convention; they are, on the contrary, eminently
+respectable, deliberate, and carefully expressed. 'It has ever been
+the habit of my mind,' he writes, 'to trust that expediency will come
+out of fidelity to principles, rather than to seek my principles of
+action in calculations of expediency.' This is what the Americans call
+'high toned'; but the metal is too heavy for the light calibre of a
+letter.
+
+Whether Tennyson had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to
+judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it
+will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of
+language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal
+interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite
+legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of
+considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual
+quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's
+character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and
+reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his
+domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and
+what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional
+insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor
+sees fit to let the dead man speak for himself; they may be employed
+as an advocate chooses the papers in his brief, for attack or defence.
+Or they may be produced without commentary, sifting, or omissions, as
+the unvarnished presentation of a man's private life and particular
+features which a candid friend commits to the judgment of posterity.
+Or, lastly, they may be mere relics, not much more in some instances
+than curiosities, valued for much the same reasons that would set a
+high price on the autograph or the inkstand of a celebrated man, on
+his furniture, his house, or anything that was his. In proportion as
+little or nothing is known of such a man's private life, every scrap
+of his writing increases in value; and so a letter of Shakespeare or
+of Dante would be priceless. But of Shakespeare no letter has come
+down to us; and of Dante not even, we believe, his signature; though
+we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion
+and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's
+works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme
+poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains
+to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when
+a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary
+letters upon petty domesticities.
+
+It is evidently impossible to draw a line that shall accurately divide
+the interest that men feel in a celebrated person from the interest
+that they take in his posthumous correspondence; so as to determine
+how far the letters are good in themselves. When the writer is well
+known, he and his writings are inseparable. Yet some attempt must be
+made, for the purposes of this article, to distinguish critically
+between letters that are readable and will survive by their own
+literary quality, as fine specimens of the art, and those which are
+preserved and published on the score of the writer's name and fame,
+with little aid from their merits. In which category are we to place
+the letters of Keats, including those that have been very recently
+unearthed by diligent literary excavation? His poetry is so exquisite,
+so radiant with imaginative colour, that to see such a man in the
+light of common day, among the ordinary cares and circumstances of the
+lower world, is necessarily a descent and a disillusion. He was young,
+he was poor, he had few acquaintances worthy of him; he roved about
+England and Scotland without adventures; his letters were perfectly
+familiar and unsophisticated. As Mr. Sidney Colvin has written, in an
+excellent preface to an edition of 1891, 'he poured out to those he
+loved his whole self indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness,
+ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good
+sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a
+spirit unsurpassed for native gift and insight.' Every now and then
+the level of his easygoing discourse is lit up by a flash of wit, and
+occasionally by a jet of brilliant fancies among which some of his
+finest poetry may be traced in the process of incubation. His whole
+mind is set upon his art; for that only, and for a few intimate
+friends, does he care to live and work; his letters often tell us when
+and where, under what influences, his best pieces were composed; one
+likes to know, for example, that the _Ode to Autumn_ came to him on a
+fine September day during a Sunday's walk over the stubbles near
+Winchester. His criticisms are always good, and their form
+picturesque. He compares human life to a chamber that becomes
+gradually darkened, in which one door after another is set open,
+showing only dim passages leading out into darkness. This, he says, is
+the burden of the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to
+explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though
+he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious
+advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as
+spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas,
+taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence
+in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless
+there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would
+have left any but a most ephemeral mark apart from their connection
+with his poetry.
+
+In the case of other poets, who were his contemporaries, the verdict
+will be different. They are all to be classed, though not in the same
+line, as writers of letters that have great original and intrinsic
+value. Scott's letters exhibit his generous and masculine nature; the
+buoyancy of his spirits in good or bad fortune; and that romantic
+attachment to old things and ideas which hardened latterly into
+inveterate Toryism. Southey's prose writings will probably survive his
+metrical compositions, which indeed have already fallen into oblivion.
+There is life in a poet so long as he is quoted; but no verses or even
+lines of Southey have fixed themselves in the popular memory. And
+whereas the letters of Keats disclose a mind filled with the sense of
+beauty and rich with poetic seedlings that blossomed into beautiful
+flowers, in Southey's correspondence we discern only an erudite man of
+taste labouring diligently upon epics which he expected to be
+immortal. The letters of Byron stand upon broader ground, because
+Byron was so much more of a personage than either Keats, or Southey,
+or Wordsworth. They supply, in the first place, an invaluable, and
+indeed indispensable, interpretation of his poetry, which is to a
+great extent the imaginative and romantic presentation of his own
+feelings, fortunes, and peculiar experiences. Secondly, they are full
+of good sayings and caustic criticism; they touch upon the domain of
+politics and society as well as upon literature; they give the
+opinions passed upon contemporary events and persons, during a
+stirring period of European history, by a man of genius who was also a
+man of the world; they float on the current of a strangely troubled
+existence. In these letters we have an important contribution to our
+acquaintance with literary circles and London society, and with
+several notable figures on either stage, during the years immediately
+before and after Waterloo. They were published in an introduction to
+the works of a famous poet; yet, although they cannot be detached from
+his poetry, they possess great independent merits of their own. They
+echo the sounds of revelry by night; they strike a note of careless
+vivacity, the tone of a man who is at home alike in good and bad
+company, whose judgment on books and politics, on writers and
+speakers, is always fresh, bold, and original. We may lament that the
+spirit of reckless devilry and dissipation should have entered into
+Byron; and the lessons to be drawn from the scenes and adventures in
+Venice and elsewhere, described for the benefit of Tom Moore, are very
+different from the moral examples furnished by the tranquil and
+well-ordered correspondence of our own day. Yet the world would have
+been poorer for the loss of this memorial of an Unquiet Life, and the
+historical gallery of literature would have missed the full-length
+portrait of an extraordinary man.
+
+The letters of Coleridge, like their writer, belong to another class,
+yet, like Byron's, they have the clear-cut stamp of individuality.
+Here again we have the man himself, with his intensity of feeling, his
+erratic moods and singular phraseology, the softness of his heart and
+the weakness of his will. He belongs to the rapidly diminishing class
+of notable men who have freely poured their real sentiments and
+thoughts out of their brain into their letters, who have given their
+best (without keeping their worst) to their correspondents, so that
+the letters abound with pathetic and amusing confessions, and with
+ideas that bear the stamp of the author's singular idiosyncrasy. The
+_Memorials of Coleorton_ are a collection of letters written to the
+Beaumont family by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott; the
+reader may pass from one to another by taking them as they come; the
+book is like the _menu_ of a dinner with varied courses. Wordsworth's
+letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural
+scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class
+_littérateur_, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in
+both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is
+the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When
+Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of
+divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and
+remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the
+humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society
+plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to
+confess that he found 'bodily relief in weeping.'
+
+     'On Tuesday evening Mr. R----, the author of ----, drank tea and
+     spent the evening with us at Grasmere; and this had produced a very
+     unpleasant effect upon my spirits.... If to be a poet or man of
+     genius entailed on us the necessity of housing such company in our
+     bosoms, I would pray the very flesh off my knees to have a head as
+     dark and unfurnished as Wordsworth's old Molly's.... If I believed
+     it possible that the man liked me, upon my soul I should feel
+     exactly as if I were tarred and feathered.'
+
+And so on through the whole letter, with a comical energy of phrase
+that scorns reserve or compass in giving vent to the misery caused by
+uninteresting conversation. We may contrast this melancholy
+tea-drinking with Byron's rollicking account of a dinner with some
+friends 'of note and notoriety':
+
+     'Like other parties of the same kind, it was first silent, then
+     talking, then argumentative, then disputatious, then
+     unintelligible, then altogethery, then articulate, and then drunk.
+     When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder it was
+     difficult to get down again without stumbling; and, to crown all,
+     Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew
+     staircase, which had been certainly constructed before the
+     invention of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however
+     crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. Both he and Coleman
+     were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the
+     wine carried away my memory, so that all was hiccup and happiness
+     for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the
+     conversation.'
+
+We are, of course, not reviewing Byron or Coleridge; we are only
+giving samples by the way. Here are two great poets, remote from each
+other as the two poles in social circumstances and habit of mind, but
+at any rate alike in this one quality--that their life is in their
+letters, and that in such passages as these the genuine undisguised
+temperament of each writer stands forth in a relief that could only be
+brought out by his own unintentional master-strokes. For neither of
+them was aware that in these scenes he was describing his own
+character--though Byron may have intended to display his wit, and
+Coleridge may have been to some extent conscious of his own humour. In
+the way of literary criticism, again, Coleridge throws out the quaint
+and uncommon remark upon Addison's Essays, that they 'have produced a
+passion for the unconnected in the minds of Englishmen.' And he
+touches delicately upon the negative or barren side of the critical
+mind in his observation that the critics are the eunuchs that guard
+the temple of the Muses.
+
+Of Shelley's letters, again, we may say that they are unconsciously
+autobiographical; they are confessions of character, spontaneous,
+unguarded, abounding with brilliancies and extravagances. They betray
+his shortcomings, but they attest his generosity and courage; they are
+the outpourings of a new spirit, who detests what would now be called
+Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his
+words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He
+abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he
+ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which
+convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which
+astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of
+ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
+despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine
+its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with
+scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,'
+for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to
+persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example
+against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service,
+which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable
+and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the
+letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses to
+character, as reflecting the vicissitudes of a life which was to the
+writer more like the 'fierce vexation of a dream' than a well-spent
+leisurely existence, and as the sincere unstudied expression of his
+emotions. For all these reasons they are essential to a right
+appreciation of his magnificent poetry.
+
+William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come
+down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which
+included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the
+somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not
+worthy. By reason of this position, and because Shelley married his
+daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing,
+though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It
+is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he
+discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics;
+and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent
+paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English
+language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that
+Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'--not
+that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'--whereby he had been seduced
+into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly
+established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other
+talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a
+greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally
+propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the
+whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and
+press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The
+effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly
+against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we
+owe this diverting palinodia. And all Englishmen should be grateful to
+Godwin for having written the tragedy of _Antonio_; for not only was
+it most justly damned, but it also elicited some letters to the
+unlucky author that are unmatched in the record of candid criticism.
+Mrs. Inchbald writes, briefly:
+
+     'I thank you for the play of Antonio, and I most sincerely wish you
+     joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being
+     classed with the successful dramatists of the present time, but
+     which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured few who,
+     during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the
+     stage.'
+
+Coleridge goes to work more elaborately:
+
+     'In the tragedy I have frequently used certain marks (which he
+     gives). Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions
+     that your language is false or intolerable English. The second
+     marks the passages that struck me as _flat_ or mean. The third is a
+     note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have
+     adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book
+     language. The last mark implies bad metre.'
+
+All this is free speaking beyond the compass of modern literary
+consultations. It may be added that Lamb also discussed the play,
+before it was performed, in his letters to Godwin; and that his
+description of Godwin's deportment, of his own feelings, and of the
+behaviour of the audience on the memorable night that witnessed its
+utter failure, has bequeathed to us a comedy over which the tragic
+Muse herself might well become hysterical.
+
+There is, indeed, in the correspondence of this remarkable group a
+tone of frankness and sincerity which, combined with the absence of
+malice and a strong element of fun, distinguishes it from the
+half-veiled disapproval and prudish reserve of later days. 'When you
+next write so eloquently and well against law and lawyers,' says
+Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your
+wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.'
+Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works,
+I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the
+author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half
+understanding of your principles, and the _not_ half understanding of
+my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.'
+His moods and circumstances, his joys and pains, are reflected in his
+language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with
+his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear
+like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct--in brief, he is worth a
+hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is
+like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now
+and then _irradiates_.' In the best letters of this remarkable group
+we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds,
+giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and
+disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their
+correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very
+rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate
+living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar
+key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of
+borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come
+but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third
+shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out
+its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as
+it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a
+stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of
+some of us.
+
+     'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The
+     streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The
+     bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that
+     lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I
+     took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling
+     rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn
+     to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
+     forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house,
+     large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of
+     friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled
+     to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that
+     I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat
+     in my corner.'
+
+We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the
+correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its
+spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and
+natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the
+kind has come down to us from the eighteenth century; and the last
+fifty years of this century, so prolific in biographies and posthumous
+publications of the papers of eminent men, go to prove that in the
+general transformation of letter-writing these peculiar qualities have
+almost, though not altogether, disappeared. Probably conversation has
+suffered a like change; and we may ascribe it generally to a lowering
+of the social temperature, to the habits of reserve, respectability,
+and conventional self-restraint that in these days govern so largely
+the intercourse of men. Something may be due to cautious expurgation
+of passages which tell against the writer, or might offend modern
+taste; yet in other respects contemporary editors have been
+sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so
+discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly
+ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject
+stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and
+which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to
+all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private
+letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but
+it is quite clear that this fine art is undergoing certain
+transmutations, and that on the whole it does not flourish quite so
+vigorously as heretofore.
+
+In a recent article upon Matthew Arnold's letters it is laid down by a
+consummate critic[8] that the first canon of unsophisticated
+letter-writing is that a letter is meant for the eye of a friend, and
+not for the world. 'Even the lurking thought in anticipation of an
+audience destroys the charm; the best letters are always
+improvisations; the public breaks the spell.' In this, as we have
+already suggested, there is much truth; yet the conditions seem to us
+too straitly enjoined; for not every man of genius has the gift of
+striking out his best thoughts, in their best form, clear and true
+from the hot iron of his mind; and in some of our best writers the
+improvising spirit is very faint. If a man writes with leisurely care,
+selecting deliberately the word that exactly matches his thought,
+aiming directly at the heart of his subject and avoiding prolixity, he
+may, like Walpole, Gray, and others, produce a delightful letter,
+provided only that he is sincere and open, has good stuff to give, and
+does not condescend to varnish his pictures. We want his best
+thoughts; we should like to have his best form; we do not always care
+so much for negligent undress. And as for the copious outpouring of
+his personal feelings, one says many things to a friend or kinsman
+that are totally without interest to the public, unless they are
+expressed in some distinctive manner or embody some originality of
+handling an ordinary event. This a writer may have the knack of doing
+artistically, even in a private and confidential letter, without
+betraying the touch of art; nor, indeed, can we ever know how many of
+the best modern letters are really improvised. Then, again, with
+regard to the anticipation of an audience, it is a risk to which
+every man of note must feel that he is exposed; the shadow of
+eventual publicity is always in the background; his letters have
+passed out of his control during his lifetime, and he can only trust
+in the uncertain discretion of his literary executor. He does not care
+to leave the record of his passing moods, his confessions of weakness,
+his personal likings and antipathies, to be discussed by the general
+reader; and it is probable that he only lets his pen run freely when
+he feels assured that his confidential improvisations will be
+judiciously omitted.
+
+It is, we think, impossible to suppose that these considerations have
+not weighed materially upon the minds of eminent men in our own day,
+when biographies have become so much more numerous, and when they are
+so much more closely criticised than formerly. And in comparing the
+letters written in the early part of this century--such as those from
+which we have given a few characteristic quotations--with those which
+have been recently published, we have to take account of these things,
+among other changes of the social and literary environment.
+Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier
+writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more
+biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time.
+There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which
+may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets,
+whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died
+young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by
+the chilly caution of middle or declining age. Their spirits were
+high, they were ardent in the pursuit of ideals; they were defying
+society, they either had no family or were at feud with it, and they
+gave not a thought to the solemn verdict of posterity. For
+correspondents who were brimming over with humour, imagination, and
+enthusiasm, no situation could be more thoroughly favourable to
+sparkling improvisation; and accordingly they have left us letters
+which will be a joy for ever.
+
+The correspondence of our own generation has been written under a
+different intellectual climate, and various circumstances have
+combined to lower the temperature of its vivacity. Posthumous
+publicity is now the manifest destiny that overhangs the private life
+of all notable persons, especially of popular authors, who can observe
+and inwardly digest continual warnings of the treatment which they are
+likely to receive from an insatiable and inconsistent criticism. They
+may have lived long and altered their opinions; they may have
+quarrelled with friends or rivals, and may have become sworn allies
+later; they may have publicly praised one whom in private they may
+have laughed at; for when you have to think what you say, it does not
+follow that you say what you think. All these considerations, enforced
+by repeated examples, are apt to damp the natural ardour of
+improvisation; the more so because the writer may be sure either that
+his genuine utterances will be suppressed by the editor, or that, if
+they are produced, the editor will be roundly abused for giving him
+away. For in these matters the judgment of the general reader is
+wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy.
+The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of
+a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous
+temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest
+animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the
+public. But if all letters that record such scenes and sayings are
+faithfully reproduced in preparing the votive tablet upon which the
+dead man's life is to be delineated, the ungrateful reader answers
+with an accusation of imprudence, indiscretion, and betrayal of
+confidence; and the surviving friends protest still more vehemently.
+Within the last three months these consequences have been forcibly
+illustrated by the reception of Cardinal Manning's Life, in which the
+letters are of extraordinary value toward the formation of a right
+understanding of that remarkable personage. Much of all this
+sensitiveness is clearly due to the hasty fashion of publishing
+private correspondence within a few years of the writer's decease, but
+more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of an inquisitive yet
+censorious society.
+
+If, on the other hand, expurgation is freely employed, the result is a
+kind of emasculation. Nothing is left that can offend or annoy living
+people, or that might damage the writer's own reputation with an
+audience that enjoys, yet condemns, unmeasured confidences. And so we
+get clever, sensible letters of men who have travelled, worked, and
+mixed much in society, who have already put into essays or reviews all
+that they wanted the public to know, and whose private doubts, or
+follies, or frolics, have been neatly removed from their
+correspondence. Let us take, for example, two batches of letters very
+lately published, and written by two men who have left their mark upon
+their generation. Of Dean Stanley it may be affirmed that no
+ecclesiastic of his time was better known, or had a higher reputation
+for strength of character and undaunted Liberalism. His public life
+and his place in the Anglican Church had been already described in a
+meritorious biography; and it might have been expected that these
+letters would bring the reader closer to the man himself, would
+accentuate the points of a striking individuality. There are few of
+these letters, we think, by which such expectations have been
+fulfilled to any appreciable degree. In one or two of them Stanley
+writes with his genuine sincerity and earnestness on the state of his
+mind in regard to the new spirit of ecclesiasticism that had arisen in
+Oxford nearly sixty years ago; we see that he saw and felt the
+magnitude of a coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the
+opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his
+career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature--and he never
+lost his trust in reason--was against the high Roman or sacerdotal
+absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and
+he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government
+which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he
+discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement that was bringing
+about a Roman Catholic revival.
+
+     'Not that I am turned or turning Newmanist, but that I do feel that
+     the crisis in my opinions is coming on, and that the difficulties I
+     find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and
+     that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent
+     system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it
+     is weak and grovelling.' (Letter to C. J. Vaughan, 1838.)
+
+'I expect,' he writes a year later, 'that the whole thing will have
+the effect of making me either a great Newmanite or a great Radical';
+and it did end in making him an advanced Liberal. His practical
+genius, and his free converse with general society (from which Manning
+deliberately turned away as fatal to ecclesiasticism), very soon
+parted him from the theologians.
+
+     'I think it is true,' he writes to Jowett (1849), 'that we have not
+     the same mental interest in talking over subjects of theology that
+     we had formerly. They have lost their novelty, I suppose; we know
+     better where we are, having rolled to the bottom together, and
+     being now able only to make a few uphill steps. I acknowledge fully
+     my own want of freshness; my mind seems at times quite dried up....
+     And at times I have felt an unsatisfied desire after a better and
+     higher sort of life, which makes me impatient of the details of
+     theology.'
+
+In these, and perhaps one or two other passages, we can trace the
+development of character and convictions in the man to whom Jowett
+wrote, thirty years afterwards, that he was 'the most distinguished
+clergyman in the Church of England, who could do more than any one
+towards the great work of placing religion on a rational basis.'[9]
+
+But, on the whole, the quality of these letters is by no means equal
+to their quantity; and too many of them belong to a class which,
+though it may have some ephemeral interest among friends and kinsfolk,
+can retain, we submit, no permanent value at all. It is best described
+under a title common in French literature--_impressions de voyage_. A
+very large part of the volume consists of letters written by Stanley,
+an intelligent and indefatigable tourist, from the countries and
+cities which he visited, from Petersburg and Palestine, from Paris and
+Athens, from Spain and Scotland. The standpoint from which he surveys
+the Holy Land is rather historical and archæological than devotional;
+but he had everywhere a clear eye for the picturesque in manners and
+scenery. He had excellent opportunities of seeing the places and the
+people; his descriptive powers are considerable; and there is a finely
+drawn picture of All Souls' Day in the Sistine Chapel, written from
+Rome to Hugh Pearson, although a ludicrous incident comes in at the
+end like a false note. Such correspondence might be so arranged
+separately as to make an interesting narrative of travel, but when
+judged by a high literary or intellectual criterion of letter-writing
+it is out of court. It is not too much to aver that most, if not all,
+of these letters might have been written by any refined and cultivated
+Englishman, whose education and social training had given him correct
+tastes and a many-sided interest in the world. They belong to the type
+of private diary or chronicle, and as such they inevitably include
+trivialities, though not many. Some of Stanley's letters are from
+Scotland, where he travels about admiring its wildness, and with a
+cultured interest in its antiquities. But no country has been better
+ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original
+hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it
+to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more
+than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or,
+indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are
+none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the
+beauties of Nature.
+
+     'For my part,' he wrote, 'with reference to my friends northwards,
+     I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth
+     and sea and sky (when all is said) is but a house to dwell in. If
+     the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits
+     at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly,
+     I have no need to stand staring at the gilded looking-glass, nor at
+     the five-shilling print over the mantelpiece. Just as important to
+     me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world; eye pampering,
+     but satisfies no heart.'
+
+This may be Cockney taste, yet it is better reading than Stanley's
+account of Edinburgh or the valley of Glencoe.
+
+The editor assures us, in his preface, that none of these letters
+touch upon theological controversies, yet many readers might have been
+very willing to part with some of the travelling journal for closer
+knowledge of Stanley's inward feelings while he was bearing up the
+fight of liberty and toleration against the gathering forces that have
+since scattered and well-nigh overwhelmed the once flourishing Broad
+Church party. Well might Jowett write to him in 1880, 'You and I, and
+our dear friend Hugh Pearson, and William Rogers, and some others, are
+rather isolated in the world, and we must hold together as long as we
+can.' All those who are here named have passed away, leaving no party
+leaders of equal rank and calibre, and if Stanley's letters survive at
+all, they will live upon those passages which remind us how
+strenuously he contended for the intellectual freedom that he believed
+to be the true spiritual heritage of English churchmen.
+
+The latest contribution to the department of national literature that
+we have been surveying is the volume containing the letters of Matthew
+Arnold (1848-88). 'Here and there,' writes their editor, 'I have been
+constrained, by deference to living susceptibilities, to make some
+slight excisions; but with regard to the bulk of the letters this
+process had been performed before the manuscript came into my hands.'
+No one has any business to question the exercise of a discretion which
+must have been necessary in publishing private correspondence so
+recently written, and only those who saw the originals can decide
+whether they have been weakened or strengthened by the pruning. On the
+other hand, the first canon of unsophistical letter-writing, as laid
+down by the eminent critic already cited--that they should be written
+for the eye of a friend, never for the public--is amply fulfilled. 'It
+will be seen' (we quote again from the preface) 'that the letters are
+essentially familiar and domestic, and were evidently written without
+a thought that they would ever be read beyond the circle of his
+family.' They are, in short, mostly family letters that have been
+necessarily subjected to censorship, and it would be unreasonable to
+measure a collection of this kind by the high standard that qualifies
+for admission to the grade of permanent literature. As these letters
+are to supply the lack of a biography (which was expressly prohibited
+by his own wish), we are not to look for further glimpses of a
+character which his editor rightly terms 'unique and fascinating.' The
+general reader may therefore feel some disappointment at finding that
+the correspondence takes no wider or more varied range; for Matthew
+Arnold's circle of acquaintances must have been very large, and he
+must have been in touch with the leading men in the political,
+academical, and official society of his day.
+
+The letters are as good as they could be expected to be under these
+conditions, which are to our mind heavily disadvantageous. We must set
+aside those which fall under the class of _impressions de voyage_, for
+the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling
+correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold
+was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the
+vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his
+prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters,
+as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of
+thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance,
+in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong
+desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen:
+
+     'The want of independence of mind, the shutting their eyes and
+     professing to believe what they do not, the running blindly
+     together in herds for fear of some obscure danger and horror if
+     they go alone, is so eminently a vice of the English, I think, of
+     the last hundred years, has led them and is leading them into such
+     scrapes and bewilderment, that,' etc., etc.
+
+It is certainly hard to recognise in this picture the features of the
+rough roving Englishman who in the course of the last hundred years
+has conquered India, founded great colonies, and fought the longest
+and most obstinate war of modern times: who has been the type of
+insularity and an incurable antinomian in religion and politics. Not
+many pages afterwards, however, we find Arnold sharing with the herd
+of his countrymen the shallow 'conviction as to the French always
+beating any number of Germans who come into the field against them.'
+He adds that 'they will never be beaten by any other nation but the
+English, for to every other nation they are in efficiency and
+intelligence decidedly superior'--an opinion which contradicts his
+previous judgment of them, and replaces the national superiority on a
+lofty though insecure basis; for if he was wrong about the French, he
+may be wrong about us whom he puts above them. Arnold admired the
+French as much as Carlyle liked the Germans, and both of them enjoyed
+ridiculing or rating the English; but each was unconsciously swayed by
+his own particular tastes and temperament, and neither of them had the
+gift of political prophecy, which is, indeed, very seldom vouchsafed
+to the highly imaginative mind. He had a strong belief, rare among
+Englishmen, in administrative organisation. 'Depend upon it,' he
+writes, 'that the great States of the Continent have two great
+elements of cohesion, in their administrative system and in their
+army, which we have not.' The general conclusion which Arnold seems to
+have drawn from his travels in Europe and America is that England was
+far behind France in lucidity of ideas, and inferior to the United
+States in straightforward political energy and the faculties of
+national success. 'Heaven forbid that the English nation should become
+like this (the French) nation; but Heaven forbid that it should remain
+as it is. If it does, it will be beaten by America on its own line,
+and by the Continental nations on the European line. I see this as
+plain as I see the paper before me.' Since this was written in 1865,
+England has been perversely holding her own course, nor has she yet
+fulfilled Arnold's melancholy foreboding, by which he was 'at times
+overwhelmed with depression' that England was sinking into a sort of
+greater Holland, 'for want of perceiving how the world is going and
+must go, and preparing herself accordingly.'
+
+On the other hand, his imaginative faculty comes out in his
+speculation upon the probable changes in the development of the
+American people that might follow their separation into different
+groups, if the civil war between the Northern and Southern States
+(which had just begun) should break up the Union.
+
+     'Climate and mixture of race will then be able fully to tell, and I
+     cannot help thinking that the more diversity of nation there is on
+     the American continent, the more chance there is of one nation
+     developing itself with grandeur and richness. It has been so in
+     Europe. What should we all be if we had not one another to check us
+     and to be learned from? Imagine an English Europe. How frightfully
+     _borné_ and dull! Or a French Europe either, for that matter.'
+
+The suggestion is, perhaps, more fanciful than profound; for history
+does not repeat itself; and, in fact, the result of breaking up South
+America into a dozen political groups has not yet produced any very
+satisfactory development of national character. Much more than
+political subdivision goes to the creation of a new Europe;
+nevertheless Arnold is probably right in supposing that uniformity of
+institutions and a somewhat monotonous level of social conditions over
+a vast area, may have depressed and stunted the free and diversified
+growth of North American civilisation.
+
+The literary criticism to be found in these letters shows a fastidious
+and delicate taste that had been nurtured almost too exclusively upon
+the masterpieces of classic antiquity. Homer he ranked far above
+Shakespeare, though one might think them too different for comparison;
+and he praises 'two articles in _Temple Bar_ (1869), one on Tennyson,
+the other on Browning,' which were afterwards republished in a book
+that made some stir in its day, and has brought down upon its author
+the unquenchable resentment of his brother poets. He thought that both
+Macaulay and Carlyle were encouraging the English nation in its
+emphatic Philistinism, and thus counteracting his own exertions to
+lighten the darkness of earnest but opaque intelligences. As his
+interest in religious movements was acute, so his observations
+occasionally throw some light upon the exceedingly complicated problem
+of ascertaining the general drift of the English mind in regard to
+things spiritual. The force which is shaping the future, is it with
+the Ritualists or with the undogmatical disciples of a purely moral
+creed? With neither, Arnold replies; not with any of the orthodox
+religions, nor with the neo-religious developments which are
+pretending to supersede them.
+
+     'Both the one and the other give to what they call religion, and to
+     religious ideas and discussions, too large and absorbing a place in
+     human life. Man feels himself to be a more various and richly
+     endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life
+     allowed, and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long
+     suppressed and imperfectly understood instincts of their varied
+     nature.'
+
+No man studied more closely than Arnold the intellectual tendencies of
+his generation, so that on the most difficult of contemporary
+questions this opinion is worth quoting, although the ritualistic
+leanings of the present day hardly operate to support it. But here, as
+in his published works, his religious utterances are somewhat
+ambiguous and oracular; and one welcomes the marking of a definite
+epoch in Church history when he writes emphatically that 'the Broad
+Church _among the clergy_ may be said to have almost perished with
+Stanley.'
+
+But correspondence that was never meant for publication is hardly a
+fair subject for literary criticism. Arnold seems to have written
+hurriedly, in the intervals of hard work, of journeyings to and fro
+upon his rounds of inspection, and of much social bustle; he had not
+the natural gift of letter-writing, and he probably did it more as a
+duty than a pleasure. He had none of the ever-smouldering irritability
+which compelled Carlyle to slash right and left of him at the people
+whom he met, at everything that he disliked, and every one whom he
+despised. Nor was he born to chronicle the small beer of everyday life
+in that spirit of contemplative quietism which is bred out of abundant
+leisure and retirement. A few lines from one of Cowper's letters may
+serve to indicate the circumstances in which 'our best letter-writer,'
+as Southey calls him, lived and wrote a hundred years ago in a muddy
+Buckinghamshire village:
+
+     'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in
+     the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravel walk, thirty yards
+     long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet
+     it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year,
+     during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'
+
+If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty
+and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand
+that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste
+nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for
+throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's
+correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must
+undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have
+been published upon their own intrinsic merits.
+
+Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category;
+they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and
+character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively
+insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the
+humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer
+did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be
+published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised
+conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has
+been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some
+doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so
+clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the
+mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether
+unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any
+other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it,
+is, in our judgment, an open question; but surely Carlyle must have
+selected and sharpened with some care the barbed epithets upon which
+he suspends his grotesque and formidable caricatures.
+
+For example, he writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in
+advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing--'A
+bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long
+blunt characterless nose--the whole visit the most unutterable
+stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered,
+farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with
+a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the
+House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the
+poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and
+shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an
+auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite
+prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman
+nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes
+I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so
+Carlyle goes on hanging up portraits of the notables whom he met and
+conversed with, to the great edification of these latter days. No more
+dangerous interviewer has ever practised professionally than this
+artist in epithets, on whom the outward visible figure of a man
+evidently made deep impressions; whereas the ordinary letter-writer is
+usually content to record the small talk. As material for publication
+his correspondence had three singular advantages. His earlier letters
+were excellent, and we may hazard the generalisation that almost all
+first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the
+ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that
+these letters could be published very soon after his death without
+much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting
+might concern; and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who
+loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor
+considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait.
+Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue--that they largely
+contribute to the creation of a true likeness of the writer, for in
+sketching other people he was also drawing himself. He could also
+paint the interior of a country house, as at Fryston, and his
+landscapes are vivid. He was, in short, an impressionist of the first
+order, who grouped all his details in subordination to a general
+effect, and never gave his correspondent a mere catalogue of trivial
+particulars.
+
+It was originally in a letter to his brother that Carlyle wrote his
+celebrated description of an interview with Coleridge. No two men
+could be more different in taste or temperament, and yet any one who
+reads attentively Coleridge's letters may observe a certain similarity
+to Carlyle's writing, not only in the figured style and prophetic
+manner, but also in the tendency of their political ideas. In the
+matter of linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of
+them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in
+politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the
+ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic
+philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief
+in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that
+salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound
+metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies
+were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual
+forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable
+conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous
+mental constitution of mind, on whom the ideas and impressions that
+had been secreted produced an excitability that was discharged upon
+correspondents in a torrent of language, sweeping away considerations
+of reserve or self-regard, and submerging the commonplace bits of news
+and everyday observations which accumulate in the letters of
+respectable notabilities. To whomsoever the letters may be addressed,
+they are in consequence equally good and characteristic. Carlyle's
+epistles to his wife and brother are among the best in the collection;
+and Coleridge threw himself with the same ardour into letters to
+Charles Lamb and to Lord Liverpool. It is this capacity for pouring
+out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of one's heart
+to a friend, which, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of
+spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water
+mark of English literature.
+
+But in saying that these conditions are eminently favourable to the
+production of fine letter-writing, we do not mean to affirm that they
+are essential. Against such a theory it would be sufficient to quote
+Cowper, though he had the poetic fire, and was subject to the
+religious frenzy; and we know that repose and refinement have a
+tendency to develop good correspondents. Among these we may number
+Edward FitzGerald, whose letters are, perhaps, the most artistic of
+any that have recently appeared, and may be placed without hesitation
+in the class of letters that have a high intrinsic merit independently
+of the writer's extraneous reputation; for FitzGerald was a recluse
+with a tinge of misanthropy, nearly unknown to the outer world, except
+by one exquisite paraphrase of a Persian poem, and his popularity
+rests almost entirely upon his published correspondence. Of these
+letters, so excellent of their kind, can it be said that they have the
+note of improvisation, that they were written for a friend's eye,
+without thought or care for that ordeal of posthumous publication
+which has added, as we have been told, a fresh terror to death? The
+composition is exactly suited to the tone of easy, pleasant
+conversation; the writing has a serene flow, with ripples of wit and
+humour; sometimes occupied with East Anglian rusticities and local
+colouring, sometimes with pungent literary criticisms; it is never
+exuberant, but nowhere dull or commonplace; the language is concise,
+with a sedulous nicety of expression. A man of delicate irony, living
+apart from the rough, tumbling struggle for existence, he was in most
+things the very opposite to Carlyle, whose _French Revolution_ he
+admired not much, and who, he thinks, 'ought to be laughed at a
+little.' Such a man was not likely to write even the most ordinary
+letter without a certain degree of mental preparation, without some
+elaboration of thought, or solicitude as to form and finish, for all
+which processes he had ample leisure. It may be noticed that he never
+condescends to the travelling journal, and that his voyaging
+impressions are given in a few fine strokes; but, although he was a
+home-keeping Englishman, he was free from household cares, nor did he
+keep up that obligatory family correspondence which, when it is
+published to exhibit the domestic habits and affections of an eminent
+person, becomes ever after a dead-weight upon his biography.
+
+In endeavouring to analyse the charm of these delightful letters, we
+may suggest that they gain their special flavour from his talent for
+compounding them, like a skilful _chef de cuisine_, out of various
+materials or intellectual condiments assorted and dexterously blended.
+He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern
+Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree,
+in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the sedentary to the
+stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years
+earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had
+few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for
+perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ancient and
+modern, and for surveying the field of contemporary literature. His
+letters to Fanny Kemble have the advantage of unity in tone that
+belongs to a series written to the same person, though the absence of
+replies is apt to produce the effect of a monologue. How far good
+letter-writing depends upon the course of exchange, upon the stimulus
+of pleasant and prompt replies, is a question not easily answered,
+since the correspondence on both sides of two good writers is very
+rarely put together. Mrs. Kemble had certain fixed rules which must
+have been fatal to the free epistolary spirit. 'I never write,' she
+said, 'until I am written to; I always write when I am written to, and
+I make a point of always returning the same amount of paper that I
+receive;' but at any rate it is evident that FitzGerald's letters to
+her were regularly answered. He had a light hand on descriptions of
+season and scenery; he could give the autumnal atmosphere, the
+awakening of leaf and flower in spring, the distant roar of the German
+Ocean on the East Anglian coast. As he could record his daily life
+without the minute prolixity of a diary, so he could throw off
+criticisms on books without falling into the manner of an essayist. In
+regard to the 'fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle,' he asks doubtfully
+whether he with all his genius will not subside into the Level that
+covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens,
+with all _his_ genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already
+after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the
+contemporary poets--Tennyson, Browning, or Swinburne--seem to have
+entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales
+of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with manifest
+enjoyment the lines:
+
+    'In a small cottage on the rising ground,
+    West of the waves, and just beyond the sound.'
+
+'The sea,' he writes, 'somehow talks to one of old things,' probably
+because it is changeless by comparison with the land; and a man whose
+life is still and solitary is affected by the transitory aspect of
+natural things, because he can watch them pass. As old friends drop
+off he touches in his letters upon the memories of days that are gone,
+and he consorts more and more with the personages of his favourite
+poets and romancers, living thus, as he says, among shadows.
+
+Here is a man to whom correspondence was a real solace and a vehicle
+of thought and feeling, not a mere note-book of travel, nor a conduit
+of confidential small talk. A faint odour of the seasons hangs round
+some of these letters, of the sunshine and rain, of dark days and
+roads blocked with snow, of the first spring crocus and the faded
+autumnal garden plots. We can perceive that, as his retirement became
+habitual with increasing age, the correspondence became his main
+outlet of ideas and sensations, taking more and more the place of
+friendly visits and personal discussion as a channel of intercourse
+with the external world. The Hindu sages despised action as
+destructive of thought; and undoubtedly the cool secluded vale of life
+is good for the cultivation of letter-writing, in one who has the
+artistic hand, and to whom this method of gathering up the fruits of
+reading and meditation, the harvest of a quiet eye, comes easily. In
+many respects the letters of FitzGerald, like his life, are in strong
+contrast to Carlyle's; and FitzGerald was somewhat startled by the
+publication of Carlyle's 'Reminiscences.' He thinks that, on the
+whole, 'they had better have been kept unpublished;' though on reading
+the 'Biography' he writes: 'I did not know that Carlyle was so good,
+grand, and even lovable, till I read the letters which Froude now
+edits.' He himself was not likely to give the general reader more than
+he wished to be known about his private affairs; and if one or two
+remarks with a sting in them appeared when these letters were first
+published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the
+book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative
+attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and
+twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious
+spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes
+humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in
+which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends,
+to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and FitzGerald,
+each in his very different manner, at the head of all the
+letter-writers of the generation to which they belong, which is not
+precisely our own. It is to be recollected that a man must be dead
+before he can win reputation in this particular branch of literature,
+and that he cannot be fairly judged until time has removed many
+obstacles to unreserved publication. But both Carlyle and FitzGerald
+had long lives.
+
+Mr. Stevenson, whose letters are the latest important contribution to
+this department of the national library, died early, in the full force
+of his intellect, at the zenith of his fame as a writer of romance.
+His letters have been edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin, with all the
+sympathy and insight into character that are inspired by congenial
+tastes and close friendship; and his preface gives an excellent
+account of the conditions, physical and mental, under which they were
+written, and of the limitations observed in the editing of them.
+
+     'Begun,' Mr. Colvin says, 'without a thought of publicity, and
+     simply to maintain an intimacy undiminished by separation, they
+     assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable,
+     and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts,
+     that it by-and-by occurred to him ... that "some kind of a book"
+     might be extracted out of them after his death.... In a
+     correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection
+     must needs be delicate. Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas,
+     of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less
+     to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.... He was a
+     watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own
+     mind.'
+
+The whole passage, too long to be quoted, suggests an instructive
+analysis of the mental qualities and disposition that go to make a
+good letter-writer--a dash of egotism, sensitiveness to outward
+impressions, literary charm, the habit of keeping a frank and familiar
+record of every day's moods, thoughts, and doings, the picturesque
+surroundings of a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa
+the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for
+Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing
+influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in
+tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech
+with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege
+of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none
+of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the
+incidents are uncommon or uncommonly well told, and the writer is
+never caught looking over his shoulder at posterity.
+
+For extracts there is now little space left in this article; but we
+may quote, to show Stevenson's style of landscape-painting, a few
+lines describing a morning in Samoa after a heavy gale:
+
+     'I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was
+     all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward
+     slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not
+     a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on
+     the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall,
+     and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a
+     thoroughfare close by.'
+
+It is good for the imaginative letter-writer to live within sight and
+sound of the sea, to hear the long roll, and to see from his window 'a
+nick of the blue Pacific.' It is also good for him to be within range
+of savage warfare, and to take long rough rides in a disturbed
+country. On one such occasion he writes:
+
+     'Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in
+     Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence
+     that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride,
+     sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven
+     of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours'
+     political discussions with an interpreter; to say nothing of
+     sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati
+     would look askance of itself.'
+
+The feat might not seem miraculous to a captain of frontier irregulars
+in hard training; but for a delicate novelist in weak health it was
+pluckily done. These letters would be readable if Stevenson had
+written nothing else, though of course their worth is doubled by our
+interest in a man of singular talent who died prematurely. They
+illustrate the tale of his life and portray his character; and they
+form an addition, valuable in itself, and unique as a variety, to the
+series of memorable English letter-writers.
+
+Mr. Colvin mentions, in his preface, that Stevenson's talk was
+irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, full of matter and mirth. It
+cannot be denied that between correspondence and conversation,
+regarded as fine arts, there is a close kinship; and very similar
+reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the
+decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of
+letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this
+sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated
+periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that
+nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge
+early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters
+from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written
+must have increased enormously; it is also true that many more are
+published than heretofore, and that as a great many of these are not
+above mediocrity, are valueless as literature, and of little worth
+biographically, they produce on the disappointed reader the effect of
+a general depreciation of the standard. Nevertheless, this article
+will have been written to little purpose, unless it has shown fair
+cause for rejecting such a conclusion, and for maintaining that,
+although fine letter-writers, like poets, are few and far between, yet
+they have not been wanting in our own time, and are not likely to
+disappear. There will always be men, like Coleridge or Carlyle, whose
+impetuous thoughts and humoristic conceptions cannot perpetually
+submit to the forms and limitations and delays of printing and
+publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and
+prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And
+although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet
+corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of
+literary recluses--of those who pass their days in reading books, in
+watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select
+circle of friends--will also continue. Whether Englishwomen, who write
+letters up to a certain point better than Englishmen, will now rise,
+as Frenchwomen have done, to the highest line, and why they have not
+done so heretofore, are points that we have no space here for taking
+up.
+
+But it is the exceptional peculiarity of letters, as a form of
+literature, that the writer can never superintend their publication.
+During his lifetime he has no control over them, they are not in his
+hands; and they do not appear until after his death. He must rely
+entirely, therefore, upon the discretion of his editor, who has to
+balance the wishes of a family, or the susceptibilities of an
+influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of
+duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination
+toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some
+remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of
+Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring
+fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the
+underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse,
+as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened
+monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may
+insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and
+shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But
+such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the
+larger field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present
+occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history
+and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly
+the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is
+universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely
+attained.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] (1) _The Letters of Charles Lamb._ Edited, with Introduction and
+Notes, by Alfred Ainger. London, 1888. (2) _Letters of John Keats to
+his Family and Friends._ Edited by Sidney Colvin. London, 1891. (3)
+_Letters and Verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley._ Edited by Rowland E.
+Prothero. London, 1895. (4) _Letters of Matthew Arnold_, 1848-88.
+Collected and arranged by George Russell. London and New York, 1895.
+(5) _Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble._ Edited by William
+Aldis Wright. London, 1895. (6) _Vailima Letters, from Robert Louis
+Stevenson to Sidney Colvin_, 1890-94. London, 1895.--_Edinburgh
+Review_, April 1896.
+
+[8] Mr. John Morley, _Nineteenth Century_, December 1895.
+
+[9] _Dean Stanley's Letters_, p. 440.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+
+It is remarkable that in a century which is far more profusely
+supplied with biographies than any preceding age, and at a time when
+chronicles of small beer no less than of fine vintages seem to gratify
+the rather indiscriminate taste of the British public, no formal life
+has ever been produced of Thackeray. That this omission has been due
+to his express wish is well understood, and at any rate it may be
+cited as a praiseworthy breach of the latter-day custom of publishing
+a man's private affairs and correspondence as soon as possible after
+his funeral. Nevertheless the generation of those who knew Thackeray,
+for whom and among whom he wrote, is now rapidly vanishing; so that it
+would have been a kind of national misfortune if posterity had been
+left without some authentic record of his personal history, his
+earlier experiences, his characteristic sayings and doings, and the
+general environment in which he worked.
+
+For the biographical introductions, therefore, which are appended to
+each volume of this new edition,[10] we owe gratitude to his daughter,
+Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.[11] No more than seven volumes have been
+actually published up to this date, but since these include a large
+proportion of Thackeray's most important and characteristic work, we
+make no apology for anticipating the completion of the series by an
+attempt to make a critical examination of the salient points which
+distinguish his genius, and mark his place in general literature. Mrs.
+Ritchie tells us in a brief prefatory note that although her father's
+wishes have prevented her from writing his complete biography she has
+at last determined to publish memories which chiefly concern his
+books. Her desire has also been 'to mark down some of the truer chords
+to which his life was habitually set'; and accordingly we have in
+every volume an instalment, too brief and intermittent for such
+interesting matter, of the incidents and vicissitudes belonging to
+successive stages of his life and work, with glimpses of his mind and
+tastes, of the friendships that he made, and the society in which he
+moved. The form in which these reminiscences and _reliquiæ_ appear has
+necessarily disconnected them, since they have been evidently chosen
+on the plan of connecting each novel with the circumstances or
+particular field of observation which may have suggested the plot, the
+scenery, or the characters. One can thus see that Thackeray's mind,
+like his sketch-book, was constantly taking down vivid impressions of
+people and places, and in some of his notes of travel can be easily
+traced the sources whence he took hints for elaborate studies. But
+under this arrangement the chronology becomes here and there somewhat
+entangled. _Pendennis_, for example, was finished in 1850, but as the
+hero's life at Oxbridge is described in the novel, its introduction
+takes us back to the period when the writer himself was at Cambridge
+in 1829. _Vanity Fair_, again, written in 1845, contains a well-known
+episode of Dobbin's school life, and the story carries us more than
+once to the Continent; so the introduction gives us recollections of
+Charterhouse, where Thackeray went in 1822, and of travels about
+Germany in the early thirties. The _Contributions to Punch_, which
+form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten
+years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for
+references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most
+successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines
+cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a
+connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as
+the system fortunately affords room and reason for giving many fresh
+details of his daily life, with some of his letters, or extracts from
+them, which are fresh and amusing, we may cheerfully pass over these
+petty drawbacks. We are heartily thankful for our admission to a
+closer acquaintance with an author who has drawn some immortal
+pictures of English society, its manners, prejudices, and
+characteristic types, in novels that will always hold the first rank
+in our lighter literature.
+
+How his boyhood was passed is tolerably well known already. Returning
+home in childhood from India he was put first to a preparatory school,
+and afterwards, for nigh seven years, to Charterhouse. At eighteen he
+went up to Cambridge, where he spoke in the Union, wrote in university
+magazines, criticised Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_, 'a beautiful poem,
+though the story is absurd,' and composed a parody on Tennyson's prize
+poem, _Timbuctoo_. In 1830 he travelled in Germany, and had his
+interview at Weimar with Goethe; and from 1831 we find him settled in
+a London pleader's office, reading law with temporary assiduity,
+frequenting the theatres and Caves of Harmony, making many literary
+acquaintances, taking runs into the country to canvass for Charles
+Buller, and trying his 'prentice hand at journalism. His vocation for
+literature speedily damped his legal ardour, and drew him out of Mr.
+Tapsell's chambers, where he left a desk full of sketches and
+caricatures. In May 1832 he wrote: 'This lawyer's preparatory
+education is certainly one of the most cold-blooded, prejudicial
+pieces of invention that ever a man was slave to;' and he longs for
+fresh air and fresh butter. By August he had fled to Paris, where he
+read French, worked at a painter's _atelier_, and took seriously to
+the work of a newspaper correspondent. On the romantic school, which
+was just then at its height, he makes the following remark, which
+betrays the antipathy to artificial and theatrical tendencies in
+literature that always provoked his satire:
+
+     'In the time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine
+     gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet
+     and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more
+     poetical than their rigid predecessors.'
+
+He had little taste, in fact, for mediævalism in any shape, and 'old
+Montaigne' was more to his liking. We are told, also, that he became
+absorbed in Cousin's _Philosophy_, noting upon it that 'the excitement
+of metaphysics must equal almost that of gambling'; and finding,
+perhaps, no great attraction in either. After his marriage in 1836 he
+settled down in London, devoting himself thenceforward to literature
+as a profession; the _Yellowplush Papers_, published in 1837 by
+_Fraser's Magazine_, being his earliest contribution of any length or
+significance. In the introductory chapter Mrs. Ritchie says:
+
+     'I hardly know--nor, if I knew, should I care to give here--the
+     names and the details of the events which suggested some of the
+     _Yellowplush Papers_. The history of Mr. Deuceace was written from
+     life during a very early period of my father's career. Nor can one
+     wonder that his views were somewhat grim at that particular time,
+     and still bore the impress of an experience lately and very dearly
+     bought.... As a boy he had lost money at cards to some cardsharpers
+     who scraped acquaintance with him. He never blinked at the truth or
+     spared himself; but neither did he blind himself to the real
+     characters of the people in question, when once he had discovered
+     them. His villains became curious studies in human nature; he
+     turned them over in his mind, and he caused Deuceace, Barry Lyndon,
+     and Ikey Solomons, Esq., to pay back some of their ill-gotten
+     spoils, in an involuntary but very legitimate fashion, when he put
+     them into print and made them the heroes of those grim early
+     histories.'
+
+We may infer from this passage that Thackeray's mind acted not only as
+a microscope but as a magnifying glass; he had an eye, as one knows,
+for characteristic details, and it appears that he could also enlarge
+the small fry of scoundrelism into magnificent rascals. There can be
+no doubt that he had the image-making faculty of sensitive genius, and
+that much of all he saw and felt went to fill up his canvas and fix
+his point of view. Writing to his mother, he once said, 'It is the
+fashion to say that people are unfortunate who have lost their money.
+Dearest mother, we know better than that;' though 'for years and years
+he had to face the great question of daily bread.' But while he could
+battle stoutly against losses of this kind, he had no mercy on the
+rogues who caused them; and his indignation, accentuated by the strain
+of married life on a very narrow income, may account in some degree
+for the cynical tone, now sombre, now mocking, which so perceptibly
+dominates his earlier writings, and pervades all his books, though in
+a lesser and more tolerant way, up to the end. Against this shaded
+background, however, we may set many kindly figures, and the contrast
+is heightened by the humorous joviality which finds vent in his
+talent for caricature. To this we owe the full-length portrait of
+Major Gahagan, and a whole gallery of other drawings, usually of
+Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The
+striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct,
+between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic
+unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later
+and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic
+proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so
+predominate as to disconcert the judgment of a generation which has
+become habituated, at the present day, to a less energetic and
+uncompromising style of exposing fools and gibbeting knaves. And after
+making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste
+which separate us from our fathers in every region of art--and even
+admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality,
+snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays--we
+are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is
+superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier
+stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some
+passages in them it might be inferred by foreigners that the better
+born Englishmen habitually indulged in rudeness toward their social
+inferiors, and that English domestics in good houses broke out into
+vulgar insolence whenever they could do so with impunity.
+
+Take, for an example, in the scene from _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_,
+the behaviour of Mr. Preston, 'one of her Majesty's Secretaries of
+State,' to an underbred but good-tempered little city clerk, whom Lady
+Drum takes in her carriage for a drive in Hyde Park, and whom she
+hints he might ask to dinner. Mr. Preston acts on the hint, but with
+savage sarcasm, and Titmarsh, the clerk, accepts in order to plague
+the minister for his astounding rudeness:
+
+     '"I did not," he says, "intend to dine with the man, but only to
+     give him a lesson in manners."'
+
+And so, when the carriage drove up to Mr. Preston's door, he says to
+him:
+
+     '"When you came up and asked who the devil I was, I thought you
+     might have put the question in a more polite manner, but it wasn't
+     my business to speak. When, by way of a joke, you invited me to
+     dinner, I answered in a joke too, and here I am. But don't be
+     frightened, I'm not agoing to dine with you."...
+
+     '"Is that all, sir?" says Mr. Preston, still in a rage. "If you
+     have done, will you leave the house, or shall my servants turn you
+     out? Turn out this fellow; do you hear me?"'
+
+Assuming that sixty years ago a Secretary of State was much the same
+sort of man that he is to-day, what are we to think of this spirited
+colloquy? and what kind of impression will it, and others no less
+forcible, produce upon the future student of manners who turns to
+light literature as the mirror of contemporary society?
+
+With regard, again, to the _Yellowplush Papers_, is it from
+unpardonable fastidiousness, the affectation of an over-refined
+literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have
+been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The
+use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of
+ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr.
+Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we
+meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the
+cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most
+appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary
+novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this
+dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old
+acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with
+Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt
+whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the
+author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the
+legitimate boundaries of literature as a fine art, and whether they do
+not much rather harm than heighten his permanent reputation when they
+are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It
+is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken
+record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the
+Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is no subject for dramatic
+treatment.
+
+Yet we are aware that it may be practically impossible to publish
+incomplete editions of a very popular writer; and in the extravagances
+of his youth one may discern the promise of much higher things. Very
+rapidly, in fact, in the work which comes next, Thackeray rises at
+once to a far superior level of artistic performance. We are not
+indisposed to endorse the opinion, pronounced more than once by good
+judges, that the high-water mark of his peculiar genius was touched by
+_Barry Lyndon_, which first exhibits the rare and distinctive
+qualities that were completely developed in his later and larger
+novels. It may be affirmed, as a general rule, that most of our
+eminent writers of fiction have leapt, as Scott did, into the arena
+with some work of first-class merit, which has immediately caught
+public attention and established their position in literature. Their
+fugitive pieces, their crudities and imperfect essays, have been
+either judiciously suppressed or consigned to oblivion. They have
+followed, one may say, the goodly custom prescribed by the governor
+of the Cana marriage feast; they put forth in the beginning their good
+wine, and they fall back upon inferior brands only when the public,
+having well drunk of the potent vintage, will swallow anything from a
+favourite author. We may regret that Thackeray's start as a man of
+letters should have furnished an exception to this salutary rule; and
+in surveying, after the lapse of many years, his collected works, we
+are disposed to observe that no first-class writer has suffered more
+from the enduring popularity which has encouraged the republication of
+everything that is his, from the finished _chefs-d'oeuvres_ down to
+the ephemeral and unripe products of an exuberant youth. He would have
+given the world a notable confirmation of the rule that a great author
+usually leads off on a high note, if he had opened his munificent
+literary entertainment with _Barry Lyndon_. We quote here from Mrs.
+Ritchie's introduction:
+
+     'My father once said to me when I was a girl, "You needn't read
+     _Barry Lyndon_; you won't like it." Indeed it is scarcely a book to
+     _like_, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power
+     and mastery.... Barry Lyndon tells his own story, so as to enlist
+     every sympathy against himself, and yet all flows so plausibly, so
+     glibly, that one can hardly explain how the effect was produced.
+     From the very first sentence, almost, one receives the impression
+     of a lawless adventurer, brutal, heartless, with low instincts and
+     rapid perceptions. Together with his own autobiography, he gives a
+     picture of the world in which he lives and brags, a picture so
+     vivid ... that as one reads one almost seems to hear the tread of
+     remorseless fate sounding through all the din and merriment. Take
+     those descriptions of the Prussian army during the Seven Years'
+     War, and of that hand of man which weighs so heavily upon man--what
+     a haunting page in history!'
+
+These remarks are very justly appreciative, for the book stamps
+Thackeray as a fine impressionist, as an artist who skilfully mixes
+the colours of reality and imagination into a composition of striking
+scenes and the effective portrayal of character. With extraordinary
+ability and consistency to the type he works out the gradual evolution
+of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring
+impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the
+intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish
+profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county
+magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which
+were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex
+strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action
+lifted above the platform of city swindlers, insignificant scoundrels,
+and needy cardsharpers, up to a stage exhibiting historic personages
+and scenes, courts and battlefields; and we breathe freely in the
+wider air of immorality on a grand scale. As a sample of spirited
+freehand drawing, the sketches of Continental society, 'before that
+vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world,' are admirable for
+their force and originality; and what can be better as a touch of
+character than the following defence of his profession by a prince of
+gamblers?
+
+     'I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of
+     the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served
+     them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an
+     honourable man--a swindling quack, who does not believe in the
+     nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering
+     in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant
+     man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers,
+     his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed
+     by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle
+     classes against gentlemen; it is only the shopkeeper cant which is
+     to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of
+     chivalry; it has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of
+     birth.'
+
+Here we have the romance of the gaming-table; and in the same chapter
+Barry Lyndon recounts the evil chance that befell him at cards with
+two young students, who had never played before:
+
+     'As ill luck would have it, they were tipsy, and against tipsiness
+     I have often found the best calculations of play fail entirely. A
+     few officers joined; they played in the most perfectly insane way,
+     and won always.... And in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick
+     with tobacco smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and
+     liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and beardless
+     students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe
+     lost seventeen hundred louis. It was like Charles xii. or Richard
+     Coeur de Lion falling before a petty fortress and an unknown
+     hand.'
+
+The picture of gamblers in a grimy tavern, the unconscious humour of
+Lyndon's heroic lament, the comparison between the cardsharpers'
+discomfiture and the fall of mighty warriors, make up a fine example
+of Thackeray's eye for graphic detail, and prove the force and temper
+of his incisive irony.
+
+Yet, in spite of its great excellence, the book still labours under
+the artistic disadvantage of having a rogue for its hero. Thackeray
+was too good an artist to be unconscious of this defect, and in a
+footnote to page 215 he defends his choice characteristically. After
+admitting that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way,
+bullied her, robbed her to spend the money in gambling and taverns,
+kept mistresses in her house, and so on, he argues:
+
+     'The world contains scores of such amiable people, and, indeed, it
+     is because justice has not been done them that we have edited this
+     autobiography. Had it been that of a mere hero of romance--one of
+     those heroic youths who figure in the novels of Scott or James,
+     there would have been no call to introduce the reader to a
+     personage already so often and so charmingly depicted. Mr. Barry is
+     not, we repeat, a hero of the common pattern; but let the reader
+     look round and ask himself, "Do not as many rogues succeed in life
+     as honest men, more fools than men of talent?" And is it not just
+     that the lives of this class should be described by the students of
+     human nature as well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes,
+     those perfectly impossible heroes,' etc., etc.
+
+One would be almost inclined to infer from this passage that the
+author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as
+to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry;
+for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are
+no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the
+truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject
+for character-drawing than in the blameless hero, while he was deeply
+implicated in the formidable revolt which Carlyle was leading against
+the respectabilities of that day.
+
+It is worth notice that in Barry Lyndon's military reminiscences, done
+with great vigour and fidelity of detail, we have a very early example
+of the realistic as contrasted with the romantic treatment of
+campaigns, of life in the bivouac and the barrack. This method, which
+has latterly had immense vogue, seems to have been first invented in
+France, where Thackeray may have taken the hint from Stendhal; but we
+are disposed to believe that he was the first who proclaimed it in
+England. As it professes to give the true unvarnished aspect of war it
+would certainly have accorded with Thackeray's natural contempt, so
+often shown in his writings, for the commonplaces of the military
+romancer who revelled in the pomp and circumstance of glorious
+battles, the charges, the heroic exploits, the honours, rather than
+the horrors, of the fighting business. Moreover, it is not only in
+style and treatment but also in sentiment and in certain peculiar
+prepossessions, that we can trace in this novel the lines which the
+writer followed throughout his narratives, and his favourite
+delineations of character. For diplomatists he has always a curious
+contempt, and he never misses an opportunity of ridiculing them. 'Mon
+Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what
+fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the
+world, this diplomacy'--as if it were not also a most important and
+difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great
+folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen;
+and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord
+Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was
+ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.'
+And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about
+women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of
+them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry
+on the subject of matrimony:
+
+     'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household
+     drudge, who loves you. _That_ is the most precious sort of
+     friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The
+     man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's
+     an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his
+     ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born
+     to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks,
+     as it were.'
+
+Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of Thackeray's genius.
+In _Vanity Fair_, his next work, it has attained its climax; the
+dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and
+more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and
+whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a
+fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in
+this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone
+is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly
+excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the
+superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and
+unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer
+hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted
+virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the
+human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their
+virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated,
+for the purposes of the social drama. The book's very title, _Vanity
+Fair_, denotes a transition from the scathing satire of his earlier
+manner to more indulgent irony, from Swift to Sterne, two authors whom
+Thackeray had evidently studied attentively. In his short preface the
+author preludes with the gentler note when he invites people of a
+lazy, benevolent, or sarcastic mood to step into the puppet show for a
+moment and look at the performance.
+
+The book's success, Mrs. Ritchie tells us, was slow; the sale hung
+fire. 'One has heard of the journeys which the manuscript made to
+various publishers' houses before it could find any one ready to
+undertake the venture, and how long its appearance was delayed by
+various doubts and hesitations, until it was at last brought out in
+its yellow covers by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans on January 1, 1847.'
+But when the last numbers were appearing Thackeray wrote that,
+'although it does everything but sell, it appears really to increase
+my reputation immensely'--as it assuredly did. That a signal success
+in literature is nearly always achieved, not by following the beaten
+road, but by a bold departure from it, is a principle that could be
+abundantly established by examples, and which seems almost a truism
+when it is stated. _Vanity Fair_ was decidedly a work of great
+freshness and originality; but publishers are circumspect and rarely
+adventurous, they distrust novelties and prefer to follow the
+prevailing fashion as far as it will go, wherein we may discern one
+reason why the accouchement of the first literary child is usually so
+laborious.
+
+To criticise at length any single novel of Thackeray's would be far
+beyond the scope or purpose of this article. Our object is rather to
+illustrate the course and development of his distinctive literary
+qualities, the slow effacement of prejudices which never entirely
+disappeared, and the rapid expansion of his highest artistic
+faculties. To begin with the prejudices. In _Vanity Fair_ he still
+makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose
+to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form;
+though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last
+fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration. And another important
+reform of manners must have supervened in the same period if we are to
+believe that in these novels the English servant is not unfairly
+caricatured. As we know him at the present day, in the class that
+lives with gentle-folk, he may be touchy and troublesome, with much
+self-assertiveness, but also with much self-respect. He has as many
+faults as other people, but among them brutal rudeness is practically
+unknown; yet when Rebecca Sharp is driven in Mr. Sedley's carriage to
+Sir Pitt Crawley's, having given nothing to the domestics on leaving
+the Sedleys, the coachman is ludicrously rude to a poor governess.
+
+     '"I shall write to Mr. Sedley, and inform him of your conduct,"
+     said Miss Sharp to him.
+
+     '"Don't," replied that functionary; "I hope you've forgot nothink?
+     Miss 'Melia's gownds--have you got them--as the lady's maid was to
+     have 'ad? I hope they'll fit you. Shut the door, Jim, you'll get no
+     good out of _'er_," continued John, pointing with his thumb towards
+     Miss Sharp; "a bad lot, I tell you, a bad lot."'
+
+One may conjecture that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque,
+which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and
+inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in
+setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the
+perfection of his higher composition. It might well produce, among
+foreigners at any rate, an unreal impression of the true relations
+existing between different classes of English society.
+
+But these are slight blemishes upon the surface of an epoch-making
+book, for _Vanity Fair_ inaugurated a new school of novel-writing
+in this country, with its combined vigour and subtlety of
+character-drawing, and with the marvellous dexterity of its scenes and
+dramatic situations. The army and military life in all its phases had
+a remarkable attraction for him; in all his larger books one or more
+officers are brought prominently upon the foreground of his canvas. He
+hits off the strong and weak points of the profession, in war and
+peace, with a truth and humour that gave freshness and originality to
+the whole subject, and the best of these pictures are in _Vanity
+Fair_. There is not one of its leading _militaires_--Dobbin and
+Osborne, Crawley and Major O'Dowd--in whom a typical representative of
+well-known varieties may not be recognised. His fine picturesque
+handiwork, his consistent preference of the real to the romantic, and
+his reserve in the use of such tempting materials as the battlefield
+affords to the story-teller, are shown in his treatment of the episode
+of Waterloo. He is far too good an artist to lay out for us a grand
+scene of fierce fighting and carnage; nor does he, like Lever, produce
+Wellington and Bonaparte acting or speaking up to the popular
+conception of these mighty heroes. He is content to follow his own
+personages into that famous field, and to show how perilous
+circumstance brings out the force or feebleness of each character,
+male and female, whether of the wives left behind at Brussels, or the
+soldiers in the fighting line at Waterloo. It is only at the end of
+his chapter, after some seriocomic incidents and dialogues exhibiting
+the behaviour of the non-combatants--of Jos Sedley, Mrs. O'Dowd, Lady
+Bareacres, and the rest--that his narrative rises suddenly to the epic
+note in a brief passage full of admirable energy and pathos:
+
+     'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great
+     field. All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away,
+     the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and
+     repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns which
+     were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades
+     falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Toward evening the
+     attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened
+     in its fury ... they were preparing for a final onset. It came at
+     last, the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of St.
+     Jean.... Unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled
+     death from the English line, the dark rolling column pressed on and
+     up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began
+     to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at
+     last the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy
+     had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.
+
+     'No more firing was heard at Brussels; the pursuit rolled miles
+     away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was
+     praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
+     through his heart.'
+
+The military critic might pick holes in this description, and
+Thackeray might as well have thrown the English infantry into squares
+instead of into line. Yet the passage is instinct with compressed
+emotion; and the sudden transition from the general battle to the
+single death is a good touch of tragic art.
+
+In _Pendennis_ (1850) we may discern the slowly softening influences
+of years that bring the philosophic mind, of a calmer and easier time,
+and perhaps also of a different class of readers. Thackeray has now
+discovered that, as he says in his preface, 'to describe a real rascal
+you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not
+tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in
+_Pendennis_, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse
+than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for
+whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and
+subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described
+a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is
+another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention
+may undergo in the course of a generation; for surely not even the
+straitest middle-class sect would in our day banish _Pendennis_ on the
+score of impropriety. Mrs. Ritchie mentions that the author's
+descriptions of literary life were criticised on the ground that he
+was trying to win favour with the non-literary classes by decrying his
+own profession--an absurd accusation which nettled him into replying.
+The truth seems to be that Thackeray, who poked fun at the weak sides
+of every class and calling, saw no reason why he should leave out his
+own; and the men of letters might have been comforted by observing
+that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural
+enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have
+ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in
+Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer
+confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of
+people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as
+literary men.'
+
+_Pendennis_ is in Thackeray's best style, as the novelist of manners.
+It opens, like _Vanity Fair_, with a short amusing scene that poses,
+as the French say, some leading actor in the play, and encourages the
+reader to go on. Next follows, as is usual with our author, a short
+retrospective account of the people and places among whom the plot is
+laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting
+his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys,
+the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity,
+Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English
+provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who
+brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the
+English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer
+and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for
+inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and
+strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless
+hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel
+Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last
+moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical
+plea that the author had not sufficient experience of gaol-birds and
+the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free
+with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the
+condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking
+unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to
+see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he
+prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain
+of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his
+stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down
+into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests
+that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and
+does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs
+and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth
+and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune
+or failure. The voyage of life
+
+     'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people
+     huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the
+     ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that
+     nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a
+     solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one
+     are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time
+     when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out
+     of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'
+
+In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the
+antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human
+efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with
+humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops
+his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation,
+after the manner of Fielding, whose leisurely tone of satire is so
+audible in the following quotation from _Pendennis_ that he might well
+have written it:
+
+     'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart
+     and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian
+     charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those
+     who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a
+     dispute?'
+
+As we have said that _Vanity Fair_ touches the climax of Thackeray's
+peculiar genius, so in our judgment _Esmond_ shows the gathered
+strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an
+eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We
+may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection
+in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the
+eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic
+events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns
+upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt
+largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in
+marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served
+as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts
+the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and
+conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the
+period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the
+society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of
+glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are
+sometimes (as in the _Grand Cyrus_) thinly veiled portraits of
+contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures
+representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The
+virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are
+chaste and beauteous damsels--Joan of Arc herself appears in one
+romance as an adorable shepherdess--and love-making is conducted after
+the model of a Parisian _précieuse_.
+
+It is the opinion of a recent French critic, who has made careful
+study of his subject, that the new school was founded by
+Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to
+the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque
+incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping
+them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by
+picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and
+conditions of existence of the time and country in which he might be
+unwinding his tale. But Chateaubriand, like Byron (who was of a
+similar temperament), never could put himself, to use a French phrase,
+into another man's skin; he is to be detected soliloquising and
+dispensing noble sentiments under the costume of a Christian martyr or
+an American savage, and thus the fidelity of his scene-painting was
+still marred by the artificiality of the discourse. It was the
+Waverley novel that lifted the historical romance far beyond
+Chateaubriand's level, that established it, in England, France, and
+Italy on the true principle of creating vivid representations of a
+bygone age by a skilful mixture of fact and fiction, and by a correct
+and harmonious combination of characters, manners, and environment.
+
+But during the twenty years that intervene between the dates, taken
+roughly, of Scott's worst novel and Thackeray's best, the flood tide
+of romanticism had risen to its highest point, and had then ebbed very
+low, on both sides of the British Channel. And we can see that the
+younger writer was no votary of the older school of high-flying
+chivalrous romance, with its tournaments, its crusaders, its valiant
+warriors, and distressed maidens. His youthful aversion for shams and
+conventionalities, his strong propensity toward burlesque and
+persiflage, his early life among cities and commonplace folk, seem to
+have obscured in some degree his appreciation of even such splendid
+compositions as _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; or, at any rate, his
+sense of the ridiculous overpowered his admiration. The result was
+that, as Scott had exalted his mediæval heroes and heroines far above
+the level of real life, had revived the legendary age of chivalry and
+adventure with all the magnificence of his poetic imagination,
+Thackeray had at first set himself, conversely, to strip the trappings
+off these fine folk, and to poke his fun at the feudal lords and
+ladies by treating them as ordinary middle-class men and women
+masquerading in old armour or drapery. He came in as a writer on the
+ebb-tide of romanticism, when the reaction showed its popular form in
+a curious outburst of the taste for burlesques and parodies on the
+stage and in the light reading of the time. Whether the creation of
+this taste is to be ascribed to the appearance of two writers with
+such genius for wit and fun as Thackeray and Dickens, or whether they
+only supplied a natural demand, may be questionable; they undoubtedly
+headed the army of Comus, and thereby raised the whole standard of
+facetious literature. But the defect of this school was its propensity
+to take a hilarious or sardonic view, not only of mediæval romance,
+but of quaint old times generally; and one leading embodiment of this
+mocking spirit was _Punch_ founded in 1841. A'Beckett's _Comic History
+of England_, which ran through many numbers, seems to this generation
+a dreary and deleterious specimen of misplaced farce; though
+historically it is not quite such bad work as Dickens's _Child's
+History of England_, which he meant to be serious. Among Thackeray's
+very numerous contributions to _Punch_ are _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
+on English History_, which might well have been consigned to
+oblivion, _Rebecca and Rowena_, and _The Prize Novelists_. The
+sarcastic and the sentimental temper must always be hostile to each
+other; between romance and ridicule the antipathy is fundamental; and
+although one regrets that he ever wrote _Rebecca and Rowena_, the
+melodramatic novels of Bulwer-Lytton were fair enough game for the
+parodist. However, it is certain that in his earlier writings
+Thackeray did much to laugh away the novel of mediæval chivalry; and
+while we think he often carried his irreverent jocosity much too far,
+since after all chivalry is better than cockneyism, we may award him
+the very high honour of becoming, latterly, one of the founders of a
+new and admirable historical school in England.
+
+The eighteenth century was always Thackeray's favourite period; he
+liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its
+practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of
+keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world
+as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that
+possessed great imaginative faculty; Defoe was a master of minute
+life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings
+are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished
+denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy,
+large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery,
+loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage,
+and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated
+manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to
+Fielding than to any other single literary ancestor; but all these
+influences were most congenial to his temperament, and informed his
+best work. His instinctive dislike of unreality, exaggeration, and
+fanciful ideals would have always prevented him from laying the
+situation of his story in some distant age, of which hardly anything
+is known accurately, and supplementing his ignorance by giving free
+scope to fantastic invention, as was the usage of the humble followers
+who tried in vain to conjure with the wand of Scott. He required a
+period which he could study, master, and sympathise with, and he found
+it in the eighteenth century; though in _Esmond_ the plot, being
+founded on Jacobite intrigues and conspiracies, opens with the
+Revolution of 1688. He had taken great trouble, as usual, with the
+localities, knowing well that you never understand a battle clearly
+until you have seen its field.
+
+     '"I was pleased to find Blenheim," he wrote to his mother, "was
+     just exactly the place I had figured to myself, except that the
+     village is larger; but I fancied I had actually been there, so like
+     the aspect of it was to what I looked for. I saw the brook which
+     Harry Esmond crossed, and almost the spot where he fell wounded."'
+
+Mrs. Ritchie quotes this letter as illustrating 'a sort of second
+sight as to places which my father used to speak of'; and it certainly
+attests his possession of the strong imaginative faculty which puts
+together vivid mental pictures.
+
+The first page strikes the note of disenchantment, of escape from the
+spell of conventionalism and the shores of romance. Colonel Esmond,
+who tells his own tale, wishes the Muse of History to disrobe, to
+discard her buskins, and to deliver herself like a woman of the
+everyday world.
+
+     'I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be
+     court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides
+     Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne tearing down the Park
+     slopes after her staghounds, in her one-horse chaise--a hot
+     redfaced woman.... She was neither better bred nor wiser than you
+     and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand basin.
+     Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for
+     having her rise off her knees, and take her natural posture, not to
+     be for ever performing cringes and congees like a Court
+     chamberlain, and shuffling backward out of doors in the presence of
+     the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar rather than
+     heroic.'
+
+No very deep philosophy in this, we might say, for surely historians
+up to Esmond's day had not all been pompous and servile, while
+something like dignity is desirable. But here we have Thackeray
+speaking through Esmond his own thoughts about history, and
+proclaiming the rise of naturalism against the romantic high-heeled
+school. And in a much later chapter, where Esmond visits Addison, we
+have the true realistic method of Tolstoi and other quite modern
+novelists, as compared with the old classic style of describing war.
+Addison has been writing a poem on the Blenheim campaign:
+
+     '"I admire your art," says Esmond to Addison; "the murder of the
+     campaign is done to military music, like a battle at the opera, and
+     the virgins shriek in harmony, as our victorious grenadiers march
+     into their villages. Do you know what a scene it was? what a
+     triumph you are celebrating, what scenes of shame and horror were
+     enacted, over which the commander's genius presided as calm as
+     though he didn't belong to our sphere? You talk of 'the listening
+     soldier fixed in sorrow,' the 'leader's grief swayed by generous
+     pity'; to my belief the leader cared no more for bleating flocks
+     than he did for infants' cries, and many of our ruffians butchered
+     one or the other with equal alacrity. You hew out of your polished
+     verses a stately image of smiling victory; I tell you 'tis an
+     uncouth, distorted, savage idol, hideous, bloody, and barbarous.
+     The rites performed before it are shocking to think of. You great
+     poets should show it as it is, ugly and horrible, not beautiful and
+     serene."'
+
+When Colonel Esmond has to describe the battles in which he himself
+took part, he avoids, as might be supposed, the high romantic style.
+But he does not, therefore, fall on the other side, into the mire of
+the writers who at the present day conscientiously give us the horrors
+of the hospital and all the brutalities of war, which Esmond knows,
+but does not choose to set down in his memoir. In his account of the
+Blenheim victory there is a skilful touch of the professional soldier,
+who records briefly the position of the armies and the tactical
+movements; and it lights up with suppressed enthusiasm when he records
+the intrepidity of the English regiments in that fierce and famous
+struggle. We read of Major-General Wilkes,
+
+     'on foot, at the head of the attacking column, marching with his
+     hat off intrepidly in the face of the enemy, who was pouring in a
+     tremendous fire from his guns and musketry, to which our people
+     were instructed not to reply except with pike and bayonet when they
+     reached the French palisades. To these Wilkes walked intrepidly,
+     and struck the woodwork with his sword before our people charged
+     it. He was shot down on the instant, with his colonel, major, and
+     several officers,'
+
+and the assault was repelled with great slaughter.
+
+In this and other similar passages, you have the historic novelist at
+his best; the true facts are selected and arranged so as to form
+pictures of soul-stirring action; while their connection with his
+story is maintained by giving Esmond himself a very modest and natural
+share in the glorious victory:
+
+     'And now the conquerors were met by a furious charge of the English
+     horse under Esmond's general, Lumley, behind whose squadrons the
+     flying foot took refuge and formed again, while Lumley drove back
+     the French horse, charging up to the village of Blenheim and the
+     palisades where Wilkes, and many hundred more gallant Englishmen,
+     lay in slaughtered heaps. Beyond this moment, and of this famous
+     victory, Mr. Esmond knows nothing, for a shot brought down his
+     horse and our young gentleman on it, who fell crushed and stunned
+     under the animal.'
+
+A lesser artist would have made his hero perform some brilliant
+exploit; but Thackeray prefers to sketch the scene as Wouvermans might
+have done it. We have not here the incomparable fire and spirit which
+Scott throws into the skirmishes at Bothwell Brig and Drumclog; we see
+the difference of mind and method; but we can have nothing except
+admiration for the rare imaginative faculty which enabled a quiet man
+of letters to deal so finely and faithfully, with such reserve and
+discrimination, with a subject that might easily have been spoiled by
+the noisy clatter and coarse colouring of the inferior artist. His
+full length portrait of Marlborough has been too often quoted to be
+reproduced here--'impassible before victory, before danger, before
+defeat; the splendid calm of his face as he rode along the lines to
+battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling
+before the enemy's charge or shot.' Of Swift, Esmond says--'I have
+always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of
+that age ... a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vultures tear
+him'; and with a few such strokes he gives etchings of other
+celebrities in letters and politics. One may observe with astonishment
+that the youthful Thackeray, who delighted in suburban chronicles, in
+mean lives and paltry incidents, has risen by middle age to the rank
+of an illustrious painter on the broad canvas of history. The annals
+of literature contain few, if any, other examples of so remarkable a
+transformation.
+
+It is evident that Thackeray, like Scott, was an industrious collector
+of material for his novels from all sources; we may refer, for an
+instance, to a scene which will have left a passing impression upon
+many readers, where, as the French and English armies are facing each
+other on two sides of a little stream in the Low Countries, Prince
+Charles Edward rides down to the French bank and exchanges a salute
+with Esmond. It falls quite naturally and easily into the narrative,
+and reads like a very happy original conception; yet the incident,
+which is quite authentic, may be found in the papers obtained in the
+last century from the Scottish convent at Paris by Macpherson.
+
+In _The Virginians_, which might have had for its second title _Forty
+Years Later_, the chronicle of the Esmond family is continued; with
+North America during the French war for the battlefields, Braddock,
+Wolfe, and Washington for the military figures, and Esmond's grandsons
+as the personages round whom the story's interest centres. It is a
+novel of very great merit, skilfully constructed, full of vivacious
+writing and delineation of character; and the novelist avails himself
+with his usual adroitness of the celebrated incidents of this period
+and the salient features of English society in the middle of the last
+century. Yet we must reluctantly admit that Thackeray has passed his
+climacteric, and that as a work of the historical school this book
+cannot claim parity with Esmond. George Warrington was on Braddock's
+staff at the fatal rout and massacre on the Ohio; his brother Harry
+was with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham; they witnessed a battle lost
+and a battle won, and each saw his commander fall. But George's
+recital of his hairbreadth escape lacks the stern simplicity with
+which his grandfather told the story of Marlborough's wars; and the
+device of his being saved from the Indians by a French officer, who
+was his intimate friend, is so ingenious as to be a trifle
+commonplace. The author does not sketch in any details or personal
+adventures from the great fight under the walls of Quebec; he has
+fallen back, at this part of the story, into personal narrative, and
+_The Warrington Memoirs_ only describe how the news of Wolfe's victory
+and death were acclaimed in London. In the War of Independence, George
+Warrington, who takes the British side, records the feelings and
+situation of an American Loyalist--a class to whom only Mr. Lecky,
+among historians, has done fair justice. There is much acute and
+well-informed reflection upon the state of the colonies at this time,
+the strong currents of party politics, and the exasperation which
+brought about the rebellion; but, on the whole, this part of the
+narrative has too much resemblance to real history. It has not enough
+of the imaginative and picturesque element to lift it above the
+comparatively prosaic level of an interesting memoir, though some good
+scenes and situations are obtained by making the two Warrington
+brothers take opposite sides. When we learn that, in 1759, the English
+Lord Castlewood repaired his shattered fortunes by marrying an
+American heiress, we are inclined to suspect that our author has taken
+a hint from the fashion of a century later.
+
+In the story of _Esmond_ Thackeray dropped the satirical tone, and
+indulged very rarely indeed in the habit of pausing to moralise, as
+writer to reader, upon social hypocrisy, servile obsequiousness, and
+whited sepulchres generally. In _The Virginians_ he is less attentive
+to dramatic propriety; he begins again to turn aside and lecture us,
+in the midst of his tale, upon the text of _De te fabula narratur_.
+Sir Miles and Lady Warrington are scandalised by their nephew's
+extravagance, and refuse all help to the spendthrift.
+
+     'How much of this behaviour goes on daily in respectable society,
+     think you? You can fancy Lord and Lady Macbeth concocting a murder,
+     and coming together with some little awkwardness, perhaps, when the
+     transaction was done and over; but my Lord and Lady Skinflint, when
+     they consult in their bedroom about giving their luckless nephew a
+     helping hand, and determine to refuse, and go down to family
+     prayers and meet their children and domestics, and discourse
+     virtuously before them...?'
+
+And so on, for a page or two, in a tone that some may think almost as
+sophistical as the reasoning by which the Skinflints might excuse to
+themselves their pharisaical behaviour. Such interpolations are
+artistically incorrect, and out of harmony with the proper conception
+of a well-wrought work of fiction, in which the moral should be
+conveyed through the action and the dialogue, and the meditations
+should be left to be done by the reader himself.
+
+We must, therefore, place _The Virginians_ below _Esmond_ in the order
+of merit. Nevertheless, these two novels, with _Barry Lyndon_, are
+most important and valuable contributions to the English historical
+series. Nothing like them had been written before, and nothing equal
+has been written after them, with the single exception of _John
+Inglesant_. They possess one essential quality that ought to
+distinguish all fiction founded on the history of bygone times--they
+are, so far as posterity can judge at all, faithful and effective
+representations of manners. Now, the inferior practitioner in this
+particular school, being prevented by indolence or incapacity from
+mastering his period and acquiring insight into its ways of thought
+and living, is too often content to cover up his deficiencies by
+indenting freely on the theatrical wardrobe and armoury. He deals
+largely in the costumes of the day; he supplies himself plentifully
+with old-fashioned phrases; he is fond of old furniture; he is
+strongest, in fact, upon the external and decorative aspect of the
+society to which he introduces us. Most of the romances written in
+imitation of Scott had this tendency; and this same feebleness
+underlies the superfluous minuteness of detail that may be observed in
+the decadent realists of the present day. Nothing of this sort can be
+alleged against Thackeray, who works from inward outwardly in his
+creations of character, and whose personages are truly historical in
+the sense that they move and speak naturally according to the ideas
+and circumstances of their age, the dialect and dress being merely
+added as appropriate colouring. It is, indeed, a peculiarity of
+Thackeray's novels, which distinguishes him alike from the romancer
+and the modern naturalist that they contain hardly any description,
+that he is never professedly picturesque, that he relies entirely on
+passing strokes and effective details given by the way. In Scott we
+have superb descriptive pieces of scenery, of storms, of the interiors
+of a castle or a Gothic cathedral; and some of the best living
+novelists are much given to elaborate landscape painting. But we doubt
+whether half a page of deliberately picturesque description can be
+found in any of Thackeray's first-class works. He will sometimes
+sketch off the inside of a house or the look of a town, but with
+natural scenery he does not concern himself; he is, for the most part,
+entirely occupied with the analysis of character, or with the
+emotional side of life; and he seems constantly to bear in mind the
+Aristotelian maxim that life consists in action. His principal
+instrument for the exhibition of motive, for the evolution of his
+story, for bringing out qualities, is dialogue, which he manages with
+great dexterity and effect, giving it point and raciness, and
+avoiding the snare--into which recent social novelists have been
+falling--of insignificance and prolixity. The method of easy,
+sparkling, natural dialogue for developing the plot and distinguishing
+the personages is said to have been first transferred from the theatre
+to the novel by Walter Scott. At any rate, the use of it on a large
+scale, which has since been carried to the verge of abuse, began with
+the Waverley novels; where we find abundance of that humorous
+vernacular talk in which Shakespeare excelled, though for the romance
+Cervantes may be registered as its inventor. In Thackeray's hands
+dramatic conversation, as of actors on the stage, becomes of very
+prominent importance, not only for the illustration of manners in
+society, but also for dressing up the subordinate figures of his
+company. He is now no longer the caricaturist of earlier days; he
+employs the popular dialect and comic touches with effective
+moderation. And he avails himself very freely, in _The Virginians_, of
+the privilege which belongs to the historical novelist, who is allowed
+to make the reader acquainted with the notabilities of the period not
+only for the movement of his drama, but also for a passing glance or
+casual introduction, as might happen in any place of public resort or
+in a crowded _salon_. Franklin, Johnson, and Richardson, George Selwyn
+and Lord Chesterfield, cross the stage and disappear, after a few
+remarks of their own or the author's. For military officers, who
+figure in all his novels, he has ever a kindly word; and also for
+sailors, although it is only in his last (unfinished) novel that he
+takes up the navy. For English clergymen, especially for bishops, he
+has no indulgence at all; and he seems to be possessed by the
+commonplace error of believing that the prevailing types of the
+Anglican Church in the eighteenth century were the courtier-bishop
+and the humble obsequious chaplain. The typical Irishman of fiction,
+with his mixture of recklessness and cunning, warm-hearted and
+unveracious, is to be found, we think, in every one of Thackeray's
+larger novels, except in _The Virginians_; the Scotsman is rare,
+having been considerably used up by Walter Scott and his assiduous
+imitators. We may notice (parenthetically) that our own day is
+witnessing a marvellous revival of Highlanders and Lowlanders in
+fiction, from Jacobite adventures to the pawky wit and humble
+incidents of the kailyard.
+
+In _The Newcomes_ we return regretfully to the novel of contemporary
+society; wherewith disappears all the light haze of enchantment that
+hangs over the revival of distant times, even though they lie no
+further behind us than the eighteenth century. Such a change of scene
+necessitates and completes the transition from the romantic to the
+realistic; for how can a picture of our own environment, which any one
+can verify, avoid being more or less photographic? In one sense
+it is a continuation of the historic novel, which has only to put
+off its archaic or literary costume to appear as a presentation of
+social history brought up to date; the method of minute description,
+the portrayal of manners, are the same, with the drawback that
+the celebrities of the day must be kept off the stage. Any
+eighteenth-century personage might figure, with effect, in _The
+Virginians_, while Macaulay and Palmerston could hardly have been
+sketched off, however briefly and good-naturedly, in _The Newcomes_.
+In all essential respects the tone and treatment are unaltered in the
+two stories; although the ironical spirit, restrained in the
+historical novels by a sense of dramatic consistency, is again among
+us having great wrath, as Thackeray surveys the aspect of the London
+world around him. The character of Colonel Newcome, his distinguished
+gallantry, his spotless honour, his simplicity and credulity, is
+drawn with truth and tenderness; and some of the lesser folk are
+admirable for their kindliness and unselfishness. But what a society
+is this in which the Colonel is landed upon his return from India! He
+calls, with his son, at his brother's house in Bryanston Square:
+
+     '"It's my father," said Clive to the "menial" who opened the door;
+     "my aunt will see Colonel Newcome."
+
+     '"Missis not at home," said the man. "Missis is gone in the
+     carriage. Not at this door. Take them things down the area steps,
+     young man," bawls out the domestic to a pastry-cook's boy ... and
+     John struggles back, closing the door on the astonished Colonel.'
+
+An astonishment that most Londoners of his time would have assuredly
+shared; unless, indeed, the West-end doorstep has gained wonderfully
+by the scrubbing of sixty years. On the relations between masters and
+servants Thackeray was never more severe than in this book; he is
+irritated by the marching in of the household brigade to family
+prayers, and he declares that we 'know no more of that race which
+inhabits the basement floor, than of the men and brethren of
+Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send missionaries'--a monstrous
+imputation. He constantly resumes the moralising attitude; and his
+pungent persiflage is poured out, as if from an apocalyptic vial, upon
+worldliness and fashionable insolence. Sir Barnes Newcome's divorce
+from the unhappy Lady Clara furnishes a text for sad and solemn
+anathema upon the mercenary marriages in Hanover Square, where 'St.
+George of England may behold virgin after virgin offered up to the
+devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away,
+just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to
+come to the rescue.' We would by no means withhold from the modern
+satirist of manners the privilege of using forcibly figurative
+language or of putting a lash to his whip. Yet if his novels are, as
+we have suggested, to be regarded as historical, in the sense of
+recording impressions drawn from life for the benefit of posterity,
+such passages as those just quoted from Thackeray raise the general
+question whether documentary evidence of this kind as to the state of
+society at a given period is as valuable and trustworthy as it has
+usually been reckoned to be. He has himself declared that 'upon the
+morals and national manners, works of satire afford a world of light
+that one would in vain look for in regular books of history'--that
+_Pickwick_, _Roderick Random_, and _Tom Jones_, 'give us a better idea
+of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any
+pompous or authentic histories.' Whether Fielding and Smollett's
+contemporaries would have endorsed this opinion is the real question;
+for on such a point the judgment of Thackeray, who lived a century
+after them, cannot be conclusive. It is probable that to an Englishman
+of that day the novels of these two authors appeared to be
+extraordinary caricatures of actual society, in town or country.
+
+On the other hand, the story is excellently conducted, and each actor
+performs with consummate skill his part or hers; for in none of his
+works has Thackeray given higher proof of that dramatic power which
+brings out situations, leads on to the _dénouement_, and points the
+moral of the story, by a skilful manipulation of various incidents and
+a remarkably numerous variety of characters. There, is one chapter
+(ix. of vol. II.), headed 'Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy,'
+where he carries on the plot entirely by a light and sparkling
+dialogue which may be compared to some of A. de Musset's wittiest
+_Proverbes_. It is a book that could only have been composed by a
+first-class artist in the maturity of his powers; and for that very
+reason we must regret that it is steeped in bitterness; while
+Thackeray's rooted hostility to mothers-in-law misguides him into the
+æsthetic error of admitting a virago to scold frantically almost over
+the colonel's death-bed. The unvarying meanness and selfishness of
+Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for
+whereas in the delineation of his amiable and high-principled
+characters Thackeray is careful to shade off their bright qualities by
+a mixture of natural weakness, these ill-favoured portraits stand out
+in the full glare of unredeemed insolence and low cunning.
+
+In his last novel, broken off half-way by his death, Thackeray went
+back once more to that eighteenth century, which, as he says in one of
+his letters, 'occupied him to the exclusion almost of the nineteenth,'
+and to the method of weaving fiction out of historical materials. We
+have already remarked upon his practice of opening with a kind of
+family history, which explains the antecedent connections,
+relationship, and pedigree of the persons who are coming upon the
+stage, and marks out the background of his story. In _Denis Duval_ he
+carries this preamble through two chapters, and arranges all the
+pieces on his board so carefully that an inattentive reader might lose
+his way among the preliminary details. One sees with what pleasure he
+has studied his favourite period in France and England, and how he
+enjoyed constructing, like Defoe, a fictitious autobiography that
+reads like a picturesque and genuine memoir of the times. Having thus
+laid out his plan, and prepared his _mise en scène_, he begins his
+third chapter with an animated entry of his actors, who thenceforward
+play their parts in a succession of incidents and adventures, that are
+all adjusted and fitted in to the framework of time and place that he
+has taken so much pains to design for them. In this manner he touches
+upon the great events of contemporary history, like the French War, or
+illustrates the state of England by bringing in highwaymen and the
+press-gang; while a minute description of localities lends an air of
+simplicity to the tale of an old man who has (as he says) an
+extraordinarily clear remembrance of his boyhood.
+
+The Notes which appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_, June 1864, as an
+epilogue to the last lines written by Thackeray, when the story
+stopped abruptly, throw curious light on the methods of gathering his
+material and preparing his work. Just as he visited the Blenheim
+battlefield, when he was engaged upon _Esmond_, so he went down to
+Romney Marsh, where Denis Duval was born and bred, surveyed Rye and
+Winchelsea as if he were drawing plans of those towns, and collected
+local traditions of the coast and the country, of the smugglers, the
+Huguenot settlements, and the old war time of 1778-82. The _Annual
+Register_ and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ furnished him with suggestive
+incidents and circumstantial reports which he expanded with admirable
+fertility of imagination; so that by combining what he saw with what
+he read he could lift the curtain and light up again an obscure corner
+of the Kentish coast, and the doings of the queer folk who lived on it
+a century before he went there. That he never finished this novel is
+much to be lamented, for Denis had just become a midshipman on board
+the _Serapis_, and we learn from these 'Notes' that he was to take
+part in the great fight which ended in the capture of that ship by
+Paul Jones, after the most bloody and desperate duel in the long and
+glorious record of the British Navy. Captain Pearson, who commanded
+the _Serapis_, reported his defeat to the Admiralty in a letter of
+which 'Mr. Thackeray seems to have thought much,' and, indeed, it is
+precisely the sort of document--quiet, formal, with a masculine
+contempt for adjectives (there is not one in the whole letter)--which
+denotes a character after Thackeray's own heart.
+
+     'We dropt alongside of each other, head and stern, when, the fluke
+     of our spare anchor hooking his quarter, we became so close, fore
+     and aft, that the muzzles of our guns touched each other's sides.'
+
+Here we have the style which Thackeray loved; and 'tis pity that we
+have so narrowly missed the picture of a fierce naval battle by an
+artist who could describe strenuous action in steady phrase, and who
+knew that the hard-fighting commander is usually a cool, resolute,
+resourceful man, for whom it is a matter of plain duty to fight his
+ship till he is fairly beaten, and to report the result briefly,
+whatever it may be, to his superiors. One can observe the mellowing
+influence upon Thackeray of the atmosphere of past times and the
+afterglow of heroic deeds; for in _Denis Duval_ there is no trace of
+the scorching satire which pursues us in _The Newcomes_; nor does he
+once pause to moralise, or to enlarge upon the innumerable hypocrisies
+of modern society. It is questionable, indeed, whether this fine
+fragment binds up well in a volume with the _Roundabout Papers_, which
+bring the author back into the light of common day, and to the
+trivialities of ordinary society.
+
+It has not been thought necessary, in this biographical edition, to
+issue the several volumes in the order of the dates at which they were
+written; nor has the attempt been made to preserve some serial
+continuity of their style or subject. The arrangement, moreover,
+serves to accentuate unnecessarily the undeniable imparity of
+Thackeray's different books; for _Punch_ and the _Sketch Books_ are
+interposed between _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_; while even the wild
+and wicked Lyndon hardly deserved to be handcuffed in the same volume
+with Fitzboodle, whom in the body he would have crushed like an
+insect. Yet the classification of Thackeray's novels might be easily
+made, for _Barry Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, and _Denis
+Duval_ fall together in one homogeneous group, having a strong family
+resemblance in tone and treatment, and following generally the
+chronological succession of the periods with which they are concerned.
+If to Esmond is awarded the precedence that is due to him not by
+seniority, but by importance, we have the wars of the eighteenth
+century between England and France from Marlborough's campaigns down
+to Rodney's great naval victory of 1783, in which Duval was destined
+to take part. These works represent Thackeray's very considerable
+contribution to the Historic School of English novelists; and we may
+count them also a valuable commentary upon English history, for
+without doubt every luminous illustration of past times and personages
+acts as a powerful stimulant to the national mind, by exciting a
+keener interest in the nation's story and a clearer appreciation of
+its reality. Chateaubriand has affirmed that Walter Scott's romances
+produced a revolution in the art of writing histories, that no greater
+master of the art of historical divination has ever lived, and that
+his profound insight into the mediæval world, its names, the true
+relation between different classes, its political and social aspects,
+originated a new and brilliant historical method which superseded the
+dim and limited views of scholarly erudition. For Thackeray we make no
+such extensive or extravagant claims; but it may be said that the
+dramatic conception of history in his novels and lectures was of
+great service to his readers and hearers by the vivid impressions
+which they conveyed of the life, character, and feelings of their
+forefathers, of their failings, virtues, and memorable achievements.
+Some material objections may be taken to the system of teaching by
+graphic pictures in Thackeray, as in Carlyle's _French Revolution_,
+and in both cases the philosophy leaves much to be desired, for the
+writer's own idiosyncrasy colours all his work. Yet when we remember
+how few are the readers to whom the accurate Dryasdust, with his
+careful research and well attested facts, brings any lasting
+enlightenment, we may well believe that very many owe their distinct
+ideas of the state of England and its people during the last century
+to Thackeray's genius for carefully studied autobiographical fiction.
+
+To the four historical novels mentioned above let us add three novels
+of nineteenth-century manners--_Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The
+Newcomes_--and we have seven books (one incomplete) upon which
+Thackeray's name and fame survive, and will be handed down to
+posterity. The list is by no means long if it be compared with the
+outturn of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton, or of his foremost contemporary
+Dickens; and Stevenson, who resembles him in the subdued realistic
+style of narrating a perilous fight or adventure, has left us a larger
+bequest. But they are amply sufficient to build up for him a lasting
+monument in English literature; and their very paucity may serve as a
+warning against the prevailing sin of copious and indiscriminate
+productiveness, by which so many second-rate novelists of the present
+day exhaust their powers and drown a respectable reputation in a flood
+of writing, which sinks in quality in proportion to the rise in
+quantity.
+
+How far the character and personal experiences of an author are
+revealed or disguised in his writings is a question which has often
+been discussed. Bulwer once endeavoured, in a whimsical essay, to
+prove that men of letters are the only people whose characters are
+really ascertainable, because you may know them intimately by their
+works; but herein he merely touched upon the general truth or truism
+that society at large judges every man only by his public
+performances, and does not trouble itself at all about anything else.
+In the category of those who display in their writings their tastes
+and prejudices, their feelings and the special bent of their mind, we
+may certainly place Thackeray, who was a moralist and a satirist, very
+sensitive to the ills and follies of humanity, and impressionable in
+the highest degree. For such a man it was impossible to refrain from
+giving his opinions, his praise or his blame, in all that he wrote
+upon everything that interested him; and in portraying the society
+which surrounded him, he inevitably portrayed himself. He displayed as
+much as any writer the general complexion of his intellectual
+propensities and sympathies; and we can even trace in him the
+existence of some of the minor human frailties which he was most apt
+to condemn, an unconscious tendency which is not altogether uncommon.
+But he is essentially a high-minded man of letters, acutely sensitive
+to absurdities, impatient of meanness, of affectation, and of
+ignominious admiration of trivial things; a resolute representative of
+the independent literary spirit, with a strong desire to see things as
+they are, and with the gift of describing them truthfully. He
+repudiated 'the absurd outcry about neglected men of genius'; and in a
+letter quoted by Mrs. Ritchie he writes:
+
+     'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty
+     years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time,
+     please God, never lost my own respect.'
+
+His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States,
+where he was lecturing--
+
+     'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the
+     friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure
+     independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I
+     choke on the instant'--
+
+having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the
+_American Notes_.
+
+On the other hand, he was not free from the defects of his qualities,
+mental and artistic, from the propensity to set points of character in
+violent relief, or from the somewhat unfair generalisation which grows
+out of the habit of drawing types and distributing colours for
+satirical effect.
+
+In regard to his religion, it appears to have been of the
+rationalistic eighteenth-century order in which moral ideas are
+entirely dominant, to the exclusion of the deeply spiritual modes of
+thought; and we may say of him, as of Carlyle, that his philosophy was
+more practical than profound. The subjoined quotation is from a letter
+to his daughter:
+
+     'What is right must always be right, before it was practised as
+     well as after. And if such and such a commandment delivered by
+     Moses was wrong, depend upon it, it was not delivered by God, and
+     the whole question of complete inspiration goes at once. And the
+     misfortune of dogmatic belief is that, the first principle granted
+     that the book called the Bible is written under the direct
+     dictation of God--for instance, that the Catholic Church is under
+     the direct dictation of God, and solely communicates with Him--that
+     Quashimaboo is the directly appointed priest of God, and so
+     forth--pain, cruelty, persecution, separation of dear relatives,
+     follow as a matter of course.... Smith's truth being established in
+     Smith's mind as the Divine one, persecution follows as a matter of
+     course--martyrs have roasted over all Europe, over all God's world,
+     upon this dogma. To my mind Scripture only means a writing, and
+     Bible means a book.... Every one of us in every part, book,
+     circumstance of life, sees a different meaning and moral, and so it
+     must be about religion. But we can all love each other and say "Our
+     Father."'
+
+This is true, stout-hearted, individualistic liberty of believing--an
+excellent thing and wholesome, though it by no means covers the whole
+ground, or meets all difficulties. The logical consequence is a strong
+distaste for theology, and no very high opinion of the priesthood,
+wherein we may probably find the root of Thackeray's proclivity,
+already mentioned, toward unmerited sarcasm upon the clergy. In the
+Introduction to _Pendennis_ is a letter written from Spa, in which he
+says, 'They have got a Sunday service here in an extinct
+gambling-house, and a clerical professor to perform, whom you have to
+pay just like any other showman who comes.' It does not seem to have
+occurred to Thackeray that the turning of a gambling-house into a
+place of prayer is no bad thing of itself, or that you have no more
+right to expect your religious services to be done for you in a
+foreign land without payment than your newspapers or novels.
+
+But these are blemishes or eccentricities which are only worth notice
+in a character of exceptional interest and a writer of great
+originality. Thackeray's work had a distinct influence on the light
+literature of his generation, and possibly also on its manners, for it
+is quite conceivable that one reason why his descriptions of snobbery
+and shams appear to us now overdrawn, may be that his trenchant blows
+at social idols did materially discredit the worship of them. His
+literary style had the usual following of imitators who caught his
+superficial form and missed the substance, as, for example, in the
+habit which arose of talking with warm-hearted familiarity of great
+eighteenth-century men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy
+enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with
+Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in _Pyramus and
+Thisbe_, 'you can do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.'
+
+Thackeray will always stand in the front rank of the very remarkable
+array of novelists who have illustrated the Victorian era; and this
+new edition is a fresh proof that his reputation is undiminished, and
+will long endure.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] _The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with Biographical
+Introductions by his daughter_, Anne Ritchie. In 13 volumes. London,
+1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1898.
+
+[11] Now Lady Ritchie.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST[12]
+
+
+For the last one hundred and fifty years India has been to Englishmen
+an ever-widening field of incessant activity, military, commercial,
+and administrative. They have been occupied, during a temporary
+sojourn in that country, in acquiring and developing a great dominion.
+No situation more unfavourable to the development of imaginative
+literature could be found than that of a few thousand Europeans
+isolated, far from home, among millions of Asiatics entirely different
+from them in race, manners, and language. Their hands have been always
+full of business, they have been absorbed in the affairs of war and
+government, they have been cut off from the culture which is essential
+to the growth of art and letters, they have had little time for
+studying the antique and alien civilisation of the country. It seldom
+happens that the men who play a part in historical events, or who
+witness the sombre realities of war and serious politics, where
+kingdoms and lives are at stake, have either leisure or inclination
+for that picturesque side of things which lies at the source of most
+poetry and romance. And thus it has naturally come to pass that while
+Englishmen in India have produced histories full of matter, though
+often deficient in composition, and have also written much upon
+Oriental antiquities, laws, social institutions, and economy, they
+have done little in the department of novels.
+
+That a good novel should have been produced in India was, therefore,
+until very recent times improbable; that it should have been
+successful in England was still less to be expected. For the modern
+reader will have nothing to do with a story full of outlandish scenes
+and characters; he must be told what he thinks he knows; he must be
+able to realise the points and the probabilities of a plot and of its
+personages; he wants a tale that falls more or less within his
+ordinary experience, or that tallies with his preconceived notions.
+Accordingly, any close description of native Indian manners or people
+is apt to lose interest in proportion as it is exact; its value as a
+painting of life is usually discernible only by those who know the
+country. The popular traditional East was long, and indeed still is,
+that which has been for generations fixed in the imagination of
+Western folk by the _Arabian Nights_, by the legends of Crusaders, and
+by pictorial editions of the Old Testament. It is seen in the Oriental
+landscape and figures presented by Walter Scott in _The Talisman_,
+which every one, at least in youth, has read; whereas _The Surgeon's
+Daughter_, where the scene is laid in India, is hardly read at all. Of
+course there are other reasons why the former book is much more liked
+than the latter; yet it was certainly not bad local colouring or
+unreality of detail that damaged _The Surgeon's Daughter_, for Scott
+knew quite as much about Mysore and Haidar Ali as he did about Syria
+in the thirteenth century and Saladin. But in _The Talisman_ he was on
+the well-trodden ground of mediæval English history and legend;
+whereas the readers of his Indian tale found themselves wandering in
+the fresh but then almost unknown field of India in the eighteenth
+century.
+
+These are the serious obstacles which have discouraged Anglo-Indians
+from attempting the pure historical romance. They knew the country too
+well for concocting stories after the fashion of Thomas Moore's _Lalla
+Rookh_, with gallant chieftains and beauteous maidens who have nothing
+Oriental about them except a few set Eastern phrases, turbans,
+daggers, and jewellery. They could not use the true local colour, the
+real temper and talk of the Indian East, without great risk of
+becoming neither intelligible nor interesting to the English public at
+large. It may be said that before our own day there has been only one
+author who has successfully overcome these difficulties--Meadows
+Taylor, who wrote a romantic novel, now almost forgotten, founded upon
+the history of Western India in the seventeenth century. The period
+was skilfully chosen, for it is the time of the Moghul emperor
+Aurungzeb's long war against the Mohammedan kingdoms in the Dekhan,
+and of the Maratha insurrection under Sivaji, which eventually ruined
+the Moghul empire. The daring murder of a Mohammedan governor by
+Sivaji, the Maratha hero who freed his countrymen from an alien yoke,
+is still kept in patriotic remembrance throughout Western India. Nor
+is there anything in such a natural sentiment that need give umbrage
+to Englishmen; although the liberality of a recent English governor of
+Bombay who headed a list of subscriptions for public commemoration of
+the deed, betrayed a somewhat simple-minded unreadiness to appreciate
+the significance of historical analogies.
+
+Meadows Taylor has treated this subject with very creditable success.
+He had lived long in that part of the country; he knew the localities;
+he was unusually conversant with the manners and feelings of the
+people, and he had the luck to be among them before the old and rough
+state of society, with its lawless and turbulent elements, had
+disappeared. He had himself been in the service of a native prince
+whose governing methods were no better, in some respects worse, than
+those of the seventeenth century; and his possession of good natural
+literary faculty made up in him a rare combination of qualifications
+for venturing upon an Indian romance. The result has been that _Tara_
+has not fallen into complete oblivion, though one may doubt whether it
+would now be thought generally readable. Although written so late as
+1863, the influence of Walter Scott's mediæval romanticism shows
+itself in the chivalrous language of the nobles, and in a somewhat
+formal drawing of the leading figures, as if they were taken from a
+model. But all the details are truly executed. There are sketches of
+scenery, of interiors, of dress, arms, and manners, which are clearly
+the outcome of direct observation; and the incidents have a genuine
+flavour. The misfortune is that these are just the sterling qualities
+which require special knowledge and insight for their appreciation,
+and are therefore missed by the great majority of readers. The
+following picture of a party of Maratha horsemen returning from a raid
+may be taken as an example:
+
+     'There might have been twenty-five to thirty men, from the youth
+     unbearded to the grizzled trooper, whose swarthy, sunburnt face,
+     large whiskers and moustaches touched with grey, wiry frame, and
+     easy lounging seat in saddle, as he balanced his heavy Maratha
+     spear across his shoulder, showed the years of service he had done.
+     There was no richness of costume among the party; the dresses were
+     worn and weather stained, and of motley character. Some wore
+     thickly quilted white doublets, strong enough to turn a sword-cut,
+     or light shirts of chain-mail, with a piece of the mail or of
+     twisted wire folded into their turbans; and a few wore steel
+     morions with turbans tied round them, and steel gauntlets inlaid
+     with gold and silver in delicate arabesque patterns. All were now
+     soiled by the wet and mud of the day. It was clear that this party
+     had ridden far; and the horses, from their drooping crests and
+     sluggish action, were evidently weary. Four of the men had been
+     wounded in some skirmish, for they sat their horses with
+     difficulty, and the bandages about them were covered with blood.'
+
+No Indian novel, indeed, has been written which displays greater power
+of picturesque description, or better acquaintance with the
+distinctive varieties of castes, race, and habits, that make up the
+composite population of India. It was for a long time the only Indian
+novel in which the _dramatis personæ_ are entirely native.
+
+Although _Tara_ is unique as an Indian romance, there is another story
+which renders Indian life and manners with equal fidelity. _Pandurang
+Hari_ was written by a member of the Indian Civil Service, and first
+published in 1826, though it reappeared in 1874, with a preface by Sir
+Bartle Frere. Here again the scene is in Western India, among the
+Marathas; but the period belongs to the first quarter of this century.
+It purports to be a free translation from a manuscript given to the
+author by a Hindu who had in his youth served with the Maratha armies,
+and latterly fell in with the Pindaree hordes, from whom he heard
+tales of their plundering raids. He eventually joins a band of
+robbers, and leads a wandering, adventurous life in the hills and
+jungles of the Dekhan, until the general pacification of the country
+by the British permits or obliges him to settle down quietly. The
+merit of the book consists entirely in its precise and valuable
+delineation of the condition of the country when it was harried by the
+freebooting Maratha companies, and in certain glimpses which are
+given of Anglo-Indian life in those rough days; for the writer, unlike
+Meadows Taylor, has no literary power, and can only relate accurately
+what he has seen or has carefully gathered from authentic sources.
+
+We have thus only two novels worth mention which have preserved true
+pictures of the times before all the wild irregularity of Indian
+circumstance and rulership had been flattened down under the
+irresistible pressure of English law and order. The historical romance
+has shared the general decline and fall of that school in Europe;
+while as for the exact reproduction of stories dealing entirely with
+native life, very few Anglo-Indians would now attempt it, for such a
+book would find very scanty favour in England. Nearly all recent
+Indian novels have for their subject, not native, but Anglo-Indian
+society; the heroes and heroines, in war or love, in peril or pastime,
+are English; the natives take the minor or accessory part in the
+drama, and give the prevailing colour, tragical or comical, to the
+background. One of the best and earliest novels of this class is
+_Oakfield_, written about 1853 by William Arnold, a son of Dr. Arnold
+of Rugby, who, after spending some years in one of the East India
+Company's sepoy regiments, obtained a civil appointment in India, and
+died at Gibraltar on his way homeward. Some pathetic lines in the
+short poem by Matthew Arnold called _A Southern Night_ commemorate his
+untimely death. The book is remarkable for the autobiographic
+description, too austere and censorious, of life in Indian
+cantonments, or during an Indian campaign, before the great Mutiny
+swept away the old sepoy army of Bengal. It represents the impression
+made upon a young Oxonian of high culture and serious religious
+feeling by the unmannerly and sometimes vicious dissipation of the
+officers' mess in an ill-managed regiment stationed up the country.
+
+Oakfield, a clergyman's son, carefully bred up in Arnold's school of
+indifference to dogma and strictness in morals, finds himself
+oppressed by the hollow conventionality of religious and social ideas
+at home, and sees no prospect of a higher level in the ordinary
+English professions. He leaves Oxford abruptly for an Indian
+cadetship, and sets out with the hope of finding wider scope for work
+and the earnest pursuit of loftier ideals in India. He is intensely
+disappointed and disgusted at finding himself, on joining his
+regiment, among men who have very slight education and wild manners,
+whose talk is coarse, who gamble, fight duels, dislike the country,
+and care nothing for the people. The aims and methods of the
+Government itself appear to him eminently unsatisfactory, being
+chiefly directed towards such grovelling business as revenue
+collection, superficial order, and public works, with little or no
+concern for the moral elevation of the people. When his friends urge
+him to study for the purpose of rising in the service, civil or
+military, he asks: 'What then? What if the extra allowances have
+really no attraction? I want to know what the life is in which you
+think it good to get on. It seems to me that my object in life must be
+not so much to get an appointment, or to get on in the world, as to
+work, and the only work worth doing in the country is helping to
+civilise it.'
+
+We have here the interesting, though not uncommon, case of a youthful
+enthusiast transported as if by one leap--for the sea voyage is a
+blank interval--from England to the Far East, from a sober and
+disciplined home to a loose society, from the centre of ancient peace
+and calm study to a semi-barbarous miscellany of races under an
+elementary kind of government. Ovid's banishment from Rome to the
+shores of the Euxine, to live among rude Roman centurions and subject
+Scythians, could have been no greater change, though Ovid and Oakfield
+are not comparable otherwise. The sight of a great Hindu fair on the
+river bank at Allahabad, as surveyed from the deck of a steamer,
+strikes him with that ever-recurrent feeling of a great gulf fixed
+between Europeans and natives: 'What an inconceivable separation there
+apparently and actually is between us few English, silently making a
+servant of the Ganges with our steam engines and paddles, and these
+Asiatics, with shouts and screams worshipping the same river!'
+
+He meets a cool and capable civilian, who expounds to him the
+practical side of all these questions and administrative problems; and
+he makes a few military friends of the higher stamp, who stand by him
+in his refusal to fight a duel and in the court-martial which follows.
+Then comes the second Sikh war, with a vivid description, evidently by
+an eye-witness, of an officer's share in the hard-fought action at
+Chillianwalla, and of the other sharp contests in that eventful
+campaign. It is an excellent example of the skilful interweaving of
+real incident with the texture of fiction, showing the clear-cut lines
+and colour of actual experience gained in the fiercest battle ever won
+by the English in India:
+
+     'The cavalry and horse-artillery dashed forward, and soon the
+     rolling of wheels and clanking of sabres were lost in one continual
+     roar from above a hundred pieces of artillery. On every side the
+     shot crashed through the jungle; branches of trees were shattered
+     and torn from their stems; rolling horses and falling men gave an
+     early character to this fearful evening.... The 3rd Division
+     advanced, with what fatal results to the gallant 24th Regiment is
+     well known.... Either by an injudicious order, or, as stated in the
+     official despatch, by mistaking a chance movement of their
+     commandant for a signal, the 24th broke into a double at a
+     distance from the guns far too great for a charge; they arrived
+     breathless and exhausted at the guns, where a terrific and hitherto
+     concealed fire of musketry awaited them. The native corps came up
+     and well sustained their European comrades; but both were
+     repulsed--not until twenty-one English officers, twelve sergeants,
+     and 450 rank and file of the 24th had been killed or wounded....
+     Oakfield counted the bodies of nine officers lying dead in as many
+     square yards; there lay the dead bodies of the two Pennycuicks side
+     by side; those of the men almost touched each other.'
+
+The transfer of Oakfield to a civil appointment in no way diminishes
+his dissatisfaction at the spectacle of a Government that has no
+apparent ethical programme and misconceives its true mission:
+
+     'The Indian Government is perhaps the best, the most perfect, nay,
+     perhaps the only specimen of pure professing secularism that the
+     civilised world has ever seen since the Christian era, and
+     sometimes, when our eyes are open to see things as they are, such a
+     secularism does appear a most monstrous phenomenon to be stalking
+     through God's world.... When the spirit of philosophy, poetry, and
+     godliness shall move across the world, when the philosophical
+     reformer shall come here as Governor-General, then the spirit of
+     Mammon may tremble for its empire, but not till then.'
+
+Yet, notwithstanding the author's solicitude for India's welfare, the
+natives make no figure at all in his story; they are barely mentioned,
+except where Oakfield denounces the unblushing perjury committed daily
+in our courts; and one can see that he does them the very common
+injustice of measuring their conduct by an ideal standard of morality.
+Anglo-Indian officials leave their country at an early age, in almost
+total ignorance of the darker side of English life, as seen in a
+police court or wherever the passions and interests of men come into
+sharp conflict. But this is just the side of Indian life that is
+brought prominently before them, at first, as junior magistrates and
+revenue officers, who sometimes do not care to look into any other
+aspects of it; and in consequence they stand aghast at the exhibition
+of vice and false-swearing. A London magistrate transferred to Lucknow
+or Lahore would find much less reason for astonishment.
+
+The same criticism applies, for similar reasons, to Oakfield's
+unmeasured censure of the tone and habits prevalent among officers of
+the old Indian army; he probably knew nothing of regimental life in
+the English army sixty years ago, and therefore supposed the
+delinquencies of his own mess to be monstrous. It must be admitted,
+however, that morals and manners were loose and low in a bad sepoy
+regiment before the Mutiny. No two men could have differed more widely
+in antecedents or character than William Arnold and John Lang, whose
+novel, _The Wetherbys; or, A Few Chapters of Indian Experience_, was
+written a few years earlier than _Oakfield_. It deals with precisely
+the same scenes and society, at the same period, in the form of an
+Indian officer's autobiography. The book is clever, amusing with a
+touch of vulgarity, yet undoubtedly composed with a complete knowledge
+of its subject; for Lang was the editor of a Meerut newspaper, who
+took his full share of Anglo-Indian revelry, and who knew the Indian
+army thoroughly. Whereas in _Oakfield_ the tone rises often to
+righteous indignation, in _The Wetherbys_ it falls to a strain of
+caustic humour, and in the modern reader's mouth it might leave an
+unpleasant taste; yet the verisimilitude of the narrative would be
+questioned by no competent judge. As Oakfield fought at Chillianwalla,
+so Wetherby fights in the almost equally desperate battle of
+Ferozeshah, where the English narrowly escaped a great disaster; and
+here, again, we have a momentary ray of vivid light thrown upon the
+battlefield by a writer who had associated with eye-witnesses, though
+he was not one of them. It is difficult to give an extract from this
+part of the tale, because Lang's power lies not in description, but in
+characteristic conversation; so we may be content, for the purpose of
+bringing out the contrast between two very diverse styles, with a
+specimen of his comic talent, as exhibited in the injunctions laid
+upon her husband by the vulgar half-caste wife of a poor henpecked
+officer just starting for the campaign:
+
+     'Well, then,' she continued, 'keep out of danger. If your troop
+     wishes to charge into a safe place, let 'em. _You_ don't want
+     brevet rank, or any of that nonsense, I hope. Make as much bluster
+     and row as you like, but for Heaven's sake keep out of harm's
+     way.... You need not write to me every day, but every third or
+     fourth day, for the postage is serious. If you should happen to
+     kill any Sikhs, search them, and pull down their back hair; that's
+     where they carry their money and jewels and valuables. A sergeant
+     of the 3rd Dragoons, like a good husband, has sent his wife down a
+     lot of gold mohurs and some precious stones that he found tied up
+     in the hair of a Sikh officer. And, by the by, you may as well
+     leave me your watch. You can always learn the time of day from
+     somebody; and if anything happened to you, it would be sold by the
+     Committee of Adjustment, and would fetch a mere nothing.'
+
+This is unquestionably a grotesque caricature; yet the ladies of mixed
+parentage were quaint and singular persons in the India of sixty years
+ago. As Arnold could hardly have failed to read _The Wetherbys_ before
+he wrote _Oakfield_, the book may have suggested to him the plan of
+going over the same ground upon a higher plane of thought and
+treatment. The two books stand as records of a state of society that
+has now entirely passed away, and from their perusal we may conclude
+that, among the many radical changes wrought upon India by the
+sweeping cyclone of the great Mutiny, not the least of them has been a
+thorough reformation of the native army.
+
+When we turn to the Indian novels written after the Mutiny we are in
+the clearer and lighter atmosphere of the contemporary social novel.
+We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the
+contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the
+old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions,
+serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments
+under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed
+Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and
+military, and sufficiently decorous, except where hill-stations foster
+flirting and the ordinary dissipation of any garrison town. It is,
+however, still a characteristic of the post-Mutiny stories that they
+find very little room for natives; the secret of successfully
+interpreting Indian life and ideas to the English public in this form
+still awaits discovery. One of the best and most popular of the new
+school was the late Sir George Chesney, whose _Battle of Dorking_ was
+a stroke of genius, and who utilised his Indian experiences with very
+considerable literary skill, weaving his projects of army reform into
+a lively tale of everyday society abroad and at home. The scene of _A
+True Reformer_ opens at Simla, under Lord Mayo's vice-royalty, names
+and places being very thinly disguised; the hero marries a pretty
+girl, and starts homeward on furlough, thereby giving the writer his
+opportunity for bringing in a description of a railway journey across
+India to Bombay in the scorching heat of May:
+
+     'And now the day goes wearily on, marked only by the change of the
+     sun's shadow, the rising of the day-wind and its accompaniment of
+     dust, and the ever-increasing heat. The country is everywhere the
+     same--a perfectly flat, desert-looking plain of reddish brown hue,
+     with here and there a village, its walls of the same colour. It
+     looks a desert, because there are no signs of crops, which were
+     reaped two months ago, and no hedgerows, but here and there an
+     acacia tree. Not a traveller is stirring on the road, not a soul to
+     be seen in the fields, but an occasional stunted bullock is
+     standing in such shade as their trees afford. At about every ten
+     miles a station is reached, each exactly like the previous one and
+     the next following.... Gradually the sun went down, the wind and
+     dust subsided, and another stifling night succeeded, with uneasy
+     slumbers, broken by the ever-recurring hubbub of the stoppages.'
+
+On reaching home Captain West learns, like the elder Wetherby in
+Lang's story, that an uncle has died leaving him a good income; so he
+enters Parliament, and the remainder of his autobiography is entirely
+occupied by an account of his efforts in the cause of army reform,
+which eventually succeed when he has overcome the scruples and
+hesitation of the prime minister--Mr. Merriman, a transparent
+pseudonym. The author's plan of endeavouring to interest his readers
+in professional and technical questions is very creditably carried
+out, for the book is throughout readable; and it also shows that on
+the subject of military organisation Chesney was often in advance of
+his time; but the scene changes from India to England so very early in
+the narrative that this novel takes a place on our list more by reason
+of its Anglo-Indian authorship than of its connection with India.
+
+In _The Dilemma_, on the other hand, Chesney gives us a story with
+characters and catastrophes drawn entirely from the sepoy mutiny. The
+main interest centres round the defence of a house in some up-country
+station that is besieged by the mutineers, and for such a purpose the
+writer could supply himself, at discretion, from the abundant
+repertory of adventures and the variety of personal conduct--heroic,
+humorous, or otherwise astonishing--which had been provided by actual
+and recent events. We have here, indeed, a dramatic version of real
+history; and, since the original of an intensely tragic situation must
+always transcend a literary adaptation of it, the fiction necessarily
+suffers by comparison with the fact. Yet the novel contends not
+unsuccessfully with this disadvantage, and in the lapse of years, as
+the real scenes and piercing emotions stirred up by a bloody struggle
+fade into distance, the value of Chesney's work may increase. For it
+preserves a true picture, drawn at first hand, of the time, the
+circumstances, and the behaviour of an isolated group of English folk
+who, while living in a state of profound peace and apparent security,
+found themselves suddenly obliged to fight desperately for their lives
+against an enemy from whom no quarter, even for women and children,
+could be expected in case of defeat.
+
+We may now take up a book of a very different kind, the production,
+not of an Anglo-Indian amateur, but of an eminent English novelist who
+has lived, though not long, in India--Mr. Marion Crawford. Here we are
+back again in the region of romance, for, although the story opens at
+Simla in Lord Lytton's reign and during the second Afghan War, Mr.
+Isaacs, the hero (whose name gives the book its title) is outwardly a
+Persian dealer in precious gems, but esoterically an adept in the
+mysteries of what has been called occult Buddhism. This queer science,
+as professed by a certain Madame Blavatsky, had much vogue in Northern
+India about 1879, particularly at Simla. To sceptics it appeared to be
+an adroit mixture of charlatanry and mere juggling tricks, with some
+elementary knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the true Indian
+Yogi, who seeks to attain supernatural powers by rigid asceticism, and
+who has really some insight into secret mental phenomena, being in
+this line of discovery the forerunner of the English Psychical
+Society.
+
+The part played in this story by Mr. Isaacs, who is not in all
+respects an imaginary personage, might remind one of Disraeli's
+Sidonia. He is an enigmatic character, versed in the philosophy of the
+East and the West, who excels on horseback and in tiger shooting, yet
+can discourse mystically and can bring the mysterious influences at
+his command to bear upon critical situations. The novel has thus two
+sides: we have the usual sketch of Anglo-Indian society--the soldiers,
+the civilians, the charming young English girl whom Mr. Isaacs
+fascinates. But a writer of Mr. Crawford's high repute is bound to put
+some depth and originality into his Indian tale, and so we have the
+Pandit Ram Lal, who is somehow also a Buddhist, and who is Mr.
+Isaacs's colleague whenever occult Buddhism is to give warning or
+timely succour. The chief exploit occurs in a wondrous expedition to
+rescue and carry away into Tibet the Afghan Amir, Sher Ali, who had
+just then actually fled from Kabul before the advance of an English
+army; and it must be confessed that so fantastic an adventure sounds
+rather startling in connection with a bit of authentic contemporary
+history.
+
+On the whole, whether we assume that the object of a novel is to
+illustrate history, or to present a faithful reflection of life and
+manners, or to render strenuous action dramatically yet not
+improbably--by whatever standard we measure Mr. Crawford's book, it
+cannot be awarded a high place on the list of Indian fiction. But we
+have run over this list so rapidly, touching only upon typical
+examples, that we are now among the latest writers of the present
+day; and we may take _Helen Treveryan_ (1892) as a very favourable
+specimen of their productions. Comparing it with earlier novels, we
+may remark, in the first place, that there is no great variety of plot
+or treatment, Anglo-Indian society being everywhere, and at most
+times, very much the same, except so far as closer intercourse with
+Europe softens down its roughness, materially and morally, increases
+the feminine element, and assimilates its outer form to the English
+model. _Helen Treveryan_, whose author is a very distinguished member
+of the Indian Civil Service, is, like all other novels of the kind,
+the narrative of the adventures, in love and war, of a young English
+military officer in India. The characters are evidently drawn from
+life; the main incidents belong to very recent Indian history; the
+description of society in an up-country station, with which the
+movement of the drama begins, is an exact and humorous photograph. A
+tiger hunt is done better, with more knowledge of the business, than a
+similar episode in Mr. Crawford's novel; and the passionate love
+between Guy Langley and Helen Treveryan is well painted in bright
+colours to intensify the gloom and pathos of Langley's death in
+battle.
+
+As Chesney went to the sepoy mutiny for his scenes of tragedy and
+heroism, so Sir Mortimer Durand (we believe that the original
+pseudonym has been dropped) takes them from the second Afghan War,
+having been at Kabul with General Roberts in the midst of hard
+fighting, where he first placed his foot on the ladder which has led
+him upward to high places and unusual distinction. In the chapters
+describing the march upon Kabul, its occupation, the rising of the
+tribes, and their attack upon the British army beleaguered in the
+Sherpur entrenchments, we have simply a memoir of actual events,
+written with truth, spirit, and with the pictorial skill of an artist
+who understands the value and proportion of romantic details. The
+English commanders, the Afghan sirdars, and several other well-known
+folk are mentioned by name; the skirmishes and perilous situations are
+described just as they really occurred. No book could better serve the
+purpose of a home-keeping Englishman who might desire to see as in a
+moving photograph what was going on in the British camp before Kabul
+during the perilous winter of 1879-80, to hear the camp-talk, and to
+realise the nature and methods of Afghan fighting.
+
+     'He turned to the westward, and as he did so there was a flicker in
+     the darkness, where the rugged top of the Asmai Hill could just be
+     made out. For an instant there was perfect silence; then, as the
+     flame caught and flared, there rose from the men around him a low,
+     involuntary "A--h," such as one may sometimes hear at Lord's when a
+     dangerous wicket goes down. Then in the distance two musket shots
+     rang out, and after them a few more; but along the cantonment wall
+     all was silent; men stood with beating hearts awaiting the
+     onslaught. For some minutes the suspense lasted, and then suddenly
+     burst from the darkness a wild storm of yells, "Allah, Allah,
+     Allah," and fifty thousand Afghans came with a rush at the wall,
+     shouting and firing. The cantonment was surrounded by a broad
+     continuous ring of rifle-flashes, and over the parapet and over the
+     trenches the bullets began to stream.'
+
+But the subjoined extract, which gives Langley's death, is a better
+example of the book's general style--cool, circumstantial, abhorrent
+of glitter or exaggeration, leaving a clear impression of things
+actually witnessed and done, a brief glimpse of one of the incidents
+that remain stamped on the brain of those who saw it, but are
+otherwise forgotten in war-time, after a day or two's regret for the
+lost comrade.[13]
+
+     'They were all weary, and marched carelessly forward in silence.
+     The night was closing fast, and a little fine snow was falling....
+     There was a sudden flash in the darkness to the right, a shot, and
+     then a scattering volley. Guy Langley threw up his arms with a cry,
+     and as the startled horse swerved across the road he fell with a
+     dull thud on the snow. There was a moment of confusion, but the
+     Sikhs, though careless, were good soldiers, and two or three of
+     them dashed towards the low wall from which the shots had come.
+     They were just in time to see four men running across a bit of
+     broken ground towards a deep water-cut, fringed with poplars. The
+     horsemen were very quick after them, being light men on hardy
+     horses; and one of the four Afghans, a big man in a dirty sheepskin
+     coat, lost his head, and ran down under a bit of wall; the other
+     three crossed the water-cut. The horsemen saw the position at once,
+     and rode after the man on their side of the trench. They were up to
+     him in a minute, and Atar Singh made a lunge at him with his lance;
+     but the Afghan avoided it, and swinging up his heavy knife cut the
+     boy across the hand. Before he could turn to run again a second
+     horseman was on him, and with a grim "Hyun--Would you?" drove the
+     lance through his chest.'
+
+The dialogue is occasionally used to bring out contending views in
+regard to Indian politics, as might be expected from a writer who has
+thoroughly studied them. At a Simla dinner-party the conversation
+turns upon the question whether, in the event of a collision between
+the armed forces of Russia and England on the Indian frontier, the
+Anglo-Indian army could hold its own successfully against such a
+serious enemy. We have on one side the man of dismal forebodings, so
+well known in India, and against him the hopeful, resolute officer,
+who lays just stress on England's superior position, with all the
+strength and resources of India and the British empire at her back.
+One supremely important point in the discussion is, by consent of both
+speakers, the probable behaviour in such a crisis of the native Indian
+army; and we may here express our agreement with the view that our
+best native regiments would prove themselves faithful soldiers and
+formidable antagonists to the Russians. As is well said in the course
+of the argument, the Sikhs and Goorkhas faced us well when they fought
+us, 'and with English officers to lead them, why should they not face
+the Russians?... I believe the natives will be true to us if we are
+true to ourselves; some few are actively disloyal, but not the mass of
+them. If we begin to falter they will go, of course; but if we show
+them we mean fighting they will fight too.' This is the true political
+creed for Englishmen in India, outside of which there is no salvation,
+but the reverse.
+
+It is perhaps to be regretted that so capable a writer upon Indian
+subjects has given us nothing of native life and character beyond a
+few silhouettes; and after Guy Langley's death, when the scene is
+transferred entirely to England, the story's interest decidedly flags.
+Yet we may fairly assign a high place in the series of Indian novels
+to _Helen Treveryan_, not only for its literary merits, but also for
+the historical value of the chapters which preserve the day by day
+experience of one who took his share in the culminating dangers and
+difficulties of an arduous campaign.
+
+Mrs. Steel's book, _On the Face of the Waters_, has been so widely
+read and reviewed since it appeared, so lately as 1897, that another
+criticism of it may appear stale and superfluous; yet to omit
+mentioning in this article the most popular of recent Indian novels
+would be impossible. Here, at any rate, is a book which is not open to
+the remark that the Anglo-Indian novelist usually leaves the natives
+in the background, or admits them only as supernumeraries. For Mrs.
+Steel's canvas is crowded with Indian figures; their talk, their
+distinctive peculiarities of character and costume, their parts in the
+great tragedy which is taken as the ground-plan of her story, are so
+abundantly described as occasionally to bewilder the inexperienced
+reader. The scene of action is the Sepoy mutiny at Meerut and the
+siege of Delhi, and while the Indian _dramatis personæ_ are mainly
+types of different classes and castes--except where, like the King of
+Delhi, they are historical--the English army leaders act and speak
+under their own names, as in Durand's book, being of course modelled
+upon the ample personal knowledge of them still obtainable from their
+surviving contemporaries in India.
+
+The book, in fact, attempts, as is frankly stated in its preface, 'to
+be at once a story and a history.' And we observe that Mrs. Steel
+tells us, as if it were a credit and a recommendation to her work,
+that she 'has not allowed fiction to interfere with fact in the
+slightest degree.'
+
+     'The reader may rest assured that every incident bearing in the
+     remotest degree on the Indian Mutiny, or on the part which real men
+     took in it, is scrupulously exact, even to the date, the hour, the
+     scene, the weather. Nor have I allowed the actual actors in the
+     great tragedy to say a word regarding it which is not to be found
+     in the accounts of eye-witnesses, or in their own writings.'
+
+Is such minute matter-of-fact copying a virtue in the novelist? or is
+it not rather a defect arising out of a misunderstanding of the
+principles of his art? In our opinion the business of the novelist,
+even when he chooses an historical subject, is not to reproduce as
+many exact details as he can pick out of memoirs, official reports,
+and histories, but, on the contrary, to avoid making up his story out
+of a string of extracts and personal reminiscences, or at any rate to
+use his skill rather for disguising than for disclosing the precise
+verbal accuracy of his borrowed material. What would be thought of a
+naval romance that adopted, word for word, the authentic account of
+Nelson's death, or of a military novel that seasoned a full and
+particular account of Waterloo with a few imaginary characters and
+incidents? Any one who has observed how two fine writers, Thackeray
+and Stendhal, have brought that famous battle into the plot of their
+masterpieces (_Vanity Fair_ and _La Chartreuse de Parme_), will have
+noticed that they carefully avoid the crude and undisguised employment
+of detail, either in words or incidents; they allow fiction to
+interfere very constantly with fact in all petty matters of this sort;
+their art consists, not in historical accuracy, but in verisimilitude;
+they discard authentic phrases and incidents; they do not aim at
+precision, but at dramatic probabilities. But Mrs. Steel does not only
+draw too copiously, for a novelist, upon history; she also undertakes
+to pass authoritative judgments upon disputable questions of fact and
+situation, with which fiction, we submit, has no concern. She very
+plainly intimates that nothing but culpable inaction and want of
+energy prevented instant pursuit by a force from Meerut of the
+mutineers who made a forced march upon Delhi on the night of May 10,
+and whose arrival produced the insurrection in that city.
+
+     'Delhi lay,' she says, 'but thirty miles distant on a broad white
+     road, and there were horses galore and men ready to ride them--men
+     like Captain Rosser, of the Carabineers, who pleaded for a
+     squadron, a field battery, a troop, or a gun--anything with which
+     to dash down the road and cut off that retreat to Delhi.'
+
+To argue the point in this review would be to fall into the very error
+on which we desire to lay stress, of attempting to deal with serious
+history in a light, literary way. We shall therefore be content with
+reminding our readers that Lord Roberts, who is perhaps the very best
+living authority on the subject, has come to the conclusion, after a
+careful survey of the circumstances, that the refusal of the Meerut
+commanders to pursue the mutineers was justifiable.
+
+Yet Mrs. Steel's performance is better than her principles. The
+unquestionable success of _On the Face of the Waters_ is in no way due
+to her scrupulous exactitude in particulars, for if this had been the
+book's chief feature it would have failed. She has a clear and
+spirited style; she knows enough of India to be able to give a fine
+natural colour to the stirring scenes of the Sepoy mutiny, and to
+execute good character-drawing of the natives, as they are to be
+studied among the various classes in a great city. And whenever her
+good genius takes her off the beaten road of recorded fact her
+narrative shows considerable imaginative vigour. The massacres at
+Meerut and Delhi, the wild tumult, terror, and agony, are
+energetically described; and her picture of the confusion inside Delhi
+during the siege is admirably worked up, remembering that she wrote
+forty years after the event, at a time when the people and even the
+places had very greatly changed. The storming of the breach at the
+Kashmir gate by the forlorn hope that led the English columns is
+dexterously brought into an animated narrative; and although that
+story has been much better told in Lord Roberts's autobiography, we
+need not look too austerely on the crowd of readers who find history
+more attractive under a thin and embroidered veil of fiction.
+
+A still more recent novel, entitled _Bijli the Dancer_ (1898), should
+be mentioned here, not only for its intrinsic merits, but also because
+the author has boldly faced the problem of constructing a story out of
+the materials available from purely native society, the stock themes
+and characters of Anglo-India being entirely discarded. Bijli is a
+professional dancing girl, whose grace and accomplishments so
+fascinate a great Mohammedan landholder of North India, that he
+persuades her to abandon her profession and to abide with him as his
+mistress. This arrangement is correctly treated in the book as quite
+consistent with the maintenance of due respect and consideration for
+the Nawab's lawful wife, who occupies separate apartments, and,
+according to Mohammedan ideas in that rank of society, has no
+reasonable ground for complaint. Yet Bijli, though she has every
+comfort, and is deeply attached to her lord, grows restless in her
+luxurious solitude; she pines for the excitement and triumphs of
+singing and dancing before an assembly. So, in the Nawab's absence,
+she takes professional disguise, and sings with a lute in the harem
+before his wife. To those who would like to see a Mohammedan lady of
+high rank in full dress, the following description of costume may be
+commended:
+
+     'She was dressed and adorned with scrupulous care; her eyebrows
+     trimmed of every stray hair that might deform the beauty-arch; the
+     lids pencilled with lampblack; the palms of her hands and the soles
+     of her feet stained with henna; not one stray lock encroached on
+     the straight parting of her glossy hair.
+
+     'She wore gold-embroidered trousers of purple satin, loose below
+     the knee and full over the ankles, and fastened round her waist by
+     a gold cord with jewelled tassels. A black crape bodice adorned
+     with spangles and gold edging confined her full bosom, and an open
+     vest of grey gauze with long, tight sleeves hung loosely over her
+     waistband. Upon the back of her head was thrown a veiling-sheet of
+     the fine muslin known as the dew of Dacca. Her feet and hands, arms
+     and wrists and neck, were adorned with numerous rings, jewels, and
+     chains, and from her nose was hung a ring of gold wire, on which
+     was strung a ruby between two grey pearls.'
+
+But Bijli's intrusion into the harem is a grave breach of etiquette;
+she is detected, and told to be gone, though the lady bears her no
+malice. The incident brings home to her a sense of degradation; she
+asks the Nawab to marry her, and her discontent is increased by his
+refusal, until at last she escapes secretly from his house. The Nawab
+follows, and finds her in a hut on the bank of a flooded river which
+has stopped her flight; but after a really pathetic interview she
+returns to her free life--and 'thus ended the romance of Bijli the
+Dancer.'
+
+In this short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style
+and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up
+European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we
+have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and
+the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with
+romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often
+exercise over natives of the highest rank is a well-known feature of
+Indian society; and although the dancer is always a courtesan, yet to
+invest her with a capacity for tender and honourable affection is by
+no means to overstep the limits of probability. We have noticed this
+book because it proves that the study of native manners, and
+sympathetic insight into their feelings and character, still survive
+among Anglo-Indians, albeit officials; and because it stands out in
+quiet relief among tales of fierce wars and savage mutiny; it neither
+chronicles the heroic deeds of Englishmen, nor does it devote even a
+single page to the loves, sorrows, or comic misadventures that break
+the monotony of a British cantonment.
+
+_The Chronicles of Dustypore_, by H. S. Cunningham, takes us back
+again from the sombre, half-veiled interior of an Indian household,
+into the fierce light which beats upon English society at some station
+in the sun-dried plains of the Punjab. We have here a sketch, half
+satirical, half in earnest, of official work and ways, with one or two
+personages that can be easily identified from among the provincial
+notabilities of twenty years ago. The book, which had considerable
+success in its time, will still provide interest and amusement for
+those who enjoy an exceedingly clever delineation of familiar scenes
+and characters; and it is in the main as true and lively a picture of
+Anglo-Indian life as when it was first written. Here is the summer
+landscape of the Sandy Tracts, a region just annexed to British
+administration after the usual skirmish with, and discomfiture of, the
+native ruler:
+
+     'Vast plains, a dead level but for an occasional clump of palms or
+     the dome of some despoiled and crumbling tomb, stretched away on
+     every side and ended in a hazy, quivering horizon that spoke of
+     infinite heat. Over these ranged herds of cattle and goats,
+     browsing on no one could see what; or bewildered buffaloes would
+     lie, panting and contented, in some muddy pool, with little but
+     horns, eyes, and nostrils exposed above the surface. Little
+     ill-begotten stunted plants worked hard to live and grow and to
+     weather the roaring fierce winds. The crows sat gasping,
+     open-beaked, as if protesting against having been born into so
+     sulphurous an existence. Here and there a well, with its huge
+     lumbering wheel and patient bullocks, went creaking and groaning
+     night and day, as if earth grudged the tiny rivulet coming so
+     toilfully from her dry breast, and gave it up with sighs of pain.
+     The sky was cloudless, pitiless, brazen. The sun rose into it
+     without a single fleck of vapour to mitigate its fierceness ... all
+     day it shone and glistened and blazed, until the very earth seemed
+     to crack with heat and the mere thought of it was pain.'
+
+Such is the environment in which many English officers live and labour
+for years; and this is the side of Anglo-Indian existence that is
+unknown to, and consequently unappreciated by, the rapid tourist, who
+runs by railway from one town to another during the bright cold winter
+months, is delighted with the climate and the country, takes note of
+the deficiencies or peculiarities of Anglo-Indians, and has a very
+short memory for their hospitality. The narrative carries us, as a
+matter of course, to a Himalayan Elysium, with its balls, picnics, and
+its flirtations, among which the leading lady of the piece is drawn to
+the brink of indiscretion, but steps happily back again into the
+secure haven of domestic felicity. A good deal of excellent light
+comedy and sparkling dialogue will always maintain for this novel a
+creditable place upon the Indian list; and as an indirect illustration
+of the social wall that separates ordinary English folk from the
+population which surrounds them, it is complete, since we have here a
+story plotted out upon the stage of a great Indian province which
+contains absolutely no mention of the natives beyond occasional
+necessary reference to the servants.
+
+For a strong contrast to _Dustypore_, both in subject and style of
+treatment, we may take a story which merits notice, even though it be
+hardly long enough to be ranked among Indian novels. _The Bond of
+Blood_, by R. E. Forrest (1896), draws, like _Bijli the Dancer_, its
+incidents and their environment exclusively from Indian life; and the
+book may be placed high in this class of difficult work, which few
+have ventured to attempt, and where success has been very rare. It is
+a study of peculiarly local manners, that may be also called
+contemporary; for though the period belongs to the early years of this
+century, yet the sure drawing from life of a skilful hand may still be
+verified by those readers who actually know the customs and feelings
+at the present day of the Rajpût clans, among whom primitive ideas and
+institutions have been less obliterated in the independent States than
+in any other region of India. The descriptive and personal sketches
+attest the writer's gift of close observation; there is good
+workmanship in all the details; his sentences hit the mark and are
+never overcharged or superfluous. The tale is of a dissipated Rajpût
+chief, to whom a moneylender has lent a large sum upon a bond which
+has been endorsed by the sign-manual of the family Bhât, or hereditary
+bard, herald, and genealogist--an office of great repute and
+importance in every noble Rajpût house. Debauchees and cunning
+gamblers empty the chief's purse; the moneylender, an honest man
+enough in his way, is obliged to press him for the sum due; until at
+last the bewildered chief is persuaded by one of the gamblers to
+declare flatly that he will not pay at all, whereupon the creditor
+falls back upon the surety. Now the Bhât has pledged upon the bond not
+his property but his life, according to an ancient and authentic
+custom among Rajpût folk, as formerly throughout India, whereby a man
+who has no other means of enforcing a just claim against a powerful
+debtor has always the resource of bringing down upon him a fearful
+curse by committing suicide before his door. The Rajpût chief pretends
+that the bond is illegal and void, being founded upon an obsolete
+custom disallowed by the English rulers; but in truth he has brought
+himself to believe that the blood penalty will not really be paid, and
+he is struck with horror when the Bhât, after formal and public
+warning, stabs his own mother in the chief's presence, whereupon the
+curse falls and clings to the family. We may add that the substitution
+of the Bhât's mother for himself as an expiatory victim is in
+accordance with accepted precedents on such occasions, while it makes
+room for a pathetic situation, and greatly enhances the dramatic
+interest of the closing scene. Here we have the antique Oriental
+version of the story in Shakespeare's _Merchant of Venice_, where
+Shylock takes the same kind of security from Antonio, upon whose
+person he subsequently demands execution of his bond of blood; nor
+does the law refuse it to him. But the Hindu custom is so far milder
+than the Venetian code that the Rajpût Shylock could not have rejected
+a tender of full payment in cash. Mr. Forrest's tale might be turned
+into an effective stage-tragedy if the main incident were not too
+shockingly improbable for Europeans, although to an Indian audience it
+would be credible enough. The final scene of the mother's death is
+stamped on the reader's imagination by the writer's power of giving
+intense significance not only to the speech but to slight movements of
+the actors, so that the mental picture becomes almost objective, while
+the strained expectation of the crowd makes itself felt by the force
+of the words.
+
+     '"Will you redeem the bond?" asks the herald once more.
+
+     '"Say 'No,'" exclaims Takht Singh.
+
+     '"No," shouts Hurdeo Singh (the chief).
+
+     '"Then blood must be shed at your door, and the life forfeit paid
+     at your threshold, so that the curse may alight upon you and your
+     house."
+
+     'He draws the dagger from its sheath. He had not laid his hand
+     upon its handle in the same manner that he would have laid it on
+     the hilt of his sword, but the reverse way to that; he puts the
+     palm of his hand under it and not over it, so he could best use it
+     in the way he intended to use it--so could he best strike the blow
+     he meant to strike.
+
+     '"Begone! Begone!" shouts Hurdeo Singh, waving him away with his
+     hand.
+
+     'The people around stand fixed as statues, eyes straining, necks
+     craning. The herald stretches his left arm behind his mother, and
+     she, throwing open her _chudder_, leans back against it....
+
+     'The money-lender had given a sudden cry, stretched out his hand,
+     uttered some words.
+
+     'When Hurdeo Singh had beheld the herald raise his right arm, his
+     own had gone up with it, and from his mouth had come the cry,
+     "Don't! Don't."
+
+     'But it was too late. The herald had raised his arm, turned round
+     his head, and plunged the sharp stiletto into his mother's breast.'
+
+It would be scarcely possible in an article that ranges over the light
+literature of Anglo-India to omit mentioning the name of Mr. Rudyard
+Kipling, who is the most prominent and by far the most popular of
+Anglo-Indian authors. Yet our reference to his writings must be very
+brief, since most of them lie beyond the scope of our present subject;
+for although Mr. Kipling's short stories are famous, and he is a
+consummate artist in black and white, yet in the complete edition of
+his volumes up to date there is, in fact, but one full-sized Indian
+novel, and for this he is only responsible in part. Nor, assuming that
+the Indian chapters of the _Naulakha_[14] may be ascribed to him,
+would it be fair criticism to treat them as good samples of his work,
+or as illustrating his distinctive genius. The attempt in this story
+to bring together West and East, and to strike bold contrasts by
+setting down a Yankee fresh from Colorado before the palace gate of a
+Maharaja in the sands of western Rajputana, is too daring a venture;
+and the plot's development, though here and there are some touches of
+true vision and some vigorous passages, labours under the weight of
+its extravagant improbability. The American's restless energy, brought
+face to face with Oriental immobility, expresses itself in the
+following way:
+
+     'It made him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and
+     lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up
+     and stirring by rights--trading, organising, inventing, building
+     new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying
+     new railroads, going in for fresh enterprises, and keeping things
+     humming.
+
+     '"They've got resources enough," he said. "It isn't as if they had
+     the excuse that the country's poor. It's a good country. Move the
+     population of a lively Colorado town to Rhatore, set up a good
+     local paper, organise a board of trade, and let the world know what
+     is here, and we'd have a boom in six months that would shake the
+     empire. But what's the use? They're dead. They're mummies. They're
+     wooden images. There isn't enough real, old-fashioned, downright
+     rustle and razzle-dazzle and 'git up and git' in Gokral Seetaram to
+     run a milk-cart."'
+
+Such indeed might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found
+himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole
+piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring
+sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and
+flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediæval crusaders. This must
+be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own
+short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the
+contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in
+the rapid, unerring delineation of characters that stand out in clear
+relief, yet blend with and act upon each other when they encounter.
+But Mr. Kipling's volumes would require a separate article to
+themselves, so that we will merely take this occasion of recording our
+wish that he may some day turn his unique faculty of painting real
+Indian pictures toward the composition of a novel which shall _not_ be
+about Anglo-Indian society (for the thin soil of that field has
+already been over-harrowed), but shall give a true and lively
+rendering of the thoughts which strike an imaginative Englishman when
+he surveys the whole moving landscape of our Indian empire, watches
+the course of actual events, and tries to forecast its probable
+destiny.
+
+It has been manifestly impossible in this brief article to do more
+than touch upon a few books that may illustrate the prominent
+characteristics, and the general place in light literature, of Indian
+novels. This must explain why we have omitted several other works, of
+which _Transgression_[15] is the latest. In this tale we have a sketch
+of life on the North-West Frontier at the present day, with some
+well-known incidents of the Afridi War of 1897-98 introduced, and so
+coloured from the writer's own point of view as to convey, under a
+thin varnish of fiction, some sharp and sarcastic criticism on the
+management of affairs, the politics of the Government, and the
+personal behaviour of certain officials, who can be at once
+identified. Although the book is not without interest as a true
+account of hazardous and stirring frontier duties, we are bound to
+repeat our warning that this abuse of the novel for controversial
+purposes is not only unfair, but profoundly inartistic. No literary
+success, but failure and the confusion of styles, lies that way.
+
+What, then, are the conclusions which we may draw from this brief
+survey of the more prominent and typical Indian novels? To the
+repertory of English fiction, which is perhaps the largest and most
+varied that any national literature contains, they have undoubtedly
+made a not unworthy contribution; for we may agree that fiction has
+some, if not the highest, value when it produces an animated
+representation of life and manners, even upon a limited and distant
+field. In the present instance the narrow range of plot and character
+that may be observed in the pure Anglo-Indian novel reflects the
+uniformity of a society which consists almost entirely, outside the
+Presidency capitals on the sea-coast, of civil and military
+officials--a society that is also upon one level of class and of age,
+for among the English in India there are neither old men nor boys and
+girls; the men and women are in the prime of life, with a number of
+small children. This age-limit lops off from both ends of human
+existence a certain proportion of the characters that are available
+for filling up the canvas of the social novelist at home. And it is in
+truth a peculiar feature, not only of Anglo-Indian society, but of the
+Anglo-Indian administration, because the enforced retirement of almost
+every officer after the age of fifty-five years greatly diminishes the
+influence of weighty and mature experience exercised by the senior men
+in the services and government of most countries. In regard to the
+equality of class it may be observed that here also the lack of
+variety produces a similar dearth of materials; we miss the
+picturesque contrasts of rich and poor, of townsfolk and country folk,
+of the diverse groups which make up a European population. The 'short
+and simple annals of the poor' cannot be woven into the Indian
+tapestry which records higher and broader scenes; the peasantry, for
+example, whose quaint figures and idioms are so useful in English
+novels, do not come into the Anglo-Indian tale. They cannot be blended
+in fiction with the foreign element because they are wholly apart in
+reality. In short, the whole company that play upon the exclusively
+Anglo-Indian stage belong to one grade of society, and the hero is
+invariably a military officer.
+
+The most popular of Anglo-Indian novels are probably those which deal
+in exact reproduction of ordinary incidents and conversation, related
+in a sprightly and humorous style. This accords with the taste of
+present-day readers, many of whom take up a book only for the
+momentary amusement that it gives them, and are well content with
+interminable dialogues that do little more than echo, with a certain
+spice of epigram and smart repartee, the commonplaces interchanged
+among clever people at a country house or in a London drawing-room.
+Nevertheless, we believe that Anglo-Indian fiction is seen at its best
+in the novel of action, since war and love-making must still, as
+formerly, rule the whole kingdom of romance; since as emotional forces
+they are the same in every climate and country. Each successive
+campaign in India, from the first Afghan War to the latest expedition
+across the Afridi frontier, has furnished the Anglo-Indian writer with
+a new series of striking incidents that can be used for his heroic
+deeds and dire catastrophes, for new landscapes and figures, all of
+them bearing the very form and stamp of impressive reality. If he is
+artist enough to avoid abusing these advantages, if he is neither an
+extravagant colourist nor a mere copyist or compiler, he has this
+fresh field to himself, he can give us a stirring narrative of
+frontier adventures, he can sketch in the aspect of a country or the
+distinctive qualities of a people that have preserved many of the
+features which in Europe have now vanished into the dim realms of
+early romance. His danger lies, as we have seen from some examples
+already quoted, in the temptation to make too much use of the
+attractive materials that are readily found to hand in military
+records or in such a real tragedy as the Sepoy mutiny, so that the
+novel is liable to become little more than authentic history related
+in a glowing, exuberant style of writing and portraiture.
+
+In short, the Indian novel belongs to the objective outdoor class; it
+is full of open air and activity, and the introspective psychological
+vein is almost entirely wanting. There are, indeed, passages which
+indicate that peculiar sense of the correlation, so to speak, of the
+environment with the moods and feelings of men, the influence upon the
+human mind of nature--a sense which has inspired some of our finest
+poetry, and which is so well rendered by the best Russian novelists,
+by Tourguéneff and by Tolstoi. One work of Tolstoi's, _Les Cosaques_,
+might be especially recommended for study to the Anglo-Indian novelist
+of the future, as an example of the true impress that can be made upon
+a reader's mind by the literary art, when it succeeds in giving vivid
+interest to the picture of a solitary officer's life upon a dull and
+distant frontier.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] (1) _Tara._ By Meadows Taylor. London, 1898. (2) _Oakfield._ By
+William D. Arnold. London, 1853. (3) _The Wetherbys, Father and Son._
+By John Lang. London, ?1850. (4) _Mr. Isaacs._ By F. Marion Crawford.
+London, 1898. (5) _Helen Treveryan._ By John Roy. London, 1892. (6)
+_On the Face of the Waters._ By Mrs. Steel. London, 1896. (7) _Bijli
+the Dancer._ By James Blythe Patton. London, 1898. (8) _The Chronicles
+of Dustypore._ By H. S. Cunningham. London, 1875. And other
+Novels.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1899.
+
+[13] [Greek]
+    'alla chrê ton katathaptein, hos ke thanêsi,
+    nêlea thumon echontas, ep hêmati hoakrusants.'
+
+    (_Iliad_, xix. 228, 229.)
+
+[14] _Naulakha_, by Rudyard Kipling and W. Balestier. London, 1892.
+
+[15] _Transgression_, by S. S. Thorburn. London, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+HEROIC POETRY[16]
+
+
+I have taken the words 'Heroic Poetry' to signify the poetry of
+strenuous action, the art of describing in vigorous animating verse
+those scenes and emergent situations in which the energies of mankind
+are strung up to the higher tones, and where the emotions are brought
+into full play by the exhibition of valour, endurance, and suffering.
+It seems to me remarkable that modern English poetry, with all its
+splendid variety, should have produced very little in this particular
+form; because no one can deny that the latter-day story of the English
+has been full of enterprise and perilous adventure, providing ample
+material to the artist who knows how to use it. Nor can it be said
+that there is any lack of demand for this sort of poetry, and
+consequently little inducement to supply it. On the contrary, any one
+can see that hero worship is as strong as ever, that any striking
+incident, or example of personal valour, or exploit of war, brings out
+the verse-writer, and that his efforts, if only very moderately
+successful, are sure to win him great popularity.
+
+But it must be admitted that most of these efforts fail rather
+lamentably, insomuch that at the present day we may seem to be losing
+one of the finest forms of a noble art. From this point of view there
+may be some advantage in looking back to the heroic poetry of earlier
+ages, and in endeavouring to mark briefly and imperfectly its
+distinctive qualities, to recall the conditions and circumstances in
+which it flourished, and possibly to hazard some suggestions as to
+the causes of its decline.
+
+I do not know any recent book which throws more light upon this
+subject than Professor Ker's book on _Epic and Romance_, published in
+1897. It is, to my mind, most valuable as an exposition of the right
+nature and methods of heroic narrative, in poetry and in prose. The
+author has the rare gift of insight into the ways and feelings of
+primitive folk, and the critical faculty of discerning the
+characteristics of a style or a period, showing how men, who knew what
+to say and the right manner of saying it, have shaped the true form of
+heroic poetry. We can see that its elementary principles, the methods
+of composition in verse and prose, are essentially the same in all
+times and countries, in the _Iliad_, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the
+old Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon poems, and to some extent in the French
+Chansons de Geste; they might be used to-morrow for a heroic subject
+by any one gifted with the requisite skill, imagination, and the eye
+for impressive realities.
+
+     'Few nations have attained, at the close of their heroic age, to a
+     form of poetical art in which men are represented freely in action
+     and conversation. The labour and meditation of all the world has
+     not discovered, for the purposes of narrative, any essential
+     modification of the procedure of Homer.'
+
+Professor Ker's essays are a brilliant and scholarly contribution to
+the external history of poetical forms: and it would be great
+presumption in me to attempt a review of his work. But it is so
+eminently suggestive, and to my mind so valuable as a study for verse
+writers of the present day, that I have ventured to place this book in
+the foreground of an attempt to sketch rapidly some clear outline of
+the conditions and the essential qualities of heroic poetry, which is
+too commonly regarded as an easy off-hand kind of versification,
+largely made up of dash, glowing words, and warlike clatter; although
+in reality nothing is more rare or difficult than success in it.
+
+We may say, then, that the first heroic poets and tale-tellers were
+those who related the deeds and sufferings, the life and death of the
+mighty men of earlier times; and that their verse was the embodiment
+of the living traditions of men and manners. They were bards and
+chroniclers who lived close enough to the age of which they wrote to
+understand and keep touch with it--an age when battles and adventures
+were ordinary incidents in the annals of a tribe, a city, or a
+country--when valour, skill at arms, and a stout heart were supremely
+important, being almost the only virtues that led to high distinction
+and a great career. Heroic poetry of the higher kind could not exist
+in a period of mere barbarism, for among barbarous folk there is no
+art of poetic form. It could not have arisen before the people were so
+far civilised as to have among them artistic singers or story-tellers
+who gave fine and forcible expression to the acts they celebrated or
+the scenes they described.
+
+The old heroic poets were neither too near to the time of which they
+sung or wrote, nor too far from it; and this gave them another special
+advantage, they had a good audience. The song, or the story, must have
+often been recited before listeners to whom the whole subject was more
+or less familiar, who knew the facts and ways of war, the true aspect
+and usages of a rough and perilous existence. They were too well
+acquainted, at any rate, with such things to be captivated by vague
+imaginative descriptions of fighting and refined chivalrous methods of
+dealing with a mortal foe, such as are found in the later Romance.
+Among primitive folk there would have been no taste for fantastic,
+allegoric, and extravagant though highly poetical accounts of
+valorous exploits by noble knights, with their tournaments and their
+adventures with giants, dwarfs, or enchanters. The tradition was of a
+community encompassed by dangers for men and for women, where life and
+goods depended on strength and sagacity. And so the original hero was
+strictly a practical soldier, a man who knew his business, who had
+very few troublesome scruples; he was a man of war from his youth up,
+struggling with arduous circumstance; and he usually came at last, as
+in actual life, to a bloody though glorious end. For the experience of
+a rough age is that the drama mostly finishes tragically, not happily
+as in a modern novel. There was always a strain of Romance in the
+heroic tale, and softer feelings were never quite absent: but all this
+was subordinate to facts: whereas Romance seems to have prevailed and
+grown popular in proportion as the writer stood further away from the
+actualities, trusted to imagination rather than to authentic
+experience, preferred literary ornament to probability, and indeed
+took his readers as far away as possible from scenes or situations
+which they could recognise or verify.
+
+It may thus be suggested that the essential quality of Heroic poetry
+is this--that it gives a true picture of the time. Not that the poet
+was an eye-witness of what he narrated, or even that he lived in the
+same generation with the men or the events that he celebrated. On the
+contrary, the distance which lends enchantment to the view is needed
+to surround heroes with a golden haze of glorification. But the bard
+did live on the outer edge, so to speak, of the period which he wrote
+about; he was more or less in the same atmosphere; his audience kept
+him very near the truth because they could detect any exaggeration,
+absurdity, or very unlikely incident; just as we should mark and
+reject any particularly foolish story of the war that might appear in
+to-morrow's newspaper. They would indeed swallow strange marvels of a
+supernatural kind, the doings of gods and goddesses, and of magicians.
+But I think it will be agreed that in all ages this has been a
+separate matter, because men will believe what is plainly miraculous,
+when they will not accept what is merely improbable. So far as the
+natural world was concerned, the heroic artist worked upon genuine
+material, transmitted orally or by fragmentary records, producing a
+right image of remarkable men and the world in which they lived. It
+was a world, in most cases, of small communities and petty wars, in
+which a good chief or warrior came rapidly to the front, and was
+all-important individually.
+
+The word Hero is one of those Greek words which have been adopted into
+all European languages, because they signify precisely a universal
+idea of the thing. He must be strong and able in battle, for a lost
+fight might mean the death or slavery of all his people. If the hero
+does his living and dying in a noble fashion, the folk trouble
+themselves very moderately about minor questions of religion or
+ethics, and are very moderately scandalised by occasional ferocity.
+Such a man is not to be hampered by ordinary rules; he is like a
+general commanding in the field, who may do anything for the
+preservation of his army, and the consequence is that he is seldom
+expected to moralise. He acknowledges and pays great honour to the
+cardinal virtues of truth-speaking, mutual fidelity, hospitality,
+strict observance of pledges. He is in many ways a religious man;
+though he is apt to break away from the priests when they interfere
+seriously with the business in hand. For the chastity of wives he has
+a high esteem, yet although he and his people are constantly brought
+into trouble about women, he is tolerant of them, even when their
+behaviour is what might be called regrettable; he treats them in some
+degree as irresponsible beings, on the ground, perhaps, that they are
+the only non-combatants in the world as he knows it, and that this
+gives them special privileges. We can measure the importance of such a
+personage in ancient days, by the noise which a first-class hero made
+in the primitive world. He became literally and figuratively immortal:
+he was regarded as a god, or at least godlike--the greatest of them
+were actually deified. He was seized upon by fable, myth, miraculous
+legend, and poetry--his name was handed down for centuries until the
+heroic lineaments were softened down, disfigured, and at last faded
+away in the magical haze of later Romance. But in very rare instances
+he had the good luck to be taken in hand, before it was too late, by
+some man of genius, who knew the temper of heroic times because he
+lived within range of them, and who has preserved for us a story, an
+incident, or a typical character--not, indeed, an authentic narrative,
+for the true story disappears under the tradition which is built over
+it; nor would such accurate knowledge be of much use to the poet,
+whose business it is only to give us a fine spirited account of what
+might have occurred. For the evidence that an ancient battle was
+really fought we must go to the historian; the poet will tell us how
+it was fought, he stirs the blood and fires the imagination by his
+tale of noble deeds and deaths. His strength rests upon the foundation
+of reality that underlies his artistic construction: he has never let
+go his hold upon sound experience: and the truth is felt in all the
+colour and detail of the picture, though the whole is a work of vivid
+imagination. We cannot verify, obviously, the facts and motives which
+led to the siege of Troy, although Herodotus appears to agree that the
+cause of that war was a Spartan woman's abduction, and only examines
+the point whether the Asiatic or the European Greeks were first to
+blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth
+growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the
+rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common
+enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right?
+We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life,
+manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose
+origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous story,
+divine or human, is first planted in fact, not in fancy; just as the
+Chanson de Roland is founded on a real battle in the pass of
+Roncevalles.
+
+Such, therefore, were the conditions and fortunate coincidences which
+produced the finest heroic poetry. You had the popular hero--the noble
+warrior who knew his business; and you had also the poet or
+story-teller who knew his art, could give you a dramatic picture
+founded upon fact, and could always keep close to reality, without
+crowding his canvas with unnecessary particulars; he gave you the
+ruling motives, actions, and feelings of the age. The excellence of
+the work lay in simplicity and directness of treatment, in a sureness
+of line drawing, in a power of striking the right note, whether of
+praise or sorrow, of glory or grief. There is no staginess or
+far-fetched emotion, or artificial scene-painting: the style strikes
+the right chords of passion or pity, and stamps upon the mind a vivid
+impression of situation and character. Moreover, the heroic poet, as a
+composer, had this advantage in early days, that continual recital
+before an appreciative public must have had the effect of polishing up
+his best verses, and polishing off his bad ones. As the theme was
+always some well-known story or personage, it was possible to omit
+details and explanations, and to go straight to the points that
+repetition had proved to be the most effective, so that the criterion
+of excellence must have been immediate popularity with the audience as
+in a play. It may be conjectured also that the metre, in length of
+line and cadence, formed itself to a great degree on the natural
+conditions of oral delivery and listening. For all poetry, I think,
+makes its primary appeal to the ear; and the modern habit of reading
+it seems to me to have thrown this essential test of quality somewhat
+into the background. The arrangement of metre and rhyme may have been
+gradually invented to correspond with and satisfy that natural
+expectation of the recurrence of certain tones and measures which
+always delights primitive men, and of which one may possibly trace
+some symptoms even in animals, as when the snake sways slowly to the
+simple sounds of a snake-charmer's pipe. The order of all modern
+versification (except in blank verse, which is never popular) depends
+on the echoing rhyme, which marks time like the stroke of a bell, and
+is waited for with keen anticipation by the sensitive listener. It is
+strange, to my mind, that such a beautiful creation as the beat of
+tonic sounds at a line's terminal should have been comparatively so
+recent a discovery in European poetry.
+
+That a master of this art must have been very rare is shown by the
+very few pieces of first-class heroic poetry still extant out of the
+immense quantity that must have been attempted in different ages and
+countries. Yet the materials lie strewn around us, awaiting the
+skilful hand; they are to be found wherever a high-spirited warlike
+race is fighting its way upward out of barbarism into some less
+wretched stage of society that may allow breathing time for working
+the precious mines of recent traditions. The state of society
+described in some Icelandic Sagas, for example, with its hereditary
+blood feuds and perpetual assassinations, with its code of honour
+making vengeance a pious duty, its tariff of blood money, and its
+council for adjusting civil and criminal wrongs, has a close
+resemblance to everyday life among the free Afghan tribes beyond the
+North-West Frontier of India. But the Saga writers flourished, I
+understand, when this state of things had passed or was passing away;
+while the Afghans are still a rude illiterate folk who have only
+songs, recited by the professional bards. The best collection of these
+popular songs has been made by a Frenchman, the late James
+Darmesteter, who remarks that 'English people in India care little for
+Indian songs'; though one may reply that he has made use of English
+writers and collectors of frontier folklore, and indeed he
+acknowledges his debt to Mr. Thorburn's excellent book on _Bannu or
+our Afghan Frontier_. However that may be, we have here, in these
+unwritten lays, the stuff out of which is developed, first, the
+established tradition, and, secondly, not only poetry but also the
+beginnings of history, for these lays are the oral records of
+contemporary events--'c'est le cri même de l'histoire.' They tell of
+the last Afghan War, and of the most famous border forays made by the
+English lords on the Afghan marches: they preserve the names and deeds
+of English officers and of the leading warriors of the Afghan tribes:
+they tell how Cavagnari 'drank the stirrup-cup of the great journey'
+when the English mission was slaughtered at Kabul in 1879, and how
+General Roberts, his heart shot through with grief, set out in fiery
+speed on his avenging march against the Afghan capital. Here then is
+for the modern historian a rare opportunity of comparing the
+contemporary popular version of events with exact authentic official
+record; and the result ought to aid him in deciding, by analogy, what
+value is to be placed on similar material that has been handed down
+in the ancient songs and stories of other countries. He will be
+fortified, I think, in the sound conclusion that all far-sounding
+legend has a solid substratum of fact. As poetry, these songs render
+forcibly the temper and feelings of the people; they illustrate their
+virtues and vices, their worship of courage and devotion to the clan,
+their fanaticism and ferocity. The sense of Afghan honour, in the
+matter of sheltering a guest, is shown in the ballad which relates how
+a son killed his father for violating this law of hospitality. Like
+all popular verse, the Afghan songs have their recurrent phrases and
+familiar commonplaces; yet, says Darmesteter,
+
+     'in spite of the limited range of ideas and interests, and a rather
+     low ideal, all such defects find their excuse in the passion, the
+     simplicity, the direct spontaneous outspeaking, that supreme gift
+     which has been lost in our intellectual decadence.'
+
+The stirring events of the time have been immediately put into verse;
+the scenes and feelings are struck off in the die of actual
+circumstance; the heated metal takes a clear-cut impression. It is in
+rough songs like these that are to be found the germs of the higher
+heroic poetry. The ballad, the short stories, the favourite anecdotes
+of remarkable men at their exploits, have the luck to fall, later,
+into the hands of a skilful reciter or verse-maker; they are enlarged,
+knit together, and fashioned according to the ideas of the day, with
+an infusion of rhetoric and literary decoration. The heroic ideal, to
+use Professor Ker's words, is thus worked up out of the sayings and
+doings of great men of the fore-time, who stand forth as the type and
+embodiment of the virtues and vices of their age, as it was conceived
+by poets who could handle the popular traditions. And we may guess
+that all anecdotes, words of might, and feats of arms that were
+current before and after him, if they were appropriate to the type,
+would cluster round the hero, and be used for bringing his character
+into strong relief. We can even discern this tendency in modern
+society, where a notable personage, like the Duke of Wellington or
+Talleyrand, is credited with any vigorous or caustic saying that suits
+the idea of him, and may be passed on in another generation to the
+account of the next popular favourite. The literary habit of providing
+impressive 'last words' for great men at death's door might be taken
+as another example of the magnetic attraction of types.
+
+Of course the perfect samples of heroic verse, of famous songs and
+stories woven into an epic poem, are to be found in Homer.[17]
+Nowhere, in the whole range of the world's poetry, can we see such
+splendid impersonations of primitive life and character treated
+artistically. Yet the plot is simple enough. Agamemnon, the chief
+commander of the Greek army, has carried off the daughter of a priest
+of Apollo, and flatly refuses to give her back; whereupon the priest
+appeals to the god, who brings the chief to reason by spreading a
+plague in the Grecian camp; and so the girl goes home with apologies.
+But Agamemnon indemnifies himself by seizing a captive damsel
+belonging to Achilles, who, being justly infuriated, will go no more
+to battle, but sits sulkily in his tent, until the Greek army is very
+nearly destroyed, for want of his help, by the Trojans.
+
+Here we have at once a picture of manners not unlike those of the
+Afghan tribes, though very differently treated. The poet is at no
+pains to put on any moral varnish, or to tone down the roughness
+romantically; because he is writing, or reciting, for people of much
+the same way of thinking as his heroes, who are fierce chiefs
+quarrelling over captured women; and the whole plot is developed by
+sheer pressure of circumstance and character. Then on the Trojan side
+we have the figure of Hector, the true patriotic hero, who is
+naturally displeased with Paris for the abduction of Helen, which has
+brought a disastrous war upon Troy; yet what is done cannot be undone,
+and his clear duty is to fight for his own people. To Helen herself he
+is gentle and kind; and the religious men only irritate him when they
+interfere in military matters. But although he is far the noblest
+character in the whole poem, he is eventually slain by Achilles, for
+the plain reason that Achilles is the most terrible warrior of both
+armies. It was Hector's fate, which is the poet's way of saying that
+the inexorable logic of facts, as he knows them, must always prevail.
+
+With regard to the position of women in Homeric poetry. They are
+mainly irresponsible creatures: how could they be otherwise, when
+everything depends on the sword, and a woman cannot wield it? As the
+equality of sexes implies a high state of civilisation and security,
+so in the old fighting times a woman had to stand aside; yet though
+she could not take part in a battle, there were incessant battles
+about her: the fatal woman, who is the ruin of her country, is
+well-known in all legend and romance, from Helen of Troy to La Cava,
+whose seduction by King Roderick brought the Moors into Spain.[18] In
+the _Iliad_ King Priam treats Helen with delicate consideration, as is
+seen in the beautiful passage that describes her sitting by him on the
+walls of Troy, and pointing out to him the leaders of the Greek army
+marshalled in the plain before them. Nor is any more perfect female
+character to be found in poetry than Andromache, Hector's wife,
+high-spirited, virtuous, and passionately affectionate. Yet Helen,
+the erring woman, is brought home eventually by Menelaus, and appears
+again in the _Odyssey_ as a highly respected matron, who has had an
+adventure in early life; while Andromache, having seen her husband
+slain and dragged round the walls of Troy behind the chariot of
+Achilles, is carried off a childless widow into dolorous servitude.
+
+Here one may feel the tragic power of an artist who draws life from
+the sombre verities, not as it is seen through the romantic colouring
+of a softer moralising age; he never wastes himself on vain
+lamentations, never suggests that virtue will save you from bitter
+unmerited calamity: he gives the true situation. There is one short
+passage in the _Odyssey_ where the poet, merely by the way, and to
+illustrate something else, lets us have a glimpse of an incident that
+was probably familiar to him and his audience. He wishes to show what
+he means by a burst of grief, and this he does, not by a string of
+epithets, but by a picture.[19]
+
+From the historic books of the Old Testament, particularly from the
+books of Samuel and the Kings, one might take some fine specimens of
+the peculiar quality distinguishing the heroic style, in prose that is
+very near poetry. Nothing can be more simple than the narrative, it is
+cool and quiet: there are whole chapters without an unnecessary
+adjective; and yet it is most impressive, both in the drawing of such
+characters as Saul, David, and Joab, who stand out dramatically, like
+Homeric heroes, and in the stories of their deeds and death.
+
+Professor Ker's essays contain a masterly and luminous survey of the
+vicissitudes undergone by the songs and legends of Western and
+Northern nations in the course of transmutation from the primitive
+heroic stage into deliberate literary composition. The original
+material never attained the grand epical form; the process was
+interrupted by the advancement of learning, by ecclesiastical
+influences, and by vast social changes.
+
+     'Even before the people had fairly escaped from barbarism, before
+     they had made a fair beginning of civilisation and of reflective
+     literature on their own account, they were drawn within the Empire,
+     within Christendom.'
+
+A similar fate, it may here be noticed, has overtaken, or awaits, the
+heroic songs of the Afghans; for Darmesteter tells us that as the oral
+tradition becomes written it falls into the net of translation and
+paraphrase, it is absorbed into the elegant literature of Persia,
+Arabia, and Hindustan, it becomes theological and romanesque. And
+another dangerous enemy has now appeared in the shape of the
+Anglo-Indian schools which follow and fix the English dominion; for
+the primitive folklore has no more chance against systematic education
+than the wild fighting men have against drilled and disciplined
+soldiers. In Europe the Sagas of Iceland, which lay furthest from the
+civilising influences, had the luck of preserving the true elements of
+heroic narrative; and the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, though it falls
+far short of the epic, has a certain Homeric flavour. The chief is the
+'folces-hyrde,' his people's shepherd; and we have Beowulf, like
+Hector,[20] desiring that after his death a mound may be raised at the
+headland which juts out into the sea, 'that seafaring men may
+afterward call it Beowulf's Mound, they who drive from far their
+roaring vessels over the mists of the flood.'[21]
+
+Let us turn now to the romantic poetry of England, which for some
+centuries ruled all our imaginative literature, and annexed, so to
+speak, almost the whole field of battles, adventures, and energetic
+activity generally. The subjects are much the same: the gallantry of
+men, the beauty, virtues, and frailties of women: but the writers have
+got a loose uncertain grip upon the actualities of life; they wander
+away into fanciful stories of noble knights, distressed damsels, and
+marvellous feats of chivalry--in short they are _romancing_. They care
+little whether the details accord with natural fact--whether, for
+instance, the account of a fight is incredible to any one who knows
+what a battle really is; the heroes are chivalrous knight-errants,
+noble, pious, devoted to their lady loves; but they are not
+hard-headed, hard-fisted men like Ulysses, David, or some old
+Icelandic sea-rover. The true heroic spirit shoots up occasionally,
+nevertheless the prevailing idea of the romance-writer is to tell a
+wondrous tale of love and adventure, in which he lets his fancy run
+riot, rather enjoying than avoiding magnificent improbabilities.
+Undoubtedly the beautiful mystic romance of the Morte d'Arthur does
+light up at the end with a true flash of heroic poetry, in the famous
+lamentation over Lancelot, when he is found at last dead in the
+hermitage: but in this passage the elegiac strain rises far above the
+ordinary level of romantic composers. Meanwhile, as the English nation
+at home settled down into peaceful habits under the strong organising
+pressure of Church and State, and arms gave way to laws, the hero's
+occupation disappeared from our everyday society, and the heroic
+tradition decayed out of imaginative literature, which was often
+picturesque, sublime, and profoundly reflective, but had parted with
+the special qualities of energetic simplicity and the vivid impression
+of fact. Nevertheless, heroic poetry in this sense has never been
+quite extinguished in Great Britain; it survived, naturally, wherever
+it could be preserved by a living popular tradition. And so it found a
+congenial refuge, though in greatly reduced circumstances, in the
+rough outlying regions where personal strength and daring were still
+vitally necessary--in the borderland between England and Scotland. An
+epic poem gave heroic poetry on a grand scale, it told the incidents
+of a great war: the ballad tells of a single skirmish or foray. Yet
+the difference is but one of degree, for both epic and ballad were
+composed for men and by men, who were in the right atmosphere; and so
+we have here very different work from that of the fanciful romancer.
+There are not many good examples; yet the antique tone rings out now
+and then, as in the ballad of Chevy Chase, which commemorates a fierce
+Northumbrian fight at Otterburne that must have stirred the hearts of
+the whole countryside. Here you have no knightly tournament, or duel
+for rescue of dames, but the sharp clash of bloody conflict between
+English and Scots borderers, the best fighting men of our island. Of
+course the genuine account, given in Froissart, is very different; but
+the ballad-singer knows his art; and whereas from history we only
+learn that a Scottish knight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, was slain in the
+medley, in the ballad an English archer draws his bow
+
+    'An arrow of a cloth yard long
+      To the hard head hayled he.'
+
+And then
+
+    'Against Sir Hugh Montgomery
+      So right his shaft he set,
+    The swan's feather that his arrow bare
+      In his heart's blood was wet.'
+
+In the compressed energy of these four lines, without an epithet or a
+superfluous word, we have a picture, drawn by a sure hand, of a man
+drawing his long bow, and driving it from steel to feathers through a
+knight in armour.
+
+Well, the border fighting disappeared with the union of the two
+kingdoms, and as Great Britain became civilised and began to transfer
+her wars oversea, the heroic verse decayed under the influence of the
+higher culture. For a civilised and literary society to have preserved
+its ancient lays and ballads is the rarest of lucky chances; the
+enthusiastic collector, like Percy or Walter Scott, is generally born
+too late, for indeed all antiquarianism is a very modern task. And
+poetry of this sort must decay under what Shakespeare calls 'the
+cankers of a calm world': while it also tends to disappear with the
+introduction of professional soldiers and great armies, where personal
+heroism counts for little. These may be, I suppose, the main reasons
+why great wars produce so little heroic verse: it may be questioned
+whether even our civil wars of the seventeenth century inspired any
+genuine poetry of this sort. And when in the eighteenth century the
+clang of arms had completely died away at home, the battle pieces were
+done after an artificial literary fashion, by writers who were content
+to describe vaguely the charging of hosts, the thunder of cannon, the
+groans of the wounded, and other such mechanical generalities.
+
+If any one could have revived the true heroic style, it would have
+been done by Walter Scott, with his delight in the border minstrelsy,
+and his martial ardour; but the romantic spirit was too strong upon
+him. He had laid hold of the right tradition, could give picturesque
+scenes and characters of a bygone time, and _Bonnie Dundee_ is a
+ringing ballad; yet his style in the longer metrical tales is
+distinctly romantic and conventional. If he had not been writing for
+readers to whom the rough riders of the Border in the sixteenth
+century were totally strange and unreal beings, he could never have
+said that they
+
+    'Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,
+    And drank the red wine through the helmet barred.'
+
+An unsophisticated audience would have laughed outright at such a
+comical performance. And we can see how Scott, as a poet of the
+battlefield, had become possessed with the idea that the grand style
+must be a lofty strain, something magnificently unusual, by his two
+poems upon Waterloo, which are fine failures; though we may admit the
+impossibility of making a heroic poem out of a battle that has just
+been minutely described in newspapers. On the other hand, his prose
+novels afford us a remarkable example of the two styles contrasted.
+When he wrote of the middle ages, as in _Ivanhoe_, _The Talisman_, and
+others, he was a pure romancer; whereas in his Tales of Scotland in
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the _Legend of Montrose_,
+_Old Mortality_, _The Bride of Lammermoor_, there are two or three
+rapid sketches of sharp fighting which are true and spirited, full of
+vivacity and character. On this ground he trod firmly, knowing the
+country, the times, and the people of Scotland: while the petty
+skirmishes at Drumclog or Bothwell Brig were easier to manage
+artistically than a great battle. Poetry, indeed, like painting, can
+do nothing on a vast scale, cannot manage masses of men; and moreover
+it fails to deal effectively with a state of war in which mechanical
+skill and the tactical movement of large bodies of troops win the day.
+There may be as much personal heroism as ever, but it is lost in the
+multitude. Nevertheless sea-fighting, where separate ships may
+encounter and grapple like two mortal foes, with the deep water
+around and beneath them, gives heroism a better chance; and the
+mariner is always a poetic figure. So Thomas Campbell did rise very
+nearly to the heroic level in his poem on the battle of the Baltic,
+written when the true story of Nelson's famous exploit was still
+fresh; we have a clear and forcible impression of the British ships
+moving silently to the attack; and the closing lines touch the ancient
+ever-living feeling of gratitude to Captain Riou and his brave
+comrades, 'so tried and yet so true,' who fell in the great victory.
+
+With this exception, the prolonged conflict between England and
+France, which lasted twenty years up to its end at Waterloo, struck
+out hardly a spark of heroic poetry. Yet the Peninsular War is full of
+splendid military exploits, of fierce battles and the desperate
+storming of fortresses: it was a period of great national energy, when
+the people were contending with all their heart and strength against a
+most dangerous enemy; it was also a time when England was singularly
+rich in poets of the highest order. Nevertheless the only verses that
+may be assigned to the peculiar class which I have been attempting to
+define, were written, not by one of the famous group of poets, but by
+an unknown hand; and they relate not to a great battle, but to a
+slight incident, not to a victory, but to a hasty retreat. I am
+alluding to the well-known stanzas on the _Burial of Sir John Moore_,
+who was killed at Corunna in 1809; and my apology for quoting anything
+so hackneyed must be that it is trite by reason of its excellence; for
+a short poem, like a single happy phrase, wins incessant repetition
+and lasting popularity, because the words precisely fit some universal
+feeling. Why have these verses made such an effect that they are
+familiar to all of us, and fresh as when they were first read? Is it
+not because the writer had one clear flash of imaginative light,
+which showed him the reality of the scene, so that the description
+speaks for itself, without literary epithets, creating, as the French
+say, the true image. He struck the right note of soldierly emotion,
+brief, stern, and compressed, when there is no time for vain
+lamentation--as when in the _Iliad_ Ulysses says to Achilles, who is
+inconsolable for the death of his friend, that a soldier must bury his
+comrade with a pitiless heart, and that in war a day's mourning is all
+that can be spared for slain men.[22]
+
+It may be allowable to suggest, therefore, among the reasons for the
+prevailing dearth and scarcity of first-class heroic poetry,
+notwithstanding the universal demand for it, the impossibility of thus
+handling war on a great scale, and also the serious difficulty of
+giving this poetic form to contemporary events, which are not easily
+grouped in artistic perspective because they are so accurately
+described elsewhere. This suggestion may derive support from the
+observation that whenever, in our own day, we have had brief samples
+of verse-writing with a strain of the genuine old quality, they have
+almost always come from a distant scene, usually from the frontiers of
+the British Empire, far away from the centres of academic culture and
+the fields of organised war. Two or three of Rudyard Kipling's short
+poems about life on the Afghan border and Indian camp life have the
+right ring: they are instinct with the colour and sensation of the
+environment: they stir the blood with a conviction of reality. If it
+be permissible for a moment to compare these rough energetic verses
+with the battle pieces of an immeasurably greater artist--with
+Tennyson's _Charge of the Light Brigade_, for example--one may see
+that in the poetry of action the grand style misses something which
+has been caught by the eye that has seen the thing itself; the Charge
+is a splendid composition, but the frontier ballad sets you down on
+the ground and shows you life.
+
+Undoubtedly, also, the romantic literary style, which prevailed so
+long in this country, and which is the natural product of high
+culture, has been unfavourable, because it was radically unsuitable,
+to the poetry of energetic action. It is true that all the highest
+compositions of the heroic poet are set off by a tinge of romance, as
+fine drawing is perfected by superb colouring; but the drawbacks of
+romance lie in a tendency to vagueness of thought, and to the
+preference of archaic words and overstrained sentiments which were
+given as poetic mainly because they were far-fetched and did not sound
+commonplace. In fact the later poets adopted mechanically the strong
+natural language of those who wrote under the inspiration of actual
+emotion or events, and therefore they used it awkwardly and
+ineffectively; or else in their consciousness of not knowing how
+things really happened, they kept within sonorous generalities, which
+are the resource of artistic impotence. In our own day we have
+witnessed a sharp revolt against romantic verse, and a reversion
+toward those forms of art which reflect the actual experience of men,
+toward precision and accurate detail: Romance has been abandoned for
+what is called Realism. But here we are threatened by a danger from
+the opposite direction: for a clumsy Realist is apt to suppose that
+his business is merely to describe facts without adding anything out
+of his own imaginative faculty, that he may bring his characters on
+the stage in their daily garb, in the dirty slovenliness with which
+they go about dreaming or acting in their own petty sphere,[23] and so
+he overcharges with technicalities or trivial particulars.
+Nevertheless one may say that the poetry of action has found better
+methods since it shook off the influence of fantastic romance, and is
+distinctly improving: though its strength lies in short pieces
+repeating some notable incident or dramatic situations bringing out
+character, which is just where it began originally, and where indeed
+it is likely to remain, for the epic poem, or heroic verse on the
+grand scale, may be thought to have disappeared finally.
+
+To conclude a very brief and inadequate dissertation, we may, I think,
+lay it down as a principle of the art, that heroic poetry must be true
+to circumstances and to character, must have the qualities of
+simplicity and sincerity, combined with the magnetic power of stirring
+the heart by showing how men and women can behave when really
+confronted by danger, death, or irremediable misfortune. Its
+background, in skilful hands, is the contrast of calm Nature looking
+on at human strife and sorrow, at stern fortitude and energetic effort
+in tragic situations. We are reading every day of such situations in
+the South African War, where there has been no lack of brave men 'so
+tried and yet so true,' who have found themselves back again suddenly
+in the rough fighting world of their forefathers, and have felt and
+acted like the men of old time. There is abundant proof that the
+English folk can display as much heroism as ever men did; but we may
+look in vain for the poet who knows how to commemorate their valour
+and patriotic self-sacrifice in heroic verse.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] _Anglo-Saxon Review_, June 1900.
+
+[17] _Epic and Romance_, p. 15.
+
+[18]
+    'Ay España
+        Perdita por un gusto y por La Cava.'
+
+    _Romance del Rey Rodrigo._
+
+[19]
+    So doth a woman weep, as her husband in death she embraces,
+    Him, who in front of his people and city has fallen in battle,
+    Striving in vain to defend his home from the fate of the vanquished.
+    She there, seeing him die, and gasping his life out before her,
+    Clings to him bitterly moaning. And round her the others, the foemen,
+    Beat her, and bid her arise, and stab at her back with the lances,
+    Dragging her off as a slave to the bondage of labour and sorrow.
+
+    _Odyssey_, viii. 523-29.
+
+[20] _Iliad_, vi. 86-90.
+
+[21] Arnold's translation.
+
+[22] _Iliad_, xix. 228-29.
+
+[23] Lessing.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON[24]
+
+
+'When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her
+poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first
+names will be Wordsworth and Byron.' Thus wrote Matthew Arnold in
+1881, and now that the century's last autumn is passing away, a new
+edition of Byron's works appears in the fullness of time to quicken
+our memories and rekindle our curiosity, by placing before us a
+complete record of the life, letters, and poetry of one whom Macaulay
+declared in 1830 to be the most celebrated Englishman of the
+nineteenth century, and who seventy years later may still be counted
+among its most striking and illustrious figures.
+
+As the new edition is issued by instalments, and several volumes are
+still to come, to compare its contents, arrangement, and the editorial
+accessories with those of preceding editions might be thought
+premature. We may say, however, that a large number of Byron's
+letters, not before printed, have now been added; and that the text of
+this new material has been prepared from originals, whereas it is now
+impossible so to collate the text of the greater number of the letters
+heretofore published. Moore is supposed to have destroyed many of
+those entrusted to him; and moreover he handled the originals very
+freely, making large omissions, and transposing passages from one
+letter to another, though we presume that he did not re-write and
+amplify passages after the fashion in which certain French editors
+have dealt with recent memoirs. The letters now for the first time
+published by Mr. Murray were for the most part inaccessible to Moore.
+But for all these details we may refer our readers to the concise and
+valuable prefaces appended to the three volumes of Letters and
+Journals.
+
+We have now, therefore, a substantial acquisition of fresh and quite
+authentic material, though it would be rash to assume that all
+important documents are included, for the family archives are still
+held in reserve. It is admitted by the editor that the literary value
+of the letters now printed for the first time is not high, but he
+explains that in publishing, with a few exceptions, the whole
+available correspondence, he has acted on the principle that they form
+an aggregate collection of great biographical interest, and may thus
+serve as the best substitute for the lost memoirs. We may agree that
+any scrap of a great man's writing, or even any words spoken, may
+throw some light upon his character, whether the subject be trivial or
+tremendous, a business letter to his solicitor or a defiance of
+society; for even though careless readers chance to miss some pearl
+strung at random on a string of commonplaces, to the higher criticism
+nothing is quite valueless. In this instance, at any rate, no pains
+have been spared to place the real Lord Byron, as described more or
+less unconsciously by himself, before his fellow-countrymen; and the
+result is to confirm his reputation as a first-class letter-writer.
+The private and confidential correspondence of eminent literary men
+would be usually more decorous than interesting; but Byron, though he
+is not always respectable, is never dull. The correspondence and
+journals, taken all together, constitute the most interesting and
+characteristic collection of its kind in English literature.
+
+In regard to the effect upon his personal reputation, we have long
+known what manner of man was Byron; nor is it likely that, after
+passing in review the complete array of evidence collected in these
+volumes, the general verdict of posterity will be sensibly modified.
+Those who judge him should bear in mind that perhaps no famous life
+has ever been so thoroughly laid bare, or scrutinised with greater
+severity. The tendency of biographers is to soften down errors and
+praise where they can; and in an autobiography the writer can tell his
+own story. But the assiduous searching out and publication of every
+letter and diary that can be gathered or gleaned is a different
+ordeal, which might try the reputation of most of us; while in the
+case of an impulsive, wayward, high-spirited man, exposed to strong
+temptations, with all a poet's traditional irritability, whose rank
+and genius concentrated public attention on his writings from his
+early youth, this test must be extremely severe. Many of the letters
+are of a sort that do not ordinarily appear in a biography. Byron's
+letters to his wife at the time of their separation, which are
+moderate and even dignified, are supplemented by his wife's letters to
+him and to her friends, full of mysterious imputations; and there are
+letters to and from the lady with whom his _liaison_ was notorious.
+His own reckless letters from Venice to Moore, and those from Shelley
+and others describing his dissipated habits, were clearly never
+intended for general reading after his death. Of course most of these
+are not now produced for the first time, nor do we argue that they
+ought never to have appeared, for the biographical interest is
+undeniable. Our point is that the publication of such private and
+damaging correspondence is so very unusual in biographies that it
+places Byron at a special disadvantage, and that when we pass our
+judgment upon him we are bound to take into account the unsparing use
+that has been made of papers connected with the most intimate
+transactions of a lifetime which was no more than a short and stormy
+passage from youth to manhood; for he was cut off before the age at
+which men abandon the wild ways of their springtide, and are usually
+disposed to obliterate the record of them. At least one recent
+biography might be mentioned which would have read differently if it
+had been compiled with similar candour.
+
+The annotations subjoined to almost every page of the text are so
+ample and particular as to furnish in themselves extensive reading.
+The notices of every person named would go far to serve as a brief
+biographical dictionary of Byron's contemporaries, whether known or
+unknown to fame. We get a concise account of Madame de Staël--her
+birth, books, and political opinions--very useful to those who had no
+previous acquaintance with her. Lady Morgan and Joanna Southcote
+obtain quite as much space as would be allotted to them in any
+handbook of celebrities. Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh are
+treated with similar liberality. There is a full account, taken from
+the _Examiner_, of the procession with which Louis XVIII. made his
+entry into London in 1814. The notes--of about four pages each--upon
+Hobhouse and Lord Carlisle may be justified by their close connection
+with Byron's affairs; though some of us might have been content with
+less. Allusions to such notorious evildoers as Tarquin are explained,
+and stock quotations from Shakespeare have been carefully verified.
+The result is that a reader might go through this edition of Byron
+with the very slightest previous knowledge of general literature or of
+contemporary history, and might give himself a very fair middle-class
+education in the process, although the consequence might be to imbue
+him with what Coleridge has called 'a passion for the disconnected.'
+Nevertheless we readily acknowledge the thorough execution of this
+part of the editorial work, and the very meritorious labour that has
+been spent upon bringing together every kind of document and reference
+that can inform or enlighten us upon the main subjects of Byron's life
+and writings. In the poems the practice of giving in notes the rough
+drafts and rejected versions of passages and lines, so as to show the
+poet at work, seems to us not altogether fair to him, and is
+occasionally distracting to those readers who enjoy a fine picture
+without asking how the colours were mixed, or are not anxious about
+the secrets of a good dinner. Yet to students of method, to the
+fellow-craftsman, and to the literary virtuoso, these variant
+readings, of which there are sometimes four to a single line, may
+often be of substantial interest, as throwing light on the tendencies
+and predilections of taste which are the formative influences upon
+style in prose or poetry.
+
+Probably the most favourable circumstance for a poet is that he should
+only be known, like the Divinity of Nature, from his works; or at
+least that, like Wordsworth, he should keep the noiseless tenor of his
+way down some secluded vale of life, whereby his poems stand out in
+clear relief like fine paintings on a plain wall. Is there any modern
+English poet of the first class, except Byron, whose entire prose
+writings and biography are bound up in standard editions with his
+poetry? The question is at any rate worth asking, because certainly
+there is no case in which the record of a poet's private life and
+personal fortunes has so greatly affected, for good or for ill, his
+poetic reputation. Those who detested his character and condemned his
+way of living found it difficult to praise his verses; they detected
+the serpent under every stone. For those who were fascinated by the
+picture of a reckless prodigal, always in love and in debt, with
+fierce passions and a haughty contempt for the world, who defied
+public opinion and was suspected of unutterable things--such a
+personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's
+whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with
+light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take
+up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main
+object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true
+value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems
+which must always hold a permanent place in the high imaginative
+literature of England.
+
+It may be said that every writer of force and originality traverses
+two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order
+of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted
+unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and
+praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse
+treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's
+reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen
+most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief
+lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon
+the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined
+slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this
+moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to
+whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so
+imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a
+character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose
+poetry, he admitted, had influenced his own later verse--one of those
+who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout
+England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who
+set the fashion of his day in England, stirred and shaped the popular
+imagination, and struck a far resonant note in our poetry. Yet after
+his death he suffered a kind of eclipse; his work was much more unduly
+depreciated than it had been extolled; while in our own time such
+critics as Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have been in profound
+disagreement on the question of his worth and value as a poet. Nor is
+it possible for impartial persons to accept the judgment of either of
+these two eminent artists in poetry, since Arnold placed Wordsworth
+and Byron by anticipation on the same level at this century's end,
+whereas Wordsworth stands now far higher. And the bitter disdain which
+Sir. Swinburne has poured upon Byron's verse and character, though
+tempered by acknowledgment of his strength and cleverness, and by
+approbation of his political views, excites some indignation and a
+sympathetic reaction in his favour. One can imagine the ghost of Byron
+rebuking his critic with the words of the Miltonic Satan, 'Ye knew me
+once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar'; for in
+his masculine defiant attitude and daring flights the elder poet
+overtops and looks down upon the fine musical artist of our own day.
+
+Some of the causes which have combined to lower Byron's popularity are
+not far to seek. The change of times, circumstance, and taste has been
+adverse to him. The political school which he so ardently represented
+has done its work; the Tory statesmen of the Metternich and
+Castlereagh type, who laid heavy hands upon nations striving for light
+and liberty, have gone down to their own place; the period of stifling
+repression has long ended in Europe. Italy and Greece are free, the
+lofty appeals to classic heroism are out of date, and such fiery
+high-swelling trumpet notes as
+
+    'Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner, torn, but flying,
+    Streams like a thunderstorm _against_ the wind,'
+
+fall upon cold and fastidious ears. 'The day will come,' said Mazzini
+in after-years, 'when the democracy will acknowledge its debt to
+Byron;' but the demos is notoriously ungrateful, and the subject races
+have now won their independence. The shadow of discouragement and
+weariness which passed over sensitive minds at the beginning of this
+century, a period of political disillusion, has long been swept away
+by the prosperity and sanguine activities of the Victorian era; and
+the literary style has changed with the times. Melancholy moods,
+attitudes of scornful despair, tales of fierce love and bloody revenge
+are strange and improbable to readers who delight in situations and
+emotions with which they are familiar, who demand exactitude in detail
+and correct versification; while sweet harmonies, perfection of metre,
+middle-class pastorals, and a blameless moral tone came in with
+Tennyson. In short, many of the qualities which enchanted Byron's own
+generation have disenchanted our own, both in his works and his life;
+for when Macaulay wrote in 1830 that the time would come when his
+'rank and private history will not be regarded in estimating his
+poetry,' he took no account of future editions enlarged and annotated,
+or of biographies of _The Real Lord Byron_; whereby it has come to
+pass, as we suspect, that the present world knows more of Byron's
+private history than of his poems. His faults and follies stand out
+more prominently than ever; his story is more attractive reading than
+most romances; and the stricter morality of the day condemns him more
+severely than did the society to which he belonged. Psychological
+speculation is now so much more practised in literature than formerly,
+there is so much more interest in 'the man behind the book,' that
+serious moral delinquencies, authentically recorded and eagerly read,
+operate more adversely than ever in affecting the public judgment upon
+Byron's poetry, because they provide a damaging commentary upon it.
+His contemporaries--Coleridge, Keats, Shelley--lived so much apart
+from the great world of their day that important changes in manners
+and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by
+which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry,
+moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own
+character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the
+man himself; and his _empeiria_ (as Goethe calls it), his too
+exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular
+class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative
+of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in
+his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to
+the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events
+and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw
+them, with comparisons of their visible condition and past glories,
+with Peninsular battlefields, and with Waterloo. Of worldliness in
+this objective meaning his contemporaries had some share, yet they
+instinctively avoided the waste of their power upon it; and so their
+finest poetry is beautiful by its detachment, by a certain magical
+faculty of treating myth, romance, and the mystery of man's
+sympathetic relations with universal Nature.
+
+A recent French critic of Chateaubriand, who defines the 'romantisme'
+of that epoch as no more than a great waking up of the poetic spirit,
+says that the movement was moral and psychological generally before it
+spread into literature. In criticising Byron's poetry we have to bear
+in mind that he came in on the first wave of this flood, which
+overflowed the exhausted and arid field of poetry at the end of the
+last century, fertilising it with colour and emotion. The comparison
+between Byron in England and Chateaubriand in France must have been
+often drawn. The similarity in their style, their moody, melancholy
+outlook upon common humanity, their aristocratic temper, their
+self-consciousness, their influence upon the literature of the two
+countries, the enthusiasm that they excited among the ardent spirits
+of the generation that reached manhood immediately after them, and the
+vain attempts of the elder critics to resist their popularity and deny
+their genius--form a remarkable parallel in literary history. As
+Jeffrey failed at first to discern the promise of Byron, so Morellet
+could only perceive the obviously weak points of Chateaubriand, laying
+stress on his affectations, his inflated language, his sentimental
+exaggeration, upon all the faults which were common to these two men
+of genius, the defects of their qualities, the energetic rebound from
+the classic level of orderly taste and measured style. It was the
+ancient _régime_ contending against a revolutionary uprising, and in
+poetry, as in politics, the leaders of revolution are sure to be
+excessive, to force their notes, to frighten their elders, and to
+scandalise the conservative mind. Yet just as Chateaubriand, after
+passing through his period of depression, is now rising again to his
+proper place in French literature, so we may hope that an impartial
+survey of Byron's verse will help to determine the rank that he is
+likely to hold permanently, although the high tide of Romance in
+poetry has at this moment fallen to a low ebb, and the spell which it
+laid upon our forefathers may have lost its power in an altered world.
+
+It must be counted to the credit of these Romantic writers that at any
+rate they widened and varied the sphere and the resources of their
+art, by introducing the Oriental element, so to speak, into the
+imaginative literature of modern Europe. They brought the lands of
+ancient civilisation again within the sphere of poetry, reviving into
+fresh animation the classic glories of Hellas, reopening the gates of
+the mysterious East, and showing us the Greek races still striving, as
+they were twenty-two centuries earlier, for freedom against the
+barbarous strength of an Asiatic empire. Byron was the first of the
+poets who headed this literary crusade for the succour of Christianity
+against Islam in the unending contest between East and West on the
+shores of the Mediterranean, and in this cause he eventually died.
+Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo were also travellers in
+Asia, and had drawn inspiration from that source; they all
+instinctively obeyed, like Bonaparte, the impulse which sends
+adventurous and imaginative spirits toward that region of strong
+passions and primitive manners, where human life is of little matter,
+and where the tragic situations of drama and fiction may at any time
+be witnessed in their simple reality. The effect was to introduce
+fresh blood into the veins of old romance; and Byron led the van of an
+illustrious line of poets who turned their _impressions de voyage_
+into glowing verse, for the others only trod in his footsteps and
+wrote on his model, while Lamartine openly imitated him in his
+_Dernier Chant de Childe Harold_. For the first time the Eastern tale
+was now told by a poet who had actually seen Eastern lands and races,
+their scenery and their cities, who drew his figures and landscape
+with his eye on the objects, and had not mixed his local colours by
+the process of skimming books of travel for myths, legends, costume,
+or customs, with such result as may be seen in Moore's _Lalla Rookh_
+and in Southey's _Thalaba_, or even in Scott's _Talisman_. The preface
+to this novel shows that Scott fully appreciated the risk of competing
+with Byron, albeit in prose, in the field of Asiatic romance, yet all
+his skill avails little to diminish the sense of conventional
+figure-drawing and of uncertainty in important details when they are
+not gathered in the field, but only transplanted from the library.
+
+Byron has noticed in one of his letters the errors of this kind into
+which a great poet must fall whose accurate observation has been
+confined mainly to his own country. 'There is much natural talent,' he
+writes, 'spilt over the _Excursion_, yet Wordsworth says of Greece
+that it is a land of
+
+    'Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores
+      Under a cope of variegated sky.
+
+The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, the shores
+still and tideless, the sky is anything but variegated, being for
+months and months beautifully blue.'
+
+This may be thought trivial criticism, yet it is evidence of the
+attention given by Byron to precise description. His accuracy in
+Oriental costume was also a novelty at that time, when so little was
+known of Oriental lore that even Mr. Murray 'doubted the propriety of
+putting the name of Cain into the mouth of a Mohammedan.' With regard
+to his characters, we may readily admit that in the _Giaour_ or the
+_Bride of Abydos_ the heroes and heroines behave and speak after the
+fashion of high-flying Western romance, and that their lofty
+sentiments in love or death have nothing specifically Oriental about
+them. But this was merely the romantic style used by all Byron's
+contemporaries, and generally accepted by the taste of that day as
+essential to the metrical rendering of a passionate love-story. It may
+be argued, with Scott, that when a writer of fiction takes in hand a
+distant age or country, he is obliged to translate ideas and their
+expression into forms with which his readers are, to some extent,
+familiar. Byron seasoned his Oriental tales with phrases and imagery
+borrowed from the East; but whatever scenic or characteristic effects
+might have thus been produced are seriously marred by the explanatory
+notices and erudite references to authorities that are appended to the
+text. This fashion of garnishing with far-fetched outlandish words, in
+order to give the requisite flavour of time or place, was peculiar to
+the new romantic school of his era; it was the poetical dialect of the
+time, and Byron employed it too copiously. Yet, with all his faults,
+he remains a splendid colourist, who broke through a limited mannerism
+in poetry, and led forth his readers into an unexplored region of
+cloudless sky and purple sea, where the serene aspect of nature could
+be powerfully contrasted with the shadow of death and desolation cast
+over it by the violence of man.
+
+Undoubtedly this contrast, between fair scenery and foul barbarism,
+had been presented more than once in poetry; yet no one before Byron
+had brought it out with the sure hand of an eye-witness, or with such
+ardent sympathy for a nation which had been for centuries trodden
+under the feet of aliens in race and religion, yet still clung to its
+ancient traditions of freedom. Throughout his descriptive poems, from
+_Childe Harold_ to _Don Juan_, it is the true and forcible impression,
+taken from sight of the thing itself, that gives vigour and animation
+to his pictures, and that has stamped on the memory the splendid
+opening of the _Giaour_, the meditations in Venice and Rome, the
+glorious scenery of the Greek islands, and even such single lines as
+
+    'By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone.'
+
+In the art of painting what may be called historical landscape, where
+retrospective associations give intellectual colour to the picture,
+Byron has very few rivals. His descriptions of the Lake of Geneva, of
+Clarens, of the Trojan plain--
+
+    'High barrows, without marble or a name,
+      A vast, untilled, and mountain-skirted plain,
+    And Ida in the distance'--
+
+have the quality of faithful drawing illumined by imaginative power.
+They have certainly touched the emotions and enhanced the pleasure of
+all travellers in the last three generations whose minds are
+accessible to poetic suggestion; and if at the present day their style
+be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be
+denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer
+without them. The stanzas in _Childe Harold_ on Waterloo are full of
+the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents
+of war--the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from
+the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the
+stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it
+may be said; yet the great difficulty of dealing adequately with
+heroic action in contemporary verse, of writing a poem on a campaign
+that has just been reported in the newspapers, is exemplified by the
+fact that Walter Scott's two compositions on Waterloo are failures;
+nor has any poet since Byron yet succeeded in giving us a good modern
+battlepiece.
+
+Nevertheless there is much in Byron's longer poems (excepting always
+_Don Juan_) that seems tedious to the modern reader; there are
+descriptions and declamations too long drawn-out to sustain the
+interest; and there are many lines that are superfluous, untidy, and
+sometimes ungrammatical. One can only plead, in extenuation of these
+defects, that the fashion of his day was for long metrical romance, in
+which it is difficult to maintain the high standard of careful
+composition exacted by the latest criticism. It is almost impossible
+to tell a long story in verse that shall be throughout poetical. And
+one main reason why this fashion has nearly passed away may be
+surmised to be that the versified narrative cannot adapt itself in
+this respect to the present taste, which is impatient of fluent
+lengthy heroics, refusing to accept them for the sake of some finely
+executed passages. Southey's epics are now quite unreadable, and many
+of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic
+style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much
+redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors
+often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded
+as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and
+costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and
+as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek
+patriots, he had actually seen the men and heard of their deeds. The
+fact that he also portrayed more unreal characters in dismal
+drapery--Lara, Conrad, and Manfred, as the mouthpieces of splenetic
+misanthropy--has led to some unjust depreciation of his capacity for
+veritable delineation. Macaulay, for example, in his essay on Byron,
+observes that 'Johnson, the man whom Don Juan met in the slave-market,
+is a striking failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have
+drawn a bluff, fearless Englishman in such a situation!' and Mr.
+Swinburne echoes this criticism. But it is unfair to compare a minor
+character, slightly sketched into a poem for the purposes of the plot,
+with the full-length portrait that might have been made of him by a
+first-class artist in prose. The proper comparison would be between
+the figures in the metrical romances of the two poets, whereby it
+might be shown that Scott could take as little trouble as Byron did
+about an unimportant subsidiary actor. In regard to the leading heroes
+and heroines, Scott's poetic creations are hardly more interesting or
+dramatic than Byron's; and whenever he makes, even in prose, an
+excursion into Asia, his figure-drawing becomes conventional. But he
+was usually at the disadvantage, from which Byron was certainly free,
+of being hampered by an inartistic propensity to make virtuous heroes
+triumph in the long run.
+
+Yet it must be admitted that no poet of the same calibre has turned
+out so much loose uneven work as Byron. His lapses into lines that are
+lame or dull are the more vexatious to the correct modern ear when, as
+sometimes happens, they spoil a fine passage, and in the midst of a
+superb flight his muse comes down with a broken wing. In the subjoined
+stanza, for example, from the Waterloo episode in _Childe Harold_, the
+first five lines are clear, strenuous, and concise, while the next
+three are confused and clumsy; so that though he recovers himself in
+the final line, the general effect is much damaged:
+
+    'Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
+      Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
+    The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,
+      The morn the marshalling in arms--the day
+    Battle's magnificently stern array.
+      The thunder-clouds close o'er it, _which when rent,
+      The earth is covered thick with other clay,
+      Which her own clay shall cover_, heaped and pent,
+    Rider and horse--friend, foe--in one red burial blent.'
+
+These blots, and there are many, become less pardonable when we
+observe, from the new edition, that Byron by no means neglected
+revision of his work. But his impetuous temper, and the circumstance
+of his writing far from the printing-press, encouraged hasty
+execution; and though the most true remark that 'easy writing is
+devilish hard reading' is his own, though he praised excessively the
+chiselled verse of Pope, he was always inclined to pose as one who
+threw off jets of boiling inspiration, and in one letter he compares
+himself to the tiger who makes or misses his point in one spring. He
+ranked Pope first among English poets, yet he learnt nothing in that
+school; he pretended to undervalue Shakespeare, yet he must have had
+the plays by heart, for his letters bristle with quotations from them.
+His avowed taste in poetry is hard to reconcile with his own
+performances: his verse was rushing, irregular, audacious, yet he
+overpraises the smooth composition of Rogers; he dealt in heroic
+themes and passionate love-stories, yet Crabbe's humble pastorals had
+their full charm for him. Except Crabbe and Rogers, he declared, 'we
+are all--Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I--upon a wrong
+revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among
+these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in
+English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural
+insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his
+clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc
+which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too
+incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy
+soliloquies of his dramatic characters we have an actor constantly
+reappearing in his favourite part. Yet this also was a novelty to the
+generation brought up on the impersonal poetry of the classic school;
+and here, again, he is a forerunner of the self-reflecting analytical
+style that is common in our own day; for there is a Byronic echo in
+the 'divine despair' of Tennyson. The melancholy brooding spirit,
+dissatisfied with society and detesting complacency, had for some time
+been in the air; it had affected the literature of France and Germany;
+Werther, Obermann, and René are all moulded on the same type with
+Childe Harold; yet Sainte-Beuve rightly says that this identity of
+type does not mean imitation--it means that the writers were all in
+the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against
+philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so
+vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or
+irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages,
+and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various
+personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw,
+in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven
+and humanity. Their literature, in short, however overcoloured it may
+have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among
+men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world
+around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must
+leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between
+this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the
+self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory
+contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in
+different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to
+have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour
+must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved
+his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in
+the same year (1818), and from the same place (Venice), he produced
+the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, full of deep longing for unbroken
+solitude:
+
+    'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
+      There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
+    There is society, where none intrudes,
+      By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;'
+
+and also _Beppo_, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian
+society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat
+ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in
+fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his
+_Mémoires d'Outre Tombe_, if they had been preserved, would have been
+very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography.
+
+It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression,
+and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest
+poems, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of Abydos_, the _Siege of Corinth_. On
+this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose
+sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour
+and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of
+metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary;
+yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not
+even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level
+with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description
+of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action.
+The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the _Giaour_--
+
+    'Clime of the unforgotten brave!
+    Whose land from plain to mountain cave
+    Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'--
+
+has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the
+manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and almost illegible
+hand--an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate
+poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and
+melodramatic figuring--
+
+    'Dark and unearthly is the scowl
+    That glares beneath his dusky cowl'--
+
+are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the
+untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and
+sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally
+disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it
+is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring
+adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality
+that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are,
+perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to
+Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal
+explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition
+lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to
+write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of
+assiduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek [Greek:
+phengarion], and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared
+us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sirât's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's
+scythe,' we should have mixed up less desultory reading with the
+enjoyment of fine passages. He gives us too much of his local
+colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors,
+he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the
+dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the
+forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that
+in these poems Byron brought the classic lands of Greece and the
+Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably
+added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.
+
+Byron has told us why he adopted for the _Corsair_, and afterwards for
+_Lara_, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':
+
+     'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for
+     narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart;
+     Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed
+     completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and
+     this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in
+     blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons
+     that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren
+     rocks on which they are kindled.'[25]
+
+We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment
+of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line
+displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement;
+it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow
+processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room
+for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of
+describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy
+heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At
+moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled
+up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run
+over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes
+ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos--as in the following
+sample from the _Corsair_:
+
+    'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives
+    One female form--remember--_we_ have wives.'
+
+And the consequence has been that _Lara_ and the _Corsair_ are now,
+we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.
+
+Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own
+metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning
+from the beacons, and had given blank verse a wide berth, instead of
+setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is
+full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he
+could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved
+not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular
+alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them.
+His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about
+_Sardanapalus_, to have been 'to dramatise striking passages of
+history and mythology.'
+
+     'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike
+     Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon
+     him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of
+     writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as
+     Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to
+     common language.'
+
+And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his
+blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed
+in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which
+have no metrical construction at all:
+
+     'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such
+     high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'[26]
+
+     'Where thou shalt pass thy days in peace, but on condition that the
+     three young princes are given up as hostages,'[27]
+
+Many others of the same quality might be given, in which the
+_disjecti membra poetæ_ would be exceedingly hard to find. It is
+surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into
+the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere
+use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple
+strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary
+vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse
+that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the
+most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood
+that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in
+this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats
+in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the
+construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of
+its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron
+should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a
+rough unpractised hand.
+
+There are some vigorous passages scattered through the plays, and we
+have it on record that Dr. Parr could not sleep a wink after reading
+_Sardanapalus_. Nevertheless, we fear that the present generation will
+find little cause for demurring to Jeffrey's judgment upon the
+tragedies, that they are for the most part 'solemn, prolix, and
+ostentatious.' They were not composed, as Byron himself explained,
+'with the most remote view to the stage,' so that he had not before
+his eyes the wholesome fear of a critical audience. In truth it must
+be admitted that he lacked the true dramatic instinct; he could only
+set up his leading figures to deliver imposing speeches appropriate to
+a tragic situation; and one may guess that the consciousness of
+awkward handling weighed upon the spirit and style of his blank verse,
+for his ear seems to have completely misled him when it had lost the
+guidance of recurrent rhyme. Of _Cain: a Mystery_, one must speak
+reverently, since Walter Scott, to whom it was dedicated, wrote that
+the author had 'matched Milton on his own ground'; yet in Lucifer, who
+leads the dialogue, we have little more than a spectral embodiment of
+Byron's own rebellious temper; and in this poem, as in _Manfred_, the
+discussion of metaphysical problems carries him beyond his depth.
+There are, nevertheless, some fine declamatory passages; and we may
+quote as a curiosity one soft line, fresh from the Swiss mountains:
+
+                         'Pipes in the liberal air
+    _Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd_,'
+
+which is to be found in _Manfred_ and might have been taken from the
+_Excursion_.
+
+When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the
+importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is
+the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter
+poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his
+popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very
+unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and
+glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead,
+as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout
+eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or
+overcharged:
+
+    'The better days of life were ours;
+      The worst can be but mine;
+    The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,
+      Shall never more be thine.
+    The silence of that dreamless sleep
+    I envy now too much to weep;
+      Nor need I to repine
+    That all those charms have passed away,
+    I might have watched through long decay.'
+
+There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of
+thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse
+has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which
+men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.
+
+In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare
+quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high
+vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic
+spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show
+that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and
+epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his
+strength freely:
+
+    'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free
+      Thou shalt not taste of death!
+    The generous blood that flowed from thee
+      Disdained to sink beneath;
+    Within our veins its currents be,
+      Thy spirit on our breath.
+
+    'Thy name, our charging hosts along,
+      Shall be their battle word!
+    Thy fall, the theme of choral song
+      From virgin voices poured!
+    To weep would do thy glory wrong;
+      Thou shalt not be deplored.'
+
+And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in
+the _Isles of Greece_, where the two lines,
+
+    'Ah, no! the voices of the dead
+      Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'
+
+drop suddenly into the elegiac strain, into a mournful echo that
+dwells upon the ear, followed by the rising note of a call to arms. It
+must be remembered that nothing is so rare as a stirring war-song, and
+that in our time we have had a good many attempts--almost all
+failures; whereas the _Isles of Greece_ will long continue to stir the
+masculine imagination of Englishmen.
+
+On the other hand, it must be admitted that Byron's Occasional Pieces
+abound with cheap pathos, dubious fervour, and a kind of commonplace
+sentimentality that comes out in the form as well as in the feeling of
+his inferior work. The rhymes are apt to be hackneyed, the similes are
+sometimes tagged on awkwardly instead of being weaved into the
+texture, the expression has often lost its strength, and the emotion
+lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what
+was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not
+been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so
+much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much _too_
+occasional, for he was prone to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the
+fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his
+own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world
+as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a false air of lamentation over
+the misfortunes which he had brought upon himself, as in the Poems of
+the Separation. Yet when he shook off his personal grief and took to
+politics, no other poet could more vividly express his intense living
+interest in the great events of his time, or strike the proper note of
+some great catastrophe. It may be affirmed that the _Ode to Napoleon_
+is better than anything else that has been written in English upon the
+most astonishing career in modern history:
+
+    'The triumph and the vanity,
+      The rapture of the strife--
+    The earthquake-voice of Victory,
+      To thee the breath of life;
+    The sword, the sceptre, and that sway
+    Which man seemed made but to obey,
+      Wherewith renown was rife--
+    All quelled; Dark Spirit, what must be
+    The madness of thy memory!
+
+    'The Desolator desolate!
+      The Victor overthrown!
+    The Arbiter of others' fate
+      A suppliant for his own!
+    Is it some yet imperial hope
+    That with such change can calmly cope?
+      Or dread of death alone?
+    To die a prince--or live a slave--
+    Thy choice is most ignobly brave.'
+
+In the first of these two stanzas the seventh line is weak and breaks
+the rapid rush of the verse; but the high pressure and impetus of the
+poem are sustained throughout twenty stanzas, producing the effect of
+an improvisatore who stops rather from want of breath than from any
+other lack of inspiration. In this respect the ode is a rare poetical
+exploit; for all poems composed under the spur of the moment, upon
+some memorable incident that has just startled the world, must be more
+or less improvised, and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary
+popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under
+such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded
+some unlucky laureate.
+
+There is one province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which
+Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of
+lyrics. In his latest and longest production, _Don Juan_, he tells us
+that his 'sere fancy has fallen into the yellow leaf':
+
+    'And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk
+    Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.'
+
+It was in _Beppo: a Venetian Story_ that he dropped, for the first
+time, the weapon of trenchant sarcasm and invective, with no very fine
+edge upon it, which he flourished in his youth, and took up the tone
+of light humorous satire upon society. He soon acquired mastery over
+the metre (which was suggested, as is well known, by Hookham Frere's
+_Whistlecraft_); and in _Don Juan_ he produced a long, rambling poem
+of a kind never before attempted, and still far beyond any subsequent
+imitations, in the English language. Of a certainty there is much that
+it is by no means desirable to imitate, for the English literature
+does not assimilate the element of cynical libertinism, which indeed
+becomes coarse on an English tongue. Yet it is remarkable that the
+Whistlecraft metre, although Byron could manage it with point and
+spirit, has never produced more than insipid _pastiche_ in later
+hands. But while _Beppo_ may be classed as pure burlesque, _Don Juan_
+strikes various keys, ironical and voluptuous, grave and gay, rising
+sometimes to the level of strenuous realistic narrative in the
+episodes of the shipwreck and the siege, falling often into something
+like grotesque buffoonery, with much picturesque description, many
+animated lines, and occasional touches of effective pathos. As a story
+it has the picaresque flavour of _Gil Blas_, presenting a variety of
+scenes and adventures strung together without any definite plot; as a
+poem its reputation rests upon some passages of indisputable beauty;
+while Byron's own experiences, grievances, and animosities, personal
+or political, run through the whole performance like an accompaniment,
+and break out occasionally into humorous sarcasm or violent
+denunciations. That the overheated fervour of a stormy youth should
+cool down into disdainful irony, under the chill of disappointment and
+exhaustion, was natural enough; and this unfinished poem may be
+regarded as typical of Byron's erratic life, full of loose intrigue
+and adventure, with its sudden and premature ending.
+
+It is in _Don Juan_ that Byron stands forth as the founder and
+precursor of modern realism in poetry. He has now finally exorcised
+the hyperbolic fiend that vexed his youth, he has cast off the
+illusions of romance, he knows the ground he treads upon, and his
+pictures are drawn from life; he is the foremost of those who have
+ventured boldly upon the sombre actualities of war and bloodshed:--
+
+    'But let me put an end unto my theme,
+      There was an end of Ismail, hapless town,
+    Far flashed her burning towers o'er Danube's stream,
+      And redly ran his blushing waters down.
+    The horrid warwhoop and the shriller scream
+      Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown;
+    Of forty thousand that had manned the wall
+    Some hundreds breathed, the rest were silent all.'
+
+'A versified paraphrase,' it may be said, 'of sober history,' yet
+withal very different from the most animated prose, which must be kept
+at a lower temperature of intense expression. If we turn to quieter
+scenes--which are called picturesque because the artist, like a
+painter, has selected the right subject and point of view, and has
+grouped his details with exquisite skill--we may take the stanzas
+describing the return of the pirate Lambro to his Greek island--
+
+    'He saw his white walls shining in the sun,
+    His garden trees all shadowy and green'--
+
+as a fine example of pure objective writing, which lays out the whole
+scene truthfully, with the direct vision of one who has seen it. One
+does not find here the suggestive intimations, the wide imaginative
+horizon of higher poetry; there are no musical blendings of sound and
+sense, as in such lines as Tennyson's
+
+    'By the long wash of Australasian seas.'
+
+Yet in these passages Byron has after his own fashion served Nature
+faithfully, and he has preserved to us some masterly sketches of life
+and manners that have long since disappeared. The Greek islands have
+since fallen under the dominion of European uniformity; the costume of
+the people, the form of their government, are shabby imitations of
+Western models. But the cloudless sky, the sun slowly sinking behind
+Morea's hills, the sea on whose azure brow Time writes no wrinkle, and
+the marbled steep of Sunium, are still unchanged; and the peaceful
+tourist in these waters will see at once that Byron was a true workman
+in line and colour, and will feel the intellectual pleasure that comes
+from accurate yet artistic interpretation of natural beauties.
+
+The poem of _Don Juan_ is, therefore, a miscellany, connected on the
+picturesque side with _Childe Harold_, and by its mocking spirit with
+_Beppo_ and the _Vision of Judgment_, the two pieces that may be
+classed as pure burlesque. The irreverent persiflage of the _Vision_
+belongs to the now obsolete school of Voltaire, and in biting wit and
+daring ridicule the performance is not unworthy of that supreme master
+in _diablerie_. Nor can it be asserted that this lashing sarcasm was
+undeserved, or that all the profanity was in Byron's parody, for
+Southey's conception of the Almighty as a High Tory judge, with an
+obsequious jury of angels, holding a trial of George III., browbeating
+the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that
+he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and
+abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron.
+There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a
+lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent
+attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have
+invariably failed. Southey's _Vision_, and Robert Montgomery's libel
+upon Satan, have each undergone the same fate of being utterly
+extinguished, knocked clean out of English literature by one single
+crushing onslaught of Byron and Macaulay respectively.
+
+Our conclusion must be brief, for in fact it is not easy to propound
+to the readers of this Review any general observations, which shall be
+new as well as true, upon a man's life and works that have been
+subjected to incessant scrutiny and criticism throughout the
+nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period Byron found
+himself matched, in the poetic arena, against contemporary rivals of
+first-class genius and striking originality. And from his death almost
+up to the century's close there has been no time when some
+considerable poet has not occupied the forefront of English letters,
+and stamped his impression on the public mind. Variety in style and
+ideas has produced many vicissitudes of taste in poetry; it has been
+discovered that narrative can be better done in prose, and so the
+novel has largely superseded story-telling in verse. There have also
+been great political and social changes, and all these things have
+severely tested the staying powers of a writer who is too closely
+associated with his own period to be reckoned among those wide-ranging
+spirits whom Shelley has called 'the kings of thought.' Nevertheless
+the new edition of Byron is appearing at a moment which is, we think,
+not inopportune. There is just now, as by a coincidence there was in
+the year 1800, a dearth of poetic production; we have fallen among
+lean years; we have come to a break in the succession of notable
+poets; the Victorian celebrities have one by one passed away; and we
+can only hope that the first quarter of the twentieth century may
+bring again some such bountiful harvest as was vouchsafed to our
+grandfathers at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the meantime the
+reading of Byron may operate as a wholesome tonic upon the literary
+nerves of the rising generation; for, as Mr. Swinburne has generously
+acknowledged, with the emphatic concurrence of Matthew Arnold, his
+poems have 'the excellence of sincerity and strength.' Now one
+tendency of latter-day verse has been toward that over-delicacy of
+fibre which has been termed decadence, toward the preference of
+correct metrical harmonies over distinct and incisive expression,
+toward vague indications of meaning. In this form the melody prevails
+over the matter; the style inclines to become precious and garnished
+with verbal artifice. Some recent French poets, indeed, in their
+anxiety to correct the troublesome lucidity of their mother-tongue,
+have set up the school of symbolism, which deals in half-veiled
+metaphor and sufficiently obscure allusion, relying upon subtly
+suggestive phrases for evoking associations. For ephemeral infirmities
+of this kind the straightforward virility of Byron's best work may
+serve as an antidote. On the other hand, we have the well-knit
+strenuous verse of extreme realism, wrought out by a poet in his
+shirt-sleeves, with rhymes clear-sounding like the tap of hammer on
+anvil, who sings of rough folk by sea and land, and can touch national
+emotion in regard to the incidents or politics of the moment. He
+paints without varnish, in hard outline, avoiding metaphor and
+ornamental diction generally; taking his language so freely out of the
+mouths of men in actual life that he makes occasional slips into
+vulgarity. He is at the opposite pole from the symbolist; but true
+poetry demands much more distinction of style and nobility of thought.
+And here again Byron's high lyrical notes may help to maintain
+elevation of tone and to preserve the romantic tradition. His poetry,
+like his character, is full of glaring imperfections; yet he wrote as
+one of the great world in which he made for a time such a noise; and
+after all that has been said about his moral delinquencies, it is
+certain that we could have better spared a better man.
+
+In one of Tennyson's earlier letters is the following passage, with
+reference to something written at the time in _Philip van Artevelde_:
+
+     'He does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar
+     strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however
+     mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart, and a
+     new pulse, and so we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease
+     the wheels of the old world.'
+
+This is the large-hearted, far-seeing judgment of one who could survey
+the whole line and evolutionary succession of English verse, being
+himself destined to close the long list of nineteenth-century poets,
+which was opened by Byron and his contemporaries. The time has surely
+now come when we may leave discussing Byron as a social outlaw, and
+cease groping after more evidence of his misdeeds. The office of true
+criticism is to show that he made so powerful an impression on our
+literature as to win for himself permanent rank in its annals, and
+that his work, with all its shortcomings, does yet mark and illustrate
+an important stage in the connected development of our English poetry.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[24] _The Works of Lord Byron: a New, Revised, and Enlarged
+Edition._--'Letters and Journals.' Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M.
+A. 'Poetry.' Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, M. A. London, John
+Murray, 1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1900.
+
+[25] Preface to the _Corsair_.
+
+[26] _The Deformed Transformed_ (part I. scene i.).
+
+[27] _Sardanapalus_ (act V. scene i.).
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS[28]
+
+
+Mr. Leslie Stephen combines the faculty of acute and searching
+criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact.
+His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he
+has given to the history of English opinions and controversies,
+speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an
+extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to
+disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a
+masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he
+published his work on _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, and
+his present book on the Utilitarians continues, and indeed brings down
+to our own time, a similar investigation of the course of certain
+views, principles, and doctrines which had taken their shape in
+England and France during the period preceding the French Revolution,
+and which profoundly influenced political discussion throughout the
+first half of the nineteenth century. But on this occasion Mr.
+Stephen's inquiry does not range over the whole area thus laid open,
+though his subject compels him to make several excursions into the
+general region of philosophical and political disputation. His main
+purpose is to relate the history of a creed propagated by a group of
+remarkable men, who took hold of some prominent theories and doctrines
+generated by the rationalism of the preceding century, and endeavoured
+to make them the basis and framework of a system for improving the
+condition of the English people. Their immediate object was to abolish
+intolerable abuses of power by the governing classes, and radically to
+reform on scientific principles the haphazard blundering
+administration which was assumed to be the source of all evil. Mr.
+Stephen describes and explains, in short, the rise, progress, and
+decay of Utilitarianism.
+
+Such a system, by its nature and aims, is evidently practical;
+it is directed towards a change of laws and an alteration of the
+prevailing methods of government. To the philosophic minds of the
+eighteenth-century reformers in England and France, it seemed evident,
+that any general conclusions upon questions vitally concerning the
+interests of mankind should be reached by convincing demonstration,
+should start from axioms, and proceed by a connected chain of logical
+argument. During the latter half of that century England and France,
+so incessantly at war and so different in character and in their
+governing institutions, were nevertheless in alliance intellectually.
+They were then (with Holland) the only countries in the world where
+public opinion had free play, and where discussion of philosophic
+problems was actively carried on; and between them there was a
+constant interchange of ideas. Now in all speculations, on things
+human or divine, there have existed immemorially two schools or
+tendencies of thought, two ways of approaching the subject,
+corresponding, we may conjecture, to a radical difference of
+intellectual predispositions. You may start by the high _a priori_
+road, or you may feel your way gradually by induction from verifiable
+experiences; and of these two main currents of speculative opinion
+whichever is the stronger at any given period will affect every branch
+of thought and action. Coleridge appealed to history as proving that
+all epoch-making revolutions coincide with the rise or fall of
+metaphysical systems, and he attributed the power of abstract theories
+over revolutionary movements to the craving of man for higher guidance
+than sensations. However this may be, it may be affirmed that the
+rationalism of the eighteenth century in England and France found room
+by replacing the decaying theologies and substituting reason for the
+traditional authority. This was the period that produced in France the
+philosophic conception of abstract humanity, everywhere the same
+naturally, with a superficial distinction of circumstances, but
+differentiated in the main by bad laws, artificial inequalities, and
+social injustice. In France the method of deducing conclusions from
+abstract principles concerning the rights of man and the social
+compact gained predominance, until they were shaped by Rousseau and
+others into the formal indictment of a corrupt society. It was the
+point and impulse thus given to very real grievances and irritation
+against privilege, that precipitated the French Revolution. Among the
+English, on the other hand, their public spirit, the connection of
+large classes with national affairs, and their habit of compromise,
+had predisposed the leading minds towards cautious views in philosophy
+and in politics; and at the century's end their inbred distrust of
+abstract propositions as a basis for social reconstruction received
+startling confirmation from the tremendous explosion in France.
+
+The foregoing remarks give in bare outline the conditions and
+circumstances, very carefully examined and skilfully analysed by Mr.
+Leslie Stephen, that prepared and cleared the ground for the
+Utilitarians. Their object was not to reconstruct, hardly to remodel,
+existing forms of government; it was to remove abuses, and to devise
+remedies for the evils of an unwieldy and complicated administrative
+machine, clogged by stupidity and selfishness. And the plan of Mr.
+Stephen's first volume is to describe the state of society at this
+period, the condition of agriculture and the industries, the position
+of the Church and the Universities, of the Army and Navy, the
+intellectual tendencies indicated by the philosophic doctrines, and
+generally to sketch the political and social aspects of England rather
+more than a hundred years ago. He is writing, as he says, the history
+of a sect; and in dealing with the tenets of that sect he lays
+prominent stress upon what may be called the environment, upon the
+various circumstances which may influence forms of belief, and
+particularly upon the idiosyncrasies of the men who held and
+propagated them. It is for this latter reason that he has given us
+brief and interesting biographies of those whose influence was
+greatest in shaping and directing the movement, illustrating his
+narrative by portraits of them as they lived and acted. All these
+things help us towards understanding how it comes to pass that
+conclusions which seem clear as daylight to earnest thinkers in one
+generation may be abandoned by succeeding generations as manifestly
+erroneous. The inquiry also shows why, and to what extent, some of the
+doctrines that were scientifically propounded by the Utilitarians did
+initiate and lead up to an important reformation in the methods of
+English government.
+
+     'It might be stated as a paradox' (Mr. Stephen observes) 'that,
+     whereas in France the most palpable evils arose from the excessive
+     power of the central government, and in England the most palpable
+     evils arose from the feebleness of the central government, the
+     French reformers demanded more government, and the English
+     reformers less government.... The solution seems to be easy. In
+     France, reformers such as Turgot and the economists were in favour
+     of an enlightened despotism, because ... it would suppress the
+     exclusive privileges of a class which, doing nothing in return, had
+     become a mere burthen, encumbering all social development. But in
+     England the privileged class was identical with the governing
+     class.'
+
+The English aristocracy, in fact, were actually doing the country's
+business, though they were doing it badly, and paid themselves much
+too highly for very indifferent administration. Yet the English nation
+acquiesced in the system, because the middle classes were growing rich
+and prosperous, and the State interfered very little with their
+private affairs. To this general statement of the case we agree; but
+we may point out that in terming our aristocracy a privileged class
+one material distinction has been passed over. For whereas the French
+_noblesse_ constituted a caste partly exempted by birthright from the
+general taxation, and vested with certain vexatious rights to which no
+duties corresponded, the English aristocracy possessed legally no
+privileges at all. It was not an exclusive order, but an upper class
+that was constantly recruited, being open to all successful men; and
+such a governing body is naturally indifferent to reforms, because it
+is very little affected by administrative imperfections or abuses.
+Pauperism and ignorance may fester long among the masses before
+wealthy and prosperous rulers discover that the interests of their own
+class are imperilled; the state of prisons does not concern them
+personally; and so long as life and property are fairly secure, they
+care little about an efficient police. The Englishman of whom a
+Frenchman reported with amazement that he consoled himself for having
+been robbed by the reflection that there were no policemen in his
+country, must have belonged to this comfortable class. And the
+inveterate conservation of abuses in the Church, the Law, and the Army
+may be partially explained in a similar way. In France the Church and
+the army were really privileged bodies: the vast ecclesiastical
+revenues were protected from taxation, and the commissioned ranks of
+the army were reserved for the _noblesse_; the French parliaments were
+close magisterial corporations. In England these were all open
+professions, with no special fiscal rights or social limitations; the
+prizes were available for general competition, and as every one had a
+chance of winning them by interest or even merit, there was no
+formidable outcry against the system.
+
+In politics, therefore, as well as in philosophy, the prevailing habit
+of the English mind was more moderate, less thorough-going and
+subversive, than in France. Mr. Stephen makes a keen and rapid
+analysis of the common-sense psychology, as expounded by Reid and
+Dugald Stewart, to show the correspondence at this period between
+abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the
+limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon
+the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their
+teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking
+experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off
+the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the
+derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics,
+there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was
+brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which
+were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of
+the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle said
+long afterwards, the Scottish philosophers started from the
+mechanical premises suggested by Hume. 'They let loose instinct as an
+indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against his conclusions; they
+tugged lustily against the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly
+towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of atheism and
+fatalism.' To save themselves from materialism they invented
+Intuitions, and thereby incurred the wrath of orthodox Utilitarianism,
+which was rigidly empirical. They were, however, accepted in England,
+where any haven was welcome, however uncertain might be the holding
+ground, which sheltered the vessel from being blown by windy
+speculation out into a shoreless sea.
+
+The Scottish philosophy therefore
+
+     'was in philosophy what Whiggism was in politics. Like political
+     Whiggism, it included a large element of enlightened and liberal
+     rationalism; but, like Whiggism, it covered an aversion to
+     thorough-going logic. The English politician was suspicious of
+     abstract principle, but would cover his acceptance of tradition and
+     rule of thumb by general phrases about liberty and toleration. The
+     Whig in philosophy equally accepted the traditional creed,
+     sufficiently purified from cruder elements, and sheltered his
+     doctrine by speaking of intuitions and laws of thought.'
+
+The foregoing quotation may serve to indicate briefly the situation,
+in politics and philosophy, at the time when Bentham, 'the patriarch
+of the English Utilitarians,' appeared upon the scene. Mr. Stephen's
+sketch of his life and doctrines, which occupies the latter half of
+the book's first volume, is eminently instructive and often amusing.
+He excels in tracing the continuity of ideas, and in showing how they
+converge upon the point of view that is gradually reached by some
+writer of superior force and activity, who rejects, alters, or uses
+them in the process of working out the doctrines of some new school.
+It was the spread of philanthropy, of a conscientious fellow-feeling
+for those classes of society who suffered from neglect and misrule,
+that fostered the movement towards political and social reform. This
+feeling was represented in Bentham's celebrated formula, originally
+invented by Hutcheson, about 'the greatest happiness of the greatest
+number'; and the criterion of utility was laid down as having the
+widest possible application to all sorts and conditions of men.
+Self-help, individualism, _laisser-faire_, the economic view that each
+should be left free to pursue his own interests, were principles
+intended to operate for the removal of abuses and the destruction of
+unfair privileges: they were promulgated for the relief of humanity at
+large, although the system which was built up on them came afterwards
+to be denounced as narrow, selfish, and materialistic. These ideas
+were undoubtedly congenial to the habits and character of Englishmen,
+who, like free men everywhere, had a traditional distrust of strong
+and active government, preferring King Log, on the whole, to King
+Stork. Inequalities and incomprehensible laws were to be seen in the
+course of Nature no less than in the English Constitution; and in
+either case a man might rely upon his wits and energy to deal with
+them. It might be that the defects in human government could only be
+remedied by employing the forces of government to cure them; but if
+you began to set going the administrative engine there was no saying
+where it might stop. Bentham held all government to be an evil, though
+he differed from the modern anarchist in holding it to be a necessary
+evil; yet he needed a strong scientific administration for the purpose
+of rooting out inveterate abuses. And this was the dilemma that
+confronted him. He worked out his solution of the problem by laying
+out a whole system of morals and a science of politics, with Utility
+as their base and standard, which has profoundly influenced all
+subsequent legislation, and led eventually to much more extensive
+theories regarding the sphere and duties of government than he himself
+would have advocated or approved.
+
+The principal events of Bentham's life, and the development of his
+opinions, are condensed by Mr. Stephen into one chapter with his usual
+biographical skill. Bentham started in life as a barrister, and
+attended Blackstone's lectures, with the result that he was deeply
+impressed by the fallacies of the legal theories there expounded, and
+soon afterward vowed eternal war against the Demon of Chicane. He
+struggled against narrow means and obscurity until he made the
+acquaintance of Lord Shelburne, through whom he became acquainted with
+other leading statesmen, and with Miss Caroline Fox, to whom he made a
+futile proposal of marriage some years later. At Bowood he also met
+Dumont, and thereby formed his connection with the French jurists,
+though in his old age he declared that Dumont, his chief interpreter
+abroad, 'did not understand a word of his meaning'; the true cause of
+his quarrel being that Dumont criticised Bentham's dinners. He
+travelled on the Continent, and lived some time in Russia. Soon
+afterward the Revolution made a clean sweep of all the old
+institutions in France, and thus laid open a bare and level ground
+just suited, as Bentham thought, for an architect who had his
+portfolio full of new administrative plans. It was long, indeed,
+before he could understand why systematic reforms were not immediately
+accepted as soon as their utility was logically demonstrated. He lost
+no time in providing the French National Assembly with elaborate
+schemes for the reconstruction of various departments of government,
+and he even offered to go to France to set up his model prison,
+proposing himself 'to become gratuitously the gaoler thereof.' The
+Assembly requited his zeal by conferring on him the title of a French
+citizen; but social reorganisation took the shape of September
+massacres and the Reign of Terror, whereat Bentham was disgusted,
+though in no way disheartened, as a theorist.
+
+     'Never' (says Mr. Stephen) 'was an adviser more at cross purposes
+     with the advised. It would be impossible to draw a more striking
+     portrait of the abstract reasoner, whose calculations of human
+     motives omit all reference to passion, and who fancied that all
+     prejudice can be dispelled by a few bits of logic.'
+
+Here, in fact, we have the key to Bentham's character, to its weakness
+and also to its strength. A philosopher who plunges into the practical
+affairs of the world without taking human feelings and imagination
+into account is sure to find himself stumbling about among blocks and
+blockheads, and tripped up by the ill-will of vested interests; but on
+the other hand, if he has taken the right direction, his ardent
+energies have the impetus of some natural force. Bentham's earlier
+notion had been that political reforms could be introduced like
+improvements in machinery; you had only to prove the superior utility
+of your new invention to obtain its adoption by all who were concerned
+in the business. Latterly he made the surprising discovery that in the
+public offices, in the Law, and in the Church, the heads of these
+professions are usually quite satisfied with their own monopolies, are
+opposed to change, and are always ready with a stock of plausible
+arguments to show the folly and danger of innovation. If the
+Utilitarian appeals to facts, common sense, and experience, so also
+does the Conservative; and until public opinion is decidedly for
+progress the dead weight prevails. Not for a day did Bentham relax his
+strenuous exertions, but he changed his tactics; he turned from his
+mechanical workshop to the study of political dynamics, and he found
+what he wanted in the rising radicalism--'his principal occupation, in
+a word, was to provide political philosophy for radical reformers.'
+
+Of the philosophic creed which Bentham undertook to proclaim from his
+hermitage at Ford Abbey, with James Mill as his leading apostle, Mr.
+Stephen gives us a very shrewd and incisively critical examination.
+The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and
+authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive
+doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the
+necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying
+ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his
+own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific
+principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete
+facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a
+single formula, to the destruction of idols of the market or tribe,
+and to the confusion of those who fattened upon antique superstitions.
+'All government is one vast evil,' and can only be kept from mischief
+by minute regulations and constant vigilance. Whatever is plainly
+illogical must be radically wrong--'to make a barrister a judge is as
+sensible as it would be to select a procuress for mistress of a girls'
+school;' and a parish boy, if he could read properly, might go through
+the Church services with the Prayer Book and the Homilies, so that an
+established Church is a costly and indefensible luxury. Taking
+Utility, founded on observation of actual facts, as his guide and his
+measure of existing institutions, he treated them as colossal
+iniquities, as frauds upon the people, as dead and ineffectual for the
+purposes of moral and political life. Nevertheless, although he
+condemned the whole fabric as it stood, Bentham was an absolute
+believer in the unlimited power of laws and institutions; nor was he
+far from wishing to deal with them on the principles applicable to the
+reform of prisons, as undesirable but necessary instruments of
+coercion to be despotically administered upon a scientific model,
+after the fashion of his favourite Panopticon. He was, in short, as
+Mr. Stephen points out, an unconscious follower of Hobbes, with this
+difference, that in Bentham's case the omnipotent Leviathan, for
+control and direction, was to be enlightened public opinion. And he
+was apparently convinced, without misgivings, that a model government,
+framed logically upon that common sense which is a public property,
+could be introduced and enforced under popular sanction as easily as
+new regulations for an ill-managed gaol. He was fully prepared to make
+liberal allowance, in framing his constitution, for the different
+needs, circumstances, and habits of communities; he was quite aware
+that precisely the same legislation would not suit England and India;
+but he believed national circumstance and character to be extensively
+modifiable by manifestly useful institutions, and he was ready to
+begin the operation at once, 'to legislate for Hindostan as well as
+for his own parish, and to make codes not only for England, Spain, and
+Russia, but also for Morocco.'
+
+Mr. Stephen has no difficulty in exposing the shortcomings and
+inadequacy of these doctrines. But he is writing the history of
+certain political ideas; so his main object is to show how such ideas
+are formed, the course they have followed, and their influence upon
+thought and action up to the present day. To trace the links and
+continuity of ideas is to analyse their elements, and to show the
+impress that they received from external circumstance, permanent or
+temporary; it is an important method in the science of politics. Upon
+the empiricism of English philosophy in the eighteenth century Bentham
+constructed a Theory of Morals that purported to rest exclusively on
+facts ascertained and verifiable, with happiness as our being's end
+and aim, with pain and pleasure as the ultimate principles of conduct;
+and upon this foundation he proceeded to build up his system of
+politics and legislation. Any attempt to derive morality from other
+sources, or to measure it by other standards, he denounced as
+arbitrary and misleading; he threw aside metaphysics, and therefore
+theology, as illusory. The exclusive appeal to experience, to plain
+reasoning from the evidence of our senses, from actual observation of
+human propensities, was sufficient for his purposes, and tallied with
+his designs as a practical reformer. In these views he was a disciple
+of Hume, whose influence has surreptitiously percolated all modern
+thought, and his unintentional allies were the teachers of Natural
+religion, with Paley as its principal exponent. Having thus defined
+and explained the basis of ethical philosophy, the Utilitarian has to
+build up the superstructure of legal ordinance; and he is at once
+confronted by the difficult problem of distinguishing the sphere of
+ethics from the province of law. Upon this vital question Mr. Stephen,
+as an expert in ethics, gives a dissertation that is exceedingly acute
+and instructive; and we may commend, in particular, his criticism of
+the doctrine that the morality of an act depends upon its
+consequences, not upon its motives. As he observes, this may be true,
+with certain reserves, in law, where the business of the legislature
+is to prohibit and punish acts that directly endanger the order and
+security of a community. But 'the exclusion of motive justifiable in
+law may take all meaning out of morality'; and yet nothing is more
+complicated than the question of demarcating a clear frontier between
+the two provinces. Mr. Stephen's examination of this question is the
+more important because it involves the problem of regulating private
+morals by public enactments; and also because the confusion of motives
+with intentions lies at the bottom of much mischievous sophistry, for
+some of the worst crimes in history have been suggested by plausible
+motives, and have been defended on that ground. He shows that
+Bentham's survey of the springs of human action was incomplete, that
+he overstrained his formula to make it universally applicable, and
+that he nevertheless gave a far-reaching impulse to clearer notions
+and an effective advance in the simplification of legal procedure and
+the codification of laws. As a moral philosophy, Bentham's system
+appeared so arid and materialistic that its unpopularity has obscured
+his real services. For he was the engineer who first led a scientific
+attack up to the ramparts of legal chicanery, and made a breach
+through which all subsequent reform found its entry.
+
+The axiom that utility is the source of justice and equity is of very
+ancient date, and indeed the word is sufficiently elastic to
+comprehend every conceivable human motive; but no one before Bentham
+had employed it so energetically as a lever to overturn ponderous
+abuses, or had pointed his theory so directly against notorious facts.
+On the other hand, since he despised and rejected historical studies,
+he greatly miscalculated the binding strength of long usage and
+possession. He forgot, what Hume had been careful to remember, that
+whether men's reasoning on these subjects be right or wrong, the
+conclusions have not really been reached by logic, but have grown up
+out of instincts, and correspond with certain immemorial needs and
+aspirations of humanity. Hume had sketched, before Bentham, his Idea
+of a Perfect Commonwealth; yet he begins by the warning that
+
+     'It is not with forms of government as with other artificial
+     contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected if we can
+     discover another more accurate and commodious ... the bulk of
+     mankind' (he adds) 'being governed by authority, not by reason, and
+     never attributing authority to anything that has not the
+     recommendation of antiquity.'
+
+Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter
+doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations
+prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his
+frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political
+projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power,
+and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he
+could only get the power he could radically change for the better the
+circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on
+the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is
+indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is
+constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is
+an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the
+natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may
+produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France;
+while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation,
+to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and
+wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public
+opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and protracted opposition. It
+is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and
+convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with
+it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his
+principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction
+of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century,
+though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired.
+He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify
+society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that
+power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the
+State, once established on a democratic basis, would exercise the
+power and disregard his carefully drawn limitations. A tendency toward
+State Socialism he would have detested above all things; and yet that
+is the direction inevitably taken by supreme authority when the
+responsibility for the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
+imposed upon it by popular demand.
+
+Mr. Stephen's second volume describes the later phase of the
+Utilitarian creed, when it passed from its founder into the hands of
+ardent disciples. The transition necessarily involves some divergence
+of views and methods. In religious movements it usually begins after
+the founder's death; but as Bentham lived to superintend his apostolic
+successors, his relations with them were not invariably harmonious.
+The leadership fell upon James Mill, whose early life and general
+character, the development of his opinions, and the bearing of his
+philosophy upon his politics, are the subjects of one of those
+condensed biographical sketches in which Mr. Stephen excels. In the
+_History of India_, which brought to James Mill reputation and
+pecuniary independence, he could apply his deductive theories to a
+remote and little known country without much risk of contradiction
+from actual circumstances or of checks from the misapprehension of
+facts. In England the Utilitarian doctrines, as propounded in Mill's
+writings, raised up opposition and hostile criticism from various
+quarters. The general current of ideas and feelings had now set
+decidedly toward the suppression of inveterate abuses, and toward
+constitutional reform. Radicalism was gaining ground rapidly, and even
+Socialism had come to the surface, while Political Economy was in the
+ascendant. But the old Tories closed their ranks for a fierce
+resistance against theories that menaced, as it seemed to them,
+nothing less than destruction to time-honoured institutions; and the
+Whigs had no taste for doctrines that pretended to be reasonable, but
+appeared to them in effect revolutionary. The different positions of
+contending parties were illustrated, as Mr. Stephen shows, by their
+respective attitudes towards Church Reform. The Tories defended
+ecclesiastical establishment as one of the main bastions of the
+citadel; the Whigs would preserve the Church in subjection to the
+State; while James Mill, in the _Westminster Review_, declared the
+Church of England to be a mere State machine, worked in subservience
+to the sinister interest of the governing classes. He desired 'to
+abolish all dogmas and ceremonies, and to employ the clergy to give
+lectures on ethics, botany, and political economy, with decent dances
+and social meals for the celebration of Sunday.' Mr. Stephen, after
+observing that this plan exemplifies 'the incapacity of an isolated
+clique to understand the real tone of public opinion,' adds that 'it
+seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman
+read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal
+instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a
+psychologist, to the strength and persistence of one of the most
+powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article
+proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the
+Oxford Movement was stirring up a wave of enthusiasm for the dogmas
+and ritual which he treated as obsolete and nonsensical; nor is there
+anything more remarkable or unexpected in the political changes of the
+last sixty years, than the discomfiture of those prophets who have
+foretold the decay of all liturgies and the speedy dissolution of
+ecclesiastical establishments. This phenomenon is by no means confined
+to England, or even to Europe; and at the present day, when the power
+of religious idealism is better understood upon wider experience, no
+practical politician attempts to disregard sentiments that defy logic
+and pass the understanding.
+
+Nevertheless Utilitarianism, as represented by James Mill's 'Essay on
+Government,' was attracting increased attention, and was provoking
+serious alarm. It was a period of confidence in theories which have
+been partly confirmed and partly contradicted by subsequent
+experiences of those 'principles of human nature' in which political
+speculators so unreservedly trusted. In France, some fifty years
+earlier, the destructive theorist had swept all before him; in
+England, while he was assaulting with effect the entrenchments of
+Conservatism, he was taken in flank by the moderate reformers. Mill
+had denounced the Whigs as half-hearted and even treacherous allies,
+who dallied with Radicalism to conceal their nefarious design of
+obtaining political mastery with the fewest concessions possible. He
+relied upon universal education to qualify the masses for the
+possession of an extensive franchise, and upon enlightened
+self-interest to guarantee their proper use of it. Macaulay rejoined,
+in the _Edinburgh Review_, that the masses might possibly conclude
+that they would get more pleasure than pain out of universal
+spoliation; and that if his opponent's principles were correct and his
+scheme adopted, 'literature, science, commerce, and manufactures might
+be swept away, and a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the
+owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities.' It was a
+notable controversial tournament, at which the intelligent bystander
+probably assisted with much satisfaction and no excessive alarm,
+having little faith in the absolute theorist, and not much in the
+disinterestedness of the Whigs. For the moment it was sufficient that
+both parties agreed in supporting the Reform Bill, although, as Mr.
+Stephen remarks, the Radical regarded it as a payment on account,
+while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge. We
+may observe, to the honour of a great Liberal family, that as the
+first Lord Lansdowne discerned Bentham's talents and gave him his
+start in life, so the impression made upon the second marquis by
+Macaulay's articles induced him to offer the writer his first seat in
+Parliament.
+
+Mr. Stephen deals with the duel between Mill and Macaulay from the
+standpoint of an impartial umpire, with an expert's appreciation of
+their logical fencing and some humorous glances at the heated
+combatants. Mill was an austere Puritan, who would fell the Tory like
+an ox and would trample upon the cunning self-seeking Whig. The
+Edinburgh Reviewers were a set of brilliant young men who represented
+intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become
+judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing in their
+social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social
+injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of
+Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of the
+French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a
+diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a
+type of Conservatism he gives us Robert Southey, whose fortune it was
+to be fiercely abused by the Utilitarians and ridiculed by the Whigs.
+Southey, like many others, had been frightened out of early Liberalism
+into the conviction that Reform would be the inevitable precursor of
+revolution; and in 1817 he had written to Lord Liverpool that the only
+hope of saving the country lay in gagging the seditious press.
+'Concessions,' he said, 'can only serve to hasten the catastrophe. Woe
+be to the garrison who hoist a white flag to an enemy that gives no
+quarter.' Yet Southey had a deep feeling for the misery of the lower
+classes at this period of widespread distress. In his belief in the
+power of Government to remedy social evils, he was much nearer the
+accepted line of later public opinion than Macaulay, who would have
+confined the State's business to the maintenance of order, the defence
+of property, and the practice of departmental economy. And when
+Southey, following Coleridge and preceding Gladstone, insisted upon
+the vital importance of religion as a principle of State policy,
+neither he nor Gladstone deserved all the ridicule cast upon them by
+Macaulay in his brilliant essays; for at any rate no first-class
+Government in Europe has hitherto ventured upon dissolving connection
+with the Church.
+
+For his philosophy, Mr. Stephen tells us, Southey was in the habit of
+referring to Coleridge, whose hostility to the Utilitarians went on
+different and deeper grounds. Coleridge had convinced himself that all
+the errors of the time, and their political dangers, arose from a
+false and godless empiricism. He declared that revolutionary periods
+have always been connected with the popular prevalence of abstract
+ideas, and that the speculative principles of men between twenty and
+thirty are the great source of political prophecy. He developed this
+view in a singular letter upon the state of affairs and opinions which
+he also, like Southey, addressed to Lord Liverpool in 1817, and which
+somewhat bewildered that veteran statesman. With the moderns, he said,
+'nothing grows, all is made'; whereas growth itself is but a disguised
+mode of being made by the superinduction of the _jam data_ on the _jam
+datum_; and he insisted that 'the flux of individuals at any moment in
+existence in a country is there for the value of the State, far more
+than the State for them, though both positions are true
+proportionately.' In other words, Coleridge pressed the evolutionary
+view against the sharp set, shortsighted Utilitarian propositions; and
+he would have agreed that antiquated prejudices are absurd only to
+those who have not looked back to their origin, when they can be found
+to proceed in logical order from natural causes. He had not been
+always a resolute opponent of the Utilitarian theory of morals; but,
+like other philosophers, he had become alarmed at the consequence of
+being shut up within the prison of finite senses, and he grasped at
+Kant's discovery of the difference between Understanding and Reason,
+in order to retire upon a metaphysical basis of religion and morality,
+and to withstand the prudential calculus. We are inclined to suggest
+that Mr. Stephen, who does little more than glance at Coleridge's
+position, has underestimated his influence upon the intellectual
+direction of politics in the first half of this century. Coleridge
+certainly provided an antidote to the crudity of eager Radicalism in
+Church and State, and his ideas may be recognised not only in the
+great High Church movement that was stirred up by the Tractarians, but
+also in the larger comprehension of the duties and attributes of the
+State that has been slowly gaining ground up to our own day.
+
+It is, indeed, the growth and development of English opinion regarding
+these public duties and attributes, as it is traced in Mr. Stephen's
+book, that forms, in our opinion, its chief value; and we are
+reviewing it mainly as a history of political ideas. This is, we
+believe, the practical outcome of the increasing feeling of sympathy
+between different classes of the community, of a sense of
+responsibility, of what is called altruism, of solidarity among all
+the diverse interests that have lately characterised our legislation:
+
+     'The two great rival theories of the functions of the State
+     are--the theory which was for so many years dominant in England,
+     and which may for convenience be called the Individualist theory;
+     and the theory which is stated most fully and powerfully by the
+     Greek philosophers, which we may call the Socialist theory. The
+     Individualist theory regards the State as a purely utilitarian
+     institution, a mere means to an end.... It represents the State as
+     existing mainly for the protection of property and personal
+     liberty, and as having therefore no concern with the private life
+     and character of the citizen, except in so far as these may make
+     him dangerous to the material welfare of his neighbour.
+
+     'The Greek theory, on the other hand, though it likewise regards
+     the State as a means to certain ends, regards it as something
+     more.... According to this theory, no department of life is outside
+     the scope of politics; and a healthy State is at once the end at
+     which the science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are
+     carried out.'[29]
+
+Accepting this passage as a philosophical statement of tendencies, we
+may observe that neither theory has ever been definitely adopted in
+England. The Utilitarians desired to recast institutions for the
+greater happiness of all citizens, but they were averse to investing
+the State with autocratic powers of interference. The Tories, on the
+other hand, were awakening to the conviction that the Government must
+do more for the people; but their fear of change and their own
+'sinister interests,' persuaded them that this might be done without
+radical reforms. The Whigs faced both ways, and since in England the
+truly valuable effect of extreme opinions is always to drive the
+majority into a middle course, they rose to power on that compromise
+which is represented by the Reform measures of 1832. The Reform Bill
+was accepted by the Utilitarians as an instalment of the rightful
+authority of the people over the conduct of public affairs, and
+therefore a provisional method of promoting their welfare. The first
+Tory statesman of that day, on the contrary, was convinced that for
+the public welfare the existing Constitution could not be bettered:
+
+     'During one hundred and fifty years the Constitution in its present
+     form has been in force; and I would ask any man who hears me to
+     declare whether the experience of history has produced any form of
+     government so calculated to promote the happiness and secure the
+     liberties of a free and enlightened people.'[30]
+
+Both parties, in fact, appealed to experience; but Peel took his stand
+upon history, which the Utilitarians disregarded as a mere record of
+unscientific errors, or at most as a lighthouse to give warning of
+rocks, rather than a lamp to show the road ahead. And the point upon
+which they joined issue was as to the consequences of staking the
+whole fabric of government upon the basis of public opinion, operating
+through almost unlimited popular suffrage. The Tory foretold that
+this would end in wrecking the Constitution, with the ship among
+breakers, and steering by ballot voting. The Benthamite persuaded
+himself that enlightened self-interest, empirical perceptions of
+utility, and general education, would prevail with the multitude for
+their support of a rational system. But with those who demanded
+sovereignty for the people a strict limitation of the sphere of
+government was one essential maxim; and the Utilitarians would have
+agreed with Guizot when he declared it to be 'a mere commonplace that
+as civilisation and reason progress, the sphere of public authority
+contracts.' They do not appear to have foreseen that whenever the
+masses should have got votes legislation would become democratic, or
+even socialistic, in order to capture them. This discovery was
+eventually made by the Tories, who availed themselves of it to dish
+the Whigs, and to come forward again upon a popular suffrage as the
+true friends and guardians of the people.
+
+In Mr. Stephen's second volume James Mill is the principal figure, as
+the apostle of Benthamism, though he also describes briefly, in his
+terse and incisive style, the lives and opinions of some notable men,
+foes as well as friends to the party, who represented different
+expressions of energetic protest against existing institutions. To
+each of them is allotted his proper place in the line of attack, and
+his due share in the general enterprise of rousing, by argument or
+invective, the slow-thinking English people to a sense of their
+lamentable condition. Cobbett and Owen were at feud with true
+Utilitarians, and in unconscious alliance, against the orthodox
+economists, with the Tories, who, as we have said, have eventually
+found their advantage in the democratic movement. Cobbett fought for
+the cause of the agricultural labourer, trodden under foot by squires
+and parsons. Owen believed that the grasping capitalist, with his
+steam machinery, would further degrade and impoverish the working
+classes. Godwin, who is merely mentioned by Mr. Stephen, was a
+peaceful anarchist, who proposed 'to abolish the whole craft and
+mystery of government,' to abandon coercion and rely upon just
+reasoning, upon the enlightened assent of individuals to the payment
+of taxes. They all embodied ideas that are incessantly fermenting in
+some ardent minds, and that maintain a perceptible influence on
+political controversies at the present day. Godwin agreed with the
+Utilitarians that government is a bad thing in itself, but he went
+beyond them in concluding that it is, or ought to be, unnecessary to
+society. To both Radical and Socialist, Utilitarianism, with its
+frigid philanthropy and its reliance on self-help, prudence, and free
+competition for converting miserable masses into a healthy and moral
+population, was the gospel of selfishness, invented for the salvation
+of landlords and capitalists. Malthus was the heartless exponent of
+natural laws that kept down multiplication by famine, while the rich
+man fared sumptuously every day; and the Ricardians, with their
+mechanical balancing of supply and demand, were mocking distress by
+solemn formulas. It must be admitted that these sharp assailants hit
+some palpable rifts in the Utilitarian armour of proof; and we know
+that popular sentiment has since been compelling later economists to
+take up much wider ground in defence of their scientific position.
+
+The doctrines of Malthus, of Ricardo and of Ricardo's disciples are
+subjected to a searching analysis by Mr. Stephen, who brings out their
+limitations very effectively. Yet it is by no means easy, even under
+our author's skilful guidance, to follow the Utilitarian track
+through the fields of economy, philosophy, and theology, and to show
+in what manner or degree it led up to the issues under discussion in
+our own time. All these 'streams of tendency' have had their influence
+on the main current and direction of contemporary politics, but they
+cannot be measured or mapped out upon the scale of a review. And, in
+regard to political economy, we may even venture to question whether
+the earlier dogmatic theories now retain sufficient interest to
+justify the space which, in this volume, has been devoted to a
+scrutiny of them; for their methods, as well as their conclusions,
+have now become to a certain extent obsolete. A strictly empirical
+science must be continually changing with fresh data and a broader
+outlook; it is always shifting under stress of new interests, changed
+feelings, and unforeseen contingencies; it is very serviceable for the
+exposure of errors, but its own demonstrations are in time proved to
+be erroneous or inadequate. Moreover, to explain the ills that afflict
+a society, and to declare them incurable except by patience and slow
+alterative medicines, is often to render them intolerable; nor is it
+of much practical importance to lay out, on hard scientific
+principles, the methodical operation of causes and effects that have
+always been understood in a rough experimental way.
+
+     'The truth that scarcity meant dearness was apparently well known
+     to Joseph in Egypt, and applied very skilfully for his purpose.
+     Economists have framed a theory of value which explains more
+     precisely the way in which this is brought about. A clear statement
+     may be valuable to psychologists; but for most purposes of
+     political economy Joseph's knowledge is sufficient,'
+
+If Joseph had written a treatise on the agrarian tenures of Egypt he
+might not have bought them up so easily at famine prices, and he
+might have entangled himself in a discussion upon peasant properties.
+The economist who makes an inductive demonstration of unalterable
+natural laws and propensities may be likened to the scientific
+legislator who undertakes to codify prevailing usages: he turns an
+elastic custom, constantly modified in practice by needs and
+sentiments, into an unbending statute, when the bare unvarnished
+statement of the principle produces an outcry. Natural processes will
+not bear calm philosophic explanations that are understood to imply
+approval of them as cruel but inevitable; not even in such an
+essentially moralistic argument as that of Butler's 'Analogy,' which
+some have regarded as a plea of ambiguous advantage to the cause of
+natural religion. Malthus, for example, proved undeniably the
+pernicious consequences of reckless propagation; but he who forces a
+great evil upon public attention is expected to find the practical
+remedy; and Malthus had little to prescribe beyond a few palliative
+measures and the expediency of self-restraint, while his proposal to
+abolish the poor laws in the interest of pauperism was interpreted as
+a recommendation that poor folk should be starved into prudential and
+self-reliant habits. Malthus held, indeed, that the improvement of the
+condition of the labouring classes should be considered as the main
+interest of society. But he also thought that
+
+     'to improve their condition, it is essential to impress them with
+     the conviction that they can do much more for themselves than
+     others can do for them, and that the _only_ source of their
+     permanent improvement is the improvement of their moral and
+     religious habits. What government can do, therefore, is to maintain
+     such institutions as may strengthen the _vis medicatrix_, or desire
+     to better our condition, which poor laws had directly tended to
+     weaken.'
+
+There is much wisdom to be found in these counsels; but good advice
+rather excites than allays the ignorant impatience of acute suffering,
+and popular opinion soon began to inquire whether the _vis medicatrix_
+might not be administered in some more drastic form by the State. The
+conception of a rational government superintending, without
+interference, the slow evolution of morals, had a kind of
+correspondence, in the religious sphere, with the doctrine of
+pre-established harmonies so clearly ordained that to suggest any need
+of further Divine interposition to readjust them occasionally was a
+reflection upon the wisdom and foresight of Providence. But the stress
+and exigencies of modern party politics has rendered this attitude
+untenable for the temporal ruler.
+
+The pure economists, however, prescribed moral remedies without
+investigating the elements of morality. They settled the laws of
+production and distribution as eliminated from the observation of
+ordinary facts; they corrected errors and registered the mechanical
+working of human desires and efforts. It is Mr. Stephen's plan,
+throughout this book, to show the bearing of philosophical speculation
+on practical conduct; and accordingly, after his chapter on Malthus
+and the Ricardians, he turns back again to philosophy and ethics. His
+clear and cogent exposition of the views and conclusions put forward
+on these subjects by Thomas Brown, with the express approval of James
+Mill, is an illustration of Coleridge's dictum regarding the
+connection between abstract theories and political movements.
+Admitting the connection, we may again observe that there is a certain
+danger in stating the theories too scientifically. Neither morals nor
+religion are much aided by digging down into their foundations. Yet
+the logical constructor of a new system usually finds himself driven
+by controversy into a discussion of ultimate ideas, though the
+Utilitarians refused to be forced back into metaphysics. No professor
+of philosophy, however, can altogether avoid asking himself what
+underlies experience and the formation of beliefs; and Brown did his
+best for the Utilitarians by defining Intuition as a belief that
+passes analysis, a principle independent of human reasoning, which
+'does not allow us to pass a single step beyond experience, but merely
+authorises us to interpret experience.' It was James Mill's mission to
+cut short and to simplify philosophical aberrations for his practical
+purposes:
+
+     'As a publicist, a historian, and a busy official, he had not much
+     time to spare for purely philosophic reading. He was not a
+     professor in want of a system, but an energetic man of business,
+     wishing to strike at the root of superstitions to which his
+     political opponents appealed for support. He had heard of Kant, and
+     seen "what the poor man would be at".'
+
+His own views are elaborated in his book on the _Analysis of the
+Phenomena of the Human Mind_, for a close criticism of which we must
+refer readers to Mr. Stephen's second volume. The connection of these
+dissertations with the social and political ends of the Utilitarians
+lies, it may be said briefly, in the support which a purely
+experiential psychology gives to the doctrine that human character
+depends on external circumstance, and that such vague terms as the
+'moral sense' only disguise the true identity of rules of morality
+with the considerations that can be shown to produce general
+happiness. Whenever there appears to be a conflict between these rules
+and considerations, utility is the only sure criterion. To the extreme
+situations in which casuistry revels, as when a man is called upon to
+sacrifice his life or his personal honour for his country's good, the
+Utilitarian would apply this unfailing test inexorably; in such cases
+a man ought to decide upon a calculation of the greatest happiness of
+the majority. He does not, in fact, apply this reckoning; he may
+possibly not have time, at the urgent moment, to work it out; his
+heroism is inspired by the universal praise or blame that reward
+self-devotion or punish shrinking from it, and thus render acts moral
+or immoral by the habitual association of ideas. The martyr or patriot
+does not, indeed, stop to calculate; he does not feel the subtle
+egoism that is hidden in the desire for applause; he believes himself
+to be acting with the perfect disinterestedness which can only be
+accounted for by superficial reasoners on the assumption of some such
+abstract notion as religion, moral sense, or duty. Since the behaviour
+of mankind at large, therefore, is invariably guided by a remote or
+proximate consideration of utility; since conduct depends upon
+character, and character is shaped by external conditions and positive
+sanctions, it is possible to frame, on utilitarian principles,
+scientific rules of behaviour which can be powerfully, though
+indirectly, promoted by legislation and a system of enlightened
+polity. For morality, it is argued, can be materially assisted by
+pointing to, or even providing, the serious consequences that are
+inseparable from human misdeeds, by proving that pain or pleasure
+follows different kinds of behaviour; while motives are so complex
+that they can never be verified with certainty, and must therefore be
+left out of account. This anatomy of the springs of action obviously
+lays bare some truths, although they fit in much better with the
+department of the legislator than of the moralist. As Mr. Stephen
+forcibly shows, although the consideration of motive may fall very
+seldom within the sphere of legislation, yet no theory which should
+exclude its influence on the moral standard could be tolerated, since
+the motive is of primary importance in our ethical judgment of
+conduct. Nor has motive, as discriminated from intention, ever been
+kept entirely outside the criminal law, notwithstanding the danger of
+admitting, as an extenuation of some violent crime, that the offender
+had convinced himself that some religious or patriotic cause would be
+served by it. James Mill's view of morals as theoretically coordinate
+with law--because in both departments the intention is the essential
+element in measuring actions according to their consequences--operated
+in practical contradiction to his principle of restraining State
+interference within narrow limits. It is this latter principle which
+has since given way. For the general trend of later political opinion
+has evidently been towards bringing public morality more and more
+under administrative regulation; and this manifestly indicates a
+growing expansion of ideas upon the legitimate duties and jurisdiction
+of the State.
+
+Upon James Mill's psychology Mr. Stephen's conclusion, with which we
+may agree, is that his analysis of virtue into enlightened
+self-interest is unsuccessful, and we have seen that his conception of
+government, as an all-powerful machine resting upon, yet strictly
+limited by, public opinion, has failed on the side of the limitations.
+Yet although Mill could not explain virtue, he was, after his fashion,
+a virtuous man, whose life was conscientiously devoted to public
+objects.
+
+     'His main purpose, too, was to lay down a rule of duty, almost
+     mathematically ascertainable, and not to be disturbed by any
+     sentimentalism, mysticism, or rhetorical foppery. If, in the
+     attempt to free his hearers from such elements, he ran the risk of
+     reducing morality to a lower level, and made it appear as unamiable
+     as sound morality can appear, it must be admitted that in this
+     respect, too, his theories reflected his personal character.'
+
+It is also probable that his theories, and his bitter controversies in
+defence of them, reacted on his personal character, and that both
+influences are to be traced beyond James Mill's own life, in the
+mental and social prepossessions which he bequeathed to his son.
+
+Mr. Stephen's third volume is chiefly occupied by the history of the
+later Utilitarians, and the expansion of their cardinal principle in
+its application to a changing temper of the times, under the
+leadership of John Stuart Mill. We have, first, a closely written and
+critical description of this remarkable man's early life, his
+stringent educational training, the development of his opinions, and
+their influence upon the orthodox tenets of the sect. Upon all these
+subjects Mill has left us, under his own hand, more intimate and
+circumstantial particulars than are to be found, perhaps, in any other
+personal memoir. The writer who tells his own story usually passes
+hastily over boyhood; the ordinary biographer gives some family
+details, or endeavours to amuse us with trivial anecdotes of the child
+who became an important man. J. S. Mill hardly alludes to any member
+of his family except his father, and his early days are marked by a
+total absence of triviality. He was bound over to hard intellectual
+labour at home during the years that for most of us pass so lightly
+and unprofitably at a public school; he was a voracious and
+indefatigable reader and writer from his youth up, with a wolfish
+hunger (as Browning calls it) for knowledge; he plunged into all the
+current discussions of philosophy and politics; he became a practised
+writer and made a good figure at debating clubs; he became so intent
+on the solution of complex social problems as to acquire a distaste
+for general society; his mental concentration blunted his sensibility
+to the physical passions that so powerfully sway mankind.
+
+Nevertheless, Mill's outlook upon the world was much wider than his
+father's, and his aim was so to adjust the Utilitarian creed as to
+bring it into closer working accord with the advancing ideas and
+projects of the political parties to whom he was nearest in sympathy.
+He allied himself in the beginning with the Philosophical Radicals, in
+the hope of organising them for active service in the cause. But this
+group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to
+their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is
+synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.'
+There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that
+the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active
+Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far
+behind the fighting line, although he may be useful in forging
+explosives in some quiet laboratory. Mill himself was continually
+hampered, as an ardent combatant, by the impedimenta which he brought
+into the field in the shape of abstract speculations, which could not
+be made to fit in with the immediate demands of thorough-going
+partisans. His democratic fervour was tempered by his conviction of
+the incapacity of the masses. He was a Socialist 'in the sense that he
+looked forward to a complete, though distant, revolution in the whole
+structure of society'; he discovered that the Chartists had crude
+views upon political economy; his attitude toward factory legislation
+was very dubious. Yet in the main purpose of his life and writings,
+which was to mend and guide public opinion on social and political
+questions by theoretical treatment--that is, by a logically connected
+survey of the facts--he was undoubtedly successful, as is shown by
+the popularity of his two great works on _Logic_ and _Political
+Economy_, which became the text-books of higher study on these
+subjects for a whole generation. On the other hand, he exposed himself
+to the distrust and hostility that are always aroused by philosophical
+arguments which strike at the roots of established beliefs and
+prejudices, and are discovered to be really more dangerous to them
+than a direct assault.
+
+It was the philosophic strategy of J. S. Mill to prosecute the
+Utilitarian war against metaphysics, and finally to exterminate
+Intuitions, being convinced, as he said, that the _a priori_ and
+spiritualistic thinkers still far exceeded the partisans of
+experience, and that a great majority of Englishmen were still
+Intuitionists. Is this actually a true account of English thought? Mr.
+Stephen thinks not, for he believes that if Mill had not lived much
+apart from ordinary folk he would have found Englishmen practically,
+though not avowedly, predisposed to empiricism, which has been the
+philosophic tradition in this country since Hobbes. We so far agree
+with Mr. Stephen that we believe Englishmen, in general, to practise a
+great deal more of empiricism than they avow. But Mill proposed to
+demonstrate and declare it as a weapon in polemics and an engine of
+action, and it was here, probably, that the main body of Englishmen
+deserted him. They were not ready to cut themselves off from theology
+and from all ideas that transcend experience, and they demurred to the
+paramount jurisdiction of logic in temporal affairs. To every section
+of Churchmen the relegation of moral sanctions within the domain of
+verifiable consequences was a doctrine to be resisted strenuously.
+With the high sacerdotalist it amounted to a denial of the Christian
+mysteries; to the Broad Churchman it was ethically inadequate and
+ignoble; to the scholastic professor of divinity it meant ruinous
+materialism.
+
+That a vigorous thinker should have begun by striking at what seemed
+to him the root of obstructive fallacies was natural enough. He
+supposed that a logical demonstration would clear the ground for his
+plans of reform; whereas, on the contrary, it entangled him in
+preliminary disputations, and his inflexible reasoning alarmed people
+who followed experience as the guide of life, but instinctively felt
+that there must be something beyond phenomenal existence. In political
+economy Mill relied upon common sense and practice in affairs to make
+the requisite allowance for general laws founded on human propensities
+regarded abstractedly. His conviction was, in short, that nothing
+should be taken for granted because everything might be explained; and
+he desired to tie men down to accepting no belief, or even feeling,
+that could not be justified by reason. His _System of Logic_ was, as
+he has himself written, a text-book for the doctrine 'which derives
+all knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual
+qualities principally from the direction given to the associations.'
+When he proceeded to construct a systematic psychology upon this
+basis, he fell into the fundamental perplexities that are concisely
+brought out by Mr. Stephen in his scrutiny of Mill's doctrine of
+Causation. He followed Hume in severing any necessary connection
+between cause and effect, and even invariable sequence became
+incapable of proof. But when he resolved Cause into a statement of
+existing conditions that can never be completely known until we have
+mastered the whole series of physical phenomena, and showed that all
+human induction is fallible because necessarily imperfect, it became
+clear that Mill had very little to offer in substitution for those
+grounds of ordinary belief that he was bent on demolishing. The word
+Cause is reduced, for ordinary use, to a signification not unlike that
+which is understood in loose popular language by the word Chance,
+since Chance means no more than ignorance of how an event came to
+pass; and in no case, according to Mill, can we ever calculate with
+security what undiscoverable conditions may suddenly bring about an
+unexpected event contrary to previous experience. The uniformity of
+Nature, as Mr. Stephen remarks, is thus made exceedingly precarious;
+and to the practical intelligence, which looks for some basis that
+cannot be argued about, there is still something to be said for
+Intuition. And when Mill, still in search of some precise formula,
+undertook to interpret persistent sequences by his theory of Real
+Kinds possessing an indeterminate number of coherent properties--so
+that our belief in the invariable blackness of crows is justified as a
+collocation of these visible properties--he merely throws the problem
+of Causation farther backward. We have to be content with direct
+observation of phenomena that can be classified as co-existent; we can
+perceive that things accompany each other, but we can never be sure
+that they follow each other, as they appear to do.
+
+It may be doubted whether Mill's treatment of these problems has
+materially affected subsequent psychological speculation, which has
+since taken different and deeper courses. His main objective was
+social and political.
+
+'The notion,' he has written, 'that truths external to the mind may be
+known by intuition, or consciousness, independently of observation and
+experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times the great intellectual
+support of false doctrines and bad institutions.' In confounding the
+metaphysicians, and eliminating all mysterious assumptions or axioms,
+he aimed at clearing the ground for a demonstrable science of
+character, and to establish the great principle that character can be
+indefinitely modified. The way is thus opened to questions of conduct,
+to positive remedies for social and political evils which, as they
+have been generated and fostered by external circumstances, can be
+removed by a change of those circumstances.
+
+     'The greatest problems of the time were either economical or
+     closely connected with economical principles. Mill had followed the
+     political struggles with the keenest interest; he saw clearly their
+     connection with underlying social movements; and he had thoroughly
+     studied the science--or what he took to be the science--which must
+     afford guidance for a satisfactory working out of the great
+     problems. The Philosophical Radicals were deserting the old cause,
+     and becoming insignificant as a party. But Mill had not lost his
+     faith in the substantial soundness of their economic doctrines. He
+     thought, therefore, that a clear and full exposition of their views
+     might be of the highest use in the coming struggle.... The
+     _Political Economy_ speedily acquired an authority unapproached by
+     any work published since the _Wealth of Nations_.'
+
+We cannot follow Mr. Stephen through his elaborate and effective
+review of this celebrated book. Its appearance marked an epoch in the
+history of Utilitarianism, for it took a much wider survey of social
+and political considerations, and the author undertook to expand the
+orthodox economic theories so that they might embrace and be
+reconciled with some daring projects of comprehensive reform. But Mill
+had to put some strain on the principles to which he adhered, and to
+accommodate certain inconsistencies in order to keep pace with moving
+ideas. He held on with some effort to the cardinal tenets of the older
+Utilitarians, to a dislike of interference by governments, to
+reliance on individual effort, to protest against the deadening
+influence of paternal administration, to his own trust in the gradual
+effect of educational agencies, and in the slow emancipation of the
+popular mind from unreasoning prejudices. On the other hand, he
+advocated a radical reform of the land laws, peasant proprietorship,
+the acquisition by the State of railways and canals, the limitation of
+the right of bequest; and he went even so far as to speak with
+approval of laws in restraint of improvident marriages. All these
+proposals could only be carried out by arbitrary and drastic
+legislation. As he put it, the State must interfere for the purpose of
+making the people independent of further interference; and he
+overlooked or set aside the question whether the eventual result of
+thus calling in the State's agency would not be contrary to the
+principles and professed intentions of the Utilitarian school, whether
+the provisional _régime_ would not become permanent, as, in fact, it
+has been rapidly becoming ever since.
+
+We can see, moreover, that while J. S. Mill's sympathy with the
+popular cause and with the most ardent reformers was sincere, he was
+at issue with them in regard to the means, though not in regard to the
+ends; he wished to better the intelligence of the people as the first
+step toward bettering their condition. But when he had convinced
+himself, as he said, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind
+are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental
+constitution of their modes of thought, he had still to persuade men
+who were stirring and pressing for immediate action that gradual
+methods were the best. Most of them may have preferred to try whether,
+if the lot of mankind were improved materially, the moral changes and
+mental habits would not follow; for indeed Mill's proposition might
+stand examination and hold good either way. It may be argued that an
+elevation or widening of intellectual views is the consequence, as
+often as it is the cause, of increasing comfort and leisure. He
+thought that all reading and writing which does not tend to promote a
+renovation of the world's belief is of very little value beyond the
+moment, which is, of course, true in a general sense; though
+literature can act much more directly than by dealing with first
+principles. He welcomes Free Trade as one triumph of Utilitarian
+doctrines, yet he sadly observes that the English public are quite as
+raw and undiscerning on subjects of political economy since the nation
+was converted to Free Trade as before. The nation, in fact, went
+straight at the immediate point, got what it wanted at the moment, and
+was satisfied.
+
+Mr. Stephen's criticism of Mill's later writings exhibits further his
+difficulties in adjusting the essential Utilitarian principles to
+closer contact with the urgent questions of the day. Mill still held
+to competition, to the full liberty of individuals, to the inevitable
+mechanical working of economic laws; he still doubted the expediency
+of factory legislation, and condemned any laws in restraint of usury.
+He was opposed, broadly, to all authoritative intrusion upon human
+existence wherever its necessity could not be proved conclusively to
+be in the interest of a self-reliant community. Yet he was forced to
+make concessions and exceptions in the face of actual needs and
+grievances; and especially he found himself more and more impelled to
+tolerate and even advocate interference by the State as the only
+effective instrument for demolishing obstacles to the moral and
+material betterment of the people. Since unjust social inequalities
+could be traced to an origin in force or fraud, the legislature might
+be logically called in to remove them; and as this is manifestly the
+revolutionary argument (as embodied, for example, in the writings of
+Thomas Paine), it enabled him to join hands with Radicalism in
+proposing some very thorough-going measures. 'Landed property in
+Europe derives its origin from force;' so the legislature is entitled
+to interpose for the reclamation of rights unjustly usurped from the
+community; while, as economical science shows that the value of land
+rises from natural causes, the conclusion is that the State may
+confiscate the unearned increment. But it was not so easy to convince
+the hungry mechanic, by rather fine-drawn distinctions, that the
+capitalist had a better right to monopolise profits than the landlord;
+for the rise of value in manufactured commodities has very complex
+causes, some of them superficially natural. So here, again, is a
+plausible case of social injustice. Again, it may be affirmed that all
+powerful associations, private as well as public, operate in
+restriction of individual liberty. You may argue that great industrial
+companies are voluntary; the question is whether they are innocuous to
+the common weal, and we may add that this point is coming seriously to
+the front at the present time. The distinction, as Mr. Stephen
+remarks, drawn by the old individualism between State institutions and
+those created by private combination is losing its significance; and,
+what is more, public bodies are now continually encouraged to absorb
+private enterprise in all matters that directly concern the people.
+
+In short, we are on the high road to State Socialism, though Mill
+helps us to console ourselves with having taken that road on strictly
+scientific principles. It is the not unusual result of stating large
+benevolent theories for popular application; the principle is accepted
+and its limitations are disregarded. Nevertheless Mill contends
+gallantly in his later works for intellectual liberty, complete
+freedom of discussion, and the utility of tolerating the most
+eccentric opinions. Into what practical difficulties and questionable
+logical distinctions he was drawn by the necessity of fencing round
+his propositions and making his reservations is well known; and Mr.
+Stephen hits the weak points with keen critical acumen. We all agree
+that persecution has done frightful mischief, at times, by suppressing
+the free utterance of unorthodox opinions. But Mill argues that
+contradiction, even of truth, is desirable in itself, because a
+doctrine, true or false, becomes a dead belief without the
+invigorating conflict of opposite reasonings. Resistance to authority
+in matters of opinion is a sacred privilege essential to the formation
+of belief; wherefore originality, even when it implies stupidity, is
+to be carefully protected as a factor of human progress. We need not
+follow Mr. Stephen in his victorious analysis of the arguments
+wherewith Mill seeks to uphold this uncompromising individualism, and
+to guard human perversity against the baneful influence of authority.
+It is clear enough that society cannot waste its time in perpetual
+wrangling over issues upon which an authoritative verdict has been
+delivered; and for most of us a reasonable probability, founded on the
+judgment of experts, is sufficient in moral or physical questions as
+well as in litigation. The religious arena still remains open, where
+experts differ and decisions are always disputable. Yet Mr. Arthur
+Balfour devotes a chapter in his _Foundations of Belief_ to the
+contention that our convictions on all the deeper subjects of thought
+are determined not by reason but by authority; whereby he provides us
+with an escape from the scepticism that menaces a philosopher who has
+proved all experience to be at bottom illusory. Mill, on the other
+hand, would make short work with authority wherever it checks or
+discourages the unlimited exercise of free individual inquiry; and in
+politics he would entrust the sovereign power to a representation of
+the entire aggregate of the community, with the most ample
+encouragement of incessant discussion. This is, indeed, the system
+actually in force, and in England it has answered very well; but Mill
+hardly foresaw that its tendency would be to make the State, as the
+embodiment of popular will, not less but more authoritative, with a
+tendency to encroach steadily upon the sphere of individual effort and
+private enterprise.
+
+It may be said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its
+high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which
+Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular
+enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to
+regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as
+innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women
+he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at
+any rate be recognised by law; the proper test was, he argued, to
+leave free competition to determine whether the distinction is radical
+or merely the result of external circumstance. But, as Mr. Stephen
+answers, such a plain physiological difference is at least not
+negligible; and competition between the sexes may favour the despotism
+of the stronger, while complete independence on both sides implies
+freedom to separate at will; and Mill had only glanced evasively at
+the question of divorce. Here, again, is a theory which the pressure
+of social conditions, much more than abstract reasoning, is bringing
+more and more into prominence with our own generation. On the wider
+and more complicated question of race distinctions Mill never worked
+out his argument against their indelibility into a regular treatise;
+nor could he foresee the increasing influence upon contemporary
+politics that is now exercised by racial feelings and their claims to
+recognition. In the eighteenth century the French Encyclopédistes, who
+were the direct philosophic ancestors of the Utilitarians, regarded
+frontiers, classes, and races as so many barriers against the spread
+of universal fraternity; and the revolutionary government took up the
+idea as a war-cry. The armies of the French Republic proclaimed the
+rights of the people in all countries, until Napoleon turned the
+democratic doctrine into the form of Imperialism. M. Eugène de Vogüé
+has told us recently that this armed propaganda produced a reaction in
+Europe toward that strong sentiment of nationality which has been
+vigorously manifested during the second half of the nineteenth
+century. The assertion of separate nationalities, by the demand for
+political autonomy and by the attempt to revive the public teaching of
+obscure languages, is the form taken in western and central Europe by
+the problem of race. No movement could be more contrary to the views
+or anticipations of the Utilitarians, for whom it would have been
+merely a recrudescence of one of those inveterate and unreasoning
+prejudices which still retard human progress, a fiction accepted by
+indolent thinkers to avoid the trouble of investigating the true
+causes that modify human character. Yet not only is national
+particularism making a fresh stir in Europe, but the spread of
+European dominion over Asia has forced upon our attention the immense
+practical importance of racial distinctions. We find that they signify
+real and profound characteristics; the European discovers that in Asia
+he is himself one of a ruling race, and thereby isolated among the
+other groups into which the population is subdivided. If he is a
+sound Utilitarian he will nevertheless cherish the belief that
+economical improvements, public instruction, good laws, and regular
+administration will obliterate antipathies, eradicate irrational
+prejudices, and reconcile Asiatic folk to the blessings of scientific
+civilisation. But he will confess that it is a stubborn element, if
+not innate yet very like such a quality; if not ineffaceable yet
+certain to outlast his dominion. It is at least remarkable that Mill's
+protest against explaining differences of character by race, to which
+Buckle 'cordially subscribed,' should have been answered in our time
+by a clamorous demand for the recognition of those very differences,
+and by an increasing tendency to admit them.
+
+Upon Mill's theological speculations Mr. Stephen has written an
+interesting chapter, illustrating Mill's desire to treat religion more
+sympathetically, with a deeper sense of its importance in life, than
+in the absolute theories of the older Utilitarians. Bentham had
+declared that the principle of theology, of referring everything to
+God's will, was no more than a covert application of the test of
+utility. You must first know whether a thing is right in order to
+discover whether it is conformable to God's pleasure; and a religious
+motive, he said, is good or bad according as the religious tenets of
+the person acting upon it approach more or less to a coincidence with
+the dictates of utility. The next step, as Bentham probably knew well,
+is to throw aside an abstraction that has become virtually
+superfluous, and to march openly under the Utilitarian standard. But
+there was in Mill a moral and emotional instinct that deterred him
+from resting without uneasiness upon such a bare empirical conclusion.
+He rejected all transcendental conceptions; yet he did his best, as
+Mr. Stephen shows, to find reasonable proofs of a Deity whose
+existence and attributes may be inferred by observation and
+experience. He agreed that such an inference is not inconsistent, _a
+priori_, with natural laws, and the argument from design was admitted
+as providing by analogy, or even inductively, a large balance of
+probability in favour of creation by Intelligence. The difficulty is
+to attain by these methods the idea of a Deity perfect in power,
+wisdom, and goodness; for the order of Nature, apart from human
+intervention and contrivances for making the earth habitable,
+discloses no tincture of morality. We are thus reduced to the dilemma
+propounded by Hume, between an omnipotent Deity who cannot be
+benevolent because misery is permitted, and a benevolent Deity with
+limited powers; and Mill sums up the discussion, doubtfully, in favour
+of a Being with great but limited powers, whose motives cannot be
+satisfactorily fathomed by the human intellect.
+
+This halting conclusion indicates a departure from the pure empiricism
+of his school, and even the inadequacy of the argument shows the
+effort that Mill was making towards some fellow-feeling with spiritual
+conceptions. As Mr. Stephen points out, there is a curious
+approximation, on some points, between Mill and his arch-enemy
+Mansel--between the conditioned and unconditioned philosophies. Both
+of them lay stress on the moral perplexities involved in arguing from
+the wasteful and relentless course of Nature to an estimate of the
+divine attributes. And both agree that the existence of evil is a
+serious difficulty; though Mansel's solution, or evasion, of it is by
+insisting that the ways of the unconditioned are necessarily for the
+most part unknowable, while Mill leans to the possibility that God's
+power or intelligence may be incomplete. Upon either hypothesis we
+must confess that our knowledge is imperfect and very fallible.
+Mr. Stephen has no trouble in exposing the philosophical weakness
+of Mill's attitude; but we are mainly concerned to compare it
+briefly with the position of his predecessors, for the purpose of
+continuing a rapid survey of the course and filiation of Utilitarian
+doctrines. When the orthodox Utilitarians definitely rejected all
+theology--though until Philip Beauchamp appeared, in 1822, they made
+no direct attack upon it--they believed that the fall of theology
+would also bring down religion, which they regarded as the source of
+motives that were fictitious, misleading, and profoundly unscientific.
+Mill agreed that a supernatural origin could not be ascribed to
+received maxims of morality without harming them, because to
+consecrate rules of conduct was to interdict free examination of them,
+and to paralyse their natural development in accordance with changes
+of circumstance. Looking back over the interminable controversies, and
+the successive variations in form and spirit that every great religion
+has undergone, this objection does not seem to us very formidable. But
+Mill's evident object was to reconcile the cultivation of religious
+feelings with his principle of free thought for individuals. In
+accepting Comte's ideal of a religion of humanity, he had entirely
+condemned Comte's reproduction of the spiritual authority in the shape
+of a philosophical priesthood. And it is remarkable, as indicating a
+radical discordance between the French and the English moralist, that
+while Comte's adoration, in his later years, of a woman led him to
+ordain a formal worship of the feminine representative of the Family,
+coupled with the strict seclusion of women from politics, Mill's
+lifelong attachment greatly strengthened his ardour for the complete
+emancipation of the whole sex.
+
+Our readers will bear in mind that we are endeavouring to measure the
+permanent influence of Utilitarian doctrines, to determine how far
+they have fixed the direction, and shaped the ends, of contemporary
+thought and political action. It cannot be said that these doctrines
+are now predominant in either of these two closely interacting
+departments. National instincts and prepossessions have lost none of
+their force; national character now divides neighbouring peoples more
+sharply, perhaps, than a hundred years ago. Militarism is stronger
+than ever; cosmopolitan philanthropy is overridden by the growth of
+national interests; political economy is overruled by political
+necessities; nor have ethical systems displaced the traditional
+religions. Empiricism has fallen into discredit as a narrow and
+inadequate philosophy; it is superseded in the spiritual world by
+transcendental interpretations of dogmas as metaphysical
+representations of underlying realities. Mr. Stephen's most
+instructive work draws to its close with a dissertation on Liberalism
+and Dogmatism, showing how and why Utilitarianism failed in convincing
+or converting Englishmen to a practical assent to its principles and
+modes of thought. Upon many minds they produced more repulsion than
+attraction. Maurice earnestly protested that we were to believe in
+God, not in a theory about God, though the distinction, as Mr. Stephen
+says, is vague; he appealed to the inner light, to the conscience of
+mankind; he went back into the slough of Intuitionism. Carlyle cried
+aloud against materialistic views and logical machinery; he denounced
+'the great steam-engine, Utilitarianism'; he was for the able despot
+and hero-worship against grinding competition and government by
+discussion. In theology the mystical spirit rose again with its
+immemorial power of enchanting human imagination; the moral law is
+discerned to be the vesture of Divinity, in which He arrays Himself
+to become apprehensible by the finite intellect; and a Science that
+tries to understand everything explains nothing. Authority, instead of
+being discarded, is invoked to deliver men out of the great waters of
+spiritual and political anarchy. The Tractarians struck in with a
+fierce attack on Rationalism, propounding Faith and Revelation as
+imperative grounds of belief. You must accept the dogmas, not as
+useful, not as moral or reasonable, not even as derived intuitively,
+but as the necessary fundamental truths declared by the infallible
+Church to be essential to salvation. Those who could not find
+infallibility in a State Church went over to Rome, abandoning the Via
+Media; others were content with the high sacramental position of
+Anglicanism; the moderate Rationalists took shelter with the Broad
+Church; a few retreated into the cloudy refuge of transcendental
+idealism. The two extreme parties, the Broad Church and the
+Sacerdotalists, were at bitter feud with each other; yet they both
+denounced the common enemy. Arnold 'agreed with Carlyle that the
+Liberals greatly overrate Bentham, and the political economists
+generally; the _summum bonum_ of their science is not identical with
+human life ... and the economical good is often, from the neglect of
+other points, a social evil.' Newman held that to allow the right of
+private judgment was to enter upon the path of scepticism; and the
+latest infidel device, he says, is to leave theology alone. He set up
+the argument, well-worn but always impressive, that science gives no
+certainty; and Mr. Stephen contends against it with the weapons of
+empiricism:--
+
+     'The scientific doctrines must lay down the base to which all other
+     truth, so far as it is discoverable, must conform. The essential
+     feature of contemporary thought was just this: that science was
+     passing from purely physical questions to historical, ethical, and
+     social problems. The dogmatist objects to private judgment or free
+     thought on the ground that, as it gives no criterion, it cannot
+     lead to certainty. His real danger was precisely that it leads
+     irresistibly to certainty. The scientific method shows how such
+     certainty as is possible must be obtained. The man of science
+     advocates free inquiry precisely because it is the way to truth,
+     and the only way, though a way which leads through many errors.'
+
+Mr. Stephen is himself a large-minded Utilitarian. He will have
+nothing to do with a transcendental basis of morals; and the dogmatist
+who dislikes cross-examination is out of his court. Dogmatic
+authority, he says, stands only on its own assertions; and if you may
+not reason upon them, the inference is that on those points reason is
+against them. You may withdraw beyond this range by sublimating
+religion into a philosophy, but then it loses touch with terrestrial
+affairs, and has a very feeble control over the unruly affections of
+sinful men. Newman himself resorted to scientific methods in his
+theory of Development, that is, of the growth and evolution of
+doctrine. We may agree that these destructive arguments have much
+logical force, yet on the other hand such certitude as empiricism can
+provide brings little consolation to the multitude, who require some
+imperative command; they look for a pillar of cloud or fire to go
+before them day and night, and a land of promise in the distance.
+Scientific exposition works slowly for the improvement of ethics,
+which to the average mind are rather weakened than strengthened by
+loosening their foundations; and religious beliefs suffer from a
+similar constitutional delicacy. Conduct is not much fortified by
+being treated as a function of character and circumstance; for in
+religion and morals ordinary humanity demands something impervious to
+reasoning, wherein lies the advantage of the intuitionist.
+
+Mr. Stephen, however, is well aware that empirical certitude will not
+supply the place of religion. In his concluding pages he states,
+fairly and forcibly, the great problems by which men are still
+perplexed. Religion, as J. S. Mill felt, is a name for something far
+wider than the Utilitarian views embrace.
+
+     'Men will always require some religion, if religion corresponds not
+     simply to their knowledge, but to the whole impression made upon
+     feeling and thinking beings by the world in which they must live.
+     The condition remains that the conception must conform to the
+     facts; our imagination and our desires must not be allowed to
+     over-ride our experience, or our philosophy to construct the
+     universe out of _a priori_ guesses.... To find a religion which
+     shall be compatible with all known truth, which shall satisfy the
+     imagination and the emotions, and which shall discharge the
+     functions hitherto assigned to the churches, is a problem for the
+     future.'
+
+The Utilitarian doctrines, in short, though propagated by leaders of
+high intellectual power, and inspired by a pure unselfish morality,
+achieved little success in the enterprise of providing new and firmer
+guidance and support to mankind in their troubles and perplexities.
+But they were not content to look down from serene heights upon the
+world, leaving the crowd
+
+    'Errare atque viam palantes quærere vitæ.'
+
+They laboured devotedly to dispel ignorance and to advance knowledge;
+they spared no pains to promote the material well-being of society.
+They helped to raise the wind that filled the sails of practical
+reform; they headed the attack upon legal and administrative abuses;
+they stirred up the national conscience against social injustice; they
+proclaimed a lofty standard of moral obligation. They laid down
+principles that in the long run accord with human progress, yet in
+their hopes of rapidly modifying society by the application of those
+principles they were disappointed; for their systematic theories were
+blocked by facts, feelings, and misunderstandings which had not been
+taken into calculation. They were averse to coercion, as an evil in
+itself; but though they would have agreed with Mr. Bright's dictum
+that 'Force is no remedy,' they were latterly brought to perceive that
+in another sense there is no remedy except force, and that the vested
+interests and preconceptions of society make a stiff and prolonged
+opposition to enlightened persuasion. They were disposed to rely too
+confidently upon the spread of intelligence by general education for
+preparing the minds of people to accept and act upon doctrines that
+were logically demonstrable, and to reject what could not be proved.
+Mr. Stephen has somewhere written that to support a religion by force
+instead of by argument is to admit that argument condemns it. The
+proposition is too absolutely stated even for the domain of spiritual
+authority, since it might be replied that no great religion, certainly
+no organised Church, has existed by argument alone, and it has usually
+been supported by laws. But at any rate the temporal power subsists
+and operates by coercion, and the sphere of the State's direct action,
+instead of diminishing, as the earlier Utilitarians expected it to do,
+with the spread of education and intelligence, is perceptibly
+extending itself. The Utilitarians demurred to religion as an ultimate
+authority in morals, and substituted the plain unvarnished criterion
+of utility. Upon this ground the State steps in, replaces religious
+precept by positive law, and public morality is enforced by Acts of
+Parliament. They were for entrusting the people with full political
+power, to be exercised in vigilant restraint of the interference by
+Government with individual rights and conduct; the people have
+obtained the power, and are using it more and more to place their
+affairs and even their moral interests under the control of organised
+authority. We do not here question the expediency of the movement; we
+are simply registering the tendency.
+
+There are few literary enterprises more arduous than the task of
+following and demarcating from the written record of a period the
+general course of political and philosophic movements. The tendencies
+are so various, the conditions which determine them are so
+complicated, that it is difficult to keep hold of the clue which
+guides and connects them. Mr. Leslie Stephen's _History of English
+Thought in the Eighteenth Century_ took the broad ground that is
+denoted by its title; but, as he now tells us in his preface, he has
+found it expedient to reduce his present work within less
+comprehensive limits, by confining it to 'an account of the compact
+and energetic school of the English Utilitarians.' This reduction of
+its scope has not, however, damaged the continuity of the narrative,
+since in the great departments of morals, religion, and political
+philosophy the Utilitarians were mainly the lineal heirs of the
+characteristic English writers in the preceding century. It is true
+that Mr. Stephen has not been able to bring within the compass of his
+three volumes the subject of general literature, especially of poetry
+and novels, which in the nineteenth century have given their vivid
+expression to the doubts and the hopes, to the aims and aspirations of
+the time. But we can see that such an enlargement of his plan would
+have rendered it unmanageable, and that Mr. Stephen may have wisely
+considered the example of Buckle's _History of Civilisation in
+England_, which was projected on too large a scale, exhausted the
+author's strength, and remains unfinished. Mr. Stephen's present work
+fulfils its promise and completes its design. The Utilitarians are
+very fortunate in having found a historian whose vivacity of style,
+consummate literary knowledge, and masculine power of thought will
+have revived their declining reputations, and secured to them their
+proper place in the literature of the nineteenth century.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[28] _The English Utilitarians._ By Leslie Stephen. 3 vols. London,
+Duckworth and Co., 1900.--_Edinburgh Review_, April 1901.
+
+[29] _The Greek Theory of the State_, by Charles John Shebbeare, B.A.,
+1895.
+
+[30] Sir Robert Peel's speech on Reform, March 1831.
+
+
+
+
+CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY[31]
+
+
+There is probably some foundation for the belief, often held in these
+days, that the production of high poetry is becoming more difficult,
+partly because the environment of modern civilisation lends itself
+less and less to artistic treatment, as mechanism supersedes human
+effort, and partly through the operation of other causes. It has been
+plausibly argued that most things worth saying have been said already;
+that even the words best fitted for poetic expression have been worn
+out, have been weakened by familiar usage or soiled by misuse, and
+that the resources of language for adequate presentation of ideas and
+feelings are running very low. Nevertheless, we all look forward
+hopefully to the coming of the original genius who is to strike a
+fresh note and inaugurate a new era, as pious Mohammedans expect
+another Imam. Yet his coming may not be in our time, and meanwhile the
+poetic lamp is burning dimly; it is just kept alight by the assiduous
+trimming of the disciples of the great men who have passed or are
+passing away, by the minor poets who strike a few musical chords that
+catch the ear, but who are not recalled by the audience when they have
+played their part and left the stage. The stars that shone in the
+bright constellation of Victorian poets have been setting one by one,
+until two only remain of those who were the pride of the generation
+to which they belong, for whom we may predict that they will hold a
+permanent place in English literature. It is now nearly sixty years
+since Mr. Meredith's first poems were published. Mr. Swinburne is
+about ten years his junior, both in age and in authorship; one may
+perhaps assume that the work upon which their reputations will rest is
+finished for both of them. Mr. Meredith's poetry has very recently
+been the subject of a very complete and sympathetic study by Mr.
+George Trevelyan. In this article we shall make an attempt to
+delineate, briefly of necessity and therefore inadequately, the
+characteristic qualities of form and thought, the technical methods
+and intellectual temperament which distinguish the younger poet, who
+may be destined to be the last survivor of an illustrious company.
+
+If we accept the theory that art, like nature, follows the principle
+of continuous development, that its existing state is closely linked
+with its past, it is not easy to affiliate Mr. Swinburne to any direct
+literary predecessors. Undoubtedly we may assign to him poetical
+kinship with Shelley; he has the same love for classical myths and
+allegories, for the embodiment of nature in the beautiful figures of
+the antique. Light and shade, a quiet landscape, a tumultuous storm,
+stir him with the same sensuous emotion. He has Shelley's passion for
+the sea; he is fond of invoking the old divinities who presided over
+the fears, hopes, and desires of mankind. He has also Shelley's
+rebellious temper, the unflinching revolt against dogmatic authority
+and fundamental beliefs which rightly shocked our grandfathers in
+'Queen Mab' and a few other poems; he is even less disposed than
+Shelley to the hypocrisy which does unwilling homage to virtue. On the
+other hand, Mr. Swinburne's pantheism has not Shelley's metaphysical
+note; the conception of an indwelling spirit guiding and moulding the
+phenomenal world has dropped out; there is no pure idealism of this
+sort in Mr. Swinburne's verse.
+
+It may be said, truly, that some of Mr. Swinburne's poetry shows the
+influence of the later French Romanticists, of the reaction toward
+mediævalism which is represented in England by Scott, and which
+culminated in France with Victor Hugo, for whom the English poet's
+admiration is unmeasured. That movement, however, had almost ceased on
+our side of the Channel at the time when it had reached, or was just
+passing, its climax in France. And, indeed, by 1835 the style and
+sentiment of English poetry was undergoing a remarkable change. Its
+magnificent efflorescence, which the first quarter of the nineteenth
+century had seen in full bloom, had faded away. It had sprung up in an
+era of great wars and revolution, amid the struggles of nations to
+shake off the incubus of despotisms, to free themselves from the yoke
+of foreigners. The cause of political liberty inspired the noblest
+verse of Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron:
+
+    Yet Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,
+    Streams like a thunderstorm against the wind--'
+
+But in England this ardent spirit had evaporated during the years of
+industrial prosperity and mechanical progress which came in with a
+long peace after twenty years of fighting; and during the next
+generation a milder tone prevailed. For an interval we had only
+second-rate artists in verse. The fiery enthusiasts, the despisers of
+respectability, were succeeded by poets who were decently emotional,
+pensive in thought, tame or affected in style, domestic in theme, with
+feeble echoes of the true romantic note in Mrs. Hemans and others.
+Next, in the fulness of time, came Tennyson and Browning, to raise
+the level of English poetry by their deeper views of life, their
+elevation of thought, and their incomparably greater imaginative
+power. Tennyson's composition is pellucid and exquisitely refined.
+Browning is rugged and often obscure; he cares more for the force than
+for the form of expression. The great problems of religion and
+politics are seriously and cautiously handled. Browning analyses them
+with caustic irony, while Tennyson, after making vain attempts to
+solve them, finds consolation in the 'Higher Pantheism.' They are soon
+joined by Matthew Arnold and Clough, who represent the melancholy
+resignation of sensitive minds that have discarded the creeds, for
+whom the miraculous history of Christianity is an illusion that has
+faded into the common light of day. Meredith, poet and novelist, falls
+back upon communion with Nature; he preaches the doctrine of duty, of
+working while the light lasts; he is a high moralist who accepts
+stoically the conclusion that nothing beyond terrestrial existence is
+knowable.
+
+Thus Mr. Swinburne's elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry
+were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in
+their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic
+beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the
+Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a
+vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by
+intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the
+central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry
+we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of
+love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not
+a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the
+principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy,
+or caught in the garden with Maud--with intentions strictly honourable
+in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is
+chiefly psychological; they are usually concerned with the tragic
+situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of sexual
+infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these
+poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore
+liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of
+misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world's evolution
+toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian
+period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral
+standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from
+irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing
+cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they
+belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas
+of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing
+distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early
+'sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.
+
+Mr. Swinburne's first publications were two historic plays, of which
+something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from
+modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he
+aroused immediate attention by _Atalanta in Calydon_, which reproduced
+the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The
+dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong
+to its Hellenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of
+sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of
+foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the
+hero's unmerited fate. The exquisite modulations of the verse, the
+splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the
+enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language
+to quantitative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary
+skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and
+cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in
+style and character as the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came
+_Chastelard_, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told
+us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek
+tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt,
+for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of
+heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his
+life for an hour in his lady's chamber, tears up the warrant
+reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary's
+fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne's coming
+poetry is struck in _Chastelard_--the overpowering enthralment of
+Love, a joy to live and die for--
+
+    'The mistress and mother of pleasure,
+      The one thing as certain as death'--
+
+yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost
+immediately.
+
+Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society,
+much moved by Tennyson's 'Idylls,' and altogether sympathetic with the
+misfortunes of the blameless king--justly appreciative of the domestic
+affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the
+House'--Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his _Poems and
+Ballads_, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence,
+kicking over screens and rending drapery--a reckless votary of
+Astarte, chanting the 'Laus Veneris' and the worship of 'Dolores, Our
+Lady of Pain.' From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is
+turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism
+which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The
+burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love,
+the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the
+dread goddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man's
+brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and
+covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of
+the 'Triumph of Time,' who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers'
+delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets 'for days that are over and
+dreams that are done,' and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a
+surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea,
+changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling
+surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is
+the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is
+set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of
+language, profusion of metaphor, and classic allusion; in rhymes that
+strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and
+his wild Mænads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The
+long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the 'Hymn to
+Proserpine' and of 'Hesperia,' with their subtle music, lay the reader
+under their charm; but too many of these poems are tainted by a
+flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown
+by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.
+
+It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems,
+saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in
+the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works,
+'as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard
+or read of.' The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly
+violent--the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had
+given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The
+current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken
+than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of
+Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the
+middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no
+means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who
+presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than
+somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry
+to Our Lady of Pain, the 'noble and nude and antique.' The result was
+that the first edition of the _Poems and Ballads_ was withdrawn,
+though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne
+published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver
+and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a
+nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied
+that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of
+Mr. Swinburne's intoxicating love-potions--were sorely tempted to dash
+down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance
+round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.
+
+In the _Poems and Ballads_ Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to
+speak, with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God
+discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before
+Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people
+implore mercy--a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the
+flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of
+the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he
+looks back with æsthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over
+the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this
+volume is the 'Hymn to Proserpine,' where a votary of the ancient
+divinities confesses sorrowfully that a new and austere faith has
+triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline
+and fall like the empire of the elder gods--
+
+    'All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and
+      be past;
+    Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you
+      at last.
+    In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes
+      of things,
+    Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you
+      for kings.'
+
+The 'Hymn to Proserpine' is a fine conception of the champion of a
+lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the
+quiet dignity of his attitude is marred by the lines in which the
+votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has
+conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent
+invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and
+highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that
+Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the
+evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have
+replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or
+fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these
+evils enormously increased, and that the sacrifice of Iphigenia in
+Aulis was as nothing to the hecatombs of the Inquisition.
+
+His intense imagination summons up a bright and luxurious vision of
+the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little
+affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in
+contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old
+nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts,
+by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal
+with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed
+animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to
+follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own
+art; since his early defects and excesses are mainly due to his having
+missed their lesson by disregarding the limitations which they
+scrupulously observed.
+
+When he reissued the _Poems and Ballads_, Mr. Swinburne took occasion,
+as we have said, to reply, in a pamphlet, to the strictures and strong
+protests which they had aroused. He was at some trouble to discover
+the passages or phrases 'that had drawn down such sudden thunder from
+the serene heavens of public virtue': he was comically puzzled to
+comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with
+sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient
+prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found
+in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there
+is nothing more famous in later Hellenic art, than the statue of
+Hermaphroditus, yet his translation of a sculptured poem into written
+verse has given offence! One might reply that a subject which is
+irreproachable, on the score of purity, in cold marble, may take a
+very different colour when it is dilated upon in burning verse.
+
+The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of
+stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr.
+Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of _Songs and
+Ballads_, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of
+concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening
+five years the empire of Napoleon III. had fallen with a mighty
+crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had
+become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian
+kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the
+ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and
+political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. The 'Song of
+the Standard,' the 'Halt before Rome,' the 'Marching Song,' the
+'Insurrection of Candia,' are poems that reflect current events; and
+the 'Litany of Nations' is the national anthem of peoples striving for
+freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the
+glorification of emancipation of Man. The final line of the 'Hymn to
+Man' is
+
+    'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things';
+
+and in one stanza of 'Hertha' is condensed all the wild declamation
+against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage,
+with his joy in the deification of humanity:
+
+                 'A creed is a rod,
+                    And a crown is of night;
+                  But this thing is God,
+                    To be man with thy might,
+    To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life
+                    As the light.'
+
+There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the
+uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce assailant of
+tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches
+and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish
+Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom
+of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the
+'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a
+fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time
+forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he
+is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano
+Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for
+Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of
+intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to
+him relics of mediæval superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic--he
+contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old
+world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty
+world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the _juventus
+mundi_ had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the
+earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour
+for civic liberties, the Hellenic delight in noble form and in
+physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian
+authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns
+the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the multitude
+before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial
+recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the 'sleep eternal in an
+eternal night'; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He
+is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the passions a loose
+rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie
+
+    'Deep in dim death, beneath the grass
+    Where no thought stings.'
+
+Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair
+quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer
+influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the association of places
+with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his
+earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the
+impressions of natural beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in
+the 'Songs of the Four Seasons,' where the approach of a storm from
+the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the
+peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:
+
+             'As men's cheeks faded
+              On shores invaded
+              When shorewards waded
+                The lords of fight;
+              When churl and craven
+              Saw hard on haven
+              The wide-winged raven
+                At mainmast height;
+              When monks affrighted
+              To windward sighted
+              The birds full-flighted
+                Of swift sea-kings;
+              So earth turns paler
+              When Storm the sailor
+    Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings.'
+
+But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague
+yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he
+transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees,
+feels, and remembers. In the poem of 'Hesperia' the view of the sunset
+over the sea stirs tender memories; the 'deep-tide wind blowing in
+with the water' seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and
+his heart floats out toward her 'as the refluent seaweed moves in the
+languid exuberant stream.' In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession
+has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare's[32]
+hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in
+the beautiful verses of 'A Forsaken Garden,' where his consummate
+faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense and sound are matched
+and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:
+
+    'Over the meadows that blossom and wither
+      Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
+    Only the sun and the rain come hither
+                  All year long.'
+
+In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the title of _A
+Midsummer Holiday_, published nearly twenty years after the _Poems and
+Ballads_, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The
+impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the
+spectator's mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that
+
+     'mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind is
+     exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness:
+     it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the
+     presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it
+     felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or
+     even a right to live.'[33]
+
+This is the right doctrine, and we may add that it is applicable as a
+criticism to some of his earlier descriptive pieces, where the intense
+personal feeling is somewhat too intense and disproportionate; so that
+a reader gifted with less keenness of sensibility is disconcerted by
+insistence on effusive moods with which he cannot be expected to be in
+full sympathy. Mr. Swinburne might reply that for such dullards he
+does not write; but the finest wines are too heady for a morning's
+draught. In his more mature poems he appears to have deliberately held
+back what may be termed the subjective emotion; the landscapes are no
+longer peopled by figures or memories of the past; the thoughts which
+they suggest are such as find response in all minds that are in accord
+with the deeper and more subtle relations of human life to its
+environment. He himself has indeed told us[34] that to many of his
+studies of English land and sea no intimacy of years and no
+association with the past has given any colour of emotion, that only
+so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring
+these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive
+that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the
+spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or
+woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the
+sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The _Midsummer Holiday_ group
+has two pictures of sweet homeliness--'The Mill Garden' and 'On a
+Country Road'--the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth's phrase),
+such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch
+book, of value the more remarkable because they are not in Mr.
+Swinburne's usual manner. They give relief to the breadth and grandeur
+of the other descriptions of the ocean, the crags, and the storms. For
+to Swinburne, as to all the romantic English poets, the ocean stream
+which encircles their island is an inexhaustible source of delight and
+pride; it is our ever present defence in time of trouble; the fountain
+of our country's wealth and honour; it is our traditional battlefield;
+the winds and the waves are the breath and the force of our national
+being. And through Mr. Swinburne's poetry runs a vein of undiluted
+love for his native land. In his poem 'On the South Coast' he looks
+out from 'the green, smooth-swelling downs' over the broad blue water,
+and his thought is expressed in its final stanza:
+
+    Fair and dear is the land's face here, and fair man's work as a
+      man's may be:
+    Dear and fair as the sunbright air is here the record that speaks
+      him free;
+    Free by birth of a sacred earth, and regent ever of all the sea.'
+
+The 'Autumn Vision' is an ode to the south-west wind, which has so
+often filled the sails of the English warships:
+
+    'Wind beloved of earth and sky and sea beyond all winds that blow,
+    Wind whose might in fight was England's on her mightiest warrior
+      day,
+    South-west wind, whose breath for her was life, and fire to scourge
+      her foe,
+    Steel to smite and death to drive him down an unreturning way,
+    Well-beloved and welcome, sounding all the clarions of the sky,
+    Rolling all the marshalled waters toward the charge that storms
+      the shore.'
+
+Charles Kingsley, like a hardy Norseman, preferred the north-east
+gale. To him the south-west wind is
+
+    'The ladies' breeze,
+    Bringing back their lovers
+    Out of all the seas,'
+
+while Mr. Swinburne hears in the rushing south-western gale
+
+                   'the sound of wings gigantic,
+    Wings whose measure is the measure of the measureless Atlantic,'
+
+and, after the storm,
+
+    'The grim sea swell, grey, sleepless and sad as a soul estranged.'
+
+'A Swimmer's Dream' gives us the poetry of floating on the slow roll
+of the waves, some cloudy November morning.
+
+    'Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,
+      Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.'
+
+'Loch Torridon' preserves the charm of what might be a landlocked
+lake, if it were not that the rippling tide flows in by an almost
+invisible inlet from the sea. From his earliest to his latest poems
+the magic of nature's changing aspects fascinates him; they inspire
+him with a kind of ecstasy that finds utterance in the variety of his
+verse, which reflects all the lights and shades of earth, sea, and
+atmosphere. One may remark, by the way, that in proportion as his
+poetic strength matures, the pagan gods and goddesses, who disported
+themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more
+rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic
+mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes
+are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in
+the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor and Woden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be admitted by Mr. Swinburne's least indulgent critics that
+his poetry displays throughout a marvellous power of execution. He
+runs over all the lyrical and elegiac chords with unabated facility;
+his metrical variations and musical phrasing bring out and extend the
+capacity and fertility of our language as a poetic instrument; he is
+master of his materials. No doubt there is some repetition, some
+iteration, which becomes slightly wearisome, of his favourite rhymes,
+indicating, what has been observed independently of reference to this
+particular writer, that the resources of the English language for
+terminal assonance, under the stringent conditions required by the
+modern rules of versification, are inevitably limited and show signs
+of exhaustion.
+
+In a Note on Poetry appended to his latest volume of verses,[35] Mr.
+John Davidson has classed rhyme as a kind of disease of poetry. Rhyme,
+he says, is probably more than seven hundred years old--in Europe, he
+must mean, for it is far older in Asia, whence it originally came--and
+since the days of the troubadours and Minnesingers it has corrupted,
+in his opinion, the ear of the world. At best it is, he thinks, a
+decadent mode, imposing shackles on free poetic expression; and
+though in these fetters great poets have done magnificent work, in
+their finest rhymed verse he finds a feeling of effort. They have
+always been obliged to throw in something that need not have been
+said, some words inserted under compulsion, to bring the rhyme about.
+Mr. Davidson declares that the true glory of free untrammelled poetry
+shines out in the rhythmic periods of blank verse. That there may be
+some truth, or at least some convenience, in this theory of the poetic
+art, the modern poet may not be concerned to deny; for, as we have
+already said, rhymes will not withstand incessant and familiar usage;
+they become commonplaces, and the rhymer wanders away from the natural
+direction of his thought in search of fresh ones. The most devout
+admirers of Browning must admit that his verse is often distorted in
+this way--so that a fine stanza sometimes finishes with a jolt and
+ends with a tag--and it must be allowed that this necessity of making
+both ends meet is bad for the poetic conscience, a temptation to
+indefensible laxities. Even Mr. Swinburne, the inventor of exquisite
+harmonies, whose work is indisputably sincere, can be occasionally
+observed to be diverging from the straight line of his impetuous
+flight, hovering and making circuits that lead up skilfully to the
+indispensable rhyme. More frequently, perhaps, there is a tendency to
+interpose some metaphor, or rather far-fetched allusion, for the sake
+of the clear, full, recurrent intonation of echoing words that can
+only be marshalled into their places by artistic ingenuity.
+
+We may so far agree with Mr. Davidson that most of the sublime
+passages in English poetry are in blank verse, though it may be
+noticed that the four lines which he quotes from _Macbeth_,[36] as
+containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the drama,'
+are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate
+art; it is an instrument that requires a first-class performer, like
+Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English
+lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr.
+Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's _New Poems_ (1867), has
+said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in
+England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a
+modern song is a wilful abdication of half the charm and half the
+power of verse.' To this general rule he might possibly admit one
+exception--Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,'
+which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not
+missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this
+terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the
+other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a
+rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in
+maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present
+day, however, there is a tendency to run into excessive elaboration,
+largely due to superficial imitation of such masters of the poetic art
+as Tennyson, and especially Swinburne, so that we have a copious
+outpouring of feeble melodies.
+
+Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, is never feeble; he combines technical
+excellence with the power of vehement, often much too violent,
+expression. His character may be defined by the French word 'entier';
+he is uncompromising in praise or blame. He insists (to quote his own
+words) that 'the worship of beauty, though beauty be itself
+transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be
+simple and absolute'; nor will he tolerate reserve or veiled
+intimations of a poet's inmost thought.
+
+     'Nothing,' he has written, 'in verse or out of verse is more
+     wearisome than the delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted
+     hope and half-incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong
+     desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot, may be
+     worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity, until he begins to
+     speak; and if he tries to speak in verse, he misses the implement
+     of an artist.'
+
+He is pained by Matthew Arnold's 'occasional habit of harking back and
+loitering in mind among the sepulchres.... Nothing which leaves us
+depressed is a true work of art.' Yet, it may be answered, the habit
+of musing among tombs has inspired good poetry; and when doubt and
+dejection, perplexed meditation over insoluble problems, are in the
+air, a poet does well to express the dominant feelings of his time;
+and a modern Hamlet is no inartistic figure.
+
+In this respect, however, Mr. Swinburne may have found reason to
+qualify, latterly, the absoluteness of his poetic principles. He has
+been from the first a generous critic of those contemporary poets whom
+he recognised as kindred souls. He awards unmeasured praise to Matthew
+Arnold, while of his defects and shortcomings he speaks plainly. He
+does loyal homage to Browning in a sequence of sonnets, and his
+tribute to Tennyson was paid in a lofty 'Threnody,' when that noble
+spirit passed away. For Victor Hugo he proclaimed, as all know,
+nothing short of unbounded adoration--he is 'the greatest writer whom
+the world has seen since Shakespeare'; though it may be doubted
+whether in his own country Hugo now stands upon so supreme a pinnacle.
+To other eminent men of his time his poetry accords admiration,
+chiefly to the champions of free thought and of resistance to
+oppression; and, in a poem entitled 'Two Leaders,' he salutes two
+antagonists as he might do before crossing swords with them. The
+leaders are not named; the first is evidently Newman:
+
+    'O great and wise, clear-souled and high of heart,
+      One the last flower of Catholic love, that grows
+      Amid bare thorn their only thornless rose,
+    From the fierce juggling of the priest's loud mart
+    Yet alien, yet unspotted and apart
+      From the blind hard foul rout whose shameless shows
+      Mock the sweet heaven whose secret no man knows
+    With prayers and curses and the soothsayers' art.'
+
+The second is
+
+        'Like a storm-god of the northern foams
+    Strong, wrought of rock that breasts and breaks the sea,'
+
+in whom we recognise Carlyle. They are the powers of darkness, doomed
+to fall and to vanish before the light; yet their genius commands
+respect and even sympathy.
+
+    'With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate,
+      High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher,
+
+    *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Honour not hate we give you, love not fear,
+      Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome
+    Of great dead Gods with wrath and wail, nor hear
+      Time's word and man's: "Go honoured hence, go home,
+    Night's childless children; here your hour is done;
+    Pass with the stars, and leave us with the sun."'
+
+The concise energy of these lines, their slow metrical movement,
+invest them with singular weight and dignity. The poet is confronting
+two representatives, in principle, of Force and Authority, whose
+prototypes in bygone times would undoubtedly have sent him to the
+scaffold or to the stake; nor is it improbable that both Carlyle and
+Newman, though in all other opinions they differed widely, would have
+agreed that a revolutionary firebrand and a pestilent infidel
+deserved some such fate. The poet might console himself with the
+reflection that they must have abhorred each other's principles quite
+as much as they detested his own.
+
+In his later verse Mr. Swinburne still continues to wield his flaming
+sword against priests and despots, against intellectual and political
+servility. What may be termed the historical plea, the excuse for
+ideas and institutions that they are the relics of evil days long
+past, is no palliation for them to his mind; he would stamp them out
+and utterly destroy them. In this respect his temperament has
+unconsciously a strong tincture of the intolerance which he denounces;
+he would sweep away Christianity as Christianity swept away
+polytheism. Toward its Founder, as the type of human love and purity,
+he is uniformly reverential; there is nothing in that supreme figure
+that jars with that Religion of Humanity, which 'The Altar of
+Righteousness' proclaims with high dithyrambic enthusiasm:
+
+    'Christ the man lives yet, remembered of man as dreams that leave
+    Light on eyes that wake and know not if memory bids them grieve.
+
+    *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Far above all wars and gospels, all ebb and flow of time,
+    Lives the soul that speaks in silence, and makes mute the earth
+      sublime.'
+
+But of theology reigning by force and terror he is the implacable
+enemy; and his intemperate violence leaves a stain on the bright
+radiance of his poetry. It amounts to an artistic fault, undiminished
+even in the later years which should have brought the philosophic
+mind. Moreover, it has materially lessened the influence which so fine
+a poetic genius should have exercised over the present generation,
+among whom polemical ardour and bitterness may be thought to have
+perceptibly cooled down, and to have become much less aggressive, in
+science, philosophy, and literature, than among the preceding
+generation. An age of tacit indifference, content with rationalistic
+explanations, with the slow working of disillusion, dislikes and
+discountenances outrageous scorn poured upon things that are
+traditionally sacred; and to the English character extremes are always
+distressing.
+
+Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work, at any rate, takes us out of the strife
+and turmoil of theologic war; we are on firm historic ground, dealing
+with authentic events and persons. The plays of _Chastelard_,
+_Bothwell_, and _Mary Stuart_ form a trilogy in which the most
+romantic and eventful period of Scottish history is presented; they
+constitute the epic-drama of Scotland, to adopt a definition applied
+by Victor Hugo to the tragedy of _Bothwell_. It is impossible, in this
+article, to find space for an adequate criticism of these remarkable
+productions. Every leading poet of the nineteenth century has made
+excursions into the dramatic field. We doubt whether any of them has
+come out of the adventure much better than Mr. Swinburne. All of them
+have given us, each in his own way, fine poetry, and, if we except
+Byron, they have shown that the masters of lyrical music can strike
+with power the high chords of blank verse. None of them have produced
+plays that took any hold of a theatrical audience; in most cases they
+were not intended for the stage.
+
+The play of _Chastelard_ is too deeply saturated with amorous essences
+throughout to be forcibly dramatic. The hero is in a high love-fever
+from first to last, the passionate strain becomes monotonous, and
+though he dies to save the Queen's honour, our minds are not purged
+with much pity for him. In the long historical drama of _Bothwell_,
+which has twenty-one scenes in its two acts, we have spirited
+portraits of the fierce nobles who surrounded Mary Stuart during her
+brief and distracted reign. The love passages are pauses in a course
+of violent action, the assassination of Rizzio, the murder of Darnley
+are not overcoloured melodramatically, and the scenes in and about the
+Kirk of Field are darkened with the shadow of Darnley's imminent fate.
+But Darnley's dream, presaging his coming doom, inevitably recalls the
+dream of Clarence, and cannot but suffer from the reminiscence. We
+might have something to say on the metrical construction of
+Swinburne's blank verse, for he shares with Tennyson, though in a
+minor degree, the distinction of having enlarged its scope and varied
+its measure. But the subject would demand careful comparative
+examination and analysis of different styles, such as is to be read,
+with profit to all students of the art poetic, in Mr. J. B. Mayor's
+_Chapters on English Metres_.
+
+It will be understood that this article attempts no more than to
+review the salient characteristics of Mr. Swinburne's poetry, to
+indicate in some degree their connexion and development. It cannot but
+fall far short, obviously, of being a comprehensive survey of his
+contributions to English literature. We have made no reference, for
+lack of space, to his treatment of chivalrous romance in _Tristram of
+Lyonesse_, which Mr. Swinburne has rightly called 'the deathless
+legend,' though, since its fascination has made it a subject for three
+other contemporary poets, a comparison of their diverse manners of
+handling the story would be interesting. It is with regret that we
+have been compelled, also, to refrain from any adequate notice of Mr.
+Swinburne's prose writings, for in regard to the poetry of his own
+period the dissertations and judgments of one who combines high
+imaginative faculty with scientific mastery of the metrical art must
+have special value. Of the ordinary untrained criticism, the 'chorus
+of indolent reviewers,' to use Tennyson's phrase, he is, we think, too
+impatient. From a passage in his Dedicatory Epistle we gather that
+some of the tribe have ventured so far as to insinuate that poetry
+ought not to become a mere musical exercise. Mr. Swinburne's rejoinder
+is that
+
+     'except to such ears as should always be closed against poetry,
+     there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness
+     and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of
+     thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind
+     scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of
+     malignity.'
+
+Apart from the wrathful form, the substance of what is here said
+merits consideration, for undoubtedly the most musical of our poets,
+from Shakespeare and Milton to Coleridge and Shelley, are those whose
+verse has embodied the richest thought and has been instinct with the
+deeper emotions. We must muster up courage to remark, nevertheless,
+that while in Mr. Swinburne's finest poems the musical setting
+accompanies and illuminates the thought or feeling, in some others the
+underlying idea is too unsubstantial; its real presence is only
+visible to the eye of implicit faith. Toward his fellow poets, his
+equals and contemporaries, Mr. Swinburne's attitude is that of
+generous enthusiasm, not excluding outspoken, yet courteous,
+indication of defects, as may be seen in the essay[37] on Matthew
+Arnold's _New Poems_, which is full of important observations on
+poetry in general, beside some well-deserved strictures on Arnold's
+shortcomings, in criticism as well as in verse. For Victor Hugo he has
+nothing but panegyric. His articles on Byron and Coleridge are
+luminous appreciations of the very diverse excellences belonging to
+two illustrious predecessors; while in his _Notes on the Text of
+Shelley_, high-soaring and incomparable, an unlucky emendation of a
+line in 'The Skylark--the insertion of a superfluous word
+conjecturally--by an editor whose work he commends on the whole,
+provokes him to sheer exasperation:
+
+     'For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible;
+     for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would
+     be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and
+     desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of
+     Shelley with this damnable corruption.'
+
+'Fas est et ab hoste doceri.' Mr. Swinburne has borrowed the style of
+sacerdotal anathema from his mortal enemies, and pronounces it no less
+inexorably. But these Notes were written nigh forty years ago, so we
+may hope that by this time he has cast out, or at least subdued by
+diligent exorcism, that same hyperbolic fiend which entered in and
+rent him at certain seasons of his youth.
+
+Mr. Swinburne has, indeed, the defects of his qualities. He is an
+ardent friend and an unflinching adversary, but we have seen that in
+prose no less than in poetry, in polemics as in politics, his style is
+liable to become overheated and thunderous. He has no patience with
+mediocrity in art; he disdains the _via media_ in thought and action.
+In these respects he stands alone among the Victorian poets, most of
+whom anticipate with misgivings the evaporation of faith in the
+supernatural, while they acknowledge that for themselves such faith
+has little meaning, and are inclined to melancholy musing over the
+'doubtful doom of human kind' which haunted the imagination of
+Tennyson. And his attitude is still further apart from the
+intellectual tendencies discernible at the present moment in pure
+literature, which is now less concerned, we think, with these
+questions than when Mr. Arnold wrote _Literature and Dogma_, and seems
+more disposed to leave theology in the hands of the physical
+scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be,
+it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory,
+unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which
+the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless
+extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from
+him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The
+sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him;
+it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, whom he
+so much admired, meant by the word [Greek: aidos]. But we very
+willingly acknowledge that of these excesses hardly a trace is to be
+found in the very numerous pieces that fill the later volumes of his
+collected poetry.
+
+From these causes it has resulted that Mr. Swinburne does not, in our
+opinion, now hold the position or command the influence which would
+otherwise be accorded to one who may be reckoned the chief lyrical
+poet of the second half of the nineteenth century; for after the
+publication, in 1855, of _Maud_, Tennyson had passed his lyrical
+climax, and Mr. Swinburne's superiority, as a lyrist, over all other
+writers of that period is incontestable. His neo-paganism, moreover,
+jars upon the realistic modernity of a generation for whom primitive
+symbolism is obsolete as a form of expression, and whose prevailing
+thought is too profoundly rationalistic to be attracted by a pagan
+paradise. All this is to be regretted, since Mr. Swinburne undoubtedly
+has the pagan virtues. His aspirations are concentrated on ideals that
+ennoble the present life, on justice, inflexible courage, patriotism,
+the unsophisticated intelligence; he loves liberty and he hates
+oppression in all their shapes. He is throughout an optimist, who
+believes and predicts that a clearer and brighter prospect is before
+humanity. To Mr. Swinburne, in short, may be applied the words with
+which Matthew Arnold summed up his essay upon Heine: 'He is not an
+adequate interpreter of the modern world; he is a brilliant soldier in
+the liberation war of humanity.' And future generations may remember
+him as the poet who passed on to them the message of his spiritual
+forefather, Shelley:
+
+    'O man, hold thee on in courage of soul
+      Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way;
+    And the billows of clouds that round thee roll
+      Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
+    When heaven and hell shall leave thee free
+      To the universe of destiny.'
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] _The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne._ In six volumes. With a
+dedicatory epistle to Theodore Watts-Dunton. London, Chatto and
+Windus, 1904.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1906.
+
+[32] 'Out, hyperbolic fiend! how vexest thou this man?'--_Twelfth
+Night._
+
+[33] Dedicatory Preface.
+
+[34] Dedicatory Preface.
+
+[35] _Holiday and Other Poems_, 1906.
+
+[36] Note on Poetry, p. 144.
+
+[37] _Essays and Studies_, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN[38]
+
+
+It may be doubted whether many students of history are aware that the
+demarcation of frontiers, of precise lines dividing the possessions of
+adjacent sovereignties and distinguishing their respective
+jurisdictions, is a practice of modern origin. At the present time it
+is the essential outcome of territorial disputes, it is the operation
+by which they are formally settled at the end of a war: it registers
+conquests and cessions; and occasionally it has been the result of
+pacific arbitration. Among compact and civilised nationalities an
+exterior frontier, thus carefully defined, remains, like the human
+skin, the most sensitive and irritable part of their corporate
+constitution. The slightest infringement of it by a neighbouring Power
+is instantly resented; to break through it violently is to be
+inflicting a wound which may draw blood; and even interference with
+any petty State that may lie between the frontiers of two great
+governments is regarded as a serious menace.
+
+The whole continent of Europe has now been laid out upon this system
+of strict delimitation. Yet it may be maintained that among the
+kingdoms of the ancient world no such exact and recognised
+distribution of territory existed; and, further, that up to a very
+recent period none of the great empires in Asia had any boundaries
+that could be traced on a map. Their landmarks were incessantly
+shifting forward or backward as their military strength rose or fell;
+and where their territories marched with some rough mountainous tract
+inhabited by warlike tribes, they were perpetually plagued by petty
+warfare on a zone of debateable land. On both sides some temporary
+intrusion upon or occupation of country held by a neighbour, which
+would now be the signal for mobilising an army, was treated as a
+trespass of small importance, to be resented and rectified at leisure.
+It is true that in earlier times the Romans marked off distinct
+frontiers, and guarded them by military posts; but their policy was to
+acknowledge no frontier power with equal rights, and their actual
+political jurisdiction usually extended far beyond their lines of
+defence, which were advanced or withdrawn as political or military
+considerations might require. In fact, the Roman empire, like the
+British empire in Asia, was a great organised State, surrounded, for
+the most part, by small and weak principalities, or by warlike tribal
+communities, and it grew by a natural process of inevitable expansion.
+The emperors were often reluctant to enlarge their possessions; but
+the raids and incursions of intractable barbarians, or the revolt of
+some protected chiefship, frequently left them no option but to
+conquer and annex. They soon found themselves compelled to overstep
+the limits of empire prescribed by the policy of Augustus, and to lay
+down an advanced frontier in the lands beyond the Rhine and the
+Danube.
+
+In Europe, where, as we have said, all national frontiers are now
+fixed and registered, the position of a civilised government entangled
+in chronic border warfare has long been unknown; the tradition of such
+a state of things is preserved in popular recollection mainly by local
+records and old ballads. Yet for Englishmen the subject possesses
+peculiar interest, since it is connected with their earlier history;
+and moreover our dominion in India invests it with special importance,
+for it is there a matter of immediate experience and active concern.
+We may recollect, in the first place, that Britain was an outlying
+province of the Roman empire, for at this moment we are excavating the
+ruins of the wall built by the Romans to protect their northern
+frontier from the incursions of the warlike tribes beyond it, by the
+first administration that established, for a time, peace and
+civilisation in England. Then, in the middle ages, and long
+afterwards, the border between the kingdoms of England and Scotland
+which ran northward of the old Roman line, was for centuries the scene
+of plundering raids, punitive expeditions, and internecine feuds that
+often laid waste the countryside with fire and sword. We may observe,
+in this instance, how shifting and indeterminate was the exact
+frontier line between the two kingdoms, and how the local fighting,
+the inroads from one side or the other, did not necessarily involve a
+rupture of their formal relations. The wardens on each side executed
+rough justice upon marauding clans; they wasted and slaughtered in
+reprisal for raids; the great nobles engaged in a kind of private
+warfare; but all this might go on without embroiling the two
+governments in a national war. On the western English border the Welsh
+hillmen kept the neighbouring counties in continual alarm; and their
+chiefs played an important part in the civil wars and rebellions of
+England. They were at last quieted by Edward I., who succeeded in
+subduing Wales though he failed in Scotland. Lastly, though the union
+of the two kingdoms brought peace to the Anglo-Scottish border, the
+Highland line along the Forth river still kept up, though in a much
+less serious degree, the troubles of a regular government in contact
+with restless tribes. Nor was it until the middle of the eighteenth
+century that these relics of an archaic condition of society, which
+had long ago disappeared in other parts of western Europe, were
+finally effaced in Great Britain. Long afterwards, in the nineteenth
+century, when the conquest of the Punjab carried the north-western
+frontier of British India up to the slopes of the Afghan mountains,
+the scene of perpetual strife between a strong settled administration
+and turbulent borderers which had passed away on the Tweed or the
+Forth, and on the Welsh Marches, reappeared in the districts beyond
+the Indus.
+
+To Englishmen, therefore, whose experience of this situation is long,
+varied, and actual, Mr. Baddeley's book on the Russians in the
+Caucasus should be of exceptional interest. It is indeed well worth
+studying by those upon whom, whether at home or in India, has been
+imposed the arduous duty of superintending our policy in dealing with
+the Afghan tribes for the protection of our Indian districts. It is
+true that the conditions and circumstances, military and political,
+under which Russia prosecuted her long war with the Caucasian
+mountaineers, rendered her position in many respects different from
+that in which the English found themselves when they first came into
+contact with Afghanistan, and which has changed very little in the
+course of sixty years. The aims and purposes of the two governments
+were by no means the same. Yet in both cases we have a story of the
+obstinate resistance opposed by fierce and free clans to the arms of a
+powerful empire, of perilous campaigns amid rugged hills and passes,
+of the hazards and misfortunes to which disciplined troops are always
+liable when they encounter resolute and fanatical defenders of a
+difficult country.
+
+Mr. Baddeley's book contains an authentic narrative, founded on
+diligent study of official documents and on the accounts of those who
+took part in the fighting, of the operations by which the Mohammedan
+tribes of the Caucasus were finally subdued, after fierce and
+protracted resistance, by Russian armies, and their country was
+annexed to the dominions of the Czar. His knowledge of this region is
+evidently derived from personal exploration; and in the Introduction
+to his book he has spared no pains to explain to his readers its
+geographical position, its topography, its physical features, and the
+extraordinary diversity of races and languages which it contained. We
+learn that the chain of mountains which was originally known by the
+name of the Caucasus stretches, with a total length of 650 miles, from
+the Caspian to the Black Sea. Toward the north is a tract of dense
+forest, intersected by numerous streams flowing down from the
+mountains; and beyond lies the high plateau of Daghestan, 'through
+which the rivers have cut their way to a depth often of thousands of
+feet, the whole backed and ribbed, south and west, by mountain ranges
+having many peaks often over 13,000 feet in height.' In the forest
+tract, to which the Russians gave the name of Tchetchnia, their armies
+were constantly entangled; and their difficulties in reducing the
+inhabitants to subjection were quite as great as in conquering the
+highland tribes of Daghestan. Throughout the eighteenth century, and
+even earlier, the Russians had been pushing southward toward the Black
+Sea and the Caspian, and had gradually taken under their authority and
+protection the Cossack tribes who were settled on the steppes that
+spread along the northern border of the Caucasus. On this border they
+had established by the end of the century the Cossack line of forts,
+military colonies and plantations of armed cultivators, linked
+together to form a barrier against the incursions and marauding raids
+of the wild folk in the woods and mountains in front of them, and
+gradually strengthened and supported by stations of regular troops in
+the background. On the south of the central mountain ranges the
+Russians held Georgia, inhabited by Christian races whom the Russians
+had liberated from the Turkish or Persian yoke before the close of the
+eighteenth century, and who ever afterwards remained loyal subjects of
+the Czar. The Georgian road which traversed the whole Caucasian region
+from north to south, formed a most important line of communication
+which was never seriously interrupted. To the south-east, when the
+nineteenth century opened, lay Mohammedan khanates, vassals of Persia;
+on the south-west were the semi-independent pachaliks of the Ottoman
+empire.
+
+We must pass over, reluctantly, Mr. Baddeley's very interesting sketch
+of the gradual approach made by Russia toward the Caucasus during the
+eighteenth century, which may be said to have begun in earnest with
+the expedition of Peter the Great, who led an army to the Caspian
+shore and captured Derbend about 1722. This threatening movement upon
+the confines of Asia inevitably involved Russia in war with the Turks
+and with the Persians, for whom the Caucasian mountains represented a
+great fortress, barring the onward march of a powerful Christian
+empire toward their dominions. For the Russians, on their side, it
+became of vital importance to break through the barrier that separated
+them from Georgia, to occupy the country between the two seas, and to
+make an end of the perpetual warfare with the tribes, who kept their
+frontier on the Cossack line in unceasing agitation and disorder, and
+were a standing menace to the Christian population of Georgia. It
+should be understood, however, that the Cossacks discharged their
+duties of watch and ward after a very rough fashion, raiding and
+fighting on their own account, making incursions upon their Mohammedan
+neighbours in retaliation for attacks and forays, and laying waste the
+enemy's country with the bitter vindictiveness of antagonistic races
+and religions.
+
+At the beginning of the nineteenth century Georgia and some other
+Christian principalities in Trans-Caucasia--that is, on the southern
+border of the mountains--had been absorbed into the Russian empire,
+which now held continuous territory on this line from the Black Sea to
+the Caspian. Along the Caspian shore the vassal States of Persia had
+been reduced to submission, while the Turks had been driven back from
+their fortified posts on the Black Sea. The Turkish and Persian
+governments naturally took alarm at the approach of a military power
+whom they had already good reason to mistrust and dread; the Russian
+viceroys and generals on the frontier treated these Oriental kingdoms
+with high-handed arrogance, and gave ample provocation for the wars
+which speedily broke out with both of them. The annals of the next few
+years record many vicissitudes of fortune. The Russian armies achieved
+some brilliant victories, and suffered some heavy disasters. By
+disease and the strain of forced marches through rugged and almost
+pathless country, by the storming of petty fortresses, by incessant
+skirmishing and treacherous surprises, the troops were reduced in
+number and gradually worn out; they were outnumbered by the Persian
+and Turkish soldiery, whose military qualities were at that time by no
+means despicable; while at this time the great European wars against
+Napoleon made reinforcements hard to obtain. In 1811 the Russians
+could barely hold their ground against the combined forces of Turkey
+and Persia; but just when the whole situation was at its worst the
+Russian Government, under the imminent emergency of Napoleon's march
+upon Moscow, patched up a peace (May 1812) with Turkey that reinstated
+the Sultan in some important positions on the Black Sea coast, and
+made considerable retrocessions of territory. By strenuous exertion
+the Persians were defeated and beaten off, and next year there was
+comparative peace on the Caucasian border. Yet it was but a calm
+interval before storms, for Mr. Baddeley remarks that nearly half a
+century of fighting was to elapse before the conquest of the mountains
+could be completed.
+
+This era of long and sanguinary contest may be said to have begun, on
+a deliberate plan, with the appointment of General Yermoloff, in 1816,
+to be commander-in-chief in Georgia, with jurisdiction over the whole
+Caucasus. It was carried on with undaunted courage, hardihood, and
+obstinate endurance on both sides; and in the matter of merciless
+ferocity there was little to choose between the two antagonists.
+Yermoloff appears to have belonged to the type of military commander
+whom the Russian soldier follows with complete trust and unhesitating
+devotion--a leader inured to hardship and perils, treating his men as
+comrades but unsparing of their lives, rigid in discipline, reckless
+of bloodshed, a relentless conqueror yet capable of occasional
+generosity. His stern and implacable temper recognised but one method
+of dealing with barbarian enemies--the unflinching use of fire and
+sword, the policy of devastation and massacre. 'I desire,' said
+Yermoloff, 'that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more
+potently than chains of fortresses; that my word shall be for the
+natives a law more inevitable than death. Condescension in the eyes
+of Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am
+inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of Russians from
+destruction, and thousands of Mussulmans from treason.' He demanded
+unconditional submission from all the tribes of the Caucasus; and he
+substituted for the former system of bribery and subsidies the policy
+of treating all resistance as rebellion, and suppressing it with cruel
+severity, 'but' (says one writer) 'always combined with justice and
+magnanimity.' Upon this Mr. Baddeley remarks that it is difficult to
+see where justice came in, 'but in this respect Russia was only doing
+what England and all other civilised States have done, and still do,
+wherever they come into contact with savage or semi-savage races. By
+force or fraud a portion of the country is taken and sooner or later,
+on one excuse or another, the rest is sure to follow.' To this it may
+be rejoined that on the north-west frontier of India, and nowhere
+else, England has come into contact with a race quite as savage and
+untamable as the Caucasian mountaineers, but that it would be a great
+mistake to suppose that the methods of Yermoloff have ever been
+adopted in dealing with the turbulent fanaticism of the Afghan tribes.
+
+On the Cossack line, when Yermoloff assumed charge of operations,
+'there was no open warfare, but there was continual unrest. No man's
+life was safe outside the forts and stanitzas; robbery and murder were
+rife; raiding parties, great and small, harried the fields, the farms
+and the weaker settlements.' To this state of things he was resolved
+to put an end. He built fortresses, pushed forward his outposts,
+formed moving columns of troops, and assiduously trained his soldiers
+to the peculiar conditions of warfare on this borderland. The Russian
+regiments, like the Roman legions, were often stationed in their
+camps or garrisons for twenty-five years; and for the service required
+of them their efficiency was admirable. For ten years Yermoloff
+carried on this tribal war with inflexible rigour, by expeditions to
+punish some marauding village, which was razed to the ground, and most
+of the men, women and children burnt or killed after defending the
+place with the fury of despair; by night marches to surprise and storm
+the hill forts; by exterminating bands of brigands; and more than once
+by laying deathtraps for notorious rebels or fanatics. There can be no
+doubt that this system of ruthless chastisement, of beating down the
+enemy's defences by sharp and rapid strokes, by sudden and daring
+inroads into the heart of their country, intimidated the tribes, and
+went far toward compelling them to sullen acquiescence in the Russian
+overlordship. Of the petty independent chiefships some were seized
+forcibly, others submitted and paid tribute. The Russians were
+advancing step by step into the interior of the country, piercing it
+with roads and riveting their hold on it by throwing forward their
+chain of connected forts. By 1820 Yermoloff appears to have convinced
+himself that in a few years the whole of the Caucasus--mountain and
+forest--would be permanently conquered and pacified; and for some time
+after that date there was little or no fighting, though the border was
+frequently disquieted by outbreaks that were sternly crushed. With the
+Persians and the Turks there was an interval of peace.
+
+But the harsh measures taken by the Russians to bring the forest
+tribes under their authority were bitterly resented; and in 1824 two
+of their generals were fatally stabbed in Tchetchnia by one of several
+villagers whom they were disarming. This murder was avenged by
+Yermoloff, as usual, relentlessly, but it was his last campaign in
+the Caucasus. In 1826 the Persians, who had been incensed by
+Yermoloff's rough ways on their frontier and by his insolent
+diplomacy, invaded Russian territory with a strong army. The Russians
+were unprepared, and at first could only act on the defensive. The
+flames of insurrection at once broke out among the tribes; the whole
+country fell back into confusion, and the Emperor Nicholas, holding
+Yermoloff responsible for this disastrous state of affairs,
+reprimanded and recalled him. He lived in retirement until 1861,
+revered by the Russian nation as the type and model of a valiant
+soldier and a devoted patriot who won brilliant victories and
+conquered large territories for the empire. But on his system and its
+consequences Mr. Baddeley pronounces a judgment which in fact points
+the moral of his whole narrative, and explains the history of the
+events that followed Yermoloff's departure:
+
+     'He gained brilliant victories at slight cost; and brought for a
+     time the greater part of Daghestan under Russian dominion.... He
+     absorbed the Persian and Tartar khanates, and treated Persia with
+     astonishing arrogance. But it was these very measures and successes
+     that led, on the one hand, to the Persian War and the revolt of the
+     newly-acquired provinces; on the other, to that great outburst of
+     religious and racial fanaticism which, under the banner of
+     Muridism, welded into one powerful whole so many weak and
+     antagonistic elements in Daghestan and Tchetchnia, thereby
+     initiating the bloody struggle waged unceasingly for the next forty
+     years. Daghestan speedily threw off the Russian yoke, and defied
+     the might of the mother empire until 1859. In Tchetchnia mere
+     border forays conducted by independent partisan leaders ...
+     developed into a war of national independence under a chieftain as
+     cruel, capable, and indomitable as Yermoloff himself.'
+
+The Persian War ended in 1828, but in the same year hostilities broke
+out with Turkey, involving the Russian troops on the Georgian frontier
+in hard and hazardous fighting, which lasted, with a great expenditure
+of men and money, until peace was concluded in 1829. From that year
+until 1854, when the Crimean War began, Russia had a free hand in the
+Caucasus, and applied her strength with inexorable energy to its
+subjugation. And it is to the rise and spread of the ferocious
+enthusiasm which Mr. Baddeley has called _Muridism_ that he attributes
+the striking fact that the complete conquest of the country was only
+accomplished in 1864--that the tribes held out against the forces of
+the Russian empire for more than thirty years.
+
+Muridism, in which this spirit of heroic and hopeless resistance by
+armed peasants against the Russian armies was, so to speak, incarnate,
+is a word employed by Mr. Baddeley with a special purpose and meaning,
+which he explains at some length. For our present purpose it may be
+sufficient to say that _Murshid_ denotes a religious teacher who
+expounds the mystic Way of Salvation to his _Murids_, or disciples,
+who gather round him, adopt his doctrines, obey his commands, and
+cheerfully accept martyrdom in his service. Muridism, therefore, may
+be taken to signify the passionate fanaticism of religious devotees,
+of warriors who follow a spiritual leader and fight in the sacred
+cause of Islam against the infidel. It was this movement that united
+the Mohammedan tribes in a holy war against the Russians, who, as our
+author observes, had never gauged correctly the latent forces of the
+twin passions, religious fanaticism and the love of liberty--two
+elements which always form a very dangerous compound, and which became
+heated up to the point of explosion as the tribes found the iron
+framework of Russian administration steadily closing up around them.
+Any attempt to break out of this house of bondage was repulsed with
+inflexible severity. In this inflammable atmosphere, charged with
+ferocious suspicion, hatred, and superstition, one Kazi Mullah was
+elected to the rank of 'Imam'; and on his proclamation of holy war
+against the infidel oppressor the whole country rose and rallied to
+his standard. He was, if we may borrow Mr. Baddeley's description of
+the class, 'one of those strange beings, compounded of fanaticism,
+military ardour, and a nature prone to adventure, for whom only the
+dreaming, fighting, tumultuous, ignorant East, in its days of trouble
+and unrest, can supply a fitting field of action.' He came forward as
+a man sent by God to deliver the faithful from their servitude,
+holding in his hands the power of life or death, and those who refused
+to obey him or denied his authority were denounced and slain without
+mercy. Under such leadership the war spread again along the border,
+some Russian detachments were cut to pieces, and even when the
+insurgents were defeated the troops suffered terribly, for as no
+quarter was asked or expected none was given on either side. After
+some two years of incessant fighting Kazi Mullah made his last stand
+in a mountain stronghold, where he was surrounded by the Russian
+troops, who in their first assault were repulsed with heavy loss; but
+on a second attempt the place was stormed, and Kazi Mullah with a band
+of devoted Murids died sword in hand on the last breastwork.
+
+Of the sixty men who stood by their chief to the end two only escaped;
+but one of these was Shamil, who became afterwards the most famous and
+formidable champion of the Mohammedan tribes in the Caucasus.
+
+     'His marvellous strength, agility, and swordsmanship served him in
+     good stead. With an Alvarado's leap he landed behind the line of
+     soldiers about to fire a volley through the raised doorway where
+     he stood, and whirling his sword in his left hand he cut down three
+     of them, but was bayoneted by the fourth clean through the breast.
+     Undismayed, he grasped the weapon in one hand, cut down its owner,
+     pulled it out of his own body, and escaped into the forest, though
+     in addition to the bayonet wound he had a rib and shoulder broken
+     by stones.'
+
+Shamil had been born and bred in the same village with Kazi Mullah,
+whose disciple he became, and whose rules of rigid adherence to the
+strictest injunctions of Islam he adopted and enforced. He even
+attempted to put down, as a practice forbidden by the law of Mahomet,
+the inveterate blood feuds that divided and weakened the tribes, with
+the politic object of uniting them in the holy war against the
+infidels; and when the Kazi had been killed his mantle fell upon
+Shamil, who soon proved himself a far more able and terrible leader of
+fanatic insurrection. The Russians, who at first believed that the
+Kazi's death was a decisive and final blow to the cause of Muridism,
+soon found that they were grievously mistaken. Mr. Baddeley's
+narrative shows occasionally some disregard of orderly arrangement, so
+that the sequence in time and interconnection of incidents is not
+always clear. We gather from this part of it, however, that very soon
+after Shamil took command the whole country had risen against the
+Russians, that their posts were attacked and their detachments cut
+off, and that expeditions sent to seize the positions or disperse the
+gatherings of the tribes paid dearly for their victories, while they
+were more than once repulsed with defeat and disaster. Villages were
+burnt; the vineyards and orchards were destroyed; desperate fights,
+hand to hand, ended only with the extermination of the defenders by
+the exasperated Russian soldiers; and after one campaign, when the
+Russian Commander-in-Chief led a considerable force against Shamil's
+stronghold, he was content to conclude, in the emperor's name, a
+treaty of peace with the tribal chief, being 'compelled to retire by
+the total disorganisation of the expeditionary corps, the enormous
+loss in _personnel_, and the want of ammunition.' A treaty with the
+Russian emperor raised Shamil's reputation high among the tribes;
+while the slaughter and devastation inflamed his revengeful temper.
+When the Emperor Nicholas came next year to the Caucasus, General
+Klugenau met Shamil and tried to persuade him to tender submission in
+person, with the result that Klugenau narrowly escaped assassination
+at the interview. He was saved by Shamil's intervention. In 1839
+almost all the tribes were united under Shamil's command; and the
+Russian Government, seriously alarmed, determined that he must be
+effectively crushed. In the story of this campaign we have a signal
+and striking example of the perils that beset regular troops who
+encounter fierce and fearless barbarians on their own ground. The
+Russians had a powerful artillery; they were led by experienced
+commanders; their officers and soldiers fought with astonishing
+courage and endurance. After several bloody actions Shamil was shut up
+in the hill fort of Akhlongo, and here the undaunted Murids turned to
+bay. It was a stronghold surrounded by ravines and sheer precipices,
+accessible only along narrow ridgeways. Mr. Baddeley has related in
+full detail the operations and incidents of this eventful siege. The
+first assault failed after a prolonged and desperate struggle. 'Only
+at nightfall,' writes an eye-witness, 'and at the word of command, did
+our troops retire from the bloodstained rock.' The bombardment went on
+'until the castle was reduced to a heap of ruins, in which the heroic
+defenders seemed literally buried.' After a siege which lasted eighty
+days the place was at last taken with a total loss of 3000 Russians,
+including 116 officers, killed and wounded. The defenders were
+slaughtered almost to the last man; many women and children were
+killed; but Shamil again escaped miraculously.
+
+     'Vanquished, wounded, a homeless fugitive, without means, with
+     hardly a follower, it might well seem that nothing was left to the
+     indomitable chieftain but the life of a hunted outlaw ... yet
+     within a year Shamil was again the leader of a people in arms;
+     within three he had inflicted a bloody defeat on his present
+     victor; yet another, and all northern Daghestan was reconquered,
+     every Russian garrison there beleaguered or destroyed, and Muridism
+     triumphant in the forest and on the mountain, from the Samour to
+     the Terek river, from Vladikavkaz to the Caspian.'
+
+By 1840 the Tchetchnia tribes of the wooded lowlands under the
+mountains had broken out into outrageous rebellion, for Shamil had
+established himself in the forests, and was harassing the whole
+Russian border. 'We have never,' wrote General Golovine, 'had in the
+Caucasus an enemy so savage and dangerous as Shamil'; and it was again
+decided to send an overwhelming army against him. The two first
+expeditions virtually failed. Between 1839 and 1842 the Russians had
+lost in killed or wounded 436 officers and 7930 men, and 'had
+accomplished little or nothing.' In 1844 the Emperor Nicholas had
+despatched large reinforcements to the Caucasus, with stringent orders
+to make an end of Shamil's 'terrible despotism' and to subdue the
+whole country. On his side Shamil mustered all his forces for an
+energetic defence. His mounted bands traversed the borderlands with
+amazing rapidity, rushing in suddenly upon the Russian outposts,
+waylaying detachments, and bewildering the commanders by the speed and
+secrecy of their movements. Count Vorontzoff marched against him with
+an army of about 18,000, horse, foot, and artillery. Shamil retreated
+gradually before him, drawing on the Russians, and abandoning his
+forward positions after a show of defending them. He had laid waste
+the country on the line of the Russian advance; so, as supplies were
+running very short, Vorontzoff pushed on hastily toward Shamil's
+headquarters at Dargo. This place, surrounded by forests,
+
+     'lay along the crest of a steep wooded spur of the Betchel ridge,
+     nowhere very broad, narrowed here and there to a few feet, and
+     consisting of a series of long descents with shorter intervening
+     rises. Abattis of giant trunks with branches cunningly interlaced
+     barred the way at short intervals, and the densely-wooded ravines
+     on either side swarmed with hidden foes.'
+
+Mr. Baddeley's vivid description of the hurried advance upon Dargo,
+and of the Russian retreat after capturing it, has all the tragic
+interest of a situation where heroic valour strives vainly against
+calamitous misfortune, and brave men, caught in a well-laid snare,
+tear their way out of it with the energy of despair. The six barriers
+of twisted branches were attacked and carried without serious loss,
+though at one point, where the path along the hill-top was narrowest,
+the troops fell into confusion, suffered heavily, and were rescued
+with some difficulty. Dargo was then occupied without resistance; but
+the army had only food for a few days, and Vorontzoff, instead of
+retiring immediately, resolved to wait for a convoy that was coming up
+from the rear and had reached the edge of the forest. But the force
+despatched to protect and bring it into camp had to pass again over
+the strait ridgeway, where all the barriers had been reconstructed;
+and the Russians again ran the gauntlet of incessant and murderous
+fire, losing one of their generals with many officers and men. There
+still remained the most arduous task of all, to force a way for the
+third time along the ridge with weakened and disheartened troops
+encumbered by the provision train that they were escorting to Dargo.
+
+     'The enemy were in greater numbers than before; the barriers had
+     once more been renewed, and a heavy rain added greatly to the
+     difficulties of the march.... On the narrow neck the advance guard
+     found the breastwork of trees faced with the Russian dead of the
+     previous day, stripped, mutilated, and piled up; it was enfiladed
+     by four smaller breastworks on each side.'
+
+Passek, a daring and fearless commander, was killed in leading the
+attack with other officers and many men. The foremost regiments fell
+back in disorder. Yet the main body, with their general, who charged
+at the head of companies like any captain, struggled along the ridge,
+fighting all the way, though the Mohammedans kept up an unceasing
+rifle-fire, and from time to time they dashed right into the Russian
+line. Nevertheless the predicament of the Russians was becoming
+hopeless, when a fresh regiment sent out to their rescue from Dargo
+threw itself between the exhausted troops and their assailants, and
+thus enabled them to reach the camp. But most of the convoy had been
+lost, the total list of casualties was frightful, and for Vorontzoff,
+with little to eat, surrounded by victorious hordes, encumbered with
+more than a thousand wounded men, the only prospect of saving the rest
+of his army lay in cutting his way homeward through many miles of
+forest. Mr. Baddeley's description of the retreat is intensely
+dramatic. After fighting every step of the road the starving and
+demoralised army was brought to a standstill, and was eventually saved
+from annihilation by fresh troops that arrived just in time under the
+Russian commander on the frontier, who had foreseen the emergency, and
+made forced marches to the rescue of his chief.
+
+Thus the attempt to piece the heart of Shamil's country had been
+completely foiled; and Vorontzoff now confined himself to
+strengthening his fortified posts, linking up more effectively their
+connection, and improving his communications. But in this situation
+the Russians were acting upon the outer circle of Shamil's central
+position in the mountains, whereas their enemy held the interior
+lines, and could choose his point of attack. Shamil's strategy was
+directed toward keeping the whole Russian frontier in constant alarm,
+breaking in upon various and distant parts of the line by incessant
+raids and surprises, in order to prevent concentration of the Russian
+forces on either flank. He made a daring attempt to seize Kabarda, on
+the extreme west of the border, but was hunted out of it by the
+activity of Freytag, the general whose foresight and promptitude had
+extricated Vorontzoff from destruction. This desultory warfare went on
+until in 1847 Vorontzoff, having secured his base, again tried
+conclusions with Shamil, being resolved that it was necessary to
+reduce the fortified village (or _aoul_) of Ghergebil, which Shamil
+was no less determined to defend. On the morning of the assault the
+Russians, in their camps below the precipitous rocks, above which
+stood the aoul, 'heard the melancholy, long-drawn notes of the
+death-chant rising from behind its wall as from an open grave,' the
+sure prelude to a stubborn and sanguinary fight.
+
+The forlorn hope rushed forward, but lost its way and suffered
+severely; the supports kept the right direction and made for the
+breach.
+
+     'A withering fire from hundreds of rifles mowed down the troops
+     like grass. Their gallant commander, Yeodskeemoff, fell dead,
+     pierced by a dozen bullets. The captain of the grenadier company
+     strode over his body and gained the top of the breach, to fall in
+     turn; the men were exasperated rather than daunted; a Danish
+     officer, more fortunate and not less brave than his predecessors,
+     led them forward, and the wall was won. In front was the first row
+     of low _saklias_ (stone houses) and, climbing their walls, the
+     attackers rushed forward, when to their horror the ground gave way
+     beneath their feet, and amid shouts of demoniac laughter they fell
+     on to the swords and daggers of the Murids below. The flat roofs
+     had been taken off the whole row of houses and replaced by layers
+     of brushwood thinly covered with earth; every house, in fact, was a
+     death-trap.'
+
+Nevertheless the troops came on, and most of them got inside the
+village, but they were entangled in the labyrinth of narrow streets,
+and were obliged to retire. Another assault ended with another
+repulse, 'and the victorious Murids, driving the broken columns before
+them, followed until stopped by the bayonets of the reserve.'
+
+Vorontzoff had now been twice beaten off by Shamil: he had been
+repulsed, and had nearly lost his army in the forests; his troops had
+been hurled back with slaughter from the mountain fort. Next year he
+despatched another large army, furnished with heavy artillery, against
+Ghergebil, which drove out the Murid garrison by a tremendous
+bombardment, but retired without occupying the place. During the next
+few years, though wild work went on as usual along the border, where a
+sharp guerilla warfare was kept up, neither Shamil nor Vorontzoff
+attempted to strike any decisive blow. But the lowlands were
+devastated by perpetual incursions and reprisals, and the forest
+tribes, placed between two fires, driven to choose between the Murids
+and the Russians, gradually transferred their allegiance to the side
+best able to protect them, and migrated northward across the Russian
+line. The uninhabited woodlands became a kind of neutral ground which
+neither side cared to occupy; and from this time Shamil's sphere of
+action was confined to the mountains of Daghestan. Then, in 1854,
+began the war in the Crimea, when according to Mr. Baddeley the Allies
+might have ruined Russia in the Caucasus by making common cause with
+Shamil and supporting him vigorously. But England and France were
+absorbed in besieging Sebastopol, and Omar Pasha's Transcaucasian
+campaign was undertaken too late for any effective result. Mr.
+Baddeley considers that in neglecting their opportunity of backing
+Shamil the Allies made a strategic blunder; yet we agree with him that
+this is not to be regretted. For the credit of civilisation it is well
+that they did not let loose the savage Mohammedan fanatics upon
+Christian Georgia and the peaceful Russian settlements beyond the
+frontier, to their own dishonour, and to the misery of the people whom
+Russia was protecting. Shamil did make one foray into Georgia, when a
+party of his men carried off two Georgian princesses, the wife and
+sister of the Viceroy, who were kept by Shamil in rigorous captivity
+and treated cruelly for eight months while negotiations went on for
+their release. His object was to exchange them for his son, who had
+been captured by the Russians some fourteen years earlier, had been
+brought up from childhood among them, and at this time was a
+lieutenant in a Russian lancer regiment. As Shamil demanded not only
+his son but a large ransom for the princesses, there was long haggling
+over the money, but this point was at last settled, and the exchange
+took place on the banks of the river. The princesses and Jamal-ud-deen
+crossed from opposite banks to the escorts appointed to deliver and
+receive them; the youth was then made to change his Russian uniform
+for a native dress and rode up the hill to his father, who welcomed
+him with tears and embraces.
+
+The scene must have been strangely picturesque; and the whole story
+illustrates the accidents and incongruities of warfare between nations
+whose standard of morals and manners is entirely different. The
+abduction and brutal treatment of the princesses were altogether
+contrary to the rules and ideas of modern belligerents; but what would
+have been to the Russians a foul disgrace was to the rude Caucasian
+chief no more than a simple and justifiable method of extorting his
+son's release. On the other hand the Russians had bred up their
+captive at their capital; they had converted him to their own social
+habits and ways of life. And the sequel is instructive for those who
+have yet to learn how completely European education may incapacitate
+an Asiatic from returning to associate with his own people, how
+effectually it may obliterate the early influences of race and
+religion.
+
+     'The fate of Jamal-ud-deen was indeed a sad one. Brought up from
+     the age of twelve years in St. Petersburg and entered in the
+     Russian army, he was now a stranger to his own father, an alien in
+     the land of his birth, and totally unfitted to resume his place
+     among a semi-barbarous people. He had looked forward to his return
+     with the gloomiest forebodings, which were fully justified by the
+     event. As a matter of fact, there could be little real sympathy
+     between his fellow-countrymen and himself; they soon began to look
+     upon him with suspicion and distrust. Even Shamil was estranged
+     when he found his son imbued with Russian ideas, and convinced of
+     Russia's right to the extent of counselling surrender.' ... Nothing
+     'could reconcile him to the change from civilisation to barbarism;
+     he grew melancholy, fell into a decline, and died within three
+     years.'
+
+After the end of the Crimean War the Russian Government could turn its
+undivided attention to the enterprise of finishing the conquest of the
+Caucasus. The preliminary work of cutting roads through the forests,
+throwing bridges over rivers and ravines, destroying the enemy's petty
+forts, and throwing forward detachments to occupy important points,
+was carried out actively during 1857; and in the next summer three
+separate columns, under one supreme command, drove back Shamil's
+bands, and took up strong positions in the heart of his country. The
+inhabitants, severely harried by the Murids, who maltreated
+ferociously all villages that would not join them, took refuge under
+Russian protection; and though Shamil made several bold attempts to
+break through the circle that was gradually encompassing him, he was
+compelled to abandon Vedén, so long his home, which was taken in April
+1859. The forest tracts were now entirely under Russian control, and
+the highland tribes were rapidly surrendering to the Russian
+commanders, whose strategy it was to avoid frontal attacks upon large
+bodies prepared to fight behind entrenchments, but to make resistance
+impossible by enveloping movements. In the mountains, which had so
+long defied the armies of the Czar, the local chiefs and their
+clansmen were now falling away from Shamil, who was forced to retreat
+hastily with a few hundred followers to his stronghold at Gooneeb,
+where he entrenched himself for a final stand, knowing well that
+defence was hopeless, yet resolved to die fighting. But his men were
+almost exterminated by the overpowering numbers which the Russians
+threw upon the fortifications in their assault. When the outworks had
+fallen, and the place was practically won, the Russian commander, who
+desired to capture Shamil alive, suspended the final rush upon the
+spot where he still held out, and sent him a message that his life
+would be spared on surrender. He yielded, and rode out to meet the
+Russian lines; but a burst of cheering from the Russian soldiers at
+sight of him so startled him that he went back. A Russian officer
+persuaded him to turn again.
+
+     'Followed by about fifty of his Murids, the sole remnant of his
+     once mighty hosts, he rode towards where Bariatinsky, surrounded by
+     his staff, sat waiting on a stone. Shamil dismounted and was led to
+     the feet of his conqueror, who told him that he answered for his
+     personal safety and that of his family; but he had refused terms
+     when offered, and all else must now depend on the will of the
+     emperor. The stern Imam bowed his head in silence and was led off
+     captive. Next day he was sent to Shoura, and thence to Russia,
+     where later on his family was allowed to join him.'
+
+In the foregoing pages we have run rapidly over Mr. Baddeley's
+narrative of the long and laborious operations by which the Russians
+gradually made good their footing in the Caucasus, and at last
+consolidated their dominion. We have necessarily omitted many curious
+incidents and exploits characteristic of a deadly struggle between
+antagonists representing the collision of archaic with modern
+societies, the clash of two religions eternally irreconcilable, the
+deadly wrestle of assailants and defenders unlike in everything but
+their tenacious intrepidity. The story, until Mr. Baddeley wrote it,
+has hitherto been little known in England. Yet Englishmen should be
+interested in this singular and striking example of the obstinate
+resistance that can be opposed by free and warlike tribes to the
+organised military forces of a first-class European Government; for
+they are not without similar experiences of their own. And moreover
+the long contest for possession of the tracts lying between the Black
+Sea and the Caspian, on the borderland between Europe and Asia, had
+its effect in the wider sphere of Asiatic politics. If the Russians,
+in their wars with Turkey and Persia, had not been constantly
+distracted by the raids and revolts of the Caucasian highlanders, the
+consequences to these two Eastern kingdoms might have been much more
+serious. It will be remembered that at this period (1826-8) we were
+actively concerned in preserving Persia's independence insomuch that
+the Russians had accused us of fomenting hostilities against them. At
+a later time also Sir Henry Rawlinson, writing in 1849, when Shamil
+was still formidable and undefeated, observes that it would have been
+impossible for Russia, with her communications at the mercy of such an
+enemy, to carry her arms farther eastward into Asia, or to contemplate
+territorial extension in that direction. And in a subsequent Note, of
+1873, he points out that not until after Shamil's surrender in 1859
+did Russia begin to push her way continuously along the upper course
+of the Jaxartes river toward Tashkend and the Asiatic midlands. So
+long, indeed, as the mountains between the two seas were unsubdued,
+they formed an effectual barrier to the expansion of Russia into
+Central Asia; but when that frontier fortress of Islam had been
+captured, and when the Circassians had emigrated into Turkish
+territory, the onward march of Russia went on securely and speedily.
+Tashkend was taken and Kokand annexed in 1866; and soon afterward the
+communications between the Russian base in Georgia and the Russian
+garrisons in Turkestan were firmly established. Thereafter the flood
+of Russian conquest overflowed irresistibly the plains of Central
+Asia, until it was arrested by another breakwater, the kingdom of
+Afghanistan. It is true that the North-western Afghan borderlands were
+comparatively open and easily penetrable by an invading force; but
+beyond them lie lofty ranges with passes at high altitudes, guarded by
+a hard-fighting and intractable people, and on the farther side of
+these mountains stands the rival European Power whose policy it had
+been always to retard and obstruct the Russian advance across the
+Asiatic Continent. We may conjecture that if Afghanistan had been
+left, as the Caucasus was left after the Crimean War, isolated and
+obliged to rely on its own resources for defence, the drama of the
+Caucasian wars would have been repeated. The Russians would have
+besieged and reduced without great difficulty this second mountain
+fortress; and after another similar though less protracted struggle
+the Afghans would have undergone the same fate as the Daghestanis. The
+Czar's rulership, solidly established in the two natural strongholds
+that stand on either side of the great central plains, and command,
+east and west, the exits and entrances, would have been supreme
+throughout Mohammedan Asia.
+
+That the Russian armies were forced to halt on the edge of Afghanistan
+is thus a point of cardinal importance, and it marks a turning-point
+in the career of her expansion. It also produced a situation that is
+the outcome of the different strategy adopted by England and Russia
+respectively, in circumstances not otherwise very dissimilar. For
+whereas the Russians had been compelled by imperative political and
+military exigencies to conquer and occupy the Caucasian highlands, the
+policy of the British Government has always been not to subjugate
+Afghanistan, but to preserve its independence and to fortify it as an
+outwork for the protection of the gates of India. It is due to this
+fundamental distinction of aim and object that the history of the
+relations of the British with Afghanistan during the nineteenth
+century, and of their management of the tribes on the Afghan border,
+differs widely from Mr. Baddeley's narrative of events and
+transactions in the Caucasus. Nevertheless in both instances the
+general situation presented a strong resemblance. The Russians,
+pushing their dominion down from the north to the Black Sea and the
+Caspian, were checked and baffled for many years by the woods and
+precipices that lay across the line of their march into Trans-Caspia.
+The British, moving up by long strides north-westward across India,
+came to a halt at the foot of the Afghan hills fifty years ago; and to
+this day they have scarcely moved farther. Here they were met by races
+almost identical in character and circumstances with the tribes of
+Daghestan, fanatically attached to the faith of Islam, profoundly
+influenced by religious preachers, prizing their liberty above their
+lives, and looking down from their rugged uplands upon a great
+military power that had swept away many principalities and subdued all
+the cities of the plain below. If the British had pressed onward and
+endeavoured to take possession of Afghanistan [which had indeed been
+occupied by the Moghul empire in its prime] they would certainly have
+been involved in a series of sanguinary conflicts, revolts, and costly
+expeditions not unlike those which put so severe a strain upon the
+Russian armies in the Caucasus. This, as we know, they did not do;
+they adopted the alternative of asserting an exclusive protectorate
+over the country; they were content to remain outside it so long as no
+rival power was allowed to set foot in it. Yet we know that even this
+much more prudent policy was carried out at a heavy cost. The British
+army suffered at least one grave disaster by the total destruction of
+a division in the retreat from Kabul in the winter of 1842-3. And the
+Afghan War of 1878-80, with the massacre of the British envoy and his
+escort at Kabul in 1879, showed us the perils and difficulties of even
+a temporary and partial occupation.
+
+At the present moment, however, the objects of our policy have been
+satisfactorily fulfilled. The Russians have settled with us the
+frontier line between their dominion and Afghanistan, and have bound
+themselves to respect it. With the Afghan Amir we are on friendly
+terms, and we have taken up our permanent position on his Eastern
+border towards India, reserving to ourselves the control of the tribes
+within a broad belt of territory, otherwise independent, between the
+Afghan kingdom and British India. This tract is intersected by lofty
+ridges running parallel for the most part to our frontier, with
+precipitous slopes toward India, with a few practicable passes and
+numerous gorges formed by the drainage from the watershed, enclosing
+some fertile valleys along the courses of the rivers, inhabited by a
+hardy population that is broken up into manifold clans and sects by
+the configuration of their country. The Caucasus, as we learn from Mr.
+Baddeley, 'is peopled by a greater number of different tribes and
+races than any similar extent on the surface of the globe'; and it is
+precisely from the same causes, difficulty of intercourse between
+villages secluded in the valleys or perched on the heights, scarcity
+of sustenance, inbred jealousy of each other, feuds and factions, that
+the groups of the Afghan borderland dwell apart, become estranged or
+hostile, are at constant war with each other, and cannot unite against
+a common enemy. But while in the Caucasus this trituration of the
+people has produced a multiplicity of dialects, the Afghan borderers
+speak a language that is generally the same.
+
+In Dr. Pennell's book, the title of which stands at the head of this
+article, we have a vivid description, drawn from life, of the names,
+habits, and peculiarities of these primitive communities, with many
+incidental examples of the relations existing between them and the
+British officers who are in touch with them on the frontier. Lord
+Roberts, in a short introduction that may be taken as a guarantee of
+the accuracy and authenticity of the volume's contents, tells us that
+it is a valuable record of sixteen years' good work by a medical
+missionary in charge of a mission station at Bannu, on the
+north-western frontier of India. And Dr. Pennell's experience,
+acquired in the prodigious enterprise of taming and converting to
+Christianity some of the most murderous ruffians and inveterate
+robbers in Asia, has provided him with a rare insight into their
+character, and furnished him with numerous anecdotes of their strange
+inconsistencies and wayward, impulsive nature. On the Afghan frontier,
+indeed, we may survey a situation that has frequently recurred in the
+history of organised governments, whenever they have found themselves
+in contact, and therefore in collision, with intractable barbarism.
+Immediately across the border line may be seen in the Afridi tribes a
+complete and living picture of man in his aboriginal condition of
+perpetual war, under no government at all, in daily peril of ending by
+a violent death a life that in the pithy words of Hobbes is 'poor,
+nasty, brutish, and short.' A few steps back into the British district
+brings us among men, often of the same breed and tribe, dwelling
+without arms in peace and security, pleading before regular law
+courts, learning in English schools, occupied in commerce and industry
+under the protection of magistrates and police. The contrast in
+morals and manners is as abrupt as the transition from the Afghan
+hills to the Indian plains. Such is the frontier along which British
+officers are charged with duties of watch and ward. Their business is
+to guard the Indian districts that march with the wild borderland, to
+prevent or punish incursions by the marauding tribes who have
+continued from time immemorial to live in practical anarchy. They obey
+no laws and acknowledge no ruler, though in emergencies they appeal
+alternately to the Afghan Amir for assistance against the British and
+to the British Government against any encroachments by the Amir.
+
+The Afghan character, writes Dr. Pennell, is a strange medley of
+contradictory qualities, in which courage blends with stealth, the
+basest treachery with the most touching fidelity, intense religious
+fanaticism with an avarice that will even induce a man to play false
+with his faith, and a lavish hospitality with an irresistible
+propensity for thieving. It will be remembered how 'Muridism,' the
+spirit of religious enthusiasm inflaming political hostility, was
+stirred up by the Mullahs of the Caucasus against the Russians, and
+embittered the resistance of the tribes. The same elements of fiery
+hatred lie close below the surface on the Afghan borderland. Dr.
+Pennell tells us that there is no section of the Afghan people which
+has a greater influence on their life than the Mullahs, who sometimes
+use their power to rouse the tribes to join in warfare against the
+English infidels; and that a prelude to one of the little frontier
+wars has often been some ardent Mullah going up and down the frontier,
+like Peter the Hermit, inciting them to break out. The notorious
+Mullah Powindah, who is still a firebrand on the border, is reported
+to possess a magical charm that renders his followers invulnerable
+before English bullets. Whether he led them in person to battle is
+not mentioned; though he could hardly adopt the excuse of Friar John,
+who, as Rabelais tells us, made a liberal distribution of mirific
+amulets to his soldiers, assuring them that those who had firm faith
+in their efficacy would come to no harm. He added, however, that to
+himself the charm would be useless, because unfortunately he could not
+believe in it. Such an explanation would be coldly received among the
+Afghans.
+
+Under the exhortations of these Mullahs their students often became
+Ghazis.
+
+     'The Ghazi is a man who has taken an oath to kill some
+     non-Mohammedan, preferably a European, as representing the ruling
+     race, but, failing this, a Hindu or a Sikh is a lawful object of
+     his fanaticism.... When the disciple has been worked up to the
+     requisite degree of religious excitement, he is usually further
+     fortified by copious draughts of intoxicating drugs.... Not a year
+     passes on the frontier but some young officer falls a victim to one
+     of these Ghazis.'
+
+It is manifest that this sporadic Muridism might become epidemic under
+serious and widespreading excitement, but the provocation that leads
+to petty frontier wars comes entirely from the tribes, who make
+predatory incursions upon the Indian villages and refuse all
+reparation. In every tribe, as Dr. Pennell tells us, the outlaws who
+live by raiding and robbery, and the Mullahs who detest the infidel
+and fear his rule, are the fomenters of crime and outrage.
+
+The vendetta, or blood-feud, our author tells us, has eaten into the
+very core of Afghan life. At present some of the best and noblest
+families in Afghanistan are on the verge of extermination through this
+wretched system. Even the women are not exempt. In a village which
+the missionary visited he noticed that the houses communicated
+laterally by little doors all down one long street; and on inquiry he
+was told that some time before a great faction fight had been carried
+on between the two rows of houses. The villagers 'were always in
+ambush to fire at each other across the street. The only way to get to
+the supply of water was to go from house to house to the bottom, and
+in order to do this without exposure the doors had been made, while by
+common consent they had agreed not to shoot while getting their
+supplies from the stream.' Another anecdote relates how a British
+officer visited a petty chief in his tower, and would have opened a
+window to look at the country round. 'He was hurriedly and
+unceremoniously pulled back by the Afghan, who told him that his
+cousin had been watching that window for months in the hope of an
+opportunity of shooting him there.' In fact the chief was actually
+shot at this window a short time after the visit. From the universal
+enmity existing between cousins in Afghanistan the proverb 'as great
+an enemy as a cousin' has become a household word. 'The causes of 90
+per cent. of these feuds are described by the Afghans as belonging to
+one of three heads--women, money, and land; and on such matters
+disputes are more likely to arise between cousins than strangers.' We
+may compare Mr. Baddeley's account of an almost identical state of
+things in Daghestan. It was split up (he says) 'into numerous khanates
+and free communities of many different races and languages, for the
+most part bitterly hostile one to another. Strife and bloodshed were
+chronic between village and village, between house and house ... and
+of many contributory causes none had operated so powerfully in
+originating and perpetuating this state of things as the elaborate
+system of blood-feud and vengeance.' And he gives one instance of a
+quarrel that arose from the theft of a hen from a villager, who
+retaliated by appropriating a cow. The retort was by taking a horse,
+upon which the murders began.
+
+     'The blood-feud was now in full swing, and was kept up for three
+     centuries, during which some scores, some say hundreds, were
+     sacrificed in the name of honour to this terrible custom; and all
+     for a hen.'
+
+But it may be more interesting to remind our readers that these feuds
+were 'in full swing' not so very long ago in our own island. A
+remarkable description of the state of the Border between England and
+Scotland in the sixteenth century and earlier has recently been
+published.[39] In a chapter headed 'The Deadly Feud' the author tells
+us that blood-feuds set family against family and clan against clan;
+and he quotes from a report submitted by Burghley to the English
+Government a passage in which the term is defined thus:
+
+     'Deadly Foed, the word of enmytie on the Borders, implacable
+     without the blood and whole family destroyed.'
+
+Feuds of the most bitter and hostile character, we are told, were an
+everyday occurrence, and were carried on with the most ferocious
+animosity on both sides. The feud was inherited along with the rest of
+the family property. It was handed down from generation to generation.
+The son and grandson maintained it with a bitterness which in some
+cases seemed year by year to grow more intense. It affected a man's
+whole social relationship, and gave rise to endless animosities and
+heart-burnings.
+
+In fact the whole description in Mr. Borland's book of the feuds
+prevalent three centuries ago on our own Border might be applied to
+those now actually raging among the Afghans, with the simple
+alteration of time, places, and names. The comparison is worth making,
+if only to show that similar conditions and circumstances produce
+everywhere the same results; and that there is yet hope for the wild
+Afghan, if hereafter it should be his destiny to fall under a strong
+government that can enforce laws, though this is the fate which he
+most dreads. No axiom is more easily refuted by historic experience
+than the commonplace saying that men cannot be made moral by statutes;
+the truth is that respect for a neighbour's purse or person cannot be
+inculcated by any other method.
+
+It was the political division along the Scottish Border that so long
+prevented the suppression of lawlessness, and when the two kingdoms
+were united it gradually ceased. On the frontier between Afghanistan
+and India the British Government keeps the peace within its own
+districts, but maintains only a fluctuating and ineffectual control
+over the tribal territory. Yet it is manifest that no permanent
+pacification can be accomplished until both sides of the line are
+brought under the same firm and civilised administration. For such a
+purpose it would be necessary, and would be practicable, to establish
+strong posts among the turbulent highlanders, to make roads, and
+probably to insist on a general disarmament, as the Russians did in
+the Caucasus. But the British Government has always been reluctant to
+undertake so arduous and so costly a task; though until some measure
+of that kind is found possible, the intestine strife and chronic
+disorder must continue; and in fact it is the natural and inevitable
+solution of the problem.
+
+     'No doubt,' Dr. Pennell observes, 'the Government desires not to
+     make any further annexation of this barren, mountainous, and
+     uninviting region, but it is not always easy to avoid doing so; and
+     it is an universal experience of history that when there are a
+     number of disorganised and ill-governed units on the borders of a
+     great power, they become inevitably, though it may be gradually and
+     piece by piece, absorbed into the latter.'
+
+In short, to manage a country without occupying it is no less
+impossible than to steer a boat without taking a seat in it. The
+process of subordinating the Afghan tribes to effective control will
+probably go forward slowly and at intervals. It may be that when one
+part of the country is taken resolutely into hand, the rest will be
+overawed and quieted; but we doubt whether any other remedy can be
+found for the feuds and forays that from time immemorial have
+distracted this borderland, which has preserved the primitive
+conditions of life and habits that have long disappeared from the
+frontiers of all other civilised nations. Yet the objections to
+pushing forward our landmarks into these mountains are great and
+manifest, while the disadvantages of the present system are equally
+patent. The attempt to protect our subjects by a line of outposts, to
+adopt the tactics of stationary defence, varied by occasional sallies
+forth from our cantonments to pursue assassins or to punish
+depredators by destroying houses and crops, is to assume a somewhat
+impotent and undignified attitude, hardly creditable in the case of a
+mighty empire worried by mere highland caterans. The Indian
+Government, therefore, finds itself placed in a dilemma: to advance or
+to stand still is equally difficult; nor is any practicable issue out
+of this situation to be foreseen.
+
+We are compelled, unwillingly, to pass over without the notice that it
+undoubtedly deserves Dr. Pennell's very impressive accounts of his
+intercourse, as medical missionary, with the strange folk whom he was
+trying to reclaim from savagery, of the risks which he faced with cool
+courage and self-command in his travels among them, and of his quaint
+theological disputations with arrogant Mullahs, whose invincible
+ignorance easily convinced a congenial audience of their argumentative
+superiority. His skill in surgery naturally invested him with a high
+reputation among people who were incessantly fighting--he had more
+success in healing their wounds than in curing their vices. His
+general 'Deductions' in regard to the present state and prospect of
+Christian missions in India are well worth attention, and with his
+survey of the existing conditions and tendencies of religious
+movements in India all who have studied the subject will generally
+agree. He lays stress on the delusion that to assault and overthrow
+the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, if such an achievement were
+possible, would be to lay open a clear field for the success of
+Christianity. 'Much more probably we should find an atheistic and
+materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and
+Worldliness had become new gods.' Such attacks upon Eastern religion
+'may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory ... but they are at the same
+time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the
+unquestioning devotion which have been the crown and glory of India
+for ages.' The wisdom and enlightened morality of these warnings are
+incontestable. But at such questions we can only glance, although from
+one point of view they may be said to have an important bearing upon
+the main subject of this article.
+
+In conclusion, we may observe that the frontiers of European dominion
+in Asia are the battleground upon which the forces of archaic and
+modern societies meet in arms for decisive conflict. In the ancient
+world the contest was only ethnical and political; the rude tribes
+were coerced into amalgamation with an expanding State, far superior
+in power and usually more humane. 'The nations of the empire[40]
+insensibly melted away into the Roman name and people.' But the
+antique polytheism had no fanatical element; the deities of the
+victorious Romans were often acknowledged and accepted by the
+conquered population. Whereas in these latter days the Russians in the
+Caucasus and the English on the Afghan border have discovered that in
+the passionate religious animosity between Islam and Christendom lies
+the mainspring of the stubborn energy and fierce hatred that so long
+held their armies in check, and that still prevents the establishment
+of even a pacific _modus vivendi_ on the most important frontier of
+India.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] (1) _The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus._ By John F. Baddeley.
+London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1908. (2) _Among the Wild Tribes of
+the Afghan Frontier._ By J. L. Pennell, M.D., F.R.C.S. London, Seeley
+and Co., 1909.--_Edinburgh Review_, July 1909.
+
+[39] _Border Raids and Reivers_, by Robert Borland, Minister of Yarrow
+(1898). This valuable work, founded entirely on the study of original
+documents, may be heartily commended to all who are interested in the
+political and social life, the customs and traditions, of the old
+Border.
+
+[40] Gibbon.
+
+
+
+
+L'EMPIRE LIBÉRAL[41]
+
+
+The fourteenth volume of _L'Empire Libéral_, issued in 1909, carries
+M. Émile Ollivier's very interesting reminiscences of that eventful
+period up to the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870. It
+contains many curious particulars of the incidents and transactions
+culminating in the rupture with Prussia that brought about the
+downfall of his ministry and the ruin of the Second Empire.
+Autobiographies by men who have taken a prominent part in the
+momentous scenes which they describe have often the powerful effect of
+a dramatic representation: the actors reappear on the stage; they
+plead for themselves; they give vivid impressions of the scenes; they
+repeat the very words that were spoken; they revive the intense
+emotion of the audience during the contest between those who are
+hurrying on toward some fatal catastrophe and those who are striving
+to prevent it. M. Ollivier's volume is the story of a great historic
+tragedy; the principal _dramatis personæ_ are celebrities of the first
+rank; on their speech and action depend the destinies of France, and
+the spectators are the nations of Europe. If we make due allowance for
+the fact that the author's main object is to explain and defend the
+part which he himself played in these important affairs, we may credit
+him with an honest desire to set a strange, complicated, and oft-told
+story in a clear light before the present generation.
+
+M. Ollivier cites, in the first page of this volume, Machiavelli's
+observation that mankind at large judges those who give advice in
+affairs of state not by the wisdom of their counsels but by the
+results. He agrees that this method is not rational, looking to the
+haphazard course of human affairs, but he admits that the multitude
+can judge by no other standard; and he appeals to historians for an
+impartial revision of the popular verdict, founded on careful
+examination of the real facts and circumstances. Yet he fears lest in
+his own country the decline of patriotic enthusiasm, the cooling of
+military ardour, that he notices in France at the present time, may
+have rendered Frenchmen incapable of realising the hot resentment, the
+intense susceptibility to affronts, the element of heroism, which were
+dominant forty years ago in the national character. And he therefore
+has little or no expectation that the falsehood of legends which have
+been circulated regarding the events of 1870 will be proved, to his
+countrymen, even by the most irrefragable demonstration. All political
+parties in France, he says, have combined to hold their own ministry
+responsible for that calamitous war; he despairs of obtaining from
+them a hearing. He awaits with resignation the time when some
+inquisitive student of history may light upon a dusty copy of his book
+in the recesses of a library, and may set himself to explain how these
+things actually happened to readers of the future.
+
+The story of the decline and fall of the second French empire has
+often been told; yet it may be worth while to remind English readers
+of the political situation in France just forty years ago. The Emperor
+Napoleon III., importuned by reformers and reactionaries, by those who
+pressed him to step forward into Liberalism, and by those who insisted
+that he must stand still, had at last decided upon making those
+changes in the form of his government that inaugurated the Liberal
+Empire; and on January 3, 1870, the new ministry took office,
+supported by the goodwill of the moderate party in the Chamber of
+Deputies and by the general approval of the country. M. Ollivier was
+recognised as its leader and spokesman, chosen by the emperor, and
+enjoying his particular confidence; though he was not prime minister
+in the English constitutional sense, for the power of issuing direct
+orders, and of overruling the Cabinet, was still reserved to the
+sovereign; nor was he always consulted in important military or
+foreign affairs. The complex and enigmatic character of Napoleon III.
+is becoming gradually intelligible to the world at large, and public
+opinion has lately been veering round to a less unfavourable
+conclusion upon it than heretofore. He had long been reviled as a
+truculent despot, artful and dangerous, powerful and perfidious; the
+genius of Victor Hugo had set on him a brand of infamy. In reality, if
+we may trust later French writers, there was much that was good in his
+nature, and they are disposed to regard him with compassion. M. de la
+Gorce says that throughout his life Napoleon had been a humane prince.
+From the entertaining memoirs of General du Barail, whose military
+services brought him into frequent relations with the emperor, we
+should draw the impression that the emperor was affable, considerate,
+and sincerely well-intentioned. Giuseppe Pasolini, the Italian
+statesman, found him simple and easy in conversation, naturally
+right-minded and kindly,[42] though weak and irresolute. He was
+equally capable of forming bold projects or adopting cautious
+decisions; but he was apt to hesitate and turn round at the moment for
+action; and it was just here that he was so unlike his uncle, Napoleon
+I., who would have classed him among the _idéologues_ whom he
+despised. He invented the theory of nationalities to justify his
+polity of encouraging the unification of Italy, and of permitting the
+aggrandisement of Germany; in the former instance he alienated the
+Italians by refusing obstinately to allow them to occupy Rome; in the
+latter case his neutrality when Prussia attacked Austria in 1866 was
+the proximate cause of his ruin. He might have read in Machiavelli's
+_Principe_ a warning of the danger of standing aside when the
+neighbouring potentates come to blows. The result, it is there said,
+is that the winner in such a contest becomes doubly formidable, while
+the loser resents your neutral attitude, and will not help you when
+the victor turns upon you with all his strength. Machiavelli declares
+that this policy has always been _perniciosissimo_; and so it proved
+to be in the case of the French Empire. In domestic affairs also the
+Liberal Empire took up a kind of half-way position, which was assailed
+by the extreme parties on both sides; for thorough-going Imperialists
+like Rouher asserted that a Napoleon could only rule by retaining
+absolute authority; while uncompromising Liberals demanded full
+parliamentary control. Ollivier's ministry took office with the avowed
+object of gradually extending constitutional administration; but he
+found that, as Tocqueville had said in his _Ancien Régime_, the most
+dangerous moment for an absolute government is when it endeavours to
+introduce reforms.
+
+General du Barail, in the memoirs already quoted, gives M. Ollivier
+full credit for his honesty, ability, and sincere patriotism in
+undertaking his difficult task, which was begun in an evil hour, and
+failed through adverse circumstance. In May 1870, Ollivier, who was
+holding the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, transferred it to the Duc de
+Gramont, foreseeing no troubles abroad, and desiring to give his
+whole attention to politics at home. The external policy of the
+ministry was decidedly pacific; they relied on a quiet moment for
+developing the new constitutional system; they had no notion of
+changing horses in mid-stream, yet most unluckily they were caught by
+a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that
+Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the
+crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim;
+and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting
+of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of
+French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence
+in Spain was essential to the security of France; while, on the other
+hand, a complete subordination of Spanish to French interests has been
+held by other governments to be dangerous to the balance of power in
+Europe. The collision between these two principles had been the cause
+of great wars and diplomatic quarrels. Louis XIV. only succeeded in
+securing the Spanish throne for his grandson after a long war. When
+Napoleon I. made his nefarious attempt to impose his brother on the
+Spaniards as their king, his pretext was that under the Bourbon
+dynasty Spain had always been a dependency of France; and it had been
+the invariable aim of English policy to prevent a close association of
+the two kingdoms. The question had long been regarded on all sides as
+one of vital importance; and in 1869, when some information of secret
+negotiations between Bismarck and Marshal Prim had leaked out, the
+French ambassador at Berlin, Benedetti, had warned Bismarck that
+France would oppose the election of a Prussian prince to the vacant
+throne of Spain. Bismarck had treated the information as an improbable
+rumour, yet he had carefully abstained from a formal assurance that
+the king would forbid Prince Leopold to accept any such offer.[43] It
+was therefore quite certain that in 1870, when the relations between
+France and Prussia were in a very critical state, the announcement
+that Prince Leopold had been chosen for Spain would be treated as a
+most threatening move on the political chessboard. Italy was under
+deep obligation to Prussia for aid in expelling the Austrians from
+Venice; the St. Gothard railway had been openly promoted and
+subsidised by Germany for direct and secure communication with Italy
+in case of need; and now the family connection which was obviously
+contemplated would bring Spain into the circle of alliances that
+Bismarck was drawing round the French frontier. It was a strategical
+manoeuvre that the imperial government was bound to resist. Within
+France all factions were for once unanimous in demanding immediate and
+resolute protest; and the clerical party, very powerful in that
+country, were especially vehement in denouncing the project of placing
+the scion of a great Protestant dynasty on the 'throne of Charles V.'
+M. Ollivier tells us that when the news first reached him it brought
+upon him suddenly and painfully the presentiment of impending war, to
+the discomfiture of all his efforts for the preservation of peace
+until the Liberal Empire should have been consolidated in France.
+
+The plot--for it was nothing less--had been skilfully concerted
+between Berlin and Madrid; and even the parts to be played in
+anticipation of French remonstrances had been rehearsed. When
+Benedetti went to the Berlin Foreign Office for explanations, he found
+that Bismarck was absent at his country house and the king at Ems; and
+Von Thiele, the Under-Secretary, cut short his interrogation by
+replying at once that the Prussian Government knew nothing of, and had
+no concern with, the Hohenzollern candidature, adding that the Spanish
+people had a right to choose their own king. At Madrid,
+notwithstanding the French ambassador's attempts to check Prim's
+jubilant activity, Leopold's acceptance of the crown was proclaimed to
+all the foreign courts as a matter for joyful congratulation; and the
+Cortes were summoned for July 20 to elect their new monarch. To demand
+satisfaction from Spain would have been to fall into Bismarck's net;
+for the Hohenzollern prince would have been elected nevertheless, and
+if French troops had then marched into Spain the Prussian army would
+have crossed the Rhine, whereby the French would have been placed
+between two fires. It was necessary to fix the responsibility for
+these proceedings upon Prussia, and to act promptly; but the precise
+line to be adopted was the subject of anxious deliberation in the
+emperor's council--that is, in a meeting of the Cabinet presided over
+by him. Finally, Ollivier proposed, as he has told us, to speak out so
+plainly that Prussia must understand France to be in earnest, and to
+say that the Hohenzollern could not be permitted to reign at Madrid.
+Marshal Le Boeuf had assured the council that the army was in the
+highest condition of efficiency and readiness; and when M. Ollivier
+inquired whether, in the event of war, any help from other governments
+could be relied upon, Napoleon produced certain letters from the
+Austrian emperor and the King of Italy, which he interpreted as
+distinct assurances of armed support in the case of a rupture with
+Prussia. The wording of a declaration to be made before the French
+Chamber of Deputies was carefully settled--it was delivered next day
+(July 6) by the Duc de Gramont, and received with immense enthusiasm.
+Some objection was taken, then and afterwards, to its menacing tone;
+but we may agree with M. Ollivier that this outspoken warning to
+Prussia was at the moment judicious and effective; and we may admit
+that up to this point no exception could be taken to the procedure of
+the French Government.
+
+M. Ollivier dates from July 6 the first of five phases, or alternating
+changes (_péripéties_), which the diplomatic campaign, as he terms it,
+traversed in its headlong course. They are successively described and
+commented upon in the chapters of his volume; and they may be here set
+down in his own language, for the guidance of our readers through the
+complicated transactions that ensued:
+
+     'Le premier moment est la déclaration ministérielle du 6 juillet;
+     le second, la renonciation du Prince Antoine (11 juillet); le
+     troisième, la demande de garanties de la droite (12 juillet); le
+     quatrième, le soufflet de Bismarck et la fabrication de la dépêche
+     d'Ems; le cinquième, notre réponse au soufflet de Bismarck par
+     notre déclaration de guerre du 15 juillet.'
+
+These are, in fact, the five acts of a portentous drama, full of
+shifting scenes and striking situations, on the issues of which
+depended the fortunes of France and of Germany; it was played out with
+ill-omened rapidity in nine days. In regard to the train of causes and
+consequences that brought France to the tremendous disaster upon which
+the curtain fell, diverse accounts have been given to the world by the
+leading actors--by M. de Gramont, by Bismarck, Benedetti, and, the
+latest by many years, by M. Ollivier. His narrative does raise
+somewhat higher the veil which has hitherto kept in partial obscurity
+certain dark corners of the stage upon which these things went on. We
+know more now of the precise motives and considerations, the personal
+influences and impulses which diverted the Cabinet, after starting on
+the right path, into leaving it for rash and perilous adventures. On
+some points of interest he is, indeed, still reticent, and on others
+his evidence is in conflict with different narratives; but in regard
+to facts actually known to him we may accept his testimony, though in
+matters of opinion we may sometimes differ from him.
+
+M. Ollivier insists that Gramont's declaration of July 6 was
+altogether _irréprochable_; he writes that he has read it again after
+so many years with satisfaction. He admits that it contained,
+substantially, an intimation to Prussia that she must choose between
+withdrawing the Hohenzollern candidate and accepting war with France;
+but he argues that this straightforward and peremptory warning was
+justified by its effects; that Bismarck was taken aback and
+discomfited by the resolute attitude of the French ministry, supported
+enthusiastically by the Chamber of Deputies; and that Prince Antoine
+was thereby so intimidated as to compel his son Leopold to retract his
+acceptance of the Spanish crown. On the other hand, this stern
+language alarmed cautious deputies, and though it stirred Paris to a
+pitch of wild excitement it was read with uneasiness in the cooler air
+of the French provinces, where the prospect of imminent war met with
+scanty welcome.[44] The foreign governments were startled. Bismarck,
+in his _Reminiscences_, says that it was an 'official international
+threat, uttered with the hand on the sword-hilt,' From the Austrian
+chancellor, Count Beust, came earnest advice against marching hastily
+into Prussia; while the British Cabinet, in particular, doubted the
+wisdom of taking up such high ground, from which it might be difficult
+to retreat, at the opening of a grave and complicated question. And
+our ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons, whose calm judgment and friendly
+counsels M. Ollivier acknowledges unreservedly, exerted himself
+throughout this critical time to deprecate precipitate words and
+deeds.
+
+Simultaneously Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, had been
+ordered to seek an interview with the Prussian king, and to impress
+upon him the necessity of appeasing the just indignation of the French
+people by forbidding Leopold to accept the crown of Spain. The king
+replied, as is well known, that he had treated the candidature
+entirely as a family matter, quite apart from the sphere of
+international politics; that he had nevertheless communicated with
+Leopold, and could give Benedetti no positive answer until he should
+have heard from that prince. If, as has been asserted, the king had
+been cognisant of Bismarck's secret negotiations, this reply was more
+evasive than ingenuous; and we may note that he immediately directed
+his own ambassador, Werther, who was present at Ems, to return at once
+to Paris. M. Ollivier scores the king's order to the credit of
+Benedetti's diplomacy, since it amounted to an admission that the
+question in debate was much more than a mere family concern. And he
+adds that he immediately urged Gramont to allow no more equivocation
+upon this essential point, but to press Werther for a straightforward
+reply upon it. It will be seen that this pressure was carried rather
+too far at the French Foreign Office, with an important effect upon
+the course of negotiations.
+
+But at this juncture supervened the _coup de théâtre_, as M. Ollivier
+styles it, which opens the second act of the drama. Olozaga, the
+Spanish ambassador at Paris, had been left in complete ignorance of
+the privy correspondence between Prim and Bismarck for procuring the
+nomination of a king from the Hohenzollern family, and this sudden
+revelation of its result by no means pleased him. He proposed to the
+Emperor Napoleon to despatch to Prince Antoine at Sigmaringen (in
+Prussian territory) an agent of his own, who should use every effort
+to convince the prince that his son must be imperatively commanded to
+withdraw his acceptance of Prim's offer. The emperor, whose sincere
+wish was for peace, consented willingly, and the mission was entirely
+successful. By long and strenuous argument the envoy had finally
+persuaded the father that his son, Leopold, would find himself in a
+precarious position on the Spanish throne, with France alienated and
+openly hostile; and the result was that Prince Antoine not only laid
+on his son a positive command to withdraw, but also telegraphed the
+decision to the principal German newspapers, to Olozaga at Paris, and
+to Madrid. According to M. Ollivier, Bismarck felt the blow keenly; it
+shattered his carefully organised plans; he found himself baffled and
+humiliated; he has himself said that his first thought was to resign
+office.[45] To the king, on the other hand, the news brought welcome
+relief; he supposed that he had now only to await Prince Antoine's
+letter confirming the public telegram, when the dispute would
+naturally drop with the disappearance of its cause. This was,
+moreover, the expectation at that moment of the French emperor, who
+observed that, if France and England were preparing to fight for the
+possession of an island in the Channel, it would be absurd to go to
+war after discovering that the island had sunk to the bottom of the
+sea.
+
+In those days, M. Ollivier explains, any telegram of political
+interest that passed over the Paris wires was communicated, by
+special arrangement, to the Ministère de l'Intérieur; and accordingly
+he received a copy of Prince Antoine's message to Olozaga before it
+reached its address. The contents filled him with exultation--he could
+feel no doubt that peace had now been triumphantly secured, mainly by
+the unflinching tone of the Cabinet's declaration. He carried the
+paper with him to the Chamber, where Olozaga rushed up to him in the
+lobby, drew him into a corner, read to him with much obvious
+excitement the telegram which Ollivier had already in his pocket, and
+hurried on to the Foreign Office. Naturally the incident aroused
+general curiosity; the deputies surrounded the minister, and eagerly
+pressed him for information. M. Ollivier tells us that he hesitated
+for some time before divulging his secret; but that on the whole he
+found no good reason for withholding news that would certainly appear
+within a few hours in the evening papers, so he read out the telegram
+to all present. We believe that few men, who had not been trained by
+experience to the cautious habits of official life, would have done
+otherwise. But M. de la Gorce[46] has pointed out that the chief
+minister ought to have kept silence until the renunciation had been
+approved and confirmed by the King of Prussia, who was in hourly
+expectation of Prince Antoine's letter, and whose acquiescence,
+transmitted through Benedetti to the French Government, would have
+probably brought the whole affair to an honourable termination. It may
+be objected that this is to argue from consequences, since known,
+which could hardly be foreseen at the moment; yet one must admit that
+reticence would have been preferable, for we have to remember that M.
+Ollivier was disclosing a telegram intercepted, so to speak, on its
+passage to a foreign embassy, thereby forestalling not only the
+Spanish ambassador but also the French Foreign Office.
+
+The news ran round the Palais Législatif, inside and outside, and
+spread through Paris with electrical rapidity.
+
+     'En même temps débouchait du Palais Législatif une bande agitée;
+     c'était à qui envahirait les fiacres de la place, à qui les
+     escaladerait, à qui les prendrait d'assaut. À la Bourse, criaient
+     les hommes d'affaires; nous doublons le prix de la course, et au
+     triple galop. Parmi les journalistes, même empressement et concert
+     de même nature, et on voyait les haridelles de la place sortir
+     l'une après l'autre et s'élancer rapides comme des flèches.'
+
+Apparently all this stir and hurry had already affected M. Ollivier
+with some misgivings; for when, on going into one of the
+committee-rooms, he met Gressier, formerly a minister, he assured him
+that he (Ollivier) had no intention of making the renunciation a
+stepping-stone toward further demands. 'To take up that ground,'
+replied Gressier, 'will be a proof of courage, but it will bring down
+your ministry, for the country will never be content with this degree
+of satisfaction.' M. Ollivier soon found that he was right; for a
+crowd of deputies began to protest against the faint-heartedness of a
+government that seemed willing to drop the whole affair, leaving
+Prussia to escape scot-free; and M. Ollivier had scarcely entered the
+Chamber when Clément Duvernois rose with an interpellation asking what
+guarantees the Cabinet proposed to require for the purpose of
+restraining Prussia from inventing more complications of this sort.
+
+Olozaga had taken his telegram to M. de Gramont, who by no means
+shared M. Ollivier's joy over it. He observed that the effect was
+rather to embarrass his negotiations with Prussia, since that
+government could now make the renunciation a pretext for disowning
+the responsibility which he desired to fix upon the king with regard
+to the whole business; and, moreover, he added, public opinion in
+France will consider such a conclusion unsatisfactory. He was at that
+moment engaged in colloquy with Werther, the Prussian ambassador, who
+had presented himself at the Foreign Office, where presently M.
+Ollivier joined them, Olozaga having departed. What followed is
+treated by some French writers as the most ill-conceived of all the
+false moves made by the French players in this hazardous diplomatic
+game. Gramont had been urging Werther to advise the Prussian king to
+write a letter to the emperor, to the effect that in authorising the
+acceptance of the Spanish throne by Leopold he had no idea of giving
+umbrage to France; that the king associated himself with the prince's
+renunciation, and hoped that all causes of misunderstanding between
+the two governments were thereby removed. Gramont sketched out what he
+thought the king might say, and actually made over his note to the
+Prussian ambassador, by way of _aide-mémoire_; precisely as in 1867
+Benedetti had trusted Bismarck with his draft of the secret treaty
+proposed for the annexation of Belgium to France, which Bismarck
+afterwards published in the _Times_ of July 1870. M. Ollivier, who
+agreed with and supported Gramont, now maintains that his arrival
+changed the character of the conference, that it ceased to be an
+official interview between the Minister of Foreign Affairs and an
+ambassador, and thenceforward became merely one of those free
+unofficial conversations in which politicians explain their views
+without compromising their respective governments. But we are obliged
+to remark that in our judgment this plea is inadmissible, for M. de
+Gramont has explicitly stated that the interview, so far as he was
+concerned, was official,[47] and Werther could not have been expected
+to appreciate this subtle yet important distinction--of which nothing
+seems to have been said to him--while M. Ollivier should have foreseen
+that Bismarck would certainly ignore it. The result was that Werther
+did transmit to his king the suggestion of the two French ministers;
+that the king was deeply offended at having been required to send what
+he called, not unreasonably, a letter of excuses; that Bismarck used
+Werther's despatch to kindle national indignation throughout Germany;
+and that Werther himself was reprimanded and recalled.
+
+The scene now shifts to St. Cloud, where the poor emperor, who had
+supposed that Prince Antoine's telegram signified peace with honour,
+found a military party eager for war, and hotly asserting that the
+empire would be totally discredited unless satisfaction were demanded
+from Prussia for conniving at the Hohenzollern candidature. The
+interpellation of Duvernois in the Chamber was cited as a forcible
+expression of public opinion. M. Gramont now arrived at the palace
+with his report of the interview with Werther, in which the latter had
+persistently declared that the king had nothing whatever to do with
+Leopold's withdrawal. The emperor's unstable mind began to waver; he
+forgot or put aside his arrangement with M. Ollivier--that the
+ministers should meet him next morning for consultation over this new
+aspect of the affair--and he proceeded then and there to hold a
+Cabinet Council.
+
+What passed at this Council has never been exactly known. The reproach
+of a ruinous blunder lies heavy on those who took part in it. Gramont
+says no more than that the deliberations were conscientious, and that
+every one, including the emperor, earnestly desired peace.[48] M.
+Ollivier tells us, in the volume now before us, that of all the
+Cabinet ministers the Duc de Gramont alone was summoned; whether he
+learnt subsequently who were also present, and what share they took in
+promoting the decision, he leaves his readers to guess. It is clear
+that the proceeding was irregular and totally unconstitutional, and
+other French writers hint that Gramont's silence is intended to shield
+_une personne auguste_ from responsibility for a decision that was
+fatally wrong. When the Council broke up at 7 P. M. (July 12) Gramont
+immediately despatched from the Foreign Office his famous telegram to
+Benedetti at Ems, instructing him to require from the Prussian king a
+positive assurance that he would not authorise the renewal of
+Leopold's candidature--a demand, in short, for guarantees. At his
+office he met Lord Lyons, to whom he expounded his reasons for
+treating the single renunciation as inadequate, to the great surprise
+of our ambassador, who objected so strenuously to Gramont's views and
+intentions that the minister, somewhat shaken, merely said that the
+formal decision would be made public next morning. While the emperor
+and two councillors were then taking irrevocable steps toward a
+collision, and were unconsciously playing into the hands of their
+arch-enemy, the leaders of the warlike faction in the Chamber and the
+Parisian press were clamouring with fury and vitriolic sarcasm against
+a faint-hearted and contemptible ministry that shrank from seizing the
+opportunity of humbling Prussia.
+
+Again the scene changes, this time to the Foreign Office, where M.
+Ollivier, in total ignorance of that evening's Council at St. Cloud,
+sought and found the Duc de Gramont about midnight. He had come to
+ask whether any fresh news had been received from Benedetti at Ems;
+and Gramont answered by showing him the telegram just despatched by
+the Council's order to Benedetti, with a letter to himself from the
+emperor desiring that its language should be stiffened. Naturally M.
+Ollivier could hardly control his resentment at discovering that an
+extremely grave resolution had been adopted and acted upon without
+consulting or even warning him beforehand; that the emperor, in spite
+of his promises to govern constitutionally, had reverted to such an
+extreme use of autocratic power; and that Gramont had made no attempt
+to check it, had even abetted the irregularity. However, the telegram
+had gone to Ems--it was too late to remedy that mischief--but the
+Cabinet would have to answer before the Chamber for its despatch. He
+said to Gramont:
+
+     'On va vous accuser d'avoir prémédité la guerre et de n'avoir vu
+     dans l'incident Hohenzollern qu'un prétexte de la provocation.
+     N'accentuez pas votre première dépêche comme vous le prescrit
+     l'Empereur, atténuez la. Benedetti aura déjà accompli sa mission
+     lorsque cette atténuation lui parviendra, mais devant la Chambre
+     vous y trouverez un argument pour établir vos intentions
+     pacifiques.'[49]
+
+And he at once drafted a telegram instructing Benedetti to require
+from the king no more than that he should agree not to permit Leopold
+to retract the particular renunciation which his father had obtained
+from him; instead of requiring a general assurance against _any
+future_ retractation. Gramont telegraphed accordingly, but in
+continuation, not in correction, of his earlier message, so that the
+latter part of the instructions to Benedetti was inconsistent with the
+former part. But this second telegram reached Ems, as M. Ollivier had
+foreseen, too late, for Benedetti had already seen the king, and had
+been urging him persistently to satisfy the French Government by
+conceding the general assurance.
+
+M. Ollivier's description of the distress and perplexity that kept him
+without sleep during the rest of that eventful night will be read with
+a feeling of sincere commiseration. This, then, he reflected, was the
+first fruit of imperial liberalism, that the chief minister was
+slighted by his sovereign, ill-served and even betrayed by his
+colleagues, and committed, behind his back, to a most hazardous
+policy. He had been too soft-hearted to insist on making a clean sweep
+of the old official class in forming his Cabinet; he had thought to
+replace the decrepit absolutism by a young and liberal empire; and
+here was the personal power reappearing at the first crisis. The idea
+of having given the signal for war was abhorrent to him; he felt
+violently tempted to resign and retire. Yet, on reflection, to tender
+his resignation at such a moment would be, he felt, an act of culpable
+egoism, it would inevitably bring on the war; for the government would
+pass into the hands of a rash and impetuous war-party, manifestly bent
+on marching against Prussia if the king persisted in refusing, as on
+hearing of Ollivier's resignation he would assuredly refuse, the
+guarantees that had been demanded by the Council held at St. Cloud. On
+the other hand, by remaining in the ministry he might still command a
+majority in the Cabinet; nor did he despair of a majority in the
+Chamber to support him in cancelling, at some future stage of the
+negotiations, this demand for guarantees if he could recover the
+emperor's confidence. He might fail, but then he would fall
+honourably, having subordinated personal susceptibilities to
+considerations of his country's interest; so he finally determined not
+to resign office.
+
+Our sympathies are unquestionably due to a minister who, finding
+himself placed, by no act of his own, in a situation of the utmost
+perplexity, resolves to take no account of his political reputation
+and personal interests, and to choose the course that he believes to
+be necessary, in arduous circumstances, for the honour and safety of
+his country. To a British prime minister his duty would have been
+clear, he would have tendered his resignation immediately; but under
+the Liberal Empire the ultimate decision upon questions before the
+Cabinet still lay with the sovereign, and thus the responsibilities of
+his principal minister remained ambiguous and indefinite.
+Nevertheless, though it is easy to be wise after the event, our
+opinion must be that M. Ollivier would have done his country better
+service by resigning office; for though it is very probable that war
+could not have been thereby averted, yet unqualified disapproval of
+the demand for guarantees might have rallied to his side all those
+who, in the Cabinet, the Chamber, and the country, were undoubtedly
+opposed to incurring terrible risks in order to obtain pledges against
+future contingencies. Among the late Lord Acton's _Historical Essays_
+there is a remarkable paper on 'The Causes of the Franco-Prussian
+War,' in which the considerations that may justify Gramont's demand
+for guarantees are fairly stated. It is there argued that the Prussian
+king, who had first 'sanctioned' Prince Leopold's candidature, and
+afterwards its withdrawal, had left the initiative in both cases to
+Prince Leopold. He had thus kept himself quite free to sanction a
+second acceptance as he had done the first--'he held in his hands a
+convenient _casus belli_, to be used or dropped at pleasure';
+remembering that the Hohenzollern candidature had been 'a meditated
+offence, long and carefully prepared, insolently denied, which
+demanded reparation.'[50] But one might reply that the best way of
+foiling these deep and deliberate designs, manifestly contrived to
+provoke war, was to give the adversary no such plausible pretext for
+driving France into hostilities as was furnished to Bismarck by
+Gramont's demand. It is evident, however, that in July 1870 all Paris
+was in a state of irrepressible agitation, that the Imperialists in
+the Chamber were determined to push the Government into a defiant and
+warlike policy, and that they were acting in the foolhardy conviction
+that the French army could beat the Prussians, and that a victorious
+campaign would consolidate the Napoleonic dynasty.
+
+The next day, July 13, is an evil date in the history of France, when
+she was hurried into war by a swift succession and very unlucky
+conjunction of incidents. The Council met early, and decided by a
+majority not to call out the army reserves, although Marshal Le
+Boeuf energetically declared that if there were any prospect of war,
+not an hour should be lost in preparation. M. de la Gorce relates that
+four of the councillors passed grave censure on the irregular
+proceedings of the previous evening, and condemned Gramont's telegram.
+M. Ollivier says that it was resolved not to insist further if the
+guarantees were refused by the king, and for the moment to keep the
+demand for them secret, merely informing the Chamber that negotiations
+with Prussia were in progress. Ollivier took his _déjeuner_ at the
+palace, where the household staff greeted him very coldly, and the
+empress, by whom he sat, turned her back on him. In the Chamber
+Duvernois asked in a surly tone when the debate on his interpellation
+would come on, and July 15 was fixed for it. Everything now depended
+on the issue of Benedetti's interview with the king at Ems, which took
+place early on the morning of the 13th, when they met as the king was
+returning by the public promenade from taking the waters. What
+followed is well known. The king was surprised and disappointed at
+learning from the ambassador that Prince Leopold's resignation had not
+settled everything; Benedetti pressed on him Gramont's new demand for
+ulterior guarantees; the king positively refused to give them, and
+parted from him coldly though courteously, promising, however, to see
+him again after receiving the letter expected from Prince Antoine. But
+in the course of that day came Werther's report of his conversation
+with the two French ministers, which the king's private secretary
+opened and carried, in some trepidation, to his majesty. The king was
+grievously offended; he wrote to Queen Augusta that to require him to
+stand before the world as a repentant sinner was nothing less than
+impertinence, and he sent his aide-de-camp, Prince Radziwill (one of
+the highest Prussian nobles), to inform Benedetti that Leopold's
+letter of resignation had arrived, and that, as the affair was thus
+completely ended, no further audience was necessary. The ambassador
+replied that he was particularly instructed to obtain the king's
+specific approbation of Leopold's action, and was therefore obliged to
+solicit another interview. The king replied by his aide-de-camp that
+so far as he had approved Leopold's acceptance of the crown he
+approved the retractation; but the request for another interview,
+though it was twice repeated during the day, was civilly and firmly
+refused.
+
+M. Ollivier argues that Werther's report in no way affected the king's
+behaviour to Benedetti; he affirms that it made no difference at all,
+and that the king's determination to hold no further intercourse with
+him was entirely due to Benedetti's indiscreet importunity at the
+morning's meeting, which was witnessed, it may be noted, by a crowd
+of observant bystanders. We may assume that the king had at no time
+the slightest intention of acceding to the demand for guarantees; but
+it seems to us impossible to maintain that Werther's report, which was
+put into his majesty's hand at such a critical moment, and which
+undeniably gave serious offence, did not exacerbate relations which
+had already been strained, or induce the king to break off abruptly
+the personal negotiations with the French minister. And we may add
+that if Benedetti had been cognisant of this report, he might have
+understood the king's sudden change of temper, and might have spared
+himself some rebuffs. When the matter came afterwards to his
+knowledge, he declared that the effect on the king of Werther's report
+had been deplorable.
+
+Bismarck had been telegraphing from Berlin to Ems that if the king
+accorded to Benedetti any more interviews he must resign office; and
+the news of Prince Leopold's renunciation seemed to cut away the
+ground upon which he had been manoeuvring for a quarrel with France.
+But his spirits revived on receiving by telegraph from the king a
+brief summary of the Ems incidents, stating that Benedetti's
+importunate requisition for guarantees had been rejected by his
+majesty, who had subsequently resolved
+
+     'de ne plus recevoir le comte Benedetti à cause de sa prétention,
+     et de lui faire dire simplement par un aide de camp ... que sa
+     Majesté avait reçu du prince Léopold confirmation de la nouvelle
+     mandée de Paris, et qu'elle n'avait plus rien à dire à
+     l'ambassadeur.'
+
+The telegram also authorised Bismarck to communicate this statement to
+the foreign courts and to the press, whereupon Bismarck gave it
+immediate publication, having made (to use his own phrase) 'some
+suppressions'; having, in fact, maliciously tampered with the text and
+falsified the tone, according to M. Ollivier and other French writers.
+His official organ, the _North German Gazette_, was directed to print
+off a supplement and to paste it up all over Berlin, and copies of
+this supplement were distributed gratis in the streets. A thrill of
+patriotic enthusiasm electrified the nation, who were unanimous in
+applauding the king in defying the French, and mocking at their
+ambassador's humiliation.
+
+     'Dans toutes les langues, dans tous les pays, courait la
+     falsification offensée lancée par Bismarck. L'effet de cette
+     publicité effroyable se produisit d'abord en Allemagne avec autant
+     d'intensité qu'à Berlin. Les journaux faisaient rage.'
+
+This is what M. Ollivier has called 'Le soufflet de Bismarck'; and
+never was the art of changing the tone and import of words without
+altering their substance more effectively employed; for it must be
+acknowledged that the communication to the press was an accurate
+rendering of the facts contained in the king's telegram, which was
+stiff but not actually discourteous; whereas Bismarck put the sting
+into it by little more than adroit condensation. We are told that when
+the king received this revised edition of his message he read it
+twice, was much moved, and said, 'This means war'; and that it rang
+throughout Europe like an alarm-bell. At the same time, and before
+Bismarck's action had been known in Paris, M. Ollivier, as he tells
+us, was struggling vigorously against the torrent of reproaches and
+imputations of cowardice which threatened to overthrow his Cabinet if
+they flinched from the demand for guarantees.
+
+Late on July 13 came a telegram from Benedetti that the king had
+consented to approve unreservedly Prince Leopold's renunciation, but
+distinctly refused any further concession. This, cried the war-party
+at St. Cloud, is totally insufficient; the emperor was irresolute, and
+merely summoned his Council for next day. Ollivier was determined, for
+his part, to accept the king's assurance as conclusively satisfactory;
+and he relates how, on the morning of the 14th, he was engaged in
+drafting, for approval by the Council, a ministerial declaration to
+that effect, when the Duc de Gramont entered his room with a copy of
+Bismarck's circular telegram, and said:
+
+     '"Mon cher, vous voyez un homme qui vient de recevoir une gifle."
+     Il me tend alors une petite feuille de papier jaune que je verrai
+     éternellement devant mes yeux.... On n'échoua jamais plus près du
+     port. Je restai quelques instants silencieux et atterré.'
+
+At the Council, which was immediately summoned, Gramont threw his
+portfolio on the table, saying that after what had happened a Foreign
+Minister who should not vote for war would be unworthy to hold office;
+and Marshal Le Boeuf informed his colleagues that they had not a
+moment to lose, for Prussia was already arming. Nevertheless the
+Council set themselves to a deliberate investigation of the actual
+facts. Their conclusion, after six hours of discussion, was that,
+according to diplomatic rule and international custom, no exception
+could have been taken to the king's refusal, courteously worded, of
+the interview which Benedetti had, it seemed to them, rather
+pertinaciously desired; but that a reasonable refusal had been
+converted into one that was offensive by its publication in terms that
+were intentionally curt and stinging. Nevertheless Ollivier, clinging
+to any slight chance of avoiding war, persuaded the emperor and the
+Council to agree that Leopold's resignation, as approved by the
+Prussian king, should be accepted by France, and that, on the further
+question, whether members of a reigning family in one country could be
+permitted to become kings in another, an appeal for some authoritative
+ruling should be made to a general congress. But in the course of that
+day the ministers received from various quarters more evidence that
+Bismarck's inflammatory telegram had been sent officially to the
+Prussian diplomatists at all the foreign courts; and they heard that
+Paris was literally foaming with exasperation at their dilatory
+indecision, while the temper of the Chamber convinced them that the
+proposal for a congress would be rejected with fiery scorn. Berlin and
+Paris vied with each other in turbulent patriotism and warlike fury,
+and Marshal Le Boeuf, being again and for the last time questioned
+by the Council, replied positively that the French army was quite
+ready, and that no better opportunity of settling accounts with
+Prussia could be expected. The Council rescinded its former decision,
+and voted unanimously for war. The empress alone (Ollivier notes
+particularly) expressed no opinion and gave no vote.
+
+On July 15 Ollivier pronounced in the Chamber the declaration that had
+been drawn up by himself and the Duc de Gramont. It was to the effect
+that the Cabinet had throughout made every possible exertion to
+preserve peace, but that their patience was exhausted when they found
+that the King of Prussia had sent an aide-de-camp to the French
+ambassador informing him that no more interviews could be granted, and
+that the Prussian Government, by way of giving point and unequivocal
+significance to this message, had circulated it to all other foreign
+governments in Europe. Having spared no pains to avoid war, the
+ministers would now accept the challenge, and prepare for the
+consequences.
+
+M. Ollivier has given a vivid description of the scene that ensued.
+His final words were barely audible in the storm of applause that
+swept through the assembly, and the vote of urgency for the motion to
+provide the necessary war-funds was demanded with enthusiastic
+outcries, varied by angry vituperation of the few deputies who stood
+up to oppose it. But Thiers immediately arose and, in spite of many
+disorderly interruptions, made a passionate appeal to the assembly to
+reflect before precipitating the country into war. His speech, with
+the violent cries of dissent interjected by the war-party, is
+reproduced by M. Ollivier in order, as he says, that his readers may
+judge for themselves how far it merited the unstinted eulogy that has
+since been bestowed upon it; for M. Ollivier evidently considers that
+those who have credited Thiers with heroic patriotism in making this
+strenuous effort to avert the catastrophe have over-praised him. Yet
+with this view we believe that few of those who read the pages in this
+volume which contain the speech will agree. They will admire, rather,
+the courage and fervid eloquence of a veteran statesman who vainly
+strove to persuade a frantic assembly that it was fatally misled, that
+it was plunging the nation into war on a mere point of form, grasping
+at a shadow after the substantial and reasonable demand for
+satisfaction had been obtained by Leopold's renunciation; who reminded
+the deputies that the official papers authenticating the supposed
+insult had never been laid before them, and implored them not to risk
+the issues of a terrible contest upon a doubtful question of national
+susceptibility. M. Ollivier goes so far as to affirm that no one could
+be more justly accused of having brought on the war of 1870 than
+Thiers himself, because it was his vehement condemnation of the policy
+which allowed Prussia to beat down Austria in 1866, and to set up a
+formidable military power on the frontier of France, that inspired the
+whole French people with the suspicion, jealous animosities, and alarm
+which rendered a war on the Rhine between the two nations eventually
+unavoidable. But Thiers in his speech emphatically repeated his
+conviction that sooner or later France must fight Prussia to redress
+the balance of military power between the rival countries; and the
+whole point of his speech lay in one sentence: 'Je trouve l'occasion
+détestablement choisie' ('Your _casus belli_ is ill chosen and utterly
+indefensible'). It cannot be denied that in 1870 the public opinion of
+Europe was on his side: for England and Austria, whose goodwill toward
+France was unquestionable, were foremost in their efforts to deter the
+French ministers from war and in deploring their infatuation when it
+had been proclaimed. At St. Petersburg the Russian emperor told the
+French ambassador plainly that the demand for guarantees was
+unreasonable. Nor is it likely that the general judgment of the
+time--that Thiers did his best to save the empire from a disastrous
+blunder--will have been revoked by posterity, or affected by anything
+that has since been pleaded in extenuation.
+
+'If (said Thiers) the Hohenzollern candidature had not been withdrawn,
+all France would have rallied to the support of your declaration, and
+all Europe would have held you to be in the right; but it _has_ been
+withdrawn with the approbation of the Prussian king, and you had
+absolutely no pretext for making any further demand. What will Europe
+say when you shed torrents of blood on a point of form?' M. Thiers
+concluded his speech by urging the ministers to lay before the Chamber
+the actual documents which, as they asserted, rendered war inevitable.
+
+M. Ollivier, in his reply, declined to communicate certain documents
+which, he said, were confidential and could not be produced without
+infringement of diplomatic rules; and he laid stress on the
+impossibility of tolerating the affront which had been intentionally
+put upon France by Bismarck's circular telegram. And it was at the end
+of this speech that he made use of the phrase which has become
+historical as the typical expression of the levity and rashness with
+which his ministry threw their nation into a tremendous war, insomuch
+that it has become one main cause why he is so commonly charged, very
+unfairly, with the whole responsibility for the blind haste that led
+to the defeat and dismemberment of his country. 'Oui, de ce jour
+commence pour les ministres mes collègues et pour moi, une grande
+responsabilité. Nous l'acceptons le coeur léger.' The words were at
+once taken up sharply and severely; and M. Ollivier went on to explain
+that he meant a heart not weighted by remorse, since he and his
+colleagues had done everything that was consistent with humanity and
+with honour to avert a dire necessity; and since the armies of France
+would be upholding a cause that was just. He now comments bitterly on
+the malignity which has fastened this stigma on his name, merely
+because in the heat and flurry of debate, which left him not a moment
+to pick his words or arrange his sentences, he said something that he
+is sure no honest man who listened to his explanation could
+misconstrue into unfeeling frivolity. And in his criticism of the
+speech in which M. Thiers so vehemently condemned the conduct of the
+ministers he repeats emphatically that the war was not brought on by
+the demand for guarantees, but by Bismarck's false and insulting
+publication of the king's refusal to consider that demand. This
+affront, he maintains, was insufferable. Yet we learn from his
+narrative that before entering the Chamber on this eventful day M.
+Ollivier had found at the Foreign Office Benedetti, just arrived from
+Ems, who had already seen Bismarck's telegram in a newspaper, and
+could have assured the ministers that it was a perfidious
+misrepresentation, since the king had not treated him with actual
+discourtesy. Nevertheless M. Ollivier quotes and entirely adopts the
+'proud and manly' utterances of the Duc de Gramont who stood up and
+addressed the assembly towards the close of the debate.
+
+'After what you have just heard,' he said, 'one fact is enough. The
+Prussian Government has informed all the Cabinets of Europe of the
+refusal to receive our ambassador or to continue the discussion with
+him. That is an affront to the emperor and to France, and if (_par
+impossible_) a Chamber could be found in my country to bear or suffer
+it, I would not remain Minister of Foreign Affairs for five minutes.'
+
+These haughty words (we are told) electrified the Chamber, and a
+committee to examine the papers on which the ministers relied to prove
+their case was immediately appointed. These were brought by Gramont,
+who, however, said that he would not lay before the committee the
+precise words of Bismarck's insulting telegram, because his knowledge
+of it came only from a very confidential communication made to him by
+the French representatives at certain foreign courts who had been
+permitted to see the original, so that the authentic text was not in
+his possession. This excuse was accepted, somewhat imprudently, by the
+committee; and their chairman proceeded to question Gramont closely on
+one point--whether, after Leopold's retirement had become known, the
+King of Prussia had been required at one and the same time to approve
+it formally and to promise that the candidature should never be
+revived. During the debate it had been objected by those who opposed
+the war-party that after obtaining the king's approval, and not till
+then, the Foreign Secretary demanded this promise, and that on this
+new demand the king took offence and briefly declined any further
+interview with Benedetti. Gramont answered the chairman with a direct
+affirmative; he stated that the two concessions had been required
+simultaneously, and M. Ollivier undertakes to prove that this
+statement was correct. He argues, if we understand him rightly, that
+before Leopold had withdrawn his candidature, the king had been
+pressed to advise or order him to do so, and that this requisition
+included by implication the demand for a guarantee against its
+renewal. When Leopold had retired without the king's intervention, the
+royal order became unnecessary; but the implied demand still remained
+in force, and was merely repeated in subsequent telegrams.[51] On this
+we must remark that both Benedetti and the Prussian king entirely
+missed the alleged implication; that the question of guarantees was
+never raised by the telegrams interchanged between Gramont and
+Benedetti before Leopold's retirement had become public, when both the
+king and the ambassador treated it as entirely new; and that at any
+rate such an important and highly contentious demand should obviously
+have been stated with unequivocal distinctness, since any other course
+was quite certain to produce misunderstandings and recriminations. And
+it is no matter for surprise that various French writers have since
+accused the Duc de Gramont of misstating the facts upon which the
+committee reported to the Chamber that the papers laid before them
+amply sustained the ministerial request for the grant of an urgent
+war-subsidy, which was thereupon voted by an immense majority. In the
+Senate, where the money was granted with even more promptitude and
+with zealous unanimity, the proceedings were expedited by a report
+from Marshal Le Boeuf that the enemy had already crossed the French
+frontier, and M. Rouher, a thorough Imperialist, headed a deputation
+of senators to congratulate the emperor, in the name of the Senate, on
+having drawn the sword when the Prussian king rejected the demand for
+guarantees. M. Ollivier reasonably complains that this unauthorised
+demonstration was awkward and mischievous; for while the Senate was
+thus made to attribute the rupture to the king's refusal, the ministry
+was declaring war on account of the 'soufflet de Bismarck'--the insult
+embodied in the Prussian telegram. Yet M. Ollivier, looking back in
+the calm evening of life on these stormy days, might have brought
+himself by reflection to admit that between these two pretexts there
+was little to choose--that neither of them justified a government in
+staking the fortunes of the nation and the empire on the hazard of a
+great war. When Rouher had read his address, the sovereigns conversed
+with the senators, and it was remarked that while the empress was
+lively and confident of success, the emperor spoke sadly of the long
+and difficult task, requiring a most violent effort, that lay before
+them.
+
+Having brought his narrative up to the moment when the Chamber by
+voting the subsidy had practically determined upon war, M. Ollivier
+stops to comment upon and explain the strenuous opposition made to the
+vote by M. Thiers and by the small section of deputies who represented
+the Radical Left. He is convinced that this latter party were mainly
+actuated in their ardent protests by a desire to embarrass and, if
+possible, to overthrow his Government, of which they had been
+consistent adversaries. They had calculated, he explains, on the
+probability that the ministry would flinch from the rupture with
+Prussia, would adopt some pacific compromise that would be rejected
+with indignation by the Chamber, and would be contemptuously expelled
+from office. When this calculation had been foiled by the resolutely
+courageous attitude of the Cabinet, they foresaw (he believes) that a
+triumphant campaign would greatly strengthen the Government and would
+utterly discredit the Opposition, so they changed their tactics and
+fought against the ministerial proposals with accusations of criminal
+recklessness and prophecies of disaster. It is hardly possible, after
+so long an interval of time, to form any opinion upon these somewhat
+invidious suggestions. The action of those who opposed the war,
+whatever may have been their motives, was outwardly consistent enough,
+and the construction placed upon it by M. Ollivier may seem rather
+subtle and far-fetched. At the present day, however, this question
+does not particularly concern any one, though we may agree that at
+that moment no one in France contemplated the possibility of defeat in
+the field. The French army was assumed by all parties to be
+invincible, and the minority in opposition did undoubtedly believe and
+fear that the empire would be consolidated by victories. M. Thiers in
+his speech only touched generally upon the chances and perils of war,
+and even Gambetta voted with the Government upon the conviction that
+success was beyond doubt; while not only in Paris, but in all the
+great towns, the determination to fight was acclaimed because a
+triumphant campaign was supposed to be certain. It was to be
+anticipated, indeed, that a brave and high-spirited nation, very
+sensitive on the point of honour, and confident in its military
+superiority, would respond enthusiastically to the signal of war
+against a rival whose ill-will was notorious, who was accused of
+plotting the injury of their country and of deliberately insulting
+their Government.
+
+A public declaration of hostilities was sent to Berlin, though M.
+Ollivier tells us that his ministry regarded it as a superfluous
+formality which they would have preferred leaving to Prussia.
+
+     'La déclaration fut libellée d'une manière assez maladroite par les
+     commis des Affaires étrangères, et elle ne fut pas même lue au
+     Conseil. Elle fut communiquée uniquement par la forme et sans
+     discussion aux Assemblées, et envoyée à la Prusse le 19 juillet.'
+
+This perfunctory method of composition is characteristic of the
+prevailing official atmosphere.
+
+The document was delivered by the French chargé d'affaires to
+Bismarck, and in the dialogue that followed between the two
+diplomatists, which M. Ollivier relates in full, we have an excellent
+sample of the Prussian Chancellor's sardonic and incisive manner.
+Bismarck asserted that if he had been present at the interviews with
+Benedetti he might have prevented the war, whereas the king's
+conciliatory tone at Ems had misled the French ministers into the
+blunder of using threats and making intolerable demands, until at last
+they found themselves confronted by a strong Government, backed by the
+Prussian nation in the firm resolution to defend itself. In reporting
+this conversation to the Foreign Office the chargé d'affaires said
+that Bismarck appeared to be sincerely afflicted with regret for the
+rupture between the two countries, that he evidently saw, too late,
+his error in having secretly encouraged the Hohenzollern candidature,
+and that the result of all these unhappy complications had left the
+well-meaning chancellor inconsolable. Such a candid confession of
+remorse and regret moved the Frenchman's compassion to a degree that
+profoundly irritates M. Ollivier:
+
+     'Un tel excès de crédulité finit par exaspérer. Et la plupart des
+     diplomates de ce temps-là étaient de cette force. Bien piètre
+     serait l'histoire qui se modélerait sur leurs appréciations.'
+
+We may agree that the sympathy of the chargé d'affaires with
+Bismarck's ingenuous contrition was ill-bestowed. But the tendency to
+fix upon French diplomacy a responsibility for national calamities
+that is much more justly chargeable to the account of the Imperial
+Government, is somewhat unduly prominent in certain parts of M.
+Ollivier's otherwise fair and conscientious narrative of the
+transactions that culminated in the war.
+
+When Bismarck announced to the Prussian Reichstag that war had been
+declared, he was interrupted by an outburst of long and enthusiastic
+cheering. He said, briefly, that he had no papers to lay before them,
+because the single official document received from the French
+Government was the declaration of war; and the only motive for
+hostilities he understood to be his own circular _télégramme de
+journal_ addressed to Prussian envoys abroad and to other friendly
+Powers for the purpose of explaining what had occurred. This, he
+observed, was not at all an official document. He added that a demand
+for a letter of excuses had been made through Werther to the king; and
+the real origin of the war he alleged to be the hatred and jealousy
+with which the independence and prosperity of Germany were regarded in
+France. Upon this adroit but incomplete exposition of causes and
+circumstances M. Ollivier comments with intelligible severity, laying
+stress on the fact that afterwards Bismarck threw off his disguise,
+and openly took to himself the credit of having deliberately contrived
+to bring on the war at his own time. In fact, the later German
+historians have confirmed this statement by their critical examination
+of the records and other evidence; though instead of concluding that
+his conduct was immoral they unite, according to M. Ollivier, in
+applauding his political genius. Almost the whole story of the
+connected machinations by which France was led step by step into war
+have since been disclosed, and the only part which is still unrevealed
+relates to the original devices by which Bismarck and Marshal Prim
+concerted the preliminaries to the offer of the Spanish throne to
+Leopold.[52]
+
+It is cheerfully admitted by the German historians who are cited in
+this volume that the train of incidents which produced so well-timed
+an explosion was scientifically laid by the Prussian chancellor. But
+they maintain that he was only countermining the underground
+combinations of the French, who were known to be organising a triple
+alliance with Italy and Austria for a combined assault upon Prussia;
+and that the journey of the Austrian Archduke Albert to Paris in
+March 1870 convinced Bismarck that he had no time to lose, because war
+must be provoked before these alliances were consummated. And they
+cite the example of Frederick the Great, who disconcerted the secret
+preparations of his enemies by the sudden dash upon Dresden which
+opened the Seven Years' War. This defence of his own very skilful and
+not less astute manoeuvres was endorsed by Bismarck in a speech
+before the Chamber in 1876; nor does it appear to us so untenable as
+M. Ollivier holds it to be. He argues that the fear of being attacked
+by France, if it had really influenced Bismarck's conduct in 1870,
+must have been a wild hallucination, for the chancellor must have been
+well aware that the emperor's policy at that time was decidedly
+pacific, and that his own (Ollivier's) views were still more so. He
+assures us that the project of a triple alliance was intended to be
+exclusively defensive, that it never passed beyond the 'academic'
+stage, or reached any practical form. The confidential negotiations of
+1869 with Austria and Italy had been left, he says, in the stage of
+unfinished outline, nor was it even suspected either by the French or
+by the Italian ministry that they had been carried further. On the
+other hand, it cannot be denied that in 1869 these negotiations had
+been carried quite far enough to inspire the Prussian chancellor with
+serious disquietude, if, as is very probable, he had good information
+of them. We know, from M. Ollivier's very interesting account of what
+passed at the first meeting of the Cabinet on July 6, when the
+ministers resolved to announce to the Chamber their determination to
+resent and resist the Hohenzollern candidature, that the emperor and
+M. de Gramont regarded the understanding with Italy and Austria as
+being much more than academic. It is there stated that when Ollivier
+hesitated to accept Gramont's assurance that the assistance of these
+two Powers, in the event of hostilities with Prussia, had been
+virtually secured, the Emperor Napoleon took from a drawer in his
+bureau certain letters written in 1869 by the Austrian emperor and the
+King of Italy, and, after reading them aloud, told the ministers that
+these writings undoubtedly amounted to promises of help in the
+circumstances that were then actually under discussion. The Cabinet
+accepted these proofs that the alliances might be reckoned upon as
+substantial, so that it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bismarck
+had drawn the same conclusion from the intimations that had reached
+him, and had set himself to provoke a war before the secret
+combinations against him should be ready for action. It must be borne
+in mind that from 1866 he had been deliberately preparing for it,
+being convinced, as he said later, that until France had been defeated
+in the field, his grand design of founding a German empire, with its
+capital at Berlin, could not be realised.
+
+We may therefore be permitted to suggest that the discussion with
+which M. Ollivier closes this volume is to some extent superfluous,
+for it is incontestable that Bismarck had reasons for desiring the
+war, and that France was inveigled into declaring it. In the final
+section he returns to the question whether France or Prussia were
+responsible for the rupture; and after summing up the evidence he
+pronounces judgment against Prussia. It was Prussia that invented the
+Hohenzollern candidature, against which France was bound to protest
+forcibly; and even if it be admitted, he says, that the French Cabinet
+was wrong in taking mortal offence at the insolent official version of
+the king's refusal to receive the French ambassador, there can be no
+doubt that this public affront infuriated the French nation, and drove
+it to the extremity of war. That the explosion was instantaneous he
+regards as a proof that it had not been expected nor premeditated by
+France. All these things are, indeed, neither denied nor deniable, for
+Bismarck's own arrogant revelations leave no doubt that the war had
+been desired and premeditated by that astute and far-seeing
+politician; and though upon the methods by which the Hohenzollern
+candidature was originally started Bismarck is judiciously silent, we
+may be morally certain that the instigation came from Berlin. The
+maxim _Fecit cui prodest_ affords fair ground for this inference,
+particularly when we remember the obvious improbability that the
+Spanish ministry would have gratuitously set up a candidature which
+must infallibly have brought their country into collision with its
+formidable neighbour.
+
+How the French Government fell into a net that had been spread for
+them is to most of us sufficiently clear. Whether the emperor and his
+ministers ought to have detected and avoided it, is the real question,
+and it is practically the only question that concerns M. Ollivier. In
+the final pages of his book, which touch in dignified and pathetic
+words upon the injustice of the reproaches that have been heaped upon
+him and the rancorous calumnies by which he has been pursued, his
+readers are told that, having done his best to defend the cause of his
+nation, he will terminate his work without taking up his personal
+justification, though on one point he desires not to be misunderstood.
+It has been pleaded on his behalf, he says, that he was in fact
+opposed to the declaration of war, but agreed to it under the violent
+pressure of public opinion, or else from reluctance to betray internal
+dissensions that would have broken up the ministry, or for other
+reasons. M. Ollivier insists, on the contrary, that after Bismarck's
+'soufflet' he was convinced that peace could be maintained only at
+the price of his country's abject humiliation; and that he chose the
+alternative of war as infinitely preferable, without the least regard
+to his personal reputation or interests. We may willingly agree that
+M. Ollivier acted throughout from motives of high-minded patriotism,
+and although we cannot acquit him on the charge of grave imprudence we
+may freely admit that he was entangled in a situation of extraordinary
+difficulty. To Englishmen, who are familiar with the regular and
+recognised working of constitutional government, it will be plain that
+he was the victim of a system that had placed him before the public as
+the nominal head of a Cabinet that he was supposed to have formed, and
+of a party in the Chamber that he was expected to lead. Whereas in
+fact he had no proper control over the policy of the Cabinet, and no
+solid support in the Chamber. The emperor presided at the meetings of
+the Cabinet; and it is clear that the ultimate decision in the
+supremely important departments of the army and of foreign affairs was
+still reserved to the sovereign, on whom the Foreign Secretary (as we
+should call him) could urge his views separately, and from whom he
+could take orders independently of the first minister. In this
+radically false position M. Ollivier found himself committed to
+measures on which he had not been consulted, and hurried into
+dangerous courses of action for which he had no recognised official
+responsibility, since they were sanctioned by the emperor's
+unquestionable authority. We have to remember, also, that in July
+1870, liberal institutions had been no more than six months under
+trial after eighteen years of autocratic rule, that the advocates of
+the old _régime_ were numerous and openly hostile to the reforms, and
+that all the ministers of the new _régime_ lacked experience in the
+art and practice of constitutional administration. It is among those
+conditions and circumstances that we must find some explanation of
+their imprudence, and of their inability to make a stand against the
+emperor's weakness, the clamour of hot-headed deputies, and the
+war-cries of journalists; some excuse, in short, for the heedlessness
+with which a well-meaning ministry stepped into the snare that had
+been laid for them.
+
+When, in 1871, the ex-emperor was told of M. Ollivier's earnest
+protest against the cruel injustice of holding him alone answerable
+for the national disasters, Napoleon is reported to have replied that
+this responsibility must be shared by the ministry, the Chamber, and
+himself.
+
+     'Si je n'avais pas voulu la guerre, j'aurais renvoyé mes ministres;
+     si l'opposition était venue d'eux, ils auraient donné leur
+     démission; enfin, si la Chambre avait été contraire à l'entreprise,
+     elle eût voté contre.'[53]
+
+In a broad and general sense this conclusion may be accepted, for all
+parties concerned were heavily to blame; and manifestly the disasters
+were the outcome of a situation in which weakness and rashness were
+matched against unscrupulous statecraft and the deep-laid combinations
+of a consummate strategist.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[41] _L'Empire Libéral: Études, Récits, Souvenirs._ Par Émile
+Ollivier. Vol. xiv.: La Guerre. 1909.--_Edinburgh Review_, January
+1910.
+
+[42] 'Animo retto e buono' (_Memorie_, p. 407).
+
+[43] Benedetti, _Ma Mission en Prusse_.
+
+[44] _Papiers Secrets: Les Préfets._
+
+[45] _Reflections and Reminiscences of Prince Bismarck._
+
+[46] _Histoire du Second Empire_, vi. 258.
+
+[47] 'Rien n'était plus officiel que l'entretien qui se poursuivait en
+ce moment entre le ministre des affaires étrangères et l'ambassadeur
+de Prusse.'--Gramont, _La France et la Prusse_, p. 168.
+
+[48] _La France et la Prusse_ (1872), pp. 131-2.
+
+[49] _L'Empire Libéral_, p. 270.
+
+[50] _Historical Essays_, p. 222.
+
+[51] 'Au début nous avions demandé au Roi de conseiller ou d'ordonner
+à son parent de renoncer, ce qui entraînait implicitement une garantie
+que la candidature ne se reproduirait plus. Le Roi ayant refusé
+d'intervenir, et la candidature ayant disparu à son insu, nous avions
+réclamé sous une forme explicite, notre première demande.'--_L'Empire
+Libéral_, p. 453.
+
+[52] Some light is thrown on these obscure intrigues by Lord Acton in
+the essay already cited. He writes that in 1869 Bismarck learned from
+Florence that Napoleon was preparing a triple alliance against him,
+and sent a Prussian officer, Bernhardi, to Madrid. 'What he did in
+Spain has been committed to oblivion. Seven volumes of his diary have
+been published; the family assures me (Acton) that the Spanish portion
+will never appear.... The Austrian First Secretary said that he
+betrayed his secret one day at dinner. Somebody spoke indiscreetly on
+the subject, and Bernhardi aimed a kick at him under the table, which
+caught the shin of the Austrian instead. He was considered to have
+mismanaged the thing, and it was whispered that he had gone too far--I
+infer that he offered a heavy bribe to secure a majority in the
+Cortes. Fifty thousand pounds of Prussian bonds were sent to Spain at
+midsummer 1870.... I know the bankers through whose hands they
+passed.'--_Historical Essays_, p. 214.
+
+[53] _L'Empire Libéral_, p. 475, footnote. Prince Napoleon told M.
+Ollivier that the emperor repeated this to him several times.
+
+
+
+
+SIR SPENCER WALPOLE[54]
+
+1839-1907
+
+
+Sir Spencer Walpole's death in 1907 left a gap in the front rank of
+contemporary English Historians. To a volume of his collected essays,
+published in the following year, his daughter, Mrs. F. Holland,
+prefixed an admirable memoir of his private life and character, with
+affectionate reminiscences of her father's 'strenuous work, his
+universal kindliness, and his simplicity of soul.' On this personal
+subject, therefore, little or nothing remains to be said. I will only
+add that during several years of intimacy with him I had every reason
+to feel honoured by his friendship, to set high value on his literary
+judgments, and to appreciate his scrupulous intellectual integrity.
+
+From that memoir I take the main incidents that belong to Sir Spencer
+Walpole's personal biography. After leaving Eton he entered the Civil
+Service at an early age, and worked for some time in the War Office,
+until he was transferred to a position of larger independence. He was
+subsequently appointed to the Governorship of the Isle of Man, where
+he remained for about twelve years; and afterwards he became Secretary
+to the Post Office until his retirement in 1899. In the discharge of
+the duties of these offices he was indefatigable; his services were
+fully approved by all with whom he came into public relations; yet
+throughout these years he found time for hard and unceasing literary
+work. In his earlier days he was a regular contributor to the
+periodical press, mainly on questions of finance; he wrote the lives
+of two Prime Ministers--his grandfather Spencer Perceval and Lord John
+Russell--while from 1876 up to the year of his death he was engaged
+upon his _History of England_. Five volumes were published, at
+intervals, on the period between 1815 and 1857; and four subsequent
+volumes, under the title of the _History of Twenty-five Years_,
+brought the whole narrative up to 1880. But the proofs of the two
+final volumes had not been revised by his hand, when he was struck
+down by a sudden and fatal malady of the brain. Other recent
+publications were a small book on the Isle of Man, entitled the _Land
+of Home Rule; Studies in Biography_; and the collection of essays to
+which I have already referred.
+
+It is upon this History of England from 1815 to 1880 that Sir Spencer
+Walpole's lasting reputation, as a man of letters, will rest. To have
+combined the writing of such a book with the duties of a very diligent
+official is no slight achievement; though one may observe that direct
+contact with administration, with political affairs, and with
+parliamentary leaders, is for the historian a distinct advantage. It
+is worth remarking that his family connections, which brought Walpole
+into the Civil Service, in no way biased his judgment on public
+questions. The grandson of a high Tory Prime Minister, the son of a
+Conservative Secretary of State, he was throughout his life an
+advanced Liberal, with an unswerving trust in popular government as
+essential to the welfare of his country and to the just and proper
+management of its affairs at home and abroad. His literary bent was
+evidently taken from hereditary association with politics, and from
+his own official training. As an historian he enters with intense
+interest into the strife of parties, the parliamentary vicissitudes,
+into the swing backward and forward of reform and reaction, into the
+exact causes and incidents that affected the rise and the fall of
+ministries. In describing the state of manners at certain periods, and
+the changes wrought in the national life by the efforts of philosophic
+writers and philanthropists, his facts and figures are always ample
+and accurate; he pays close attention to financial and economical
+movements. As a politician he distrusted the spirited policy that
+involved England in the warlike adventures and hazards of an eventful
+and stirring time. The Afghan war of 1838-43 was, he said, the most
+ruinous and unnecessary war which the English had ever waged. The
+Crimean war he evidently regarded as a useless expenditure of blood
+and money, which might well have been avoided. On Lord Beaconsfield's
+Imperialism he passes severe censure: and the interference of that
+statesman in 1877 to protect the Turkish Sultan against Russia is very
+sharply condemned. He has even some doubt whether the purchase of the
+Suez Canal Shares was a wise stroke of policy. This book, in short, is
+a corroboration of the well-known remark that the history of our
+country has been mainly written by Whigs and Liberals, with the
+exception of a few authors who, like Hume and Alison, have hardly
+preserved an historic reputation. Nevertheless, whether we agree or
+not with the prudent and pacific views towards which Walpole
+manifestly leaned, his narrative, his statements of disputable cases,
+his distribution of the arguments for and against his conclusions, are
+invariably accurate, fair, and dispassionate. His anxiety to give full
+authority for facts and opinions is shown in an almost too copious
+supply of foot-notes. Lord Acton, who found the late Bishop Creighton
+too economical of these citations, compares his practice to Mr.
+Walpole's if several hundred references to Hansard and the Annual
+Register had been struck out from the History of England.
+
+In his preface to the first volume the author explains briefly the
+method that he has adopted. History, he says, may be written in two
+ways--you may relate each event in chronological order, or you may
+deal with each subject in a separate episode--and he tells us that he
+has chosen the latter way. This method enabled him to introduce
+sketches of the state of English society at different periods, by way
+of illustrating his narrative, which are certainly attractive and
+impressive. They are composed to a large degree upon the model set by
+Macaulay, by grouping together a number of characteristic particulars
+to bring out into strong relief the morals and manners of the time.
+Walpole's picture of the Eton boy in the early nineteenth century, who
+could write admirable Greek and Latin verse but knew not a word of any
+modern language--'who regarded the Gracchi as patriots but had only an
+obscure notion that Adam Smith was a dangerous character'--is almost a
+parody of Macaulay's style. Nevertheless these sketches are on the
+whole truthful and instructive, if we allow for some exuberance of
+colouring that may have been thought necessary for artistic effect.
+
+But Walpole studied literature, as the measure of intellectual
+evolution, with the same interest that he devoted to economical and
+administrative developments. His aim was to show how all kinds of
+mental and material activity acted and reacted upon each other, how
+the feelings and aspirations of the nation were reflected in
+philosophy and in poetry, and how literary genius could stir the
+imagination of the people. He observes that while English literature
+had declined towards the close of the eighteenth century, it rose
+again rapidly with the opening of the nineteenth century. For a short
+time, indeed, the furious outbreak of the French Revolution had scared
+men of letters into recoil from the optimistic speculations of the
+preceding age--they abandoned the worship of Liberty. But the storm
+blew over; and a general revival of literary animation signalised the
+end of the long war-time, with a magnificent efflorescence of poetry.
+Walpole records, as notable signs of this intellectual expansion, the
+appearance of women in the field of literature, the immediate success
+of the two famous reviews, the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, and
+the rapid growth of journalism. The whole subject of mental progress
+has, indeed, a peculiar charm for him. He insists that 'the history of
+human thought is the most comprehensive and the most difficult subject
+which can occupy the student's attention, far more interesting and
+important than the progress of society.' He would probably have agreed
+with Coleridge that knowledge of current speculative opinions is the
+surest ground for political prophecy; and he delights in tracing back
+to distant sources the religious movements of the nineteenth century.
+He declares that the heroic measures introduced by legislation within
+our own recollections are the links of a continuous chain extending
+from a prehistoric past to an invisible future. We have here a writer
+who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical
+calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal
+pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas and the
+march of mind.
+
+There are at least two chapters in the History that exemplify the
+attention given by Walpole to ecclesiastical controversies, and to the
+significance of the antagonism between the New Learning and dogmatic
+orthodoxy. In his fourth volume the story of the Oxford Tractarians is
+related at some length, and he remarks on the singular coincidence,
+that almost simultaneously with the secession of the English High
+Churchmen the Free Church was established by disrupture from the
+Established Church in Scotland. He affirms that both these schisms, so
+different in motive and direction, had their origin in events dating
+from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The disintegrating
+forces of geology, astronomy, and scientific research generally upon
+the received tradition are examined; the beginning of modern Church
+reform is noted; and in a chapter of the final volume of the _History
+of Twenty-five Years_ it is maintained that the great question before
+the religious world in the middle of the nineteenth century was the
+possibility of resisting the inroads of science. He describes the
+vigour with which the polemical campaign was conducted on both sides;
+how the orthodox position was assailed by writers of the _Essays and
+Reviews_, by the criticism of Bishop Colenso, by Broad Churchmen and
+the champions of free thought; how it was defended by prosecutions in
+the ecclesiastical courts and in appeals to the Privy Council from
+both parties. It was certainly a remarkable epoch in the history of
+opinions, when the country was agitated by the ardent zeal of
+disputants over questions of ritual and dogma that now seem to have
+fallen into cool neglect; and Walpole gives, as usual, a careful array
+of the particular cases, with the points in debate, and the
+characteristics of the prominent leaders in each party. To estimate
+the position of the clergy as a body, and to show, as Walpole
+undertakes to do, that in the middle of the nineteenth century they
+were losing caste as a class, and that between the middle and end of
+that century they had fallen in social status, was a much more
+difficult and delicate problem. All generalisations upon the condition
+of society in times that have passed away, however recently, are of
+doubtful value, because the evidence of documents must always be
+incomplete, and even personal recollections are partial and become
+indistinct; they are all seen in a fading and uncertain light.
+Moreover the chronicler of disputations over ritual and articles, and
+of matters concerning churches and the clergy, may be said to move
+over the surface of the spiritual waters; and Walpole draws nearer to
+the deeper undercurrents when he appeals to the higher literature for
+signs of alternating tendencies of religious thought in that
+generation; though the famous stanzas from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,'
+which he quotes at the end of his chapter, represent rather the poetic
+than the philosophic conclusions of thinkers in the nineteenth
+century.
+
+But Walpole was quite aware of the difficulties that beset any writer
+who endeavours to relate the history of a very recent period,
+especially of that part to which his own lifetime belongs, and to pass
+judgments on the conduct or opinions of statesmen and writers who may
+be still living, or have only lately departed. Yet, as Lord Acton has
+said, the secrets of our own time cannot be learnt from books, but
+from men; and Walpole's social relations, his personal popularity, his
+familiarity with official business, and his literary culture, provided
+him with valuable opportunities for composing his last four volumes
+from direct impressions of his subject, for preserving the right
+atmosphere. His studies in biography show an aptitude for personal
+delineation; and in one of his earlier volumes there is a full-length
+portrait of Sir Robert Peel, executed with much skill and
+comprehension. Therein lay the artistic quality of his work; he aimed
+at the presentation of individual character and action; he laid stress
+on the influence of remarkable men on their country's fortunes; for
+true historical art is concerned with bringing prominent figures into
+formal relief, and with arranging a mass of disorderly facts under
+some scheme that produces a definite impression. Otherwise Walpole's
+style was clear, level, and straightforward; with no pretence to be
+ornamental. Perhaps the best example of his talent for well-ordered
+and compact narrative is found in two chapters of the fifth volume of
+the History, which contain an excellent summary of the rise and
+expansion of British dominion in India during the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries, with a very correct appreciation of the causes
+and circumstances to which that memorable episode in the annals of the
+British Empire is due.
+
+Walpole lived just long enough to bring his historical work, which
+occupied him for about thirty years, to the end which he had assigned
+to it. In traversing such an extensive and varied field of arduous
+labour some errors and shortcomings were inevitable, for the history
+of England in the nineteenth century is the history of the British
+Empire at its climacteric, of moral and material changes and
+developments more numerous and perhaps more important than in any
+former century. Nor did he limit his survey to the particular period
+that he had chosen; for his theory, as he has stated it, of the
+function of history, was that it shall not merely catalogue events but
+shall go back to an analysis of their causes, and of the general
+progress of the human family. He believed, with Lord Acton, that the
+recent past contained the key to the present time. It has been said
+that Walpole undertook to do for the nineteenth century what Lecky did
+for the eighteenth century: and we may agree that both historians have
+filled up, with distinguished merit and ability, large vacant spaces
+in the history of our country. Perhaps Lecky had more of the
+philosophic mind, while the distance of time that lay between that
+writer and his period enabled him to see men and things in their true
+proportion, and to judge of events by their outcome. Walpole, on the
+other hand, wrote under the disadvantages as well as the advantages of
+close proximity to the scenes which he described; and the conclusion
+of his history marks the fall of the curtain on a drama of which the
+final acts are still to be played out.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[54] _Proceedings of the British Academy_, vol. iii.
+
+
+
+
+REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY[55]
+
+
+Since I have accepted, at the request of your Warden, the honour of
+delivering an inaugural address on this occasion, it has appeared to
+me appropriate to choose, for such an audience, some literary subject.
+And I propose, with some diffidence, to offer a few observations on
+the reading of history, because in these latter days, when education
+has come in upon us like a flood, rising higher and spreading wider
+every year among our people, no part of literature is more sedulously
+studied than the field of history. On the other hand, this field is
+being very rapidly enlarged. It has been said that the output of
+histories during the nineteenth century has exceeded in bulk and
+volume the production of all previous centuries. And in all the
+countries now standing in the forefront of civilisation, the chief
+product of their serious literature is at this time historical and
+biographical--for I take authentic biography to be a kind of handmaid
+of history. It has been reported that during the ten years ending 1907
+there were published in England 5498 books under the head of history,
+and 1059 biographies. Moreover, of those who are not actually writing
+history, an important number are occupied in criticising the
+historians.
+
+Now the first observation that I submit to you is that the production
+of all history has been almost entirely the work of Europeans, among
+whom I reckon the American writers, as belonging by language and
+culture to Europe. So far as the African continent has any trustworthy
+history, it is in some European language. In Asia there have been
+annalists, chroniclers, and genealogists, mostly Mohammedan, who
+narrate the wars and exploits of great conquerors, the succession of
+kings, and the rise and fall of dynasties. And I believe that in China
+official record of public events and transactions has been kept up
+from very early ages. But if we measure these Asiatic narratives by
+the standard of literary merit and the demand for authentication of
+facts, I fear that they will be found wanting; though they may be
+relied upon to give the general course of important events, and an
+outline of the result of battles and the upsetting of thrones.
+
+When these Asiatic chroniclers wrote of the times in and near which
+they were living, they were fairly trustworthy. But whenever they
+attempted to write of times long past and of countries unknown to them
+personally, their narratives became for the most part fabulous and
+romantic, confused and improbable, with some grains of truth here and
+there. Our best information regarding the earlier ages of Asia is
+derived, I think, from Greek and Latin literature, and latterly from
+the researches of quite modern scholars and archæologists. So that it
+may be affirmed that authentic history began in Europe, and that to
+Europe it has ever since been practically confined. At this day the
+history of all parts of the world is being written by Europeans. The
+result has been that for the last 2500 years historical material,
+collected from and relating to all parts of the world, has been
+accumulating in Europe.
+
+Such masses of records and monuments necessarily require methodical
+treatment by men of trained intelligence and of untiring industry,
+learned, and accurate. Their systematic labours, their acute and
+intelligent criticism, have created what is now usually termed the
+Science of History, which abstracts general conclusions from the mass
+of particulars. And so, I think, we may agree with Renan, who has
+declared that to the nineteenth century may be accorded the title of
+the Age of Historians, and that this has been the special distinction
+of that century's literature.
+
+Now I believe that the question, whether history is an art or a
+science, is not yet universally settled. But whatever may be the case
+in these modern days, I submit that in earlier times, and certainly
+when history began to be written, it was mainly an art. Indeed, it
+could hardly have been otherwise. In all ages and countries, from the
+time when men first attained to some stage of elementary culture, they
+have been curious about the past, they have enjoyed hearing of the
+deeds and fame of their ancestors, of far-off things and battles long
+ago. But the primitive chronicler had very slight material for his
+stories of bygone times--he had few, if any, documents--he was himself
+creating the documentary evidence for those who came after him; he
+could only compile his narratives from tradition, legends, anecdotes
+of heroic ancestors, from information picked up by travel to famous
+places, and so on. Yet from sources of this kind he composed tales of
+inestimable value as representing the ideas, habits, and social
+condition of preceding generations that were very like his own.
+Herodotus, who is our best example of the class, reconstructs,
+revives, and relates conversations that neither he nor his informants
+could have actually heard; but he does this in order to give a
+dramatic version of great events. In the opening sentence of his first
+book he says that he has written in order that the actions of men may
+not be effaced by time, nor great and wondrous deeds be deprived of
+renown. And one may notice the same style and method in the
+historical books of the Old Testament. In both these ancient histories
+the narratives represent life, action, speech, situations.
+
+It is futile, I may suggest, to subject work of this sort to critical
+analysis by attempting to sift out what is probably true from what is
+certainly false. You only break up the picture, you destroy the
+artistic effect, which is at least a true reflection of real life.
+Moreover, it is dangerous for learned men sitting in libraries to
+regard as incredible facts stated by these old writers. The legend of
+Romulus and Remus having been suckled by a wolf has been dismissed as
+a childish fable. Yet it is certain that this very thing has happened
+more than once in the forests of India within the memory of living
+men. You cannot be particular about details, you must take the story
+as a whole.
+
+From this standpoint we may agree, I think, that in illiterate times,
+and, indeed, throughout the middle ages of Europe, history-writing was
+practised as an art. The unlearned chronicler wrote in no fear of
+critics or sceptics; he drew striking scenes and portraits; he
+described warlike exploits; he related characteristic sayings and
+dialogues which completely satisfied his audience or his readers. The
+society in which he lived was not far different, in morals and
+manners, from that which he portrayed, so that he can have committed
+very few anachronisms or incongruities; and in sentiments and
+character-drawing he could not go far astray. He produced, at any
+rate, vivid impressions of reality, just as Shakespeare's historical
+plays have stamped upon the English mind the figures of Hotspur or
+Richard III., which have been thus set up in permanent type for all
+subsequent ages. At any rate portraits of this kind have not been
+modernised to suit the taste of a later age, as has been done with
+King Arthur in Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King.' And when work of this
+sort has been finely executed, the question whether the details are
+untrustworthy or even fictitious is immaterial, particularly in cases
+where the precise facts can never be recovered. We do not know exactly
+how the battle of Marathon, or, indeed, the battle of Hastings, was
+fought, but we have in the chronicles something of great value--a true
+outline of the general situation, and some stirring narratives of the
+clash and wrestling of armed men, compiled either at first hand from
+the recollections of those who were actually on the field, or else
+taken at second hand from others who made notes of what had been told
+them by those present at the battles. This, then, is what I meant when
+I said that in early times history was an art. Its method was
+picturesque.
+
+Now my next observation is that, although the science of history has
+since been invented, we have, among quite modern English writers, men
+of singular genius, who have to some extent followed the example,
+adopted the manner, of the ancient annalist. Like him, they are
+artists, their aim has been to depict famous men, to reproduce
+striking incidents and scenes dramatically. Their technical methods,
+so to speak, are entirely different from those of the old chronicler,
+who sketched with a free hand, and trusted largely to his
+inspirations, to his own experience of what was likely to have been
+said or done, or to popular tradition, which is always animated and
+distinct. The modern historian, of what I may call the school of
+impressionists, has no such experience, he knows nothing personally of
+violent scenes or fierce deeds; he composes his picture of things that
+happened long ago from a mass of papers, books, memoirs, that have
+come down to us. Yet although style and substance are quite different,
+the chief aim, the design, of the ancient and modern artist in
+history is the same. They both strive to set before their reader a
+vision of certain scenes and figures at moments of energetic
+action--not only to tell him a story, but to make him see it. Let me
+give an example. Every one here may remember the story in the Old
+Testament (2nd Book of Kings) of Jehu driving furiously into Jezreel,
+how on his way he smote Ahaziah, king of Judah, with an arrow, and how
+Jezebel, the Phoenician Queen, was hurled down out of her palace
+window to be devoured by dogs in the street. And some of you may have
+read in Froude's _History of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth_ his
+description of the murder of David Rizzio by the fierce Scotch nobles,
+how he was killed clinging to Queen Mary's knees in her chamber in
+Holyrood Palace. Now the manner, the artistic presentation of
+ferocious action, are in both cases alike; we have the words spoken
+and the deeds done; we can look on at the bloody tragedy; we have a
+dramatic version of the story. The ancient writer of the Old Testament
+probably did his work naturally, instinctively; he tells the story as
+he received it by word of mouth, briefly--laying stress only on the
+things that cut into the imagination of an eye-witness, and remain in
+the memory of those to whom they were related. He troubles us with no
+moral reflections, but goes on quietly to the next chapter of
+incidents. The modern historian has composed his picture from details
+collected by study of documents; he puts in adjectives as a painter
+lays on colour; yet the effect, the impression, is of the same
+quality: it is artistic.
+
+Now the principal English historians of the modern school, who revived
+what one may call the dramatic presentation of history, I take to be
+Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle. They all worked upon genuine material,
+upon authentic records of the period which they were writing about.
+Lord Acton mentions that Froude spoke of having consulted 100,000
+papers in manuscript, at home and abroad, for one of his histories.
+Macaulay was industrious and indefatigable. Yet Ranke, the great
+German historian, said of Macaulay that he could hardly be called a
+historian at all, judged by the strict tests of German criticism. And
+Freeman, the English historian, brought violent charges against Froude
+of deliberately twisting his facts and misquoting his authorities;
+though I believe that Freeman's bitter jealousies led him into grave
+exaggerations. Then take Carlyle. His Cromwell is a fine portrait by
+an eminent literary artist. But is it a genuine delineation of the man
+himself, of his motives, of the working of his mind in speech and
+action? Later investigation, minute scrutiny of old and new material,
+suggest doubts, different interpretations of conduct and character.
+Take, again, his description of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell's great
+victory. Carlyle explains to us the nature of the ground, the
+movements of the troops, the tactics, the points of attack, with
+admirable force and clearness--it is a marvellous specimen of literary
+execution. Yet recent and very careful examination of the locality,
+and a comparison of the evidence of eye-witnesses, have proved beyond
+doubt that Carlyle had not studied the ground, had made some important
+errors. He was, in fact, giving a dramatic representation of the
+battle, which, if it had come down to us from some mediæval annalist,
+would have been universally accepted as genuine. In short, these three
+artists have all suffered damage under scientific treatment.
+
+Now I am not here to disparage Macaulay, Froude, or Carlyle. They were
+all, in my opinion, authors of rare genius, whose places in the
+forefront of the literature of the nineteenth century are permanently
+secure. Yet I fear that the tendency of the twentieth century is
+unfavourable to the artistic historian. It seems to me probable, much
+to my personal regret, that the scientific writing of history, based
+upon exhaustive research, accumulation and minute sifting of all
+available details, relentless verification of every statement, will
+gradually discourage and supersede the art of picturesque composition.
+In the first place the spirit of doubt and distrust is abroad, every
+statement is scrutinised and tested. The imaginative historian cannot
+lay on his colours, or fill up his canvas, by effective and lively
+touches without finding his work placed under the microscope of
+erudite analysts, some of whom, like Iago, are nothing if not
+critical, are not only exact but very exacting. In these days a writer
+who endeavours to illuminate some scene of ages past, to show us, as
+by a magic lantern, the moving figures brought out in relief against
+the surrounding darkness, is liable to be set down as an illusionist,
+possibly even as a charlatan or conjurer. Yet one feels the charm of
+the splendid vision, though it may fade into the light of common day
+when it falls under relentless scrutiny, and one is haunted by the
+doubt whether the scientific historian, with all his conscientious
+accuracy, is after all much nearer the reality than the literary
+artist. For it is seriously questionable whether the precise truth
+about bygone events and men long dead can ever actually be discovered,
+whether, by piecing together what has come down to us in documents, we
+can resuscitate from the dust-heap of records the state of society
+many centuries ago. And in regard to historical portrait painting Lord
+Acton has warned intending historians to seek no unity of
+character--to remember that allowance must always be made for human
+inconsistencies; that a man is never all of one piece. But cautious
+conclusions, nice weighing of evidence, do not satisfy the ordinary
+reader. The vivid impressions that are stamped on his mind by the
+power of style are what he mostly requires and retains; and these we
+are all reluctant to lose. We must concede to the writer, as to the
+painter, some indulgence of his imaginative faculty. Otherwise we must
+leave the battle scenes and the national portrait gallery to the poets
+and romancers of genius--to Shakespeare and Walter Scott, whose art
+had nothing to gain from accuracy, who have only to give us the types,
+the right colouring and strong outline of life and character in days
+bygone.
+
+However, I think we shall be compelled to accept the change from the
+artistic to the scientific school of historians, though we may regret
+it as unavoidable. It is the vast enlargement of the field of
+historical study, the strong critical searchlight that is turned on
+all the dark corners and outlying tracts of this field, that is
+irresistibly affecting the work of writers, enforcing the need of
+caution, of scrutinising every point, of weighing evidence in the
+finest scales, of assaying its precise value. The contemporary writer
+has to deal with the huge accumulation of material to which I have
+already referred; he must ransack archives, hunt through records piled
+up, public and private, must decipher ancient manuscript, must follow
+the labours of the wandering collector of inscriptions and the
+excavator of old tombs. He has to make extracts from correspondence,
+diaries, and notes of travel which are coming for the first time to
+the light; he must keep abreast of foreign literature and criticism.
+The mass and multiplicity of documentary evidence now at his disposal,
+most of which may not have been available to his predecessors, is
+enormous. Some twelve years ago Lord Acton wrote: 'The honest student
+has to hew his way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals
+and official publications, where it is difficult to sweep the horizon
+or to keep abreast. The result has been that the classics of
+historical literature are found inadequate, are being re-written, and
+the student has to be warned that they have been superseded by later
+discoveries.'
+
+What has been the effect of this altered situation upon the writer of
+history at the present time? On such an extensive field of operations,
+which has to be cultivated so intensely, he finds himself compelled to
+contract the scope of his operations; he can only take up very narrow
+ground. So in many instances he limits himself to a period, or even to
+a single reign, to a particular class of historical personage, or to
+some special department of human activity. He looks about for a plot
+that he can work thoroughly; he concentrates his attention upon some
+line or aspect of a subject in which he may hope that he has not been
+anticipated by others. Lord Acton has laid down that 'every student
+ought to know that mastery is acquired by acknowledged limitation'--he
+must peg out his small holding and keep within its bounds. Histories
+are now written by many and various hands--as in the case of the
+Cambridge Modern History, which already counts numerous volumes--and
+so the general area is divided and subdivided among experts, each of
+whom dips deeply into his particular allotment, and takes heavy crops
+off his ground. Yet the productiveness of the field at large seems
+still inexhaustible, for there is always some new theory to be
+established, some fresh vein of facts to be opened, some corrections
+or additions to be made. Moreover, the experts, while they toil at
+their own special work, while they attack a difficult problem from
+different sides, must nevertheless co-operate with each other. Sir
+William Ramsay, a noted archæologist, tells us that for a new study
+of history there is needed a group of scholars working in unison; that
+the solitary historian is doomed to failure. He adds that the history
+of the Roman empire has still to be re-written. The late Lord Acton,
+when as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge he drew out his plan
+for a modern history that would satisfy the scientific demand for
+completeness and exactitude, proposed to distribute the work among
+more than a hundred writers. He observed that the entire bulk of new
+matter which the last forty years have supplied amounts to many
+thousand volumes. When history becomes the product of many hands and
+various minds the artistic element is likely to disappear.
+
+One obvious result of this state of things is that we hear no more of
+the old-fashioned histories embracing vast subjects, the work of a
+single author--of histories of the world, or a history of Europe like
+Alison's in thirty volumes. Indeed it is not long since Buckle found
+his _History of European Civilisation_ unmanageable; he died before he
+could finish it. At the present time historical subjects are divided
+and subdivided by classes, periods, or even single events. Art,
+literature, philosophy, war, diplomacy, receive separate treatment. We
+have colonial histories in numerous thick volumes; though no English
+colony has a long past. We have histories of the queens who have
+reigned in their own right, like Queen Elizabeth, and of Queens
+Consort: we have even a book on the bachelor kings of England, written
+by a lady who proves undeniably that these unlucky bachelors--there
+were only three of them--all came to a bad or sad end. As to military
+historians, Kinglake's _History of the Crimean War_ takes up, I think,
+some eight volumes. The whole course of the recent Boer War has been
+related in five substantial volumes. Neither of these wars lasted
+more than two years, yet both histories are many times larger than
+Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War in Germany. The only
+edition of Schiller's work that I have found in the library of this
+University is in four small volumes.
+
+Now, the drawback to the composition of histories on this ample and
+elaborate scale is obviously this--that the ordinary man or woman can
+hardly be expected to read them, or at most to read more than two or
+three of them. So there has sprung up a natural demand for something
+lighter and shorter; the amplification has produced a supply of
+abbreviation. The massive volumes, the heaps of material, are taken in
+hand by very capable writers with a clear eye for the main points, for
+striking incidents and personalities. The big books are sliced up into
+convenient portions, and served up in attractive form and manageable
+quantities. The work is often done with admirable skill and judgment.
+You thus obtain a bird's-eye view of the past; you have the loftier
+prominences and bold outlines of the historic landscape.
+
+In these serials, which are deservedly popular, you can read short
+biographies, for example, of English Men of Letters, of English Men of
+Action, of famous Scotsmen, Rulers of India, Heroes of the Nation. You
+have also a story of all the nations in series, and thus you can limit
+your mental survey to separate periods, events, countries, and
+figures. You are carried swiftly and adroitly over the dry interspaces
+which lie between startling incidents or between supremely interesting
+epochs.
+
+Now I have no doubt that these series, which contain much sound
+information very skilfully condensed, have been of real service in the
+propagation of historical knowledge. On the other hand, we have to
+consider that this kind of reading is disconnected in style and
+subject. The reader can make a long jump from one period to another,
+or from the statesman of one century to another who flourished in a
+very different country and age. And the handling of these diverse
+subjects is not uniform; the points of view or lines of thought are
+various, and may be contradictory. It may be expedient to warn those
+who use these excellent summaries against the habit of neglecting the
+great English classics for short biographies or compendious sketches
+of periods and personages, as if one could learn enough of Edmund
+Burke, or Milton, or Oliver Cromwell, or master the events of some
+important period, from a well-written serial in some two hundred
+pages.
+
+The demand for these historical handbooks has evidently been created
+by the spread of general education, which stimulates the laudable
+desire to learn something about subjects of which it is hardly
+respectable, in these days, to be ignorant. Such knowledge is very
+useful to those who have no leisure for more; and it is far superior
+to mere desultory reading, to the habit of picking out amusing bits
+here and there. Yet I hope it is unnecessary to impress on earnest
+students of history that they must go further; must push up as near as
+possible to the fountain heads of the rivers of knowledge; must make
+acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature--that their reading
+must be continuous and consecutive.
+
+Now those among you who are studying for University honours have no
+need for any advice from me; they are well aware that the wide
+expansion, in these days, of the field of history has raised the
+standard of examinations, and that they must be prepared for questions
+testing a candidate's critical acumen, the breadth and depth of his
+reading, much more closely than was required formerly. But there must
+also be many here present who have no examinations in front of them,
+who have no ardent inclination or even leisure for abstruse labours.
+And I presume that all of you read history for a clear understanding
+of past ages, of the acts and thoughts of the great men who illustrate
+those times. You all desire to comprehend the sequence and
+significance of events. You feel the intellectual pleasure of
+appreciating rightly the character and motive of the men and women who
+stand in the foreground of our country's annals, and also of those who
+are famous in other countries, to know how and why they rose or fell,
+whether they deserved the success that they won, or won it without
+deserving it. Moreover, for us English folk, who live at the centre of
+an empire containing races and communities in various stages of
+political development, the lessons of history have a special value.
+They teach us to judge leniently of acts and opinions that appear to
+us irrational and even iniquitous as we see them in other backward
+countries at the present day. We learn that manners and morals may not
+be unchangeable in a nation; that fallacies and prejudices are not
+ineradicable; that even cruelty, tyranny, reckless bloodshed, are not
+incurable vices. For history tells us that some of the nations now
+foremost in the ranks of civilisation have passed through the stages
+of society in which such things are possible. And thus we can study
+the circumstances and conditions of political existence which have
+retarded the upward progress of certain nations and accelerated the
+advance of others. Such inquiries belong to the philosophy of history.
+When we read, for example, the history of England in the fifteenth or
+sixteenth century, we find that our ancestors, born and bred in this
+same island, kindly men in private life and sincerely religious,
+intellectually not our inferiors, yet, when they took sides in
+politics or Church questions, did things which appear to us utterly
+cruel, against reason, justice, and humanity. To remember this helps
+us to realise the difficulty of passing fair judgment not only on the
+conduct of our forefathers, but upon the actions and character of
+other peoples and governments that are doing very similar things at
+the present time in other parts of the world. We shall find it an
+arduous task to assign motives, to weigh considerations, to acquit or
+condemn. So that, to the politician of to-day, history ought to be an
+invaluable guide and monitor for taking an impartial measure of the
+difficulties of government in troubled or perilous circumstances. Yet
+one sometimes wishes that the record of the fierce and bitter
+struggles of former days had been forgotten, for it still breeds
+rancour and resentment among the descendants of the people that fought
+for lost causes, and suffered the penalty of defeat. The remembrance
+keeps alive grievances, and the ancient tale of wrongs that have long
+been remedied survives to perpetuate national antipathies. Moreover,
+in some of the most celebrated cases known to our own annals, we are
+never sure that we have the whole case before us, for the historians
+give doubtful help, since the best authorities often take opposite
+views, as, for instance, on the question whether Mary Queen of Scots
+was her husband's murderess, or a much injured and calumniated lady.
+The admitted facts are valued differently, interpreted variously, and
+made to support contradictory conclusions. The latest historian of
+Rome, Signor Ferrero, sums up a long and elaborate dissertation on the
+acts and character of Julius Cæsar by a judgment which differs
+emphatically from the views of all preceding historians. On some of
+these disputed questions we may make up our minds after studying the
+evidence; but many historical problems are in truth insoluble; the
+evidence is imperfect and untrustworthy.
+
+These, then, are some of the warnings we may take from history. We
+must not be hasty about condemning misdeeds of past generations,
+whether of the rulers or their people. The times were hard, so were
+the men; they were encompassed by dangers, while we who criticise them
+live in ease and safety. And when we hear at the present day of
+misrule and strife and bloodshed among other races--in Asia, for
+example--we may remember our own story, and we may trust that they
+also will work their way upward to peace and concord.
+
+But the truth is that, as our knowledge of the past is very imperfect,
+so also our predictions of the future are very fallible. The best
+observers can see only a very short way ahead. History shows us how
+frequently the course of affairs has taken quite unexpected turns, for
+good or for ill, forward or backward. On the whole, we may believe
+that the main direction is certainly toward the gradual betterment of
+the world at large, though the theory of progress is quite modern, for
+the ancients looked behind them for the Golden Age. Nowadays we
+trumpet the glory of our British empire; yet at intervals our
+confidence in its fortunes is shaken by some sharp panic; the decline
+and fall of England is predicted. It is, indeed, perilous to be
+overconfident, to live in a fool's paradise, for some of us have seen
+in our lifetime the sudden catastrophes that have overtaken great
+empires. But history may comfort us when we read how often the
+downfall of England has been predicted, how we have been on the brink
+of shooting down Niagara, as Carlyle declared, or threatened with
+imminent invasion, with total loss of commerce and colonies, with
+defeat abroad and bankruptcy at home. And yet our country is still
+fairly prosperous and free, and as for invasions, we may still trust
+that, as Coleridge has written:
+
+    'Ocean 'mid the uproar wild
+    Speaks safety to his island child.'
+
+But on the whole history gives political prophets little
+encouragement--we cannot foretell the future from the past.
+Nevertheless, there is some truth in the saying that history is like
+an old almanac, if we may take this to mean that, although the same
+events never happen again in the same way, yet in the great movements
+of the tide of the world's affairs a sort of periodical recurrence, an
+ebb and flow, may be noticed. For example, we know that from the
+fifteenth until near the end of the seventeenth century the Asiatic
+armies of the Turkish Sultans were invading and conquering
+South-Eastern Europe--they reached the gates of Vienna. Then followed
+a swing backward of the pendulum, and from the eighteenth to the end
+of the nineteenth century the European Powers, Russia and England,
+were each extending a great dominion over Asia. Again, up to a few
+years ago, the Turkish empire was a barbarous despotism, and we all
+believed that it must break up and be extinguished. Yet it has now
+revived in a new form, which may possibly restore its power and
+prosperity. To search for and distinguish the operating causes, the
+powers that underlie these incalculable changes, is a task for the
+student of history.
+
+There must be many of you for whom these high problems have a strong
+attraction, who enjoy rapid flights over the broad surface of history,
+wide outlooks over the past and future. Now, I admit that bold
+generalisations are hazardous, unless founded upon very solid
+knowledge; but in historical as well as in physical science they are
+needed to sum up results, to bring facts into focus. They enable us,
+so the late Lord Acton has said, to fasten on abiding issues, to
+distinguish the temporary from the transient.
+
+The late Lord Acton, who, as you may remember, was Professor of Modern
+History at Cambridge, is reckoned by general consent to have surpassed
+all his contemporaries, at least in England, by his encyclopædic,
+accurate, and profound knowledge of history. His reading was vast, his
+learning prodigious, his industry never slackened. Yet the literary
+production of his life is contained in three volumes of essays,
+lectures, and articles; he has left us no complete book. Indeed, his
+writing is so disproportionate to his reading that one is tempted to
+liken his luminous intellect to a fire on which too much fuel had been
+heaped; the ardent mind glowed and shot up its streaks of radiance
+through the weight of erudition that overlaid it. Among Lord Acton's
+published papers is a 'Note of Advice to Persons about to Write
+History,' of which the first word is _Don't_. But he then proceeds to
+jot down some hints and maxims, brief and caustic, for the benefit of
+those who nevertheless persist in writing; and to some of these I
+commend the attention of readers, since upon readers as well as upon
+writers lies the duty of forming careful opinions, of judging
+impartially, in working out their conclusions upon the events and
+personages of past times. For Lord Acton was an indefatigable
+researcher after truth; his standard of public morality was austere,
+lofty, and uncompromising. I myself venture to think that he was too
+rigid; he admitted no excuse for breaches of the moral law on the
+pretext, however urgent, of political necessity; he refused to allow
+extenuation of violence or bloodshed even in times of great emergency.
+'The inflexible integrity of the moral code,' he said, 'is to me the
+secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history.' Now
+this is hard doctrine for most of us to follow when we set ourselves,
+as students, to condemn or acquit, to blame or to praise the prominent
+actors in the drama of our national history. On that stage, as we all
+know, the real tragedies that stand on record were sanguinary enough,
+and the parts occasionally played in them by our ancestors were of a
+sort that now appear most unnatural and indefensible to their
+descendants. Yet most of us are disposed to regard with some leniency
+even the crimes of a violent and lawless age.
+
+But however this may be, some of Lord Acton's counsels are undoubtedly
+valuable as warnings or for guidance, either as lamps to show the
+right road, or as lighthouses to keep us from going wrong. His
+inaugural lecture at Cambridge on the Study of History is full of
+precepts, maxims, warnings, injunctions, all of which may be pondered
+by students with advantage. We are enjoined, for example, to beware of
+permitting our historic judgment to be warped by influences, whether
+of Country, Class, Church, College, or Party; and it is said, by way
+of driving home the warning, that the most respectable of these
+influences is the most dangerous. But very few writers, and, I
+suspect, not many readers, can hold their mental balance quite
+steadily, can weigh testimony on either side of a question quite
+dispassionately, when our Church, or our Country, perhaps even our
+University, is concerned. Nor is it easy for students to find
+historians who are entirely unmoved by bias of these kinds, who have
+neither a theory to prove, nor a cause to support, nor a hero to be
+exalted, nor a sinner to be whitewashed. Indeed, the wicked men of
+history have always found some ingenious advocate to defend them by
+attempting to justify bad acts on the ground of excellent motives and
+intentions, of the exigencies of the situation, or other excuses and
+explanations. It is certain that some of the worst crimes on record,
+assassinations and savage persecutions, have been defended on pretexts
+of this kind, by allegations of patriotism or devotion to a faith. Not
+many weeks have passed since a dastardly murder was perpetrated in
+London, close to this spot, by a crazy wretch who declared himself a
+patriot.
+
+So we may profitably lay to mind Lord Acton's stern denunciation, not
+only of criminals in high places, but of all, high or low, who pretend
+that foul deeds may be justified by asserting pure motives. Let me
+quote again from Lord Acton. He has said: 'Of killing, from private
+motives or from public, _eadem est ratio_, there is no difference.
+Morally, the worst is the last; the fanatic assassin, the cruel
+inquisitor, are the worst of all; they are more, not less, infamous,
+because they use religion or political expediency as a cloak for their
+crimes.' He affirms elsewhere that crimes by constitutional
+authorities--by Popes and Kings--are more indefensible than those
+committed by private malefactors. And he holds that the theorist is
+more guilty than the actual assassin; that the worst use of theory is
+to make men insensible to fact, to the real complexion and true
+quality of conduct. He would probably have insisted that journalists
+and others who instigate political crimes are at least quite as bad as
+the actual criminal. Herein, at any rate, we may thoroughly agree with
+him, though the question whether the intercourse of nations and their
+Governments can be strictly regulated by the same moral standard which
+rules among individuals, does raise difficult points for the
+conscientious student of history. We have to remember that no power
+exists to enforce international laws or police, so that every
+Government has to rely upon its own strength for the defence of its
+people and the preservation of its rights.
+
+On the whole, I do not know any recent works that may be more
+profitable for advice and guidance in reading history than these three
+volumes of Lord Acton's. They contain the essence of his unceasing
+labours in collecting, comparing, and testing an immense quantity of
+historic material. They are particularly valuable for the flashes of
+insight into the deeper relations of events, for brief, sententious
+observations in which he sums up his judgments upon men and their
+doings. They are not to be taken lightly; they demand all your
+attention, for the style is compressed and packed with meaning; and
+the author seems to expect his readers to be prepared with more
+knowledge than, I think, most of us possess. His allusions take for
+granted so much learning that they occasionally puzzle the average
+man. For example, in one of his essays he makes a passing reference to
+'those who in the year 1348 shared the worst crimes that Christian
+nations have committed.' What these crimes were he does not say; and
+how many of us could answer the question off-hand? Certainly I could
+not. But the lectures and essays abound in far-ranging ideas, and show
+profound penetration into historic causes and consequences. Some of
+the essays, written in comparative youth, betray here and there a
+natural leaning towards the Church of Rome, in which he was born, and
+against Protestantism; yet his hatred of intolerance and despotism,
+spiritual or temporal, was sincere and intense. In politics he was a
+Liberal, yet he saw that Liberal institutions, representative
+government, are by no means a sure and speedy remedy for misrule in
+all times and countries, as in our day simple folk are apt to suppose.
+In writing of the condition of Europe during the earlier middle ages
+he observes: 'To bring order out of chaotic mire, to rear a new
+civilisation and blend hostile and unequal races into a nation, the
+thing wanted was not Liberty, but Force.'
+
+Here is a bold and clear-sighted deduction from the lessons of
+history, which revolutionary politicians in Asia, where no
+nationalities have yet been formed, may well take to heart.
+Parliamentary institutions, as Lord Acton has well said, presuppose
+unity of a people.
+
+Scattered through these volumes may be found, indeed, certain brief
+paragraphs which, as they contain the essence of much learning and
+deep thought, may well set us all thinking. In a remarkable essay on
+the historical relations of Church and State Lord Acton observes: 'The
+State is so closely linked with religion, that no nation that has
+changed its religion has ever survived in its old political form.'
+Here again is a striking generalisation which a student might set
+himself to verify by careful examination of the facts.
+
+And now I will make an end of my address by quoting one more remark of
+Lord Acton, in which he gives his definition of history taken as a
+whole. 'By universal history,' he says, 'I understand that which is
+distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a
+rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the
+memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to
+which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for
+their own sake, but in subordination to a higher series, according to
+the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common
+fortunes of mankind.'
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[55] Inaugural Address to the Students of King's College for Women,
+University of London, October 8, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+RACE AND RELIGION[56]
+
+
+I propose to offer for consideration some very general views upon the
+effects and interaction of the ideas of Race and Religion upon the
+political grouping of the population in various countries of Eastern
+Europe and of Asia, with the object of showing how they unite and
+divide mankind over a great portion of the earth. It will be
+understood, I hope, that it is impossible in a brief discussion to go
+far or thoroughly over such a wide field. I can only try to indicate
+some salient points that may be worth attention.
+
+If we look back upon the ancient world, as it was known to Greece and
+to Rome, and as it can be dimly surveyed through the records of
+classic antiquity, we find that before the Christian era the
+populations were divided and subdivided into races or tribes, with
+names signifying a common origin or descent; at any rate some kind of
+tribal association. The designation of their country was usually
+derived from the name of some dominant race, as Gallia from the Gauls
+or Judea from the Jews; indeed I might say, as France from the Franks
+or England from the Angles. Religious denominations of any large
+community were, I venture to suggest, unknown, at any rate in ancient
+Europe. The polytheism of these ages was too local and miscellaneous
+to weld together any considerable groups on the basis of a common
+worship or belief; for although three great religions then existed,
+Buddhism, Hinduism, and the faith of Zoroaster (still represented by
+the Parsees), these were confined to Central and Eastern Asia. And,
+moreover, these religions had not the missionary spirit; I mean that
+they made no vigorous open attempts to spread and gain proselytes,
+still less did they use force to convert great multitudes. But after
+the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world.
+The Roman empire--that greatest monument of human power, as Dean
+Church has called it--began the fusion of races into one vast
+political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on
+the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea;
+it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment
+of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political
+history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that
+changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world--the
+rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions.
+First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had
+levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the
+conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal
+spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the
+temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia. In Asia the
+victorious creed of Mohammed imposed upon immense multitudes a
+religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the
+dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was
+torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire
+was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered
+together all races of the West under the common denomination of
+Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the
+primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there
+were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes
+contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this
+strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the
+formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we
+may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when
+the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when
+the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that
+may be called national. In these countries the subdivisions according
+to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the
+sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The
+great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into
+two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has
+gradually subsided, and at the present time all minor groups of the
+population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national
+designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers,
+and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western
+Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his
+religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory
+he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or
+Italian.
+
+Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West
+into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to
+the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the
+earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of
+mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My
+present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and
+understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion
+that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have
+great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in
+France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that
+arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopédistes, as
+they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French
+Encyclopædia, treated in theory all notions of separate races,
+religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a
+common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general
+principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from
+local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much
+practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the
+French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very
+seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded
+the kingdoms of Western Europe with the war-cry of universal
+fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and
+religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all
+peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended
+to include the people of every country to which it extended,
+superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national
+character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling
+was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in
+the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when
+Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger
+than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclopédistes were inherited
+by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two
+Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the
+chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard
+difference of race as indelible. In fact, all this school, which had
+considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and
+social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against
+rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to
+save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that
+modify human character.
+
+There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view.
+In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race
+and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for
+political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will
+remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay
+stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion,
+politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some
+Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and
+concerned. For, in the first place, there has been a notable revival
+of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread
+of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most
+prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of
+the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of
+politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing
+upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race
+and religion.
+
+The plan which I shall attempt to follow in making a brief survey of
+my subject, is to begin with a glance at the political condition of
+Central Europe, and to travel rapidly Eastward. In the West, as I have
+said, we have compact and permanently established States with national
+governments. But as soon as we pass to Central Europe we find the
+Austro-Hungarian empire distracted and threatened by internal feuds,
+arising out of the contention for ascendency of two races, Germans and
+Slavonians, and also out of the demands of the various provinces and
+dependencies for political recognition of their separate identities,
+founded on claims to represent internal sections or subdivisions of
+the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the north-west of the
+empire are parted asunder from those in the south-east by the
+Hungarians, who came in from the east, and are of a different stock,
+and who have succeeded in establishing the federated kingdom of
+Hungary. I will not trouble you with statistical or geographical
+details. For my present purpose it is enough to mention that the
+subjects of Austria, apart from Hungary, are classed in eight separate
+sections, differentiated by separate languages, and that Poles,
+Bohemians, Germans, and Italians, are all and each claiming a kind of
+home rule within the empire, and show an increasing tendency to group
+themselves by distinctions of race. In Bohemia the population is
+nearly equally divided between Germans and Slavs, who speak different
+languages, have separate schools, and contend violently for political
+preponderance. In Moravia and Silesia, where the Slav element is
+stronger, the same conflict goes on. In Galicia the contest is between
+Poles and Ruthenians, between the Roman Catholic and the Greek
+churches. In Hungary proper the Magyars have political predominance,
+but the population of German descent and language is more numerous
+than the Magyars: in Transylvania, further eastward, the Magyars are
+politically overriding the Slav races; in Croatia to the southward a
+similar struggle is going on. Throughout every province of the
+Austro-Hungarian empire we see the same intermixture of races,
+religions, and languages--the more numerous and better united sections
+are striving for political ascendency: the weaker sections contend
+against them by demanding autonomy. And, as all these various
+antipathies and jealousies are represented in the Parliament of the
+empire, the peaceful consolidation of the empire into a large national
+State is interrupted by resistance under the watchword of separate
+nationalities. Religious differences between Roman Catholicism,
+Calvinism, and the Greek Church in the Eastern provinces, accentuate
+the incoherence. Each separate group takes for its symbol, the
+standard round which people rally, a language--German, Polish,
+Tcheque, Ruthenian, and so on. They are all being energetically
+maintained and jealously preserved in speech and writing in the
+schools and the assemblies. Moreover, three different churches, at
+least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of
+religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions
+and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose
+each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They
+are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil
+society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small
+States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in
+Western Europe. In Western Europe the principle of nationalities has
+been a method not of disintegration, but of concentration. It has led
+within the last fifty years to the establishment of two States of
+first-class magnitude, Germany and Italy; and Louis Napoleon, who had
+proclaimed the idea of national unification, was ruined by his own
+policy, for the Germans destroyed his dynasty, and Italy gave him no
+help. But in Austro-Hungary, on the contrary, the movement is not
+toward centralisation--it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it
+continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an
+ancient and powerful empire.
+
+You will observe that since we entered, in our survey, the Austrian
+territories, we have found ourselves within the jurisdiction of an
+empire in the true sense of that word, which I take to mean the
+dominion of one superior sovereignty over many subordinate races,
+tribes, or petty States that obey its authority. I may be permitted to
+regard the German emperor as the military head of a constitutional
+federation, which is a different thing. Now I think it may be said
+that from Austria eastward across South-Eastern Europe and Asia, from
+Vienna to Pekin, the general form of government is not national but
+imperial. Every government is holding together a number of different
+groups, all jealous of each other, all of whom would fall apart and
+probably fight among themselves, if they were not kept under by one
+ruler over them. It may be affirmed, broadly, that the structure of
+modern Europe, as represented by the massing of the populations into
+great homogeneous nations within fixed limits, has now been completely
+left behind in the West, and that from the shores of the Adriatic Sea
+right across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the real subdivisions of the
+people, the bonds that unite and separate them into different groups,
+are denoted by Race and Religion, sometimes by one, sometimes by the
+other, occasionally by both.
+
+Our first step over the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
+proceeding south-east beyond the Danube and the Carpathian mountains,
+brings us into the various principalities and provinces that were once
+under the dominion of the Ottoman empire, though almost all of them
+are now independent of it. Nearly all of them lie in the region south
+of the Danube, which is usually known as the Balkan Peninsula. Here
+the complexities of race and religion are abundantly manifest, and
+these archaic divisions of political society surround us everywhere.
+This region has indeed been parcelled out, within our own time, into
+territories of diverse States, but this is quite a modern formation,
+and the idea of such political citizenship has been very recently
+introduced.
+
+If, now, it is asked why, in this corner of South-Eastern Europe, this
+medley of internal distinctions, which was the prevailing
+characteristic of the ancient world, has been so long preserved, the
+answer is that all this country, the Balkan Peninsula, was under the
+direct government of the Ottoman empire up to about seventy years ago,
+and that most of the provinces were only liberated from the Turkish
+yoke in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of the
+long dominion of the Turks over this country had been to perpetuate
+the state of things which existed when they first conquered it. Their
+policy, the policy of all Asiatic empires, was not to consolidate, or
+to obliterate differences produced by race and religion, but to
+maintain them in order to rule more securely. And here I may quote
+from a book recently published under the title of _Turkey in Europe_,
+which is unique of its kind, for in no other work can we find so
+complete and particular a history of the Balkan lands, or so accurate
+a description of the grouping of the people, taken from personal
+knowledge and local investigation. The author, who calls himself
+Odysseus, reminds us that the Ottoman Sultans acquired these
+territories when they were in the confusion and dismemberment which
+followed the decay and fall of the Byzantine empire; and he explains
+that the Turks, who have been always inferior in number to the
+aggregate of their Christian subjects, could hardly have kept up their
+dominion if at any time the Christians had united against them. As the
+Christians were not converted, religious unification, which in Asia
+was the basis of Mohammedan power, was here impossible, so the Turks
+divided that they might rule. 'The Turks have thoroughly learned,' he
+says, 'and daily put into practice with admirable skill, the lesson
+of _divide et impera_, and hence they have always done, and still do,
+all in their power to prevent the obliteration of racial, linguistic,
+and religious differences.' They have perpetuated and preserved, as if
+in a museum, the strange medley that was existing when these lands
+were first conquered by Turkish Sultans nearly five hundred years ago.
+Their idea of government has always been simply to take tribute and
+secure their paramount supremacy. The result has been that the
+confusion, intermixture, and rivalry of race and religion is far more
+intricate than even in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the central
+government has tried to reconcile and amalgamate. In Turkey, Odysseus
+tells us, 'not only is there a medley of races, but the races inhabit,
+not different districts, but the same district. Of three villages
+within ten miles of one another, one will be Turkish, one Greek, one
+Bulgarian--or perhaps one Albanian, one Bulgarian, and one Servian,
+each with their own language, dress, and religion, and eight races and
+languages may be found in one large town.'
+
+What has been the upshot and consequence of this Turkish system? It
+has been to make the Balkan Peninsula a battlefield, during the last
+four centuries, of two great militant creeds, Christianity and Islam,
+collecting the population into two religious camps; while inside these
+two main religious divisions there are manifold subdivisions of race.
+Men of the same creed are in different groups of race; nor are the
+race-groups always of the same creed, for one section may have become
+fanatic Mohammedans, while the rest have adhered to Christianity. The
+intermixture is the more complicated because one cannot attempt to
+distinguish a race by physical characteristics, by their personal
+appearance or features as marking descent from one stock. The
+practices of polygamy, slavery, of the purchase of women, and their
+capture in the interminable wars, have produced incessant crossing of
+breeds. It is not often understood or remembered that in former times
+a tribe or band of foreign invaders, when they had to cross the sea or
+to make long expeditions, very rarely brought women with them. So when
+they settled on the conquered lands they must have intermarried,
+forcibly or otherwise, with the subject race. If they massacred the
+men, the women were part of their booty. Neither is the test of
+language a sure one, though it is the best we have, and is becoming
+more and more the criterion of race; for a kind of struggle for
+existence goes on among the languages, they spread or contract under
+various influences, mainly political. The folk may change their
+language as they may change their creed; and, what is more remarkable,
+they may even change their race. According to the book I have just
+quoted, the Ottoman Government classes all its subject population into
+religious communities. Whatever be a man's race or language, if he
+professes Islam, he is called a Mohammedan; if he is of the orthodox
+Greek Church at Constantinople, he is Greek or Rûmi, for Stambul was
+the capital of the Roman empire; or else he is Katholik, Armenian, or
+Jew, according to his creed, not according to his birthplace or his
+blood. So the official designations are religious, while the popular
+usage is various, sometimes following race, sometimes creed, and it is
+still constantly shifting, as I shall presently try to explain.
+
+And here it may be interesting to mention a peculiarity of the growth
+and constitution of the Eastern or Greek Church, in contrast with the
+Western Church of Rome. The Roman Church has always claimed
+universality--it has ignored and attempted to trample down all
+political and national divisions; it demands of all Roman Catholics,
+whoever they may be, submission to the supreme spiritual dictation of
+the Roman pontiff, and those who accept any other authority are
+outside the pale. From the beginning the Roman Catholic Church has
+made incessant war upon every kind of heresy or dissent, transforming
+the old rites and worships where they could not be exterminated. It
+proclaims independence of the State, it has no local centres or
+national branches. The Pope at Rome claims spiritual authority over
+all Roman Catholics everywhere. But the historical fact that the
+Eastern or Greek Church was always under the control of the Byzantine
+empire at Constantinople, has kept this Church much more closely
+allied to the temporal power; and the result has been that throughout
+its development it has remained closely connected with the State. So
+that wherever a fresh State has been formed, the Greek Church has
+become national, and the spiritual authority, adapting itself to
+political changes, has become a separate institution. The most signal
+example of this is to be seen in Russia, where the Greek Church, being
+cut off from Constantinople, had its own independent Patriarch up to
+the time of Peter the Great; and very lately, when Bulgaria became a
+State, it set up its own head of the Church, or Exarch. When Bosnia
+and Herzegovina were ruled by the Turkish Sultan, the chief of the
+Greek Church in that country was the Patriarch at Constantinople. Now
+that these provinces have passed under the administration of Austria,
+the ecclesiastical authority has also been transferred from the
+Patriarch to local Metropolitans. Each new State shows a tendency to
+establish what I may call spiritual Home Rule. We know that in Western
+Europe the establishment of National Churches came in by one great
+religious upheaval that is called the Reformation. In Eastern Europe
+the movement has proceeded gradually, keeping pace with the rise and
+recognition of separate governments, and the result has been the
+multiplication of internal ecclesiastical divisions.
+
+I have said that the Ottoman empire recognises only religious
+denominations in the classification of the people. Apparently this was
+the general usage in former times. A Greek meant a member of the
+orthodox Greek Church, who might or might not be an inhabitant of
+Greece, nor would he necessarily have spoken the Greek tongue. If a
+Christian changed his religion, as a matter of course he changed his
+name and his designation; he was placed in another group. But the
+pressure of political independence has been latterly bringing into
+prominence the idea of Race. Odysseus, from whose book I quote again,
+gives us the very curious fact that even race is not immutable, it
+changes like religion, with the political movement; it has become a
+question of political expediency. When a separate State has been
+organised, as in Bulgaria, or when a league for shaking off the
+Turkish yoke is being organised, as in Macedonia, the plan of the
+leaders is to induce the people to drop minor distinctions of origin
+and to unite for the purposes of political combination, under some
+larger national name, to call themselves Hellenes in Greece,
+Bulgarians in Bulgaria, and Macedonians in the Turkish province of
+Macedonia. Moreover, when a new State has been thus formed, like
+Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, on the principle of Race, the patriotic
+party begins to discover that many Greeks or Bulgarians are outside
+the territory, and they set up a claim to enlarge their boundaries in
+order to bring these people inside. So that the questions of races and
+churches are used to keep up continual intrigues, dissensions, and a
+lively agitation throughout these countries. For since religion is
+always a powerful uniting force, there is a constant effort to bring
+the people to congregate under the Established Church of their new
+State, to renounce their obedience to any spiritual head outside its
+limits. We have, therefore, the curious spectacle of a frequent
+shifting of denominations of Race and Creed for the purpose of
+political consolidation. In fact we are witnessing in the Balkan
+Peninsula a struggle among the petty States to strengthen themselves
+by capturing each other's population.
+
+I think I may have said enough to prove, briefly and superficially,
+the importance, in Central and South-Eastern Europe, of the ideas of
+Race and Religion, the necessity of understanding their strength and
+operation. So soon as we cross into Asia we find these ideas
+universally paramount. It will perhaps be remembered that Henry Maine
+pointed out long ago, in his book on Ancient Law, that during a large
+part of what we call modern history no such conception was entertained
+as that of territorial sovereignty, as indicated by such a title as
+the King of France. 'Sovereignty,' he said, 'was not associated with
+dominion over a portion or subdivision of the earth.' Now I do not
+believe that a territorial title is assumed at this moment by any of
+the great Asiatic sovereigns in Asia. Here in Europe we talk of the
+Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, or the Emperor of China; but
+these are not the styles or designations which are actually used by
+these potentates; they are each known, on their coins, and in their
+public proclamations, by a string of lofty titles, generally
+religious, like our 'Defender of the Faith,' which make no reference
+to their territories. Such were the titles of the Moghul emperors of
+India, and I may here observe that the term Emperor of India, now
+borne by the English king, is entirely of British manufacture. The
+truth is that Asiatic kingdoms have no settled territorial
+boundaries, they are always changing, just as our Indian frontiers are
+constantly moving forward; and wherever in Asia there exists a
+demarcated line of frontier, it has been fixed by the intervention of
+European governments interested in maintaining order. In Mohammedan
+lands the basis of a ruler's authority, in theory at least, is
+religious, and all through Western Asia there is the closest
+connection between the State and the dominant creed of Islam; for a
+Mohammedan sovereign's authority is ecclesiastical, so to speak, as
+well as civil; he is bound, in the words of our Litany, not only to
+'execute justice,' but to 'maintain truth'; and the theory of two
+separate jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal, is practically
+unknown, though of course in dealing with religious questions the
+ruler must be supported by the chief expounders of the law of Islam.
+To borrow a phrase from Hobbes, 'the religion of the Mohammedans is a
+part of their policy,' as it is also the fundamental bond of their
+whole society.
+
+We have seen that in South-Eastern Europe there is an intricate
+intermixture of the distinctions of race and religion, with a tendency
+of race to win the mastery. This is because the people of those
+countries were conquered by Islam, but only partially converted, and
+the Turkish Sultans, as I have already said, encouraged discord among
+their Christian subjects. But in Western Asia the faith of Islam not
+only conquered but converted much more completely; it almost
+extirpated other faiths in Asia Minor and Persia, leaving in Asia
+Minor only a few obscure sects, like the Nestorians, in a region that
+had been wholly Christian, and leaving in Persia only some scattered
+relics of the great Zoroastrian religion, still represented in two or
+three towns by those whom we call Parsees. In these lands, therefore,
+religion has generally mastered race, for the laws that regulate the
+whole personal condition and property of the people are determined by
+their religion, with a certain variety of local customs. Nevertheless,
+beneath the overspreading religious denomination there are a large
+number of tribal groups, all of whom are known by tribal names. Most
+of these tribes are fanatic Islamites, but in the midst of them is one
+group which is distinct by religion and probably by race--I mean the
+Armenians. They do not form a majority of the population in Armenia,
+they are scattered about Western Asia, and are divided into two
+Christian sects, which under the Turkish empire are regarded as two
+religious communities. Their recent terrible misfortunes afford a
+signal and melancholy warning of the danger of interfering in Oriental
+affairs without a full understanding of the complications arising out
+of these very differences and antagonisms of race and religion that I
+have been endeavouring to explain. And the whole story is a striking
+example of the tremendous power of religion in Asiatic politics. In
+1895 the European Powers interposed in the name of justice and
+humanity to press upon the Turkish Government the reforms that had
+been promised by treaty, and thus to better the condition of the
+Armenians, by securing to them a certain share in the local and
+municipal government. But the Armenians are a scattered and subject
+people, different in race and religion and language from the ruling
+Turks, and the demand for giving them some kind of independence
+alarmed the Turkish Government and inflamed the fanaticism of the
+Mohammedans. The only result of European intervention was a frightful
+massacre of the Armenians, which the European Powers witnessed without
+any serious attempt to stop. Such are the consequences of
+misunderstanding the real political situation and the forces at work.
+Probably many people in England had a very hazy notion of what the
+Armenians were, or what their name signified. We have always to
+remember that throughout Asia, and indeed over the greater part of the
+non-Christian world, the various sections of the population very
+rarely use for themselves, or indeed for the country that they dwell
+in, the name that is used for them by Europeans. As our own system has
+become territorial, as we call any natural-born inhabitant of France a
+Frenchman, and so on, we are led by a false analogy to talk of Turkey
+and the Turks, Persia and the Persians, India and the Indians, China
+and the Chinese. But these broad designations denoting modern
+nationalities are not used in Asia by the people themselves, to whom
+such a conception is foreign. I know of no terms in the languages of
+these countries that correspond to our words, Turkey, India, China, as
+geographical expressions, and I think that the names used by Europeans
+for outlying countries or peoples often come from some accident or
+chance, or mistake, or by taking the name of a part of a country for
+the name of the whole. In Asia the people still class themselves, in
+their ordinary talk, by names designating religion or race. A curious
+example of a religious designation still survives, by the way, among
+Europeans in South Africa. When the first Portuguese explorers of the
+African coast asked the Arab traders about the indigenous tribes,
+they, being Mohammedans, said that the natives were all Kafirs, which
+means Infidels. This was supposed to be the general name of a people,
+and it has been handed down to us so that we still call the South
+African natives Kaffirs. I doubt whether the tribes concerned have
+ever used or recognised among themselves this unsavoury name. I may
+note, by the way, that one of the most ancient tribal names in Asia is
+that by which the Greeks, outside the Turkish empire, are often
+known--Yunâni, or Ionian--which must have been in use from the days
+when the Greek colonies settled on the coast of Asia Minor, many
+centuries before the Christian era.
+
+We are pushing our survey eastward across Asia. The kingdom known to
+Europe by the name of Persia is styled by its inhabitants _Irân_,
+though I doubt whether a Persian subject belonging to a particular
+tribe or sect would call himself _Irâni_. The next independent
+kingdom, beyond Persia, is Afghanistan; and here we have an example of
+a designation originally implying race, gradually merging into one
+that is territorial and political. Afghanistan originally meant, I
+believe, the great central mass of mountains occupied by a tribe
+called Afghans; it is now becoming a name that includes the whole
+territory ruled by the Afghan Amir at Kabul. The causes that are
+producing this change in the signification of the word are, first,
+that the Amir of Kabul has subdued, more or less, all the tribes
+inhabiting the country; and secondly, that the pressure of England and
+Russia on two sides of that country has necessitated an accurate
+demarcation of frontiers all round it, in order that the Amir's
+territories, which are under our protection, may be precisely known.
+The kingdom is thus acquiring a territorial designation. But this
+kingdom of Afghanistan is really composed of a number of chiefships
+and provinces very loosely knit together under the sway of the Amir,
+which might fall asunder again if the rulership at Kabul became weak.
+And the population is all parcelled out into various races and tribes,
+usually dwelling in separate tracts under local chiefs; they are
+always known among themselves by names, denoting race or tribe;
+sometimes patriarchal, like the Children of Israel, or the clans of
+our own Highlands; sometimes local, and in one case historical, for
+the dominant tribe to which the Amir belongs has called itself Durâni
+or royal.
+
+It is therefore the distinction of race or tribe, not of religion,
+that governs the whole interior population throughout this vast region
+of high mountains and valleys in the centre, with comparatively open
+country on the north and south; the whole area has been peopled by a
+conflux of tribes. Yet Afghanistan has some of the symptoms of
+national growth--I mean that if it could hold together as one kingdom
+it might grow into a nationality. In religion the Afghans are almost
+all fanatical Mohammedans, for Afghanistan is the great bulwark and
+citadel on the eastern frontier of Islam, and beyond it, in Eastern
+Asia, there are no independent Mohammedan principalities. The kingdom
+has a strictly defined territory, and a dynasty which has risen from
+the chiefship of a powerful tribe to the heritable possession of that
+territory. This dynasty, moreover, is identical in race and religion
+with a large majority of its subjects, which is another peculiar
+source of strength; for almost all the other first-class kingdoms of
+Asia are ruled by dynasties of alien race, who sometimes profess a
+religion different from that of many of their subjects. We are
+frequently reminded of the important fact that in India the English
+rulers are aliens in race and religion from the people; but we may
+also remember that after all this is only a difference of degree, a
+wider separation between the governors and the governed than elsewhere
+in Asia. The principal kingdoms of Asia are ruled by foreign families
+or dynasties that have come in by conquest. The Moghul dynasty that
+preceded our own government in India was foreign; and it was a
+Mohammedan rulership over an enormous Hindu population. The Ottoman
+Turk was a foreign invader from Central Asia, who still governs a
+variety of races and religions. In Persia the Shah's family is of a
+Turkish tribe. And the Emperor of China is a Mandchoo Tartar, of a
+race quite apart from that of the immense majority of the Chinese. Of
+course the Russians are as much aliens in Central Asia as the English
+in India; they govern from St. Petersburg as we do from London. I
+doubt, therefore, whether there is any other kingdom in Asia that has
+more of the element of national unity than Afghanistan, though
+unfortunately its political condition is precarious, because there is
+still much tribal disunion inside it.
+
+Eastward again beyond Afghanistan we enter the Indian empire, a vast
+dominion stretching south-eastward from the slopes of the outer Afghan
+hills and the Persian border to the western frontiers of the Chinese
+empire and of Siam, and controlling the whole seaboard of Southern
+Asia, from Aden to Singapore. It is the possession of this wide
+territory that has given to the English a direct and most important
+interest in the problems of race and religion. For, in the first
+place, in this empire we have to deal with three out of the four great
+faiths of the world--Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism--and we have to
+uphold for ourselves the fourth, Christianity. Secondly, we have also
+within the borders of our empire a multiplicity of races and tribes;
+and we have the peculiar Indian institution of Caste, which marks off
+all Hindu society into innumerable groups, distinguished one from
+another by the rules that forbid intermarriage and (in most cases) the
+sharing of food. Now the word Hindu requires a special explanation,
+because there is nothing exactly like it elsewhere in the world; it is
+not exclusively a religious denomination; it denotes also a country
+and a race. When we speak of a Christian, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist,
+we mean a particular religious community without distinction of race
+or country. When we talk of Persians or Chinese, we indicate country
+or parentage without any necessary distinction of creed. But when a
+man tells me he is a Hindu, I know that he means all three things
+together--religion, race and country. I can be almost sure that he is
+an inhabitant of India, quite sure that he is of Indian parentage; and
+as to religion, the word Hindu undoubtedly locates him within one of
+the manifold groups who follow the ordinances and worship the gods of
+Hinduism. Next in importance to the Hindus, as a religious community,
+come the Mohammedans, who number over sixty millions in India. The two
+faiths, Hinduism and Islam--polytheism and monotheism--are in strong
+opposition to each other; yet they are not quite clean cut apart, for
+some Hindu tribes that have been converted to Islam retain in part
+their primitive customs of worship and caste. And in Burmah, as in
+Ceylon, the population is almost wholly Buddhist.
+
+In a very able article that has recently appeared in an Indian
+magazine, the writer, a Hindu, observes: 'The Hindus offer a curious
+instance of a people without any feeling of nationality.' He finds an
+explanation in 'the intensity of religiousness, which led to
+sectarianism, and allying itself with caste, tended to preserve all
+local and tribal differences.' Other causes, historical, political,
+and geographical, might be mentioned, but I agree that the chief
+separating influence has been religious. And, however this may be, it
+may be affirmed that within our Indian empire at the present moment
+the primary superior designation of a man is according to his
+religion--he is either a Hindu, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist. But
+inside these general religious denominations are very many
+distinctions of caste, race, or tribe. The Sikhs are a sect of Hindus
+who belong exclusively to the Punjab. The Marathas and Rajpûts are
+races who profess Hinduism and who always call themselves by their
+racial names: and there are many aboriginal tribes, like the Bheels
+and Gonds, who are being gradually absorbed into Hinduism. Race and
+religion are, in fact, more profoundly intermixed in India than
+perhaps in any other country of the world; and into such an intricate
+subject I cannot now enter. My present point is that in India we are
+governing an empire of the antique pattern, quite different from the
+western nationalities, a country where complexities of race and creed
+meet us at every turn in the course of our administration; an empire
+which, as Mr. Bryce has pointed out in a recent essay that is full of
+light and knowledge, has many striking resemblances with the dominion
+of Imperial Rome.[57] There is the same miscellany of tribes and races
+in diverse stages of civilisation, warlike and half-tamed on the
+frontiers, softened and reconciled by peace, prosperity, and culture
+in the older provinces of the empire, wild and barbarous in remote
+interior tracts. There is just visible in India a similar though much
+slighter tendency of the language of the ruling race to prevail among
+the educated classes, because the English language, like the Latin,
+has greater literary power, and conveys to the Indians the latest
+ideas and scientific discoveries of the foremost nations of the world.
+There is also a certain diffusion of European manners and even dress,
+resembling in some degree what took place even in such a remote
+province of the Roman empire as Britain, where, as we know from
+Tacitus, it was made a reproach against the Romanising Britons that
+they were abandoning their own costume for the Roman toga and adopting
+the manners of their conquerors. All these tendencies are slightly
+affecting distinctions of race and religion; though in India these
+distinctions are far deeper than they were under the Roman empire, and
+so far as one can judge they are ineffaceable.
+
+In regard to religious differences, so long as the people were almost
+universally polytheistic the Romans had little trouble on this score,
+since every deity and every ritual was tolerated indifferently by
+their government, provided that public order and decency were
+observed; and this is the practice of our Government in India. But we
+have one difficulty in governing India that did not trouble the Romans
+at the time when they first founded their empire by conquest. I think
+that religion had then very little influence on politics. It was the
+advent of two great militant and propagating faiths, first
+Christianity, next Islam, that first made religion a vital element in
+politics, and afterwards made a common creed the bond of union for
+great masses of mankind. It has now become in Asia a powerful
+instrument of political association. Therefore when we proclaim for
+our government in India the principle of religious neutrality we do
+indeed avoid collision with other faiths, but we are without the
+advantage that is possessed by a State which represents and is
+supported by the religious enthusiasm of a great number of its
+subjects. I take the separation of the State from religion to be a
+principle that is quite modern in Europe; and outside our Indian
+empire it is unknown in Asia. Everywhere else the ruler is the head of
+some dominant church or creed. On the other hand our neutral attitude
+enables us to arbitrate and keep the peace between the two formidable
+rivals, Islam and Hinduism, which in a large measure balance and
+restrain each other. And it is easier to govern a great empire full of
+diverse castes and creeds when you only demand from them obedience to
+the civil law, than when the Government takes one side on religious
+questions. Nevertheless, though in India we proclaim and practise
+religious neutrality, we must always remember that India is, of all
+great countries in the world, that in which religious beliefs and
+antagonisms affect the administration most profoundly, and subdivide
+the population with the greatest complexity. For the empire contains a
+wonderful variety of races and tribes, especially on its frontiers; it
+has the fierce Afghan tribes under our protectorate on the north-west,
+a cluster of utterly barbarous tribes in the north-east, and in the
+Far East beyond Burmah we have undertaken the control of a border
+tract, full of petty rival chiefships, where the language, manners and
+origins are related to the neighbouring population of China.
+
+In China we have the true type of Asiatic empire, by far the oldest in
+the world, a sovereignty that, with various changes of dynasty, has
+governed the Far East of Asia from time almost immemorial; an immense
+conglomeration of different races under the rulership of a dynasty
+that is foreign to the great majority of its subjects. Here again I
+must remark on the absence of territorial or national designations.
+The word China, as designating this empire, is not used by the people
+themselves; the official name means, I believe, the Great Pure
+Kingdom; and the emperor himself is known by various titles signifying
+august, lofty, or sacred. I suppose that almost the whole population
+belongs to the great Mongolian or Tartar family of mankind; but the
+subdivisions of different tribes, races, and languages must be
+numerous, as might be expected in such a vastly extended empire, and
+the tribesmen are all known by their tribal names. In regard to
+Religion the situation is peculiar, it is without parallel elsewhere
+in Asia; for three great systems exist in China separately and
+independently, each of them working in peace side by side with the
+others: the religion founded by Confucius, which is a great system of
+morals; Buddhism, which is a Church with a splendid ritual,
+priesthood, and monastic orders; and Taoism, which is a kind of
+naturalistic religion, the worship of stars, natural forces, spirits,
+deified heroes and local gods. It is said to be a common thing for one
+person to belong to all three religions, and the State superintends
+them all impartially. One very remarkable and peculiar fact, which I
+give on excellent authority, is that in China religious denominations
+are never used to denote sections of the people, except by the
+Mohammedans, who are not numerous and form a class apart. But any
+attempt to describe the religion of China would lead me far beyond the
+scope of this address. My present point is only to lay stress on the
+enormous political importance, in China as elsewhere in Asia, of the
+religious idea. For whereas powerful religious movements, affecting
+the destinies of kingdoms and causing great wars, have ceased in
+Western and Central Europe, in Asia all governments have constantly to
+apprehend some fresh outburst of religious enthusiasm, the appearance
+of some prophet or new spiritual teacher, who gathers a following,
+like the Mahdi in the Soudan, and attacks the ruling power. The
+Taeping rebellion, which devastated China some forty years ago, is a
+case in point; it was begun by a fanatic leader who denounced the
+established religions, and it soon became a dangerous revolt against
+the Imperial dynasty. And the outbreak against the foreigners in China
+last year is understood to have originated in religious fanaticism.
+These events go to illustrate the enormous influence on politics which
+Religion, whether you call it enthusiasm or superstition, exercises
+everywhere in Asia.
+
+But of all empires in Asia, the Russian empire is the greatest and the
+most powerful. I have only space to say here that it is of the same
+type with the others; it is a vast dominion over an infinite variety
+of races, tribes, and creeds; it is a government which has come in by
+foreign conquest; a Christian Power which has among its subjects a
+great number of Mohammedans. It differs from our Indian empire in this
+respect, that the Russian conquests were made gradually by land,
+across Central Asia, or by slow immigration and extension, as in
+Siberia, whereas the English reached India by a long sea-journey. So
+that in the Asiatic empire of Russia the separation of race between
+the rulers and their subjects is not so sharply defined as between
+England and India. Nevertheless the problems that confront Russia in
+Asia are similar in kind to those which face us in India; she has to
+reconcile to her permanent dominion a miscellany of alien peoples,
+whom it is almost impossible to fuse and consolidate into anything
+like a nationality.
+
+I have now endeavoured, very imperfectly, to show how Race and
+Religion still powerfully affect society, and trouble politics,
+throughout a great part of the world. How far they influence and
+interact upon each other is a difficult problem; but one may say that
+some religions seem to accord with the peculiar temperament and
+intellectual disposition of certain races; that, for instance, the
+active propagating spirit of Islam flourishes in Western Asia, while
+in Eastern Asia a quiet and contemplative faith, with little
+missionary impulse, no strong desire to make converts, has always
+prevailed. But in the East everywhere Race and Religion still unite
+and isolate the populations in groups--they are the great dividing and
+disturbing forces that prevent or delay the consolidation of settled
+nationalities; and so far as our experience goes, a fixed nationality
+of the Western type is the most solid and permanent form of political
+government and social aggregation. An empire is a different and looser
+mode of binding people together, yet at certain stages of civilisation
+and the world's progress it is a necessity; and an empire well
+administered is the best available instrument for promoting
+civilisation and good order among backward races. So managed it may
+last long; and its dominion may be practically permanent, for commerce
+and industry, literature and science, rapid and easy communication by
+land and sea, spread far more quickly, and connect distant countries
+far more closely, in modern times than in the ancient world. Yet there
+is always an element of unrest and insecurity underlying the position
+of imperial rulership over different and often discordant groups of
+subjects; and this has been one main cause of the immemorial weakness
+of Asiatic empires, and of the indifference of the people to a change
+of masters, because no single dynasty represented the whole people. It
+is just this weakness of the native rulers that has enabled the
+European to make his conquests in Asia; and we have carefully to
+remember that although our governments are superior in skill and
+strength, we have inherited the old difficulties. For it is my belief
+that in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, the strength of
+the racial and religious sentiments is rather increasing than
+diminishing. This is indeed the view--the fact, if I am right--that I
+especially desire to press home, because it is of the highest
+importance at the present time, when all the European nations, and
+England among the foremost, are extending their dominion over peoples
+of races and creeds different from their own. Our governments are now
+no longer confined to the continent which we inhabit; we are acquiring
+immense possessions in Asia and Africa; we can survey the whole earth
+with its confusion of tongues; its multitude of beliefs and customs,
+its infinitely miscellaneous populations. We must recognise the
+variety of the human species; we must acknowledge that we cannot
+impose a uniform type of civilisation, just as we admit that a uniform
+faith is beyond mere human efforts to impose, and that to attempt it
+would be politically disastrous. This is the conclusion upon which I
+venture to lay stress, because some such warning seems to me neither
+untimely nor unimportant.
+
+For there is still a dangerous tendency among the enterprising
+commercial nations of the West to assume that the importation into
+Asia of economical improvements, public instruction, regular
+administration, and religious neutrality will conquer antipathies,
+overcome irrational prejudices, and reconcile old-world folk to an
+alien civilisation. Undoubtedly a foreign government that rules
+wisely, justly, and very cautiously, acquires a strong hold on its
+subjects, and may stand, like the Roman empire, for centuries. But
+this can only be achieved by recognising, instead of ignoring, certain
+ineffaceable characteristics in the origins and history of the people,
+for whom the tradition and sentiment of race is often their bond of
+union and the base of their society, as their religion is the
+embodiment of their spiritual instincts and imaginations.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[56] Address delivered as President of the Social and Political
+Education League, May 5, 1902.--_Fortnightly Review_, December 1902.
+
+[57] _Studies in History and Jurisprudence_, vol. I., chap. i.
+
+
+
+
+THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS
+
+
+In considering the subject of my address,[58] I have been confronted
+by this difficulty--that in the sections which regulate the order of
+our proceedings, we have a list of papers that range over all the
+principal religions, ancient and modern, that have existed and still
+exist in the world. They are to be treated and discussed by experts
+whose scholarship, particular studies, and close research entitle them
+all to address you authoritatively. I have no such special
+qualifications; and in any case it would be most presumptuous in me to
+trespass upon their ground. All that I can venture to do, therefore,
+in the remarks which I propose to address to you to-day, is to attempt
+a brief general survey of the history of religions from a standpoint
+which may possibly not fall within the scope of these separate papers.
+
+The four great religions now prevailing in the world, which are
+historical in the sense that they have been long known to history, I
+take to be--Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Having regard
+to their origin and derivation, to their history and character, I may
+be permitted, for my present purpose only, to class the two former as
+the Religions of the West, and the two latter as the Religions of the
+East. These are the faiths which still maintain a mighty influence
+over the minds of mankind. And my object is to compare the political
+relations, the attitude, maintained toward them, from time to time, by
+the States and rulers of the people over which these religions have
+established their spiritual dominion. The religion of the Jews is not
+included, though its influence has been incalculable, because it has
+been caught up, so to speak, into Christianity and Islam, and cannot
+therefore be counted among those which have made a partition of the
+religious world. For this reason, perhaps, it has retained to this day
+its ancient denomination, derived from the tribe or country of its
+origin; whereas the others are named from a Faith or a Founder. The
+word Nazarene, denoting the birthplace of Christianity, which is said
+to be still used in that region, was, as we know, very speedily
+superseded by its wider title, as the Creed broke out of local limits
+and was proclaimed universal.
+
+There has evidently been a fore-time, though it is prehistorical,
+when, so far as we know, mankind was universally polytheistic; when
+innumerable rites and worships prevailed without restraint, springing
+up and contending with each other like the trees in a primeval forest,
+reflecting a primitive and precarious condition of human society. I
+take polytheism to have been, in this earliest stage, the wild growth
+of superstitious imagination, varied indefinitely by the pressure of
+circumstance, by accident, by popular caprice, or by the good or evil
+fortunes of the community. In this stage it can now be seen among
+barbarous tribes--as, for instance, in Central Africa. And some traces
+of it still survive, under different pretexts and disguises, in the
+lowest strata of civilised nations, where it may be said to represent
+the natural reluctance of the vagrant human fancy to be satisfied with
+higher forms and purer conceptions that are always imperfectly
+assimilated by the multitude.
+
+Among primitive societies the spheres of human and divine affairs
+were intermixed and identical; they could not be disentangled. But
+with the growth of political institutions came gradual separation, or
+at any rate the subordination of religion to the practical necessities
+of orderly government and public morals. That polytheism can exist and
+flourish in the midst of a highly intellectual and civilised society,
+we know from the history of Greece and Rome. But in ancient Greece its
+direct influence upon political affairs seems to have been slight;
+though it touched at some points upon morality. The function of the
+State, according to Greek ideas, was to legislate for all the
+departments of human life and to uphold the moral standard. The law
+prohibited sacrilege and profanity; it punished open impiety that
+might bring down divine wrath upon the people at large. The
+philosophers taught rational ethics; they regarded the popular
+superstitions with indulgent contempt; but they inculcated the duty of
+honouring the gods, and the observance of public ceremonial. Beyond
+these limits the practice of local and customary worship was, I think,
+free and unrestrained; though I need hardly add that toleration, as
+understood by the States of antiquity, was a very different thing from
+the modern principle of religious neutrality. Under the Roman
+government the connection between the State and religion was much
+closer, as the dominion of Rome expanded and its power became
+centralised. The Roman State maintained a strict control and
+superintendence over the official rituals and worships, which were
+regulated as a department of the administration, to bind the people
+together by established rites and worships, in order to cement
+political and social unity. It is true that the usages of the tribes
+and principalities that were conquered and annexed were left
+undisturbed; for the Roman policy, like that of the English in India,
+was to avoid giving offence to religion; and undoubtedly this policy,
+in both instances, materially facilitated the rapid building up of a
+wide dominion. Nevertheless, there was a tendency to draw in the
+worship toward a common centre. The deities of the conquered provinces
+were respected and conciliated; the Roman generals even appealed to
+them for protection and favour, yet they became absorbed and
+assimilated under Roman names; they were often identified with the
+gods of the Roman pantheon, and were frequently superseded by the
+victorious divinities of the new rulers--the strange deities, in fact,
+were Romanised as well as the foreign tribes and cities. After this
+manner the Roman empire combined the tolerance of great religious
+diversity with the supremacy of a centralised government. Political
+amalgamation brought about a fusion of divine attributes; and latterly
+the emperor was adored as the symbol of manifest power, ruler and
+pontiff; he was the visible image of supreme authority.
+
+This _régime_ was easily accepted by the simple unsophisticated
+paganism of Europe. The Romans, with all their statecraft, had as yet
+no experience of a high religious temperature, of enthusiastic
+devotion and divine mysteries. But as their conquest and commerce
+spread eastward, the invasion of Asia let in upon Europe a flood of
+Oriental divinities, and thus Rome came into contact with much
+stronger and deeper spiritual forces. The European polytheism might be
+utilised and administered, the Asiatic deities could not be
+domesticated and subjected to regulation; the Oriental orgies and
+strange rites broke in upon the organised State worship; the new ideas
+and practices came backed by a profound and fervid spiritualism.
+Nevertheless the Roman policy of bringing religion under
+authoritative control was more or less successful even in the Asiatic
+provinces of the empire; the privileges of the temples were
+restricted; the priesthoods were placed under the general
+superintendence of the proconsular officials; and Roman divinities
+gradually found their way into the Asiatic pantheon.
+
+But we all know that the religion of the Roman empire was falling into
+multitudinous confusion when Christianity arose--an austere exclusive
+faith, with its army of saints, ascetics, and unflinching martyrs,
+proclaiming worship to be due to one God only, and sternly refusing to
+acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. Against such a faith an
+incoherent disorderly polytheism could make no better stand than
+tribal levies against a disciplined army. The new religion struck
+directly at the sacrifices that symbolised imperial unity; the passive
+resistance of Christians was necessarily treated as rebellion, the
+State made implacable war upon them. Yet the spiritual and moral
+forces won the victory, and Christianity established itself throughout
+the empire. Universal religion, following upon universal civil
+dominion, completed the levelling of local and national distinctions.
+The Churches rapidly grew into authority superior to the State within
+their own jurisdiction; they called in the temporal government to
+enforce theological decisions and to put down heresies; they founded a
+powerful hierarchy. The earlier Roman constitution had made religion
+an instrument of administration. When one religion became universal,
+the churches enlisted the civil ruler into the service of orthodoxy;
+they converted the State into an instrument for enforcing religion.
+The pagan empire had issued edicts against Christianity and had
+suppressed Christian assemblies as tainted with disaffection; the
+Christian emperors enacted laws against the rites and worships of
+paganism, and closed temples. It was by the supreme authority of
+Constantine that, for the first time in the religious history of the
+world, uniformity of belief was defined by a creed, and sanctioned by
+the ruler's assent.
+
+Then came, in Western Europe, the time when the empire at Rome was
+rent asunder by the inrush of barbarians; but upon its ruins was
+erected the great Catholic Church of the Papacy, which preserved in
+the ecclesiastical domain the autocratic imperial tradition. The
+primacy of the Roman Church, according to Harnack, is essentially the
+transference to her of Rome's central position in the religions of the
+heathen world; the Church united the western races, disunited
+politically, under the common denomination of Christianity. Yet
+Christianity had not long established itself throughout all the lands,
+in Europe and Asia, which had once been under the Roman sovereignty,
+when the violent irruptions of Islam upset not only the temporal but
+also the spiritual dominion throughout Western Asia, and along the
+southern shores of the Mediterranean. The Eastern empire at
+Constantinople had been weakened by bitter theological dissensions and
+heresies among the Christians; the votaries of the new, simple,
+unswerving faith of Mohammed were ardent and unanimous. In Egypt and
+Syria the Mohammedans were speedily victorious; the Latin Church and
+even the Latin language were swept out of North Africa. In Persia the
+Sassanian dynasty was overthrown, and although there was no immediate
+and total conversion of the people, Mohammedanism gradually superseded
+the ancient Zoroastrian cultus as the religion of the Persian State.
+It was not long before the armies of Islam had triumphed from the
+Atlantic coast to the Jaxartes river in Central Asia; and conversion
+followed, speedily or slowly, as the direct result of conquest.
+Moreover, the Mohammedans invaded Europe. In the south-west they
+subdued almost all Spain; and in the south-east they destroyed, some
+centuries later, the Greek empire, though not the Greek Church, and
+consolidated a mighty rulership at Constantinople.
+
+With this prolonged conflict between Islam and Christianity along the
+borderlands of Europe and Asia began the era of those religious wars
+that have darkened the history of the Western nations, and have
+perpetuated the inveterate antipathy between Asiatic and European
+races, which the spread of Christianity into both continents had
+softened and might have healed. In the end Christianity has fixed
+itself permanently in Europe, while Islam is strongly established
+throughout half Asia. But the sharp collision between the two faiths,
+the clash of armies bearing the cross and the crescent, generated
+fierce fanaticism on both sides. The Crusades kindled a fiery militant
+and missionary spirit previously unknown to religions, whereby
+religious propagation became the mainspring and declared object of
+conquest and colonisation. Finally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries the great secession from the Roman Church divided the
+nations of Western Europe into hostile camps, and throughout the long
+wars of that period political jealousies and ambitions were inflamed
+by religious animosities. In Eastern Europe the Greek Church fell
+under almost complete subordination to the State.
+
+The history of Europe and Western Asia records, therefore, a close
+connection and community of interests between the States and the
+orthodox faiths; a combination which has had a very potent influence,
+during many centuries, upon the course of civil affairs, upon the
+fortunes, or misfortunes, of nations. Up to the sixteenth century, at
+least, it was universally held, by Christianity and by Islam, that
+the State was bound to enforce orthodoxy; conversion and the
+suppression or expulsion of heretics were public duties. Unity of
+creed was thought necessary for national unity--a government could not
+undertake to maintain authority, or preserve the allegiance of its
+subjects, in a realm divided and distracted by sectarian
+controversies. On these principles Christianity and Islam were
+consolidated, in union with the States or in close alliance with them;
+and the geographical boundaries of these two faiths, and of their
+internal divisions respectively, have not materially changed up to the
+present day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let me now turn to the history of religion in those countries of
+further Asia, which were never reached by Greek or Roman conquest or
+civilisation, where the ancient forms of worship and conceptions of
+divinity, which existed before Christianity and Islam, still flourish.
+And here I shall only deal with the relations of the State to religion
+in India and China and their dependencies, because these vast and
+populous empires contain the two great religions, Hinduism and
+Buddhism, of purely Asiatic origin and character, which have
+assimilated to a large extent, and in a certain degree elevated, the
+indigenous polytheism, and which still exercise a mighty influence
+over the spiritual and moral condition of many millions.
+
+We know what a tremendous power religion has been in the wars and
+politics of the West. I submit that in Eastern Asia, beyond the pale
+of Islam, the history of religion has been very different. Religious
+wars--I mean wars caused by the conflict of militant faiths contending
+for superiority--were, I believe, unknown on any great scale to the
+ancient civilisations. It seems to me that until Islam invaded India
+the great religious movements and changes in that region had seldom or
+never been the consequence of, nor had been materially affected by,
+wars, conquests, or political revolutions.
+
+Throughout Europe and Mohammedan Asia the indigenous deities and their
+temples have disappeared centuries ago; they have been swept away by
+the forces of Church and State combined to exterminate them; they have
+all yielded to the lofty overruling ideal of monotheism. But the tide
+of Mohammedanism reached its limit in India; the people, though
+conquered, were but partly converted, and eastward of India there have
+been no important Mohammedan rulerships. On this side of Asia,
+therefore, two great religions, Buddhism and Brahmanism, have held
+their ground from times far anterior to Christianity; they have
+retained the elastic comprehensive character of polytheism, purified
+and elevated by higher conceptions, developed by the persistent
+competition of diverse ideas and forms among the people, unrestrained
+by attempts of superior organised faiths to obliterate the lower and
+weaker species. In that region political despotism has prevailed
+immemorially; religious despotism, in the sense of the legal
+establishment of one faith or worship to the exclusion of all others,
+of uniformity imposed by coercion, of proselytism by persecution, is
+unknown to history: the governments have been absolute and personal;
+the religions have been popular and democratic. They have never been
+identified so closely with the ruling power as to share its fortunes,
+or to be used for the consolidation of successful conquest. Nor, on
+the other hand, has a ruler ever found it necessary, for the security
+of his throne, to conform to the religion of his subjects, and to
+abjure all others. The political maxim, that the sovereign and his
+subjects should be of one and the same religion,[59] has never
+prevailed in this part of the world. And although in India, the land
+of their common origin, Buddhism widely displaced and overlaid
+Brahmanism, while it was in its turn, after several centuries,
+overcome and ejected by a Brahmanic revival, yet I believe that
+history records no violent contests or collisions between them; nor do
+we know that the armed force of the State played any decisive part in
+these spiritual revolutions.
+
+I do not maintain that Buddhism has owed nothing to State influence.
+It represents certain doctrines of the ancient Indian theosophy,
+incarnate, as one might say, in the figure of a spiritual Master, the
+Indian prince, Sakya Gautama, who was the type and example of ascetic
+quietism; it embodies the idea of salvation, or emancipation
+attainable by man's own efforts, without aid from priests or
+divinities. Buddhism is the earliest, by many centuries, of the faiths
+that claim descent from a personal founder. It emerges into authentic
+history with the empire of Asoka, who ruled over the greater part of
+India some 250 years before Christ, and its propagation over his realm
+and the countries adjacent is undoubtedly due to the influence,
+example, and authority of that devout monarch. According to Mr.
+Vincent Smith, from whose valuable work on the Early History of India
+I take the description of Asoka's religious policy, the king,
+renouncing after one necessary war all further military conquest, made
+it the business of his life to employ his autocratic power in
+directing the preaching and teaching of the Law of Piety, which he had
+learnt from his Buddhist priesthood. All his high officers were
+commanded to instruct the people in the way of salvation; he sent
+missions to foreign countries; he issued edicts promulgating ethical
+doctrines, and the rules of a devout life; he made pilgrimages to the
+sacred places; and finally he assumed the yellow robe of a Buddhist
+monk. Asoka elevated, so Mr. Smith has said, a sect of Hinduism to the
+rank of a world-religion. Nevertheless, I think it may be affirmed
+that the emperor consistently refrained from the forcible conversion
+of his subjects, and indeed the use of compulsion would have
+apparently been a breach of his own edicts, which insist on the
+principle of toleration, and declare the propagation of the Law of
+Piety to be his sole object. Asoka made no attempt to persecute
+Brahmanism; and it seems clear that the extraordinary success of
+Buddhism in India cannot be attributed to war or to conquest. To
+imperial influence and example much must be ascribed, yet I think
+Buddhism owed much more to its spiritual potency, to its superior
+faculty of transmuting and assimilating, instead of abolishing, the
+elementary instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher
+significance, attracting and stimulating devotion by impressive rites
+and ceremonies, impressing upon the people the dogma of the soul's
+transmigration and its escape from the miseries of sentient existence
+by the operation of merits. And of all great religions it is the least
+political, for the practice of asceticism and quietism, of monastic
+seclusion from the working world, is necessarily adverse to any active
+connection with mundane affairs.
+
+I do not know that the mysterious disappearance of Buddhism from India
+can be accounted for by any great political revolution, like that
+which brought Islam into India. It seems to have vanished before the
+Mohammedans had gained any footing in the country. Meanwhile Buddhism
+is said to have penetrated into the Chinese empire by the first
+century of the Christian era. Before that time the doctrines of
+Confucius and Laotze were the dominant philosophies; rather moral than
+religious, though ancestral worship and the propitiation of spirits
+were not disallowed, and were to a certain extent enjoined. Laotze,
+the apostle of Taoism, appears to have preached a kind of
+Stoicism--the observance of the order of Nature in searching for the
+right way of salvation, the abhorrence of vicious sensuality--and the
+cultivation of humility, self-sacrifice, and simplicity of life. He
+condemned altogether the use of force in the sphere of religion or
+morality; though he admitted that it might be necessary for the
+purposes of civil government. The system of Confucius inculcated
+justice, benevolence, self-control, obedience and loyalty to the
+sovereign--all the civic virtues; it was a moral code without a
+metaphysical background; the popular worships were tolerated,
+reverence for ancestors conduced to edification; the gods were to be
+honoured, though it was well to keep aloof from them; he disliked
+religious fervour, and of things beyond experience he had nothing to
+say.
+
+Buddhism, with its contempt for temporal affairs, treating life as a
+mere burden, and the soul's liberation from existence as the end and
+object of meditative devotion, must have imported a new and disturbing
+element into the utilitarian philosophies of ancient China. For many
+centuries Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are said to have
+contended for the patronage and recognition of the Chinese emperors.
+Buddhism was alternately persecuted and protected, expelled and
+restored by imperial decree. Priesthoods and monastic orders are
+institutions of which governments are naturally jealous; the
+monasteries were destroyed or rebuilt, sacerdotal orders and celibacy
+suppressed or encouraged by imperial decrees, according to the views
+and prepossessions of successive dynasties or emperors. Nevertheless
+the general policy of Chinese rulers and ministers seems not to have
+varied essentially. Their administrative principle was that religion
+must be prevented from interfering with affairs of State, that abuses
+and superstitious extravagances are not so much offences against
+orthodoxy as matters for the police, and as such must be put down by
+the secular arm.
+
+Upon this policy successive dynasties appear to have acted
+continuously up to the present day in China, where the relations of
+the State to religions are, I think, without parallel elsewhere in the
+modern world. One may find some resemblance to the attitude of the
+Roman emperors towards rites and worships among the population, in the
+Chinese emperor's reverent observance and regulation of the rites and
+ceremonies performed by him as the religious chief and representative
+before Heaven of the great national interests. The deification of
+deceased emperors is a solemn rite ordained by proclamation. As the
+_Ius sacrum_, the body of rights and duties in the matter of religion,
+was regarded in Rome as a department of the _Ius publicum_, belonging
+to the fundamental constitution of the State, so in China the ritual
+code was incorporated into the statute books, and promulgated with
+imperial sanction. Now we know that in Rome the established ritual was
+legally prescribed, though otherwise strange deities and their
+worships were admitted indiscriminately. But the Chinese Government
+goes much further. It appears to regard all novel superstitions, and
+especially foreign worships, as the hotbed of sedition and disloyalty.
+Unlicensed deities and sects are put down by the police; magicians and
+sorcerers are arrested; and the peculiar Chinese practice of
+canonising deceased officials and paying sacrificial honours to local
+celebrities after death is strictly reserved by the Board of
+Ceremonies for imperial consideration and approval. The Censor, to
+whom any proposal of this kind must be entrusted, is admonished that
+he must satisfy himself by inquiry of its validity. An official who
+performs sacred rites in honour of a spirit or holy personage not
+recognised by the Ritual Code, was liable, under laws that may be
+still in force, to corporal punishment; and the adoration by private
+families of spirits whose worship is reserved for public ceremonial
+was a heinous offence. No such rigorous control over the
+multiplication of rites and deities has been instituted elsewhere. On
+the other hand, while in other countries the State has recognised no
+more than one established religion, the Chinese Government formally
+recognises three denominations. Buddhism has been sanctioned by
+various edicts and endowments, yet the State divinities belong to the
+Taoist pantheon, and their worship is regulated by public ordinances;
+while Confucianism represents official orthodoxy, and its precepts
+embody the latitudinarian spirit of the intellectual classes. We know
+that the Chinese people make use, so to speak, of all three religions
+indiscriminately, according to their individual whims, needs, or
+experience of results. So also a politic administration countenances
+these divisions and probably finds some interest in maintaining them.
+The morality of the people requires some religious sanction; and it is
+this element with which the State professes its chief concern. We are
+told on good authority that one of the functions of high officials is
+to deliver public lectures freely criticising and discouraging
+indolent monasticism and idolatry from the standpoint of rational
+ethics, as follies that are reluctantly tolerated. Yet the Government
+has never been able to keep down the fanatics, mystics, and heretical
+sects that are incessantly springing up in China, as elsewhere in
+Asia; though they are treated as pestilent rebels and law-breakers,
+to be exterminated by massacre and cruel punishments; and bloody
+repression of this kind has been the cause of serious insurrections.
+It is to be observed that all religious persecution is by the direct
+action of the State, _not_ instigated or insisted upon by a powerful
+orthodox priesthood. But a despotic administration which undertakes to
+control and circumscribe all forms and manifestations of superstition
+in a vast polytheistic multitude of its subjects, is inevitably driven
+to repressive measures of the utmost severity. Neither Christianity
+nor Islam attempted to regulate polytheism, their mission was to
+exterminate it, and they succeeded mainly because in those countries
+the State was acting with the support and under the uncompromising
+pressure of a dominant church or faith.
+
+Some writers have noticed a certain degree of resemblance between the
+policy of the Roman empire and that of the Chinese empire toward
+religion. We may read in Gibbon that the Roman magistrates regarded
+the various modes of worship as equally useful, that sages and heroes
+were exalted to immortality and entitled to reverence and adoration,
+and that philosophic officials, viewing with indulgence the
+superstitions of the multitude, diligently practised the ceremonies of
+their fathers. So far, indeed, his description of the attitude of the
+State toward polytheism may be applicable to China; but although the
+Roman and Chinese emperors both assumed the rank of divinity, and were
+supreme in the department of worships, the Roman administration never
+attempted to regulate and restrain polytheism at large on the Chinese
+system.
+
+The religion of the Gentiles, said Hobbes, is a part of their policy;
+and it may be said that this is still the policy of Oriental
+monarchies, who admit no separation between the secular and the
+ecclesiastic jurisdiction. They would agree with Hobbes that temporal
+and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to
+make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign. But while in
+Mohammedan Asia the State upholds orthodox uniformity, in China and
+Japan the mainspring of all such administrative action is political
+expediency. It may be suggested that in the mind of these far-Eastern
+people religion has never been conceived as something quite apart from
+human experience and the affairs of the visible world; for Buddhism,
+with its metaphysical doctrines, is a foreign importation, corrupted
+and materialised in China and Japan. And we may observe that from
+among the Mongolian races, which have produced mighty conquerors and
+founded famous dynasties from Constantinople to Pekin, no mighty
+prophet, no profound spiritual teacher, has arisen. Yet in China, as
+throughout all the countries of the Asiatic mainland, an enthusiast
+may still gather together ardent proselytes, and fresh revelations may
+create among the people unrest that may ferment and become heated up
+to the degree of fanaticism, and explode against attempts made to
+suppress it. The Taeping insurrection, which devastated cities and
+provinces in China, and nearly overthrew the Manchu dynasty, is a
+striking example of the volcanic fires that underlie the surface of
+Asiatic societies. It was quenched in torrents of blood after lasting
+some ten years. And very recently there has been a determined revolt
+of the Lamas in Eastern Tibet, where the provincial administration is,
+as we know, sacerdotal. The imperial troops are said to be crushing it
+with unrelenting severity. These are the perilous experiences of a
+philosophic Government that assumes charge and control over the
+religions of some three hundred millions of Asiatics.
+
+I can only make a hasty reference to Japan. In that country the
+relations of the State to religions appear to have followed the
+Chinese model. Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, are impartially
+recognised. The emperor presides over official worship as high priest
+of his people; the liturgical ordinances are issued by imperial
+rescripts not differing in form from other public edicts. The dominant
+article of faith is the divinity of Japan and its emperor; and Shinto,
+the worship of the gods of nature, is understood to be patronised
+chiefly with the motive of preserving the national traditions. But in
+Japan the advance of modern science and enlightened scepticism may
+have diminished the importance of the religious department. Shinto,
+says a recent writer, still embodies the religion of the people; yet
+in 1877 a decree was issued declaring it to be no more than a
+convenient system of State ceremonial.[60] And in 1889 an article of
+the constitution granted freedom of belief and worship to all Japanese
+subjects, without prejudice to peace, order, and loyalty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In India the religious situation is quite different. I think it is
+without parallel elsewhere in the world. Here we are at the
+fountain-head of metaphysical theology, of ideas that have flowed
+eastward and westward across Asia. And here, also, we find every
+species of primitive polytheism, unlimited and multitudinous; we can
+survey a confused medley of divinities, of rites and worships
+incessantly varied by popular whim and fancy, by accidents, and by the
+pressure of changing circumstances. Hinduism permits any doctrine to
+be taught, any sort of theory to be held regarding the divine
+attributes and manifestations, the forces of nature, or the
+mysterious functions of mind or body. Its tenets have never been
+circumscribed by a creed; its free play has never been checked or
+regulated by State authority.
+
+Now, at first sight, this is not unlike the popular polytheism of the
+ancient world, before the triumph of Christianity. There are passages
+in St. Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, describing the worship of the
+unconverted pagans among whom he lived, that might have been written
+yesterday by a Christian bishop in India. And we might ask why all
+this polytheism was not swept out from among such a highly
+intellectual people as the Indians, with their restless pursuit of
+divine knowledge, by some superior faith, by some central idea.
+Undoubtedly the material and moral conditions, and the course of
+events which combine to stamp a particular form of religion upon any
+great people, are complex and manifold; but into this inquiry I cannot
+go. I can only point out that the institution of caste has riveted
+down Hindu society into innumerable divisions upon a general religious
+basis, and that the sacred books separated the Hindu theologians into
+different schools, preventing uniformity of worship or of creed. And
+it is to be observed that these books are not historical; they give no
+account of the rise and spread of a faith. The Hindu theologian would
+say, in the words of an early Christian father, that the objects of
+divine knowledge are not historical, that they can only be apprehended
+intellectually, that within experience there is no reality. And the
+fact that Brahmanism has no authentic inspired narrative, that it is
+the only great religion not concentrated round the life and teachings
+of a person, may be one reason why it has remained diffuse and
+incoherent. All ways of salvation are still open to the Hindus; the
+canon of their scripture has never been authoritatively closed. New
+doctrines, new sects, fresh theological controversies, are
+incessantly modifying and superseding the old scholastic
+interpretations of the mysteries, for Hindus, like Asiatics
+everywhere, are still in that condition of mind when a fresh spiritual
+message is eagerly received. Vishnu and Siva are the realistic
+abstractions of the understanding from objects of sense, from
+observation of the destructive and reproductive operations of nature;
+they represent among educated men separate systems of worship which,
+again, are parted into different schools or theories regarding the
+proper ways and methods of attaining to spiritual emancipation. Yet
+the higher philosophy and the lower polytheism are not mutually
+antagonistic; on the contrary, they support each other; for Brahmanism
+accepts and allies itself with the popular forms of idolatry, treating
+them as outward visible signs of an inner truth, as indications of
+all-pervading pantheism. The peasant and the philosopher reverence the
+same deity, perform the same rite; they do not mean the same thing,
+but they do not quarrel on this account. Nevertheless, it is certainly
+remarkable that this inorganic medley of ideas and worships should
+have resisted for so many ages the invasion and influence of the
+coherent faiths that have won ascendancy, complete or dominant, on
+either side of India, the west and the east; it has thrown off
+Buddhism, it has withstood the triumphant advance of Islam, it has as
+yet been little affected by Christianity. Probably the political
+history of India may account in some degree for its religious
+disorganisation. I may propound the theory that no religion has
+obtained supremacy, or at any rate definite establishment, in any
+great country except with the active co-operation, by force or favour,
+of the rulers, whether by conquest, as in Western Asia, or by
+patronage and protection, as in China. The direct influence and
+recognition of the State has been an indispensable instrument of
+religious consolidation. But until the nineteenth century the whole of
+India, from the mountains to the sea, had never been united under one
+stable government; the country was for ages parcelled out into
+separate principalities, incessantly contending for territory. And
+even the Moghul empire, which was always at war upon its frontiers,
+never acquired universal dominion. The Moghul emperors, except
+Aurungzeb, were by no means bigoted Mohammedans; and their obvious
+interest was to abstain from meddling with Hinduism. Yet the irruption
+of Islam into India seems rather to have stimulated religious activity
+among the Hindus, for during the Mohammedan period various spiritual
+teachers arose, new sects were formed, and theological controversies
+divided the intellectual classes. To these movements the Mohammedan
+governments must have been for a long time indifferent; and among the
+new sects the principle of mutual toleration was universal. Towards
+the close of the Moghul empire, however, Hinduism, provoked by the
+bigotry of the Emperor Aurungzeb, became a serious element of
+political disturbance. Attempts to suppress forcibly the followers of
+Nanak Guru, and the execution of one spiritual leader of the Sikhs,
+turned the Sikhs from inoffensive quietists into fanatical warriors;
+and by the eighteenth century they were in open revolt against the
+empire. They were, I think, the most formidable embodiment of militant
+Hinduism known to Indian history. By that time, also, the Marathas in
+South-West India were declaring themselves the champions of the Hindu
+religion against the Mohammedan oppression; and to the Sikhs and
+Marathas the dislocation of the Moghul empire may be very largely
+attributed. We have here a notable example of the dynamic power upon
+politics of revolts that are generated by religious fermentation, and
+a proof of the strength that can be exerted by a pacific inorganic
+polytheism in self-defence, when ambitious rebels proclaim themselves
+defenders of a faith. The Marathas and the Sikhs founded the only
+rulerships whose armies could give the English serious trouble in the
+field during the nineteenth century.
+
+On the whole, however, when we survey the history of India, and
+compare it with that of Western Asia, we may say that although the
+Hindus are perhaps the most intensely religious people in the world,
+Hinduism has never been, like Christianity, Islam, and to some extent
+Buddhism, a religion established by the State. Nor has it suffered
+much from the State's power. It seems strange, indeed, that
+Mohammedanism, a compact proselytising faith, closely united with the
+civil rulership, should have so slightly modified, during seven
+centuries of dominion, this infinitely divided polytheism. Of course,
+Mohammedanism made many converts, and annexed a considerable number of
+the population--yet the effect was rather to stiffen than to loosen
+the bonds that held the mass of the people to their traditional
+divinities, and to the institution of castes. Moreover the antagonism
+of the two religions, the popular and the dynastic, was a perpetual
+element of weakness in a Mohammedan empire. In India polytheism could
+not be crushed, as in Western Asia, by Islam; neither could it be
+controlled and administered, as in Eastern Asia; yet the Moghul
+emperors managed to keep on good terms with it, so long as they
+adhered to a policy of toleration.
+
+To the Mohammedan empire has succeeded another foreign dominion, which
+practises not merely tolerance but complete religious neutrality.
+Looking back over the period of a hundred years, from 1757 to 1857,
+during which the British dominion was gradually extended over India,
+we find that the British empire, like the Roman, met with little or no
+opposition from religion. Hindus and Mohammedans, divided against each
+other, were equally willing to form alliances with, and to fight on
+the side of, the foreigner who kept religion entirely outside
+politics. And the British Government, when established, has so
+carefully avoided offence to caste or creed that on one great occasion
+only, the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, have the smouldering fires of
+credulous fanaticism broken out against our rule.
+
+I believe the British-Indian position of complete religious neutrality
+to be unique among Asiatic governments, and almost unknown in Europe.
+The Anglo-Indian sovereignty does not identify itself with the
+interests of a single faith, as in Mohammedan kingdoms, nor does it
+recognise a definite ecclesiastical jurisdiction in things spiritual,
+as in Catholic Europe. Still less has our Government adopted the
+Chinese system of placing the State at the head of different rituals
+for the purpose of controlling them all, and proclaiming an ethical
+code to be binding on all denominations. The British ruler, while
+avowedly Christian, ignores all religions administratively,
+interfering only to suppress barbarous or indecent practices when the
+advance of civilisation has rendered them obsolete. Public
+instruction, so far as the State is concerned, is entirely secular;
+the universal law is the only authorised guardian of morals; to
+expound moral duties officially, as things apart from religion, has
+been found possible in China, but not in India. But the Chinese
+Government can issue edicts enjoining public morality and rationalism
+because the State takes part in the authorised worship of the people,
+and the emperor assumes pontifical office. The British Government in
+India, on the other hand, disowns official connection with any
+religion. It places all its measures on the sole ground of reasonable
+expediency, of efficient administration; it seeks to promote industry
+and commerce, and material civilisation generally; it carefully avoids
+giving any religious colour whatever to its public acts; and the
+result is that our Government, notwithstanding its sincere professions
+of absolute neutrality, is sometimes suspected of regarding all
+religion with cynical indifference, possibly even with hostility.
+
+Moreover, religious neutrality, though it is right, just, and the only
+policy which the English in India could possibly adopt, has certain
+political disadvantages. The two most potent influences which still
+unite and divide the Asiatic peoples, are race and religion; a
+Government which represents both these forces, as, for instance, in
+Afghanistan, has deep roots in a country. A dynasty that can rely on
+the support of an organised religion, and stands forth as the champion
+of a dominant faith, has a powerful political power at its command.
+The Turkish empire, weak, ill-governed, repeatedly threatened with
+dismemberment, embarrassed internally by the conflict of races, has
+been preserved for the last hundred years by its incorporation with
+the faith of Islam, by the Sultan's claim to the Caliphate. To attack
+it is to assault a religious citadel; it is the bulwark on the west of
+Mohammedan Asia, as Afghanistan is the frontier fortress of Islam on
+the east. A leading Turkish politician has very recently said: 'It is
+in Islam pure and simple that lies the strength of Turkey as an
+independent State; and if the Sultan's position as religious chief
+were encroached upon by constitutional reforms, the whole Ottoman
+empire would be in danger.' We have to remember that for ages
+religious enthusiasm has been, and still is in some parts of Asia, one
+of the strongest incentives to military ardour and fidelity to a
+standard on the battlefield. Identity of creed has often proved more
+effective, in war, than territorial patriotism; it has surmounted
+racial and tribal antipathies; while religious antagonism is still in
+many countries a standing impediment to political consolidation.
+
+When, therefore, we survey the history of religions, though this
+sketch is necessarily very imperfect and inadequate, we find
+Mohammedanism still identified with the fortunes of Mohammedan rulers;
+and we know that for many centuries the relations of Christianity to
+European States have been very close. In Europe the ardent
+perseverance and intellectual superiority of great theologians, of
+ecclesiastical statesmen supported by autocratic rulers, have hardened
+and beat out into form doctrines and liturgies that it was at one time
+criminal to disregard or deny, dogmatic articles of faith that were
+enforced by law. By these processes orthodoxy emerged compact, sharply
+defined, irresistible, out of the strife and confusion of heresies;
+the early record of the churches has pages spotted with tears and
+stained with blood. But at the present time European States seem
+inclined to dissolve their alliance with the churches, and to arrange
+a kind of judicial separation between the altar and the throne, though
+in very few cases has a divorce been made absolute. No State, in
+civilised countries, now assists in the propagation of doctrine; and
+ecclesiastical influence is of very little service to a Government.
+The civil law, indeed, makes continual encroachments on the
+ecclesiastical domain, questions its authority, and usurps its
+jurisdiction. Modern erudition criticises the historical authenticity
+of the scriptures, philosophy tries to undermine the foundations of
+belief; the governments find small interest in propping up edifices
+that are shaken by internal controversies. In Mohammedan Asia, on the
+other hand, the connection between the orthodox faith and the States
+is firmly maintained, for the solidarity is so close that disruptions
+would be dangerous, and a Mohammedan rulership over a majority of
+unbelievers would still be perilously unstable.
+
+I have thus endeavoured to show that the historical relations of
+Buddhism and Hinduism to the State have been in the past, and are
+still in the present time, very different from the situation in the
+West. There has always existed, I submit, one essential distinction of
+principle. Religious propagation, forcible conversion, aided and
+abetted by the executive power of the State, and by laws against
+heresy or dissent, have been defended in the West by the doctors of
+Islam, and formerly by Christian theologians, by the axiom that all
+means are justifiable for extirpating false teachers who draw souls to
+perdition. The right and duty of the civil magistrate to maintain
+truth, in regard to which Bossuet declared all Christians to be
+unanimous, and which is still affirmed in the Litany of our Church, is
+a principle from which no Government, three centuries ago, dissented
+in theory, though in practice it needed cautious handling. I do not
+think that this principle ever found its way into Hinduism or
+Buddhism; I doubt, that is to say, whether the civil government was at
+any time called in to undertake or assist propagation of those
+religions as part of its duty. Nor do I know that the States of
+Eastern Asia, beyond the pale of Islam, claim or exercise the right of
+insisting on conformance to particular doctrines, because they are
+true. The erratic manifestations of the religious spirit throughout
+Asia, constantly breaking out in various forms and figures, in
+thaumaturgy, mystical inspiration, in orgies and secret societies,
+have always disquieted these Asiatic States, yet, so far as I can
+ascertain, the employment of force to repress them has always been
+justified on administrative or political grounds, as distinguishable
+from theological motives pure and simple. Sceptics and agnostics have
+been often marked out for persecution in the West, but I do not think
+that they have been molested in India, China, or Japan, where they
+abound, because they seldom meddle with politics.[61] It may perhaps
+be admitted, however, that a Government which undertakes to regulate
+impartially all rites and worship among its subjects is at a
+disadvantage by comparison with a Government that acts as the
+representative of a great church or an exclusive faith. It bears the
+sole undivided responsibility for measures of repression; it cannot
+allege divine command or even the obligation of punishing impiety for
+the public good.
+
+To conclude. In Asiatic States the superintendence of religious
+affairs is an integral attribute of the sovereignty, which no
+Government, except the English in India, has yet ventured to
+relinquish; and even in India this is not done without some risk, for
+religion and politics are still intermingled throughout the world;
+they act and react upon each other everywhere. They are still far from
+being disentangled in our own country, where the theory that a
+Government in its collective character must profess and even propagate
+some religion has not been very long obsolete. It was maintained
+seventy years ago by a great statesman who was already rising into
+prominence, by Mr. Gladstone. The text of Mr. Gladstone's argument, in
+his book on the relations of the State with the Church, was Hooker's
+saying, that the religious duty of kings is the weightiest part of
+their sovereignty; while Macaulay, in criticising this position,
+insisted that the main, if not the only, duty of a Government, to
+which all other objects must be subordinate, was the protection of
+persons and property. These two eminent politicians were, in fact, the
+champions of the ancient and the modern ideas of sovereignty; for the
+theory that a State is bound to propagate the religion that it
+professes was for many centuries the accepted theory of all Christian
+rulerships, though I think it now survives only in Mohammedan
+kingdoms.
+
+As the influence of religion in the sphere of politics declines, the
+State becomes naturally less concerned with the superintendence of
+religion; and the tendency of constitutional Governments seems to be
+towards abandoning it. The States that have completely dissolved
+connection with ecclesiastical institutions are the two great
+republics, the United States of America and France. We can discern at
+this moment a movement towards constitutional reforms in Mohammedan
+Asia, in Turkey, and Persia, and if they succeed it will be most
+interesting to observe the effect which liberal reforms will produce
+upon the relation of Mohammedan Governments with the dominant faith,
+and on which side the religious teachers will be arrayed. It is
+certain, at any rate, that for a long time to come religion will
+continue to be a potent factor in Asiatic politics; and I may add that
+the reconciliation of civil with religious liberty is one of the most
+arduous of the many problems to be solved by the promoters of national
+unity.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[58] Delivered as President of the Congress for the History of
+Religions, September 1908.--_Fortnightly Review_, November 1908.
+
+[59] 'Cujus regio ejus religio.'
+
+[60] _The Development of Religion in Japan_, G. W. Knox, 1907.
+
+[61] 'Atheism did never disturb States' (Bacon).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Acton, Lord:
+  On causes of Franco-German War, 346.
+  Quoted, 362 (footnote), 386, 396, 398.
+  Advice to writers of history, 384, 394.
+  Also 370, 374, 375, 387.
+
+Addison's _Blenheim_ criticised in _Esmond_, 101.
+
+Adventure, see Novels of.
+
+Adventures of Moreau de Jonnés, 16.
+  Popularity of, in short stories, 31.
+
+Afghan:
+  Blood feuds, border forays, etc., 163, 164.
+  War, 163, 318.
+  Songs, 168.
+  Frontier and frontier policy, 319, 324.
+  Character, 320.
+
+Afghanistan:
+  Barrier to Russian advance in Asia, 316.
+  British policy towards, compared with Russian policy in Caucasus, 317.
+  Is acquiring a territorial connotation, 416.
+  Eastern bulwark of Islam, 417, 449.
+
+Akhlongo, siege of, 305.
+
+Althorp, Lord, 64.
+
+Armenians, their position and misfortunes, 414.
+
+Arnold, Matthew:
+  Lord Morley's article on his letters, 50.
+  His letters reviewed, 57.
+  Quoted, 58, 59, 60, 61,177, 257.
+  Praised and criticised by Swinburne, 282, 287.
+  Also 126, 183, 207, 266, 281.
+
+Asia and foreign dynasties, 417.
+
+Asoka, 436.
+
+Austen, Jane, as novelist of manners, 21, 24.
+
+Austria-Hungary, intermixture of races and religions in, 403.
+
+
+Balfour, Arthur James, _Foundations of Belief_, 250.
+
+Balkans, policy of the Turks in the, 407.
+
+Balzac, 94.
+
+Bariatinsky, 314.
+
+Beauchamp and the Utilitarian rejection of theology, 255.
+
+Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 2.
+
+Benedetti, 332, etc.
+
+Bentham, see 'Utilitarians.'
+
+Beowulf, 168.
+
+Bismarck, see 'L'Empire Libéral,' _passim_.
+
+Blavatsky, Madame, 134.
+
+Blood feuds in Afghanistan, 321.
+  On the Scotch borders, 323.
+
+Bonaparte, 92, 187.
+
+Bossuet, 451.
+
+Braddock, General, 104.
+
+Braddon, Miss, 26.
+
+Bret Harte, 32.
+
+Bright, John: 'Force no remedy,' 260.
+
+Broad Church, 62, 257.
+
+Brontë, Charlotte, 25.
+
+Broughton, Miss, 26.
+
+Brown: definition of 'Intuition,' 238.
+
+Browning, Robert, 69, 266, 267.
+  Swinburne's homage to, 282.
+
+Buckle, 253, 261.
+
+Buddhism, 400, 423, and see 'The State in Relation to Religion.'
+
+Bulwer-Lytton, Sir E., 99, 116.
+
+_Burial of Sir John Moore_, 173.
+
+Burke's letters, 37.
+
+Burney, Miss, 21.
+
+Butler's _Analogy_, 236.
+
+=Byron, Works of Lord=, 177-209.
+  Additions to his published letters, 178.
+  Their bearing on his reputation, 179.
+  Causes affecting his popularity, 183.
+  Comparison with Chateaubriand, 186, 194.
+  His success in oriental romance, 187;
+    and in heroic verse, 190.
+  Defects, tendency to declamation, etc., 191.
+  Carelessness, contrast between his theory and practice, 193.
+  Comparison with Scott, _The Giaour_, 195.
+  Metre of his romantic poems, 197.
+  His dramas, failure in blank verse, 198.
+  His lyrical power, examples, 200.
+  _Beppo_ and _Don Juan_, 203.
+  Founder of modern realism in poetry, 204.
+  _Vision of Judgment_, 206.
+  Conclusions: value of his influence, 207.
+
+Byron, Lord, as realist, 6.
+  Also 13 and 97, and see under 'Letter-writing.'
+
+
+Campbell, Thomas:
+  Carlyle's description, 64.
+  As heroic poet, 173.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, see 'Letter-writing.'
+  Denounces Utilitarianism, 256.
+  Swinburne's tribute, 283.
+  His descriptive method, 383.
+  See also 9, 58, 116, 215.
+
+Castlereagh, Lord, 180, 183.
+
+Caucasus, see 'Frontiers,' 291, etc.
+
+Cavagnari, in Afghan ballads, 163.
+
+Cervantes, 108.
+
+Chanson de Roland, 161.
+
+Charles Edward, Prince, authentic incident in _Esmond_, 104.
+
+Chateaubriand, 97, 115, 185-187, 194.
+
+Chaucer, 1.
+
+_Chevy Chase_, 170.
+
+Chillianwalla in fiction, 128.
+
+China, religious systems, 423.
+  Religious polity, 438.
+
+Christian missions in India, 326.
+
+Christianity and Islam, as militant religions, 400, 408, 421.
+  Compared with Buddhism, etc., 427.
+  Form alliances with the State, 434, 441.
+
+Church and State:
+  Lord Acton on, 398.
+  Separation a modern idea, 421.
+  Importance to the Church of recognition, 445.
+  Diminishing closeness of the connection, 450.
+  Gladstone and Macaulay on, 452.
+
+Clough, 266.
+
+Coleridge, S. T., see 'Letter-writing.'
+  Connection of speculative ideas and political movements,
+    211, 229, 237, 372.
+  Quoted, 33, 181, 393.
+  Also mentioned, 37, 185, 265, 287.
+
+Colvin, Sidney, quoted, 40, 71.
+
+Comte and J. S. Mill, 255.
+
+Cooper, Fenimore, 32.
+
+Cowper, as letter-writer, 37, 66.
+  Quoted, 62.
+
+Crabbe, 193.
+  Quoted, 69.
+
+Crimean War, 311, 313.
+
+_Cujus regio ejus religio_, 436.
+
+
+Dante, 39.
+
+Dargo, in the Caucasus, attack on, 307-308.
+
+Darmesteter, Afghan ballads, 163, 168.
+
+Davidson on rhyme in poetry, 279, 280.
+
+Defoe, 3, 99.
+
+De la Gorce:
+  On Napoleon III., 330.
+  On the French ministry, 339, 347.
+
+De Musset, Alfred, 111.
+
+De Staël, Madame, 180.
+
+De Tocqueville, 331, 402.
+
+De Vogüé, 252.
+
+Dickens, Charles, 23, 30, 68, 98.
+
+Direct narration in fiction, 18.
+
+Disraeli, Benjamin, as novelist, 18.
+
+Drama, rival of the novel, 2.
+
+Du Barail, General:
+  On Napoleon III., 330.
+  On Ollivier, 331.
+
+Due de Gramont, 331, etc.
+
+Duvernois' interpellation in French Chamber, 342, 347.
+
+
+Edgeworth, Miss, 21.
+
+Eliot, George:
+  _Romola_, 23.
+  _Adam Bede_, 25.
+
+Empire, defined, 406.
+
+Ems, Benedetti and King of Prussia at, 343-350, 356.
+
+Encyclopédistes, ancestors of the Utilitarians, 252, 402.
+
+European dominion in Asia, importance of, 403.
+
+
+Farrar, Archdeacon, quoted, 12.
+
+Ferozeshah, 130.
+
+Ferrero on Julius Cæsar, 391.
+
+Fiction and fact in the novel and in history, 10, 385.
+
+Fiction, doubt as to its value as evidence of manners, 111.
+  See also 91 and 110.
+
+Fielding, Henry, 3, 26, 95, 111.
+  _Tom Jones_, 19.
+  Influence on Thackeray, 99.
+
+Fitzgerald, Edward, see 'Letter-writing,' 66-70.
+
+Franco-German War, see 'L'Empire Libéral.'
+
+French Revolution, 212, 218.
+
+=Frontiers, Ancient and Modern=, 291-327.
+  Demarcation of frontiers a modern development, 291.
+  Interest of the subject to England, 293.
+  Mr. Baddeley's work on the Caucasus, 294.
+  Description of the Caucasus, 295.
+  The Russian advance, 296.
+  Yermoloff and his policy, 298.
+  Its failure for the time, and his recall, 301.
+  Rise of Muridism, 302.
+  Shamil succeeds Kazi Mullah, 303.
+  Capture of Akhlongo, 306.
+  Repulse of Vorontzoff at Dargo; 307.
+   and at Ghergebil, 310.
+  Shamil ransoms his son, 312.
+  Surrenders at Gooneeb (1857), 313.
+  Effect on Asiatic politics, 315.
+  Russian policy compared with British in Afghanistan, 316.
+  Dr. Pennell on the Afghans, 319.
+  Ghazis, blood feuds, 321.
+  Dr. Pennell on missions, 326.
+
+Frontiers, not strictly demarcated in the East, 413.
+
+Froude, J. A., quoted, 74.
+  His methods as a historian, 382.
+
+
+Gambetta votes for war with Prussia, 359.
+
+Garibaldi, 273.
+
+Gaskell, Mrs., 26.
+
+_Gesta Romanorum_, 2.
+
+_Gil Blas_, 19, 204.
+
+Gladstone, W. E., 229.
+
+Godwin, William:
+  As recipient of good letters, 46.
+  His tragedy, _Antonio_, 46.
+  Carlyle's description, 64.
+  A peaceful anarchist, 234.
+
+Goethe, 78, 182.
+
+Gordon, Lindsay, 32.
+
+_Grand Cyrus_, 96.
+
+Gray, Thomas, 37, 50.
+
+Greek Church, 433.
+  Comparison with Rome, 409.
+
+
+Hemans, Mrs., 265.
+
+Herodotus, 160, 379.
+
+=Heroic Poetry=, 155-176.
+  Definition, 155.
+  Professor Ker's _Epic and Romance_, 156.
+  Early bards and chroniclers, 157.
+  Their work based on fact, 158, 164.
+  The hero and the heroic poet, 159.
+  Icelandic Sagas, and Afghan songs, 163.
+  Homer, 165.
+  Position of women in Homeric poetry, 166.
+  The heroic style in the Old Testament, 167.
+  Romantic poetry of England, _Morte d Arthur_ and ballads, 169.
+  Sir Walter Scott, 171.
+  Limitations of heroic poetry, 172.
+  Its decline, unfavourable influences of both the romantic and the
+    realistic spirit, 174.
+
+Hindu, meaning of, 419.
+
+Hinduism, not a missionary religion, 400.
+  Never established by the State, 447.
+
+Historical romance brought to perfection in nineteenth century, 96.
+
+=History, Remarks on the Reading of=, 377-398.
+  Almost all real history written in some European language, 377.
+  History, formerly an art, becoming a science, 379.
+  Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle as historical artists, 382.
+  The scientific method, possible drawbacks, 384.
+  Limitation and subdivision necessary, 386.
+  Short abstracts, their use and abuse, 388.
+  Motives for studying history, 390.
+  Our knowledge imperfect, and our predictions fallible, 392.
+  Lord Acton's advice and principles, 394.
+
+Hobbes, Thomas, 243, 273.
+  Followed by Bentham, 221.
+  Quoted, 319, 413, 441.
+
+Hogarth, William, 99.
+
+Hookham Frere, 204.
+
+Hugo, Victor, 187, 300.
+  Swinburne's admiration, 265, 282, 287.
+
+Hume, 215, 216.
+  Influence on Bentham, 222;
+    on Mill, 244, 254.
+  Quoted, 224.
+
+Humphry Ward, Mrs., example of her descriptive method, 27.
+
+Hutcheson, 217.
+
+
+Iliad, 174.
+
+Impressionist school in fiction, 33.
+
+Inchbald, Mrs., quoted, 46.
+
+India, Mill's history of, 225.
+
+Importance of frontier questions, 293.
+
+Indian Empire:
+  Resemblance to Roman, 420.
+  Comparison with Russian, 424.
+  See also 'Race and Religion,' and 'The State in Relation to Religion.'
+
+Irish characters, Thackeray's partiality for, 109.
+
+Islam:
+  Its militant policy, 400, 413.
+  Spread of, 432.
+  In India, 446.
+  Importance to Turkey of Sultan's position in, 449.
+
+
+James, G. P. R., 32.
+
+Jeffrey, Thomas, 186, 199.
+
+Jehu's story, 382.
+
+_John Inglesant_, 18, 106.
+
+Johnson, Samuel, 120.
+
+Jones, Paul, 113.
+
+Jowett, Benjamin, quoted, 55, 57.
+
+
+Kaffir, origin of the name, 415.
+
+Keats, John, 185, 199.
+  See also 'Letter-writing.'
+
+Kemble, Fanny, FitzGerald's letters to, 68.
+
+Ker's _Epic and Romance_, 156, 164, 168.
+
+_Kidnapped_, direct narration in, 18.
+
+Kingsley, Charles, 8.
+  Quoted, 278.
+
+Kipling, Rudyard, 32, 149, 174.
+
+Klugenau, Russian General, 305.
+
+
+Lamartine, 187.
+
+Lamb, Charles, 47.
+  Quoted, 48, 56.
+
+Lansdowne, Lord, 228.
+
+Laotze, 438.
+
+Le Boeuf, Marshal, 334, 347, 351, 358.
+
+Lecky, W. E. H., on American Loyalists, 105.
+  Comparison with Walpole, 376.
+
+=L'Empire Libéral=, 328-367.
+  Constitutional reforms and character of Napoleon III., 330.
+  Ollivier's difficult position as chief minister, 331.
+  Crown of Spain accepted by Leopold, 332.
+  Effect in France, warning to Prussia, 333-336.
+  Benedetti's interview at Ems, 337.
+  Leopold's compulsory renunciation, 338.
+  Incautious action of Ollivier, 339;
+    and of Gramont, 341.
+  Assurances demanded from Prussia, 344.
+  Ollivier meditates resignation, 345.
+  Benedetti at Ems, 348.
+  'Le Soufflet de Bismarck,' 350.
+  Declaration of war, 352.
+  Thiers' opposition, Ollivier's defence, 353, 354.
+  French enthusiasm, 358.
+  Reception of declaration by Bismarck; 360;
+  and by the Reichstag, 361.
+  Bismarck's real responsibility, 362.
+  Ollivier's acts and motives examined, 365.
+
+=Letter-writing (English) in the Nineteenth Century=, 34-75.
+  Conditions of fine letter-writing, 34.
+  Affinities with the diary and the essay, 36.
+  Poets as good letter-writers, 37.
+  Value of letters for biographical and other purposes, 38.
+  Earlier writers--Keats, Scott, Southey, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+    Shelley, Lamb, 39-47.
+  Lord Morley's canon, 50.
+  Later writers and their difficulties, 52.
+  Dean Stanley's letters, 53.
+  Matthew Arnold's, 57.
+  Thomas Carlyle's, 63.
+  Edward Fitzgerald's, 66.
+  R. L. Stevenson's, 70.
+
+Lever, Charles, 8, 92.
+
+Liverpool, Lord, 66, 229, 230.
+
+Lucretius, 271.
+
+
+Macaulay, T. B., 61, 206.
+  On Byron, 184, 191.
+  His rejoinder to James Mill, 227.
+  Influence on Walpole, 371.
+  Ranke's criticism, 383.
+
+Machiavelli:
+  On judging by results, 329.
+  On standing neutral in war, 331.
+
+Mackintosh, as typical Whig, 228.
+
+Maine, Sir H., on 'Sovereignty,' 412.
+
+Malthus, T., 234, 236.
+
+Manning, Cardinal, 53, 74.
+
+Marbot, success of his Memoirs, 13, 16.
+
+_Marcella_, quoted, 27.
+
+Marlborough, Thackeray's description of, 103.
+
+Marryat, Captain, 8.
+
+_Master of Ballantrae_, direct narration in, 18.
+
+Maurice, 256.
+
+Mayor's _English Metres_, 286.
+
+Mazzini, 273.
+  Quoted, 184.
+
+Memoirs and fiction, 13.
+
+_Memorials of Coleorton_, 42.
+
+Meredith, George, 264.
+
+Mill, see 'Utilitarians.'
+
+Milton, 200, 287.
+  Quoted, 183.
+
+Mongolians have not produced spiritual teachers, 442.
+
+Moore, Thomas, 42, 179, 193.
+  His sham Orientalism, 6, 123, 188.
+  His dealings with Byron's letters, 177.
+
+_Morte d'Arthur_, 169.
+
+Mullahs, 320.
+
+Muridism, see 'Frontiers,' 320.
+
+Murray, John, 178.
+  Quoted, 188.
+
+Murray, Professor, and solar myths, 161.
+
+Myths, historical value of, 11.
+
+
+Napoleon:
+  His story adapted to myth-making, 14.
+  Transformer of democracy into Imperialism, 252, 402.
+
+_Napoléon Intime_, 15.
+
+Napoleon III; and see 'L'Empire Libéral.'
+
+Nationalities, formation of, in Europe, 401.
+
+Naturalism or realism defined, 25.
+
+Newman, Cardinal, 257, 258.
+  Swinburne's tribute to, 283.
+
+=Novels of Adventure and Manners=, 1-33.
+  Mr. Raleigh on origins of fiction, 1.
+  Metrical tales, heroic romance, the eighteenth-century school of
+    novelists, 2, 3.
+  Novel of adventure derived from the fabulous romance, 4.
+  Scott's influence, 5.
+  Later tendencies, 6.
+  Approximation of the historian and novelist, 10.
+  The novelist rivalled by the writer of Memoirs, 13.
+  Adventures of de Jonnés reviewed, 16.
+  Causes limiting the sphere of the Novel of Adventure, 18.
+  Novel of Manners, its pedigree: Fielding, 19.
+  Influence of women writers: Miss Austen, etc., 21.
+  Growth of Realism, 25.
+  Description of nature, its uses, 26.
+  Danger of excessive Realism, 29.
+  Short stories: the Impressionist School, 32.
+
+=Novelist, The Anglo-Indian=, 121-154.
+  Causes affecting output of good fiction in India, 121.
+  _Tara_, a successful historical novel, 123.
+  _Pandurang Hari_, valuable as picture of pre-English times, 125.
+  _Oakfield_, good battle pictures, absence of native characters
+     noted, 126.
+  _The Wetherbys_, 131.
+  _A True Reformer_, and _The Dilemma_, 132.
+  _Mr. Isaacs_, 134.
+  _Helen Treveryan_, assigned a high place as a historical novel, 136.
+  _On the Face of the Waters_, Indian characters freely introduced,
+     minute adherence to fact, 139.
+  _Bijli the Dancer_, a purely native story, 143.
+  _Chronicles of Dustypore_, a picture of Anglo-Indian life, 145.
+  _The Bond of Blood_, a dramatic presentation of incidents of Indian
+     life, 146.
+  _The Naulakha_, 149.
+  _Transgression_, 151.
+  Conclusions: uniformity of Anglo-Indian society, 152.
+  Conditions favour the novel of action, 153.
+  Absence of the psychological vein, 154.
+
+
+O'Connell, Daniel, described by Carlyle, 64.
+
+_Odyssey_ quoted, 167.
+
+Old Testament and heroic narration, 167.
+
+Oliphant, Mrs., 26.
+
+Ollivier, see 'L'Empire Libéral.'
+
+Olozaga, 337.
+
+Ottoman Empire, its complexities of Race and Religion, 406.
+
+Ouida, 25.
+
+
+Paley, 222.
+
+Parr, Dr., 199.
+
+Patmore, Coventry, 268.
+
+Pearson, Hugh, 55, 57.
+
+Peel, Sir Robert, quoted, 232.
+
+Peninsular War and heroic poetry, 173.
+
+Peter the Great's Caspian expedition, 296.
+
+Phingari, 196.
+
+Polytheism, formerly universal, 428;
+  gives way to Christianity, 431.
+
+Pope, 37.
+  Byron's praise, 193.
+
+Porter, Jane, and historical romance, 23.
+
+
+Rabelais, 321.
+
+=Race and Religion=, 399-426.
+  Ancient groupings of peoples, 399.
+  Effect of (1) the Roman Empire, (2) Christianity and Islam, 400.
+  Consolidation of States in the West, 401.
+  Importance of 'Race' overlooked by Utilitarians, 402.
+  Gravity of the question in Austria, 403.
+  Its complexity in Turkey, 406.
+  Maintenance of racial and religious differences by Asiatic Empires, 407.
+  Close alliance of Greek Church with the State, 410.
+  Classification of the people by religion in Ottoman Empire, 411.
+  Importance of 'Race and Religion' in Asia, 412.
+  Religious distinctions predominant in Western Asia, 413.
+  Causes of the Armenian massacres, 414.
+  Racial distinctions predominant in Afghanistan, 417.
+  India, connotation of 'Hindu,' 418.
+  Complexities of race and creed, 420.
+  Policy of religious neutrality, 421.
+  Peculiarity of religious situation in China, 422.
+  Russian Empire, conclusions, 424.
+
+Race distinctions, increasing influence of, 252.
+
+Radcliffe, Mrs., the novelist, 5.
+
+Raleigh, Sir Walter, on _The English Novel_, 1.
+
+Ramsay, Sir William, on writing of history, 386.
+
+Rawlinson on the effect of troubles in the Caucasus on Russian policy, 315.
+
+Realism defined, 25.
+  Its dangers, 28, 30, 31, (cf. 12, 140).
+
+Reform Bill, 232.
+
+=Religions, The State in its Relation to Eastern and Western=, 427-453.
+  Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism; Western, Christianity and
+    Islam, 427.
+  Growth of State domination under Roman Empire, 429.
+  Domination of the Church when Christianity established, 431.
+  Conflict with Islam, its effects, 432.
+  Close alliance of both faiths with the State, 434.
+  Absence of religious wars and of persecution in ancient India, 434.
+  The situation in China, 437;
+    and in Japan, 443.
+  India, political independence of Hinduism, 443.
+  Toleration by Mohammedan rulers, 446.
+  Hinduism never an established religion, 447.
+  British policy of neutrality, 447.
+  Some political disadvantages, 449.
+  Conclusions: difference in relations of Eastern and Western religions
+    to the State, 451.
+
+Renan, 379.
+
+Ricardo, 234.
+
+Richardson, the novelist, 3.
+
+Ritchie, Lady Richmond, 76.
+  Quoted, 79.
+
+_Robert Elsmere_, its popularity, 30.
+
+Roberts, Lord, 136, 142, 163, 319.
+
+Rodney, Admiral, 115.
+
+Roman Catholic Church, its polity compared with the Greek, 410.
+  Inheritor of Imperial tradition, 432.
+
+Roman Empire, its frontier policy, 292; also 400, 420, 430, 441.
+
+_Roman Naturaliste_, by Brunetière, 25.
+
+Rousseau, J. J., 212.
+
+
+Sagas, 163, 168.
+
+Sainte-Beuve, 194.
+
+Say, Léon, 16.
+
+Scotch common sense philosophy, 215.
+
+Scotsman, the, in fiction, 109.
+
+Scott, Michael, 8.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter:
+  Head of modern romantic school of fiction, 5.
+  Abandoned poetry for prose, 6.
+  Transferred dialogue from the drama to the novel, 108.
+  His historical insight, 115.
+  His descriptions of fighting, 103, 172, 190, 385.
+  Quoted, 200.
+
+Shakespeare, 39, 108, 198, 287, 380, 385.
+  Quoted, 171, 275.
+
+Shamil, see 'Frontiers,' 303, etc.
+
+Shelley, 179, 185, 287.
+  His letters, 44.
+  Quoted, 207, 290.
+  Comparison with Swinburne, 264.
+  Swinburne's admiration, 288.
+
+Shintoism, 443.
+
+Shorthouse, J. H., 9.
+
+Smollett, 111.
+
+South African War, 176.
+
+Southey, Robert, 41, 43, 62, 73, 206.
+  Carlyle's description, 64.
+  Type of Conservatism, 229.
+
+Sovereignty, Territorial, a modern idea, 412.
+
+Spenserian stanza, Byron's admiration for, 197.
+
+Stanley, Dean, see 'Letter-writing.'
+
+Stendhal, 87, 141.
+
+Sterne, Laurence, 89.
+
+Stevenson, R. L., see 'Letter-writing,' also 9, 116.
+
+Surtees and the Sporting Novel, 26.
+
+Swift, 89, 99.
+  Thackeray's description, 103.
+
+Swinburne, A. C., 69.
+  On Byron, 183, 191, 207.
+
+=Swinburne, Characteristics of his Poetry=, 263-290.
+  Swinburne's predecessors and contemporaries, 263.
+  Earlier poems, _Atalanta in Calydon_, _Chastelard_, 267.
+  _Poems and Ballads_, published and withdrawn, 268;
+    reissued with reply to critics, 272.
+  _Songs and Ballads_, war upon theology, 273.
+  _Songs of the Four Seasons_, 275.
+  _A Midsummer Holiday_, 276.
+  Love of the sea and of his country, 277.
+  His power of musical phrasing, 279.
+  His attitude to eminent contemporaries, 282.
+  His dramas, 285.
+  Concluding remarks: his high aspirations and his defects, 288.
+
+
+Taeping rebellion, 423.
+
+Taoism, 423, 438, 440.
+
+Tchetchnia, in the Caucasus, 295, etc.
+
+Tennyson, 38, 69, 174, 184, 194, 199, 266, 268, 286, 289, 374.
+  Quoted, 205, 209, 287, 288.
+  Absence of rhyme in 'Tears, idle tears,' 281.
+  Swinburne's tribute, 282.
+
+Thackeray, W. M., 23, 26, 141.
+
+=Thackeray, William Makepeace=, 76-120.
+  Lady Ritchie's biographical contributions, 76.
+  Brief sketch of his life, 78.
+  Early works, _Yellowplush Papers_, etc., 79.
+  His rare qualities first shown in _Barry Lyndon_, 83.
+  His defence of taking a rogue for hero, 86.
+  _Vanity Fair_, his irony and pathos, 89.
+  His merciless war on snobbery, 90.
+  His pictures from military life, 91.
+  _Pendennis_, a novel of manners, 93.
+  Tendency to moralise, 95, 106, 110.
+  _Esmond_, 96.
+  Thackeray as historical novelist contrasted with Scott, 97, 103.
+  _The Virginians_, 104.
+  _The Newcomes_, a return to the novel of society, 109.
+  Tendency to caricature, 111.
+  _Denis Duval_, 112.
+  Classification of his works as historical novels and novels of
+    manners, 115.
+  His character, religion and influence, 117.
+
+Thiers, opposed to war of 1870, 353, etc.
+
+Thorburn's _Bannu_, 163.
+
+Tolstoi, 8, 101, 154.
+
+Tractarians, 257.
+  Walpole's account of, 372.
+
+Trollope, Anthony, 24.
+
+Turgot, 214.
+
+
+=Utilitarians, The English=, 210-262.
+  Objects of Mr. Stephen's history, 210.
+  A system with a practical aim, 211.
+  Its influence on government, 213.
+  Philosophy of Reid and Stewart, 215.
+  Bentham's doctrines, 216.
+  Brief account of his life, 218.
+  Mr. Stephen's criticisms, 221.
+  Bentham's neglect of history, 223.
+  James Mill, 225.
+  Attitude to the Church, 226.
+  His 'Essay on Government,' Macaulay's attack, 227.
+  Position of Southey and Coleridge, 229.
+  English and Greek theories of the State, 231.
+  Criticism of Malthus and Ricardo, 234;
+    and of James Mill, 238.
+  John Stuart Mill, his life and training, 241.
+  His doctrines and policy, 243.
+  His _Political Economy_, 246.
+  His later writings criticised, 248.
+  _The Subjection of Women_, 251.
+  Mill's theology, 253.
+  Opposition to Utilitarianism, 256.
+  Mr. Stephen's position, 259.
+
+
+Voltaire, 206, 274.
+
+Vorontzoff, Russian General, 307, 310.
+
+
+Walpole, Horace, 3, 37, 50.
+
+=Walpole, Sir Spencer=, 368-376.
+  His literary bent as an historian, 369.
+  His method described by himself, 371.
+  His treatment of ecclesiastical controversies, 372.
+  Comparison with Lecky, 375.
+
+Waterloo in Scott and Byron's verse, 172, 190.
+
+'Waverley' Novel, 28, 97. See 'Scott.'
+
+Wellington, Duke of, 92, 165.
+
+Werther, Prussian minister at Paris, 348.
+
+Whately, _Historic Doubts_, 14.
+
+Wolfe, General, 104.
+
+Wordsworth, William:
+  His letters, 37, 43.
+  Described by Carlyle, 64.
+  Criticised by Byron, 188.
+  Also 49, 177, 181, 199, 277.
+
+
+Yermoloff, General, 298.
+
+
+Zola, 15, 33.
+
+Zoroaster, 400, 413.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the
+Edinburgh University Press
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Studies in Literature and History, by Sir
+Alfred Comyn Lyall</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Studies in Literature and History</p>
+<p>Author: Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall</p>
+<p>Release Date: June 30, 2008  [eBook #25937]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Stacy Brown, Thierry Alberto,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>STUDIES IN<br />
+LITERATURE<br />
+AND HISTORY</h1>
+
+
+<p class="padtop subhead2">BY THE LATE</p>
+
+<h2>SIR ALFRED C. LYALL</h2>
+
+<p class="subhead2">P.C., G.C.I.E., K.C.B., D.C.L., LL.D.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="subhead2 padtop">LONDON<br />
+JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.<br />
+1915</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the Second Series of his <i>Asiatic Studies</i> the late Sir Alfred
+Lyall republished a number of articles that he had contributed to
+various Reviews up to the year 1894. After that date he wrote
+frequently, especially for the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, and he left amongst
+his papers a note naming a number of articles from which he considered
+that a selection might be made for publication.</p>
+
+<p>The present volume contains, with two exceptions, the articles so
+mentioned, together with one that was not included by the author.</p>
+
+<p>A large number of Sir Alfred Lyall's contributions<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> to the Reviews
+deal, as might be expected, with India&mdash;with its political and
+administrative problems, or with the careers of its statesmen and
+soldiers. He appears, however, to have regarded such articles as not
+of sufficient permanent value for republication, and his selection was
+confined almost exclusively to writings on literary, historical or
+religious subjects. He made an exception in favour of an essay on his
+old friend Sir Henry Maine; but as the limitations imposed by the
+publisher made it necessary to sacrifice one of the larger articles,
+this essay was, with some reluctance, excluded. It dealt chiefly with
+Maine's influence on Indian administration and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> legislation; and would
+more appropriately be included in a collection of his writings on
+India, should these ever be published.</p>
+
+<p>While Indian official subjects have been excluded, readers of the
+earlier 'Studies' will recognise that many of the writings in this
+volume follow out lines of thought suggested in the earlier works, or
+apply in a larger sphere the results of observations made when the
+author was studying Indian myths and Indian religions in Berar, or the
+'rare and antique stratification of society' in Rajputana. The two
+addresses on religion placed at the end of the volume form the most
+obvious example, but there is a close connection between a group of
+the other articles and the views developed in <i>Asiatic Studies</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the last edition of that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was
+inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views
+'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that
+may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid
+survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through
+the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At
+their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and
+again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and
+there is always an element of history in one particular sort of
+fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of
+'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further
+illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another
+standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'&mdash;a short
+address, which it has been thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span> worth while to reprint, though it
+was not specially indicated by the author for publication.</p>
+
+<p>Several of the other articles contain criticism of a more purely
+literary character; the article on 'Frontiers,' which recounts
+exciting but little-known episodes in the Russian advance in Asia, has
+an important bearing on a branch of Indian policy in which Sir Alfred
+Lyall to the end of his career took a deep interest, and of which he
+had a profound knowledge; and 'L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral' may, it is thought,
+be found to contain much that is of special interest at the present
+time.</p>
+
+<p>These articles have not had the benefit of any general revision by
+their author, but in a few cases he had indicated in the printed
+copies alterations or additions that he desired to be made.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote"><i>The Quarterly.<br />The Anglo-Saxon.<br />The Edinburgh.<br />The Fortnightly.</i></span>
+Except that the two essays on 'Race and Religion' and 'The State in
+its Relation to Religion' have been brought together at the end of the
+volume, the chronological order of original publication has been
+observed. The source from which each article is drawn has in all cases
+been indicated, and this opportunity is taken of acknowledging the
+permission to republish that has courteously been accorded by the
+editors or proprietors of the Reviews concerned.</p>
+
+<p>Permission has also been given to publish the article on 'Sir Spencer
+Walpole' written for the British Academy, and the address on the
+'Reading of History.'</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">John O. Miller</span></p>
+
+<p><i>December 1914.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<table summary="contents" style="width: 60%;"><tbody>
+<tr>
+<td class="tl">NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS</td>                                <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY</td>              <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">THACKERAY</td>                                                     <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_76">76</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST</td>                                    <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">HEROIC POETRY</td>                                                <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON</td>                                      <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS</td>                                     <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY</td>                    <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_263">263</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN</td>                                 <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">L'EMPIRE LIB&Eacute;RAL</td>                                             <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_328">328</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">SIR SPENCER WALPOLE</td>                                          <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_368">368</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY</td>                            <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_377">377</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">RACE AND RELIGION</td>                                            <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_399">399</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS</td>   <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_427">427</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">INDEX</td>                                                        <td class="tr"><a href="#Page_454">454</a></td>
+</tr></tbody></table>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Raleigh<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> very rightly goes back to medi&aelig;val romance for the
+origins of English fiction. In all countries the metrical tale is many
+generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a
+refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has
+become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of <i>memoria
+technica</i> used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the
+heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an
+audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of
+saints&mdash;love, fighting, and theology&mdash;form the subject matter of these
+stories in verse. They are, as Mr. Raleigh says, epical in spirit
+though not in form: 'they carry their hero through the actions and
+adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds
+done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability
+of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle
+and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came
+Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward
+perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth
+century both of the ancestors of the modern novel&mdash;that is, the
+novella or short pithy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> story after the manner of the Italians, and
+the romance of chivalry&mdash;appear in an English prose dress.' But the
+genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory
+and pedantic moralisation; and in the <i>Gesta Romanorum</i>, the most
+popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated
+from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are
+mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of medi&aelig;val thought and
+medi&aelig;val institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover
+the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the
+closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'</p>
+
+<p>The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist,
+insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our
+author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the
+seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and
+fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its
+vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves
+skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading
+public&mdash;a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a
+self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and
+portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that
+these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for
+the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable
+reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two
+centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and
+developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back
+to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century,
+Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the
+service of her fiction,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr.
+Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with
+contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and
+character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh holds, however, that
+this attempt was abortive; that it failed at the time; and that the
+great eighteenth-century school of English novelists, with Richardson
+and Fielding at their head, took its rise, quite independently of
+predecessors in the seventeenth century, out of the general stock of
+miscellaneous literature&mdash;plays, books of travel, adventures, satires,
+journals, and broadsides&mdash;which had been drawn at first hand from
+observation and experience of the various forms of surrounding life.</p>
+
+<p>We are quite ready to agree that the eighteenth-century Novel of
+Manners belongs to a family distinct from that of the Romantic story,
+or is at any rate very distantly connected with it. But when Mr.
+Raleigh goes on to say that the heroic romance died in the seventeenth
+century and left no issue, although it was revived again in the latter
+half of the eighteenth century, to this view we are much inclined to
+demur. Such complete interruptions in the transmission of species are
+as rare in the intellectual as in the physical world; and we prefer to
+maintain that the romance, although it was for a time eclipsed by the
+brilliancy of the writers who described the manners and sentiments of
+contemporary society, was never extinguished, but became transformed
+gradually, by successive modifications of environment, into the modern
+novel of adventure. It is true that Defoe entirely rejected the
+marvellous, while Horace Walpole, fifty years later, dealt
+immoderately in the elements of mystery and wonder; yet,
+notwithstanding these violent oscillations of style and method, we
+believe that the great historical novels of the early nineteenth
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>century, and the tales of stirring incident which flourish at the
+present day, descend by an unbroken filiation from the fabulous
+romance of elder times.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Raleigh does not carry his brief yet instructive history of the
+English novel beyond the time of Walter Scott, with whom, he says,
+'the wheel has come full circle,' the Romantic revival was victorious,
+prose finally superseded verse as the vehicle of adventurous story,
+and realism was wedded to romance. We trust that in some future work
+he will carry on up to a later date his survey of the course and
+currents of imaginative fiction. In the meantime, it may not be
+irrelevant to follow up further and a little more closely the ruling
+characteristics and the formative influences that have contributed
+toward the production of English light literature as it exists at the
+present day.</p>
+
+<p>The novels with which our fortunate generation is so abundantly
+supplied may be divided broadly into two classes, overlapping and
+interlaced with each other, yet on the whole distinguishable as
+separate species&mdash;the Novel of Adventure and the Novel of Manners. The
+former class has a very long pedigree. The early romance writer drew
+his incidents from the field of heroic action and marvellous
+enterprise; he revelled in noble sentiments, astonishing feats, and
+the exhibition of all the cardinal virtues in tragic situations; his
+mission was to preserve and hand down to us magnified figures of
+mighty men, or the pictures of great events, as they had impressed
+themselves upon the popular imagination. For such material he was
+obliged to travel abroad into remote countries, or backward to bygone
+ages; but if his images of gallant knights and fair damsels were well
+modelled, if the language was superb, and the deeds or sufferings
+sufficiently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> astonishing, no one cared about anachronisms,
+incongruities, or improbabilities.</p>
+
+<p>But as the heroic romance dwindled and withered under the dry light of
+precise knowledge and extending erudition, the purveyors of fiction,
+accommodating themselves to a more exacting taste, applied themselves
+seriously to the reproduction of famous scenes and portraits by the
+aid and guidance of historic documents and antiquarian research. The
+modern romantic school, of whom the master, if not the founder, is
+Scott, represented a clear step forward to what is now called Realism,
+and a proportionate abandonment of the classic convention, or the
+method of drawing from traditional or imaginary models. To Scott may
+be ascribed the authoritative introduction of descriptions of
+landscape, of storms, sunsets, and picturesque effects; not the
+artificial scene-painting of Mrs. Radcliffe, but artistic delineations
+of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky which gave depth and atmosphere
+to his dramatic situations. From this period, also, may be dated the
+practice, so entirely contrary to the spirit of true romance, of
+verifying by documentary evidence the details of a story. It was Scott
+who, in the first years of this century, set prominently the example
+of appending copious notes to his stories in verse or prose, wherein
+he displayed his arch&aelig;ologic lore and produced his authorities for any
+striking illustration of manners or characteristic incident. This
+practice, which was largely adopted by others, was at least an
+improvement upon the old unregenerate system of seasoning the
+conversation of warriors and peasants with uncouth phrases picked up
+at random, or trusting to mere fancy or accepted formula for the
+description of battles or of the ways of folk in medi&aelig;val castles and
+cottages. But the process savoured too much of the workshop. A novel
+or poem that required an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> appendix of notes and glossaries must be of
+high excellence to avoid suspicious resemblance to an elaborate
+literary counterfeit, since open and avowed borrowing from
+dictionaries of antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the
+illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's
+fantastic metrical romance of <i>Lalla Rookh</i> the system was carried to
+an extent that now seems ridiculous, for certain passages are loaded
+with outlandish phrases or metaphors that are unintelligible except by
+reference to the notes. Nevertheless the English public, being then
+quite ignorant of the true East, tolerated Moore's sham Orientalism,
+even though Byron's fine poems were just then exposing the difference
+between working up the subject in a library and wandering in Asiatic
+countries. Byron's language seems in the present day turgid, and his
+Greeks and Turks may have a theatrical air, but his splendid
+descriptive passages were drawn by a master hand straight from nature,
+while his colouring, landscape, and costume are usually excellent; so
+that his work also is a distinct movement in the direction of realism.
+Yet it is to be observed that after Byron and Scott the metrical
+romance, that most ancient form of tale-telling, fell rapidly into
+disuse. The fact that Byron's latest poem, <i>Don Juan</i>, belonged
+essentially to the coming realistic school, is a significant
+indication of transition; and Scott's abandonment of poetry for prose,
+which was a necessary consequence of his advance toward realism, gave
+its death-blow to the earlier fashion.</p>
+
+<p>By this time, indeed, the conventional writer of adventures, though he
+held his ground up to or even beyond the middle of the century, was in
+a state of incurable decadence. He was losing the confidence of the
+general reader, who had picked up some precise notions regarding
+appropriate scenery, language, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>and costume in sundry periods and
+divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that
+mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who trampled
+even upon a commonplace book well filled with references to standard
+authorities, insisting upon careful study of the whole environment,
+the dexterous incorporation of details, and delicate blending of local
+colours. Severe pedagogic handling of a historic novel, as if it were
+a paper done at some competitive examination, was too much for the old
+school, which finally subsided into cheap popular editions, making way
+for a new class of writers that adapted the Novel of Adventure to the
+requirements of latter-day taste, to the widening of knowledge, and
+the diversified expansion of our national life. The prevailing
+tendency was now to confine the range of scene and action more and
+more approximately to the contemporary period, to insist on genuine
+materials, and to observe a stricter canon of probabilities, wherein
+the discriminating reader fancied himself to be a judge. The use of
+notes was discarded as contrary to the high artistic principle that in
+fiction everything must resemble reality while nothing must be
+demonstrably matter of fact. The appearance of famous personages must
+be occasional, after the manner of gods in an epic poem; they must not
+be, as formerly, the leading characters and chief actors in the drama.
+And great battles, instead of marking the grand climacteric of a
+story's development, were now merely traversed, so to speak, on their
+outskirts, or were only approached near enough to throw a glowing
+sidelight on certain groups and situations. The gradual adoption of
+these limitations may be traced back to the naval and military novels
+that reflect the traditions of the great French war. No one even then
+thought of writing a romance with Nelson or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> Bonaparte as the hero, or
+of finishing off in the full blaze of Trafalgar or in the rout of
+Waterloo; although with Marryat and Lever the English reader revelled
+in the dashing exploits or bacchanalian revels of sailors and
+soldiers. Lever did indeed give glimpses of Wellington or Napoleon;
+but his business was with Connaught Rangers and French guardsmen;
+while Marryat and Michael Scott gave us daring sea-captains and
+reckless sailors with inimitable vigour and animation.</p>
+
+<p>But as the echo of thunderous battles by sea and land died away, this
+particular offshoot of modern romance ceased to flourish, and has
+never had any considerable revival. The tale-teller of adventure, like
+his ancestor the epic poet, requires a certain haziness of atmosphere;
+he must have elbow room for his inventive faculty; and he is liable to
+be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let
+loose upon recent events in our day by complete histories, personal
+memoirs, public documents, war correspondence, and all-pervading
+journalism. This is probably the main reason why the Crimean War and
+the Indian Mutiny, which broke for brief intervals the long peace of
+England, have furnished no fresh material contribution of importance
+to the romance of war, either in prose or poetry, to stamp the memory
+of a long weary siege, or of a short and bloody struggle, upon the
+popular imagination. Another reason must be, of course, the
+non-appearance in England of the <i>vates sacer</i>; for Tolstoi has shown
+us that within and without Sebastopol there might be found material
+for work of the highest order. However this may be, it is a remarkable
+fact that just about that time the novel of adventure turned back for
+a moment, in Kingsley's hands, to the spacious times of great
+Elizabeth, to the Armada and the legends of filibustering on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+Spanish main; and at the present time we may observe that the leading
+writer of this school goes back at least a hundred years for the field
+of his best stories. The eighteenth century, whose politics,
+philosophy, and literature seemed to Carlyle's somewhat bookish
+conception to be flat, prosaic, and comparatively uninteresting, was
+in truth for Englishmen pre-eminently the age of energetic activity,
+which touched the high level of romantic enterprise at two points, the
+Scottish rebellions and the exploits of famous buccaneers. Mr.
+Stevenson has reopened, with great skill and success, these mines of
+literary ore that had been discovered but only partially worked by
+Walter Scott. His rare artistic instinct divined the rich veins which
+they still contained; while in other stories his intimate acquaintance
+with actual life and circumstance on the coasts and islands of the
+Pacific Ocean has provided him with those elements of distance and
+unfamiliarity which are essential, as we have suggested, to the
+composition of the novel of adventure. Other less original writers
+have travelled in search of these elements to the Australian bush or
+the outlying half-explored regions of South Africa.</p>
+
+<p>This very cursory survey of the main influences and circumstances that
+have shaped the course and set the fashion of our modern novel of
+adventure may be useful in explaining its actual position at the
+present moment. Scepticism and research have effectually retrenched
+the very liberal credit formerly assigned to romance writing; the art
+now consists in spinning a long narrative out of authentic materials
+which must be disguised or kept hidden; while its leading features are
+a delight in elaborate accessories and that very modern sentiment, a
+horror of anachronism. A few living artists, like Mr. Shorthouse and
+Mr. Stevenson, can still excel under these difficult<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> conditions,
+which have driven a crowd of second-rate novelists into the extreme of
+minute realism. Into this retreat, however, they have been followed by
+a host of readers; for in these days of universal instruction and flat
+uneventful existence nothing satisfies the average mind like
+photographic detail, which is a commodity to be had of every
+industrious or studious composer. As the range of accurate information
+extends, as the dust heap of old records, private as well as public,
+is sifted more narrowly, as the antique habit of taking things readily
+for granted disappears, the novel becomes more and more an arrangement
+of genuine facts and circumstances, interleaved by such fiction as the
+skill and imagination of the author can produce. It may be worth
+observing that this demand for exact verification has affected the use
+of the early chronicles in two contrary ways; they are relied upon
+implicitly or they are arbitrarily discredited, in proportion as the
+facts stated appear credible or not credible to critics or professors
+who are working upon them. All the particulars of a great battle or of
+some famous event that can be gleaned out of some ancient monkish
+annalist, who must always have collected his information by hearsay
+and often after many years, are treated as authentic so long as they
+do not sound improbable; but if they offend against the canon of
+probability set up by a library-hunting student, they are liable to be
+summarily rejected. We may venture upon the conjecture that the true
+result of this process is to assimilate the work of the critical
+historian much more nearly than he would for a moment allow to that of
+a skilful historic novelist. A romancer of insight and imaginative
+power, who studied his period, would be quite as likely to make a
+lucky selection of real incidents, motives, and characters, in a story
+of the Roman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> Empire or of England under the Plantagenets, as an
+erudite writer of history. Perhaps the best measure available to us of
+what we may believe in regard to far-off times is afforded by
+observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places;
+and this test the novelist is rather more apt, on the whole, to employ
+than the historian.</p>
+
+<p>In the novels, as upon the stage, this demand for minute accuracy of
+scenic or historical details has necessarily elicited an abundant
+supply; though whether the entire picture is rendered much more
+natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be
+questioned. 'La recherche exag&eacute;r&eacute;e du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It
+is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a
+life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its
+ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter
+studies arch&aelig;ology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local
+colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The
+result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be
+great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be
+undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of
+motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern
+novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his
+time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is
+moulded by the environment of ideas and circumstances within which he
+lives. The Myth, the Romance, the Historic Novel, each in its
+successive period, did at least this service to later generations:
+they preserved and handed down to us the popular impressions, the
+figures or pictures of great men and striking events, as they were
+reflected upon the imagination of subsequent ages. It can never be
+discovered, and it does not very much matter, whether these images<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+have any close resemblance to the lost originals; it may be that some
+artists in some periods saw far more clearly than in others. The true
+criterion for estimating the true value of romantic fiction, of tales
+of action and adventure, must be always its artistic and intellectual
+qualities, the question whether it succeeds in filling a broad canvas,
+in dealing with masculine sentiment and stirring action, in striking
+the deeper chords of human emotion and energy.</p>
+
+<p>But the historic novel of our day strives principally after exact
+reproduction, as may be seen even in a book of such incontestable
+talent as <i>Marius the Epicurean</i>, and very notably in Archdeacon
+Farrar's book, <i>Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero</i>
+(1891), which may stand as the type and complete specimen of Erudite
+Fiction. In his preface he tells us that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'those who are familiar with the literature of the first century
+will recognise that even for the minutest allusions and particulars
+I have contemporary authority. Expressions and incidents which to
+some might seem startlingly modern, are in reality suggested by
+passages in the satirists, epigrammatists, and romancers of the
+(Roman) Empire, or by anecdotes preserved in the grave pages of
+Seneca and the elder Pliny.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Here we have reached, in this conscientious explanation of method, the
+extreme point of remoteness from the original spirit of historic
+romance. Archdeacon Farrar's figures and descriptions are worked out
+upon the pattern of a mosaic, by piecing together the loose
+fragmentary bits of our knowledge regarding life and society under
+Nero. A glance at these books shows that they belong to the latest
+school of nineteenth-century fiction, to a period when careful
+scholarly accumulation of accessories and adroit adaptation of history
+have taken the place, not only of convention <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>and clumsy invention,
+but also of the free untrammelled handling of types and traditions
+which gave freshness and originality to the simpler forms of early
+romance.</p>
+
+<p>We believe, then, that these attempts at exact reproduction, this
+method of the multiplication of particulars, involve a fallacy, and
+are detrimental to the more enduring forms of art. But the people is
+willing to be deceived; the general reader has acquired a taste that
+must be gratified; with the result that the elder romancers in prose
+and verse, including Scott and Byron, are falling out of fashion with
+the middle classes, though Scott holds his own in the sixpenny
+edition. The rule of Realism is becoming so despotic that the story of
+adventure is reverting more and more to that shape which lends itself
+most completely to life-like narrative, the shape of a Memoir. And it
+may be pointed out accordingly that in France the Editor of Memoirs
+has lately entered into substantial rivalry with the Novelist of
+Adventure.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been noticed by those who attend to the course of French
+literature, that of late years the publication of Memoirs relating to
+the period of the Revolutionary war, and especially of the First
+Empire, has rather suddenly increased. The causes are undoubtedly to a
+considerable degree political, connected with the reorganisation of
+the French army and navy, which has revived the military ardour of the
+nation, and has given an edge to the deep-seated spirit of rivalry
+with Germany on land and with England at sea. Whatever immediately
+interests a nation gives a sharp turn to its literature, and the
+immense success of General Marbot's book, containing the extraordinary
+personal experiences of one who passed through the most famous scenes
+of the heroic era, exactly hit off the public taste at a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> moment when
+various motives combined to revive the Napoleonic legend. The
+historians of that era had done their harvesting; the crop had been
+reaped, raked, and gleaned; the time was too near and too thoroughly
+known for fiction; and yet there never was a finer field for the
+production of romance. No one can doubt that if Napoleon Bonaparte had
+conquered half Europe, won his tremendous battles, and founded his
+empire in an illiterate prehistoric age, he would have taken
+everlasting rank with Alexander the Great and Charlemagne as the
+central figure of a third world-wide cycle of heroic myths; nor is it
+necessary to read Archbishop Whately's <i>Historic Doubts</i> to perceive
+how readily Napoleon's real story lends itself to extravagant
+myth-making. At a later period he might have been the leading
+character in some prolix and pedantic romance, and still more recently
+his life and deeds would have been built up into the scaffolding
+within which the historic novelist used to construct his love idylls,
+his tragic situations, or even his illustrations of some social
+theory. All these methods and devices have become obsolete; and though
+the spirit of hero-worship that animated those who listened to the
+ancient tales still possesses mankind at certain seasons, Romance must
+now submit to the hard conditions of modern Realism. In this
+predicament it finds a new and satisfactory embodiment in the form of
+Memoirs concerning the great Emperor and his companions, which
+dispense copious anecdotes of his court and camp, his sayings and
+doings, his domestic habits, his private manners and peccadilloes. If
+these particulars can be served up as sauce to the description of
+mighty events, the contrast renders them all the more savoury. But
+there is now a large class of readers who care less about Jena and
+Austerlitz than for such books as <i>Napol&eacute;on Intime,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> Napol&eacute;on et les
+Femmes</i>, which have all the attraction always possessed by the
+intermixture of love and war, and by the blending of arms with amours
+in the conventional style of historic fiction. The lowest depth is
+reached when the reminiscences of an Emperor's valet, to whom he is
+still a kind of hero, are served up with that succulent dressing of
+vivid particularity which is swallowed with relish because it brings
+down a great man to the level of the most trivial experience.</p>
+
+<p>How far these Memoirs are genuine in the sense which makes them so
+attractive&mdash;that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great
+man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by
+his intimates&mdash;must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True
+reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose
+together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent,
+clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and
+setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a
+solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of
+them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the
+very latest type, such as Zola's <i>D&eacute;b&acirc;cle</i>, which contains a very
+strong and pervading mixture of pure historical fact.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever may be the exact proportion of authenticity which this
+class of Memoirs can justly claim, they completely fulfil the prime
+conditions of popularity prescribed for the modern novel, which must
+work out minute details with the greatest possible resemblance to
+actual life and circumstance. Upon this ground, indeed, the ablest
+professors of fiction might despair of competing with those who
+exhibit a mighty man of valour in undress, who lead us where we may
+hear him talk, watch him eat or shave, and study his conjugal
+relations. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> is to be feared that if the multiplication of such
+Reminiscences continues, they will seriously trench upon the province
+of the novelist, who will be left no scope for the employment of his
+craft in a field that has been thoroughly ransacked, and who must
+inevitably retire before writers who have discovered the art of making
+truth quite as amusing as fiction, than which it must always be more
+interesting. The brilliant success of Marbot's Memoirs, which were
+undoubtedly written by himself, seems to have warmed into activity and
+circulation various other volumes of similar reminiscences that must
+have been hibernating for one or two generations in the family
+archives, or have otherwise fallen into temporary oblivion; for in
+many cases one is inclined to wonder why authentic documents of such
+value and interest were not sooner produced.</p>
+
+<p>The latest example of this class of Memoirs, belonging to the
+Revolutionary or Napoleonic cycle, is to be found in the <i>Adventures</i>
+of A. Moreau de Jonn&eacute;s, who died in 1870 at the age of ninety-two,
+having been for fifty years a member of the Institut and a great
+authority on statistics. 'We should never have supposed,' says M. L&eacute;on
+Say in his preface to this book, 'that Moreau had been the hero of
+warlike adventures, or that he might possibly have been placed in a
+line with Marbot.' The men of M. Say's generation who knew Marbot were
+quite unaware, he adds, that here was a naval and colonial Marbot,
+whose fighting life was one of the strangest of stories. M. Say's
+preface seems to be intended as a guarantee of this story's
+authenticity, though he notices casually the remarkable fact that 'on
+every occasion when Moreau is on the brink of destruction, it is his
+luck to be saved by a pretty girl'; also that 'a charming
+portrait-gallery might be made of the women who, between 1793 and
+1805, rescued this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> hardy rover, who was both sailor and soldier, from
+death by sword or sickness in divers parts of the world,' from the
+West India Islands to the banks of the Thames. His guarantee must be
+accepted; yet if this book had not been the genuine autobiography of a
+known personage, there would really be nothing to distinguish it from
+the historic novel, in which an imaginary person, such as Thackeray's
+Esmond, describes well-known scenes of history as an eye-witness and
+actor in them. Moreau was present at the great naval engagement of
+June 1, 1794; at the hanging of Parker, the ringleader of the famous
+mutiny at the Nore, when he was saved by Parker's widow; he was in
+Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed
+with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some
+marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion
+of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony
+in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in
+competition with literature of this class.</p>
+
+<p>'Times are changed,' observes M. L&eacute;on Say in his preface. 'The taste
+of the public of our own day grows more and more keen for the romance
+of the cloak and rapier, when the heroes relate their own adventures.
+The authentic Memoirs of the d'Artagnans of our own century are now
+preferred even to the works of Alexandre Dumas, so dear to our youth.'
+Undoubtedly they must be preferred, for being more real than the most
+realistic novel, and just as full of fascinating adventures, the
+Memoir is superior precisely at those points which have given the
+modern romance an advantage over its more conventional predecessors.
+There may be consolation for the novelist in the reflection that the
+fund from which these Memoirs are drawn must soon be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> running low,
+whereas the resources of fiction are comparatively inexhaustible. In
+the meantime one result, already perceptible, will be that the novel
+will tend more and more to imitate the personal memoir, by reverting
+to the autobiographical form which, since Defoe's day, has always been
+fiction's most effective disguise, permitting the author to efface
+himself completely, while it gives the whole composition an air of
+dramatic vigour. It will have been observed that the most vivid
+modern English romances, from <i>Barry Lyndon</i> and <i>Esmond</i> to
+<i>John Inglesant</i>, <i>Kidnapped</i>, and <i>The Master of Ballantrae</i>,
+are all written as the direct narratives of men who have taken a
+comparatively secondary or even humble share in great transactions. On
+the other hand, the famous characters who stand in the foremost line of
+history, and who were the delight and ornament of the elder romances,
+must now be struck out of the repertory of the modern story-teller,
+since the public now will no longer tolerate ancient or medi&aelig;val heroes,
+while the great men of recent times have been too often photographed.
+The only novelist of our own day who has attempted with some success to
+draw thinly-veiled portraits of contemporary celebrities is Disraeli,
+and his whole style and treatment show him to be a true-bred
+descendant of the old romantic stock.</p>
+
+<p>Our argument is, therefore, that various causes and tendencies, the
+change of environment, the limitation of the average reader's
+experiences, his taste for accuracy, his rejection of tradition,
+convention, anachronism and improbabilities, the extension of exact
+knowledge and the critical spirit, have all combined to limit the
+sphere of the Novel of Adventure and to check the free sweep of its
+inventive genius. To these conditions the first-class artist can
+accommodate himself; but for the average writer they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> serve fatally to
+expedite his descent into the regions of everyday life, among all the
+emotions known to middle-class folk, from murders, bankruptcies, and
+railway accidents down to their religious doubts and the psychology of
+their love-making.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Against all these adverse circumstances the Novel of Adventure strives
+gallantly, and, of late years, with such conspicuous success, that it
+is difficult to decide whether the tide of popular inclination has not
+turned against the Novel of Manners. This branch of the great
+story-telling family has, as we know, a long descent and an
+illustrious pedigree, although for our present purpose we need not go
+back further than the eighteenth century, to <i>Gil Blas</i> in France and
+<i>Tom Jones</i> in England. It will be found that these masterpieces
+consist principally of a series of scenes and comical or semi-tragical
+situations, rather loosely strung together on the thread of the
+experiences undergone by the principal personages. The main object is
+not so much ingenuity of plot as the presentation with much humour,
+some strokes of caricature, and a touch of pathos, of morals and
+manners, of public abuses and private vices, the way of living and
+standard of thinking, the distinctive prejudices and ingrained
+beliefs, that characterised different classes at a time when their
+ideas and habits were often in sharp contrast. The sketches are
+admirably done, the conversation is full of wit, the whole work may be
+relied upon as a faithful though coarsely drawn picture of
+contemporary society. Fielding constantly makes a halt in his
+narrative to moralise and discourse ironically with the reader, in a
+vein that was reopened a century later by Thackeray, and by him pretty
+nearly exhausted, for at any rate it has since been closed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p><p>Mr. Raleigh's book contains a just and discriminating appreciation of
+Fielding's place in the line of great novelists, and of the strong
+formative influence that his work exercised over the early development
+of what is now called Naturalism. This note is struck, as he points
+out, in the invocation at the beginning of the thirteenth book of <i>Tom
+Jones</i>, addressed to Experience, to the inspiration which is derived
+from what one has actually seen and known among all sorts and
+conditions of men:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Others before him had seen and known these things, but in
+Fielding's pages they are for the first time introduced, with no
+loss of reality, to subserve the ends of fiction; common life is
+the material of the story, but it is handled here for the first
+time with the freedom and imagination of a great artist.'<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>And here, we may add, is the fruitful and vigorous stock out of which
+has since radiated that immense growth of realistic novels which now
+tends to overshadow and supersede the earlier species of romance
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>But Fielding's style is unblushingly masculine; his scenes are in the
+street, the tavern, the sponging-house, and other places
+unmentionable. By the end of his century the Novel of Manners had
+fallen into very different hands, and to these it owes mainly the
+shaping, both as to tone and subject, that decisively laid down its
+course of future development. The electricity of that stormful period
+which comprises the last years of the eighteenth and the opening of
+the nineteenth century seems to have generated an efflorescence of
+high original capacity in the department of imagination as well as of
+action. Nevertheless nothing is more remarkable, probably nothing was
+less expected, than the sudden accession of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> women to the first rank
+of popular novelists. Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen (not to
+mention Miss Ferrier), entered upon the same field from different
+points and divided it among them. They may be said to have virtually
+created the decent story of contemporary life, the light satirical
+pictures of familiar folk, the representation of ordinary society in
+the form of a delicate comedy, which rose to the pitch of racy humour
+when the scenes and characters were Irish. Under the touch of this
+feminine genius convention vanishes altogether; the painting is direct
+from nature; the plot and incidents are saturated with probability;
+the personages might be met at the corner of any street in town or
+village; the very voice, gesture, and language are almost ludicrously
+familiar. No heroics, not much use of the pathetic; very slight
+landscape-painting and background; no psychology; there is no
+systematic attempt to introduce, under the story's disguise, the
+serious discussion of social, political, or polemical questions.</p>
+
+<p>For an artist who deals so largely with country life, the absence of
+landscape-painting in Miss Austen is very noticeable. The fine vein of
+satire that pervades all her work, the constant presence of the human
+element, leave her no room for expatiating on the aspects of nature;
+and indeed she was manifestly impatient with enthusiasts over the
+picturesque. She only touched upon such tastes in order to bring out
+character:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape
+scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and
+tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first
+defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind;
+and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could
+find no language to describe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> them in but what was worn and
+hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."</p>
+
+<p>'"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the
+delight in a fair prospect which you profess to feel. But, in
+return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I
+like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; I do not
+like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if
+they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
+tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath
+blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a
+watch-tower, and a troop of tidy happy villagers please me better
+than the finest banditti in the world."'<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>There can be no doubt, indeed, that in the novels of this period two
+main features of the modern story, the word-painting of scenery and
+the analysis of subjective emotions, are conspicuously absent. Yet
+among the manifold causes to which may be ascribed the wide recent
+expansion of the Novel of Manners, we may well reckon the decisive
+impulse that it received from these famous authoresses. They were, in
+fact, the founders of the dominion which women bid fair to establish
+over this class of fiction, where they are already extending it to a
+degree that threatens to evict the men. Various circumstances have
+co-operated toward this curious literary revolution. The conventional
+romance, though apparently flourishing, was in their time on the brink
+of a decline; and as women have never succeeded in the Novel of
+Adventure&mdash;for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences
+are opposed to success&mdash;they had no difficulty in abandoning a
+decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and
+subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited
+their idiosyncrasy. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> spread of education among female readers and
+writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine
+novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that
+has joined the camp of Manners, to which alliance it may be noticed
+that, with very few exceptions, the women have faithfully adhered. For
+although in the last century Mrs. Radcliffe had revived, as Mr.
+Raleigh observes, the Romance proper, and Miss Jane Porter claimed in
+the first years of this century the honour of having invented the
+historical romance, women have been practically superseded in this
+class of literature, so far as it survives, by men, George Eliot's
+<i>Romola</i> being the only notable exception. The true representatives of
+female novelists are now the leaders of that school which confines
+itself to minute observation, whether of outward facts or inward
+feeling, and which is above all things devoted to the close
+delineation of contemporary society. The analysis of character within
+the range of ordinary experience, the play of civilised emotion, the
+vicissitudes of grief or joy in the parsonage, the ball-room, and the
+village, the troubled course of legitimate love-making, have all
+contributed the congenial material whereby the Novel of Manners
+treated realistically, as the phrase goes, has been moulded by the
+adroit hands of women.</p>
+
+<p>We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have
+appeared in this century were male authors&mdash;Thackeray and Dickens. But
+we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English
+fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament.
+Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have
+produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of
+the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think,
+proportionate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> to the rare and original value of their work. Both of
+them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time
+afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of
+loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty
+that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying
+effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar
+qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary;
+and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the
+popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an
+enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great
+proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the
+lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their
+type and forerunner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example,
+follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion
+and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured
+descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and
+occasionally in the higher walks of society&mdash;they are always decorous
+and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or
+adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's
+literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever
+but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations
+and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by
+phonograph, is essentially feminine.</p>
+
+<p>Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished
+for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did
+for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped
+its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure
+as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has
+been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of
+convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from
+the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts
+and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of
+everyday existence. In <i>Le Roman Naturaliste</i>, by M. Bruneti&egrave;re, one
+chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares
+that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of
+<i>Adam Bede</i>, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says,
+has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school.
+Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a
+faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her
+mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I
+can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating
+my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious
+quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.'
+But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her
+power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a
+poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital
+relations of common things. In Charlotte Bront&euml;, again, we have
+Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality;
+the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who
+strives against adverse circumstance upon an ordinary, often an
+humble, plane of society, never travelling for a moment beyond the
+possibilities of everyday existence. This ominous dismissal of the
+male hero from his previous position in the centre of the story's
+movement may be taken as a sign that he is not of so much account in
+the sphere of domestic fiction as he was erst in the arena of perilous
+adventure. It is true that mankind is still glorified by Ouida, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+lady who may yet be occasionally found sitting, almost alone, by the
+shores of old Romance; but with Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss
+Broughton, and even Miss Braddon, the majority of their leading
+characters may be said to be female. And the most deservedly popular
+of our latest novels by women is <i>Marcella</i>.</p>
+
+<p>We must not be understood to maintain that the Novel of Manners has
+been, or is being, completely monopolised, as a department of light
+literature, by women, for of course there are many men who are
+achieving success in that field, among whom Henry James holds a high
+place for distinction and delicacy of workmanship. And among certain
+special branches in which women have not as yet competed at all, we
+may mention the Sporting Novel, where provincial manners and the
+humour of the coverside have been portrayed by Surtees with wonderful
+exactitude and a kind of coarse yet irresistible comicality that
+remind one of Fielding. It is true that he never moralises, as
+Fielding does; but then the interjection by the author of moral
+reflections went out, as we have said, with Thackeray. The description
+of landscape drawn from nature occupies large and extending space in
+the latter-day novel of manners, where it is used very sparingly as
+subservient to character or situation, but commonly as an illustration
+or pictorial background. Let us compare the two following extracts.
+The first is from Jane Austen's <i>Mansfield Park</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Now we shall have no more rough road, Miss Crawford; our
+difficulties are over. The rest of the way is such as it ought to
+be. Mr. Rushworth has made it since he succeeded to the
+estate.&mdash;Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a
+disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am
+glad the church is not so close to the great House as often happens
+in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There
+is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> the parsonage, a tidy-looking house, and I understand the
+clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are
+almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the
+steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to
+the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still.
+It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber,
+but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it
+for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an
+ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+<i>Marcella</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care
+of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees&mdash;some
+Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two&mdash;groups where the slow
+selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing
+here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there
+the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing
+back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent
+indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of
+the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular
+avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last
+in a far distant gap where a gate&mdash;and a gate of some
+importance&mdash;clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the
+trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
+avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
+steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
+lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried
+with them a confused general impression of well-being and of
+dignity. Marcella drew it in&mdash;this impression&mdash;with avidity. Yet at
+the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the
+end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on
+either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> grass spotting
+the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'</p></div>
+
+<p>In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the
+writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human
+character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece
+of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture,
+from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is
+excellently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected
+estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and
+might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut.
+Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic
+feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised
+finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element
+of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened
+by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight
+account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that
+may be roused by using language as an instrument for the
+interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself,
+as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are
+told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon
+pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>
+proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and
+vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how
+'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes,
+buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by
+reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river
+winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number
+of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the
+leading lines of the mental<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> picture produced by the words. The
+drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been
+confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the
+pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this
+fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing
+methods.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who
+exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one
+can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this
+ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed,
+lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance,
+which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and
+action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it
+reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the
+street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the
+commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in
+writing as in painting; nor can very clever dialogue, ingenious
+situations, variety of style and subject, or even a high average
+morality, preserve such literature from triviality and gradual
+degradation.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is the saying of a French writer, that the novel of to-day has
+abjured both the past and the future, and lives wholly in the present.
+We are so far of his opinion in regard to the past, that we doubt, for
+reasons already given, whether the reading public can be induced to
+travel backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even
+though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be
+scrupulously and historically exact. The future is a domain upon which
+the novelist has rarely trespassed; but in close propinquity to it
+lies theologic speculation, and we have not long ago witnessed the
+fascination that can be exercised over a multitude of readers by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> a
+novel which described the unhappiness brought upon the peaceful home
+of an Anglican clergyman who was driven forth from his parsonage by
+imbibing some tincture of modern Biblical criticism. The sensation,
+for so it must be called, produced by <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, illustrated
+the degree to which in these days popularity depends on hitting the
+intellectual level of the general reader, and on touching the fancy or
+the conscience of that very numerous class whose culture is of the
+medium sort, neither high nor low. For while it seems certain that to
+a great many people the views and arguments which overthrew Elsmere's
+orthodoxy and brought him to martyrdom must have seemed profound,
+daring, and novel, to others they are but too familiar and by no means
+fresh. To some of us, indeed, the overpowering effect produced on
+Elsmere's mind by his remarkable discoveries may be not unlike the awe
+and gratitude with which an African chief receives the present of an
+obsolete cannon. But the main reason why the future is no better field
+than the distant past for the modern novelist, is that in both cases
+there is a want of actuality, and that the positive temper of the age
+requires in either case something more definite and verifiable.</p>
+
+<p>It may be affirmed, moreover, as a general observation, that the
+spirit of realism is hostile to the Novel with a Purpose, whether it
+be that species which undertakes to argue or instruct under the cloak
+of agreeable fiction, or that other species, much cultivated by
+Dickens in his later works, which attacks antiquated institutions and
+public abuses in a story so contrived as to expose their absurdity and
+injustice. There is an air of artificiality about such compositions
+which damages the artistic illusion, the photographic rendering of
+actual life, upon which the author relies, because it throws over the
+stage a shadow of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> own personality. For one tendency of excessive
+realism is to encourage an approximation between literary and
+theatrical effects, since the whole interest becomes concentrated upon
+figures acting and moving under a strong light in the foreground of
+scenes carefully adjusted, so that anything which betrays the author's
+presence interrupts the performance.</p>
+
+<p>Yet although our contemporary novelist is thus subjected, in respect
+of his period and his repertory, to limitations from which his
+predecessors were free, there has never been a time when English
+fiction has exhibited, in competent hands, greater fertility of
+invention and resource, or so high an average proficiency in the art
+of writing. The vastly increased demand for amusement in modern life
+has stimulated the production of light literature, which is now
+cultivated far more widely than heretofore, like tea, and the market
+is flooded with an article of sound moderate quality. At this moment
+we have in very truth a democracy of letters, for while no mighty
+masters overtop the rest, the number of writers who stand on an
+equality of merit, who can produce one or more excellent stories, is
+very large. Their field has widened with the expansion of British
+enterprise; they can draw their plots, descriptions, and characters
+from the colonies, from Africa, from the South Sea Islands, or from
+India; and it will be observed that not only the tale of adventure,
+but also the quiet story of domestic interiors and family troubles, is
+easily acclimatised, and gains something from a sparing use of variety
+of dialect and landscape. As for the Novel of Adventure, it is drawing
+copious sustenance from these outlying regions. For although it is
+only from first favourites that the home-keeping reader will tolerate
+an elaborate romance about Africa or the Pacific, he has taken a very
+strong liking to short stories of scenes and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> actions strictly
+contemporaneous, written in a rough, vigorous, and utterly
+unconventional style, which convey to his mind impressions as
+distinctly as a set of pictorial sketches.</p>
+
+<p>We believe that this style, which retains a strong flavour of its
+American origin (it can hardly be dated earlier than Bret Harte), may
+be reckoned to be peculiar to the light literature of the English
+language. We are not aware that it prevails to any extent in other
+countries; for although the short story of love, intrigue, and manners
+in general has flourished from medi&aelig;val times, and at this moment is
+almost exclusively confined to these subjects in France, the class of
+works to which we are now referring differs entirely in subject and
+style. In England and America the roving life of the colonies, the
+backwoods, the Western States, and the Indian frontiers has created an
+unique school of realistic fiction in which Mr. Kipling is at this
+moment the chief professor. There is moreover a manifest affinity
+between these short prose narratives and the strain of racy strenuous
+versification upon the quaint unvarnished notions and hardy exploits
+of the bush, the prairie, or the frontier, by which Bret Harte,
+Lindsay Gordon, and again Kipling have attained celebrity. As these
+poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture
+to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to
+modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its
+picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in
+its long evolution. Such a tale will squeeze into fifty or a hundred
+pages what Fenimore Cooper or G. P. R. James would have distended into
+three volumes of slow-moving narrative, whereby infinite labour is
+saved to the hasty and indolent reader of these railroad days.</p>
+
+<p>Here, in short, we perceive the influence of that very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> characteristic
+school of contemporary art, which we know to have always existed, but
+to which men have recently given the exceedingly modern title of
+Impressionist,&mdash;the school of authors who desire to strike the
+imagination vividly and with a few sharp strokes, grouping their
+figures in a strong light, rounding off their compact story upon a
+small canvas, and rejecting every detail that is not strictly
+accessory to the main purpose. Already it is beginning to be said in
+France that Zola with his laborious particularism has passed his
+climacteric of fashion, and that the swift impressionist is sailing in
+on a fair wind of spreading popularity. Now in France, though no
+longer in England, the critics still do their duty; they are not
+merely, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge, the eunuchs who guard the
+temple of the Muses; they are often prolific authors who exercise
+great influence upon public opinion, so that their forecast of the
+course and tendencies of fiction is worth bearing in mind. We
+ourselves are ever a restless, bustling, far-wandering folk, great
+lovers of fiction and travel, who not only carry forth the English
+language into the uttermost parts of the earth, to be moulded in
+strange dialects to queer uses, but also bring back fresh ideas and
+incidents, and various aspects of a many-sided world-ranging life. If,
+as has been often asserted, literature be the collective expression of
+the ideas and aspirations, the tastes, feelings, and habits of the
+generation which produces it, we may not be altogether wrong in
+treating the short highly finished story, whether of adventure or
+manners, as the impress and reflection of modern English society. But
+no operation is more delicate than the endeavour to trace the subtle
+connection between constant modifications of literary form and the
+pressure of its ever-changing moral and material environment.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The list of these contributions at page 477 of his <i>Life</i>
+is not complete.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> (1) <i>The English Novel.</i> By Walter Raleigh. Being a short
+Sketch of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of
+'Waverley.' London, 1894. (2) <i>Aventures de Guerre au temps de la
+R&eacute;publique et du Consulat.</i> Par A. Moreau de Jonn&eacute;s. Pr&eacute;face de M.
+L&eacute;on Say. Paris, Guillaumin et Cie., 1893.&mdash;<i>Quarterly Review</i>,
+October 1894.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Now Sir Walter Raleigh.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Page 179.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Sense and Sensibility.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>The Art of Illustration</i>, by Henry Blackburn, 1894.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>The preservation and posthumous publication of private correspondence
+has supplied modern society with one of its daintiest literary
+luxuries. The art of letter-writing is, of course, no recent
+invention; it reached a high level of excellence, like almost every
+other branch of refined expression in prose or verse, in the older
+world of Rome. Nevertheless, the exceeding rarity of the specimens
+that have come down to us from those times is an important element of
+their value; while in our own day the letters of eminent persons fill
+many book-shelves in every decent library, and their quantity
+increases out of all proportion to their quality.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said, generally, of fine letter-writing that it is a
+distinctive product of a high civilisation, denoting the existence of
+a cultured and leisurely class, implying the conditions of secure
+intercourse, confidence, sociability, many common interests, and that
+peculiar delight in the stimulating interchange of ideas and feelings
+which is one characteristic of modern life. The language of a country
+must have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> thrown off its archaic stiffness, must have acquired
+suppleness and variety; the writer's instrument must be a style that
+combines familiarity with distinction, correctness of thought with
+easy diction. It is from the lack of these conditions that the Asiatic
+world has given us no such letters; the material as well as the
+intellectual environment has been wanting. For similar reasons the
+middle ages of Europe produced us none of the kind with which we are
+now dealing; the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries have left us
+very few samples of them; and since in this article we propose to
+treat only of English letter-writers, we may affirm that the art did
+not flourish in England until the eighteenth century, when according
+to certain authorities it rose to something like perfection. It is a
+notable observation of Hume's that Swift is the first Englishman who
+wrote polite prose; and Swift is one of the earliest, as he is still
+one of the pleasantest, writers of private correspondence that has
+taken a permanent place in our literature.</p>
+
+<p>We can understand without difficulty why the eighteenth century was a
+period favourable to the growth of excellent letter-writing. There
+were very few newspapers, and those which appeared were low in tone
+and ill-informed&mdash;political pamphleteers abounded and the essayists on
+morals and manners were numerous&mdash;but it was chiefly by private hands
+that accurate information and ideas were circulated in a small and
+highly cultivated society with an exquisite taste in literature, with
+a keen interest in public affairs, and a very strong appetite for
+philosophic discussion. Side by side with the intellectual conditions
+we may take into account the national circumstances of that age. The
+post was expensive, with a slow and intermittent circulation, so that
+letters, being infrequent, were worth writing carefully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> and at
+length; while correspondents were nevertheless not separated by
+distances of time and space sufficient to weaken or extinguish the
+desire of interchanging thoughts and news. For it is within the
+experience of most of us that the difficulty of keeping up regular
+correspondence increases with distance; that friends who meet seldom
+write to each other rarely; and that, although letters are most valued
+by those who are far from home and long absent, yet it is precisely in
+the case of prolonged separation that the chain of friendly
+communication is apt gradually to slacken until it becomes entirely
+disconnected. So long, indeed, as men depended for news on private
+sources, there was always a kind of obligation to write; but the
+telegraph and the newspaper have now monopolised the Intelligence
+Department. On the whole, it may be concluded that the art of
+letter-writing flourishes best within a limited radius of distance,
+among persons living neither very near to each other nor yet far
+apart, who meet occasionally yet not often, and who are within the
+same range of social, political, and intellectual influences. Its best
+period is probably before the advent of copious indefatigable
+journalism, before men have taken to publishing letters in the morning
+papers, and when they have not yet acquired the economical habit of
+reserving all their valuable ideas and information for signed articles
+in some monthly review.</p>
+
+<p>It was under these conditions that the letters of eminent men in the
+eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century were
+generally written. In the former century letter-writing was
+undoubtedly a recognised form of high literary workmanship, with close
+affinities on one side to the diary or private journal, and on another
+to the essay. Long, continuous, and intimate correspondence, as in the
+case<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> of Swift and Walpole, gravitated toward the journal;
+dissertations on literature, politics, and manners were more akin to
+the essay; while in the hands of the novelist the journalistic series
+of letters took artificial development into a method of story-telling.
+On the other side, the tendency of epistles to become essays reached
+its climax in the letters of Burke, some of which are only
+distinguishable from brilliant pamphlets by the formal address and
+subscription.</p>
+
+<p>With the nineteenth century begins an era of amusing and animated
+letter-writing. The classic and somewhat elaborate style of the
+preceding age falls into disuse; the essayist draws gradually back
+into a department of his own; the new school reflects, as is natural,
+the general tendency of English literature toward a livelier and more
+varied movement, with a wider range of subjects and sympathies. In his
+letters, as in his poetry, the precursor of the Naturalistic school
+was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy
+and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his
+reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and somewhat commonplace
+society in the English midlands. That poets should usually have been
+good letter-writers is probably no more than might have been expected,
+for imagination and word-power must tell everywhere; yet the list is
+so long as to be worth noticing. Swift, Pope, Gray, and Cowper in the
+last century, and in the present century Scott, Byron, Shelley,
+Coleridge, and Southey, have all left us distinctive and copious
+correspondence. Wordsworth may, perhaps, be classed as a notable
+exception; for Wordsworth's letters are dull, being at their best more
+like essays or literary dissertations than the free outpouring of
+intimate thought. They have none of the charm which comes from the
+revelation of private doubt or passionate affection<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> that is
+ordinarily stifled by convention; they are, on the contrary, eminently
+respectable, deliberate, and carefully expressed. 'It has ever been
+the habit of my mind,' he writes, 'to trust that expediency will come
+out of fidelity to principles, rather than to seek my principles of
+action in calculations of expediency.' This is what the Americans call
+'high toned'; but the metal is too heavy for the light calibre of a
+letter.</p>
+
+<p>Whether Tennyson had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to
+judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it
+will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of
+language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal
+interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite
+legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of
+considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual
+quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's
+character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and
+reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his
+domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and
+what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional
+insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor
+sees fit to let the dead man speak for himself; they may be employed
+as an advocate chooses the papers in his brief, for attack or defence.
+Or they may be produced without commentary, sifting, or omissions, as
+the unvarnished presentation of a man's private life and particular
+features which a candid friend commits to the judgment of posterity.
+Or, lastly, they may be mere relics, not much more in some instances
+than curiosities, valued for much the same reasons that would set a
+high price on the autograph or the inkstand of a celebrated man, on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+his furniture, his house, or anything that was his. In proportion as
+little or nothing is known of such a man's private life, every scrap
+of his writing increases in value; and so a letter of Shakespeare or
+of Dante would be priceless. But of Shakespeare no letter has come
+down to us; and of Dante not even, we believe, his signature; though
+we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion
+and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's
+works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme
+poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains
+to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when
+a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary
+letters upon petty domesticities.</p>
+
+<p>It is evidently impossible to draw a line that shall accurately divide
+the interest that men feel in a celebrated person from the interest
+that they take in his posthumous correspondence; so as to determine
+how far the letters are good in themselves. When the writer is well
+known, he and his writings are inseparable. Yet some attempt must be
+made, for the purposes of this article, to distinguish critically
+between letters that are readable and will survive by their own
+literary quality, as fine specimens of the art, and those which are
+preserved and published on the score of the writer's name and fame,
+with little aid from their merits. In which category are we to place
+the letters of Keats, including those that have been very recently
+unearthed by diligent literary excavation? His poetry is so exquisite,
+so radiant with imaginative colour, that to see such a man in the
+light of common day, among the ordinary cares and circumstances of the
+lower world, is necessarily a descent and a disillusion. He was young,
+he was poor, he had few acquaintances worthy of him; he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> roved about
+England and Scotland without adventures; his letters were perfectly
+familiar and unsophisticated. As Mr. Sidney Colvin has written, in an
+excellent preface to an edition of 1891, 'he poured out to those he
+loved his whole self indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness,
+ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good
+sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a
+spirit unsurpassed for native gift and insight.' Every now and then
+the level of his easygoing discourse is lit up by a flash of wit, and
+occasionally by a jet of brilliant fancies among which some of his
+finest poetry may be traced in the process of incubation. His whole
+mind is set upon his art; for that only, and for a few intimate
+friends, does he care to live and work; his letters often tell us when
+and where, under what influences, his best pieces were composed; one
+likes to know, for example, that the <i>Ode to Autumn</i> came to him on a
+fine September day during a Sunday's walk over the stubbles near
+Winchester. His criticisms are always good, and their form
+picturesque. He compares human life to a chamber that becomes
+gradually darkened, in which one door after another is set open,
+showing only dim passages leading out into darkness. This, he says, is
+the burden of the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to
+explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though
+he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious
+advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as
+spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas,
+taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence
+in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless
+there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would
+have left any but a most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> ephemeral mark apart from their connection
+with his poetry.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of other poets, who were his contemporaries, the verdict
+will be different. They are all to be classed, though not in the same
+line, as writers of letters that have great original and intrinsic
+value. Scott's letters exhibit his generous and masculine nature; the
+buoyancy of his spirits in good or bad fortune; and that romantic
+attachment to old things and ideas which hardened latterly into
+inveterate Toryism. Southey's prose writings will probably survive his
+metrical compositions, which indeed have already fallen into oblivion.
+There is life in a poet so long as he is quoted; but no verses or even
+lines of Southey have fixed themselves in the popular memory. And
+whereas the letters of Keats disclose a mind filled with the sense of
+beauty and rich with poetic seedlings that blossomed into beautiful
+flowers, in Southey's correspondence we discern only an erudite man of
+taste labouring diligently upon epics which he expected to be
+immortal. The letters of Byron stand upon broader ground, because
+Byron was so much more of a personage than either Keats, or Southey,
+or Wordsworth. They supply, in the first place, an invaluable, and
+indeed indispensable, interpretation of his poetry, which is to a
+great extent the imaginative and romantic presentation of his own
+feelings, fortunes, and peculiar experiences. Secondly, they are full
+of good sayings and caustic criticism; they touch upon the domain of
+politics and society as well as upon literature; they give the
+opinions passed upon contemporary events and persons, during a
+stirring period of European history, by a man of genius who was also a
+man of the world; they float on the current of a strangely troubled
+existence. In these letters we have an important contribution to our
+acquaintance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>with literary circles and London society, and with
+several notable figures on either stage, during the years immediately
+before and after Waterloo. They were published in an introduction to
+the works of a famous poet; yet, although they cannot be detached from
+his poetry, they possess great independent merits of their own. They
+echo the sounds of revelry by night; they strike a note of careless
+vivacity, the tone of a man who is at home alike in good and bad
+company, whose judgment on books and politics, on writers and
+speakers, is always fresh, bold, and original. We may lament that the
+spirit of reckless devilry and dissipation should have entered into
+Byron; and the lessons to be drawn from the scenes and adventures in
+Venice and elsewhere, described for the benefit of Tom Moore, are very
+different from the moral examples furnished by the tranquil and
+well-ordered correspondence of our own day. Yet the world would have
+been poorer for the loss of this memorial of an Unquiet Life, and the
+historical gallery of literature would have missed the full-length
+portrait of an extraordinary man.</p>
+
+<p>The letters of Coleridge, like their writer, belong to another class,
+yet, like Byron's, they have the clear-cut stamp of individuality.
+Here again we have the man himself, with his intensity of feeling, his
+erratic moods and singular phraseology, the softness of his heart and
+the weakness of his will. He belongs to the rapidly diminishing class
+of notable men who have freely poured their real sentiments and
+thoughts out of their brain into their letters, who have given their
+best (without keeping their worst) to their correspondents, so that
+the letters abound with pathetic and amusing confessions, and with
+ideas that bear the stamp of the author's singular idiosyncrasy. The
+<i>Memorials of Coleorton</i> are a collection of letters written to the
+Beaumont family by Coleridge,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott; the
+reader may pass from one to another by taking them as they come; the
+book is like the <i>menu</i> of a dinner with varied courses. Wordsworth's
+letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural
+scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class
+<i>litt&eacute;rateur</i>, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in
+both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is
+the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When
+Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of
+divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and
+remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the
+humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society
+plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to
+confess that he found 'bodily relief in weeping.'</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'On Tuesday evening Mr. R&mdash;&mdash;, the author of &mdash;&mdash;, drank tea and
+spent the evening with us at Grasmere; and this had produced a very
+unpleasant effect upon my spirits.... If to be a poet or man of
+genius entailed on us the necessity of housing such company in our
+bosoms, I would pray the very flesh off my knees to have a head as
+dark and unfurnished as Wordsworth's old Molly's.... If I believed
+it possible that the man liked me, upon my soul I should feel
+exactly as if I were tarred and feathered.'</p></div>
+
+<p>And so on through the whole letter, with a comical energy of phrase
+that scorns reserve or compass in giving vent to the misery caused by
+uninteresting conversation. We may contrast this melancholy
+tea-drinking with Byron's rollicking account of a dinner with some
+friends 'of note and notoriety':</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Like other parties of the same kind, it was first silent, then
+talking, then argumentative, then disputatious, then
+unintelligible, then altogethery, then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> articulate, and then drunk.
+When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder it was
+difficult to get down again without stumbling; and, to crown all,
+Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew
+staircase, which had been certainly constructed before the
+invention of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however
+crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. Both he and Coleman
+were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the
+wine carried away my memory, so that all was hiccup and happiness
+for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the
+conversation.'</p></div>
+
+<p>We are, of course, not reviewing Byron or Coleridge; we are only
+giving samples by the way. Here are two great poets, remote from each
+other as the two poles in social circumstances and habit of mind, but
+at any rate alike in this one quality&mdash;that their life is in their
+letters, and that in such passages as these the genuine undisguised
+temperament of each writer stands forth in a relief that could only be
+brought out by his own unintentional master-strokes. For neither of
+them was aware that in these scenes he was describing his own
+character&mdash;though Byron may have intended to display his wit, and
+Coleridge may have been to some extent conscious of his own humour. In
+the way of literary criticism, again, Coleridge throws out the quaint
+and uncommon remark upon Addison's Essays, that they 'have produced a
+passion for the unconnected in the minds of Englishmen.' And he
+touches delicately upon the negative or barren side of the critical
+mind in his observation that the critics are the eunuchs that guard
+the temple of the Muses.</p>
+
+<p>Of Shelley's letters, again, we may say that they are unconsciously
+autobiographical; they are confessions of character, spontaneous,
+unguarded, abounding with brilliancies and extravagances. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> betray
+his shortcomings, but they attest his generosity and courage; they are
+the outpourings of a new spirit, who detests what would now be called
+Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his
+words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He
+abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he
+ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which
+convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which
+astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of
+ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
+despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine
+its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with
+scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,'
+for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to
+persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example
+against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service,
+which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable
+and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the
+letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses to
+character, as reflecting the vicissitudes of a life which was to the
+writer more like the 'fierce vexation of a dream' than a well-spent
+leisurely existence, and as the sincere unstudied expression of his
+emotions. For all these reasons they are essential to a right
+appreciation of his magnificent poetry.</p>
+
+<p>William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come
+down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which
+included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the
+somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not
+worthy. By reason of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> position, and because Shelley married his
+daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing,
+though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It
+is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he
+discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics;
+and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent
+paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English
+language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that
+Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'&mdash;not
+that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'&mdash;whereby he had been seduced
+into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly
+established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other
+talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a
+greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally
+propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the
+whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and
+press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The
+effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly
+against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we
+owe this diverting palinodia. And all Englishmen should be grateful to
+Godwin for having written the tragedy of <i>Antonio</i>; for not only was
+it most justly damned, but it also elicited some letters to the
+unlucky author that are unmatched in the record of candid criticism.
+Mrs. Inchbald writes, briefly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I thank you for the play of Antonio, and I most sincerely wish you
+joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being
+classed with the successful dramatists of the present time, but
+which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> few who,
+during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the
+stage.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Coleridge goes to work more elaborately:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'In the tragedy I have frequently used certain marks (which he
+gives). Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions
+that your language is false or intolerable English. The second
+marks the passages that struck me as <i>flat</i> or mean. The third is a
+note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have
+adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book
+language. The last mark implies bad metre.'</p></div>
+
+<p>All this is free speaking beyond the compass of modern literary
+consultations. It may be added that Lamb also discussed the play,
+before it was performed, in his letters to Godwin; and that his
+description of Godwin's deportment, of his own feelings, and of the
+behaviour of the audience on the memorable night that witnessed its
+utter failure, has bequeathed to us a comedy over which the tragic
+Muse herself might well become hysterical.</p>
+
+<p>There is, indeed, in the correspondence of this remarkable group a
+tone of frankness and sincerity which, combined with the absence of
+malice and a strong element of fun, distinguishes it from the
+half-veiled disapproval and prudish reserve of later days. 'When you
+next write so eloquently and well against law and lawyers,' says
+Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your
+wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.'
+Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works,
+I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the
+author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half
+understanding of your principles, and the <i>not</i> half understanding of
+my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.'
+His moods and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> circumstances, his joys and pains, are reflected in his
+language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with
+his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear
+like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct&mdash;in brief, he is worth a
+hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is
+like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now
+and then <i>irradiates</i>.' In the best letters of this remarkable group
+we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds,
+giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and
+disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their
+correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very
+rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate
+living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar
+key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of
+borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come
+but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third
+shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out
+its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as
+it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a
+stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of
+some of us.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The
+streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The
+bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that
+lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I
+took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling
+rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn
+to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
+forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> sort of friend's house,
+large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of
+friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled
+to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that
+I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat
+in my corner.'</p></div>
+
+<p>We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the
+correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its
+spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and
+natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the
+kind has come down to us from the eighteenth century; and the last
+fifty years of this century, so prolific in biographies and posthumous
+publications of the papers of eminent men, go to prove that in the
+general transformation of letter-writing these peculiar qualities have
+almost, though not altogether, disappeared. Probably conversation has
+suffered a like change; and we may ascribe it generally to a lowering
+of the social temperature, to the habits of reserve, respectability,
+and conventional self-restraint that in these days govern so largely
+the intercourse of men. Something may be due to cautious expurgation
+of passages which tell against the writer, or might offend modern
+taste; yet in other respects contemporary editors have been
+sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so
+discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly
+ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject
+stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and
+which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to
+all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private
+letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but
+it is quite clear that this fine art is undergoing certain
+transmutations, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>and that on the whole it does not flourish quite so
+vigorously as heretofore.</p>
+
+<p>In a recent article upon Matthew Arnold's letters it is laid down by a
+consummate critic<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> that the first canon of unsophisticated
+letter-writing is that a letter is meant for the eye of a friend, and
+not for the world. 'Even the lurking thought in anticipation of an
+audience destroys the charm; the best letters are always
+improvisations; the public breaks the spell.' In this, as we have
+already suggested, there is much truth; yet the conditions seem to us
+too straitly enjoined; for not every man of genius has the gift of
+striking out his best thoughts, in their best form, clear and true
+from the hot iron of his mind; and in some of our best writers the
+improvising spirit is very faint. If a man writes with leisurely care,
+selecting deliberately the word that exactly matches his thought,
+aiming directly at the heart of his subject and avoiding prolixity, he
+may, like Walpole, Gray, and others, produce a delightful letter,
+provided only that he is sincere and open, has good stuff to give, and
+does not condescend to varnish his pictures. We want his best
+thoughts; we should like to have his best form; we do not always care
+so much for negligent undress. And as for the copious outpouring of
+his personal feelings, one says many things to a friend or kinsman
+that are totally without interest to the public, unless they are
+expressed in some distinctive manner or embody some originality of
+handling an ordinary event. This a writer may have the knack of doing
+artistically, even in a private and confidential letter, without
+betraying the touch of art; nor, indeed, can we ever know how many of
+the best modern letters are really improvised. Then, again, with
+regard to the anticipation of an audience, it is a risk to which
+every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> man of note must feel that he is exposed; the shadow of
+eventual publicity is always in the background; his letters have
+passed out of his control during his lifetime, and he can only trust
+in the uncertain discretion of his literary executor. He does not care
+to leave the record of his passing moods, his confessions of weakness,
+his personal likings and antipathies, to be discussed by the general
+reader; and it is probable that he only lets his pen run freely when
+he feels assured that his confidential improvisations will be
+judiciously omitted.</p>
+
+<p>It is, we think, impossible to suppose that these considerations have
+not weighed materially upon the minds of eminent men in our own day,
+when biographies have become so much more numerous, and when they are
+so much more closely criticised than formerly. And in comparing the
+letters written in the early part of this century&mdash;such as those from
+which we have given a few characteristic quotations&mdash;with those which
+have been recently published, we have to take account of these things,
+among other changes of the social and literary environment.
+Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier
+writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more
+biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time.
+There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which
+may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets,
+whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died
+young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by
+the chilly caution of middle or declining age. Their spirits were
+high, they were ardent in the pursuit of ideals; they were defying
+society, they either had no family or were at feud with it, and they
+gave not a thought to the solemn verdict of posterity. For
+correspondents who were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> brimming over with humour, imagination, and
+enthusiasm, no situation could be more thoroughly favourable to
+sparkling improvisation; and accordingly they have left us letters
+which will be a joy for ever.</p>
+
+<p>The correspondence of our own generation has been written under a
+different intellectual climate, and various circumstances have
+combined to lower the temperature of its vivacity. Posthumous
+publicity is now the manifest destiny that overhangs the private life
+of all notable persons, especially of popular authors, who can observe
+and inwardly digest continual warnings of the treatment which they are
+likely to receive from an insatiable and inconsistent criticism. They
+may have lived long and altered their opinions; they may have
+quarrelled with friends or rivals, and may have become sworn allies
+later; they may have publicly praised one whom in private they may
+have laughed at; for when you have to think what you say, it does not
+follow that you say what you think. All these considerations, enforced
+by repeated examples, are apt to damp the natural ardour of
+improvisation; the more so because the writer may be sure either that
+his genuine utterances will be suppressed by the editor, or that, if
+they are produced, the editor will be roundly abused for giving him
+away. For in these matters the judgment of the general reader is
+wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy.
+The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of
+a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous
+temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest
+animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the
+public. But if all letters that record such scenes and sayings are
+faithfully reproduced in preparing the votive tablet upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> which the
+dead man's life is to be delineated, the ungrateful reader answers
+with an accusation of imprudence, indiscretion, and betrayal of
+confidence; and the surviving friends protest still more vehemently.
+Within the last three months these consequences have been forcibly
+illustrated by the reception of Cardinal Manning's Life, in which the
+letters are of extraordinary value toward the formation of a right
+understanding of that remarkable personage. Much of all this
+sensitiveness is clearly due to the hasty fashion of publishing
+private correspondence within a few years of the writer's decease, but
+more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of an inquisitive yet
+censorious society.</p>
+
+<p>If, on the other hand, expurgation is freely employed, the result is a
+kind of emasculation. Nothing is left that can offend or annoy living
+people, or that might damage the writer's own reputation with an
+audience that enjoys, yet condemns, unmeasured confidences. And so we
+get clever, sensible letters of men who have travelled, worked, and
+mixed much in society, who have already put into essays or reviews all
+that they wanted the public to know, and whose private doubts, or
+follies, or frolics, have been neatly removed from their
+correspondence. Let us take, for example, two batches of letters very
+lately published, and written by two men who have left their mark upon
+their generation. Of Dean Stanley it may be affirmed that no
+ecclesiastic of his time was better known, or had a higher reputation
+for strength of character and undaunted Liberalism. His public life
+and his place in the Anglican Church had been already described in a
+meritorious biography; and it might have been expected that these
+letters would bring the reader closer to the man himself, would
+accentuate the points of a striking individuality. There are few of
+these letters, we think, by which such expectations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> have been
+fulfilled to any appreciable degree. In one or two of them Stanley
+writes with his genuine sincerity and earnestness on the state of his
+mind in regard to the new spirit of ecclesiasticism that had arisen in
+Oxford nearly sixty years ago; we see that he saw and felt the
+magnitude of a coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the
+opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his
+career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature&mdash;and he never
+lost his trust in reason&mdash;was against the high Roman or sacerdotal
+absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and
+he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government
+which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he
+discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement that was bringing
+about a Roman Catholic revival.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Not that I am turned or turning Newmanist, but that I do feel that
+the crisis in my opinions is coming on, and that the difficulties I
+find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and
+that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent
+system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it
+is weak and grovelling.' (Letter to C. J. Vaughan, 1838.)</p></div>
+
+<p>'I expect,' he writes a year later, 'that the whole thing will have
+the effect of making me either a great Newmanite or a great Radical';
+and it did end in making him an advanced Liberal. His practical
+genius, and his free converse with general society (from which Manning
+deliberately turned away as fatal to ecclesiasticism), very soon
+parted him from the theologians.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I think it is true,' he writes to Jowett (1849), 'that we have not
+the same mental interest in talking over subjects of theology that
+we had formerly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> They have lost their novelty, I suppose; we know
+better where we are, having rolled to the bottom together, and
+being now able only to make a few uphill steps. I acknowledge fully
+my own want of freshness; my mind seems at times quite dried up....
+And at times I have felt an unsatisfied desire after a better and
+higher sort of life, which makes me impatient of the details of
+theology.'</p></div>
+
+<p>In these, and perhaps one or two other passages, we can trace the
+development of character and convictions in the man to whom Jowett
+wrote, thirty years afterwards, that he was 'the most distinguished
+clergyman in the Church of England, who could do more than any one
+towards the great work of placing religion on a rational basis.'<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></p>
+
+<p>But, on the whole, the quality of these letters is by no means equal
+to their quantity; and too many of them belong to a class which,
+though it may have some ephemeral interest among friends and kinsfolk,
+can retain, we submit, no permanent value at all. It is best described
+under a title common in French literature&mdash;<i>impressions de voyage</i>. A
+very large part of the volume consists of letters written by Stanley,
+an intelligent and indefatigable tourist, from the countries and
+cities which he visited, from Petersburg and Palestine, from Paris and
+Athens, from Spain and Scotland. The standpoint from which he surveys
+the Holy Land is rather historical and arch&aelig;ological than devotional;
+but he had everywhere a clear eye for the picturesque in manners and
+scenery. He had excellent opportunities of seeing the places and the
+people; his descriptive powers are considerable; and there is a finely
+drawn picture of All Souls' Day in the Sistine Chapel, written from
+Rome to Hugh Pearson, although a ludicrous incident comes in at the
+end like a false note. Such correspondence <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>might be so arranged
+separately as to make an interesting narrative of travel, but when
+judged by a high literary or intellectual criterion of letter-writing
+it is out of court. It is not too much to aver that most, if not all,
+of these letters might have been written by any refined and cultivated
+Englishman, whose education and social training had given him correct
+tastes and a many-sided interest in the world. They belong to the type
+of private diary or chronicle, and as such they inevitably include
+trivialities, though not many. Some of Stanley's letters are from
+Scotland, where he travels about admiring its wildness, and with a
+cultured interest in its antiquities. But no country has been better
+ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original
+hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it
+to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more
+than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or,
+indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are
+none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the
+beauties of Nature.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'For my part,' he wrote, 'with reference to my friends northwards,
+I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth
+and sea and sky (when all is said) is but a house to dwell in. If
+the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits
+at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly,
+I have no need to stand staring at the gilded looking-glass, nor at
+the five-shilling print over the mantelpiece. Just as important to
+me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world; eye pampering,
+but satisfies no heart.'</p></div>
+
+<p>This may be Cockney taste, yet it is better reading than Stanley's
+account of Edinburgh or the valley of Glencoe.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p><p>The editor assures us, in his preface, that none of these letters
+touch upon theological controversies, yet many readers might have been
+very willing to part with some of the travelling journal for closer
+knowledge of Stanley's inward feelings while he was bearing up the
+fight of liberty and toleration against the gathering forces that have
+since scattered and well-nigh overwhelmed the once flourishing Broad
+Church party. Well might Jowett write to him in 1880, 'You and I, and
+our dear friend Hugh Pearson, and William Rogers, and some others, are
+rather isolated in the world, and we must hold together as long as we
+can.' All those who are here named have passed away, leaving no party
+leaders of equal rank and calibre, and if Stanley's letters survive at
+all, they will live upon those passages which remind us how
+strenuously he contended for the intellectual freedom that he believed
+to be the true spiritual heritage of English churchmen.</p>
+
+<p>The latest contribution to the department of national literature that
+we have been surveying is the volume containing the letters of Matthew
+Arnold (1848-88). 'Here and there,' writes their editor, 'I have been
+constrained, by deference to living susceptibilities, to make some
+slight excisions; but with regard to the bulk of the letters this
+process had been performed before the manuscript came into my hands.'
+No one has any business to question the exercise of a discretion which
+must have been necessary in publishing private correspondence so
+recently written, and only those who saw the originals can decide
+whether they have been weakened or strengthened by the pruning. On the
+other hand, the first canon of unsophistical letter-writing, as laid
+down by the eminent critic already cited&mdash;that they should be written
+for the eye of a friend, never for the public&mdash;is amply fulfilled. 'It
+will be seen'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> (we quote again from the preface) 'that the letters are
+essentially familiar and domestic, and were evidently written without
+a thought that they would ever be read beyond the circle of his
+family.' They are, in short, mostly family letters that have been
+necessarily subjected to censorship, and it would be unreasonable to
+measure a collection of this kind by the high standard that qualifies
+for admission to the grade of permanent literature. As these letters
+are to supply the lack of a biography (which was expressly prohibited
+by his own wish), we are not to look for further glimpses of a
+character which his editor rightly terms 'unique and fascinating.' The
+general reader may therefore feel some disappointment at finding that
+the correspondence takes no wider or more varied range; for Matthew
+Arnold's circle of acquaintances must have been very large, and he
+must have been in touch with the leading men in the political,
+academical, and official society of his day.</p>
+
+<p>The letters are as good as they could be expected to be under these
+conditions, which are to our mind heavily disadvantageous. We must set
+aside those which fall under the class of <i>impressions de voyage</i>, for
+the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling
+correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold
+was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the
+vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his
+prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters,
+as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of
+thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance,
+in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong
+desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The want of independence of mind, the shutting their eyes and
+professing to believe what they do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> not, the running blindly
+together in herds for fear of some obscure danger and horror if
+they go alone, is so eminently a vice of the English, I think, of
+the last hundred years, has led them and is leading them into such
+scrapes and bewilderment, that,' etc., etc.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is certainly hard to recognise in this picture the features of the
+rough roving Englishman who in the course of the last hundred years
+has conquered India, founded great colonies, and fought the longest
+and most obstinate war of modern times: who has been the type of
+insularity and an incurable antinomian in religion and politics. Not
+many pages afterwards, however, we find Arnold sharing with the herd
+of his countrymen the shallow 'conviction as to the French always
+beating any number of Germans who come into the field against them.'
+He adds that 'they will never be beaten by any other nation but the
+English, for to every other nation they are in efficiency and
+intelligence decidedly superior'&mdash;an opinion which contradicts his
+previous judgment of them, and replaces the national superiority on a
+lofty though insecure basis; for if he was wrong about the French, he
+may be wrong about us whom he puts above them. Arnold admired the
+French as much as Carlyle liked the Germans, and both of them enjoyed
+ridiculing or rating the English; but each was unconsciously swayed by
+his own particular tastes and temperament, and neither of them had the
+gift of political prophecy, which is, indeed, very seldom vouchsafed
+to the highly imaginative mind. He had a strong belief, rare among
+Englishmen, in administrative organisation. 'Depend upon it,' he
+writes, 'that the great States of the Continent have two great
+elements of cohesion, in their administrative system and in their
+army, which we have not.' The general conclusion which Arnold seems to
+have drawn from his travels in Europe and America is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> that England was
+far behind France in lucidity of ideas, and inferior to the United
+States in straightforward political energy and the faculties of
+national success. 'Heaven forbid that the English nation should become
+like this (the French) nation; but Heaven forbid that it should remain
+as it is. If it does, it will be beaten by America on its own line,
+and by the Continental nations on the European line. I see this as
+plain as I see the paper before me.' Since this was written in 1865,
+England has been perversely holding her own course, nor has she yet
+fulfilled Arnold's melancholy foreboding, by which he was 'at times
+overwhelmed with depression' that England was sinking into a sort of
+greater Holland, 'for want of perceiving how the world is going and
+must go, and preparing herself accordingly.'</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, his imaginative faculty comes out in his
+speculation upon the probable changes in the development of the
+American people that might follow their separation into different
+groups, if the civil war between the Northern and Southern States
+(which had just begun) should break up the Union.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Climate and mixture of race will then be able fully to tell, and I
+cannot help thinking that the more diversity of nation there is on
+the American continent, the more chance there is of one nation
+developing itself with grandeur and richness. It has been so in
+Europe. What should we all be if we had not one another to check us
+and to be learned from? Imagine an English Europe. How frightfully
+<i>born&eacute;</i> and dull! Or a French Europe either, for that matter.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The suggestion is, perhaps, more fanciful than profound; for history
+does not repeat itself; and, in fact, the result of breaking up South
+America into a dozen political groups has not yet produced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> any very
+satisfactory development of national character. Much more than
+political subdivision goes to the creation of a new Europe;
+nevertheless Arnold is probably right in supposing that uniformity of
+institutions and a somewhat monotonous level of social conditions over
+a vast area, may have depressed and stunted the free and diversified
+growth of North American civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>The literary criticism to be found in these letters shows a fastidious
+and delicate taste that had been nurtured almost too exclusively upon
+the masterpieces of classic antiquity. Homer he ranked far above
+Shakespeare, though one might think them too different for comparison;
+and he praises 'two articles in <i>Temple Bar</i> (1869), one on Tennyson,
+the other on Browning,' which were afterwards republished in a book
+that made some stir in its day, and has brought down upon its author
+the unquenchable resentment of his brother poets. He thought that both
+Macaulay and Carlyle were encouraging the English nation in its
+emphatic Philistinism, and thus counteracting his own exertions to
+lighten the darkness of earnest but opaque intelligences. As his
+interest in religious movements was acute, so his observations
+occasionally throw some light upon the exceedingly complicated problem
+of ascertaining the general drift of the English mind in regard to
+things spiritual. The force which is shaping the future, is it with
+the Ritualists or with the undogmatical disciples of a purely moral
+creed? With neither, Arnold replies; not with any of the orthodox
+religions, nor with the neo-religious developments which are
+pretending to supersede them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Both the one and the other give to what they call religion, and to
+religious ideas and discussions, too large and absorbing a place in
+human life. Man feels himself to be a more various and richly
+endowed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> animal than the old religious theory of human life
+allowed, and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long
+suppressed and imperfectly understood instincts of their varied
+nature.'</p></div>
+
+<p>No man studied more closely than Arnold the intellectual tendencies of
+his generation, so that on the most difficult of contemporary
+questions this opinion is worth quoting, although the ritualistic
+leanings of the present day hardly operate to support it. But here, as
+in his published works, his religious utterances are somewhat
+ambiguous and oracular; and one welcomes the marking of a definite
+epoch in Church history when he writes emphatically that 'the Broad
+Church <i>among the clergy</i> may be said to have almost perished with
+Stanley.'</p>
+
+<p>But correspondence that was never meant for publication is hardly a
+fair subject for literary criticism. Arnold seems to have written
+hurriedly, in the intervals of hard work, of journeyings to and fro
+upon his rounds of inspection, and of much social bustle; he had not
+the natural gift of letter-writing, and he probably did it more as a
+duty than a pleasure. He had none of the ever-smouldering irritability
+which compelled Carlyle to slash right and left of him at the people
+whom he met, at everything that he disliked, and every one whom he
+despised. Nor was he born to chronicle the small beer of everyday life
+in that spirit of contemplative quietism which is bred out of abundant
+leisure and retirement. A few lines from one of Cowper's letters may
+serve to indicate the circumstances in which 'our best letter-writer,'
+as Southey calls him, lived and wrote a hundred years ago in a muddy
+Buckinghamshire village:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in
+the autumn too, has hurt us both.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> A gravel walk, thirty yards
+long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet
+it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year,
+during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'</p></div>
+
+<p>If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty
+and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand
+that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste
+nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for
+throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's
+correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must
+undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have
+been published upon their own intrinsic merits.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category;
+they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and
+character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively
+insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the
+humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer
+did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be
+published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised
+conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has
+been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some
+doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so
+clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the
+mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether
+unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any
+other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it,
+is, in our judgment, an open question; but surely Carlyle must have
+selected and sharpened with some care<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> the barbed epithets upon which
+he suspends his grotesque and formidable caricatures.</p>
+
+<p>For example, he writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in
+advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing&mdash;'A
+bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long
+blunt characterless nose&mdash;the whole visit the most unutterable
+stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered,
+farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with
+a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the
+House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the
+poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and
+shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an
+auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite
+prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman
+nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes
+I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so
+Carlyle goes on hanging up portraits of the notables whom he met and
+conversed with, to the great edification of these latter days. No more
+dangerous interviewer has ever practised professionally than this
+artist in epithets, on whom the outward visible figure of a man
+evidently made deep impressions; whereas the ordinary letter-writer is
+usually content to record the small talk. As material for publication
+his correspondence had three singular advantages. His earlier letters
+were excellent, and we may hazard the generalisation that almost all
+first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the
+ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that
+these letters could be published very soon after his death without
+much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting
+might concern;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who
+loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor
+considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait.
+Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue&mdash;that they largely
+contribute to the creation of a true likeness of the writer, for in
+sketching other people he was also drawing himself. He could also
+paint the interior of a country house, as at Fryston, and his
+landscapes are vivid. He was, in short, an impressionist of the first
+order, who grouped all his details in subordination to a general
+effect, and never gave his correspondent a mere catalogue of trivial
+particulars.</p>
+
+<p>It was originally in a letter to his brother that Carlyle wrote his
+celebrated description of an interview with Coleridge. No two men
+could be more different in taste or temperament, and yet any one who
+reads attentively Coleridge's letters may observe a certain similarity
+to Carlyle's writing, not only in the figured style and prophetic
+manner, but also in the tendency of their political ideas. In the
+matter of linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of
+them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in
+politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the
+ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic
+philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief
+in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that
+salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound
+metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies
+were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual
+forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable
+conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous
+mental constitution of mind, on whom the ideas and impressions that
+had been secreted produced <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>an excitability that was discharged upon
+correspondents in a torrent of language, sweeping away considerations
+of reserve or self-regard, and submerging the commonplace bits of news
+and everyday observations which accumulate in the letters of
+respectable notabilities. To whomsoever the letters may be addressed,
+they are in consequence equally good and characteristic. Carlyle's
+epistles to his wife and brother are among the best in the collection;
+and Coleridge threw himself with the same ardour into letters to
+Charles Lamb and to Lord Liverpool. It is this capacity for pouring
+out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of one's heart
+to a friend, which, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of
+spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water
+mark of English literature.</p>
+
+<p>But in saying that these conditions are eminently favourable to the
+production of fine letter-writing, we do not mean to affirm that they
+are essential. Against such a theory it would be sufficient to quote
+Cowper, though he had the poetic fire, and was subject to the
+religious frenzy; and we know that repose and refinement have a
+tendency to develop good correspondents. Among these we may number
+Edward FitzGerald, whose letters are, perhaps, the most artistic of
+any that have recently appeared, and may be placed without hesitation
+in the class of letters that have a high intrinsic merit independently
+of the writer's extraneous reputation; for FitzGerald was a recluse
+with a tinge of misanthropy, nearly unknown to the outer world, except
+by one exquisite paraphrase of a Persian poem, and his popularity
+rests almost entirely upon his published correspondence. Of these
+letters, so excellent of their kind, can it be said that they have the
+note of improvisation, that they were written for a friend's eye,
+without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> thought or care for that ordeal of posthumous publication
+which has added, as we have been told, a fresh terror to death? The
+composition is exactly suited to the tone of easy, pleasant
+conversation; the writing has a serene flow, with ripples of wit and
+humour; sometimes occupied with East Anglian rusticities and local
+colouring, sometimes with pungent literary criticisms; it is never
+exuberant, but nowhere dull or commonplace; the language is concise,
+with a sedulous nicety of expression. A man of delicate irony, living
+apart from the rough, tumbling struggle for existence, he was in most
+things the very opposite to Carlyle, whose <i>French Revolution</i> he
+admired not much, and who, he thinks, 'ought to be laughed at a
+little.' Such a man was not likely to write even the most ordinary
+letter without a certain degree of mental preparation, without some
+elaboration of thought, or solicitude as to form and finish, for all
+which processes he had ample leisure. It may be noticed that he never
+condescends to the travelling journal, and that his voyaging
+impressions are given in a few fine strokes; but, although he was a
+home-keeping Englishman, he was free from household cares, nor did he
+keep up that obligatory family correspondence which, when it is
+published to exhibit the domestic habits and affections of an eminent
+person, becomes ever after a dead-weight upon his biography.</p>
+
+<p>In endeavouring to analyse the charm of these delightful letters, we
+may suggest that they gain their special flavour from his talent for
+compounding them, like a skilful <i>chef de cuisine</i>, out of various
+materials or intellectual condiments assorted and dexterously blended.
+He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern
+Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree,
+in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> sedentary to the
+stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years
+earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had
+few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for
+perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ancient and
+modern, and for surveying the field of contemporary literature. His
+letters to Fanny Kemble have the advantage of unity in tone that
+belongs to a series written to the same person, though the absence of
+replies is apt to produce the effect of a monologue. How far good
+letter-writing depends upon the course of exchange, upon the stimulus
+of pleasant and prompt replies, is a question not easily answered,
+since the correspondence on both sides of two good writers is very
+rarely put together. Mrs. Kemble had certain fixed rules which must
+have been fatal to the free epistolary spirit. 'I never write,' she
+said, 'until I am written to; I always write when I am written to, and
+I make a point of always returning the same amount of paper that I
+receive;' but at any rate it is evident that FitzGerald's letters to
+her were regularly answered. He had a light hand on descriptions of
+season and scenery; he could give the autumnal atmosphere, the
+awakening of leaf and flower in spring, the distant roar of the German
+Ocean on the East Anglian coast. As he could record his daily life
+without the minute prolixity of a diary, so he could throw off
+criticisms on books without falling into the manner of an essayist. In
+regard to the 'fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle,' he asks doubtfully
+whether he with all his genius will not subside into the Level that
+covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens,
+with all <i>his</i> genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already
+after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the
+contemporary poets&mdash;Tennyson,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> Browning, or Swinburne&mdash;seem to have
+entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales
+of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with manifest
+enjoyment the lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'In a small cottage on the rising ground,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">West of the waves, and just beyond the sound.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'The sea,' he writes, 'somehow talks to one of old things,' probably
+because it is changeless by comparison with the land; and a man whose
+life is still and solitary is affected by the transitory aspect of
+natural things, because he can watch them pass. As old friends drop
+off he touches in his letters upon the memories of days that are gone,
+and he consorts more and more with the personages of his favourite
+poets and romancers, living thus, as he says, among shadows.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a man to whom correspondence was a real solace and a vehicle
+of thought and feeling, not a mere note-book of travel, nor a conduit
+of confidential small talk. A faint odour of the seasons hangs round
+some of these letters, of the sunshine and rain, of dark days and
+roads blocked with snow, of the first spring crocus and the faded
+autumnal garden plots. We can perceive that, as his retirement became
+habitual with increasing age, the correspondence became his main
+outlet of ideas and sensations, taking more and more the place of
+friendly visits and personal discussion as a channel of intercourse
+with the external world. The Hindu sages despised action as
+destructive of thought; and undoubtedly the cool secluded vale of life
+is good for the cultivation of letter-writing, in one who has the
+artistic hand, and to whom this method of gathering up the fruits of
+reading and meditation, the harvest of a quiet eye, comes easily. In
+many respects the letters of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> FitzGerald, like his life, are in strong
+contrast to Carlyle's; and FitzGerald was somewhat startled by the
+publication of Carlyle's 'Reminiscences.' He thinks that, on the
+whole, 'they had better have been kept unpublished;' though on reading
+the 'Biography' he writes: 'I did not know that Carlyle was so good,
+grand, and even lovable, till I read the letters which Froude now
+edits.' He himself was not likely to give the general reader more than
+he wished to be known about his private affairs; and if one or two
+remarks with a sting in them appeared when these letters were first
+published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the
+book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative
+attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and
+twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious
+spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes
+humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in
+which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends,
+to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and FitzGerald,
+each in his very different manner, at the head of all the
+letter-writers of the generation to which they belong, which is not
+precisely our own. It is to be recollected that a man must be dead
+before he can win reputation in this particular branch of literature,
+and that he cannot be fairly judged until time has removed many
+obstacles to unreserved publication. But both Carlyle and FitzGerald
+had long lives.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stevenson, whose letters are the latest important contribution to
+this department of the national library, died early, in the full force
+of his intellect, at the zenith of his fame as a writer of romance.
+His letters have been edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin, with all the
+sympathy and insight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> into character that are inspired by congenial
+tastes and close friendship; and his preface gives an excellent
+account of the conditions, physical and mental, under which they were
+written, and of the limitations observed in the editing of them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Begun,' Mr. Colvin says, 'without a thought of publicity, and
+simply to maintain an intimacy undiminished by separation, they
+assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable,
+and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts,
+that it by-and-by occurred to him ... that "some kind of a book"
+might be extracted out of them after his death.... In a
+correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection
+must needs be delicate. Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas,
+of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less
+to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.... He was a
+watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own
+mind.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The whole passage, too long to be quoted, suggests an instructive
+analysis of the mental qualities and disposition that go to make a
+good letter-writer&mdash;a dash of egotism, sensitiveness to outward
+impressions, literary charm, the habit of keeping a frank and familiar
+record of every day's moods, thoughts, and doings, the picturesque
+surroundings of a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa
+the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for
+Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing
+influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in
+tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech
+with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege
+of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none
+of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the
+incidents are uncommon or uncommonly well told, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> writer is
+never caught looking over his shoulder at posterity.</p>
+
+<p>For extracts there is now little space left in this article; but we
+may quote, to show Stevenson's style of landscape-painting, a few
+lines describing a morning in Samoa after a heavy gale:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was
+all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward
+slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not
+a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on
+the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall,
+and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a
+thoroughfare close by.'</p></div>
+
+<p>It is good for the imaginative letter-writer to live within sight and
+sound of the sea, to hear the long roll, and to see from his window 'a
+nick of the blue Pacific.' It is also good for him to be within range
+of savage warfare, and to take long rough rides in a disturbed
+country. On one such occasion he writes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in
+Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence
+that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride,
+sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven
+of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours'
+political discussions with an interpreter; to say nothing of
+sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati
+would look askance of itself.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The feat might not seem miraculous to a captain of frontier irregulars
+in hard training; but for a delicate novelist in weak health it was
+pluckily done. These letters would be readable if Stevenson had
+written nothing else, though of course their worth is doubled by our
+interest in a man of singular talent who died<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> prematurely. They
+illustrate the tale of his life and portray his character; and they
+form an addition, valuable in itself, and unique as a variety, to the
+series of memorable English letter-writers.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Colvin mentions, in his preface, that Stevenson's talk was
+irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, full of matter and mirth. It
+cannot be denied that between correspondence and conversation,
+regarded as fine arts, there is a close kinship; and very similar
+reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the
+decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of
+letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this
+sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated
+periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that
+nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge
+early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters
+from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written
+must have increased enormously; it is also true that many more are
+published than heretofore, and that as a great many of these are not
+above mediocrity, are valueless as literature, and of little worth
+biographically, they produce on the disappointed reader the effect of
+a general depreciation of the standard. Nevertheless, this article
+will have been written to little purpose, unless it has shown fair
+cause for rejecting such a conclusion, and for maintaining that,
+although fine letter-writers, like poets, are few and far between, yet
+they have not been wanting in our own time, and are not likely to
+disappear. There will always be men, like Coleridge or Carlyle, whose
+impetuous thoughts and humoristic conceptions cannot perpetually
+submit to the forms and limitations and delays of printing and
+publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And
+although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet
+corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of
+literary recluses&mdash;of those who pass their days in reading books, in
+watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select
+circle of friends&mdash;will also continue. Whether Englishwomen, who write
+letters up to a certain point better than Englishmen, will now rise,
+as Frenchwomen have done, to the highest line, and why they have not
+done so heretofore, are points that we have no space here for taking
+up.</p>
+
+<p>But it is the exceptional peculiarity of letters, as a form of
+literature, that the writer can never superintend their publication.
+During his lifetime he has no control over them, they are not in his
+hands; and they do not appear until after his death. He must rely
+entirely, therefore, upon the discretion of his editor, who has to
+balance the wishes of a family, or the susceptibilities of an
+influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of
+duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination
+toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some
+remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of
+Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring
+fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the
+underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse,
+as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened
+monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may
+insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and
+shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But
+such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the
+larger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present
+occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history
+and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly
+the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is
+universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely
+attained.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> (1) <i>The Letters of Charles Lamb.</i> Edited, with
+Introduction and Notes, by Alfred Ainger. London, 1888. (2) <i>Letters
+of John Keats to his Family and Friends.</i> Edited by Sidney Colvin.
+London, 1891. (3) <i>Letters and Verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley.</i>
+Edited by Rowland E. Prothero. London, 1895. (4) <i>Letters of Matthew
+Arnold</i>, 1848-88. Collected and arranged by George Russell. London and
+New York, 1895. (5) <i>Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble.</i>
+Edited by William Aldis Wright. London, 1895. (6) <i>Vailima Letters,
+from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin</i>, 1890-94. London,
+1895.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, April 1896.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Mr. John Morley, <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, December 1895.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> <i>Dean Stanley's Letters</i>, p. 440.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THACKERAY" id="THACKERAY"></a>THACKERAY</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is remarkable that in a century which is far more profusely
+supplied with biographies than any preceding age, and at a time when
+chronicles of small beer no less than of fine vintages seem to gratify
+the rather indiscriminate taste of the British public, no formal life
+has ever been produced of Thackeray. That this omission has been due
+to his express wish is well understood, and at any rate it may be
+cited as a praiseworthy breach of the latter-day custom of publishing
+a man's private affairs and correspondence as soon as possible after
+his funeral. Nevertheless the generation of those who knew Thackeray,
+for whom and among whom he wrote, is now rapidly vanishing; so that it
+would have been a kind of national misfortune if posterity had been
+left without some authentic record of his personal history, his
+earlier experiences, his characteristic sayings and doings, and the
+general environment in which he worked.</p>
+
+<p>For the biographical introductions, therefore, which are appended to
+each volume of this new edition,<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> we owe gratitude to his daughter,
+Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> No more than seven volumes have been
+actually published up to this date, but since these include a large
+proportion of Thackeray's most important and characteristic work, we
+make no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> apology for anticipating the completion of the series by an
+attempt to make a critical examination of the salient points which
+distinguish his genius, and mark his place in general literature. Mrs.
+Ritchie tells us in a brief prefatory note that although her father's
+wishes have prevented her from writing his complete biography she has
+at last determined to publish memories which chiefly concern his
+books. Her desire has also been 'to mark down some of the truer chords
+to which his life was habitually set'; and accordingly we have in
+every volume an instalment, too brief and intermittent for such
+interesting matter, of the incidents and vicissitudes belonging to
+successive stages of his life and work, with glimpses of his mind and
+tastes, of the friendships that he made, and the society in which he
+moved. The form in which these reminiscences and <i>reliqui&aelig;</i> appear has
+necessarily disconnected them, since they have been evidently chosen
+on the plan of connecting each novel with the circumstances or
+particular field of observation which may have suggested the plot, the
+scenery, or the characters. One can thus see that Thackeray's mind,
+like his sketch-book, was constantly taking down vivid impressions of
+people and places, and in some of his notes of travel can be easily
+traced the sources whence he took hints for elaborate studies. But
+under this arrangement the chronology becomes here and there somewhat
+entangled. <i>Pendennis</i>, for example, was finished in 1850, but as the
+hero's life at Oxbridge is described in the novel, its introduction
+takes us back to the period when the writer himself was at Cambridge
+in 1829. <i>Vanity Fair</i>, again, written in 1845, contains a well-known
+episode of Dobbin's school life, and the story carries us more than
+once to the Continent; so the introduction gives us recollections of
+Charterhouse, where Thackeray went in 1822,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> and of travels about
+Germany in the early thirties. The <i>Contributions to Punch</i>, which
+form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten
+years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for
+references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most
+successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines
+cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a
+connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as
+the system fortunately affords room and reason for giving many fresh
+details of his daily life, with some of his letters, or extracts from
+them, which are fresh and amusing, we may cheerfully pass over these
+petty drawbacks. We are heartily thankful for our admission to a
+closer acquaintance with an author who has drawn some immortal
+pictures of English society, its manners, prejudices, and
+characteristic types, in novels that will always hold the first rank
+in our lighter literature.</p>
+
+<p>How his boyhood was passed is tolerably well known already. Returning
+home in childhood from India he was put first to a preparatory school,
+and afterwards, for nigh seven years, to Charterhouse. At eighteen he
+went up to Cambridge, where he spoke in the Union, wrote in university
+magazines, criticised Shelley's <i>Revolt of Islam</i>, 'a beautiful poem,
+though the story is absurd,' and composed a parody on Tennyson's prize
+poem, <i>Timbuctoo</i>. In 1830 he travelled in Germany, and had his
+interview at Weimar with Goethe; and from 1831 we find him settled in
+a London pleader's office, reading law with temporary assiduity,
+frequenting the theatres and Caves of Harmony, making many literary
+acquaintances, taking runs into the country to canvass for Charles
+Buller, and trying his 'prentice hand at journalism. His vocation for
+literature speedily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> damped his legal ardour, and drew him out of Mr.
+Tapsell's chambers, where he left a desk full of sketches and
+caricatures. In May 1832 he wrote: 'This lawyer's preparatory
+education is certainly one of the most cold-blooded, prejudicial
+pieces of invention that ever a man was slave to;' and he longs for
+fresh air and fresh butter. By August he had fled to Paris, where he
+read French, worked at a painter's <i>atelier</i>, and took seriously to
+the work of a newspaper correspondent. On the romantic school, which
+was just then at its height, he makes the following remark, which
+betrays the antipathy to artificial and theatrical tendencies in
+literature that always provoked his satire:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'In the time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine
+gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet
+and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more
+poetical than their rigid predecessors.'</p></div>
+
+<p>He had little taste, in fact, for medi&aelig;valism in any shape, and 'old
+Montaigne' was more to his liking. We are told, also, that he became
+absorbed in Cousin's <i>Philosophy</i>, noting upon it that 'the excitement
+of metaphysics must equal almost that of gambling'; and finding,
+perhaps, no great attraction in either. After his marriage in 1836 he
+settled down in London, devoting himself thenceforward to literature
+as a profession; the <i>Yellowplush Papers</i>, published in 1837 by
+<i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, being his earliest contribution of any length or
+significance. In the introductory chapter Mrs. Ritchie says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I hardly know&mdash;nor, if I knew, should I care to give here&mdash;the
+names and the details of the events which suggested some of the
+<i>Yellowplush Papers</i>. The history of Mr. Deuceace was written from
+life during a very early period of my father's career. Nor can one
+wonder that his views were somewhat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> grim at that particular time,
+and still bore the impress of an experience lately and very dearly
+bought.... As a boy he had lost money at cards to some cardsharpers
+who scraped acquaintance with him. He never blinked at the truth or
+spared himself; but neither did he blind himself to the real
+characters of the people in question, when once he had discovered
+them. His villains became curious studies in human nature; he
+turned them over in his mind, and he caused Deuceace, Barry Lyndon,
+and Ikey Solomons, Esq., to pay back some of their ill-gotten
+spoils, in an involuntary but very legitimate fashion, when he put
+them into print and made them the heroes of those grim early
+histories.'</p></div>
+
+<p>We may infer from this passage that Thackeray's mind acted not only as
+a microscope but as a magnifying glass; he had an eye, as one knows,
+for characteristic details, and it appears that he could also enlarge
+the small fry of scoundrelism into magnificent rascals. There can be
+no doubt that he had the image-making faculty of sensitive genius, and
+that much of all he saw and felt went to fill up his canvas and fix
+his point of view. Writing to his mother, he once said, 'It is the
+fashion to say that people are unfortunate who have lost their money.
+Dearest mother, we know better than that;' though 'for years and years
+he had to face the great question of daily bread.' But while he could
+battle stoutly against losses of this kind, he had no mercy on the
+rogues who caused them; and his indignation, accentuated by the strain
+of married life on a very narrow income, may account in some degree
+for the cynical tone, now sombre, now mocking, which so perceptibly
+dominates his earlier writings, and pervades all his books, though in
+a lesser and more tolerant way, up to the end. Against this shaded
+background, however, we may set many kindly figures, and the contrast
+is heightened by the humorous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>joviality which finds vent in his
+talent for caricature. To this we owe the full-length portrait of
+Major Gahagan, and a whole gallery of other drawings, usually of
+Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The
+striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct,
+between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic
+unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later
+and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic
+proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so
+predominate as to disconcert the judgment of a generation which has
+become habituated, at the present day, to a less energetic and
+uncompromising style of exposing fools and gibbeting knaves. And after
+making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste
+which separate us from our fathers in every region of art&mdash;and even
+admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality,
+snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays&mdash;we
+are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is
+superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier
+stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some
+passages in them it might be inferred by foreigners that the better
+born Englishmen habitually indulged in rudeness toward their social
+inferiors, and that English domestics in good houses broke out into
+vulgar insolence whenever they could do so with impunity.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for an example, in the scene from <i>The Great Hoggarty Diamond</i>,
+the behaviour of Mr. Preston, 'one of her Majesty's Secretaries of
+State,' to an underbred but good-tempered little city clerk, whom Lady
+Drum takes in her carriage for a drive in Hyde Park, and whom she
+hints he might ask to dinner. Mr. Preston acts on the hint, but with
+savage sarcasm,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> and Titmarsh, the clerk, accepts in order to plague
+the minister for his astounding rudeness:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"I did not," he says, "intend to dine with the man, but only to
+give him a lesson in manners."'</p></div>
+
+<p>And so, when the carriage drove up to Mr. Preston's door, he says to
+him:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"When you came up and asked who the devil I was, I thought you
+might have put the question in a more polite manner, but it wasn't
+my business to speak. When, by way of a joke, you invited me to
+dinner, I answered in a joke too, and here I am. But don't be
+frightened, I'm not agoing to dine with you."...</p>
+
+<p>'"Is that all, sir?" says Mr. Preston, still in a rage. "If you
+have done, will you leave the house, or shall my servants turn you
+out? Turn out this fellow; do you hear me?"'</p></div>
+
+<p>Assuming that sixty years ago a Secretary of State was much the same
+sort of man that he is to-day, what are we to think of this spirited
+colloquy? and what kind of impression will it, and others no less
+forcible, produce upon the future student of manners who turns to
+light literature as the mirror of contemporary society?</p>
+
+<p>With regard, again, to the <i>Yellowplush Papers</i>, is it from
+unpardonable fastidiousness, the affectation of an over-refined
+literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have
+been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The
+use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of
+ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr.
+Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we
+meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the
+cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most
+appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary
+novel-readers <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>that we think few will master two hundred pages of this
+dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old
+acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with
+Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt
+whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the
+author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the
+legitimate boundaries of literature as a fine art, and whether they do
+not much rather harm than heighten his permanent reputation when they
+are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It
+is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken
+record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the
+Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is no subject for dramatic
+treatment.</p>
+
+<p>Yet we are aware that it may be practically impossible to publish
+incomplete editions of a very popular writer; and in the extravagances
+of his youth one may discern the promise of much higher things. Very
+rapidly, in fact, in the work which comes next, Thackeray rises at
+once to a far superior level of artistic performance. We are not
+indisposed to endorse the opinion, pronounced more than once by good
+judges, that the high-water mark of his peculiar genius was touched by
+<i>Barry Lyndon</i>, which first exhibits the rare and distinctive
+qualities that were completely developed in his later and larger
+novels. It may be affirmed, as a general rule, that most of our
+eminent writers of fiction have leapt, as Scott did, into the arena
+with some work of first-class merit, which has immediately caught
+public attention and established their position in literature. Their
+fugitive pieces, their crudities and imperfect essays, have been
+either judiciously suppressed or consigned to oblivion. They have
+followed, one may say, the goodly custom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> prescribed by the governor
+of the Cana marriage feast; they put forth in the beginning their good
+wine, and they fall back upon inferior brands only when the public,
+having well drunk of the potent vintage, will swallow anything from a
+favourite author. We may regret that Thackeray's start as a man of
+letters should have furnished an exception to this salutary rule; and
+in surveying, after the lapse of many years, his collected works, we
+are disposed to observe that no first-class writer has suffered more
+from the enduring popularity which has encouraged the republication of
+everything that is his, from the finished <i>chefs-d'&oelig;uvres</i> down to
+the ephemeral and unripe products of an exuberant youth. He would have
+given the world a notable confirmation of the rule that a great author
+usually leads off on a high note, if he had opened his munificent
+literary entertainment with <i>Barry Lyndon</i>. We quote here from Mrs.
+Ritchie's introduction:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'My father once said to me when I was a girl, "You needn't read
+<i>Barry Lyndon</i>; you won't like it." Indeed it is scarcely a book to
+<i>like</i>, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power
+and mastery.... Barry Lyndon tells his own story, so as to enlist
+every sympathy against himself, and yet all flows so plausibly, so
+glibly, that one can hardly explain how the effect was produced.
+From the very first sentence, almost, one receives the impression
+of a lawless adventurer, brutal, heartless, with low instincts and
+rapid perceptions. Together with his own autobiography, he gives a
+picture of the world in which he lives and brags, a picture so
+vivid ... that as one reads one almost seems to hear the tread of
+remorseless fate sounding through all the din and merriment. Take
+those descriptions of the Prussian army during the Seven Years'
+War, and of that hand of man which weighs so heavily upon man&mdash;what
+a haunting page in history!'</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p><p>These remarks are very justly appreciative, for the book stamps
+Thackeray as a fine impressionist, as an artist who skilfully mixes
+the colours of reality and imagination into a composition of striking
+scenes and the effective portrayal of character. With extraordinary
+ability and consistency to the type he works out the gradual evolution
+of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring
+impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the
+intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish
+profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county
+magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which
+were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex
+strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action
+lifted above the platform of city swindlers, insignificant scoundrels,
+and needy cardsharpers, up to a stage exhibiting historic personages
+and scenes, courts and battlefields; and we breathe freely in the
+wider air of immorality on a grand scale. As a sample of spirited
+freehand drawing, the sketches of Continental society, 'before that
+vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world,' are admirable for
+their force and originality; and what can be better as a touch of
+character than the following defence of his profession by a prince of
+gamblers?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of
+the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served
+them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an
+honourable man&mdash;a swindling quack, who does not believe in the
+nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering
+in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant
+man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers,
+his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed
+by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> the middle
+classes against gentlemen; it is only the shopkeeper cant which is
+to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of
+chivalry; it has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of
+birth.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Here we have the romance of the gaming-table; and in the same chapter
+Barry Lyndon recounts the evil chance that befell him at cards with
+two young students, who had never played before:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'As ill luck would have it, they were tipsy, and against tipsiness
+I have often found the best calculations of play fail entirely. A
+few officers joined; they played in the most perfectly insane way,
+and won always.... And in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick
+with tobacco smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and
+liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and beardless
+students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe
+lost seventeen hundred louis. It was like Charles xii. or Richard
+C&oelig;ur de Lion falling before a petty fortress and an unknown
+hand.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The picture of gamblers in a grimy tavern, the unconscious humour of
+Lyndon's heroic lament, the comparison between the cardsharpers'
+discomfiture and the fall of mighty warriors, make up a fine example
+of Thackeray's eye for graphic detail, and prove the force and temper
+of his incisive irony.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in spite of its great excellence, the book still labours under
+the artistic disadvantage of having a rogue for its hero. Thackeray
+was too good an artist to be unconscious of this defect, and in a
+footnote to page 215 he defends his choice characteristically. After
+admitting that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way,
+bullied her, robbed her to spend the money in gambling and taverns,
+kept mistresses in her house, and so on, he argues:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The world contains scores of such amiable people, and, indeed, it
+is because justice has not been done<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> them that we have edited this
+autobiography. Had it been that of a mere hero of romance&mdash;one of
+those heroic youths who figure in the novels of Scott or James,
+there would have been no call to introduce the reader to a
+personage already so often and so charmingly depicted. Mr. Barry is
+not, we repeat, a hero of the common pattern; but let the reader
+look round and ask himself, "Do not as many rogues succeed in life
+as honest men, more fools than men of talent?" And is it not just
+that the lives of this class should be described by the students of
+human nature as well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes,
+those perfectly impossible heroes,' etc., etc.</p></div>
+
+<p>One would be almost inclined to infer from this passage that the
+author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as
+to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry;
+for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are
+no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the
+truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject
+for character-drawing than in the blameless hero, while he was deeply
+implicated in the formidable revolt which Carlyle was leading against
+the respectabilities of that day.</p>
+
+<p>It is worth notice that in Barry Lyndon's military reminiscences, done
+with great vigour and fidelity of detail, we have a very early example
+of the realistic as contrasted with the romantic treatment of
+campaigns, of life in the bivouac and the barrack. This method, which
+has latterly had immense vogue, seems to have been first invented in
+France, where Thackeray may have taken the hint from Stendhal; but we
+are disposed to believe that he was the first who proclaimed it in
+England. As it professes to give the true unvarnished aspect of war it
+would certainly have accorded with Thackeray's natural contempt, so
+often shown in his writings, for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> commonplaces of the military
+romancer who revelled in the pomp and circumstance of glorious
+battles, the charges, the heroic exploits, the honours, rather than
+the horrors, of the fighting business. Moreover, it is not only in
+style and treatment but also in sentiment and in certain peculiar
+prepossessions, that we can trace in this novel the lines which the
+writer followed throughout his narratives, and his favourite
+delineations of character. For diplomatists he has always a curious
+contempt, and he never misses an opportunity of ridiculing them. 'Mon
+Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what
+fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the
+world, this diplomacy'&mdash;as if it were not also a most important and
+difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great
+folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen;
+and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord
+Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was
+ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.'
+And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about
+women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of
+them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry
+on the subject of matrimony:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household
+drudge, who loves you. <i>That</i> is the most precious sort of
+friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The
+man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's
+an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his
+ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born
+to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks,
+as it were.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> Thackeray's genius.
+In <i>Vanity Fair</i>, his next work, it has attained its climax; the
+dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and
+more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and
+whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a
+fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in
+this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone
+is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly
+excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the
+superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and
+unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer
+hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted
+virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the
+human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their
+virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated,
+for the purposes of the social drama. The book's very title, <i>Vanity
+Fair</i>, denotes a transition from the scathing satire of his earlier
+manner to more indulgent irony, from Swift to Sterne, two authors whom
+Thackeray had evidently studied attentively. In his short preface the
+author preludes with the gentler note when he invites people of a
+lazy, benevolent, or sarcastic mood to step into the puppet show for a
+moment and look at the performance.</p>
+
+<p>The book's success, Mrs. Ritchie tells us, was slow; the sale hung
+fire. 'One has heard of the journeys which the manuscript made to
+various publishers' houses before it could find any one ready to
+undertake the venture, and how long its appearance was delayed by
+various doubts and hesitations, until it was at last brought out in
+its yellow covers by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans on January 1, 1847.'
+But when the last numbers were appearing Thackeray<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> wrote that,
+'although it does everything but sell, it appears really to increase
+my reputation immensely'&mdash;as it assuredly did. That a signal success
+in literature is nearly always achieved, not by following the beaten
+road, but by a bold departure from it, is a principle that could be
+abundantly established by examples, and which seems almost a truism
+when it is stated. <i>Vanity Fair</i> was decidedly a work of great
+freshness and originality; but publishers are circumspect and rarely
+adventurous, they distrust novelties and prefer to follow the
+prevailing fashion as far as it will go, wherein we may discern one
+reason why the accouchement of the first literary child is usually so
+laborious.</p>
+
+<p>To criticise at length any single novel of Thackeray's would be far
+beyond the scope or purpose of this article. Our object is rather to
+illustrate the course and development of his distinctive literary
+qualities, the slow effacement of prejudices which never entirely
+disappeared, and the rapid expansion of his highest artistic
+faculties. To begin with the prejudices. In <i>Vanity Fair</i> he still
+makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose
+to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form;
+though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last
+fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration. And another important
+reform of manners must have supervened in the same period if we are to
+believe that in these novels the English servant is not unfairly
+caricatured. As we know him at the present day, in the class that
+lives with gentle-folk, he may be touchy and troublesome, with much
+self-assertiveness, but also with much self-respect. He has as many
+faults as other people, but among them brutal rudeness is practically
+unknown; yet when Rebecca Sharp is driven in Mr. Sedley's carriage to
+Sir Pitt Crawley's, having given<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> nothing to the domestics on leaving
+the Sedleys, the coachman is ludicrously rude to a poor governess.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"I shall write to Mr. Sedley, and inform him of your conduct,"
+said Miss Sharp to him.</p>
+
+<p>'"Don't," replied that functionary; "I hope you've forgot nothink?
+Miss 'Melia's gownds&mdash;have you got them&mdash;as the lady's maid was to
+have 'ad? I hope they'll fit you. Shut the door, Jim, you'll get no
+good out of <i>'er</i>," continued John, pointing with his thumb towards
+Miss Sharp; "a bad lot, I tell you, a bad lot."'</p></div>
+
+<p>One may conjecture that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque,
+which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and
+inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in
+setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the
+perfection of his higher composition. It might well produce, among
+foreigners at any rate, an unreal impression of the true relations
+existing between different classes of English society.</p>
+
+<p>But these are slight blemishes upon the surface of an epoch-making
+book, for <i>Vanity Fair</i> inaugurated a new school of novel-writing
+in this country, with its combined vigour and subtlety of
+character-drawing, and with the marvellous dexterity of its scenes and
+dramatic situations. The army and military life in all its phases had
+a remarkable attraction for him; in all his larger books one or more
+officers are brought prominently upon the foreground of his canvas. He
+hits off the strong and weak points of the profession, in war and
+peace, with a truth and humour that gave freshness and originality to
+the whole subject, and the best of these pictures are in <i>Vanity
+Fair</i>. There is not one of its leading <i>militaires</i>&mdash;Dobbin and
+Osborne, Crawley and Major O'Dowd&mdash;in whom a typical representative of
+well-known <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>varieties may not be recognised. His fine picturesque
+handiwork, his consistent preference of the real to the romantic, and
+his reserve in the use of such tempting materials as the battlefield
+affords to the story-teller, are shown in his treatment of the episode
+of Waterloo. He is far too good an artist to lay out for us a grand
+scene of fierce fighting and carnage; nor does he, like Lever, produce
+Wellington and Bonaparte acting or speaking up to the popular
+conception of these mighty heroes. He is content to follow his own
+personages into that famous field, and to show how perilous
+circumstance brings out the force or feebleness of each character,
+male and female, whether of the wives left behind at Brussels, or the
+soldiers in the fighting line at Waterloo. It is only at the end of
+his chapter, after some seriocomic incidents and dialogues exhibiting
+the behaviour of the non-combatants&mdash;of Jos Sedley, Mrs. O'Dowd, Lady
+Bareacres, and the rest&mdash;that his narrative rises suddenly to the epic
+note in a brief passage full of admirable energy and pathos:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great
+field. All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away,
+the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and
+repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns which
+were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades
+falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Toward evening the
+attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened
+in its fury ... they were preparing for a final onset. It came at
+last, the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of St.
+Jean.... Unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled
+death from the English line, the dark rolling column pressed on and
+up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began
+to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at
+last the English troops rushed from the post from which no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> enemy
+had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.</p>
+
+<p>'No more firing was heard at Brussels; the pursuit rolled miles
+away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was
+praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
+through his heart.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The military critic might pick holes in this description, and
+Thackeray might as well have thrown the English infantry into squares
+instead of into line. Yet the passage is instinct with compressed
+emotion; and the sudden transition from the general battle to the
+single death is a good touch of tragic art.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Pendennis</i> (1850) we may discern the slowly softening influences
+of years that bring the philosophic mind, of a calmer and easier time,
+and perhaps also of a different class of readers. Thackeray has now
+discovered that, as he says in his preface, 'to describe a real rascal
+you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not
+tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in
+<i>Pendennis</i>, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse
+than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for
+whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and
+subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described
+a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is
+another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention
+may undergo in the course of a generation; for surely not even the
+straitest middle-class sect would in our day banish <i>Pendennis</i> on the
+score of impropriety. Mrs. Ritchie mentions that the author's
+descriptions of literary life were criticised on the ground that he
+was trying to win favour with the non-literary classes by decrying his
+own profession&mdash;an absurd accusation which nettled him into replying.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+The truth seems to be that Thackeray, who poked fun at the weak sides
+of every class and calling, saw no reason why he should leave out his
+own; and the men of letters might have been comforted by observing
+that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural
+enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have
+ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in
+Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer
+confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of
+people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as
+literary men.'</p>
+
+<p><i>Pendennis</i> is in Thackeray's best style, as the novelist of manners.
+It opens, like <i>Vanity Fair</i>, with a short amusing scene that poses,
+as the French say, some leading actor in the play, and encourages the
+reader to go on. Next follows, as is usual with our author, a short
+retrospective account of the people and places among whom the plot is
+laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting
+his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys,
+the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity,
+Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English
+provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who
+brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the
+English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer
+and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for
+inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and
+strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless
+hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel
+Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last
+moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical
+plea that the author had not sufficient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> experience of gaol-birds and
+the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free
+with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the
+condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking
+unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to
+see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he
+prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain
+of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his
+stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down
+into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests
+that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and
+does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs
+and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth
+and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune
+or failure. The voyage of life</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people
+huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the
+ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that
+nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a
+solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one
+are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time
+when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out
+of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'</p></div>
+
+<p>In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the
+antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human
+efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with
+humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops
+his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation,
+after the manner of Fielding,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> whose leisurely tone of satire is so
+audible in the following quotation from <i>Pendennis</i> that he might well
+have written it:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart
+and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian
+charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those
+who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a
+dispute?'</p></div>
+
+<p>As we have said that <i>Vanity Fair</i> touches the climax of Thackeray's
+peculiar genius, so in our judgment <i>Esmond</i> shows the gathered
+strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an
+eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We
+may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection
+in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the
+eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic
+events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns
+upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt
+largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in
+marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served
+as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts
+the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and
+conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the
+period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the
+society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of
+glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are
+sometimes (as in the <i>Grand Cyrus</i>) thinly veiled portraits of
+contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures
+representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The
+virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are
+chaste and beauteous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> damsels&mdash;Joan of Arc herself appears in one
+romance as an adorable shepherdess&mdash;and love-making is conducted after
+the model of a Parisian <i>pr&eacute;cieuse</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is the opinion of a recent French critic, who has made careful
+study of his subject, that the new school was founded by
+Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to
+the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque
+incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping
+them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by
+picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and
+conditions of existence of the time and country in which he might be
+unwinding his tale. But Chateaubriand, like Byron (who was of a
+similar temperament), never could put himself, to use a French phrase,
+into another man's skin; he is to be detected soliloquising and
+dispensing noble sentiments under the costume of a Christian martyr or
+an American savage, and thus the fidelity of his scene-painting was
+still marred by the artificiality of the discourse. It was the
+Waverley novel that lifted the historical romance far beyond
+Chateaubriand's level, that established it, in England, France, and
+Italy on the true principle of creating vivid representations of a
+bygone age by a skilful mixture of fact and fiction, and by a correct
+and harmonious combination of characters, manners, and environment.</p>
+
+<p>But during the twenty years that intervene between the dates, taken
+roughly, of Scott's worst novel and Thackeray's best, the flood tide
+of romanticism had risen to its highest point, and had then ebbed very
+low, on both sides of the British Channel. And we can see that the
+younger writer was no votary of the older school of high-flying
+chivalrous romance, with its tournaments, its crusaders, its valiant
+warriors, and distressed maidens. His youthful aversion for shams and
+conventionalities, his strong propensity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> toward burlesque and
+persiflage, his early life among cities and commonplace folk, seem to
+have obscured in some degree his appreciation of even such splendid
+compositions as <i>Ivanhoe</i> or <i>The Talisman</i>; or, at any rate, his
+sense of the ridiculous overpowered his admiration. The result was
+that, as Scott had exalted his medi&aelig;val heroes and heroines far above
+the level of real life, had revived the legendary age of chivalry and
+adventure with all the magnificence of his poetic imagination,
+Thackeray had at first set himself, conversely, to strip the trappings
+off these fine folk, and to poke his fun at the feudal lords and
+ladies by treating them as ordinary middle-class men and women
+masquerading in old armour or drapery. He came in as a writer on the
+ebb-tide of romanticism, when the reaction showed its popular form in
+a curious outburst of the taste for burlesques and parodies on the
+stage and in the light reading of the time. Whether the creation of
+this taste is to be ascribed to the appearance of two writers with
+such genius for wit and fun as Thackeray and Dickens, or whether they
+only supplied a natural demand, may be questionable; they undoubtedly
+headed the army of Comus, and thereby raised the whole standard of
+facetious literature. But the defect of this school was its propensity
+to take a hilarious or sardonic view, not only of medi&aelig;val romance,
+but of quaint old times generally; and one leading embodiment of this
+mocking spirit was <i>Punch</i> founded in 1841. A'Beckett's <i>Comic History
+of England</i>, which ran through many numbers, seems to this generation
+a dreary and deleterious specimen of misplaced farce; though
+historically it is not quite such bad work as Dickens's <i>Child's
+History of England</i>, which he meant to be serious. Among Thackeray's
+very numerous contributions to <i>Punch</i> are <i>Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
+on English History</i>, which might well have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> consigned to
+oblivion, <i>Rebecca and Rowena</i>, and <i>The Prize Novelists</i>. The
+sarcastic and the sentimental temper must always be hostile to each
+other; between romance and ridicule the antipathy is fundamental; and
+although one regrets that he ever wrote <i>Rebecca and Rowena</i>, the
+melodramatic novels of Bulwer-Lytton were fair enough game for the
+parodist. However, it is certain that in his earlier writings
+Thackeray did much to laugh away the novel of medi&aelig;val chivalry; and
+while we think he often carried his irreverent jocosity much too far,
+since after all chivalry is better than cockneyism, we may award him
+the very high honour of becoming, latterly, one of the founders of a
+new and admirable historical school in England.</p>
+
+<p>The eighteenth century was always Thackeray's favourite period; he
+liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its
+practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of
+keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world
+as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that
+possessed great imaginative faculty; Defoe was a master of minute
+life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings
+are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished
+denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy,
+large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery,
+loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage,
+and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated
+manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to
+Fielding than to any other single literary ancestor; but all these
+influences were most congenial to his temperament, and informed his
+best work. His instinctive dislike of unreality, exaggeration, and
+fanciful ideals would have always prevented him from laying the
+situation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> of his story in some distant age, of which hardly anything
+is known accurately, and supplementing his ignorance by giving free
+scope to fantastic invention, as was the usage of the humble followers
+who tried in vain to conjure with the wand of Scott. He required a
+period which he could study, master, and sympathise with, and he found
+it in the eighteenth century; though in <i>Esmond</i> the plot, being
+founded on Jacobite intrigues and conspiracies, opens with the
+Revolution of 1688. He had taken great trouble, as usual, with the
+localities, knowing well that you never understand a battle clearly
+until you have seen its field.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"I was pleased to find Blenheim," he wrote to his mother, "was
+just exactly the place I had figured to myself, except that the
+village is larger; but I fancied I had actually been there, so like
+the aspect of it was to what I looked for. I saw the brook which
+Harry Esmond crossed, and almost the spot where he fell wounded."'</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ritchie quotes this letter as illustrating 'a sort of second
+sight as to places which my father used to speak of'; and it certainly
+attests his possession of the strong imaginative faculty which puts
+together vivid mental pictures.</p>
+
+<p>The first page strikes the note of disenchantment, of escape from the
+spell of conventionalism and the shores of romance. Colonel Esmond,
+who tells his own tale, wishes the Muse of History to disrobe, to
+discard her buskins, and to deliver herself like a woman of the
+everyday world.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be
+court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides
+Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne tearing down the Park
+slopes after her staghounds, in her one-horse chaise&mdash;a hot
+redfaced woman.... She was neither better bred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> nor wiser than you
+and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand basin.
+Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for
+having her rise off her knees, and take her natural posture, not to
+be for ever performing cringes and congees like a Court
+chamberlain, and shuffling backward out of doors in the presence of
+the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar rather than
+heroic.'</p></div>
+
+<p>No very deep philosophy in this, we might say, for surely historians
+up to Esmond's day had not all been pompous and servile, while
+something like dignity is desirable. But here we have Thackeray
+speaking through Esmond his own thoughts about history, and
+proclaiming the rise of naturalism against the romantic high-heeled
+school. And in a much later chapter, where Esmond visits Addison, we
+have the true realistic method of Tolstoi and other quite modern
+novelists, as compared with the old classic style of describing war.
+Addison has been writing a poem on the Blenheim campaign:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"I admire your art," says Esmond to Addison; "the murder of the
+campaign is done to military music, like a battle at the opera, and
+the virgins shriek in harmony, as our victorious grenadiers march
+into their villages. Do you know what a scene it was? what a
+triumph you are celebrating, what scenes of shame and horror were
+enacted, over which the commander's genius presided as calm as
+though he didn't belong to our sphere? You talk of 'the listening
+soldier fixed in sorrow,' the 'leader's grief swayed by generous
+pity'; to my belief the leader cared no more for bleating flocks
+than he did for infants' cries, and many of our ruffians butchered
+one or the other with equal alacrity. You hew out of your polished
+verses a stately image of smiling victory; I tell you 'tis an
+uncouth, distorted, savage idol, hideous, bloody, and barbarous.
+The rites performed before it are shocking to think of. You<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> great
+poets should show it as it is, ugly and horrible, not beautiful and
+serene."'</p></div>
+
+<p>When Colonel Esmond has to describe the battles in which he himself
+took part, he avoids, as might be supposed, the high romantic style.
+But he does not, therefore, fall on the other side, into the mire of
+the writers who at the present day conscientiously give us the horrors
+of the hospital and all the brutalities of war, which Esmond knows,
+but does not choose to set down in his memoir. In his account of the
+Blenheim victory there is a skilful touch of the professional soldier,
+who records briefly the position of the armies and the tactical
+movements; and it lights up with suppressed enthusiasm when he records
+the intrepidity of the English regiments in that fierce and famous
+struggle. We read of Major-General Wilkes,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'on foot, at the head of the attacking column, marching with his
+hat off intrepidly in the face of the enemy, who was pouring in a
+tremendous fire from his guns and musketry, to which our people
+were instructed not to reply except with pike and bayonet when they
+reached the French palisades. To these Wilkes walked intrepidly,
+and struck the woodwork with his sword before our people charged
+it. He was shot down on the instant, with his colonel, major, and
+several officers,'</p></div>
+
+<p>and the assault was repelled with great slaughter.</p>
+
+<p>In this and other similar passages, you have the historic novelist at
+his best; the true facts are selected and arranged so as to form
+pictures of soul-stirring action; while their connection with his
+story is maintained by giving Esmond himself a very modest and natural
+share in the glorious victory:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'And now the conquerors were met by a furious charge of the English
+horse under Esmond's general,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> Lumley, behind whose squadrons the
+flying foot took refuge and formed again, while Lumley drove back
+the French horse, charging up to the village of Blenheim and the
+palisades where Wilkes, and many hundred more gallant Englishmen,
+lay in slaughtered heaps. Beyond this moment, and of this famous
+victory, Mr. Esmond knows nothing, for a shot brought down his
+horse and our young gentleman on it, who fell crushed and stunned
+under the animal.'</p></div>
+
+<p>A lesser artist would have made his hero perform some brilliant
+exploit; but Thackeray prefers to sketch the scene as Wouvermans might
+have done it. We have not here the incomparable fire and spirit which
+Scott throws into the skirmishes at Bothwell Brig and Drumclog; we see
+the difference of mind and method; but we can have nothing except
+admiration for the rare imaginative faculty which enabled a quiet man
+of letters to deal so finely and faithfully, with such reserve and
+discrimination, with a subject that might easily have been spoiled by
+the noisy clatter and coarse colouring of the inferior artist. His
+full length portrait of Marlborough has been too often quoted to be
+reproduced here&mdash;'impassible before victory, before danger, before
+defeat; the splendid calm of his face as he rode along the lines to
+battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling
+before the enemy's charge or shot.' Of Swift, Esmond says&mdash;'I have
+always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of
+that age ... a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vultures tear
+him'; and with a few such strokes he gives etchings of other
+celebrities in letters and politics. One may observe with astonishment
+that the youthful Thackeray, who delighted in suburban chronicles, in
+mean lives and paltry incidents, has risen by middle age to the rank
+of an illustrious painter on the broad canvas of history.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> The annals
+of literature contain few, if any, other examples of so remarkable a
+transformation.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that Thackeray, like Scott, was an industrious collector
+of material for his novels from all sources; we may refer, for an
+instance, to a scene which will have left a passing impression upon
+many readers, where, as the French and English armies are facing each
+other on two sides of a little stream in the Low Countries, Prince
+Charles Edward rides down to the French bank and exchanges a salute
+with Esmond. It falls quite naturally and easily into the narrative,
+and reads like a very happy original conception; yet the incident,
+which is quite authentic, may be found in the papers obtained in the
+last century from the Scottish convent at Paris by Macpherson.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Virginians</i>, which might have had for its second title <i>Forty
+Years Later</i>, the chronicle of the Esmond family is continued; with
+North America during the French war for the battlefields, Braddock,
+Wolfe, and Washington for the military figures, and Esmond's grandsons
+as the personages round whom the story's interest centres. It is a
+novel of very great merit, skilfully constructed, full of vivacious
+writing and delineation of character; and the novelist avails himself
+with his usual adroitness of the celebrated incidents of this period
+and the salient features of English society in the middle of the last
+century. Yet we must reluctantly admit that Thackeray has passed his
+climacteric, and that as a work of the historical school this book
+cannot claim parity with Esmond. George Warrington was on Braddock's
+staff at the fatal rout and massacre on the Ohio; his brother Harry
+was with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham; they witnessed a battle lost
+and a battle won, and each saw his commander fall. But George's
+recital of his hairbreadth escape lacks the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> stern simplicity with
+which his grandfather told the story of Marlborough's wars; and the
+device of his being saved from the Indians by a French officer, who
+was his intimate friend, is so ingenious as to be a trifle
+commonplace. The author does not sketch in any details or personal
+adventures from the great fight under the walls of Quebec; he has
+fallen back, at this part of the story, into personal narrative, and
+<i>The Warrington Memoirs</i> only describe how the news of Wolfe's victory
+and death were acclaimed in London. In the War of Independence, George
+Warrington, who takes the British side, records the feelings and
+situation of an American Loyalist&mdash;a class to whom only Mr. Lecky,
+among historians, has done fair justice. There is much acute and
+well-informed reflection upon the state of the colonies at this time,
+the strong currents of party politics, and the exasperation which
+brought about the rebellion; but, on the whole, this part of the
+narrative has too much resemblance to real history. It has not enough
+of the imaginative and picturesque element to lift it above the
+comparatively prosaic level of an interesting memoir, though some good
+scenes and situations are obtained by making the two Warrington
+brothers take opposite sides. When we learn that, in 1759, the English
+Lord Castlewood repaired his shattered fortunes by marrying an
+American heiress, we are inclined to suspect that our author has taken
+a hint from the fashion of a century later.</p>
+
+<p>In the story of <i>Esmond</i> Thackeray dropped the satirical tone, and
+indulged very rarely indeed in the habit of pausing to moralise, as
+writer to reader, upon social hypocrisy, servile obsequiousness, and
+whited sepulchres generally. In <i>The Virginians</i> he is less attentive
+to dramatic propriety; he begins again to turn aside and lecture us,
+in the midst of his tale, upon the text of <i>De te fabula narratur</i>.
+Sir Miles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> and Lady Warrington are scandalised by their nephew's
+extravagance, and refuse all help to the spendthrift.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'How much of this behaviour goes on daily in respectable society,
+think you? You can fancy Lord and Lady Macbeth concocting a murder,
+and coming together with some little awkwardness, perhaps, when the
+transaction was done and over; but my Lord and Lady Skinflint, when
+they consult in their bedroom about giving their luckless nephew a
+helping hand, and determine to refuse, and go down to family
+prayers and meet their children and domestics, and discourse
+virtuously before them...?'</p></div>
+
+<p>And so on, for a page or two, in a tone that some may think almost as
+sophistical as the reasoning by which the Skinflints might excuse to
+themselves their pharisaical behaviour. Such interpolations are
+artistically incorrect, and out of harmony with the proper conception
+of a well-wrought work of fiction, in which the moral should be
+conveyed through the action and the dialogue, and the meditations
+should be left to be done by the reader himself.</p>
+
+<p>We must, therefore, place <i>The Virginians</i> below <i>Esmond</i> in the order
+of merit. Nevertheless, these two novels, with <i>Barry Lyndon</i>, are
+most important and valuable contributions to the English historical
+series. Nothing like them had been written before, and nothing equal
+has been written after them, with the single exception of <i>John
+Inglesant</i>. They possess one essential quality that ought to
+distinguish all fiction founded on the history of bygone times&mdash;they
+are, so far as posterity can judge at all, faithful and effective
+representations of manners. Now, the inferior practitioner in this
+particular school, being prevented by indolence or incapacity from
+mastering his period and acquiring insight into its ways of thought
+and living, is too often content to cover up his deficiencies by
+indenting freely on the theatrical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> wardrobe and armoury. He deals
+largely in the costumes of the day; he supplies himself plentifully
+with old-fashioned phrases; he is fond of old furniture; he is
+strongest, in fact, upon the external and decorative aspect of the
+society to which he introduces us. Most of the romances written in
+imitation of Scott had this tendency; and this same feebleness
+underlies the superfluous minuteness of detail that may be observed in
+the decadent realists of the present day. Nothing of this sort can be
+alleged against Thackeray, who works from inward outwardly in his
+creations of character, and whose personages are truly historical in
+the sense that they move and speak naturally according to the ideas
+and circumstances of their age, the dialect and dress being merely
+added as appropriate colouring. It is, indeed, a peculiarity of
+Thackeray's novels, which distinguishes him alike from the romancer
+and the modern naturalist that they contain hardly any description,
+that he is never professedly picturesque, that he relies entirely on
+passing strokes and effective details given by the way. In Scott we
+have superb descriptive pieces of scenery, of storms, of the interiors
+of a castle or a Gothic cathedral; and some of the best living
+novelists are much given to elaborate landscape painting. But we doubt
+whether half a page of deliberately picturesque description can be
+found in any of Thackeray's first-class works. He will sometimes
+sketch off the inside of a house or the look of a town, but with
+natural scenery he does not concern himself; he is, for the most part,
+entirely occupied with the analysis of character, or with the
+emotional side of life; and he seems constantly to bear in mind the
+Aristotelian maxim that life consists in action. His principal
+instrument for the exhibition of motive, for the evolution of his
+story, for bringing out qualities, is dialogue, which he manages with
+great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> dexterity and effect, giving it point and raciness, and
+avoiding the snare&mdash;into which recent social novelists have been
+falling&mdash;of insignificance and prolixity. The method of easy,
+sparkling, natural dialogue for developing the plot and distinguishing
+the personages is said to have been first transferred from the theatre
+to the novel by Walter Scott. At any rate, the use of it on a large
+scale, which has since been carried to the verge of abuse, began with
+the Waverley novels; where we find abundance of that humorous
+vernacular talk in which Shakespeare excelled, though for the romance
+Cervantes may be registered as its inventor. In Thackeray's hands
+dramatic conversation, as of actors on the stage, becomes of very
+prominent importance, not only for the illustration of manners in
+society, but also for dressing up the subordinate figures of his
+company. He is now no longer the caricaturist of earlier days; he
+employs the popular dialect and comic touches with effective
+moderation. And he avails himself very freely, in <i>The Virginians</i>, of
+the privilege which belongs to the historical novelist, who is allowed
+to make the reader acquainted with the notabilities of the period not
+only for the movement of his drama, but also for a passing glance or
+casual introduction, as might happen in any place of public resort or
+in a crowded <i>salon</i>. Franklin, Johnson, and Richardson, George Selwyn
+and Lord Chesterfield, cross the stage and disappear, after a few
+remarks of their own or the author's. For military officers, who
+figure in all his novels, he has ever a kindly word; and also for
+sailors, although it is only in his last (unfinished) novel that he
+takes up the navy. For English clergymen, especially for bishops, he
+has no indulgence at all; and he seems to be possessed by the
+commonplace error of believing that the prevailing types of the
+Anglican Church in the eighteenth century were the courtier-bishop<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+and the humble obsequious chaplain. The typical Irishman of fiction,
+with his mixture of recklessness and cunning, warm-hearted and
+unveracious, is to be found, we think, in every one of Thackeray's
+larger novels, except in <i>The Virginians</i>; the Scotsman is rare,
+having been considerably used up by Walter Scott and his assiduous
+imitators. We may notice (parenthetically) that our own day is
+witnessing a marvellous revival of Highlanders and Lowlanders in
+fiction, from Jacobite adventures to the pawky wit and humble
+incidents of the kailyard.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Newcomes</i> we return regretfully to the novel of contemporary
+society; wherewith disappears all the light haze of enchantment that
+hangs over the revival of distant times, even though they lie no
+further behind us than the eighteenth century. Such a change of scene
+necessitates and completes the transition from the romantic to the
+realistic; for how can a picture of our own environment, which any one
+can verify, avoid being more or less photographic? In one sense
+it is a continuation of the historic novel, which has only to put
+off its archaic or literary costume to appear as a presentation of
+social history brought up to date; the method of minute description,
+the portrayal of manners, are the same, with the drawback that
+the celebrities of the day must be kept off the stage. Any
+eighteenth-century personage might figure, with effect, in <i>The
+Virginians</i>, while Macaulay and Palmerston could hardly have been
+sketched off, however briefly and good-naturedly, in <i>The Newcomes</i>.
+In all essential respects the tone and treatment are unaltered in the
+two stories; although the ironical spirit, restrained in the
+historical novels by a sense of dramatic consistency, is again among
+us having great wrath, as Thackeray surveys the aspect of the London
+world around him. The character of Colonel Newcome, his distinguished
+gallantry, his spotless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> honour, his simplicity and credulity, is
+drawn with truth and tenderness; and some of the lesser folk are
+admirable for their kindliness and unselfishness. But what a society
+is this in which the Colonel is landed upon his return from India! He
+calls, with his son, at his brother's house in Bryanston Square:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"It's my father," said Clive to the "menial" who opened the door;
+"my aunt will see Colonel Newcome."</p>
+
+<p>'"Missis not at home," said the man. "Missis is gone in the
+carriage. Not at this door. Take them things down the area steps,
+young man," bawls out the domestic to a pastry-cook's boy ... and
+John struggles back, closing the door on the astonished Colonel.'</p></div>
+
+<p>An astonishment that most Londoners of his time would have assuredly
+shared; unless, indeed, the West-end doorstep has gained wonderfully
+by the scrubbing of sixty years. On the relations between masters and
+servants Thackeray was never more severe than in this book; he is
+irritated by the marching in of the household brigade to family
+prayers, and he declares that we 'know no more of that race which
+inhabits the basement floor, than of the men and brethren of
+Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send missionaries'&mdash;a monstrous
+imputation. He constantly resumes the moralising attitude; and his
+pungent persiflage is poured out, as if from an apocalyptic vial, upon
+worldliness and fashionable insolence. Sir Barnes Newcome's divorce
+from the unhappy Lady Clara furnishes a text for sad and solemn
+anathema upon the mercenary marriages in Hanover Square, where 'St.
+George of England may behold virgin after virgin offered up to the
+devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away,
+just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to
+come to the rescue.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> We would by no means withhold from the modern
+satirist of manners the privilege of using forcibly figurative
+language or of putting a lash to his whip. Yet if his novels are, as
+we have suggested, to be regarded as historical, in the sense of
+recording impressions drawn from life for the benefit of posterity,
+such passages as those just quoted from Thackeray raise the general
+question whether documentary evidence of this kind as to the state of
+society at a given period is as valuable and trustworthy as it has
+usually been reckoned to be. He has himself declared that 'upon the
+morals and national manners, works of satire afford a world of light
+that one would in vain look for in regular books of history'&mdash;that
+<i>Pickwick</i>, <i>Roderick Random</i>, and <i>Tom Jones</i>, 'give us a better idea
+of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any
+pompous or authentic histories.' Whether Fielding and Smollett's
+contemporaries would have endorsed this opinion is the real question;
+for on such a point the judgment of Thackeray, who lived a century
+after them, cannot be conclusive. It is probable that to an Englishman
+of that day the novels of these two authors appeared to be
+extraordinary caricatures of actual society, in town or country.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the story is excellently conducted, and each actor
+performs with consummate skill his part or hers; for in none of his
+works has Thackeray given higher proof of that dramatic power which
+brings out situations, leads on to the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>, and points the
+moral of the story, by a skilful manipulation of various incidents and
+a remarkably numerous variety of characters. There, is one chapter
+(ix. of vol. <span class="smcap">II.</span>), headed 'Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy,'
+where he carries on the plot entirely by a light and sparkling
+dialogue which may be compared to some of A. de Musset's wittiest
+<i>Proverbes</i>. It is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> book that could only have been composed by a
+first-class artist in the maturity of his powers; and for that very
+reason we must regret that it is steeped in bitterness; while
+Thackeray's rooted hostility to mothers-in-law misguides him into the
+&aelig;sthetic error of admitting a virago to scold frantically almost over
+the colonel's death-bed. The unvarying meanness and selfishness of
+Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for
+whereas in the delineation of his amiable and high-principled
+characters Thackeray is careful to shade off their bright qualities by
+a mixture of natural weakness, these ill-favoured portraits stand out
+in the full glare of unredeemed insolence and low cunning.</p>
+
+<p>In his last novel, broken off half-way by his death, Thackeray went
+back once more to that eighteenth century, which, as he says in one of
+his letters, 'occupied him to the exclusion almost of the nineteenth,'
+and to the method of weaving fiction out of historical materials. We
+have already remarked upon his practice of opening with a kind of
+family history, which explains the antecedent connections,
+relationship, and pedigree of the persons who are coming upon the
+stage, and marks out the background of his story. In <i>Denis Duval</i> he
+carries this preamble through two chapters, and arranges all the
+pieces on his board so carefully that an inattentive reader might lose
+his way among the preliminary details. One sees with what pleasure he
+has studied his favourite period in France and England, and how he
+enjoyed constructing, like Defoe, a fictitious autobiography that
+reads like a picturesque and genuine memoir of the times. Having thus
+laid out his plan, and prepared his <i>mise en sc&egrave;ne</i>, he begins his
+third chapter with an animated entry of his actors, who thenceforward
+play their parts in a succession of incidents and adventures, that are
+all adjusted and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> fitted in to the framework of time and place that he
+has taken so much pains to design for them. In this manner he touches
+upon the great events of contemporary history, like the French War, or
+illustrates the state of England by bringing in highwaymen and the
+press-gang; while a minute description of localities lends an air of
+simplicity to the tale of an old man who has (as he says) an
+extraordinarily clear remembrance of his boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>The Notes which appeared in the <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, June 1864, as an
+epilogue to the last lines written by Thackeray, when the story
+stopped abruptly, throw curious light on the methods of gathering his
+material and preparing his work. Just as he visited the Blenheim
+battlefield, when he was engaged upon <i>Esmond</i>, so he went down to
+Romney Marsh, where Denis Duval was born and bred, surveyed Rye and
+Winchelsea as if he were drawing plans of those towns, and collected
+local traditions of the coast and the country, of the smugglers, the
+Huguenot settlements, and the old war time of 1778-82. The <i>Annual
+Register</i> and the <i>Gentleman's Magazine</i> furnished him with suggestive
+incidents and circumstantial reports which he expanded with admirable
+fertility of imagination; so that by combining what he saw with what
+he read he could lift the curtain and light up again an obscure corner
+of the Kentish coast, and the doings of the queer folk who lived on it
+a century before he went there. That he never finished this novel is
+much to be lamented, for Denis had just become a midshipman on board
+the <i>Serapis</i>, and we learn from these 'Notes' that he was to take
+part in the great fight which ended in the capture of that ship by
+Paul Jones, after the most bloody and desperate duel in the long and
+glorious record of the British Navy. Captain Pearson, who commanded
+the <i>Serapis</i>, reported his defeat to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> Admiralty in a letter of
+which 'Mr. Thackeray seems to have thought much,' and, indeed, it is
+precisely the sort of document&mdash;quiet, formal, with a masculine
+contempt for adjectives (there is not one in the whole letter)&mdash;which
+denotes a character after Thackeray's own heart.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'We dropt alongside of each other, head and stern, when, the fluke
+of our spare anchor hooking his quarter, we became so close, fore
+and aft, that the muzzles of our guns touched each other's sides.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Here we have the style which Thackeray loved; and 'tis pity that we
+have so narrowly missed the picture of a fierce naval battle by an
+artist who could describe strenuous action in steady phrase, and who
+knew that the hard-fighting commander is usually a cool, resolute,
+resourceful man, for whom it is a matter of plain duty to fight his
+ship till he is fairly beaten, and to report the result briefly,
+whatever it may be, to his superiors. One can observe the mellowing
+influence upon Thackeray of the atmosphere of past times and the
+afterglow of heroic deeds; for in <i>Denis Duval</i> there is no trace of
+the scorching satire which pursues us in <i>The Newcomes</i>; nor does he
+once pause to moralise, or to enlarge upon the innumerable hypocrisies
+of modern society. It is questionable, indeed, whether this fine
+fragment binds up well in a volume with the <i>Roundabout Papers</i>, which
+bring the author back into the light of common day, and to the
+trivialities of ordinary society.</p>
+
+<p>It has not been thought necessary, in this biographical edition, to
+issue the several volumes in the order of the dates at which they were
+written; nor has the attempt been made to preserve some serial
+continuity of their style or subject. The arrangement, moreover,
+serves to accentuate unnecessarily the undeniable imparity of
+Thackeray's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> different books; for <i>Punch</i> and the <i>Sketch Books</i> are
+interposed between <i>Barry Lyndon</i> and <i>Esmond</i>; while even the wild
+and wicked Lyndon hardly deserved to be handcuffed in the same volume
+with Fitzboodle, whom in the body he would have crushed like an
+insect. Yet the classification of Thackeray's novels might be easily
+made, for <i>Barry Lyndon</i>, <i>Esmond</i>, <i>The Virginians</i>, and <i>Denis
+Duval</i> fall together in one homogeneous group, having a strong family
+resemblance in tone and treatment, and following generally the
+chronological succession of the periods with which they are concerned.
+If to Esmond is awarded the precedence that is due to him not by
+seniority, but by importance, we have the wars of the eighteenth
+century between England and France from Marlborough's campaigns down
+to Rodney's great naval victory of 1783, in which Duval was destined
+to take part. These works represent Thackeray's very considerable
+contribution to the Historic School of English novelists; and we may
+count them also a valuable commentary upon English history, for
+without doubt every luminous illustration of past times and personages
+acts as a powerful stimulant to the national mind, by exciting a
+keener interest in the nation's story and a clearer appreciation of
+its reality. Chateaubriand has affirmed that Walter Scott's romances
+produced a revolution in the art of writing histories, that no greater
+master of the art of historical divination has ever lived, and that
+his profound insight into the medi&aelig;val world, its names, the true
+relation between different classes, its political and social aspects,
+originated a new and brilliant historical method which superseded the
+dim and limited views of scholarly erudition. For Thackeray we make no
+such extensive or extravagant claims; but it may be said that the
+dramatic conception of history in his novels and lectures was of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+great service to his readers and hearers by the vivid impressions
+which they conveyed of the life, character, and feelings of their
+forefathers, of their failings, virtues, and memorable achievements.
+Some material objections may be taken to the system of teaching by
+graphic pictures in Thackeray, as in Carlyle's <i>French Revolution</i>,
+and in both cases the philosophy leaves much to be desired, for the
+writer's own idiosyncrasy colours all his work. Yet when we remember
+how few are the readers to whom the accurate Dryasdust, with his
+careful research and well attested facts, brings any lasting
+enlightenment, we may well believe that very many owe their distinct
+ideas of the state of England and its people during the last century
+to Thackeray's genius for carefully studied autobiographical fiction.</p>
+
+<p>To the four historical novels mentioned above let us add three novels
+of nineteenth-century manners&mdash;<i>Vanity Fair</i>, <i>Pendennis</i>, <i>The
+Newcomes</i>&mdash;and we have seven books (one incomplete) upon which
+Thackeray's name and fame survive, and will be handed down to
+posterity. The list is by no means long if it be compared with the
+outturn of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton, or of his foremost contemporary
+Dickens; and Stevenson, who resembles him in the subdued realistic
+style of narrating a perilous fight or adventure, has left us a larger
+bequest. But they are amply sufficient to build up for him a lasting
+monument in English literature; and their very paucity may serve as a
+warning against the prevailing sin of copious and indiscriminate
+productiveness, by which so many second-rate novelists of the present
+day exhaust their powers and drown a respectable reputation in a flood
+of writing, which sinks in quality in proportion to the rise in
+quantity.</p>
+
+<p>How far the character and personal experiences of an author are
+revealed or disguised in his writings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> is a question which has often
+been discussed. Bulwer once endeavoured, in a whimsical essay, to
+prove that men of letters are the only people whose characters are
+really ascertainable, because you may know them intimately by their
+works; but herein he merely touched upon the general truth or truism
+that society at large judges every man only by his public
+performances, and does not trouble itself at all about anything else.
+In the category of those who display in their writings their tastes
+and prejudices, their feelings and the special bent of their mind, we
+may certainly place Thackeray, who was a moralist and a satirist, very
+sensitive to the ills and follies of humanity, and impressionable in
+the highest degree. For such a man it was impossible to refrain from
+giving his opinions, his praise or his blame, in all that he wrote
+upon everything that interested him; and in portraying the society
+which surrounded him, he inevitably portrayed himself. He displayed as
+much as any writer the general complexion of his intellectual
+propensities and sympathies; and we can even trace in him the
+existence of some of the minor human frailties which he was most apt
+to condemn, an unconscious tendency which is not altogether uncommon.
+But he is essentially a high-minded man of letters, acutely sensitive
+to absurdities, impatient of meanness, of affectation, and of
+ignominious admiration of trivial things; a resolute representative of
+the independent literary spirit, with a strong desire to see things as
+they are, and with the gift of describing them truthfully. He
+repudiated 'the absurd outcry about neglected men of genius'; and in a
+letter quoted by Mrs. Ritchie he writes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty
+years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time,
+please God, never lost my own respect.'</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p><p>His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States,
+where he was lecturing&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the
+friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure
+independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I
+choke on the instant'&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p>having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the
+<i>American Notes</i>.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, he was not free from the defects of his qualities,
+mental and artistic, from the propensity to set points of character in
+violent relief, or from the somewhat unfair generalisation which grows
+out of the habit of drawing types and distributing colours for
+satirical effect.</p>
+
+<p>In regard to his religion, it appears to have been of the
+rationalistic eighteenth-century order in which moral ideas are
+entirely dominant, to the exclusion of the deeply spiritual modes of
+thought; and we may say of him, as of Carlyle, that his philosophy was
+more practical than profound. The subjoined quotation is from a letter
+to his daughter:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'What is right must always be right, before it was practised as
+well as after. And if such and such a commandment delivered by
+Moses was wrong, depend upon it, it was not delivered by God, and
+the whole question of complete inspiration goes at once. And the
+misfortune of dogmatic belief is that, the first principle granted
+that the book called the Bible is written under the direct
+dictation of God&mdash;for instance, that the Catholic Church is under
+the direct dictation of God, and solely communicates with Him&mdash;that
+Quashimaboo is the directly appointed priest of God, and so
+forth&mdash;pain, cruelty, persecution, separation of dear relatives,
+follow as a matter of course.... Smith's truth being established in
+Smith's mind as the Divine one, persecution follows as a matter of
+course&mdash;martyrs have roasted over all Europe, over all God's world,
+upon this dogma. To<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> my mind Scripture only means a writing, and
+Bible means a book.... Every one of us in every part, book,
+circumstance of life, sees a different meaning and moral, and so it
+must be about religion. But we can all love each other and say "Our
+Father."'</p></div>
+
+<p>This is true, stout-hearted, individualistic liberty of believing&mdash;an
+excellent thing and wholesome, though it by no means covers the whole
+ground, or meets all difficulties. The logical consequence is a strong
+distaste for theology, and no very high opinion of the priesthood,
+wherein we may probably find the root of Thackeray's proclivity,
+already mentioned, toward unmerited sarcasm upon the clergy. In the
+Introduction to <i>Pendennis</i> is a letter written from Spa, in which he
+says, 'They have got a Sunday service here in an extinct
+gambling-house, and a clerical professor to perform, whom you have to
+pay just like any other showman who comes.' It does not seem to have
+occurred to Thackeray that the turning of a gambling-house into a
+place of prayer is no bad thing of itself, or that you have no more
+right to expect your religious services to be done for you in a
+foreign land without payment than your newspapers or novels.</p>
+
+<p>But these are blemishes or eccentricities which are only worth notice
+in a character of exceptional interest and a writer of great
+originality. Thackeray's work had a distinct influence on the light
+literature of his generation, and possibly also on its manners, for it
+is quite conceivable that one reason why his descriptions of snobbery
+and shams appear to us now overdrawn, may be that his trenchant blows
+at social idols did materially discredit the worship of them. His
+literary style had the usual following of imitators who caught his
+superficial form and missed the substance, as, for example, in the
+habit which arose of talking with warm-hearted familiarity of great
+eighteenth-century<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy
+enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with
+Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in <i>Pyramus and
+Thisbe</i>, 'you can do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.'</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray will always stand in the front rank of the very remarkable
+array of novelists who have illustrated the Victorian era; and this
+new edition is a fresh proof that his reputation is undiminished, and
+will long endure.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with
+Biographical Introductions by his daughter</i>, Anne Ritchie. In 13
+volumes. London, 1898.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, October 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Now Lady Ritchie.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>For the last one hundred and fifty years India has been to Englishmen
+an ever-widening field of incessant activity, military, commercial,
+and administrative. They have been occupied, during a temporary
+sojourn in that country, in acquiring and developing a great dominion.
+No situation more unfavourable to the development of imaginative
+literature could be found than that of a few thousand Europeans
+isolated, far from home, among millions of Asiatics entirely different
+from them in race, manners, and language. Their hands have been always
+full of business, they have been absorbed in the affairs of war and
+government, they have been cut off from the culture which is essential
+to the growth of art and letters, they have had little time for
+studying the antique and alien civilisation of the country. It seldom
+happens that the men who play a part in historical events, or who
+witness the sombre realities of war and serious politics, where
+kingdoms and lives are at stake, have either leisure or inclination
+for that picturesque side of things which lies at the source of most
+poetry and romance. And thus it has naturally come to pass that while
+Englishmen in India have produced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> histories full of matter, though
+often deficient in composition, and have also written much upon
+Oriental antiquities, laws, social institutions, and economy, they
+have done little in the department of novels.</p>
+
+<p>That a good novel should have been produced in India was, therefore,
+until very recent times improbable; that it should have been
+successful in England was still less to be expected. For the modern
+reader will have nothing to do with a story full of outlandish scenes
+and characters; he must be told what he thinks he knows; he must be
+able to realise the points and the probabilities of a plot and of its
+personages; he wants a tale that falls more or less within his
+ordinary experience, or that tallies with his preconceived notions.
+Accordingly, any close description of native Indian manners or people
+is apt to lose interest in proportion as it is exact; its value as a
+painting of life is usually discernible only by those who know the
+country. The popular traditional East was long, and indeed still is,
+that which has been for generations fixed in the imagination of
+Western folk by the <i>Arabian Nights</i>, by the legends of Crusaders, and
+by pictorial editions of the Old Testament. It is seen in the Oriental
+landscape and figures presented by Walter Scott in <i>The Talisman</i>,
+which every one, at least in youth, has read; whereas <i>The Surgeon's
+Daughter</i>, where the scene is laid in India, is hardly read at all. Of
+course there are other reasons why the former book is much more liked
+than the latter; yet it was certainly not bad local colouring or
+unreality of detail that damaged <i>The Surgeon's Daughter</i>, for Scott
+knew quite as much about Mysore and Haidar Ali as he did about Syria
+in the thirteenth century and Saladin. But in <i>The Talisman</i> he was on
+the well-trodden ground of medi&aelig;val English history and legend;
+whereas the readers of his Indian tale<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> found themselves wandering in
+the fresh but then almost unknown field of India in the eighteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>These are the serious obstacles which have discouraged Anglo-Indians
+from attempting the pure historical romance. They knew the country too
+well for concocting stories after the fashion of Thomas Moore's <i>Lalla
+Rookh</i>, with gallant chieftains and beauteous maidens who have nothing
+Oriental about them except a few set Eastern phrases, turbans,
+daggers, and jewellery. They could not use the true local colour, the
+real temper and talk of the Indian East, without great risk of
+becoming neither intelligible nor interesting to the English public at
+large. It may be said that before our own day there has been only one
+author who has successfully overcome these difficulties&mdash;Meadows
+Taylor, who wrote a romantic novel, now almost forgotten, founded upon
+the history of Western India in the seventeenth century. The period
+was skilfully chosen, for it is the time of the Moghul emperor
+Aurungzeb's long war against the Mohammedan kingdoms in the Dekhan,
+and of the Maratha insurrection under Sivaji, which eventually ruined
+the Moghul empire. The daring murder of a Mohammedan governor by
+Sivaji, the Maratha hero who freed his countrymen from an alien yoke,
+is still kept in patriotic remembrance throughout Western India. Nor
+is there anything in such a natural sentiment that need give umbrage
+to Englishmen; although the liberality of a recent English governor of
+Bombay who headed a list of subscriptions for public commemoration of
+the deed, betrayed a somewhat simple-minded unreadiness to appreciate
+the significance of historical analogies.</p>
+
+<p>Meadows Taylor has treated this subject with very creditable success.
+He had lived long in that part of the country; he knew the localities;
+he was unusually <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>conversant with the manners and feelings of the
+people, and he had the luck to be among them before the old and rough
+state of society, with its lawless and turbulent elements, had
+disappeared. He had himself been in the service of a native prince
+whose governing methods were no better, in some respects worse, than
+those of the seventeenth century; and his possession of good natural
+literary faculty made up in him a rare combination of qualifications
+for venturing upon an Indian romance. The result has been that <i>Tara</i>
+has not fallen into complete oblivion, though one may doubt whether it
+would now be thought generally readable. Although written so late as
+1863, the influence of Walter Scott's medi&aelig;val romanticism shows
+itself in the chivalrous language of the nobles, and in a somewhat
+formal drawing of the leading figures, as if they were taken from a
+model. But all the details are truly executed. There are sketches of
+scenery, of interiors, of dress, arms, and manners, which are clearly
+the outcome of direct observation; and the incidents have a genuine
+flavour. The misfortune is that these are just the sterling qualities
+which require special knowledge and insight for their appreciation,
+and are therefore missed by the great majority of readers. The
+following picture of a party of Maratha horsemen returning from a raid
+may be taken as an example:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'There might have been twenty-five to thirty men, from the youth
+unbearded to the grizzled trooper, whose swarthy, sunburnt face,
+large whiskers and moustaches touched with grey, wiry frame, and
+easy lounging seat in saddle, as he balanced his heavy Maratha
+spear across his shoulder, showed the years of service he had done.
+There was no richness of costume among the party; the dresses were
+worn and weather stained, and of motley character. Some wore
+thickly quilted white doublets, strong enough to turn a sword-cut,
+or light shirts of chain-mail, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> a piece of the mail or of
+twisted wire folded into their turbans; and a few wore steel
+morions with turbans tied round them, and steel gauntlets inlaid
+with gold and silver in delicate arabesque patterns. All were now
+soiled by the wet and mud of the day. It was clear that this party
+had ridden far; and the horses, from their drooping crests and
+sluggish action, were evidently weary. Four of the men had been
+wounded in some skirmish, for they sat their horses with
+difficulty, and the bandages about them were covered with blood.'</p></div>
+
+<p>No Indian novel, indeed, has been written which displays greater power
+of picturesque description, or better acquaintance with the
+distinctive varieties of castes, race, and habits, that make up the
+composite population of India. It was for a long time the only Indian
+novel in which the <i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> are entirely native.</p>
+
+<p>Although <i>Tara</i> is unique as an Indian romance, there is another story
+which renders Indian life and manners with equal fidelity. <i>Pandurang
+Hari</i> was written by a member of the Indian Civil Service, and first
+published in 1826, though it reappeared in 1874, with a preface by Sir
+Bartle Frere. Here again the scene is in Western India, among the
+Marathas; but the period belongs to the first quarter of this century.
+It purports to be a free translation from a manuscript given to the
+author by a Hindu who had in his youth served with the Maratha armies,
+and latterly fell in with the Pindaree hordes, from whom he heard
+tales of their plundering raids. He eventually joins a band of
+robbers, and leads a wandering, adventurous life in the hills and
+jungles of the Dekhan, until the general pacification of the country
+by the British permits or obliges him to settle down quietly. The
+merit of the book consists entirely in its precise and valuable
+delineation of the condition of the country when it was harried by the
+freebooting Maratha<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> companies, and in certain glimpses which are
+given of Anglo-Indian life in those rough days; for the writer, unlike
+Meadows Taylor, has no literary power, and can only relate accurately
+what he has seen or has carefully gathered from authentic sources.</p>
+
+<p>We have thus only two novels worth mention which have preserved true
+pictures of the times before all the wild irregularity of Indian
+circumstance and rulership had been flattened down under the
+irresistible pressure of English law and order. The historical romance
+has shared the general decline and fall of that school in Europe;
+while as for the exact reproduction of stories dealing entirely with
+native life, very few Anglo-Indians would now attempt it, for such a
+book would find very scanty favour in England. Nearly all recent
+Indian novels have for their subject, not native, but Anglo-Indian
+society; the heroes and heroines, in war or love, in peril or pastime,
+are English; the natives take the minor or accessory part in the
+drama, and give the prevailing colour, tragical or comical, to the
+background. One of the best and earliest novels of this class is
+<i>Oakfield</i>, written about 1853 by William Arnold, a son of Dr. Arnold
+of Rugby, who, after spending some years in one of the East India
+Company's sepoy regiments, obtained a civil appointment in India, and
+died at Gibraltar on his way homeward. Some pathetic lines in the
+short poem by Matthew Arnold called <i>A Southern Night</i> commemorate his
+untimely death. The book is remarkable for the autobiographic
+description, too austere and censorious, of life in Indian
+cantonments, or during an Indian campaign, before the great Mutiny
+swept away the old sepoy army of Bengal. It represents the impression
+made upon a young Oxonian of high culture and serious religious
+feeling by the unmannerly and sometimes vicious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> dissipation of the
+officers' mess in an ill-managed regiment stationed up the country.</p>
+
+<p>Oakfield, a clergyman's son, carefully bred up in Arnold's school of
+indifference to dogma and strictness in morals, finds himself
+oppressed by the hollow conventionality of religious and social ideas
+at home, and sees no prospect of a higher level in the ordinary
+English professions. He leaves Oxford abruptly for an Indian
+cadetship, and sets out with the hope of finding wider scope for work
+and the earnest pursuit of loftier ideals in India. He is intensely
+disappointed and disgusted at finding himself, on joining his
+regiment, among men who have very slight education and wild manners,
+whose talk is coarse, who gamble, fight duels, dislike the country,
+and care nothing for the people. The aims and methods of the
+Government itself appear to him eminently unsatisfactory, being
+chiefly directed towards such grovelling business as revenue
+collection, superficial order, and public works, with little or no
+concern for the moral elevation of the people. When his friends urge
+him to study for the purpose of rising in the service, civil or
+military, he asks: 'What then? What if the extra allowances have
+really no attraction? I want to know what the life is in which you
+think it good to get on. It seems to me that my object in life must be
+not so much to get an appointment, or to get on in the world, as to
+work, and the only work worth doing in the country is helping to
+civilise it.'</p>
+
+<p>We have here the interesting, though not uncommon, case of a youthful
+enthusiast transported as if by one leap&mdash;for the sea voyage is a
+blank interval&mdash;from England to the Far East, from a sober and
+disciplined home to a loose society, from the centre of ancient peace
+and calm study to a semi-barbarous miscellany of races under an
+elementary kind of government. Ovid's banishment from Rome to the
+shores of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> Euxine, to live among rude Roman centurions and subject
+Scythians, could have been no greater change, though Ovid and Oakfield
+are not comparable otherwise. The sight of a great Hindu fair on the
+river bank at Allahabad, as surveyed from the deck of a steamer,
+strikes him with that ever-recurrent feeling of a great gulf fixed
+between Europeans and natives: 'What an inconceivable separation there
+apparently and actually is between us few English, silently making a
+servant of the Ganges with our steam engines and paddles, and these
+Asiatics, with shouts and screams worshipping the same river!'</p>
+
+<p>He meets a cool and capable civilian, who expounds to him the
+practical side of all these questions and administrative problems; and
+he makes a few military friends of the higher stamp, who stand by him
+in his refusal to fight a duel and in the court-martial which follows.
+Then comes the second Sikh war, with a vivid description, evidently by
+an eye-witness, of an officer's share in the hard-fought action at
+Chillianwalla, and of the other sharp contests in that eventful
+campaign. It is an excellent example of the skilful interweaving of
+real incident with the texture of fiction, showing the clear-cut lines
+and colour of actual experience gained in the fiercest battle ever won
+by the English in India:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The cavalry and horse-artillery dashed forward, and soon the
+rolling of wheels and clanking of sabres were lost in one continual
+roar from above a hundred pieces of artillery. On every side the
+shot crashed through the jungle; branches of trees were shattered
+and torn from their stems; rolling horses and falling men gave an
+early character to this fearful evening.... The 3rd Division
+advanced, with what fatal results to the gallant 24th Regiment is
+well known.... Either by an injudicious order, or, as stated in the
+official despatch, by mistaking a chance movement of their
+commandant for a signal, the 24th broke into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> a double at a
+distance from the guns far too great for a charge; they arrived
+breathless and exhausted at the guns, where a terrific and hitherto
+concealed fire of musketry awaited them. The native corps came up
+and well sustained their European comrades; but both were
+repulsed&mdash;not until twenty-one English officers, twelve sergeants,
+and 450 rank and file of the 24th had been killed or wounded....
+Oakfield counted the bodies of nine officers lying dead in as many
+square yards; there lay the dead bodies of the two Pennycuicks side
+by side; those of the men almost touched each other.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The transfer of Oakfield to a civil appointment in no way diminishes
+his dissatisfaction at the spectacle of a Government that has no
+apparent ethical programme and misconceives its true mission:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The Indian Government is perhaps the best, the most perfect, nay,
+perhaps the only specimen of pure professing secularism that the
+civilised world has ever seen since the Christian era, and
+sometimes, when our eyes are open to see things as they are, such a
+secularism does appear a most monstrous phenomenon to be stalking
+through God's world.... When the spirit of philosophy, poetry, and
+godliness shall move across the world, when the philosophical
+reformer shall come here as Governor-General, then the spirit of
+Mammon may tremble for its empire, but not till then.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Yet, notwithstanding the author's solicitude for India's welfare, the
+natives make no figure at all in his story; they are barely mentioned,
+except where Oakfield denounces the unblushing perjury committed daily
+in our courts; and one can see that he does them the very common
+injustice of measuring their conduct by an ideal standard of morality.
+Anglo-Indian officials leave their country at an early age, in almost
+total ignorance of the darker side of English life, as seen in a
+police court or wherever the passions and interests of men come into
+sharp conflict. But this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> is just the side of Indian life that is
+brought prominently before them, at first, as junior magistrates and
+revenue officers, who sometimes do not care to look into any other
+aspects of it; and in consequence they stand aghast at the exhibition
+of vice and false-swearing. A London magistrate transferred to Lucknow
+or Lahore would find much less reason for astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>The same criticism applies, for similar reasons, to Oakfield's
+unmeasured censure of the tone and habits prevalent among officers of
+the old Indian army; he probably knew nothing of regimental life in
+the English army sixty years ago, and therefore supposed the
+delinquencies of his own mess to be monstrous. It must be admitted,
+however, that morals and manners were loose and low in a bad sepoy
+regiment before the Mutiny. No two men could have differed more widely
+in antecedents or character than William Arnold and John Lang, whose
+novel, <i>The Wetherbys; or, A Few Chapters of Indian Experience</i>, was
+written a few years earlier than <i>Oakfield</i>. It deals with precisely
+the same scenes and society, at the same period, in the form of an
+Indian officer's autobiography. The book is clever, amusing with a
+touch of vulgarity, yet undoubtedly composed with a complete knowledge
+of its subject; for Lang was the editor of a Meerut newspaper, who
+took his full share of Anglo-Indian revelry, and who knew the Indian
+army thoroughly. Whereas in <i>Oakfield</i> the tone rises often to
+righteous indignation, in <i>The Wetherbys</i> it falls to a strain of
+caustic humour, and in the modern reader's mouth it might leave an
+unpleasant taste; yet the verisimilitude of the narrative would be
+questioned by no competent judge. As Oakfield fought at Chillianwalla,
+so Wetherby fights in the almost equally desperate battle of
+Ferozeshah, where the English narrowly escaped a great disaster; and
+here, again,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> we have a momentary ray of vivid light thrown upon the
+battlefield by a writer who had associated with eye-witnesses, though
+he was not one of them. It is difficult to give an extract from this
+part of the tale, because Lang's power lies not in description, but in
+characteristic conversation; so we may be content, for the purpose of
+bringing out the contrast between two very diverse styles, with a
+specimen of his comic talent, as exhibited in the injunctions laid
+upon her husband by the vulgar half-caste wife of a poor henpecked
+officer just starting for the campaign:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Well, then,' she continued, 'keep out of danger. If your troop
+wishes to charge into a safe place, let 'em. <i>You</i> don't want
+brevet rank, or any of that nonsense, I hope. Make as much bluster
+and row as you like, but for Heaven's sake keep out of harm's
+way.... You need not write to me every day, but every third or
+fourth day, for the postage is serious. If you should happen to
+kill any Sikhs, search them, and pull down their back hair; that's
+where they carry their money and jewels and valuables. A sergeant
+of the 3rd Dragoons, like a good husband, has sent his wife down a
+lot of gold mohurs and some precious stones that he found tied up
+in the hair of a Sikh officer. And, by the by, you may as well
+leave me your watch. You can always learn the time of day from
+somebody; and if anything happened to you, it would be sold by the
+Committee of Adjustment, and would fetch a mere nothing.'</p></div>
+
+<p>This is unquestionably a grotesque caricature; yet the ladies of mixed
+parentage were quaint and singular persons in the India of sixty years
+ago. As Arnold could hardly have failed to read <i>The Wetherbys</i> before
+he wrote <i>Oakfield</i>, the book may have suggested to him the plan of
+going over the same ground upon a higher plane of thought and
+treatment. The two books stand as records of a state of society that
+has now entirely passed away, and from their perusal we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> may conclude
+that, among the many radical changes wrought upon India by the
+sweeping cyclone of the great Mutiny, not the least of them has been a
+thorough reformation of the native army.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn to the Indian novels written after the Mutiny we are in
+the clearer and lighter atmosphere of the contemporary social novel.
+We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the
+contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the
+old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions,
+serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments
+under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed
+Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and
+military, and sufficiently decorous, except where hill-stations foster
+flirting and the ordinary dissipation of any garrison town. It is,
+however, still a characteristic of the post-Mutiny stories that they
+find very little room for natives; the secret of successfully
+interpreting Indian life and ideas to the English public in this form
+still awaits discovery. One of the best and most popular of the new
+school was the late Sir George Chesney, whose <i>Battle of Dorking</i> was
+a stroke of genius, and who utilised his Indian experiences with very
+considerable literary skill, weaving his projects of army reform into
+a lively tale of everyday society abroad and at home. The scene of <i>A
+True Reformer</i> opens at Simla, under Lord Mayo's vice-royalty, names
+and places being very thinly disguised; the hero marries a pretty
+girl, and starts homeward on furlough, thereby giving the writer his
+opportunity for bringing in a description of a railway journey across
+India to Bombay in the scorching heat of May:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'And now the day goes wearily on, marked only by the change of the
+sun's shadow, the rising of the day-wind and its accompaniment of
+dust, and the ever-increasing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>heat. The country is everywhere the
+same&mdash;a perfectly flat, desert-looking plain of reddish brown hue,
+with here and there a village, its walls of the same colour. It
+looks a desert, because there are no signs of crops, which were
+reaped two months ago, and no hedgerows, but here and there an
+acacia tree. Not a traveller is stirring on the road, not a soul to
+be seen in the fields, but an occasional stunted bullock is
+standing in such shade as their trees afford. At about every ten
+miles a station is reached, each exactly like the previous one and
+the next following.... Gradually the sun went down, the wind and
+dust subsided, and another stifling night succeeded, with uneasy
+slumbers, broken by the ever-recurring hubbub of the stoppages.'</p></div>
+
+<p>On reaching home Captain West learns, like the elder Wetherby in
+Lang's story, that an uncle has died leaving him a good income; so he
+enters Parliament, and the remainder of his autobiography is entirely
+occupied by an account of his efforts in the cause of army reform,
+which eventually succeed when he has overcome the scruples and
+hesitation of the prime minister&mdash;Mr. Merriman, a transparent
+pseudonym. The author's plan of endeavouring to interest his readers
+in professional and technical questions is very creditably carried
+out, for the book is throughout readable; and it also shows that on
+the subject of military organisation Chesney was often in advance of
+his time; but the scene changes from India to England so very early in
+the narrative that this novel takes a place on our list more by reason
+of its Anglo-Indian authorship than of its connection with India.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Dilemma</i>, on the other hand, Chesney gives us a story with
+characters and catastrophes drawn entirely from the sepoy mutiny. The
+main interest centres round the defence of a house in some up-country
+station that is besieged by the mutineers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> and for such a purpose the
+writer could supply himself, at discretion, from the abundant
+repertory of adventures and the variety of personal conduct&mdash;heroic,
+humorous, or otherwise astonishing&mdash;which had been provided by actual
+and recent events. We have here, indeed, a dramatic version of real
+history; and, since the original of an intensely tragic situation must
+always transcend a literary adaptation of it, the fiction necessarily
+suffers by comparison with the fact. Yet the novel contends not
+unsuccessfully with this disadvantage, and in the lapse of years, as
+the real scenes and piercing emotions stirred up by a bloody struggle
+fade into distance, the value of Chesney's work may increase. For it
+preserves a true picture, drawn at first hand, of the time, the
+circumstances, and the behaviour of an isolated group of English folk
+who, while living in a state of profound peace and apparent security,
+found themselves suddenly obliged to fight desperately for their lives
+against an enemy from whom no quarter, even for women and children,
+could be expected in case of defeat.</p>
+
+<p>We may now take up a book of a very different kind, the production,
+not of an Anglo-Indian amateur, but of an eminent English novelist who
+has lived, though not long, in India&mdash;Mr. Marion Crawford. Here we are
+back again in the region of romance, for, although the story opens at
+Simla in Lord Lytton's reign and during the second Afghan War, Mr.
+Isaacs, the hero (whose name gives the book its title) is outwardly a
+Persian dealer in precious gems, but esoterically an adept in the
+mysteries of what has been called occult Buddhism. This queer science,
+as professed by a certain Madame Blavatsky, had much vogue in Northern
+India about 1879, particularly at Simla. To sceptics it appeared to be
+an adroit mixture of charlatanry and mere juggling tricks, with some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+elementary knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the true Indian
+Yogi, who seeks to attain supernatural powers by rigid asceticism, and
+who has really some insight into secret mental phenomena, being in
+this line of discovery the forerunner of the English Psychical
+Society.</p>
+
+<p>The part played in this story by Mr. Isaacs, who is not in all
+respects an imaginary personage, might remind one of Disraeli's
+Sidonia. He is an enigmatic character, versed in the philosophy of the
+East and the West, who excels on horseback and in tiger shooting, yet
+can discourse mystically and can bring the mysterious influences at
+his command to bear upon critical situations. The novel has thus two
+sides: we have the usual sketch of Anglo-Indian society&mdash;the soldiers,
+the civilians, the charming young English girl whom Mr. Isaacs
+fascinates. But a writer of Mr. Crawford's high repute is bound to put
+some depth and originality into his Indian tale, and so we have the
+Pandit Ram Lal, who is somehow also a Buddhist, and who is Mr.
+Isaacs's colleague whenever occult Buddhism is to give warning or
+timely succour. The chief exploit occurs in a wondrous expedition to
+rescue and carry away into Tibet the Afghan Amir, Sher Ali, who had
+just then actually fled from Kabul before the advance of an English
+army; and it must be confessed that so fantastic an adventure sounds
+rather startling in connection with a bit of authentic contemporary
+history.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, whether we assume that the object of a novel is to
+illustrate history, or to present a faithful reflection of life and
+manners, or to render strenuous action dramatically yet not
+improbably&mdash;by whatever standard we measure Mr. Crawford's book, it
+cannot be awarded a high place on the list of Indian fiction. But we
+have run over this list so rapidly, touching only upon typical
+examples, that we are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> now among the latest writers of the present
+day; and we may take <i>Helen Treveryan</i> (1892) as a very favourable
+specimen of their productions. Comparing it with earlier novels, we
+may remark, in the first place, that there is no great variety of plot
+or treatment, Anglo-Indian society being everywhere, and at most
+times, very much the same, except so far as closer intercourse with
+Europe softens down its roughness, materially and morally, increases
+the feminine element, and assimilates its outer form to the English
+model. <i>Helen Treveryan</i>, whose author is a very distinguished member
+of the Indian Civil Service, is, like all other novels of the kind,
+the narrative of the adventures, in love and war, of a young English
+military officer in India. The characters are evidently drawn from
+life; the main incidents belong to very recent Indian history; the
+description of society in an up-country station, with which the
+movement of the drama begins, is an exact and humorous photograph. A
+tiger hunt is done better, with more knowledge of the business, than a
+similar episode in Mr. Crawford's novel; and the passionate love
+between Guy Langley and Helen Treveryan is well painted in bright
+colours to intensify the gloom and pathos of Langley's death in
+battle.</p>
+
+<p>As Chesney went to the sepoy mutiny for his scenes of tragedy and
+heroism, so Sir Mortimer Durand (we believe that the original
+pseudonym has been dropped) takes them from the second Afghan War,
+having been at Kabul with General Roberts in the midst of hard
+fighting, where he first placed his foot on the ladder which has led
+him upward to high places and unusual distinction. In the chapters
+describing the march upon Kabul, its occupation, the rising of the
+tribes, and their attack upon the British army beleaguered in the
+Sherpur entrenchments, we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> have simply a memoir of actual events,
+written with truth, spirit, and with the pictorial skill of an artist
+who understands the value and proportion of romantic details. The
+English commanders, the Afghan sirdars, and several other well-known
+folk are mentioned by name; the skirmishes and perilous situations are
+described just as they really occurred. No book could better serve the
+purpose of a home-keeping Englishman who might desire to see as in a
+moving photograph what was going on in the British camp before Kabul
+during the perilous winter of 1879-80, to hear the camp-talk, and to
+realise the nature and methods of Afghan fighting.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'He turned to the westward, and as he did so there was a flicker in
+the darkness, where the rugged top of the Asmai Hill could just be
+made out. For an instant there was perfect silence; then, as the
+flame caught and flared, there rose from the men around him a low,
+involuntary "A&mdash;h," such as one may sometimes hear at Lord's when a
+dangerous wicket goes down. Then in the distance two musket shots
+rang out, and after them a few more; but along the cantonment wall
+all was silent; men stood with beating hearts awaiting the
+onslaught. For some minutes the suspense lasted, and then suddenly
+burst from the darkness a wild storm of yells, "Allah, Allah,
+Allah," and fifty thousand Afghans came with a rush at the wall,
+shouting and firing. The cantonment was surrounded by a broad
+continuous ring of rifle-flashes, and over the parapet and over the
+trenches the bullets began to stream.'</p></div>
+
+<p>But the subjoined extract, which gives Langley's death, is a better
+example of the book's general style&mdash;cool, circumstantial, abhorrent
+of glitter or exaggeration, leaving a clear impression of things
+actually witnessed and done, a brief glimpse of one of the incidents
+that remain stamped on the brain of those who saw it, but are
+otherwise forgotten in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> war-time, after a day or two's regret for the
+lost comrade.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'They were all weary, and marched carelessly forward in silence.
+The night was closing fast, and a little fine snow was falling....
+There was a sudden flash in the darkness to the right, a shot, and
+then a scattering volley. Guy Langley threw up his arms with a cry,
+and as the startled horse swerved across the road he fell with a
+dull thud on the snow. There was a moment of confusion, but the
+Sikhs, though careless, were good soldiers, and two or three of
+them dashed towards the low wall from which the shots had come.
+They were just in time to see four men running across a bit of
+broken ground towards a deep water-cut, fringed with poplars. The
+horsemen were very quick after them, being light men on hardy
+horses; and one of the four Afghans, a big man in a dirty sheepskin
+coat, lost his head, and ran down under a bit of wall; the other
+three crossed the water-cut. The horsemen saw the position at once,
+and rode after the man on their side of the trench. They were up to
+him in a minute, and Atar Singh made a lunge at him with his lance;
+but the Afghan avoided it, and swinging up his heavy knife cut the
+boy across the hand. Before he could turn to run again a second
+horseman was on him, and with a grim "Hyun&mdash;Would you?" drove the
+lance through his chest.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The dialogue is occasionally used to bring out contending views in
+regard to Indian politics, as might be expected from a writer who has
+thoroughly studied them. At a Simla dinner-party the conversation
+turns upon the question whether, in the event of a collision between
+the armed forces of Russia and England on the Indian frontier, the
+Anglo-Indian army could hold its own successfully against such a
+serious enemy. We have on one side the man of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> dismal forebodings, so
+well known in India, and against him the hopeful, resolute officer,
+who lays just stress on England's superior position, with all the
+strength and resources of India and the British empire at her back.
+One supremely important point in the discussion is, by consent of both
+speakers, the probable behaviour in such a crisis of the native Indian
+army; and we may here express our agreement with the view that our
+best native regiments would prove themselves faithful soldiers and
+formidable antagonists to the Russians. As is well said in the course
+of the argument, the Sikhs and Goorkhas faced us well when they fought
+us, 'and with English officers to lead them, why should they not face
+the Russians?... I believe the natives will be true to us if we are
+true to ourselves; some few are actively disloyal, but not the mass of
+them. If we begin to falter they will go, of course; but if we show
+them we mean fighting they will fight too.' This is the true political
+creed for Englishmen in India, outside of which there is no salvation,
+but the reverse.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps to be regretted that so capable a writer upon Indian
+subjects has given us nothing of native life and character beyond a
+few silhouettes; and after Guy Langley's death, when the scene is
+transferred entirely to England, the story's interest decidedly flags.
+Yet we may fairly assign a high place in the series of Indian novels
+to <i>Helen Treveryan</i>, not only for its literary merits, but also for
+the historical value of the chapters which preserve the day by day
+experience of one who took his share in the culminating dangers and
+difficulties of an arduous campaign.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Steel's book, <i>On the Face of the Waters</i>, has been so widely
+read and reviewed since it appeared, so lately as 1897, that another
+criticism of it may appear stale and superfluous; yet to omit
+mentioning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> in this article the most popular of recent Indian novels
+would be impossible. Here, at any rate, is a book which is not open to
+the remark that the Anglo-Indian novelist usually leaves the natives
+in the background, or admits them only as supernumeraries. For Mrs.
+Steel's canvas is crowded with Indian figures; their talk, their
+distinctive peculiarities of character and costume, their parts in the
+great tragedy which is taken as the ground-plan of her story, are so
+abundantly described as occasionally to bewilder the inexperienced
+reader. The scene of action is the Sepoy mutiny at Meerut and the
+siege of Delhi, and while the Indian <i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> are mainly
+types of different classes and castes&mdash;except where, like the King of
+Delhi, they are historical&mdash;the English army leaders act and speak
+under their own names, as in Durand's book, being of course modelled
+upon the ample personal knowledge of them still obtainable from their
+surviving contemporaries in India.</p>
+
+<p>The book, in fact, attempts, as is frankly stated in its preface, 'to
+be at once a story and a history.' And we observe that Mrs. Steel
+tells us, as if it were a credit and a recommendation to her work,
+that she 'has not allowed fiction to interfere with fact in the
+slightest degree.'</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The reader may rest assured that every incident bearing in the
+remotest degree on the Indian Mutiny, or on the part which real men
+took in it, is scrupulously exact, even to the date, the hour, the
+scene, the weather. Nor have I allowed the actual actors in the
+great tragedy to say a word regarding it which is not to be found
+in the accounts of eye-witnesses, or in their own writings.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Is such minute matter-of-fact copying a virtue in the novelist? or is
+it not rather a defect arising out of a misunderstanding of the
+principles of his art?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> In our opinion the business of the novelist,
+even when he chooses an historical subject, is not to reproduce as
+many exact details as he can pick out of memoirs, official reports,
+and histories, but, on the contrary, to avoid making up his story out
+of a string of extracts and personal reminiscences, or at any rate to
+use his skill rather for disguising than for disclosing the precise
+verbal accuracy of his borrowed material. What would be thought of a
+naval romance that adopted, word for word, the authentic account of
+Nelson's death, or of a military novel that seasoned a full and
+particular account of Waterloo with a few imaginary characters and
+incidents? Any one who has observed how two fine writers, Thackeray
+and Stendhal, have brought that famous battle into the plot of their
+masterpieces (<i>Vanity Fair</i> and <i>La Chartreuse de Parme</i>), will have
+noticed that they carefully avoid the crude and undisguised employment
+of detail, either in words or incidents; they allow fiction to
+interfere very constantly with fact in all petty matters of this sort;
+their art consists, not in historical accuracy, but in verisimilitude;
+they discard authentic phrases and incidents; they do not aim at
+precision, but at dramatic probabilities. But Mrs. Steel does not only
+draw too copiously, for a novelist, upon history; she also undertakes
+to pass authoritative judgments upon disputable questions of fact and
+situation, with which fiction, we submit, has no concern. She very
+plainly intimates that nothing but culpable inaction and want of
+energy prevented instant pursuit by a force from Meerut of the
+mutineers who made a forced march upon Delhi on the night of May 10,
+and whose arrival produced the insurrection in that city.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Delhi lay,' she says, 'but thirty miles distant on a broad white
+road, and there were horses galore and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> men ready to ride them&mdash;men
+like Captain Rosser, of the Carabineers, who pleaded for a
+squadron, a field battery, a troop, or a gun&mdash;anything with which
+to dash down the road and cut off that retreat to Delhi.'</p></div>
+
+<p>To argue the point in this review would be to fall into the very error
+on which we desire to lay stress, of attempting to deal with serious
+history in a light, literary way. We shall therefore be content with
+reminding our readers that Lord Roberts, who is perhaps the very best
+living authority on the subject, has come to the conclusion, after a
+careful survey of the circumstances, that the refusal of the Meerut
+commanders to pursue the mutineers was justifiable.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Mrs. Steel's performance is better than her principles. The
+unquestionable success of <i>On the Face of the Waters</i> is in no way due
+to her scrupulous exactitude in particulars, for if this had been the
+book's chief feature it would have failed. She has a clear and
+spirited style; she knows enough of India to be able to give a fine
+natural colour to the stirring scenes of the Sepoy mutiny, and to
+execute good character-drawing of the natives, as they are to be
+studied among the various classes in a great city. And whenever her
+good genius takes her off the beaten road of recorded fact her
+narrative shows considerable imaginative vigour. The massacres at
+Meerut and Delhi, the wild tumult, terror, and agony, are
+energetically described; and her picture of the confusion inside Delhi
+during the siege is admirably worked up, remembering that she wrote
+forty years after the event, at a time when the people and even the
+places had very greatly changed. The storming of the breach at the
+Kashmir gate by the forlorn hope that led the English columns is
+dexterously brought into an animated narrative; and although that
+story has been much better told in Lord Roberts's autobiography, we
+need not look too austerely on the crowd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> of readers who find history
+more attractive under a thin and embroidered veil of fiction.</p>
+
+<p>A still more recent novel, entitled <i>Bijli the Dancer</i> (1898), should
+be mentioned here, not only for its intrinsic merits, but also because
+the author has boldly faced the problem of constructing a story out of
+the materials available from purely native society, the stock themes
+and characters of Anglo-India being entirely discarded. Bijli is a
+professional dancing girl, whose grace and accomplishments so
+fascinate a great Mohammedan landholder of North India, that he
+persuades her to abandon her profession and to abide with him as his
+mistress. This arrangement is correctly treated in the book as quite
+consistent with the maintenance of due respect and consideration for
+the Nawab's lawful wife, who occupies separate apartments, and,
+according to Mohammedan ideas in that rank of society, has no
+reasonable ground for complaint. Yet Bijli, though she has every
+comfort, and is deeply attached to her lord, grows restless in her
+luxurious solitude; she pines for the excitement and triumphs of
+singing and dancing before an assembly. So, in the Nawab's absence,
+she takes professional disguise, and sings with a lute in the harem
+before his wife. To those who would like to see a Mohammedan lady of
+high rank in full dress, the following description of costume may be
+commended:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'She was dressed and adorned with scrupulous care; her eyebrows
+trimmed of every stray hair that might deform the beauty-arch; the
+lids pencilled with lampblack; the palms of her hands and the soles
+of her feet stained with henna; not one stray lock encroached on
+the straight parting of her glossy hair.</p>
+
+<p>'She wore gold-embroidered trousers of purple satin, loose below
+the knee and full over the ankles, and fastened round her waist by
+a gold cord with jewelled tassels. A black crape bodice adorned
+with spangles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> and gold edging confined her full bosom, and an open
+vest of grey gauze with long, tight sleeves hung loosely over her
+waistband. Upon the back of her head was thrown a veiling-sheet of
+the fine muslin known as the dew of Dacca. Her feet and hands, arms
+and wrists and neck, were adorned with numerous rings, jewels, and
+chains, and from her nose was hung a ring of gold wire, on which
+was strung a ruby between two grey pearls.'</p></div>
+
+<p>But Bijli's intrusion into the harem is a grave breach of etiquette;
+she is detected, and told to be gone, though the lady bears her no
+malice. The incident brings home to her a sense of degradation; she
+asks the Nawab to marry her, and her discontent is increased by his
+refusal, until at last she escapes secretly from his house. The Nawab
+follows, and finds her in a hut on the bank of a flooded river which
+has stopped her flight; but after a really pathetic interview she
+returns to her free life&mdash;and 'thus ended the romance of Bijli the
+Dancer.'</p>
+
+<p>In this short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style
+and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up
+European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we
+have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and
+the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with
+romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often
+exercise over natives of the highest rank is a well-known feature of
+Indian society; and although the dancer is always a courtesan, yet to
+invest her with a capacity for tender and honourable affection is by
+no means to overstep the limits of probability. We have noticed this
+book because it proves that the study of native manners, and
+sympathetic insight into their feelings and character, still survive
+among Anglo-Indians, albeit officials; and because it stands out in
+quiet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> relief among tales of fierce wars and savage mutiny; it neither
+chronicles the heroic deeds of Englishmen, nor does it devote even a
+single page to the loves, sorrows, or comic misadventures that break
+the monotony of a British cantonment.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Chronicles of Dustypore</i>, by H. S. Cunningham, takes us back
+again from the sombre, half-veiled interior of an Indian household,
+into the fierce light which beats upon English society at some station
+in the sun-dried plains of the Punjab. We have here a sketch, half
+satirical, half in earnest, of official work and ways, with one or two
+personages that can be easily identified from among the provincial
+notabilities of twenty years ago. The book, which had considerable
+success in its time, will still provide interest and amusement for
+those who enjoy an exceedingly clever delineation of familiar scenes
+and characters; and it is in the main as true and lively a picture of
+Anglo-Indian life as when it was first written. Here is the summer
+landscape of the Sandy Tracts, a region just annexed to British
+administration after the usual skirmish with, and discomfiture of, the
+native ruler:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Vast plains, a dead level but for an occasional clump of palms or
+the dome of some despoiled and crumbling tomb, stretched away on
+every side and ended in a hazy, quivering horizon that spoke of
+infinite heat. Over these ranged herds of cattle and goats,
+browsing on no one could see what; or bewildered buffaloes would
+lie, panting and contented, in some muddy pool, with little but
+horns, eyes, and nostrils exposed above the surface. Little
+ill-begotten stunted plants worked hard to live and grow and to
+weather the roaring fierce winds. The crows sat gasping,
+open-beaked, as if protesting against having been born into so
+sulphurous an existence. Here and there a well, with its huge
+lumbering wheel and patient bullocks, went creaking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> and groaning
+night and day, as if earth grudged the tiny rivulet coming so
+toilfully from her dry breast, and gave it up with sighs of pain.
+The sky was cloudless, pitiless, brazen. The sun rose into it
+without a single fleck of vapour to mitigate its fierceness ... all
+day it shone and glistened and blazed, until the very earth seemed
+to crack with heat and the mere thought of it was pain.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Such is the environment in which many English officers live and labour
+for years; and this is the side of Anglo-Indian existence that is
+unknown to, and consequently unappreciated by, the rapid tourist, who
+runs by railway from one town to another during the bright cold winter
+months, is delighted with the climate and the country, takes note of
+the deficiencies or peculiarities of Anglo-Indians, and has a very
+short memory for their hospitality. The narrative carries us, as a
+matter of course, to a Himalayan Elysium, with its balls, picnics, and
+its flirtations, among which the leading lady of the piece is drawn to
+the brink of indiscretion, but steps happily back again into the
+secure haven of domestic felicity. A good deal of excellent light
+comedy and sparkling dialogue will always maintain for this novel a
+creditable place upon the Indian list; and as an indirect illustration
+of the social wall that separates ordinary English folk from the
+population which surrounds them, it is complete, since we have here a
+story plotted out upon the stage of a great Indian province which
+contains absolutely no mention of the natives beyond occasional
+necessary reference to the servants.</p>
+
+<p>For a strong contrast to <i>Dustypore</i>, both in subject and style of
+treatment, we may take a story which merits notice, even though it be
+hardly long enough to be ranked among Indian novels. <i>The Bond of
+Blood</i>, by R. E. Forrest (1896), draws, like <i>Bijli the Dancer</i>, its
+incidents and their environment exclusively<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> from Indian life; and the
+book may be placed high in this class of difficult work, which few
+have ventured to attempt, and where success has been very rare. It is
+a study of peculiarly local manners, that may be also called
+contemporary; for though the period belongs to the early years of this
+century, yet the sure drawing from life of a skilful hand may still be
+verified by those readers who actually know the customs and feelings
+at the present day of the Rajp&ucirc;t clans, among whom primitive ideas and
+institutions have been less obliterated in the independent States than
+in any other region of India. The descriptive and personal sketches
+attest the writer's gift of close observation; there is good
+workmanship in all the details; his sentences hit the mark and are
+never overcharged or superfluous. The tale is of a dissipated Rajp&ucirc;t
+chief, to whom a moneylender has lent a large sum upon a bond which
+has been endorsed by the sign-manual of the family Bh&acirc;t, or hereditary
+bard, herald, and genealogist&mdash;an office of great repute and
+importance in every noble Rajp&ucirc;t house. Debauchees and cunning
+gamblers empty the chief's purse; the moneylender, an honest man
+enough in his way, is obliged to press him for the sum due; until at
+last the bewildered chief is persuaded by one of the gamblers to
+declare flatly that he will not pay at all, whereupon the creditor
+falls back upon the surety. Now the Bh&acirc;t has pledged upon the bond not
+his property but his life, according to an ancient and authentic
+custom among Rajp&ucirc;t folk, as formerly throughout India, whereby a man
+who has no other means of enforcing a just claim against a powerful
+debtor has always the resource of bringing down upon him a fearful
+curse by committing suicide before his door. The Rajp&ucirc;t chief pretends
+that the bond is illegal and void, being founded upon an obsolete
+custom disallowed by the English rulers; but in truth he has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> brought
+himself to believe that the blood penalty will not really be paid, and
+he is struck with horror when the Bh&acirc;t, after formal and public
+warning, stabs his own mother in the chief's presence, whereupon the
+curse falls and clings to the family. We may add that the substitution
+of the Bh&acirc;t's mother for himself as an expiatory victim is in
+accordance with accepted precedents on such occasions, while it makes
+room for a pathetic situation, and greatly enhances the dramatic
+interest of the closing scene. Here we have the antique Oriental
+version of the story in Shakespeare's <i>Merchant of Venice</i>, where
+Shylock takes the same kind of security from Antonio, upon whose
+person he subsequently demands execution of his bond of blood; nor
+does the law refuse it to him. But the Hindu custom is so far milder
+than the Venetian code that the Rajp&ucirc;t Shylock could not have rejected
+a tender of full payment in cash. Mr. Forrest's tale might be turned
+into an effective stage-tragedy if the main incident were not too
+shockingly improbable for Europeans, although to an Indian audience it
+would be credible enough. The final scene of the mother's death is
+stamped on the reader's imagination by the writer's power of giving
+intense significance not only to the speech but to slight movements of
+the actors, so that the mental picture becomes almost objective, while
+the strained expectation of the crowd makes itself felt by the force
+of the words.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"Will you redeem the bond?" asks the herald once more.</p>
+
+<p>'"Say 'No,'" exclaims Takht Singh.</p>
+
+<p>'"No," shouts Hurdeo Singh (the chief).</p>
+
+<p>'"Then blood must be shed at your door, and the life forfeit paid
+at your threshold, so that the curse may alight upon you and your
+house."</p>
+
+<p>'He draws the dagger from its sheath. He had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> not laid his hand
+upon its handle in the same manner that he would have laid it on
+the hilt of his sword, but the reverse way to that; he puts the
+palm of his hand under it and not over it, so he could best use it
+in the way he intended to use it&mdash;so could he best strike the blow
+he meant to strike.</p>
+
+<p>'"Begone! Begone!" shouts Hurdeo Singh, waving him away with his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>'The people around stand fixed as statues, eyes straining, necks
+craning. The herald stretches his left arm behind his mother, and
+she, throwing open her <i>chudder</i>, leans back against it....</p>
+
+<p>'The money-lender had given a sudden cry, stretched out his hand,
+uttered some words.</p>
+
+<p>'When Hurdeo Singh had beheld the herald raise his right arm, his
+own had gone up with it, and from his mouth had come the cry,
+"Don't! Don't."</p>
+
+<p>'But it was too late. The herald had raised his arm, turned round
+his head, and plunged the sharp stiletto into his mother's breast.'</p></div>
+
+<p>It would be scarcely possible in an article that ranges over the light
+literature of Anglo-India to omit mentioning the name of Mr. Rudyard
+Kipling, who is the most prominent and by far the most popular of
+Anglo-Indian authors. Yet our reference to his writings must be very
+brief, since most of them lie beyond the scope of our present subject;
+for although Mr. Kipling's short stories are famous, and he is a
+consummate artist in black and white, yet in the complete edition of
+his volumes up to date there is, in fact, but one full-sized Indian
+novel, and for this he is only responsible in part. Nor, assuming that
+the Indian chapters of the <i>Naulakha</i><a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> may be ascribed to him,
+would it be fair criticism to treat them as good samples of his work,
+or as illustrating his distinctive genius. The attempt in this story
+to bring together West and East, and to strike bold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> contrasts by
+setting down a Yankee fresh from Colorado before the palace gate of a
+Maharaja in the sands of western Rajputana, is too daring a venture;
+and the plot's development, though here and there are some touches of
+true vision and some vigorous passages, labours under the weight of
+its extravagant improbability. The American's restless energy, brought
+face to face with Oriental immobility, expresses itself in the
+following way:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'It made him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and
+lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up
+and stirring by rights&mdash;trading, organising, inventing, building
+new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying
+new railroads, going in for fresh enterprises, and keeping things
+humming.</p>
+
+<p>'"They've got resources enough," he said. "It isn't as if they had
+the excuse that the country's poor. It's a good country. Move the
+population of a lively Colorado town to Rhatore, set up a good
+local paper, organise a board of trade, and let the world know what
+is here, and we'd have a boom in six months that would shake the
+empire. But what's the use? They're dead. They're mummies. They're
+wooden images. There isn't enough real, old-fashioned, downright
+rustle and razzle-dazzle and 'git up and git' in Gokral Seetaram to
+run a milk-cart."'</p></div>
+
+<p>Such indeed might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found
+himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole
+piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring
+sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and
+flounders heavily, like a cockney among medi&aelig;val crusaders. This must
+be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own
+short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the
+contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> rapid, unerring delineation of characters that stand out in clear
+relief, yet blend with and act upon each other when they encounter.
+But Mr. Kipling's volumes would require a separate article to
+themselves, so that we will merely take this occasion of recording our
+wish that he may some day turn his unique faculty of painting real
+Indian pictures toward the composition of a novel which shall <i>not</i> be
+about Anglo-Indian society (for the thin soil of that field has
+already been over-harrowed), but shall give a true and lively
+rendering of the thoughts which strike an imaginative Englishman when
+he surveys the whole moving landscape of our Indian empire, watches
+the course of actual events, and tries to forecast its probable
+destiny.</p>
+
+<p>It has been manifestly impossible in this brief article to do more
+than touch upon a few books that may illustrate the prominent
+characteristics, and the general place in light literature, of Indian
+novels. This must explain why we have omitted several other works, of
+which <i>Transgression</i><a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> is the latest. In this tale we have a sketch
+of life on the North-West Frontier at the present day, with some
+well-known incidents of the Afridi War of 1897-98 introduced, and so
+coloured from the writer's own point of view as to convey, under a
+thin varnish of fiction, some sharp and sarcastic criticism on the
+management of affairs, the politics of the Government, and the
+personal behaviour of certain officials, who can be at once
+identified. Although the book is not without interest as a true
+account of hazardous and stirring frontier duties, we are bound to
+repeat our warning that this abuse of the novel for controversial
+purposes is not only unfair, but profoundly inartistic. No literary
+success, but failure and the confusion of styles, lies that way.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p><p>What, then, are the conclusions which we may draw from this brief
+survey of the more prominent and typical Indian novels? To the
+repertory of English fiction, which is perhaps the largest and most
+varied that any national literature contains, they have undoubtedly
+made a not unworthy contribution; for we may agree that fiction has
+some, if not the highest, value when it produces an animated
+representation of life and manners, even upon a limited and distant
+field. In the present instance the narrow range of plot and character
+that may be observed in the pure Anglo-Indian novel reflects the
+uniformity of a society which consists almost entirely, outside the
+Presidency capitals on the sea-coast, of civil and military
+officials&mdash;a society that is also upon one level of class and of age,
+for among the English in India there are neither old men nor boys and
+girls; the men and women are in the prime of life, with a number of
+small children. This age-limit lops off from both ends of human
+existence a certain proportion of the characters that are available
+for filling up the canvas of the social novelist at home. And it is in
+truth a peculiar feature, not only of Anglo-Indian society, but of the
+Anglo-Indian administration, because the enforced retirement of almost
+every officer after the age of fifty-five years greatly diminishes the
+influence of weighty and mature experience exercised by the senior men
+in the services and government of most countries. In regard to the
+equality of class it may be observed that here also the lack of
+variety produces a similar dearth of materials; we miss the
+picturesque contrasts of rich and poor, of townsfolk and country folk,
+of the diverse groups which make up a European population. The 'short
+and simple annals of the poor' cannot be woven into the Indian
+tapestry which records higher and broader scenes; the peasantry, for
+example,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> whose quaint figures and idioms are so useful in English
+novels, do not come into the Anglo-Indian tale. They cannot be blended
+in fiction with the foreign element because they are wholly apart in
+reality. In short, the whole company that play upon the exclusively
+Anglo-Indian stage belong to one grade of society, and the hero is
+invariably a military officer.</p>
+
+<p>The most popular of Anglo-Indian novels are probably those which deal
+in exact reproduction of ordinary incidents and conversation, related
+in a sprightly and humorous style. This accords with the taste of
+present-day readers, many of whom take up a book only for the
+momentary amusement that it gives them, and are well content with
+interminable dialogues that do little more than echo, with a certain
+spice of epigram and smart repartee, the commonplaces interchanged
+among clever people at a country house or in a London drawing-room.
+Nevertheless, we believe that Anglo-Indian fiction is seen at its best
+in the novel of action, since war and love-making must still, as
+formerly, rule the whole kingdom of romance; since as emotional forces
+they are the same in every climate and country. Each successive
+campaign in India, from the first Afghan War to the latest expedition
+across the Afridi frontier, has furnished the Anglo-Indian writer with
+a new series of striking incidents that can be used for his heroic
+deeds and dire catastrophes, for new landscapes and figures, all of
+them bearing the very form and stamp of impressive reality. If he is
+artist enough to avoid abusing these advantages, if he is neither an
+extravagant colourist nor a mere copyist or compiler, he has this
+fresh field to himself, he can give us a stirring narrative of
+frontier adventures, he can sketch in the aspect of a country or the
+distinctive qualities of a people that have preserved many of the
+features which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> in Europe have now vanished into the dim realms of
+early romance. His danger lies, as we have seen from some examples
+already quoted, in the temptation to make too much use of the
+attractive materials that are readily found to hand in military
+records or in such a real tragedy as the Sepoy mutiny, so that the
+novel is liable to become little more than authentic history related
+in a glowing, exuberant style of writing and portraiture.</p>
+
+<p>In short, the Indian novel belongs to the objective outdoor class; it
+is full of open air and activity, and the introspective psychological
+vein is almost entirely wanting. There are, indeed, passages which
+indicate that peculiar sense of the correlation, so to speak, of the
+environment with the moods and feelings of men, the influence upon the
+human mind of nature&mdash;a sense which has inspired some of our finest
+poetry, and which is so well rendered by the best Russian novelists,
+by Tourgu&eacute;neff and by Tolstoi. One work of Tolstoi's, <i>Les Cosaques</i>,
+might be especially recommended for study to the Anglo-Indian novelist
+of the future, as an example of the true impress that can be made upon
+a reader's mind by the literary art, when it succeeds in giving vivid
+interest to the picture of a solitary officer's life upon a dull and
+distant frontier.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> (1) <i>Tara.</i> By Meadows Taylor. London, 1898. (2)
+<i>Oakfield.</i> By William D. Arnold. London, 1853. (3) <i>The Wetherbys,
+Father and Son.</i> By John Lang. London, ?1850. (4) <i>Mr. Isaacs.</i> By F.
+Marion Crawford. London, 1898. (5) <i>Helen Treveryan.</i> By John Roy.
+London, 1892. (6) <i>On the Face of the Waters.</i> By Mrs. Steel. London,
+1896. (7) <i>Bijli the Dancer.</i> By James Blythe Patton. London, 1898.
+(8) <i>The Chronicles of Dustypore.</i> By H. S. Cunningham. London, 1875.
+And other Novels.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, October 1899.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'&alpha;&lambda;&lambda; &chi;&rho;&eta; &tau;&omicron;&nu; &kappa;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&theta;&alpha;&pi;&tau;&epsilon;&iota;&nu;, &omicron;&sigma;
+&kappa;&epsilon; &theta;&alpha;&nu;&eta;&sigma;&iota;,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nu;&eta;&lambda;&epsilon;&alpha; &theta;&upsilon;&mu;&omicron;&nu; &epsilon;&chi;&omicron;&nu;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;, &epsilon;&pi;
+&eta;&mu;&alpha;&tau;&iota; &omicron;&alpha;&kappa;&rho;&upsilon;&sigma;&alpha;&nu;&tau;&sigma;.'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(<i>Iliad</i>, xix. 228, 229.)<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Naulakha</i>, by Rudyard Kipling and W. Balestier. London,
+1892.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>Transgression</i>, by S. S. Thorburn. London, 1899.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>HEROIC POETRY<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>I have taken the words 'Heroic Poetry' to signify the poetry of
+strenuous action, the art of describing in vigorous animating verse
+those scenes and emergent situations in which the energies of mankind
+are strung up to the higher tones, and where the emotions are brought
+into full play by the exhibition of valour, endurance, and suffering.
+It seems to me remarkable that modern English poetry, with all its
+splendid variety, should have produced very little in this particular
+form; because no one can deny that the latter-day story of the English
+has been full of enterprise and perilous adventure, providing ample
+material to the artist who knows how to use it. Nor can it be said
+that there is any lack of demand for this sort of poetry, and
+consequently little inducement to supply it. On the contrary, any one
+can see that hero worship is as strong as ever, that any striking
+incident, or example of personal valour, or exploit of war, brings out
+the verse-writer, and that his efforts, if only very moderately
+successful, are sure to win him great popularity.</p>
+
+<p>But it must be admitted that most of these efforts fail rather
+lamentably, insomuch that at the present day we may seem to be losing
+one of the finest forms of a noble art. From this point of view there
+may be some advantage in looking back to the heroic poetry of earlier
+ages, and in endeavouring to mark briefly and imperfectly its
+distinctive qualities, to recall the conditions and circumstances in
+which it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> flourished, and possibly to hazard some suggestions as to
+the causes of its decline.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know any recent book which throws more light upon this
+subject than Professor Ker's book on <i>Epic and Romance</i>, published in
+1897. It is, to my mind, most valuable as an exposition of the right
+nature and methods of heroic narrative, in poetry and in prose. The
+author has the rare gift of insight into the ways and feelings of
+primitive folk, and the critical faculty of discerning the
+characteristics of a style or a period, showing how men, who knew what
+to say and the right manner of saying it, have shaped the true form of
+heroic poetry. We can see that its elementary principles, the methods
+of composition in verse and prose, are essentially the same in all
+times and countries, in the <i>Iliad</i>, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the
+old Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon poems, and to some extent in the French
+Chansons de Geste; they might be used to-morrow for a heroic subject
+by any one gifted with the requisite skill, imagination, and the eye
+for impressive realities.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Few nations have attained, at the close of their heroic age, to a
+form of poetical art in which men are represented freely in action
+and conversation. The labour and meditation of all the world has
+not discovered, for the purposes of narrative, any essential
+modification of the procedure of Homer.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Professor Ker's essays are a brilliant and scholarly contribution to
+the external history of poetical forms: and it would be great
+presumption in me to attempt a review of his work. But it is so
+eminently suggestive, and to my mind so valuable as a study for verse
+writers of the present day, that I have ventured to place this book in
+the foreground of an attempt to sketch rapidly some clear outline of
+the conditions and the essential qualities of heroic poetry, which is
+too commonly regarded as an easy off-hand kind of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> versification,
+largely made up of dash, glowing words, and warlike clatter; although
+in reality nothing is more rare or difficult than success in it.</p>
+
+<p>We may say, then, that the first heroic poets and tale-tellers were
+those who related the deeds and sufferings, the life and death of the
+mighty men of earlier times; and that their verse was the embodiment
+of the living traditions of men and manners. They were bards and
+chroniclers who lived close enough to the age of which they wrote to
+understand and keep touch with it&mdash;an age when battles and adventures
+were ordinary incidents in the annals of a tribe, a city, or a
+country&mdash;when valour, skill at arms, and a stout heart were supremely
+important, being almost the only virtues that led to high distinction
+and a great career. Heroic poetry of the higher kind could not exist
+in a period of mere barbarism, for among barbarous folk there is no
+art of poetic form. It could not have arisen before the people were so
+far civilised as to have among them artistic singers or story-tellers
+who gave fine and forcible expression to the acts they celebrated or
+the scenes they described.</p>
+
+<p>The old heroic poets were neither too near to the time of which they
+sung or wrote, nor too far from it; and this gave them another special
+advantage, they had a good audience. The song, or the story, must have
+often been recited before listeners to whom the whole subject was more
+or less familiar, who knew the facts and ways of war, the true aspect
+and usages of a rough and perilous existence. They were too well
+acquainted, at any rate, with such things to be captivated by vague
+imaginative descriptions of fighting and refined chivalrous methods of
+dealing with a mortal foe, such as are found in the later Romance.
+Among primitive folk there would have been no taste for fantastic,
+allegoric, and extravagant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> though highly poetical accounts of
+valorous exploits by noble knights, with their tournaments and their
+adventures with giants, dwarfs, or enchanters. The tradition was of a
+community encompassed by dangers for men and for women, where life and
+goods depended on strength and sagacity. And so the original hero was
+strictly a practical soldier, a man who knew his business, who had
+very few troublesome scruples; he was a man of war from his youth up,
+struggling with arduous circumstance; and he usually came at last, as
+in actual life, to a bloody though glorious end. For the experience of
+a rough age is that the drama mostly finishes tragically, not happily
+as in a modern novel. There was always a strain of Romance in the
+heroic tale, and softer feelings were never quite absent: but all this
+was subordinate to facts: whereas Romance seems to have prevailed and
+grown popular in proportion as the writer stood further away from the
+actualities, trusted to imagination rather than to authentic
+experience, preferred literary ornament to probability, and indeed
+took his readers as far away as possible from scenes or situations
+which they could recognise or verify.</p>
+
+<p>It may thus be suggested that the essential quality of Heroic poetry
+is this&mdash;that it gives a true picture of the time. Not that the poet
+was an eye-witness of what he narrated, or even that he lived in the
+same generation with the men or the events that he celebrated. On the
+contrary, the distance which lends enchantment to the view is needed
+to surround heroes with a golden haze of glorification. But the bard
+did live on the outer edge, so to speak, of the period which he wrote
+about; he was more or less in the same atmosphere; his audience kept
+him very near the truth because they could detect any exaggeration,
+absurdity, or very unlikely incident; just as we should mark and
+reject any particularly foolish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> story of the war that might appear in
+to-morrow's newspaper. They would indeed swallow strange marvels of a
+supernatural kind, the doings of gods and goddesses, and of magicians.
+But I think it will be agreed that in all ages this has been a
+separate matter, because men will believe what is plainly miraculous,
+when they will not accept what is merely improbable. So far as the
+natural world was concerned, the heroic artist worked upon genuine
+material, transmitted orally or by fragmentary records, producing a
+right image of remarkable men and the world in which they lived. It
+was a world, in most cases, of small communities and petty wars, in
+which a good chief or warrior came rapidly to the front, and was
+all-important individually.</p>
+
+<p>The word Hero is one of those Greek words which have been adopted into
+all European languages, because they signify precisely a universal
+idea of the thing. He must be strong and able in battle, for a lost
+fight might mean the death or slavery of all his people. If the hero
+does his living and dying in a noble fashion, the folk trouble
+themselves very moderately about minor questions of religion or
+ethics, and are very moderately scandalised by occasional ferocity.
+Such a man is not to be hampered by ordinary rules; he is like a
+general commanding in the field, who may do anything for the
+preservation of his army, and the consequence is that he is seldom
+expected to moralise. He acknowledges and pays great honour to the
+cardinal virtues of truth-speaking, mutual fidelity, hospitality,
+strict observance of pledges. He is in many ways a religious man;
+though he is apt to break away from the priests when they interfere
+seriously with the business in hand. For the chastity of wives he has
+a high esteem, yet although he and his people are constantly brought
+into trouble about women, he is tolerant of them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> even when their
+behaviour is what might be called regrettable; he treats them in some
+degree as irresponsible beings, on the ground, perhaps, that they are
+the only non-combatants in the world as he knows it, and that this
+gives them special privileges. We can measure the importance of such a
+personage in ancient days, by the noise which a first-class hero made
+in the primitive world. He became literally and figuratively immortal:
+he was regarded as a god, or at least godlike&mdash;the greatest of them
+were actually deified. He was seized upon by fable, myth, miraculous
+legend, and poetry&mdash;his name was handed down for centuries until the
+heroic lineaments were softened down, disfigured, and at last faded
+away in the magical haze of later Romance. But in very rare instances
+he had the good luck to be taken in hand, before it was too late, by
+some man of genius, who knew the temper of heroic times because he
+lived within range of them, and who has preserved for us a story, an
+incident, or a typical character&mdash;not, indeed, an authentic narrative,
+for the true story disappears under the tradition which is built over
+it; nor would such accurate knowledge be of much use to the poet,
+whose business it is only to give us a fine spirited account of what
+might have occurred. For the evidence that an ancient battle was
+really fought we must go to the historian; the poet will tell us how
+it was fought, he stirs the blood and fires the imagination by his
+tale of noble deeds and deaths. His strength rests upon the foundation
+of reality that underlies his artistic construction: he has never let
+go his hold upon sound experience: and the truth is felt in all the
+colour and detail of the picture, though the whole is a work of vivid
+imagination. We cannot verify, obviously, the facts and motives which
+led to the siege of Troy, although Herodotus appears to agree that the
+cause of that war was a Spartan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> woman's abduction, and only examines
+the point whether the Asiatic or the European Greeks were first to
+blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth
+growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the
+rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common
+enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right?
+We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life,
+manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose
+origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous story,
+divine or human, is first planted in fact, not in fancy; just as the
+Chanson de Roland is founded on a real battle in the pass of
+Roncevalles.</p>
+
+<p>Such, therefore, were the conditions and fortunate coincidences which
+produced the finest heroic poetry. You had the popular hero&mdash;the noble
+warrior who knew his business; and you had also the poet or
+story-teller who knew his art, could give you a dramatic picture
+founded upon fact, and could always keep close to reality, without
+crowding his canvas with unnecessary particulars; he gave you the
+ruling motives, actions, and feelings of the age. The excellence of
+the work lay in simplicity and directness of treatment, in a sureness
+of line drawing, in a power of striking the right note, whether of
+praise or sorrow, of glory or grief. There is no staginess or
+far-fetched emotion, or artificial scene-painting: the style strikes
+the right chords of passion or pity, and stamps upon the mind a vivid
+impression of situation and character. Moreover, the heroic poet, as a
+composer, had this advantage in early days, that continual recital
+before an appreciative public must have had the effect of polishing up
+his best verses, and polishing off his bad ones. As the theme was
+always some well-known story or personage, it was possible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> to omit
+details and explanations, and to go straight to the points that
+repetition had proved to be the most effective, so that the criterion
+of excellence must have been immediate popularity with the audience as
+in a play. It may be conjectured also that the metre, in length of
+line and cadence, formed itself to a great degree on the natural
+conditions of oral delivery and listening. For all poetry, I think,
+makes its primary appeal to the ear; and the modern habit of reading
+it seems to me to have thrown this essential test of quality somewhat
+into the background. The arrangement of metre and rhyme may have been
+gradually invented to correspond with and satisfy that natural
+expectation of the recurrence of certain tones and measures which
+always delights primitive men, and of which one may possibly trace
+some symptoms even in animals, as when the snake sways slowly to the
+simple sounds of a snake-charmer's pipe. The order of all modern
+versification (except in blank verse, which is never popular) depends
+on the echoing rhyme, which marks time like the stroke of a bell, and
+is waited for with keen anticipation by the sensitive listener. It is
+strange, to my mind, that such a beautiful creation as the beat of
+tonic sounds at a line's terminal should have been comparatively so
+recent a discovery in European poetry.</p>
+
+<p>That a master of this art must have been very rare is shown by the
+very few pieces of first-class heroic poetry still extant out of the
+immense quantity that must have been attempted in different ages and
+countries. Yet the materials lie strewn around us, awaiting the
+skilful hand; they are to be found wherever a high-spirited warlike
+race is fighting its way upward out of barbarism into some less
+wretched stage of society that may allow breathing time for working
+the precious mines of recent traditions. The state of society
+described in some Icelandic Sagas, for example, with its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> hereditary
+blood feuds and perpetual assassinations, with its code of honour
+making vengeance a pious duty, its tariff of blood money, and its
+council for adjusting civil and criminal wrongs, has a close
+resemblance to everyday life among the free Afghan tribes beyond the
+North-West Frontier of India. But the Saga writers flourished, I
+understand, when this state of things had passed or was passing away;
+while the Afghans are still a rude illiterate folk who have only
+songs, recited by the professional bards. The best collection of these
+popular songs has been made by a Frenchman, the late James
+Darmesteter, who remarks that 'English people in India care little for
+Indian songs'; though one may reply that he has made use of English
+writers and collectors of frontier folklore, and indeed he
+acknowledges his debt to Mr. Thorburn's excellent book on <i>Bannu or
+our Afghan Frontier</i>. However that may be, we have here, in these
+unwritten lays, the stuff out of which is developed, first, the
+established tradition, and, secondly, not only poetry but also the
+beginnings of history, for these lays are the oral records of
+contemporary events&mdash;'c'est le cri m&ecirc;me de l'histoire.' They tell of
+the last Afghan War, and of the most famous border forays made by the
+English lords on the Afghan marches: they preserve the names and deeds
+of English officers and of the leading warriors of the Afghan tribes:
+they tell how Cavagnari 'drank the stirrup-cup of the great journey'
+when the English mission was slaughtered at Kabul in 1879, and how
+General Roberts, his heart shot through with grief, set out in fiery
+speed on his avenging march against the Afghan capital. Here then is
+for the modern historian a rare opportunity of comparing the
+contemporary popular version of events with exact authentic official
+record; and the result ought to aid him in deciding, by analogy, what
+value is to be placed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> on similar material that has been handed down
+in the ancient songs and stories of other countries. He will be
+fortified, I think, in the sound conclusion that all far-sounding
+legend has a solid substratum of fact. As poetry, these songs render
+forcibly the temper and feelings of the people; they illustrate their
+virtues and vices, their worship of courage and devotion to the clan,
+their fanaticism and ferocity. The sense of Afghan honour, in the
+matter of sheltering a guest, is shown in the ballad which relates how
+a son killed his father for violating this law of hospitality. Like
+all popular verse, the Afghan songs have their recurrent phrases and
+familiar commonplaces; yet, says Darmesteter,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'in spite of the limited range of ideas and interests, and a rather
+low ideal, all such defects find their excuse in the passion, the
+simplicity, the direct spontaneous outspeaking, that supreme gift
+which has been lost in our intellectual decadence.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The stirring events of the time have been immediately put into verse;
+the scenes and feelings are struck off in the die of actual
+circumstance; the heated metal takes a clear-cut impression. It is in
+rough songs like these that are to be found the germs of the higher
+heroic poetry. The ballad, the short stories, the favourite anecdotes
+of remarkable men at their exploits, have the luck to fall, later,
+into the hands of a skilful reciter or verse-maker; they are enlarged,
+knit together, and fashioned according to the ideas of the day, with
+an infusion of rhetoric and literary decoration. The heroic ideal, to
+use Professor Ker's words, is thus worked up out of the sayings and
+doings of great men of the fore-time, who stand forth as the type and
+embodiment of the virtues and vices of their age, as it was conceived
+by poets who could handle the popular traditions. And we may guess
+that all anecdotes, words of might, and feats of arms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> that were
+current before and after him, if they were appropriate to the type,
+would cluster round the hero, and be used for bringing his character
+into strong relief. We can even discern this tendency in modern
+society, where a notable personage, like the Duke of Wellington or
+Talleyrand, is credited with any vigorous or caustic saying that suits
+the idea of him, and may be passed on in another generation to the
+account of the next popular favourite. The literary habit of providing
+impressive 'last words' for great men at death's door might be taken
+as another example of the magnetic attraction of types.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the perfect samples of heroic verse, of famous songs and
+stories woven into an epic poem, are to be found in Homer.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a>
+Nowhere, in the whole range of the world's poetry, can we see such
+splendid impersonations of primitive life and character treated
+artistically. Yet the plot is simple enough. Agamemnon, the chief
+commander of the Greek army, has carried off the daughter of a priest
+of Apollo, and flatly refuses to give her back; whereupon the priest
+appeals to the god, who brings the chief to reason by spreading a
+plague in the Grecian camp; and so the girl goes home with apologies.
+But Agamemnon indemnifies himself by seizing a captive damsel
+belonging to Achilles, who, being justly infuriated, will go no more
+to battle, but sits sulkily in his tent, until the Greek army is very
+nearly destroyed, for want of his help, by the Trojans.</p>
+
+<p>Here we have at once a picture of manners not unlike those of the
+Afghan tribes, though very differently treated. The poet is at no
+pains to put on any moral varnish, or to tone down the roughness
+romantically; because he is writing, or reciting, for people of much
+the same way of thinking as his heroes, who are fierce chiefs
+quarrelling over captured women;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> and the whole plot is developed by
+sheer pressure of circumstance and character. Then on the Trojan side
+we have the figure of Hector, the true patriotic hero, who is
+naturally displeased with Paris for the abduction of Helen, which has
+brought a disastrous war upon Troy; yet what is done cannot be undone,
+and his clear duty is to fight for his own people. To Helen herself he
+is gentle and kind; and the religious men only irritate him when they
+interfere in military matters. But although he is far the noblest
+character in the whole poem, he is eventually slain by Achilles, for
+the plain reason that Achilles is the most terrible warrior of both
+armies. It was Hector's fate, which is the poet's way of saying that
+the inexorable logic of facts, as he knows them, must always prevail.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the position of women in Homeric poetry. They are
+mainly irresponsible creatures: how could they be otherwise, when
+everything depends on the sword, and a woman cannot wield it? As the
+equality of sexes implies a high state of civilisation and security,
+so in the old fighting times a woman had to stand aside; yet though
+she could not take part in a battle, there were incessant battles
+about her: the fatal woman, who is the ruin of her country, is
+well-known in all legend and romance, from Helen of Troy to La Cava,
+whose seduction by King Roderick brought the Moors into Spain.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> In
+the <i>Iliad</i> King Priam treats Helen with delicate consideration, as is
+seen in the beautiful passage that describes her sitting by him on the
+walls of Troy, and pointing out to him the leaders of the Greek army
+marshalled in the plain before them. Nor is any more perfect female
+character to be found in poetry than Andromache, Hector's wife,
+high-spirited,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> virtuous, and passionately affectionate. Yet Helen,
+the erring woman, is brought home eventually by Menelaus, and appears
+again in the <i>Odyssey</i> as a highly respected matron, who has had an
+adventure in early life; while Andromache, having seen her husband
+slain and dragged round the walls of Troy behind the chariot of
+Achilles, is carried off a childless widow into dolorous servitude.</p>
+
+<p>Here one may feel the tragic power of an artist who draws life from
+the sombre verities, not as it is seen through the romantic colouring
+of a softer moralising age; he never wastes himself on vain
+lamentations, never suggests that virtue will save you from bitter
+unmerited calamity: he gives the true situation. There is one short
+passage in the <i>Odyssey</i> where the poet, merely by the way, and to
+illustrate something else, lets us have a glimpse of an incident that
+was probably familiar to him and his audience. He wishes to show what
+he means by a burst of grief, and this he does, not by a string of
+epithets, but by a picture.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p>From the historic books of the Old Testament, particularly from the
+books of Samuel and the Kings, one might take some fine specimens of
+the peculiar quality distinguishing the heroic style, in prose that is
+very near poetry. Nothing can be more simple than the narrative, it is
+cool and quiet: there are whole chapters without an unnecessary
+adjective; and yet it is most impressive, both in the drawing of such
+characters as Saul, David, and Joab, who stand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> out dramatically, like
+Homeric heroes, and in the stories of their deeds and death.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Ker's essays contain a masterly and luminous survey of the
+vicissitudes undergone by the songs and legends of Western and
+Northern nations in the course of transmutation from the primitive
+heroic stage into deliberate literary composition. The original
+material never attained the grand epical form; the process was
+interrupted by the advancement of learning, by ecclesiastical
+influences, and by vast social changes.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Even before the people had fairly escaped from barbarism, before
+they had made a fair beginning of civilisation and of reflective
+literature on their own account, they were drawn within the Empire,
+within Christendom.'</p></div>
+
+<p>A similar fate, it may here be noticed, has overtaken, or awaits, the
+heroic songs of the Afghans; for Darmesteter tells us that as the oral
+tradition becomes written it falls into the net of translation and
+paraphrase, it is absorbed into the elegant literature of Persia,
+Arabia, and Hindustan, it becomes theological and romanesque. And
+another dangerous enemy has now appeared in the shape of the
+Anglo-Indian schools which follow and fix the English dominion; for
+the primitive folklore has no more chance against systematic education
+than the wild fighting men have against drilled and disciplined
+soldiers. In Europe the Sagas of Iceland, which lay furthest from the
+civilising influences, had the luck of preserving the true elements of
+heroic narrative; and the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, though it falls
+far short of the epic, has a certain Homeric flavour. The chief is the
+'folces-hyrde,' his people's shepherd; and we have Beowulf, like
+Hector,<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> desiring that after his death a mound may be raised at the
+headland which juts out into the sea, 'that seafaring men may
+afterward call it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> Beowulf's Mound, they who drive from far their
+roaring vessels over the mists of the flood.'<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<p>Let us turn now to the romantic poetry of England, which for some
+centuries ruled all our imaginative literature, and annexed, so to
+speak, almost the whole field of battles, adventures, and energetic
+activity generally. The subjects are much the same: the gallantry of
+men, the beauty, virtues, and frailties of women: but the writers have
+got a loose uncertain grip upon the actualities of life; they wander
+away into fanciful stories of noble knights, distressed damsels, and
+marvellous feats of chivalry&mdash;in short they are <i>romancing</i>. They care
+little whether the details accord with natural fact&mdash;whether, for
+instance, the account of a fight is incredible to any one who knows
+what a battle really is; the heroes are chivalrous knight-errants,
+noble, pious, devoted to their lady loves; but they are not
+hard-headed, hard-fisted men like Ulysses, David, or some old
+Icelandic sea-rover. The true heroic spirit shoots up occasionally,
+nevertheless the prevailing idea of the romance-writer is to tell a
+wondrous tale of love and adventure, in which he lets his fancy run
+riot, rather enjoying than avoiding magnificent improbabilities.
+Undoubtedly the beautiful mystic romance of the Morte d'Arthur does
+light up at the end with a true flash of heroic poetry, in the famous
+lamentation over Lancelot, when he is found at last dead in the
+hermitage: but in this passage the elegiac strain rises far above the
+ordinary level of romantic composers. Meanwhile, as the English nation
+at home settled down into peaceful habits under the strong organising
+pressure of Church and State, and arms gave way to laws, the hero's
+occupation disappeared from our everyday society, and the heroic
+tradition decayed out of imaginative literature, which was often<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+picturesque, sublime, and profoundly reflective, but had parted with
+the special qualities of energetic simplicity and the vivid impression
+of fact. Nevertheless, heroic poetry in this sense has never been
+quite extinguished in Great Britain; it survived, naturally, wherever
+it could be preserved by a living popular tradition. And so it found a
+congenial refuge, though in greatly reduced circumstances, in the
+rough outlying regions where personal strength and daring were still
+vitally necessary&mdash;in the borderland between England and Scotland. An
+epic poem gave heroic poetry on a grand scale, it told the incidents
+of a great war: the ballad tells of a single skirmish or foray. Yet
+the difference is but one of degree, for both epic and ballad were
+composed for men and by men, who were in the right atmosphere; and so
+we have here very different work from that of the fanciful romancer.
+There are not many good examples; yet the antique tone rings out now
+and then, as in the ballad of Chevy Chase, which commemorates a fierce
+Northumbrian fight at Otterburne that must have stirred the hearts of
+the whole countryside. Here you have no knightly tournament, or duel
+for rescue of dames, but the sharp clash of bloody conflict between
+English and Scots borderers, the best fighting men of our island. Of
+course the genuine account, given in Froissart, is very different; but
+the ballad-singer knows his art; and whereas from history we only
+learn that a Scottish knight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, was slain in the
+medley, in the ballad an English archer draws his bow</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'An arrow of a cloth yard long<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the hard head hayled he.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Against Sir Hugh Montgomery<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So right his shaft he set,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The swan's feather that his arrow bare<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In his heart's blood was wet.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p><p>In the compressed energy of these four lines, without an epithet or a
+superfluous word, we have a picture, drawn by a sure hand, of a man
+drawing his long bow, and driving it from steel to feathers through a
+knight in armour.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the border fighting disappeared with the union of the two
+kingdoms, and as Great Britain became civilised and began to transfer
+her wars oversea, the heroic verse decayed under the influence of the
+higher culture. For a civilised and literary society to have preserved
+its ancient lays and ballads is the rarest of lucky chances; the
+enthusiastic collector, like Percy or Walter Scott, is generally born
+too late, for indeed all antiquarianism is a very modern task. And
+poetry of this sort must decay under what Shakespeare calls 'the
+cankers of a calm world': while it also tends to disappear with the
+introduction of professional soldiers and great armies, where personal
+heroism counts for little. These may be, I suppose, the main reasons
+why great wars produce so little heroic verse: it may be questioned
+whether even our civil wars of the seventeenth century inspired any
+genuine poetry of this sort. And when in the eighteenth century the
+clang of arms had completely died away at home, the battle pieces were
+done after an artificial literary fashion, by writers who were content
+to describe vaguely the charging of hosts, the thunder of cannon, the
+groans of the wounded, and other such mechanical generalities.</p>
+
+<p>If any one could have revived the true heroic style, it would have
+been done by Walter Scott, with his delight in the border minstrelsy,
+and his martial ardour; but the romantic spirit was too strong upon
+him. He had laid hold of the right tradition, could give picturesque
+scenes and characters of a bygone time, and <i>Bonnie Dundee</i> is a
+ringing ballad; yet his style in the longer metrical tales is
+distinctly romantic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> and conventional. If he had not been writing for
+readers to whom the rough riders of the Border in the sixteenth
+century were totally strange and unreal beings, he could never have
+said that they</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And drank the red wine through the helmet barred.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>An unsophisticated audience would have laughed outright at such a
+comical performance. And we can see how Scott, as a poet of the
+battlefield, had become possessed with the idea that the grand style
+must be a lofty strain, something magnificently unusual, by his two
+poems upon Waterloo, which are fine failures; though we may admit the
+impossibility of making a heroic poem out of a battle that has just
+been minutely described in newspapers. On the other hand, his prose
+novels afford us a remarkable example of the two styles contrasted.
+When he wrote of the middle ages, as in <i>Ivanhoe</i>, <i>The Talisman</i>, and
+others, he was a pure romancer; whereas in his Tales of Scotland in
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the <i>Legend of Montrose</i>,
+<i>Old Mortality</i>, <i>The Bride of Lammermoor</i>, there are two or three
+rapid sketches of sharp fighting which are true and spirited, full of
+vivacity and character. On this ground he trod firmly, knowing the
+country, the times, and the people of Scotland: while the petty
+skirmishes at Drumclog or Bothwell Brig were easier to manage
+artistically than a great battle. Poetry, indeed, like painting, can
+do nothing on a vast scale, cannot manage masses of men; and moreover
+it fails to deal effectively with a state of war in which mechanical
+skill and the tactical movement of large bodies of troops win the day.
+There may be as much personal heroism as ever, but it is lost in the
+multitude. Nevertheless sea-fighting, where separate ships may
+encounter and grapple like two mortal foes, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> the deep water
+around and beneath them, gives heroism a better chance; and the
+mariner is always a poetic figure. So Thomas Campbell did rise very
+nearly to the heroic level in his poem on the battle of the Baltic,
+written when the true story of Nelson's famous exploit was still
+fresh; we have a clear and forcible impression of the British ships
+moving silently to the attack; and the closing lines touch the ancient
+ever-living feeling of gratitude to Captain Riou and his brave
+comrades, 'so tried and yet so true,' who fell in the great victory.</p>
+
+<p>With this exception, the prolonged conflict between England and
+France, which lasted twenty years up to its end at Waterloo, struck
+out hardly a spark of heroic poetry. Yet the Peninsular War is full of
+splendid military exploits, of fierce battles and the desperate
+storming of fortresses: it was a period of great national energy, when
+the people were contending with all their heart and strength against a
+most dangerous enemy; it was also a time when England was singularly
+rich in poets of the highest order. Nevertheless the only verses that
+may be assigned to the peculiar class which I have been attempting to
+define, were written, not by one of the famous group of poets, but by
+an unknown hand; and they relate not to a great battle, but to a
+slight incident, not to a victory, but to a hasty retreat. I am
+alluding to the well-known stanzas on the <i>Burial of Sir John Moore</i>,
+who was killed at Corunna in 1809; and my apology for quoting anything
+so hackneyed must be that it is trite by reason of its excellence; for
+a short poem, like a single happy phrase, wins incessant repetition
+and lasting popularity, because the words precisely fit some universal
+feeling. Why have these verses made such an effect that they are
+familiar to all of us, and fresh as when they were first read? Is it
+not because the writer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> had one clear flash of imaginative light,
+which showed him the reality of the scene, so that the description
+speaks for itself, without literary epithets, creating, as the French
+say, the true image. He struck the right note of soldierly emotion,
+brief, stern, and compressed, when there is no time for vain
+lamentation&mdash;as when in the <i>Iliad</i> Ulysses says to Achilles, who is
+inconsolable for the death of his friend, that a soldier must bury his
+comrade with a pitiless heart, and that in war a day's mourning is all
+that can be spared for slain men.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></p>
+
+<p>It may be allowable to suggest, therefore, among the reasons for the
+prevailing dearth and scarcity of first-class heroic poetry,
+notwithstanding the universal demand for it, the impossibility of thus
+handling war on a great scale, and also the serious difficulty of
+giving this poetic form to contemporary events, which are not easily
+grouped in artistic perspective because they are so accurately
+described elsewhere. This suggestion may derive support from the
+observation that whenever, in our own day, we have had brief samples
+of verse-writing with a strain of the genuine old quality, they have
+almost always come from a distant scene, usually from the frontiers of
+the British Empire, far away from the centres of academic culture and
+the fields of organised war. Two or three of Rudyard Kipling's short
+poems about life on the Afghan border and Indian camp life have the
+right ring: they are instinct with the colour and sensation of the
+environment: they stir the blood with a conviction of reality. If it
+be permissible for a moment to compare these rough energetic verses
+with the battle pieces of an immeasurably greater artist&mdash;with
+Tennyson's <i>Charge of the Light Brigade</i>, for example&mdash;one may see
+that in the poetry of action the grand style misses something which
+has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> caught by the eye that has seen the thing itself; the Charge
+is a splendid composition, but the frontier ballad sets you down on
+the ground and shows you life.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly, also, the romantic literary style, which prevailed so
+long in this country, and which is the natural product of high
+culture, has been unfavourable, because it was radically unsuitable,
+to the poetry of energetic action. It is true that all the highest
+compositions of the heroic poet are set off by a tinge of romance, as
+fine drawing is perfected by superb colouring; but the drawbacks of
+romance lie in a tendency to vagueness of thought, and to the
+preference of archaic words and overstrained sentiments which were
+given as poetic mainly because they were far-fetched and did not sound
+commonplace. In fact the later poets adopted mechanically the strong
+natural language of those who wrote under the inspiration of actual
+emotion or events, and therefore they used it awkwardly and
+ineffectively; or else in their consciousness of not knowing how
+things really happened, they kept within sonorous generalities, which
+are the resource of artistic impotence. In our own day we have
+witnessed a sharp revolt against romantic verse, and a reversion
+toward those forms of art which reflect the actual experience of men,
+toward precision and accurate detail: Romance has been abandoned for
+what is called Realism. But here we are threatened by a danger from
+the opposite direction: for a clumsy Realist is apt to suppose that
+his business is merely to describe facts without adding anything out
+of his own imaginative faculty, that he may bring his characters on
+the stage in their daily garb, in the dirty slovenliness with which
+they go about dreaming or acting in their own petty sphere,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> and so
+he overcharges with technicalities or trivial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> particulars.
+Nevertheless one may say that the poetry of action has found better
+methods since it shook off the influence of fantastic romance, and is
+distinctly improving: though its strength lies in short pieces
+repeating some notable incident or dramatic situations bringing out
+character, which is just where it began originally, and where indeed
+it is likely to remain, for the epic poem, or heroic verse on the
+grand scale, may be thought to have disappeared finally.</p>
+
+<p>To conclude a very brief and inadequate dissertation, we may, I think,
+lay it down as a principle of the art, that heroic poetry must be true
+to circumstances and to character, must have the qualities of
+simplicity and sincerity, combined with the magnetic power of stirring
+the heart by showing how men and women can behave when really
+confronted by danger, death, or irremediable misfortune. Its
+background, in skilful hands, is the contrast of calm Nature looking
+on at human strife and sorrow, at stern fortitude and energetic effort
+in tragic situations. We are reading every day of such situations in
+the South African War, where there has been no lack of brave men 'so
+tried and yet so true,' who have found themselves back again suddenly
+in the rough fighting world of their forefathers, and have felt and
+acted like the men of old time. There is abundant proof that the
+English folk can display as much heroism as ever men did; but we may
+look in vain for the poet who knows how to commemorate their valour
+and patriotic self-sacrifice in heroic verse.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Anglo-Saxon Review</i>, June 1900.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Epic and Romance</i>, p. 15.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Ay Espa&ntilde;a<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Perdita por un gusto y por La Cava.'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Romance del Rey Rodrigo.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So doth a woman weep, as her husband in death she embraces,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Him, who in front of his people and city has fallen in battle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Striving in vain to defend his home from the fate of the vanquished.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She there, seeing him die, and gasping his life out before her,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Clings to him bitterly moaning. And round her the others, the foemen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beat her, and bid her arise, and stab at her back with the lances,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dragging her off as a slave to the bondage of labour and sorrow.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Odyssey</i>, viii. 523-29.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Iliad</i>, vi. 86-90.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> Arnold's translation.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Iliad</i>, xix. 228-29.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> Lessing.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>'When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her
+poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first
+names will be Wordsworth and Byron.' Thus wrote Matthew Arnold in
+1881, and now that the century's last autumn is passing away, a new
+edition of Byron's works appears in the fullness of time to quicken
+our memories and rekindle our curiosity, by placing before us a
+complete record of the life, letters, and poetry of one whom Macaulay
+declared in 1830 to be the most celebrated Englishman of the
+nineteenth century, and who seventy years later may still be counted
+among its most striking and illustrious figures.</p>
+
+<p>As the new edition is issued by instalments, and several volumes are
+still to come, to compare its contents, arrangement, and the editorial
+accessories with those of preceding editions might be thought
+premature. We may say, however, that a large number of Byron's
+letters, not before printed, have now been added; and that the text of
+this new material has been prepared from originals, whereas it is now
+impossible so to collate the text of the greater number of the letters
+heretofore published. Moore is supposed to have destroyed many of
+those entrusted to him; and moreover he handled the originals very
+freely, making large omissions, and transposing passages<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> from one
+letter to another, though we presume that he did not re-write and
+amplify passages after the fashion in which certain French editors
+have dealt with recent memoirs. The letters now for the first time
+published by Mr. Murray were for the most part inaccessible to Moore.
+But for all these details we may refer our readers to the concise and
+valuable prefaces appended to the three volumes of Letters and
+Journals.</p>
+
+<p>We have now, therefore, a substantial acquisition of fresh and quite
+authentic material, though it would be rash to assume that all
+important documents are included, for the family archives are still
+held in reserve. It is admitted by the editor that the literary value
+of the letters now printed for the first time is not high, but he
+explains that in publishing, with a few exceptions, the whole
+available correspondence, he has acted on the principle that they form
+an aggregate collection of great biographical interest, and may thus
+serve as the best substitute for the lost memoirs. We may agree that
+any scrap of a great man's writing, or even any words spoken, may
+throw some light upon his character, whether the subject be trivial or
+tremendous, a business letter to his solicitor or a defiance of
+society; for even though careless readers chance to miss some pearl
+strung at random on a string of commonplaces, to the higher criticism
+nothing is quite valueless. In this instance, at any rate, no pains
+have been spared to place the real Lord Byron, as described more or
+less unconsciously by himself, before his fellow-countrymen; and the
+result is to confirm his reputation as a first-class letter-writer.
+The private and confidential correspondence of eminent literary men
+would be usually more decorous than interesting; but Byron, though he
+is not always respectable, is never dull. The correspondence and
+journals, taken all together,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> constitute the most interesting and
+characteristic collection of its kind in English literature.</p>
+
+<p>In regard to the effect upon his personal reputation, we have long
+known what manner of man was Byron; nor is it likely that, after
+passing in review the complete array of evidence collected in these
+volumes, the general verdict of posterity will be sensibly modified.
+Those who judge him should bear in mind that perhaps no famous life
+has ever been so thoroughly laid bare, or scrutinised with greater
+severity. The tendency of biographers is to soften down errors and
+praise where they can; and in an autobiography the writer can tell his
+own story. But the assiduous searching out and publication of every
+letter and diary that can be gathered or gleaned is a different
+ordeal, which might try the reputation of most of us; while in the
+case of an impulsive, wayward, high-spirited man, exposed to strong
+temptations, with all a poet's traditional irritability, whose rank
+and genius concentrated public attention on his writings from his
+early youth, this test must be extremely severe. Many of the letters
+are of a sort that do not ordinarily appear in a biography. Byron's
+letters to his wife at the time of their separation, which are
+moderate and even dignified, are supplemented by his wife's letters to
+him and to her friends, full of mysterious imputations; and there are
+letters to and from the lady with whom his <i>liaison</i> was notorious.
+His own reckless letters from Venice to Moore, and those from Shelley
+and others describing his dissipated habits, were clearly never
+intended for general reading after his death. Of course most of these
+are not now produced for the first time, nor do we argue that they
+ought never to have appeared, for the biographical interest is
+undeniable. Our point is that the publication of such private and
+damaging correspondence is so very unusual in biographies that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+places Byron at a special disadvantage, and that when we pass our
+judgment upon him we are bound to take into account the unsparing use
+that has been made of papers connected with the most intimate
+transactions of a lifetime which was no more than a short and stormy
+passage from youth to manhood; for he was cut off before the age at
+which men abandon the wild ways of their springtide, and are usually
+disposed to obliterate the record of them. At least one recent
+biography might be mentioned which would have read differently if it
+had been compiled with similar candour.</p>
+
+<p>The annotations subjoined to almost every page of the text are so
+ample and particular as to furnish in themselves extensive reading.
+The notices of every person named would go far to serve as a brief
+biographical dictionary of Byron's contemporaries, whether known or
+unknown to fame. We get a concise account of Madame de Sta&euml;l&mdash;her
+birth, books, and political opinions&mdash;very useful to those who had no
+previous acquaintance with her. Lady Morgan and Joanna Southcote
+obtain quite as much space as would be allotted to them in any
+handbook of celebrities. Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh are
+treated with similar liberality. There is a full account, taken from
+the <i>Examiner</i>, of the procession with which Louis <span class="smcap">XVIII</span>. made his
+entry into London in 1814. The notes&mdash;of about four pages each&mdash;upon
+Hobhouse and Lord Carlisle may be justified by their close connection
+with Byron's affairs; though some of us might have been content with
+less. Allusions to such notorious evildoers as Tarquin are explained,
+and stock quotations from Shakespeare have been carefully verified.
+The result is that a reader might go through this edition of Byron
+with the very slightest previous knowledge of general literature or of
+contemporary history, and might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> give himself a very fair middle-class
+education in the process, although the consequence might be to imbue
+him with what Coleridge has called 'a passion for the disconnected.'
+Nevertheless we readily acknowledge the thorough execution of this
+part of the editorial work, and the very meritorious labour that has
+been spent upon bringing together every kind of document and reference
+that can inform or enlighten us upon the main subjects of Byron's life
+and writings. In the poems the practice of giving in notes the rough
+drafts and rejected versions of passages and lines, so as to show the
+poet at work, seems to us not altogether fair to him, and is
+occasionally distracting to those readers who enjoy a fine picture
+without asking how the colours were mixed, or are not anxious about
+the secrets of a good dinner. Yet to students of method, to the
+fellow-craftsman, and to the literary virtuoso, these variant
+readings, of which there are sometimes four to a single line, may
+often be of substantial interest, as throwing light on the tendencies
+and predilections of taste which are the formative influences upon
+style in prose or poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Probably the most favourable circumstance for a poet is that he should
+only be known, like the Divinity of Nature, from his works; or at
+least that, like Wordsworth, he should keep the noiseless tenor of his
+way down some secluded vale of life, whereby his poems stand out in
+clear relief like fine paintings on a plain wall. Is there any modern
+English poet of the first class, except Byron, whose entire prose
+writings and biography are bound up in standard editions with his
+poetry? The question is at any rate worth asking, because certainly
+there is no case in which the record of a poet's private life and
+personal fortunes has so greatly affected, for good or for ill, his
+poetic reputation. Those who detested his character <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>and condemned his
+way of living found it difficult to praise his verses; they detected
+the serpent under every stone. For those who were fascinated by the
+picture of a reckless prodigal, always in love and in debt, with
+fierce passions and a haughty contempt for the world, who defied
+public opinion and was suspected of unutterable things&mdash;such a
+personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's
+whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with
+light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take
+up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main
+object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true
+value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems
+which must always hold a permanent place in the high imaginative
+literature of England.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that every writer of force and originality traverses
+two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order
+of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted
+unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and
+praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse
+treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's
+reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen
+most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief
+lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon
+the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined
+slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this
+moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to
+whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so
+imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a
+character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose
+poetry, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> admitted, had influenced his own later verse&mdash;one of those
+who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout
+England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who
+set the fashion of his day in England, stirred and shaped the popular
+imagination, and struck a far resonant note in our poetry. Yet after
+his death he suffered a kind of eclipse; his work was much more unduly
+depreciated than it had been extolled; while in our own time such
+critics as Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have been in profound
+disagreement on the question of his worth and value as a poet. Nor is
+it possible for impartial persons to accept the judgment of either of
+these two eminent artists in poetry, since Arnold placed Wordsworth
+and Byron by anticipation on the same level at this century's end,
+whereas Wordsworth stands now far higher. And the bitter disdain which
+Sir. Swinburne has poured upon Byron's verse and character, though
+tempered by acknowledgment of his strength and cleverness, and by
+approbation of his political views, excites some indignation and a
+sympathetic reaction in his favour. One can imagine the ghost of Byron
+rebuking his critic with the words of the Miltonic Satan, 'Ye knew me
+once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar'; for in
+his masculine defiant attitude and daring flights the elder poet
+overtops and looks down upon the fine musical artist of our own day.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the causes which have combined to lower Byron's popularity are
+not far to seek. The change of times, circumstance, and taste has been
+adverse to him. The political school which he so ardently represented
+has done its work; the Tory statesmen of the Metternich and
+Castlereagh type, who laid heavy hands upon nations striving for light
+and liberty, have gone down to their own place; the period of stifling
+repression has long ended in Europe.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> Italy and Greece are free, the
+lofty appeals to classic heroism are out of date, and such fiery
+high-swelling trumpet notes as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner, torn, but flying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Streams like a thunderstorm <i>against</i> the wind,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>fall upon cold and fastidious ears. 'The day will come,' said Mazzini
+in after-years, 'when the democracy will acknowledge its debt to
+Byron;' but the demos is notoriously ungrateful, and the subject races
+have now won their independence. The shadow of discouragement and
+weariness which passed over sensitive minds at the beginning of this
+century, a period of political disillusion, has long been swept away
+by the prosperity and sanguine activities of the Victorian era; and
+the literary style has changed with the times. Melancholy moods,
+attitudes of scornful despair, tales of fierce love and bloody revenge
+are strange and improbable to readers who delight in situations and
+emotions with which they are familiar, who demand exactitude in detail
+and correct versification; while sweet harmonies, perfection of metre,
+middle-class pastorals, and a blameless moral tone came in with
+Tennyson. In short, many of the qualities which enchanted Byron's own
+generation have disenchanted our own, both in his works and his life;
+for when Macaulay wrote in 1830 that the time would come when his
+'rank and private history will not be regarded in estimating his
+poetry,' he took no account of future editions enlarged and annotated,
+or of biographies of <i>The Real Lord Byron</i>; whereby it has come to
+pass, as we suspect, that the present world knows more of Byron's
+private history than of his poems. His faults and follies stand out
+more prominently than ever; his story is more attractive reading than
+most romances; and the stricter morality of the day condemns him more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+severely than did the society to which he belonged. Psychological
+speculation is now so much more practised in literature than formerly,
+there is so much more interest in 'the man behind the book,' that
+serious moral delinquencies, authentically recorded and eagerly read,
+operate more adversely than ever in affecting the public judgment upon
+Byron's poetry, because they provide a damaging commentary upon it.
+His contemporaries&mdash;Coleridge, Keats, Shelley&mdash;lived so much apart
+from the great world of their day that important changes in manners
+and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by
+which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry,
+moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own
+character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the
+man himself; and his <i>empeiria</i> (as Goethe calls it), his too
+exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular
+class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative
+of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in
+his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to
+the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events
+and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw
+them, with comparisons of their visible condition and past glories,
+with Peninsular battlefields, and with Waterloo. Of worldliness in
+this objective meaning his contemporaries had some share, yet they
+instinctively avoided the waste of their power upon it; and so their
+finest poetry is beautiful by its detachment, by a certain magical
+faculty of treating myth, romance, and the mystery of man's
+sympathetic relations with universal Nature.</p>
+
+<p>A recent French critic of Chateaubriand, who defines the 'romantisme'
+of that epoch as no more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> than a great waking up of the poetic spirit,
+says that the movement was moral and psychological generally before it
+spread into literature. In criticising Byron's poetry we have to bear
+in mind that he came in on the first wave of this flood, which
+overflowed the exhausted and arid field of poetry at the end of the
+last century, fertilising it with colour and emotion. The comparison
+between Byron in England and Chateaubriand in France must have been
+often drawn. The similarity in their style, their moody, melancholy
+outlook upon common humanity, their aristocratic temper, their
+self-consciousness, their influence upon the literature of the two
+countries, the enthusiasm that they excited among the ardent spirits
+of the generation that reached manhood immediately after them, and the
+vain attempts of the elder critics to resist their popularity and deny
+their genius&mdash;form a remarkable parallel in literary history. As
+Jeffrey failed at first to discern the promise of Byron, so Morellet
+could only perceive the obviously weak points of Chateaubriand, laying
+stress on his affectations, his inflated language, his sentimental
+exaggeration, upon all the faults which were common to these two men
+of genius, the defects of their qualities, the energetic rebound from
+the classic level of orderly taste and measured style. It was the
+ancient <i>r&eacute;gime</i> contending against a revolutionary uprising, and in
+poetry, as in politics, the leaders of revolution are sure to be
+excessive, to force their notes, to frighten their elders, and to
+scandalise the conservative mind. Yet just as Chateaubriand, after
+passing through his period of depression, is now rising again to his
+proper place in French literature, so we may hope that an impartial
+survey of Byron's verse will help to determine the rank that he is
+likely to hold permanently, although the high tide of Romance in
+poetry has at this moment fallen to a low ebb, and the spell which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> it
+laid upon our forefathers may have lost its power in an altered world.</p>
+
+<p>It must be counted to the credit of these Romantic writers that at any
+rate they widened and varied the sphere and the resources of their
+art, by introducing the Oriental element, so to speak, into the
+imaginative literature of modern Europe. They brought the lands of
+ancient civilisation again within the sphere of poetry, reviving into
+fresh animation the classic glories of Hellas, reopening the gates of
+the mysterious East, and showing us the Greek races still striving, as
+they were twenty-two centuries earlier, for freedom against the
+barbarous strength of an Asiatic empire. Byron was the first of the
+poets who headed this literary crusade for the succour of Christianity
+against Islam in the unending contest between East and West on the
+shores of the Mediterranean, and in this cause he eventually died.
+Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo were also travellers in
+Asia, and had drawn inspiration from that source; they all
+instinctively obeyed, like Bonaparte, the impulse which sends
+adventurous and imaginative spirits toward that region of strong
+passions and primitive manners, where human life is of little matter,
+and where the tragic situations of drama and fiction may at any time
+be witnessed in their simple reality. The effect was to introduce
+fresh blood into the veins of old romance; and Byron led the van of an
+illustrious line of poets who turned their <i>impressions de voyage</i>
+into glowing verse, for the others only trod in his footsteps and
+wrote on his model, while Lamartine openly imitated him in his
+<i>Dernier Chant de Childe Harold</i>. For the first time the Eastern tale
+was now told by a poet who had actually seen Eastern lands and races,
+their scenery and their cities, who drew his figures and landscape
+with his eye on the objects, and had not mixed his local colours by
+the process of skimming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> books of travel for myths, legends, costume,
+or customs, with such result as may be seen in Moore's <i>Lalla Rookh</i>
+and in Southey's <i>Thalaba</i>, or even in Scott's <i>Talisman</i>. The preface
+to this novel shows that Scott fully appreciated the risk of competing
+with Byron, albeit in prose, in the field of Asiatic romance, yet all
+his skill avails little to diminish the sense of conventional
+figure-drawing and of uncertainty in important details when they are
+not gathered in the field, but only transplanted from the library.</p>
+
+<p>Byron has noticed in one of his letters the errors of this kind into
+which a great poet must fall whose accurate observation has been
+confined mainly to his own country. 'There is much natural talent,' he
+writes, 'spilt over the <i>Excursion</i>, yet Wordsworth says of Greece
+that it is a land of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Under a cope of variegated sky.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, the shores
+still and tideless, the sky is anything but variegated, being for
+months and months beautifully blue.'</p>
+
+<p>This may be thought trivial criticism, yet it is evidence of the
+attention given by Byron to precise description. His accuracy in
+Oriental costume was also a novelty at that time, when so little was
+known of Oriental lore that even Mr. Murray 'doubted the propriety of
+putting the name of Cain into the mouth of a Mohammedan.' With regard
+to his characters, we may readily admit that in the <i>Giaour</i> or the
+<i>Bride of Abydos</i> the heroes and heroines behave and speak after the
+fashion of high-flying Western romance, and that their lofty
+sentiments in love or death have nothing specifically Oriental about
+them. But this was merely the romantic style used by all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> Byron's
+contemporaries, and generally accepted by the taste of that day as
+essential to the metrical rendering of a passionate love-story. It may
+be argued, with Scott, that when a writer of fiction takes in hand a
+distant age or country, he is obliged to translate ideas and their
+expression into forms with which his readers are, to some extent,
+familiar. Byron seasoned his Oriental tales with phrases and imagery
+borrowed from the East; but whatever scenic or characteristic effects
+might have thus been produced are seriously marred by the explanatory
+notices and erudite references to authorities that are appended to the
+text. This fashion of garnishing with far-fetched outlandish words, in
+order to give the requisite flavour of time or place, was peculiar to
+the new romantic school of his era; it was the poetical dialect of the
+time, and Byron employed it too copiously. Yet, with all his faults,
+he remains a splendid colourist, who broke through a limited mannerism
+in poetry, and led forth his readers into an unexplored region of
+cloudless sky and purple sea, where the serene aspect of nature could
+be powerfully contrasted with the shadow of death and desolation cast
+over it by the violence of man.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly this contrast, between fair scenery and foul barbarism,
+had been presented more than once in poetry; yet no one before Byron
+had brought it out with the sure hand of an eye-witness, or with such
+ardent sympathy for a nation which had been for centuries trodden
+under the feet of aliens in race and religion, yet still clung to its
+ancient traditions of freedom. Throughout his descriptive poems, from
+<i>Childe Harold</i> to <i>Don Juan</i>, it is the true and forcible impression,
+taken from sight of the thing itself, that gives vigour and animation
+to his pictures, and that has stamped on the memory the splendid
+opening of the <i>Giaour</i>, the meditations in Venice and Rome,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> the
+glorious scenery of the Greek islands, and even such single lines as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the art of painting what may be called historical landscape, where
+retrospective associations give intellectual colour to the picture,
+Byron has very few rivals. His descriptions of the Lake of Geneva, of
+Clarens, of the Trojan plain&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'High barrows, without marble or a name,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A vast, untilled, and mountain-skirted plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Ida in the distance'&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>have the quality of faithful drawing illumined by imaginative power.
+They have certainly touched the emotions and enhanced the pleasure of
+all travellers in the last three generations whose minds are
+accessible to poetic suggestion; and if at the present day their style
+be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be
+denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer
+without them. The stanzas in <i>Childe Harold</i> on Waterloo are full of
+the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents
+of war&mdash;the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from
+the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the
+stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it
+may be said; yet the great difficulty of dealing adequately with
+heroic action in contemporary verse, of writing a poem on a campaign
+that has just been reported in the newspapers, is exemplified by the
+fact that Walter Scott's two compositions on Waterloo are failures;
+nor has any poet since Byron yet succeeded in giving us a good modern
+battlepiece.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless there is much in Byron's longer poems (excepting always
+<i>Don Juan</i>) that seems tedious to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> the modern reader; there are
+descriptions and declamations too long drawn-out to sustain the
+interest; and there are many lines that are superfluous, untidy, and
+sometimes ungrammatical. One can only plead, in extenuation of these
+defects, that the fashion of his day was for long metrical romance, in
+which it is difficult to maintain the high standard of careful
+composition exacted by the latest criticism. It is almost impossible
+to tell a long story in verse that shall be throughout poetical. And
+one main reason why this fashion has nearly passed away may be
+surmised to be that the versified narrative cannot adapt itself in
+this respect to the present taste, which is impatient of fluent
+lengthy heroics, refusing to accept them for the sake of some finely
+executed passages. Southey's epics are now quite unreadable, and many
+of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic
+style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much
+redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors
+often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded
+as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and
+costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and
+as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek
+patriots, he had actually seen the men and heard of their deeds. The
+fact that he also portrayed more unreal characters in dismal
+drapery&mdash;Lara, Conrad, and Manfred, as the mouthpieces of splenetic
+misanthropy&mdash;has led to some unjust depreciation of his capacity for
+veritable delineation. Macaulay, for example, in his essay on Byron,
+observes that 'Johnson, the man whom Don Juan met in the slave-market,
+is a striking failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have
+drawn a bluff, fearless Englishman in such a situation!' and Mr.
+Swinburne echoes this criticism. But it is unfair<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> to compare a minor
+character, slightly sketched into a poem for the purposes of the plot,
+with the full-length portrait that might have been made of him by a
+first-class artist in prose. The proper comparison would be between
+the figures in the metrical romances of the two poets, whereby it
+might be shown that Scott could take as little trouble as Byron did
+about an unimportant subsidiary actor. In regard to the leading heroes
+and heroines, Scott's poetic creations are hardly more interesting or
+dramatic than Byron's; and whenever he makes, even in prose, an
+excursion into Asia, his figure-drawing becomes conventional. But he
+was usually at the disadvantage, from which Byron was certainly free,
+of being hampered by an inartistic propensity to make virtuous heroes
+triumph in the long run.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it must be admitted that no poet of the same calibre has turned
+out so much loose uneven work as Byron. His lapses into lines that are
+lame or dull are the more vexatious to the correct modern ear when, as
+sometimes happens, they spoil a fine passage, and in the midst of a
+superb flight his muse comes down with a broken wing. In the subjoined
+stanza, for example, from the Waterloo episode in <i>Childe Harold</i>, the
+first five lines are clear, strenuous, and concise, while the next
+three are confused and clumsy; so that though he recovers himself in
+the final line, the general effect is much damaged:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The morn the marshalling in arms&mdash;the day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Battle's magnificently stern array.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The thunder-clouds close o'er it, <i>which when rent,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>The earth is covered thick with other clay,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Which her own clay shall cover</i>, heaped and pent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Rider and horse&mdash;friend, foe&mdash;in one red burial blent.'</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p><p>These blots, and there are many, become less pardonable when we
+observe, from the new edition, that Byron by no means neglected
+revision of his work. But his impetuous temper, and the circumstance
+of his writing far from the printing-press, encouraged hasty
+execution; and though the most true remark that 'easy writing is
+devilish hard reading' is his own, though he praised excessively the
+chiselled verse of Pope, he was always inclined to pose as one who
+threw off jets of boiling inspiration, and in one letter he compares
+himself to the tiger who makes or misses his point in one spring. He
+ranked Pope first among English poets, yet he learnt nothing in that
+school; he pretended to undervalue Shakespeare, yet he must have had
+the plays by heart, for his letters bristle with quotations from them.
+His avowed taste in poetry is hard to reconcile with his own
+performances: his verse was rushing, irregular, audacious, yet he
+overpraises the smooth composition of Rogers; he dealt in heroic
+themes and passionate love-stories, yet Crabbe's humble pastorals had
+their full charm for him. Except Crabbe and Rogers, he declared, 'we
+are all&mdash;Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I&mdash;upon a wrong
+revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among
+these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in
+English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural
+insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his
+clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc
+which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too
+incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy
+soliloquies of his dramatic characters we have an actor constantly
+reappearing in his favourite part. Yet this also was a novelty to the
+generation brought up on the impersonal poetry of the classic school;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+and here, again, he is a forerunner of the self-reflecting analytical
+style that is common in our own day; for there is a Byronic echo in
+the 'divine despair' of Tennyson. The melancholy brooding spirit,
+dissatisfied with society and detesting complacency, had for some time
+been in the air; it had affected the literature of France and Germany;
+Werther, Obermann, and Ren&eacute; are all moulded on the same type with
+Childe Harold; yet Sainte-Beuve rightly says that this identity of
+type does not mean imitation&mdash;it means that the writers were all in
+the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against
+philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so
+vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or
+irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages,
+and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various
+personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw,
+in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven
+and humanity. Their literature, in short, however overcoloured it may
+have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among
+men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world
+around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must
+leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between
+this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the
+self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory
+contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in
+different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to
+have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour
+must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved
+his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in
+the same year (1818), and from the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> place (Venice), he produced
+the fourth canto of <i>Childe Harold</i>, full of deep longing for unbroken
+solitude:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There is a rapture on the lonely shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There is society, where none intrudes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and also <i>Beppo</i>, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian
+society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat
+ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in
+fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his
+<i>M&eacute;moires d'Outre Tombe</i>, if they had been preserved, would have been
+very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography.</p>
+
+<p>It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression,
+and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest
+poems, the <i>Giaour</i>, the <i>Bride of Abydos</i>, the <i>Siege of Corinth</i>. On
+this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose
+sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour
+and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of
+metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary;
+yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not
+even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level
+with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description
+of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action.
+The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the <i>Giaour</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Clime of the unforgotten brave!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose land from plain to mountain cave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the
+manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> almost illegible
+hand&mdash;an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate
+poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and
+melodramatic figuring&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Dark and unearthly is the scowl<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That glares beneath his dusky cowl'&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the
+untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and
+sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally
+disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it
+is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring
+adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality
+that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are,
+perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to
+Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal
+explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition
+lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to
+write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of
+assiduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek <span title="phengarion">&phi;&epsilon;&nu;&gamma;&alpha;&rho;&iota;&omicron;&nu;</span>,
+and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared
+us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sir&acirc;t's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's
+scythe,' we should have mixed up less desultory reading with the
+enjoyment of fine passages. He gives us too much of his local
+colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors,
+he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the
+dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the
+forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that
+in these poems Byron brought the classic lands of Greece and the
+Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.</p>
+
+<p>Byron has told us why he adopted for the <i>Corsair</i>, and afterwards for
+<i>Lara</i>, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for
+narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart;
+Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed
+completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and
+this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in
+blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons
+that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren
+rocks on which they are kindled.'<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment
+of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line
+displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement;
+it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow
+processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room
+for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of
+describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy
+heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At
+moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled
+up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run
+over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes
+ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos&mdash;as in the following
+sample from the <i>Corsair</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One female form&mdash;remember&mdash;<i>we</i> have wives.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And the consequence has been that <i>Lara</i> and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> <i>Corsair</i> are now,
+we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.</p>
+
+<p>Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own
+metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning
+from the beacons, and had given blank verse a wide berth, instead of
+setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is
+full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he
+could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved
+not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular
+alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them.
+His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about
+<i>Sardanapalus</i>, to have been 'to dramatise striking passages of
+history and mythology.'</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike
+Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon
+him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of
+writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as
+Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to
+common language.'</p></div>
+
+<p>And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his
+blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed
+in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which
+have no metrical construction at all:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such
+high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a></p>
+
+<p>'Where thou shalt pass thy days in peace, but on condition that the
+three young princes are given up as hostages,'<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Many others of the same quality might be given,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> in which the
+<i>disjecti membra poet&aelig;</i> would be exceedingly hard to find. It is
+surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into
+the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere
+use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple
+strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary
+vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse
+that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the
+most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood
+that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in
+this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats
+in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the
+construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of
+its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron
+should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a
+rough unpractised hand.</p>
+
+<p>There are some vigorous passages scattered through the plays, and we
+have it on record that Dr. Parr could not sleep a wink after reading
+<i>Sardanapalus</i>. Nevertheless, we fear that the present generation will
+find little cause for demurring to Jeffrey's judgment upon the
+tragedies, that they are for the most part 'solemn, prolix, and
+ostentatious.' They were not composed, as Byron himself explained,
+'with the most remote view to the stage,' so that he had not before
+his eyes the wholesome fear of a critical audience. In truth it must
+be admitted that he lacked the true dramatic instinct; he could only
+set up his leading figures to deliver imposing speeches appropriate to
+a tragic situation; and one may guess that the consciousness of
+awkward handling weighed upon the spirit and style of his blank verse,
+for his ear seems to have completely misled him when it had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> lost the
+guidance of recurrent rhyme. Of <i>Cain: a Mystery</i>, one must speak
+reverently, since Walter Scott, to whom it was dedicated, wrote that
+the author had 'matched Milton on his own ground'; yet in Lucifer, who
+leads the dialogue, we have little more than a spectral embodiment of
+Byron's own rebellious temper; and in this poem, as in <i>Manfred</i>, the
+discussion of metaphysical problems carries him beyond his depth.
+There are, nevertheless, some fine declamatory passages; and we may
+quote as a curiosity one soft line, fresh from the Swiss mountains:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">'Pipes in the liberal air<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd</i>,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>which is to be found in <i>Manfred</i> and might have been taken from the
+<i>Excursion</i>.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the
+importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is
+the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter
+poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his
+popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very
+unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and
+glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead,
+as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout
+eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or
+overcharged:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The better days of life were ours;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The worst can be but mine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall never more be thine.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The silence of that dreamless sleep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I envy now too much to weep;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nor need I to repine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That all those charms have passed away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I might have watched through long decay.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p><p>There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of
+thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse
+has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which
+men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare
+quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high
+vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic
+spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show
+that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and
+epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his
+strength freely:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thou shalt not taste of death!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The generous blood that flowed from thee<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Disdained to sink beneath;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Within our veins its currents be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thy spirit on our breath.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Thy name, our charging hosts along,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall be their battle word!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy fall, the theme of choral song<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From virgin voices poured!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To weep would do thy glory wrong;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thou shalt not be deplored.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in
+the <i>Isles of Greece</i>, where the two lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Ah, no! the voices of the dead<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>drop suddenly into the elegiac strain, into a mournful echo that
+dwells upon the ear, followed by the rising note of a call to arms. It
+must be remembered that nothing is so rare as a stirring war-song, and
+that in our time we have had a good many attempts&mdash;almost all
+failures; whereas the <i>Isles of Greece</i> will long continue to stir the
+masculine imagination of Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p><p>On the other hand, it must be admitted that Byron's Occasional Pieces
+abound with cheap pathos, dubious fervour, and a kind of commonplace
+sentimentality that comes out in the form as well as in the feeling of
+his inferior work. The rhymes are apt to be hackneyed, the similes are
+sometimes tagged on awkwardly instead of being weaved into the
+texture, the expression has often lost its strength, and the emotion
+lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what
+was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not
+been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so
+much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much <i>too</i>
+occasional, for he was prone to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the
+fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his
+own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world
+as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a false air of lamentation over
+the misfortunes which he had brought upon himself, as in the Poems of
+the Separation. Yet when he shook off his personal grief and took to
+politics, no other poet could more vividly express his intense living
+interest in the great events of his time, or strike the proper note of
+some great catastrophe. It may be affirmed that the <i>Ode to Napoleon</i>
+is better than anything else that has been written in English upon the
+most astonishing career in modern history:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The triumph and the vanity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The rapture of the strife&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The earthquake-voice of Victory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To thee the breath of life;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sword, the sceptre, and that sway<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which man seemed made but to obey,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Wherewith renown was rife&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All quelled; Dark Spirit, what must be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The madness of thy memory!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The Desolator desolate!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Victor overthrown!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Arbiter of others' fate<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A suppliant for his own!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is it some yet imperial hope<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That with such change can calmly cope?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or dread of death alone?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To die a prince&mdash;or live a slave&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy choice is most ignobly brave.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>In the first of these two stanzas the seventh line is weak and breaks
+the rapid rush of the verse; but the high pressure and impetus of the
+poem are sustained throughout twenty stanzas, producing the effect of
+an improvisatore who stops rather from want of breath than from any
+other lack of inspiration. In this respect the ode is a rare poetical
+exploit; for all poems composed under the spur of the moment, upon
+some memorable incident that has just startled the world, must be more
+or less improvised, and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary
+popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under
+such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded
+some unlucky laureate.</p>
+
+<p>There is one province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which
+Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of
+lyrics. In his latest and longest production, <i>Don Juan</i>, he tells us
+that his 'sere fancy has fallen into the yellow leaf':</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was in <i>Beppo: a Venetian Story</i> that he dropped, for the first
+time, the weapon of trenchant sarcasm and invective, with no very fine
+edge upon it, which he flourished in his youth, and took up the tone
+of light humorous satire upon society. He soon acquired mastery over
+the metre (which was suggested, as is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> well known, by Hookham Frere's
+<i>Whistlecraft</i>); and in <i>Don Juan</i> he produced a long, rambling poem
+of a kind never before attempted, and still far beyond any subsequent
+imitations, in the English language. Of a certainty there is much that
+it is by no means desirable to imitate, for the English literature
+does not assimilate the element of cynical libertinism, which indeed
+becomes coarse on an English tongue. Yet it is remarkable that the
+Whistlecraft metre, although Byron could manage it with point and
+spirit, has never produced more than insipid <i>pastiche</i> in later
+hands. But while <i>Beppo</i> may be classed as pure burlesque, <i>Don Juan</i>
+strikes various keys, ironical and voluptuous, grave and gay, rising
+sometimes to the level of strenuous realistic narrative in the
+episodes of the shipwreck and the siege, falling often into something
+like grotesque buffoonery, with much picturesque description, many
+animated lines, and occasional touches of effective pathos. As a story
+it has the picaresque flavour of <i>Gil Blas</i>, presenting a variety of
+scenes and adventures strung together without any definite plot; as a
+poem its reputation rests upon some passages of indisputable beauty;
+while Byron's own experiences, grievances, and animosities, personal
+or political, run through the whole performance like an accompaniment,
+and break out occasionally into humorous sarcasm or violent
+denunciations. That the overheated fervour of a stormy youth should
+cool down into disdainful irony, under the chill of disappointment and
+exhaustion, was natural enough; and this unfinished poem may be
+regarded as typical of Byron's erratic life, full of loose intrigue
+and adventure, with its sudden and premature ending.</p>
+
+<p>It is in <i>Don Juan</i> that Byron stands forth as the founder and
+precursor of modern realism in poetry. He has now finally exorcised
+the hyperbolic fiend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> that vexed his youth, he has cast off the
+illusions of romance, he knows the ground he treads upon, and his
+pictures are drawn from life; he is the foremost of those who have
+ventured boldly upon the sombre actualities of war and bloodshed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'But let me put an end unto my theme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There was an end of Ismail, hapless town,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Far flashed her burning towers o'er Danube's stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And redly ran his blushing waters down.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The horrid warwhoop and the shriller scream<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of forty thousand that had manned the wall<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some hundreds breathed, the rest were silent all.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'A versified paraphrase,' it may be said, 'of sober history,' yet
+withal very different from the most animated prose, which must be kept
+at a lower temperature of intense expression. If we turn to quieter
+scenes&mdash;which are called picturesque because the artist, like a
+painter, has selected the right subject and point of view, and has
+grouped his details with exquisite skill&mdash;we may take the stanzas
+describing the return of the pirate Lambro to his Greek island&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'He saw his white walls shining in the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His garden trees all shadowy and green'&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as a fine example of pure objective writing, which lays out the whole
+scene truthfully, with the direct vision of one who has seen it. One
+does not find here the suggestive intimations, the wide imaginative
+horizon of higher poetry; there are no musical blendings of sound and
+sense, as in such lines as Tennyson's</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'By the long wash of Australasian seas.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yet in these passages Byron has after his own fashion served Nature
+faithfully, and he has preserved to us some masterly sketches of life
+and manners that have long since disappeared. The Greek islands have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+since fallen under the dominion of European uniformity; the costume of
+the people, the form of their government, are shabby imitations of
+Western models. But the cloudless sky, the sun slowly sinking behind
+Morea's hills, the sea on whose azure brow Time writes no wrinkle, and
+the marbled steep of Sunium, are still unchanged; and the peaceful
+tourist in these waters will see at once that Byron was a true workman
+in line and colour, and will feel the intellectual pleasure that comes
+from accurate yet artistic interpretation of natural beauties.</p>
+
+<p>The poem of <i>Don Juan</i> is, therefore, a miscellany, connected on the
+picturesque side with <i>Childe Harold</i>, and by its mocking spirit with
+<i>Beppo</i> and the <i>Vision of Judgment</i>, the two pieces that may be
+classed as pure burlesque. The irreverent persiflage of the <i>Vision</i>
+belongs to the now obsolete school of Voltaire, and in biting wit and
+daring ridicule the performance is not unworthy of that supreme master
+in <i>diablerie</i>. Nor can it be asserted that this lashing sarcasm was
+undeserved, or that all the profanity was in Byron's parody, for
+Southey's conception of the Almighty as a High Tory judge, with an
+obsequious jury of angels, holding a trial of George <span class="smcap">III.</span>, browbeating
+the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that
+he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and
+abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron.
+There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a
+lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent
+attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have
+invariably failed. Southey's <i>Vision</i>, and Robert Montgomery's libel
+upon Satan, have each undergone the same fate of being utterly
+extinguished, knocked clean out of English literature by one single
+crushing onslaught of Byron and Macaulay respectively.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p><p>Our conclusion must be brief, for in fact it is not easy to propound
+to the readers of this Review any general observations, which shall be
+new as well as true, upon a man's life and works that have been
+subjected to incessant scrutiny and criticism throughout the
+nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period Byron found
+himself matched, in the poetic arena, against contemporary rivals of
+first-class genius and striking originality. And from his death almost
+up to the century's close there has been no time when some
+considerable poet has not occupied the forefront of English letters,
+and stamped his impression on the public mind. Variety in style and
+ideas has produced many vicissitudes of taste in poetry; it has been
+discovered that narrative can be better done in prose, and so the
+novel has largely superseded story-telling in verse. There have also
+been great political and social changes, and all these things have
+severely tested the staying powers of a writer who is too closely
+associated with his own period to be reckoned among those wide-ranging
+spirits whom Shelley has called 'the kings of thought.' Nevertheless
+the new edition of Byron is appearing at a moment which is, we think,
+not inopportune. There is just now, as by a coincidence there was in
+the year 1800, a dearth of poetic production; we have fallen among
+lean years; we have come to a break in the succession of notable
+poets; the Victorian celebrities have one by one passed away; and we
+can only hope that the first quarter of the twentieth century may
+bring again some such bountiful harvest as was vouchsafed to our
+grandfathers at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the meantime the
+reading of Byron may operate as a wholesome tonic upon the literary
+nerves of the rising generation; for, as Mr. Swinburne has generously
+acknowledged, with the emphatic concurrence of Matthew Arnold, his
+poems<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> have 'the excellence of sincerity and strength.' Now one
+tendency of latter-day verse has been toward that over-delicacy of
+fibre which has been termed decadence, toward the preference of
+correct metrical harmonies over distinct and incisive expression,
+toward vague indications of meaning. In this form the melody prevails
+over the matter; the style inclines to become precious and garnished
+with verbal artifice. Some recent French poets, indeed, in their
+anxiety to correct the troublesome lucidity of their mother-tongue,
+have set up the school of symbolism, which deals in half-veiled
+metaphor and sufficiently obscure allusion, relying upon subtly
+suggestive phrases for evoking associations. For ephemeral infirmities
+of this kind the straightforward virility of Byron's best work may
+serve as an antidote. On the other hand, we have the well-knit
+strenuous verse of extreme realism, wrought out by a poet in his
+shirt-sleeves, with rhymes clear-sounding like the tap of hammer on
+anvil, who sings of rough folk by sea and land, and can touch national
+emotion in regard to the incidents or politics of the moment. He
+paints without varnish, in hard outline, avoiding metaphor and
+ornamental diction generally; taking his language so freely out of the
+mouths of men in actual life that he makes occasional slips into
+vulgarity. He is at the opposite pole from the symbolist; but true
+poetry demands much more distinction of style and nobility of thought.
+And here again Byron's high lyrical notes may help to maintain
+elevation of tone and to preserve the romantic tradition. His poetry,
+like his character, is full of glaring imperfections; yet he wrote as
+one of the great world in which he made for a time such a noise; and
+after all that has been said about his moral delinquencies, it is
+certain that we could have better spared a better man.</p>
+
+<p>In one of Tennyson's earlier letters is the following<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> passage, with
+reference to something written at the time in <i>Philip van Artevelde</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'He does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar
+strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however
+mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart, and a
+new pulse, and so we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease
+the wheels of the old world.'</p></div>
+
+<p>This is the large-hearted, far-seeing judgment of one who could survey
+the whole line and evolutionary succession of English verse, being
+himself destined to close the long list of nineteenth-century poets,
+which was opened by Byron and his contemporaries. The time has surely
+now come when we may leave discussing Byron as a social outlaw, and
+cease groping after more evidence of his misdeeds. The office of true
+criticism is to show that he made so powerful an impression on our
+literature as to win for himself permanent rank in its annals, and
+that his work, with all its shortcomings, does yet mark and illustrate
+an important stage in the connected development of our English poetry.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> <i>The Works of Lord Byron: a New, Revised, and Enlarged
+Edition.</i>&mdash;'Letters and Journals.' Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M.
+A. 'Poetry.' Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, M. A. London, John
+Murray, 1898.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, October 1900.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Preface to the <i>Corsair</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> <i>The Deformed Transformed</i> (part <span class="smcap">I.</span> scene i.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> <i>Sardanapalus</i> (act <span class="smcap">V.</span> scene i.).</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Leslie Stephen combines the faculty of acute and searching
+criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact.
+His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he
+has given to the history of English opinions and controversies,
+speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an
+extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to
+disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a
+masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he
+published his work on <i>English Thought in the Eighteenth Century</i>, and
+his present book on the Utilitarians continues, and indeed brings down
+to our own time, a similar investigation of the course of certain
+views, principles, and doctrines which had taken their shape in
+England and France during the period preceding the French Revolution,
+and which profoundly influenced political discussion throughout the
+first half of the nineteenth century. But on this occasion Mr.
+Stephen's inquiry does not range over the whole area thus laid open,
+though his subject compels him to make several excursions into the
+general region of philosophical and political disputation. His main
+purpose is to relate the history of a creed propagated by a group of
+remarkable men, who took hold of some prominent theories and doctrines
+generated by the rationalism of the preceding century, and endeavoured
+to make them the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> basis and framework of a system for improving the
+condition of the English people. Their immediate object was to abolish
+intolerable abuses of power by the governing classes, and radically to
+reform on scientific principles the haphazard blundering
+administration which was assumed to be the source of all evil. Mr.
+Stephen describes and explains, in short, the rise, progress, and
+decay of Utilitarianism.</p>
+
+<p>Such a system, by its nature and aims, is evidently practical;
+it is directed towards a change of laws and an alteration of the
+prevailing methods of government. To the philosophic minds of the
+eighteenth-century reformers in England and France, it seemed evident,
+that any general conclusions upon questions vitally concerning the
+interests of mankind should be reached by convincing demonstration,
+should start from axioms, and proceed by a connected chain of logical
+argument. During the latter half of that century England and France,
+so incessantly at war and so different in character and in their
+governing institutions, were nevertheless in alliance intellectually.
+They were then (with Holland) the only countries in the world where
+public opinion had free play, and where discussion of philosophic
+problems was actively carried on; and between them there was a
+constant interchange of ideas. Now in all speculations, on things
+human or divine, there have existed immemorially two schools or
+tendencies of thought, two ways of approaching the subject,
+corresponding, we may conjecture, to a radical difference of
+intellectual predispositions. You may start by the high <i>a priori</i>
+road, or you may feel your way gradually by induction from verifiable
+experiences; and of these two main currents of speculative opinion
+whichever is the stronger at any given period will affect every branch
+of thought and action. Coleridge appealed to history as proving that
+all epoch-making<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> revolutions coincide with the rise or fall of
+metaphysical systems, and he attributed the power of abstract theories
+over revolutionary movements to the craving of man for higher guidance
+than sensations. However this may be, it may be affirmed that the
+rationalism of the eighteenth century in England and France found room
+by replacing the decaying theologies and substituting reason for the
+traditional authority. This was the period that produced in France the
+philosophic conception of abstract humanity, everywhere the same
+naturally, with a superficial distinction of circumstances, but
+differentiated in the main by bad laws, artificial inequalities, and
+social injustice. In France the method of deducing conclusions from
+abstract principles concerning the rights of man and the social
+compact gained predominance, until they were shaped by Rousseau and
+others into the formal indictment of a corrupt society. It was the
+point and impulse thus given to very real grievances and irritation
+against privilege, that precipitated the French Revolution. Among the
+English, on the other hand, their public spirit, the connection of
+large classes with national affairs, and their habit of compromise,
+had predisposed the leading minds towards cautious views in philosophy
+and in politics; and at the century's end their inbred distrust of
+abstract propositions as a basis for social reconstruction received
+startling confirmation from the tremendous explosion in France.</p>
+
+<p>The foregoing remarks give in bare outline the conditions and
+circumstances, very carefully examined and skilfully analysed by Mr.
+Leslie Stephen, that prepared and cleared the ground for the
+Utilitarians. Their object was not to reconstruct, hardly to remodel,
+existing forms of government; it was to remove abuses, and to devise
+remedies for the evils<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> of an unwieldy and complicated administrative
+machine, clogged by stupidity and selfishness. And the plan of Mr.
+Stephen's first volume is to describe the state of society at this
+period, the condition of agriculture and the industries, the position
+of the Church and the Universities, of the Army and Navy, the
+intellectual tendencies indicated by the philosophic doctrines, and
+generally to sketch the political and social aspects of England rather
+more than a hundred years ago. He is writing, as he says, the history
+of a sect; and in dealing with the tenets of that sect he lays
+prominent stress upon what may be called the environment, upon the
+various circumstances which may influence forms of belief, and
+particularly upon the idiosyncrasies of the men who held and
+propagated them. It is for this latter reason that he has given us
+brief and interesting biographies of those whose influence was
+greatest in shaping and directing the movement, illustrating his
+narrative by portraits of them as they lived and acted. All these
+things help us towards understanding how it comes to pass that
+conclusions which seem clear as daylight to earnest thinkers in one
+generation may be abandoned by succeeding generations as manifestly
+erroneous. The inquiry also shows why, and to what extent, some of the
+doctrines that were scientifically propounded by the Utilitarians did
+initiate and lead up to an important reformation in the methods of
+English government.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'It might be stated as a paradox' (Mr. Stephen observes) 'that,
+whereas in France the most palpable evils arose from the excessive
+power of the central government, and in England the most palpable
+evils arose from the feebleness of the central government, the
+French reformers demanded more government, and the English
+reformers less government.... The solution seems to be easy. In
+France, reformers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> such as Turgot and the economists were in favour
+of an enlightened despotism, because ... it would suppress the
+exclusive privileges of a class which, doing nothing in return, had
+become a mere burthen, encumbering all social development. But in
+England the privileged class was identical with the governing
+class.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The English aristocracy, in fact, were actually doing the country's
+business, though they were doing it badly, and paid themselves much
+too highly for very indifferent administration. Yet the English nation
+acquiesced in the system, because the middle classes were growing rich
+and prosperous, and the State interfered very little with their
+private affairs. To this general statement of the case we agree; but
+we may point out that in terming our aristocracy a privileged class
+one material distinction has been passed over. For whereas the French
+<i>noblesse</i> constituted a caste partly exempted by birthright from the
+general taxation, and vested with certain vexatious rights to which no
+duties corresponded, the English aristocracy possessed legally no
+privileges at all. It was not an exclusive order, but an upper class
+that was constantly recruited, being open to all successful men; and
+such a governing body is naturally indifferent to reforms, because it
+is very little affected by administrative imperfections or abuses.
+Pauperism and ignorance may fester long among the masses before
+wealthy and prosperous rulers discover that the interests of their own
+class are imperilled; the state of prisons does not concern them
+personally; and so long as life and property are fairly secure, they
+care little about an efficient police. The Englishman of whom a
+Frenchman reported with amazement that he consoled himself for having
+been robbed by the reflection that there were no policemen in his
+country, must have belonged <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>to this comfortable class. And the
+inveterate conservation of abuses in the Church, the Law, and the Army
+may be partially explained in a similar way. In France the Church and
+the army were really privileged bodies: the vast ecclesiastical
+revenues were protected from taxation, and the commissioned ranks of
+the army were reserved for the <i>noblesse</i>; the French parliaments were
+close magisterial corporations. In England these were all open
+professions, with no special fiscal rights or social limitations; the
+prizes were available for general competition, and as every one had a
+chance of winning them by interest or even merit, there was no
+formidable outcry against the system.</p>
+
+<p>In politics, therefore, as well as in philosophy, the prevailing habit
+of the English mind was more moderate, less thorough-going and
+subversive, than in France. Mr. Stephen makes a keen and rapid
+analysis of the common-sense psychology, as expounded by Reid and
+Dugald Stewart, to show the correspondence at this period between
+abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the
+limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon
+the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their
+teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking
+experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off
+the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the
+derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics,
+there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was
+brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which
+were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of
+the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle said
+long afterwards, the Scottish philosophers started from the
+mechanical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> premises suggested by Hume. 'They let loose instinct as an
+indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against his conclusions; they
+tugged lustily against the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly
+towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of atheism and
+fatalism.' To save themselves from materialism they invented
+Intuitions, and thereby incurred the wrath of orthodox Utilitarianism,
+which was rigidly empirical. They were, however, accepted in England,
+where any haven was welcome, however uncertain might be the holding
+ground, which sheltered the vessel from being blown by windy
+speculation out into a shoreless sea.</p>
+
+<p>The Scottish philosophy therefore</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'was in philosophy what Whiggism was in politics. Like political
+Whiggism, it included a large element of enlightened and liberal
+rationalism; but, like Whiggism, it covered an aversion to
+thorough-going logic. The English politician was suspicious of
+abstract principle, but would cover his acceptance of tradition and
+rule of thumb by general phrases about liberty and toleration. The
+Whig in philosophy equally accepted the traditional creed,
+sufficiently purified from cruder elements, and sheltered his
+doctrine by speaking of intuitions and laws of thought.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The foregoing quotation may serve to indicate briefly the situation,
+in politics and philosophy, at the time when Bentham, 'the patriarch
+of the English Utilitarians,' appeared upon the scene. Mr. Stephen's
+sketch of his life and doctrines, which occupies the latter half of
+the book's first volume, is eminently instructive and often amusing.
+He excels in tracing the continuity of ideas, and in showing how they
+converge upon the point of view that is gradually reached by some
+writer of superior force and activity, who rejects, alters, or uses
+them in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> the process of working out the doctrines of some new school.
+It was the spread of philanthropy, of a conscientious fellow-feeling
+for those classes of society who suffered from neglect and misrule,
+that fostered the movement towards political and social reform. This
+feeling was represented in Bentham's celebrated formula, originally
+invented by Hutcheson, about 'the greatest happiness of the greatest
+number'; and the criterion of utility was laid down as having the
+widest possible application to all sorts and conditions of men.
+Self-help, individualism, <i>laisser-faire</i>, the economic view that each
+should be left free to pursue his own interests, were principles
+intended to operate for the removal of abuses and the destruction of
+unfair privileges: they were promulgated for the relief of humanity at
+large, although the system which was built up on them came afterwards
+to be denounced as narrow, selfish, and materialistic. These ideas
+were undoubtedly congenial to the habits and character of Englishmen,
+who, like free men everywhere, had a traditional distrust of strong
+and active government, preferring King Log, on the whole, to King
+Stork. Inequalities and incomprehensible laws were to be seen in the
+course of Nature no less than in the English Constitution; and in
+either case a man might rely upon his wits and energy to deal with
+them. It might be that the defects in human government could only be
+remedied by employing the forces of government to cure them; but if
+you began to set going the administrative engine there was no saying
+where it might stop. Bentham held all government to be an evil, though
+he differed from the modern anarchist in holding it to be a necessary
+evil; yet he needed a strong scientific administration for the purpose
+of rooting out inveterate abuses. And this was the dilemma that
+confronted him. He worked out his solution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> of the problem by laying
+out a whole system of morals and a science of politics, with Utility
+as their base and standard, which has profoundly influenced all
+subsequent legislation, and led eventually to much more extensive
+theories regarding the sphere and duties of government than he himself
+would have advocated or approved.</p>
+
+<p>The principal events of Bentham's life, and the development of his
+opinions, are condensed by Mr. Stephen into one chapter with his usual
+biographical skill. Bentham started in life as a barrister, and
+attended Blackstone's lectures, with the result that he was deeply
+impressed by the fallacies of the legal theories there expounded, and
+soon afterward vowed eternal war against the Demon of Chicane. He
+struggled against narrow means and obscurity until he made the
+acquaintance of Lord Shelburne, through whom he became acquainted with
+other leading statesmen, and with Miss Caroline Fox, to whom he made a
+futile proposal of marriage some years later. At Bowood he also met
+Dumont, and thereby formed his connection with the French jurists,
+though in his old age he declared that Dumont, his chief interpreter
+abroad, 'did not understand a word of his meaning'; the true cause of
+his quarrel being that Dumont criticised Bentham's dinners. He
+travelled on the Continent, and lived some time in Russia. Soon
+afterward the Revolution made a clean sweep of all the old
+institutions in France, and thus laid open a bare and level ground
+just suited, as Bentham thought, for an architect who had his
+portfolio full of new administrative plans. It was long, indeed,
+before he could understand why systematic reforms were not immediately
+accepted as soon as their utility was logically demonstrated. He lost
+no time in providing the French National Assembly with elaborate
+schemes for the reconstruction <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>of various departments of government,
+and he even offered to go to France to set up his model prison,
+proposing himself 'to become gratuitously the gaoler thereof.' The
+Assembly requited his zeal by conferring on him the title of a French
+citizen; but social reorganisation took the shape of September
+massacres and the Reign of Terror, whereat Bentham was disgusted,
+though in no way disheartened, as a theorist.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Never' (says Mr. Stephen) 'was an adviser more at cross purposes
+with the advised. It would be impossible to draw a more striking
+portrait of the abstract reasoner, whose calculations of human
+motives omit all reference to passion, and who fancied that all
+prejudice can be dispelled by a few bits of logic.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Here, in fact, we have the key to Bentham's character, to its weakness
+and also to its strength. A philosopher who plunges into the practical
+affairs of the world without taking human feelings and imagination
+into account is sure to find himself stumbling about among blocks and
+blockheads, and tripped up by the ill-will of vested interests; but on
+the other hand, if he has taken the right direction, his ardent
+energies have the impetus of some natural force. Bentham's earlier
+notion had been that political reforms could be introduced like
+improvements in machinery; you had only to prove the superior utility
+of your new invention to obtain its adoption by all who were concerned
+in the business. Latterly he made the surprising discovery that in the
+public offices, in the Law, and in the Church, the heads of these
+professions are usually quite satisfied with their own monopolies, are
+opposed to change, and are always ready with a stock of plausible
+arguments to show the folly and danger of innovation. If the
+Utilitarian appeals to facts, common sense,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> and experience, so also
+does the Conservative; and until public opinion is decidedly for
+progress the dead weight prevails. Not for a day did Bentham relax his
+strenuous exertions, but he changed his tactics; he turned from his
+mechanical workshop to the study of political dynamics, and he found
+what he wanted in the rising radicalism&mdash;'his principal occupation, in
+a word, was to provide political philosophy for radical reformers.'</p>
+
+<p>Of the philosophic creed which Bentham undertook to proclaim from his
+hermitage at Ford Abbey, with James Mill as his leading apostle, Mr.
+Stephen gives us a very shrewd and incisively critical examination.
+The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and
+authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive
+doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the
+necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying
+ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his
+own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific
+principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete
+facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a
+single formula, to the destruction of idols of the market or tribe,
+and to the confusion of those who fattened upon antique superstitions.
+'All government is one vast evil,' and can only be kept from mischief
+by minute regulations and constant vigilance. Whatever is plainly
+illogical must be radically wrong&mdash;'to make a barrister a judge is as
+sensible as it would be to select a procuress for mistress of a girls'
+school;' and a parish boy, if he could read properly, might go through
+the Church services with the Prayer Book and the Homilies, so that an
+established Church is a costly and indefensible luxury. Taking
+Utility, founded on observation of actual facts, as his guide and his
+measure of existing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> institutions, he treated them as colossal
+iniquities, as frauds upon the people, as dead and ineffectual for the
+purposes of moral and political life. Nevertheless, although he
+condemned the whole fabric as it stood, Bentham was an absolute
+believer in the unlimited power of laws and institutions; nor was he
+far from wishing to deal with them on the principles applicable to the
+reform of prisons, as undesirable but necessary instruments of
+coercion to be despotically administered upon a scientific model,
+after the fashion of his favourite Panopticon. He was, in short, as
+Mr. Stephen points out, an unconscious follower of Hobbes, with this
+difference, that in Bentham's case the omnipotent Leviathan, for
+control and direction, was to be enlightened public opinion. And he
+was apparently convinced, without misgivings, that a model government,
+framed logically upon that common sense which is a public property,
+could be introduced and enforced under popular sanction as easily as
+new regulations for an ill-managed gaol. He was fully prepared to make
+liberal allowance, in framing his constitution, for the different
+needs, circumstances, and habits of communities; he was quite aware
+that precisely the same legislation would not suit England and India;
+but he believed national circumstance and character to be extensively
+modifiable by manifestly useful institutions, and he was ready to
+begin the operation at once, 'to legislate for Hindostan as well as
+for his own parish, and to make codes not only for England, Spain, and
+Russia, but also for Morocco.'</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen has no difficulty in exposing the shortcomings and
+inadequacy of these doctrines. But he is writing the history of
+certain political ideas; so his main object is to show how such ideas
+are formed, the course they have followed, and their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> influence upon
+thought and action up to the present day. To trace the links and
+continuity of ideas is to analyse their elements, and to show the
+impress that they received from external circumstance, permanent or
+temporary; it is an important method in the science of politics. Upon
+the empiricism of English philosophy in the eighteenth century Bentham
+constructed a Theory of Morals that purported to rest exclusively on
+facts ascertained and verifiable, with happiness as our being's end
+and aim, with pain and pleasure as the ultimate principles of conduct;
+and upon this foundation he proceeded to build up his system of
+politics and legislation. Any attempt to derive morality from other
+sources, or to measure it by other standards, he denounced as
+arbitrary and misleading; he threw aside metaphysics, and therefore
+theology, as illusory. The exclusive appeal to experience, to plain
+reasoning from the evidence of our senses, from actual observation of
+human propensities, was sufficient for his purposes, and tallied with
+his designs as a practical reformer. In these views he was a disciple
+of Hume, whose influence has surreptitiously percolated all modern
+thought, and his unintentional allies were the teachers of Natural
+religion, with Paley as its principal exponent. Having thus defined
+and explained the basis of ethical philosophy, the Utilitarian has to
+build up the superstructure of legal ordinance; and he is at once
+confronted by the difficult problem of distinguishing the sphere of
+ethics from the province of law. Upon this vital question Mr. Stephen,
+as an expert in ethics, gives a dissertation that is exceedingly acute
+and instructive; and we may commend, in particular, his criticism of
+the doctrine that the morality of an act depends upon its
+consequences, not upon its motives. As he observes, this may be true,
+with certain reserves, in law, where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> the business of the legislature
+is to prohibit and punish acts that directly endanger the order and
+security of a community. But 'the exclusion of motive justifiable in
+law may take all meaning out of morality'; and yet nothing is more
+complicated than the question of demarcating a clear frontier between
+the two provinces. Mr. Stephen's examination of this question is the
+more important because it involves the problem of regulating private
+morals by public enactments; and also because the confusion of motives
+with intentions lies at the bottom of much mischievous sophistry, for
+some of the worst crimes in history have been suggested by plausible
+motives, and have been defended on that ground. He shows that
+Bentham's survey of the springs of human action was incomplete, that
+he overstrained his formula to make it universally applicable, and
+that he nevertheless gave a far-reaching impulse to clearer notions
+and an effective advance in the simplification of legal procedure and
+the codification of laws. As a moral philosophy, Bentham's system
+appeared so arid and materialistic that its unpopularity has obscured
+his real services. For he was the engineer who first led a scientific
+attack up to the ramparts of legal chicanery, and made a breach
+through which all subsequent reform found its entry.</p>
+
+<p>The axiom that utility is the source of justice and equity is of very
+ancient date, and indeed the word is sufficiently elastic to
+comprehend every conceivable human motive; but no one before Bentham
+had employed it so energetically as a lever to overturn ponderous
+abuses, or had pointed his theory so directly against notorious facts.
+On the other hand, since he despised and rejected historical studies,
+he greatly miscalculated the binding strength of long usage and
+possession. He forgot, what Hume had been careful to remember, that
+whether men's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> reasoning on these subjects be right or wrong, the
+conclusions have not really been reached by logic, but have grown up
+out of instincts, and correspond with certain immemorial needs and
+aspirations of humanity. Hume had sketched, before Bentham, his Idea
+of a Perfect Commonwealth; yet he begins by the warning that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'It is not with forms of government as with other artificial
+contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected if we can
+discover another more accurate and commodious ... the bulk of
+mankind' (he adds) 'being governed by authority, not by reason, and
+never attributing authority to anything that has not the
+recommendation of antiquity.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter
+doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations
+prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his
+frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political
+projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power,
+and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he
+could only get the power he could radically change for the better the
+circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on
+the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is
+indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is
+constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is
+an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the
+natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may
+produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France;
+while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation,
+to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and
+wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public
+opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> protracted opposition. It
+is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and
+convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with
+it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his
+principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction
+of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century,
+though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired.
+He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify
+society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that
+power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the
+State, once established on a democratic basis, would exercise the
+power and disregard his carefully drawn limitations. A tendency toward
+State Socialism he would have detested above all things; and yet that
+is the direction inevitably taken by supreme authority when the
+responsibility for the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
+imposed upon it by popular demand.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen's second volume describes the later phase of the
+Utilitarian creed, when it passed from its founder into the hands of
+ardent disciples. The transition necessarily involves some divergence
+of views and methods. In religious movements it usually begins after
+the founder's death; but as Bentham lived to superintend his apostolic
+successors, his relations with them were not invariably harmonious.
+The leadership fell upon James Mill, whose early life and general
+character, the development of his opinions, and the bearing of his
+philosophy upon his politics, are the subjects of one of those
+condensed biographical sketches in which Mr. Stephen excels. In the
+<i>History of India</i>, which brought to James Mill reputation and
+pecuniary independence, he could apply his deductive theories to a
+remote and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> little known country without much risk of contradiction
+from actual circumstances or of checks from the misapprehension of
+facts. In England the Utilitarian doctrines, as propounded in Mill's
+writings, raised up opposition and hostile criticism from various
+quarters. The general current of ideas and feelings had now set
+decidedly toward the suppression of inveterate abuses, and toward
+constitutional reform. Radicalism was gaining ground rapidly, and even
+Socialism had come to the surface, while Political Economy was in the
+ascendant. But the old Tories closed their ranks for a fierce
+resistance against theories that menaced, as it seemed to them,
+nothing less than destruction to time-honoured institutions; and the
+Whigs had no taste for doctrines that pretended to be reasonable, but
+appeared to them in effect revolutionary. The different positions of
+contending parties were illustrated, as Mr. Stephen shows, by their
+respective attitudes towards Church Reform. The Tories defended
+ecclesiastical establishment as one of the main bastions of the
+citadel; the Whigs would preserve the Church in subjection to the
+State; while James Mill, in the <i>Westminster Review</i>, declared the
+Church of England to be a mere State machine, worked in subservience
+to the sinister interest of the governing classes. He desired 'to
+abolish all dogmas and ceremonies, and to employ the clergy to give
+lectures on ethics, botany, and political economy, with decent dances
+and social meals for the celebration of Sunday.' Mr. Stephen, after
+observing that this plan exemplifies 'the incapacity of an isolated
+clique to understand the real tone of public opinion,' adds that 'it
+seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman
+read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal
+instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a
+psychologist, to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> strength and persistence of one of the most
+powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article
+proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the
+Oxford Movement was stirring up a wave of enthusiasm for the dogmas
+and ritual which he treated as obsolete and nonsensical; nor is there
+anything more remarkable or unexpected in the political changes of the
+last sixty years, than the discomfiture of those prophets who have
+foretold the decay of all liturgies and the speedy dissolution of
+ecclesiastical establishments. This phenomenon is by no means confined
+to England, or even to Europe; and at the present day, when the power
+of religious idealism is better understood upon wider experience, no
+practical politician attempts to disregard sentiments that defy logic
+and pass the understanding.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless Utilitarianism, as represented by James Mill's 'Essay on
+Government,' was attracting increased attention, and was provoking
+serious alarm. It was a period of confidence in theories which have
+been partly confirmed and partly contradicted by subsequent
+experiences of those 'principles of human nature' in which political
+speculators so unreservedly trusted. In France, some fifty years
+earlier, the destructive theorist had swept all before him; in
+England, while he was assaulting with effect the entrenchments of
+Conservatism, he was taken in flank by the moderate reformers. Mill
+had denounced the Whigs as half-hearted and even treacherous allies,
+who dallied with Radicalism to conceal their nefarious design of
+obtaining political mastery with the fewest concessions possible. He
+relied upon universal education to qualify the masses for the
+possession of an extensive franchise, and upon enlightened
+self-interest to guarantee their proper use of it. Macaulay rejoined,
+in the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, that the masses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> might possibly conclude
+that they would get more pleasure than pain out of universal
+spoliation; and that if his opponent's principles were correct and his
+scheme adopted, 'literature, science, commerce, and manufactures might
+be swept away, and a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the
+owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities.' It was a
+notable controversial tournament, at which the intelligent bystander
+probably assisted with much satisfaction and no excessive alarm,
+having little faith in the absolute theorist, and not much in the
+disinterestedness of the Whigs. For the moment it was sufficient that
+both parties agreed in supporting the Reform Bill, although, as Mr.
+Stephen remarks, the Radical regarded it as a payment on account,
+while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge. We
+may observe, to the honour of a great Liberal family, that as the
+first Lord Lansdowne discerned Bentham's talents and gave him his
+start in life, so the impression made upon the second marquis by
+Macaulay's articles induced him to offer the writer his first seat in
+Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen deals with the duel between Mill and Macaulay from the
+standpoint of an impartial umpire, with an expert's appreciation of
+their logical fencing and some humorous glances at the heated
+combatants. Mill was an austere Puritan, who would fell the Tory like
+an ox and would trample upon the cunning self-seeking Whig. The
+Edinburgh Reviewers were a set of brilliant young men who represented
+intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become
+judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing in their
+social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social
+injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of
+Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> the
+French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a
+diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a
+type of Conservatism he gives us Robert Southey, whose fortune it was
+to be fiercely abused by the Utilitarians and ridiculed by the Whigs.
+Southey, like many others, had been frightened out of early Liberalism
+into the conviction that Reform would be the inevitable precursor of
+revolution; and in 1817 he had written to Lord Liverpool that the only
+hope of saving the country lay in gagging the seditious press.
+'Concessions,' he said, 'can only serve to hasten the catastrophe. Woe
+be to the garrison who hoist a white flag to an enemy that gives no
+quarter.' Yet Southey had a deep feeling for the misery of the lower
+classes at this period of widespread distress. In his belief in the
+power of Government to remedy social evils, he was much nearer the
+accepted line of later public opinion than Macaulay, who would have
+confined the State's business to the maintenance of order, the defence
+of property, and the practice of departmental economy. And when
+Southey, following Coleridge and preceding Gladstone, insisted upon
+the vital importance of religion as a principle of State policy,
+neither he nor Gladstone deserved all the ridicule cast upon them by
+Macaulay in his brilliant essays; for at any rate no first-class
+Government in Europe has hitherto ventured upon dissolving connection
+with the Church.</p>
+
+<p>For his philosophy, Mr. Stephen tells us, Southey was in the habit of
+referring to Coleridge, whose hostility to the Utilitarians went on
+different and deeper grounds. Coleridge had convinced himself that all
+the errors of the time, and their political dangers, arose from a
+false and godless empiricism. He declared that revolutionary periods
+have always been connected with the popular prevalence of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> abstract
+ideas, and that the speculative principles of men between twenty and
+thirty are the great source of political prophecy. He developed this
+view in a singular letter upon the state of affairs and opinions which
+he also, like Southey, addressed to Lord Liverpool in 1817, and which
+somewhat bewildered that veteran statesman. With the moderns, he said,
+'nothing grows, all is made'; whereas growth itself is but a disguised
+mode of being made by the superinduction of the <i>jam data</i> on the <i>jam
+datum</i>; and he insisted that 'the flux of individuals at any moment in
+existence in a country is there for the value of the State, far more
+than the State for them, though both positions are true
+proportionately.' In other words, Coleridge pressed the evolutionary
+view against the sharp set, shortsighted Utilitarian propositions; and
+he would have agreed that antiquated prejudices are absurd only to
+those who have not looked back to their origin, when they can be found
+to proceed in logical order from natural causes. He had not been
+always a resolute opponent of the Utilitarian theory of morals; but,
+like other philosophers, he had become alarmed at the consequence of
+being shut up within the prison of finite senses, and he grasped at
+Kant's discovery of the difference between Understanding and Reason,
+in order to retire upon a metaphysical basis of religion and morality,
+and to withstand the prudential calculus. We are inclined to suggest
+that Mr. Stephen, who does little more than glance at Coleridge's
+position, has underestimated his influence upon the intellectual
+direction of politics in the first half of this century. Coleridge
+certainly provided an antidote to the crudity of eager Radicalism in
+Church and State, and his ideas may be recognised not only in the
+great High Church movement that was stirred up by the Tractarians, but
+also in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> larger comprehension of the duties and attributes of the
+State that has been slowly gaining ground up to our own day.</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, the growth and development of English opinion regarding
+these public duties and attributes, as it is traced in Mr. Stephen's
+book, that forms, in our opinion, its chief value; and we are
+reviewing it mainly as a history of political ideas. This is, we
+believe, the practical outcome of the increasing feeling of sympathy
+between different classes of the community, of a sense of
+responsibility, of what is called altruism, of solidarity among all
+the diverse interests that have lately characterised our legislation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The two great rival theories of the functions of the State
+are&mdash;the theory which was for so many years dominant in England,
+and which may for convenience be called the Individualist theory;
+and the theory which is stated most fully and powerfully by the
+Greek philosophers, which we may call the Socialist theory. The
+Individualist theory regards the State as a purely utilitarian
+institution, a mere means to an end.... It represents the State as
+existing mainly for the protection of property and personal
+liberty, and as having therefore no concern with the private life
+and character of the citizen, except in so far as these may make
+him dangerous to the material welfare of his neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>'The Greek theory, on the other hand, though it likewise regards
+the State as a means to certain ends, regards it as something
+more.... According to this theory, no department of life is outside
+the scope of politics; and a healthy State is at once the end at
+which the science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are
+carried out.'<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Accepting this passage as a philosophical statement of tendencies, we
+may observe that neither theory<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> has ever been definitely adopted in
+England. The Utilitarians desired to recast institutions for the
+greater happiness of all citizens, but they were averse to investing
+the State with autocratic powers of interference. The Tories, on the
+other hand, were awakening to the conviction that the Government must
+do more for the people; but their fear of change and their own
+'sinister interests,' persuaded them that this might be done without
+radical reforms. The Whigs faced both ways, and since in England the
+truly valuable effect of extreme opinions is always to drive the
+majority into a middle course, they rose to power on that compromise
+which is represented by the Reform measures of 1832. The Reform Bill
+was accepted by the Utilitarians as an instalment of the rightful
+authority of the people over the conduct of public affairs, and
+therefore a provisional method of promoting their welfare. The first
+Tory statesman of that day, on the contrary, was convinced that for
+the public welfare the existing Constitution could not be bettered:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'During one hundred and fifty years the Constitution in its present
+form has been in force; and I would ask any man who hears me to
+declare whether the experience of history has produced any form of
+government so calculated to promote the happiness and secure the
+liberties of a free and enlightened people.'<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Both parties, in fact, appealed to experience; but Peel took his stand
+upon history, which the Utilitarians disregarded as a mere record of
+unscientific errors, or at most as a lighthouse to give warning of
+rocks, rather than a lamp to show the road ahead. And the point upon
+which they joined issue was as to the consequences of staking the
+whole fabric of government upon the basis of public opinion, operating
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>through almost unlimited popular suffrage. The Tory foretold that
+this would end in wrecking the Constitution, with the ship among
+breakers, and steering by ballot voting. The Benthamite persuaded
+himself that enlightened self-interest, empirical perceptions of
+utility, and general education, would prevail with the multitude for
+their support of a rational system. But with those who demanded
+sovereignty for the people a strict limitation of the sphere of
+government was one essential maxim; and the Utilitarians would have
+agreed with Guizot when he declared it to be 'a mere commonplace that
+as civilisation and reason progress, the sphere of public authority
+contracts.' They do not appear to have foreseen that whenever the
+masses should have got votes legislation would become democratic, or
+even socialistic, in order to capture them. This discovery was
+eventually made by the Tories, who availed themselves of it to dish
+the Whigs, and to come forward again upon a popular suffrage as the
+true friends and guardians of the people.</p>
+
+<p>In Mr. Stephen's second volume James Mill is the principal figure, as
+the apostle of Benthamism, though he also describes briefly, in his
+terse and incisive style, the lives and opinions of some notable men,
+foes as well as friends to the party, who represented different
+expressions of energetic protest against existing institutions. To
+each of them is allotted his proper place in the line of attack, and
+his due share in the general enterprise of rousing, by argument or
+invective, the slow-thinking English people to a sense of their
+lamentable condition. Cobbett and Owen were at feud with true
+Utilitarians, and in unconscious alliance, against the orthodox
+economists, with the Tories, who, as we have said, have eventually
+found their advantage in the democratic movement. Cobbett fought for
+the cause<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> of the agricultural labourer, trodden under foot by squires
+and parsons. Owen believed that the grasping capitalist, with his
+steam machinery, would further degrade and impoverish the working
+classes. Godwin, who is merely mentioned by Mr. Stephen, was a
+peaceful anarchist, who proposed 'to abolish the whole craft and
+mystery of government,' to abandon coercion and rely upon just
+reasoning, upon the enlightened assent of individuals to the payment
+of taxes. They all embodied ideas that are incessantly fermenting in
+some ardent minds, and that maintain a perceptible influence on
+political controversies at the present day. Godwin agreed with the
+Utilitarians that government is a bad thing in itself, but he went
+beyond them in concluding that it is, or ought to be, unnecessary to
+society. To both Radical and Socialist, Utilitarianism, with its
+frigid philanthropy and its reliance on self-help, prudence, and free
+competition for converting miserable masses into a healthy and moral
+population, was the gospel of selfishness, invented for the salvation
+of landlords and capitalists. Malthus was the heartless exponent of
+natural laws that kept down multiplication by famine, while the rich
+man fared sumptuously every day; and the Ricardians, with their
+mechanical balancing of supply and demand, were mocking distress by
+solemn formulas. It must be admitted that these sharp assailants hit
+some palpable rifts in the Utilitarian armour of proof; and we know
+that popular sentiment has since been compelling later economists to
+take up much wider ground in defence of their scientific position.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrines of Malthus, of Ricardo and of Ricardo's disciples are
+subjected to a searching analysis by Mr. Stephen, who brings out their
+limitations very effectively. Yet it is by no means easy, even under
+our author's skilful guidance, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> follow the Utilitarian track
+through the fields of economy, philosophy, and theology, and to show
+in what manner or degree it led up to the issues under discussion in
+our own time. All these 'streams of tendency' have had their influence
+on the main current and direction of contemporary politics, but they
+cannot be measured or mapped out upon the scale of a review. And, in
+regard to political economy, we may even venture to question whether
+the earlier dogmatic theories now retain sufficient interest to
+justify the space which, in this volume, has been devoted to a
+scrutiny of them; for their methods, as well as their conclusions,
+have now become to a certain extent obsolete. A strictly empirical
+science must be continually changing with fresh data and a broader
+outlook; it is always shifting under stress of new interests, changed
+feelings, and unforeseen contingencies; it is very serviceable for the
+exposure of errors, but its own demonstrations are in time proved to
+be erroneous or inadequate. Moreover, to explain the ills that afflict
+a society, and to declare them incurable except by patience and slow
+alterative medicines, is often to render them intolerable; nor is it
+of much practical importance to lay out, on hard scientific
+principles, the methodical operation of causes and effects that have
+always been understood in a rough experimental way.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The truth that scarcity meant dearness was apparently well known
+to Joseph in Egypt, and applied very skilfully for his purpose.
+Economists have framed a theory of value which explains more
+precisely the way in which this is brought about. A clear statement
+may be valuable to psychologists; but for most purposes of
+political economy Joseph's knowledge is sufficient,'</p></div>
+
+<p>If Joseph had written a treatise on the agrarian tenures of Egypt he
+might not have bought them up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> so easily at famine prices, and he
+might have entangled himself in a discussion upon peasant properties.
+The economist who makes an inductive demonstration of unalterable
+natural laws and propensities may be likened to the scientific
+legislator who undertakes to codify prevailing usages: he turns an
+elastic custom, constantly modified in practice by needs and
+sentiments, into an unbending statute, when the bare unvarnished
+statement of the principle produces an outcry. Natural processes will
+not bear calm philosophic explanations that are understood to imply
+approval of them as cruel but inevitable; not even in such an
+essentially moralistic argument as that of Butler's 'Analogy,' which
+some have regarded as a plea of ambiguous advantage to the cause of
+natural religion. Malthus, for example, proved undeniably the
+pernicious consequences of reckless propagation; but he who forces a
+great evil upon public attention is expected to find the practical
+remedy; and Malthus had little to prescribe beyond a few palliative
+measures and the expediency of self-restraint, while his proposal to
+abolish the poor laws in the interest of pauperism was interpreted as
+a recommendation that poor folk should be starved into prudential and
+self-reliant habits. Malthus held, indeed, that the improvement of the
+condition of the labouring classes should be considered as the main
+interest of society. But he also thought that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'to improve their condition, it is essential to impress them with
+the conviction that they can do much more for themselves than
+others can do for them, and that the <i>only</i> source of their
+permanent improvement is the improvement of their moral and
+religious habits. What government can do, therefore, is to maintain
+such institutions as may strengthen the <i>vis medicatrix</i>, or desire
+to better our condition, which poor laws had directly tended to
+weaken.'</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p><p>There is much wisdom to be found in these counsels; but good advice
+rather excites than allays the ignorant impatience of acute suffering,
+and popular opinion soon began to inquire whether the <i>vis medicatrix</i>
+might not be administered in some more drastic form by the State. The
+conception of a rational government superintending, without
+interference, the slow evolution of morals, had a kind of
+correspondence, in the religious sphere, with the doctrine of
+pre-established harmonies so clearly ordained that to suggest any need
+of further Divine interposition to readjust them occasionally was a
+reflection upon the wisdom and foresight of Providence. But the stress
+and exigencies of modern party politics has rendered this attitude
+untenable for the temporal ruler.</p>
+
+<p>The pure economists, however, prescribed moral remedies without
+investigating the elements of morality. They settled the laws of
+production and distribution as eliminated from the observation of
+ordinary facts; they corrected errors and registered the mechanical
+working of human desires and efforts. It is Mr. Stephen's plan,
+throughout this book, to show the bearing of philosophical speculation
+on practical conduct; and accordingly, after his chapter on Malthus
+and the Ricardians, he turns back again to philosophy and ethics. His
+clear and cogent exposition of the views and conclusions put forward
+on these subjects by Thomas Brown, with the express approval of James
+Mill, is an illustration of Coleridge's dictum regarding the
+connection between abstract theories and political movements.
+Admitting the connection, we may again observe that there is a certain
+danger in stating the theories too scientifically. Neither morals nor
+religion are much aided by digging down into their foundations. Yet
+the logical constructor of a new system usually finds himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> driven
+by controversy into a discussion of ultimate ideas, though the
+Utilitarians refused to be forced back into metaphysics. No professor
+of philosophy, however, can altogether avoid asking himself what
+underlies experience and the formation of beliefs; and Brown did his
+best for the Utilitarians by defining Intuition as a belief that
+passes analysis, a principle independent of human reasoning, which
+'does not allow us to pass a single step beyond experience, but merely
+authorises us to interpret experience.' It was James Mill's mission to
+cut short and to simplify philosophical aberrations for his practical
+purposes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'As a publicist, a historian, and a busy official, he had not much
+time to spare for purely philosophic reading. He was not a
+professor in want of a system, but an energetic man of business,
+wishing to strike at the root of superstitions to which his
+political opponents appealed for support. He had heard of Kant, and
+seen "what the poor man would be at".'</p></div>
+
+<p>His own views are elaborated in his book on the <i>Analysis of the
+Phenomena of the Human Mind</i>, for a close criticism of which we must
+refer readers to Mr. Stephen's second volume. The connection of these
+dissertations with the social and political ends of the Utilitarians
+lies, it may be said briefly, in the support which a purely
+experiential psychology gives to the doctrine that human character
+depends on external circumstance, and that such vague terms as the
+'moral sense' only disguise the true identity of rules of morality
+with the considerations that can be shown to produce general
+happiness. Whenever there appears to be a conflict between these rules
+and considerations, utility is the only sure criterion. To the extreme
+situations in which casuistry revels, as when a man is called upon to
+sacrifice his life or his personal honour for his country's good, the
+Utilitarian would apply this unfailing test inexorably;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> in such cases
+a man ought to decide upon a calculation of the greatest happiness of
+the majority. He does not, in fact, apply this reckoning; he may
+possibly not have time, at the urgent moment, to work it out; his
+heroism is inspired by the universal praise or blame that reward
+self-devotion or punish shrinking from it, and thus render acts moral
+or immoral by the habitual association of ideas. The martyr or patriot
+does not, indeed, stop to calculate; he does not feel the subtle
+egoism that is hidden in the desire for applause; he believes himself
+to be acting with the perfect disinterestedness which can only be
+accounted for by superficial reasoners on the assumption of some such
+abstract notion as religion, moral sense, or duty. Since the behaviour
+of mankind at large, therefore, is invariably guided by a remote or
+proximate consideration of utility; since conduct depends upon
+character, and character is shaped by external conditions and positive
+sanctions, it is possible to frame, on utilitarian principles,
+scientific rules of behaviour which can be powerfully, though
+indirectly, promoted by legislation and a system of enlightened
+polity. For morality, it is argued, can be materially assisted by
+pointing to, or even providing, the serious consequences that are
+inseparable from human misdeeds, by proving that pain or pleasure
+follows different kinds of behaviour; while motives are so complex
+that they can never be verified with certainty, and must therefore be
+left out of account. This anatomy of the springs of action obviously
+lays bare some truths, although they fit in much better with the
+department of the legislator than of the moralist. As Mr. Stephen
+forcibly shows, although the consideration of motive may fall very
+seldom within the sphere of legislation, yet no theory which should
+exclude its influence on the moral standard could be tolerated, since
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> motive is of primary importance in our ethical judgment of
+conduct. Nor has motive, as discriminated from intention, ever been
+kept entirely outside the criminal law, notwithstanding the danger of
+admitting, as an extenuation of some violent crime, that the offender
+had convinced himself that some religious or patriotic cause would be
+served by it. James Mill's view of morals as theoretically coordinate
+with law&mdash;because in both departments the intention is the essential
+element in measuring actions according to their consequences&mdash;operated
+in practical contradiction to his principle of restraining State
+interference within narrow limits. It is this latter principle which
+has since given way. For the general trend of later political opinion
+has evidently been towards bringing public morality more and more
+under administrative regulation; and this manifestly indicates a
+growing expansion of ideas upon the legitimate duties and jurisdiction
+of the State.</p>
+
+<p>Upon James Mill's psychology Mr. Stephen's conclusion, with which we
+may agree, is that his analysis of virtue into enlightened
+self-interest is unsuccessful, and we have seen that his conception of
+government, as an all-powerful machine resting upon, yet strictly
+limited by, public opinion, has failed on the side of the limitations.
+Yet although Mill could not explain virtue, he was, after his fashion,
+a virtuous man, whose life was conscientiously devoted to public
+objects.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'His main purpose, too, was to lay down a rule of duty, almost
+mathematically ascertainable, and not to be disturbed by any
+sentimentalism, mysticism, or rhetorical foppery. If, in the
+attempt to free his hearers from such elements, he ran the risk of
+reducing morality to a lower level, and made it appear as unamiable
+as sound morality can appear, it must be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> admitted that in this
+respect, too, his theories reflected his personal character.'</p></div>
+
+<p>It is also probable that his theories, and his bitter controversies in
+defence of them, reacted on his personal character, and that both
+influences are to be traced beyond James Mill's own life, in the
+mental and social prepossessions which he bequeathed to his son.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen's third volume is chiefly occupied by the history of the
+later Utilitarians, and the expansion of their cardinal principle in
+its application to a changing temper of the times, under the
+leadership of John Stuart Mill. We have, first, a closely written and
+critical description of this remarkable man's early life, his
+stringent educational training, the development of his opinions, and
+their influence upon the orthodox tenets of the sect. Upon all these
+subjects Mill has left us, under his own hand, more intimate and
+circumstantial particulars than are to be found, perhaps, in any other
+personal memoir. The writer who tells his own story usually passes
+hastily over boyhood; the ordinary biographer gives some family
+details, or endeavours to amuse us with trivial anecdotes of the child
+who became an important man. J. S. Mill hardly alludes to any member
+of his family except his father, and his early days are marked by a
+total absence of triviality. He was bound over to hard intellectual
+labour at home during the years that for most of us pass so lightly
+and unprofitably at a public school; he was a voracious and
+indefatigable reader and writer from his youth up, with a wolfish
+hunger (as Browning calls it) for knowledge; he plunged into all the
+current discussions of philosophy and politics; he became a practised
+writer and made a good figure at debating clubs; he became so intent
+on the solution of complex social problems as to acquire a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> distaste
+for general society; his mental concentration blunted his sensibility
+to the physical passions that so powerfully sway mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, Mill's outlook upon the world was much wider than his
+father's, and his aim was so to adjust the Utilitarian creed as to
+bring it into closer working accord with the advancing ideas and
+projects of the political parties to whom he was nearest in sympathy.
+He allied himself in the beginning with the Philosophical Radicals, in
+the hope of organising them for active service in the cause. But this
+group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to
+their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is
+synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.'
+There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that
+the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active
+Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far
+behind the fighting line, although he may be useful in forging
+explosives in some quiet laboratory. Mill himself was continually
+hampered, as an ardent combatant, by the impedimenta which he brought
+into the field in the shape of abstract speculations, which could not
+be made to fit in with the immediate demands of thorough-going
+partisans. His democratic fervour was tempered by his conviction of
+the incapacity of the masses. He was a Socialist 'in the sense that he
+looked forward to a complete, though distant, revolution in the whole
+structure of society'; he discovered that the Chartists had crude
+views upon political economy; his attitude toward factory legislation
+was very dubious. Yet in the main purpose of his life and writings,
+which was to mend and guide public opinion on social and political
+questions by theoretical treatment&mdash;that is, by a logically connected
+survey of the facts&mdash;he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> was undoubtedly successful, as is shown by
+the popularity of his two great works on <i>Logic</i> and <i>Political
+Economy</i>, which became the text-books of higher study on these
+subjects for a whole generation. On the other hand, he exposed himself
+to the distrust and hostility that are always aroused by philosophical
+arguments which strike at the roots of established beliefs and
+prejudices, and are discovered to be really more dangerous to them
+than a direct assault.</p>
+
+<p>It was the philosophic strategy of J. S. Mill to prosecute the
+Utilitarian war against metaphysics, and finally to exterminate
+Intuitions, being convinced, as he said, that the <i>a priori</i> and
+spiritualistic thinkers still far exceeded the partisans of
+experience, and that a great majority of Englishmen were still
+Intuitionists. Is this actually a true account of English thought? Mr.
+Stephen thinks not, for he believes that if Mill had not lived much
+apart from ordinary folk he would have found Englishmen practically,
+though not avowedly, predisposed to empiricism, which has been the
+philosophic tradition in this country since Hobbes. We so far agree
+with Mr. Stephen that we believe Englishmen, in general, to practise a
+great deal more of empiricism than they avow. But Mill proposed to
+demonstrate and declare it as a weapon in polemics and an engine of
+action, and it was here, probably, that the main body of Englishmen
+deserted him. They were not ready to cut themselves off from theology
+and from all ideas that transcend experience, and they demurred to the
+paramount jurisdiction of logic in temporal affairs. To every section
+of Churchmen the relegation of moral sanctions within the domain of
+verifiable consequences was a doctrine to be resisted strenuously.
+With the high sacerdotalist it amounted to a denial of the Christian
+mysteries; to the Broad Churchman it was ethically inadequate and
+ignoble;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> to the scholastic professor of divinity it meant ruinous
+materialism.</p>
+
+<p>That a vigorous thinker should have begun by striking at what seemed
+to him the root of obstructive fallacies was natural enough. He
+supposed that a logical demonstration would clear the ground for his
+plans of reform; whereas, on the contrary, it entangled him in
+preliminary disputations, and his inflexible reasoning alarmed people
+who followed experience as the guide of life, but instinctively felt
+that there must be something beyond phenomenal existence. In political
+economy Mill relied upon common sense and practice in affairs to make
+the requisite allowance for general laws founded on human propensities
+regarded abstractedly. His conviction was, in short, that nothing
+should be taken for granted because everything might be explained; and
+he desired to tie men down to accepting no belief, or even feeling,
+that could not be justified by reason. His <i>System of Logic</i> was, as
+he has himself written, a text-book for the doctrine 'which derives
+all knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual
+qualities principally from the direction given to the associations.'
+When he proceeded to construct a systematic psychology upon this
+basis, he fell into the fundamental perplexities that are concisely
+brought out by Mr. Stephen in his scrutiny of Mill's doctrine of
+Causation. He followed Hume in severing any necessary connection
+between cause and effect, and even invariable sequence became
+incapable of proof. But when he resolved Cause into a statement of
+existing conditions that can never be completely known until we have
+mastered the whole series of physical phenomena, and showed that all
+human induction is fallible because necessarily imperfect, it became
+clear that Mill had very little to offer in substitution for those
+grounds of ordinary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> belief that he was bent on demolishing. The word
+Cause is reduced, for ordinary use, to a signification not unlike that
+which is understood in loose popular language by the word Chance,
+since Chance means no more than ignorance of how an event came to
+pass; and in no case, according to Mill, can we ever calculate with
+security what undiscoverable conditions may suddenly bring about an
+unexpected event contrary to previous experience. The uniformity of
+Nature, as Mr. Stephen remarks, is thus made exceedingly precarious;
+and to the practical intelligence, which looks for some basis that
+cannot be argued about, there is still something to be said for
+Intuition. And when Mill, still in search of some precise formula,
+undertook to interpret persistent sequences by his theory of Real
+Kinds possessing an indeterminate number of coherent properties&mdash;so
+that our belief in the invariable blackness of crows is justified as a
+collocation of these visible properties&mdash;he merely throws the problem
+of Causation farther backward. We have to be content with direct
+observation of phenomena that can be classified as co-existent; we can
+perceive that things accompany each other, but we can never be sure
+that they follow each other, as they appear to do.</p>
+
+<p>It may be doubted whether Mill's treatment of these problems has
+materially affected subsequent psychological speculation, which has
+since taken different and deeper courses. His main objective was
+social and political.</p>
+
+<p>'The notion,' he has written, 'that truths external to the mind may be
+known by intuition, or consciousness, independently of observation and
+experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times the great intellectual
+support of false doctrines and bad institutions.' In confounding the
+metaphysicians, and eliminating all mysterious assumptions or axioms,
+he aimed at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> clearing the ground for a demonstrable science of
+character, and to establish the great principle that character can be
+indefinitely modified. The way is thus opened to questions of conduct,
+to positive remedies for social and political evils which, as they
+have been generated and fostered by external circumstances, can be
+removed by a change of those circumstances.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The greatest problems of the time were either economical or
+closely connected with economical principles. Mill had followed the
+political struggles with the keenest interest; he saw clearly their
+connection with underlying social movements; and he had thoroughly
+studied the science&mdash;or what he took to be the science&mdash;which must
+afford guidance for a satisfactory working out of the great
+problems. The Philosophical Radicals were deserting the old cause,
+and becoming insignificant as a party. But Mill had not lost his
+faith in the substantial soundness of their economic doctrines. He
+thought, therefore, that a clear and full exposition of their views
+might be of the highest use in the coming struggle.... The
+<i>Political Economy</i> speedily acquired an authority unapproached by
+any work published since the <i>Wealth of Nations</i>.'</p></div>
+
+<p>We cannot follow Mr. Stephen through his elaborate and effective
+review of this celebrated book. Its appearance marked an epoch in the
+history of Utilitarianism, for it took a much wider survey of social
+and political considerations, and the author undertook to expand the
+orthodox economic theories so that they might embrace and be
+reconciled with some daring projects of comprehensive reform. But Mill
+had to put some strain on the principles to which he adhered, and to
+accommodate certain inconsistencies in order to keep pace with moving
+ideas. He held on with some effort to the cardinal tenets of the older
+Utilitarians, to a dislike of interference<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> by governments, to
+reliance on individual effort, to protest against the deadening
+influence of paternal administration, to his own trust in the gradual
+effect of educational agencies, and in the slow emancipation of the
+popular mind from unreasoning prejudices. On the other hand, he
+advocated a radical reform of the land laws, peasant proprietorship,
+the acquisition by the State of railways and canals, the limitation of
+the right of bequest; and he went even so far as to speak with
+approval of laws in restraint of improvident marriages. All these
+proposals could only be carried out by arbitrary and drastic
+legislation. As he put it, the State must interfere for the purpose of
+making the people independent of further interference; and he
+overlooked or set aside the question whether the eventual result of
+thus calling in the State's agency would not be contrary to the
+principles and professed intentions of the Utilitarian school, whether
+the provisional <i>r&eacute;gime</i> would not become permanent, as, in fact, it
+has been rapidly becoming ever since.</p>
+
+<p>We can see, moreover, that while J. S. Mill's sympathy with the
+popular cause and with the most ardent reformers was sincere, he was
+at issue with them in regard to the means, though not in regard to the
+ends; he wished to better the intelligence of the people as the first
+step toward bettering their condition. But when he had convinced
+himself, as he said, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind
+are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental
+constitution of their modes of thought, he had still to persuade men
+who were stirring and pressing for immediate action that gradual
+methods were the best. Most of them may have preferred to try whether,
+if the lot of mankind were improved materially, the moral changes and
+mental habits would not follow; for indeed Mill's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> proposition might
+stand examination and hold good either way. It may be argued that an
+elevation or widening of intellectual views is the consequence, as
+often as it is the cause, of increasing comfort and leisure. He
+thought that all reading and writing which does not tend to promote a
+renovation of the world's belief is of very little value beyond the
+moment, which is, of course, true in a general sense; though
+literature can act much more directly than by dealing with first
+principles. He welcomes Free Trade as one triumph of Utilitarian
+doctrines, yet he sadly observes that the English public are quite as
+raw and undiscerning on subjects of political economy since the nation
+was converted to Free Trade as before. The nation, in fact, went
+straight at the immediate point, got what it wanted at the moment, and
+was satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen's criticism of Mill's later writings exhibits further his
+difficulties in adjusting the essential Utilitarian principles to
+closer contact with the urgent questions of the day. Mill still held
+to competition, to the full liberty of individuals, to the inevitable
+mechanical working of economic laws; he still doubted the expediency
+of factory legislation, and condemned any laws in restraint of usury.
+He was opposed, broadly, to all authoritative intrusion upon human
+existence wherever its necessity could not be proved conclusively to
+be in the interest of a self-reliant community. Yet he was forced to
+make concessions and exceptions in the face of actual needs and
+grievances; and especially he found himself more and more impelled to
+tolerate and even advocate interference by the State as the only
+effective instrument for demolishing obstacles to the moral and
+material betterment of the people. Since unjust social inequalities
+could be traced to an origin in force or fraud, the legislature might
+be logically<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> called in to remove them; and as this is manifestly the
+revolutionary argument (as embodied, for example, in the writings of
+Thomas Paine), it enabled him to join hands with Radicalism in
+proposing some very thorough-going measures. 'Landed property in
+Europe derives its origin from force;' so the legislature is entitled
+to interpose for the reclamation of rights unjustly usurped from the
+community; while, as economical science shows that the value of land
+rises from natural causes, the conclusion is that the State may
+confiscate the unearned increment. But it was not so easy to convince
+the hungry mechanic, by rather fine-drawn distinctions, that the
+capitalist had a better right to monopolise profits than the landlord;
+for the rise of value in manufactured commodities has very complex
+causes, some of them superficially natural. So here, again, is a
+plausible case of social injustice. Again, it may be affirmed that all
+powerful associations, private as well as public, operate in
+restriction of individual liberty. You may argue that great industrial
+companies are voluntary; the question is whether they are innocuous to
+the common weal, and we may add that this point is coming seriously to
+the front at the present time. The distinction, as Mr. Stephen
+remarks, drawn by the old individualism between State institutions and
+those created by private combination is losing its significance; and,
+what is more, public bodies are now continually encouraged to absorb
+private enterprise in all matters that directly concern the people.</p>
+
+<p>In short, we are on the high road to State Socialism, though Mill
+helps us to console ourselves with having taken that road on strictly
+scientific principles. It is the not unusual result of stating large
+benevolent theories for popular application; the principle is accepted
+and its limitations are disregarded. Nevertheless Mill contends
+gallantly in his later works for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> intellectual liberty, complete
+freedom of discussion, and the utility of tolerating the most
+eccentric opinions. Into what practical difficulties and questionable
+logical distinctions he was drawn by the necessity of fencing round
+his propositions and making his reservations is well known; and Mr.
+Stephen hits the weak points with keen critical acumen. We all agree
+that persecution has done frightful mischief, at times, by suppressing
+the free utterance of unorthodox opinions. But Mill argues that
+contradiction, even of truth, is desirable in itself, because a
+doctrine, true or false, becomes a dead belief without the
+invigorating conflict of opposite reasonings. Resistance to authority
+in matters of opinion is a sacred privilege essential to the formation
+of belief; wherefore originality, even when it implies stupidity, is
+to be carefully protected as a factor of human progress. We need not
+follow Mr. Stephen in his victorious analysis of the arguments
+wherewith Mill seeks to uphold this uncompromising individualism, and
+to guard human perversity against the baneful influence of authority.
+It is clear enough that society cannot waste its time in perpetual
+wrangling over issues upon which an authoritative verdict has been
+delivered; and for most of us a reasonable probability, founded on the
+judgment of experts, is sufficient in moral or physical questions as
+well as in litigation. The religious arena still remains open, where
+experts differ and decisions are always disputable. Yet Mr. Arthur
+Balfour devotes a chapter in his <i>Foundations of Belief</i> to the
+contention that our convictions on all the deeper subjects of thought
+are determined not by reason but by authority; whereby he provides us
+with an escape from the scepticism that menaces a philosopher who has
+proved all experience to be at bottom illusory. Mill, on the other
+hand, would make short work with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> authority wherever it checks or
+discourages the unlimited exercise of free individual inquiry; and in
+politics he would entrust the sovereign power to a representation of
+the entire aggregate of the community, with the most ample
+encouragement of incessant discussion. This is, indeed, the system
+actually in force, and in England it has answered very well; but Mill
+hardly foresaw that its tendency would be to make the State, as the
+embodiment of popular will, not less but more authoritative, with a
+tendency to encroach steadily upon the sphere of individual effort and
+private enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its
+high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which
+Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular
+enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to
+regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as
+innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women
+he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at
+any rate be recognised by law; the proper test was, he argued, to
+leave free competition to determine whether the distinction is radical
+or merely the result of external circumstance. But, as Mr. Stephen
+answers, such a plain physiological difference is at least not
+negligible; and competition between the sexes may favour the despotism
+of the stronger, while complete independence on both sides implies
+freedom to separate at will; and Mill had only glanced evasively at
+the question of divorce. Here, again, is a theory which the pressure
+of social conditions, much more than abstract reasoning, is bringing
+more and more into prominence with our own generation. On the wider
+and more complicated question of race distinctions Mill never worked
+out his argument against their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> indelibility into a regular treatise;
+nor could he foresee the increasing influence upon contemporary
+politics that is now exercised by racial feelings and their claims to
+recognition. In the eighteenth century the French Encyclop&eacute;distes, who
+were the direct philosophic ancestors of the Utilitarians, regarded
+frontiers, classes, and races as so many barriers against the spread
+of universal fraternity; and the revolutionary government took up the
+idea as a war-cry. The armies of the French Republic proclaimed the
+rights of the people in all countries, until Napoleon turned the
+democratic doctrine into the form of Imperialism. M. Eug&egrave;ne de Vog&uuml;&eacute;
+has told us recently that this armed propaganda produced a reaction in
+Europe toward that strong sentiment of nationality which has been
+vigorously manifested during the second half of the nineteenth
+century. The assertion of separate nationalities, by the demand for
+political autonomy and by the attempt to revive the public teaching of
+obscure languages, is the form taken in western and central Europe by
+the problem of race. No movement could be more contrary to the views
+or anticipations of the Utilitarians, for whom it would have been
+merely a recrudescence of one of those inveterate and unreasoning
+prejudices which still retard human progress, a fiction accepted by
+indolent thinkers to avoid the trouble of investigating the true
+causes that modify human character. Yet not only is national
+particularism making a fresh stir in Europe, but the spread of
+European dominion over Asia has forced upon our attention the immense
+practical importance of racial distinctions. We find that they signify
+real and profound characteristics; the European discovers that in Asia
+he is himself one of a ruling race, and thereby isolated among the
+other groups into which the population is subdivided. If he is a
+sound<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> Utilitarian he will nevertheless cherish the belief that
+economical improvements, public instruction, good laws, and regular
+administration will obliterate antipathies, eradicate irrational
+prejudices, and reconcile Asiatic folk to the blessings of scientific
+civilisation. But he will confess that it is a stubborn element, if
+not innate yet very like such a quality; if not ineffaceable yet
+certain to outlast his dominion. It is at least remarkable that Mill's
+protest against explaining differences of character by race, to which
+Buckle 'cordially subscribed,' should have been answered in our time
+by a clamorous demand for the recognition of those very differences,
+and by an increasing tendency to admit them.</p>
+
+<p>Upon Mill's theological speculations Mr. Stephen has written an
+interesting chapter, illustrating Mill's desire to treat religion more
+sympathetically, with a deeper sense of its importance in life, than
+in the absolute theories of the older Utilitarians. Bentham had
+declared that the principle of theology, of referring everything to
+God's will, was no more than a covert application of the test of
+utility. You must first know whether a thing is right in order to
+discover whether it is conformable to God's pleasure; and a religious
+motive, he said, is good or bad according as the religious tenets of
+the person acting upon it approach more or less to a coincidence with
+the dictates of utility. The next step, as Bentham probably knew well,
+is to throw aside an abstraction that has become virtually
+superfluous, and to march openly under the Utilitarian standard. But
+there was in Mill a moral and emotional instinct that deterred him
+from resting without uneasiness upon such a bare empirical conclusion.
+He rejected all transcendental conceptions; yet he did his best, as
+Mr. Stephen shows, to find reasonable proofs of a Deity whose
+existence and attributes may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> inferred by observation and
+experience. He agreed that such an inference is not inconsistent, <i>a
+priori</i>, with natural laws, and the argument from design was admitted
+as providing by analogy, or even inductively, a large balance of
+probability in favour of creation by Intelligence. The difficulty is
+to attain by these methods the idea of a Deity perfect in power,
+wisdom, and goodness; for the order of Nature, apart from human
+intervention and contrivances for making the earth habitable,
+discloses no tincture of morality. We are thus reduced to the dilemma
+propounded by Hume, between an omnipotent Deity who cannot be
+benevolent because misery is permitted, and a benevolent Deity with
+limited powers; and Mill sums up the discussion, doubtfully, in favour
+of a Being with great but limited powers, whose motives cannot be
+satisfactorily fathomed by the human intellect.</p>
+
+<p>This halting conclusion indicates a departure from the pure empiricism
+of his school, and even the inadequacy of the argument shows the
+effort that Mill was making towards some fellow-feeling with spiritual
+conceptions. As Mr. Stephen points out, there is a curious
+approximation, on some points, between Mill and his arch-enemy
+Mansel&mdash;between the conditioned and unconditioned philosophies. Both
+of them lay stress on the moral perplexities involved in arguing from
+the wasteful and relentless course of Nature to an estimate of the
+divine attributes. And both agree that the existence of evil is a
+serious difficulty; though Mansel's solution, or evasion, of it is by
+insisting that the ways of the unconditioned are necessarily for the
+most part unknowable, while Mill leans to the possibility that God's
+power or intelligence may be incomplete. Upon either hypothesis we
+must confess that our knowledge is imperfect and very fallible.
+Mr. Stephen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> has no trouble in exposing the philosophical weakness
+of Mill's attitude; but we are mainly concerned to compare it
+briefly with the position of his predecessors, for the purpose of
+continuing a rapid survey of the course and filiation of Utilitarian
+doctrines. When the orthodox Utilitarians definitely rejected all
+theology&mdash;though until Philip Beauchamp appeared, in 1822, they made
+no direct attack upon it&mdash;they believed that the fall of theology
+would also bring down religion, which they regarded as the source of
+motives that were fictitious, misleading, and profoundly unscientific.
+Mill agreed that a supernatural origin could not be ascribed to
+received maxims of morality without harming them, because to
+consecrate rules of conduct was to interdict free examination of them,
+and to paralyse their natural development in accordance with changes
+of circumstance. Looking back over the interminable controversies, and
+the successive variations in form and spirit that every great religion
+has undergone, this objection does not seem to us very formidable. But
+Mill's evident object was to reconcile the cultivation of religious
+feelings with his principle of free thought for individuals. In
+accepting Comte's ideal of a religion of humanity, he had entirely
+condemned Comte's reproduction of the spiritual authority in the shape
+of a philosophical priesthood. And it is remarkable, as indicating a
+radical discordance between the French and the English moralist, that
+while Comte's adoration, in his later years, of a woman led him to
+ordain a formal worship of the feminine representative of the Family,
+coupled with the strict seclusion of women from politics, Mill's
+lifelong attachment greatly strengthened his ardour for the complete
+emancipation of the whole sex.</p>
+
+<p>Our readers will bear in mind that we are endeavouring <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>to measure the
+permanent influence of Utilitarian doctrines, to determine how far
+they have fixed the direction, and shaped the ends, of contemporary
+thought and political action. It cannot be said that these doctrines
+are now predominant in either of these two closely interacting
+departments. National instincts and prepossessions have lost none of
+their force; national character now divides neighbouring peoples more
+sharply, perhaps, than a hundred years ago. Militarism is stronger
+than ever; cosmopolitan philanthropy is overridden by the growth of
+national interests; political economy is overruled by political
+necessities; nor have ethical systems displaced the traditional
+religions. Empiricism has fallen into discredit as a narrow and
+inadequate philosophy; it is superseded in the spiritual world by
+transcendental interpretations of dogmas as metaphysical
+representations of underlying realities. Mr. Stephen's most
+instructive work draws to its close with a dissertation on Liberalism
+and Dogmatism, showing how and why Utilitarianism failed in convincing
+or converting Englishmen to a practical assent to its principles and
+modes of thought. Upon many minds they produced more repulsion than
+attraction. Maurice earnestly protested that we were to believe in
+God, not in a theory about God, though the distinction, as Mr. Stephen
+says, is vague; he appealed to the inner light, to the conscience of
+mankind; he went back into the slough of Intuitionism. Carlyle cried
+aloud against materialistic views and logical machinery; he denounced
+'the great steam-engine, Utilitarianism'; he was for the able despot
+and hero-worship against grinding competition and government by
+discussion. In theology the mystical spirit rose again with its
+immemorial power of enchanting human imagination; the moral law is
+discerned to be the vesture of Divinity,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> in which He arrays Himself
+to become apprehensible by the finite intellect; and a Science that
+tries to understand everything explains nothing. Authority, instead of
+being discarded, is invoked to deliver men out of the great waters of
+spiritual and political anarchy. The Tractarians struck in with a
+fierce attack on Rationalism, propounding Faith and Revelation as
+imperative grounds of belief. You must accept the dogmas, not as
+useful, not as moral or reasonable, not even as derived intuitively,
+but as the necessary fundamental truths declared by the infallible
+Church to be essential to salvation. Those who could not find
+infallibility in a State Church went over to Rome, abandoning the Via
+Media; others were content with the high sacramental position of
+Anglicanism; the moderate Rationalists took shelter with the Broad
+Church; a few retreated into the cloudy refuge of transcendental
+idealism. The two extreme parties, the Broad Church and the
+Sacerdotalists, were at bitter feud with each other; yet they both
+denounced the common enemy. Arnold 'agreed with Carlyle that the
+Liberals greatly overrate Bentham, and the political economists
+generally; the <i>summum bonum</i> of their science is not identical with
+human life ... and the economical good is often, from the neglect of
+other points, a social evil.' Newman held that to allow the right of
+private judgment was to enter upon the path of scepticism; and the
+latest infidel device, he says, is to leave theology alone. He set up
+the argument, well-worn but always impressive, that science gives no
+certainty; and Mr. Stephen contends against it with the weapons of
+empiricism:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The scientific doctrines must lay down the base to which all other
+truth, so far as it is discoverable, must conform. The essential
+feature of contemporary thought was just this: that science was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+passing from purely physical questions to historical, ethical, and
+social problems. The dogmatist objects to private judgment or free
+thought on the ground that, as it gives no criterion, it cannot
+lead to certainty. His real danger was precisely that it leads
+irresistibly to certainty. The scientific method shows how such
+certainty as is possible must be obtained. The man of science
+advocates free inquiry precisely because it is the way to truth,
+and the only way, though a way which leads through many errors.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen is himself a large-minded Utilitarian. He will have
+nothing to do with a transcendental basis of morals; and the dogmatist
+who dislikes cross-examination is out of his court. Dogmatic
+authority, he says, stands only on its own assertions; and if you may
+not reason upon them, the inference is that on those points reason is
+against them. You may withdraw beyond this range by sublimating
+religion into a philosophy, but then it loses touch with terrestrial
+affairs, and has a very feeble control over the unruly affections of
+sinful men. Newman himself resorted to scientific methods in his
+theory of Development, that is, of the growth and evolution of
+doctrine. We may agree that these destructive arguments have much
+logical force, yet on the other hand such certitude as empiricism can
+provide brings little consolation to the multitude, who require some
+imperative command; they look for a pillar of cloud or fire to go
+before them day and night, and a land of promise in the distance.
+Scientific exposition works slowly for the improvement of ethics,
+which to the average mind are rather weakened than strengthened by
+loosening their foundations; and religious beliefs suffer from a
+similar constitutional delicacy. Conduct is not much fortified by
+being treated as a function of character and circumstance; for in
+religion and morals ordinary humanity demands<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> something impervious to
+reasoning, wherein lies the advantage of the intuitionist.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen, however, is well aware that empirical certitude will not
+supply the place of religion. In his concluding pages he states,
+fairly and forcibly, the great problems by which men are still
+perplexed. Religion, as J. S. Mill felt, is a name for something far
+wider than the Utilitarian views embrace.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Men will always require some religion, if religion corresponds not
+simply to their knowledge, but to the whole impression made upon
+feeling and thinking beings by the world in which they must live.
+The condition remains that the conception must conform to the
+facts; our imagination and our desires must not be allowed to
+over-ride our experience, or our philosophy to construct the
+universe out of <i>a priori</i> guesses.... To find a religion which
+shall be compatible with all known truth, which shall satisfy the
+imagination and the emotions, and which shall discharge the
+functions hitherto assigned to the churches, is a problem for the
+future.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The Utilitarian doctrines, in short, though propagated by leaders of
+high intellectual power, and inspired by a pure unselfish morality,
+achieved little success in the enterprise of providing new and firmer
+guidance and support to mankind in their troubles and perplexities.
+But they were not content to look down from serene heights upon the
+world, leaving the crowd</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Errare atque viam palantes qu&aelig;rere vit&aelig;.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They laboured devotedly to dispel ignorance and to advance knowledge;
+they spared no pains to promote the material well-being of society.
+They helped to raise the wind that filled the sails of practical
+reform; they headed the attack upon legal and administrative abuses;
+they stirred up the national conscience against social injustice; they
+proclaimed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> a lofty standard of moral obligation. They laid down
+principles that in the long run accord with human progress, yet in
+their hopes of rapidly modifying society by the application of those
+principles they were disappointed; for their systematic theories were
+blocked by facts, feelings, and misunderstandings which had not been
+taken into calculation. They were averse to coercion, as an evil in
+itself; but though they would have agreed with Mr. Bright's dictum
+that 'Force is no remedy,' they were latterly brought to perceive that
+in another sense there is no remedy except force, and that the vested
+interests and preconceptions of society make a stiff and prolonged
+opposition to enlightened persuasion. They were disposed to rely too
+confidently upon the spread of intelligence by general education for
+preparing the minds of people to accept and act upon doctrines that
+were logically demonstrable, and to reject what could not be proved.
+Mr. Stephen has somewhere written that to support a religion by force
+instead of by argument is to admit that argument condemns it. The
+proposition is too absolutely stated even for the domain of spiritual
+authority, since it might be replied that no great religion, certainly
+no organised Church, has existed by argument alone, and it has usually
+been supported by laws. But at any rate the temporal power subsists
+and operates by coercion, and the sphere of the State's direct action,
+instead of diminishing, as the earlier Utilitarians expected it to do,
+with the spread of education and intelligence, is perceptibly
+extending itself. The Utilitarians demurred to religion as an ultimate
+authority in morals, and substituted the plain unvarnished criterion
+of utility. Upon this ground the State steps in, replaces religious
+precept by positive law, and public morality is enforced by Acts of
+Parliament. They were for entrusting the people with full political<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+power, to be exercised in vigilant restraint of the interference by
+Government with individual rights and conduct; the people have
+obtained the power, and are using it more and more to place their
+affairs and even their moral interests under the control of organised
+authority. We do not here question the expediency of the movement; we
+are simply registering the tendency.</p>
+
+<p>There are few literary enterprises more arduous than the task of
+following and demarcating from the written record of a period the
+general course of political and philosophic movements. The tendencies
+are so various, the conditions which determine them are so
+complicated, that it is difficult to keep hold of the clue which
+guides and connects them. Mr. Leslie Stephen's <i>History of English
+Thought in the Eighteenth Century</i> took the broad ground that is
+denoted by its title; but, as he now tells us in his preface, he has
+found it expedient to reduce his present work within less
+comprehensive limits, by confining it to 'an account of the compact
+and energetic school of the English Utilitarians.' This reduction of
+its scope has not, however, damaged the continuity of the narrative,
+since in the great departments of morals, religion, and political
+philosophy the Utilitarians were mainly the lineal heirs of the
+characteristic English writers in the preceding century. It is true
+that Mr. Stephen has not been able to bring within the compass of his
+three volumes the subject of general literature, especially of poetry
+and novels, which in the nineteenth century have given their vivid
+expression to the doubts and the hopes, to the aims and aspirations of
+the time. But we can see that such an enlargement of his plan would
+have rendered it unmanageable, and that Mr. Stephen may have wisely
+considered the example of Buckle's <i>History of Civilisation in
+England</i>, which was projected <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>on too large a scale, exhausted the
+author's strength, and remains unfinished. Mr. Stephen's present work
+fulfils its promise and completes its design. The Utilitarians are
+very fortunate in having found a historian whose vivacity of style,
+consummate literary knowledge, and masculine power of thought will
+have revived their declining reputations, and secured to them their
+proper place in the literature of the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <i>The English Utilitarians.</i> By Leslie Stephen. 3 vols.
+London, Duckworth and Co., 1900.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, April 1901.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>The Greek Theory of the State</i>, by Charles John
+Shebbeare, B.A., 1895.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Sir Robert Peel's speech on Reform, March 1831.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>There is probably some foundation for the belief, often held in these
+days, that the production of high poetry is becoming more difficult,
+partly because the environment of modern civilisation lends itself
+less and less to artistic treatment, as mechanism supersedes human
+effort, and partly through the operation of other causes. It has been
+plausibly argued that most things worth saying have been said already;
+that even the words best fitted for poetic expression have been worn
+out, have been weakened by familiar usage or soiled by misuse, and
+that the resources of language for adequate presentation of ideas and
+feelings are running very low. Nevertheless, we all look forward
+hopefully to the coming of the original genius who is to strike a
+fresh note and inaugurate a new era, as pious Mohammedans expect
+another Imam. Yet his coming may not be in our time, and meanwhile the
+poetic lamp is burning dimly; it is just kept alight by the assiduous
+trimming of the disciples of the great men who have passed or are
+passing away, by the minor poets who strike a few musical chords that
+catch the ear, but who are not recalled by the audience when they have
+played their part and left the stage. The stars that shone in the
+bright constellation of Victorian poets have been setting one by one,
+until two only remain of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> those who were the pride of the generation
+to which they belong, for whom we may predict that they will hold a
+permanent place in English literature. It is now nearly sixty years
+since Mr. Meredith's first poems were published. Mr. Swinburne is
+about ten years his junior, both in age and in authorship; one may
+perhaps assume that the work upon which their reputations will rest is
+finished for both of them. Mr. Meredith's poetry has very recently
+been the subject of a very complete and sympathetic study by Mr.
+George Trevelyan. In this article we shall make an attempt to
+delineate, briefly of necessity and therefore inadequately, the
+characteristic qualities of form and thought, the technical methods
+and intellectual temperament which distinguish the younger poet, who
+may be destined to be the last survivor of an illustrious company.</p>
+
+<p>If we accept the theory that art, like nature, follows the principle
+of continuous development, that its existing state is closely linked
+with its past, it is not easy to affiliate Mr. Swinburne to any direct
+literary predecessors. Undoubtedly we may assign to him poetical
+kinship with Shelley; he has the same love for classical myths and
+allegories, for the embodiment of nature in the beautiful figures of
+the antique. Light and shade, a quiet landscape, a tumultuous storm,
+stir him with the same sensuous emotion. He has Shelley's passion for
+the sea; he is fond of invoking the old divinities who presided over
+the fears, hopes, and desires of mankind. He has also Shelley's
+rebellious temper, the unflinching revolt against dogmatic authority
+and fundamental beliefs which rightly shocked our grandfathers in
+'Queen Mab' and a few other poems; he is even less disposed than
+Shelley to the hypocrisy which does unwilling homage to virtue. On the
+other hand, Mr. Swinburne's pantheism has not Shelley's metaphysical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+note; the conception of an indwelling spirit guiding and moulding the
+phenomenal world has dropped out; there is no pure idealism of this
+sort in Mr. Swinburne's verse.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said, truly, that some of Mr. Swinburne's poetry shows the
+influence of the later French Romanticists, of the reaction toward
+medi&aelig;valism which is represented in England by Scott, and which
+culminated in France with Victor Hugo, for whom the English poet's
+admiration is unmeasured. That movement, however, had almost ceased on
+our side of the Channel at the time when it had reached, or was just
+passing, its climax in France. And, indeed, by 1835 the style and
+sentiment of English poetry was undergoing a remarkable change. Its
+magnificent efflorescence, which the first quarter of the nineteenth
+century had seen in full bloom, had faded away. It had sprung up in an
+era of great wars and revolution, amid the struggles of nations to
+shake off the incubus of despotisms, to free themselves from the yoke
+of foreigners. The cause of political liberty inspired the noblest
+verse of Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Streams like a thunderstorm against the wind&mdash;'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But in England this ardent spirit had evaporated during the years of
+industrial prosperity and mechanical progress which came in with a
+long peace after twenty years of fighting; and during the next
+generation a milder tone prevailed. For an interval we had only
+second-rate artists in verse. The fiery enthusiasts, the despisers of
+respectability, were succeeded by poets who were decently emotional,
+pensive in thought, tame or affected in style, domestic in theme, with
+feeble echoes of the true romantic note in Mrs. Hemans and others.
+Next, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> fulness of time, came Tennyson and Browning, to raise
+the level of English poetry by their deeper views of life, their
+elevation of thought, and their incomparably greater imaginative
+power. Tennyson's composition is pellucid and exquisitely refined.
+Browning is rugged and often obscure; he cares more for the force than
+for the form of expression. The great problems of religion and
+politics are seriously and cautiously handled. Browning analyses them
+with caustic irony, while Tennyson, after making vain attempts to
+solve them, finds consolation in the 'Higher Pantheism.' They are soon
+joined by Matthew Arnold and Clough, who represent the melancholy
+resignation of sensitive minds that have discarded the creeds, for
+whom the miraculous history of Christianity is an illusion that has
+faded into the common light of day. Meredith, poet and novelist, falls
+back upon communion with Nature; he preaches the doctrine of duty, of
+working while the light lasts; he is a high moralist who accepts
+stoically the conclusion that nothing beyond terrestrial existence is
+knowable.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Mr. Swinburne's elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry
+were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in
+their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic
+beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the
+Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a
+vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by
+intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the
+central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry
+we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of
+love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not
+a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the
+principal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy,
+or caught in the garden with Maud&mdash;with intentions strictly honourable
+in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is
+chiefly psychological; they are usually concerned with the tragic
+situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of sexual
+infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these
+poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore
+liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of
+misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world's evolution
+toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian
+period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral
+standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from
+irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing
+cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they
+belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas
+of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing
+distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early
+'sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Swinburne's first publications were two historic plays, of which
+something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from
+modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he
+aroused immediate attention by <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i>, which reproduced
+the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The
+dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong
+to its Hellenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of
+sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of
+foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the
+hero's unmerited fate. The exquisite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> modulations of the verse, the
+splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the
+enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language
+to quantitative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary
+skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and
+cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in
+style and character as the <i>Antigone</i> of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came
+<i>Chastelard</i>, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told
+us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek
+tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt,
+for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of
+heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his
+life for an hour in his lady's chamber, tears up the warrant
+reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary's
+fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne's coming
+poetry is struck in <i>Chastelard</i>&mdash;the overpowering enthralment of
+Love, a joy to live and die for&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The mistress and mother of pleasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The one thing as certain as death'&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost
+immediately.</p>
+
+<p>Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society,
+much moved by Tennyson's 'Idylls,' and altogether sympathetic with the
+misfortunes of the blameless king&mdash;justly appreciative of the domestic
+affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the
+House'&mdash;Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his <i>Poems and
+Ballads</i>, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence,
+kicking over screens and rending drapery&mdash;a reckless votary of
+Astarte, chanting the 'Laus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> Veneris' and the worship of 'Dolores, Our
+Lady of Pain.' From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is
+turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism
+which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The
+burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love,
+the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the
+dread goddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man's
+brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and
+covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of
+the 'Triumph of Time,' who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers'
+delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets 'for days that are over and
+dreams that are done,' and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a
+surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea,
+changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling
+surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is
+the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is
+set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of
+language, profusion of metaphor, and classic allusion; in rhymes that
+strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and
+his wild M&aelig;nads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The
+long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the 'Hymn to
+Proserpine' and of 'Hesperia,' with their subtle music, lay the reader
+under their charm; but too many of these poems are tainted by a
+flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown
+by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.</p>
+
+<p>It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems,
+saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in
+the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works,
+'as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard
+or read of.' The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly
+violent&mdash;the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had
+given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The
+current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken
+than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of
+Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the
+middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no
+means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who
+presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than
+somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry
+to Our Lady of Pain, the 'noble and nude and antique.' The result was
+that the first edition of the <i>Poems and Ballads</i> was withdrawn,
+though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne
+published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver
+and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a
+nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied
+that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of
+Mr. Swinburne's intoxicating love-potions&mdash;were sorely tempted to dash
+down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance
+round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Poems and Ballads</i> Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to
+speak, with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God
+discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before
+Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people
+implore mercy&mdash;a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the
+flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of
+the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> martyr. It is true that he
+looks back with &aelig;sthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over
+the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this
+volume is the 'Hymn to Proserpine,' where a votary of the ancient
+divinities confesses sorrowfully that a new and austere faith has
+triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline
+and fall like the empire of the elder gods&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The 'Hymn to Proserpine' is a fine conception of the champion of a
+lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the
+quiet dignity of his attitude is marred by the lines in which the
+votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has
+conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent
+invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and
+highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that
+Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the
+evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have
+replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or
+fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these
+evils enormously increased, and that the sacrifice of Iphigenia in
+Aulis was as nothing to the hecatombs of the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>His intense imagination summons up a bright and luxurious vision of
+the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little
+affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in
+contemplation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old
+nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts,
+by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal
+with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed
+animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to
+follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own
+art; since his early defects and excesses are mainly due to his having
+missed their lesson by disregarding the limitations which they
+scrupulously observed.</p>
+
+<p>When he reissued the <i>Poems and Ballads</i>, Mr. Swinburne took occasion,
+as we have said, to reply, in a pamphlet, to the strictures and strong
+protests which they had aroused. He was at some trouble to discover
+the passages or phrases 'that had drawn down such sudden thunder from
+the serene heavens of public virtue': he was comically puzzled to
+comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with
+sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient
+prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found
+in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there
+is nothing more famous in later Hellenic art, than the statue of
+Hermaphroditus, yet his translation of a sculptured poem into written
+verse has given offence! One might reply that a subject which is
+irreproachable, on the score of purity, in cold marble, may take a
+very different colour when it is dilated upon in burning verse.</p>
+
+<p>The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of
+stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr.
+Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of <i>Songs and
+Ballads</i>, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of
+concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening
+five years the empire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> of Napoleon <span class="smcap">III.</span> had fallen with a mighty
+crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had
+become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian
+kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the
+ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and
+political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. The 'Song of
+the Standard,' the 'Halt before Rome,' the 'Marching Song,' the
+'Insurrection of Candia,' are poems that reflect current events; and
+the 'Litany of Nations' is the national anthem of peoples striving for
+freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the
+glorification of emancipation of Man. The final line of the 'Hymn to
+Man' is</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things';<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and in one stanza of 'Hertha' is condensed all the wild declamation
+against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage,
+with his joy in the deification of humanity:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">'A creed is a rod,<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">And a crown is of night;<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">But this thing is God,<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">To be man with thy might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">As the light.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the
+uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce assailant of
+tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches
+and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish
+Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom
+of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the
+'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a
+fire that is fed with the bones of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> her victims. From this time
+forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he
+is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano
+Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for
+Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of
+intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to
+him relics of medi&aelig;val superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic&mdash;he
+contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old
+world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty
+world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the <i>juventus
+mundi</i> had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the
+earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour
+for civic liberties, the Hellenic delight in noble form and in
+physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian
+authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns
+the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the multitude
+before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial
+recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the 'sleep eternal in an
+eternal night'; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He
+is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the passions a loose
+rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Deep in dim death, beneath the grass<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where no thought stings.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair
+quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer
+influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the association of places
+with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his
+earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the
+impressions of natural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in
+the 'Songs of the Four Seasons,' where the approach of a storm from
+the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the
+peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">'As men's cheeks faded<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">On shores invaded<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">When shorewards waded<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">The lords of fight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">When churl and craven<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Saw hard on haven<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The wide-winged raven<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">At mainmast height;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">When monks affrighted<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To windward sighted<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The birds full-flighted<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Of swift sea-kings;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">So earth turns paler<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">When Storm the sailor<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague
+yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he
+transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees,
+feels, and remembers. In the poem of 'Hesperia' the view of the sunset
+over the sea stirs tender memories; the 'deep-tide wind blowing in
+with the water' seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and
+his heart floats out toward her 'as the refluent seaweed moves in the
+languid exuberant stream.' In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession
+has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare's<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a>
+hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in
+the beautiful verses of 'A Forsaken Garden,' where his consummate
+faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> and sound are matched
+and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Over the meadows that blossom and wither<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only the sun and the rain come hither<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">All year long.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the title of <i>A
+Midsummer Holiday</i>, published nearly twenty years after the <i>Poems and
+Ballads</i>, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The
+impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the
+spectator's mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind is
+exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness:
+it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the
+presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it
+felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or
+even a right to live.'<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This is the right doctrine, and we may add that it is applicable as a
+criticism to some of his earlier descriptive pieces, where the intense
+personal feeling is somewhat too intense and disproportionate; so that
+a reader gifted with less keenness of sensibility is disconcerted by
+insistence on effusive moods with which he cannot be expected to be in
+full sympathy. Mr. Swinburne might reply that for such dullards he
+does not write; but the finest wines are too heady for a morning's
+draught. In his more mature poems he appears to have deliberately held
+back what may be termed the subjective emotion; the landscapes are no
+longer peopled by figures or memories of the past; the thoughts which
+they suggest are such as find response in all minds that are in accord
+with the deeper and more subtle relations of human life to its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+environment. He himself has indeed told us<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> that to many of his
+studies of English land and sea no intimacy of years and no
+association with the past has given any colour of emotion, that only
+so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring
+these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive
+that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the
+spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or
+woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the
+sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The <i>Midsummer Holiday</i> group
+has two pictures of sweet homeliness&mdash;'The Mill Garden' and 'On a
+Country Road'&mdash;the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth's phrase),
+such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch
+book, of value the more remarkable because they are not in Mr.
+Swinburne's usual manner. They give relief to the breadth and grandeur
+of the other descriptions of the ocean, the crags, and the storms. For
+to Swinburne, as to all the romantic English poets, the ocean stream
+which encircles their island is an inexhaustible source of delight and
+pride; it is our ever present defence in time of trouble; the fountain
+of our country's wealth and honour; it is our traditional battlefield;
+the winds and the waves are the breath and the force of our national
+being. And through Mr. Swinburne's poetry runs a vein of undiluted
+love for his native land. In his poem 'On the South Coast' he looks
+out from 'the green, smooth-swelling downs' over the broad blue water,
+and his thought is expressed in its final stanza:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Fair and dear is the land's face here, and fair man's work as a man's may be:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dear and fair as the sunbright air is here the record that speaks him free;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Free by birth of a sacred earth, and regent ever of all the sea.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p><p>The 'Autumn Vision' is an ode to the south-west wind, which has so
+often filled the sails of the English warships:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Wind beloved of earth and sky and sea beyond all winds that blow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wind whose might in fight was England's on her mightiest warrior day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">South-west wind, whose breath for her was life, and fire to scourge her foe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Steel to smite and death to drive him down an unreturning way,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Well-beloved and welcome, sounding all the clarions of the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rolling all the marshalled waters toward the charge that storms the shore.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Charles Kingsley, like a hardy Norseman, preferred the north-east
+gale. To him the south-west wind is</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The ladies' breeze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bringing back their lovers<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of all the seas,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>while Mr. Swinburne hears in the rushing south-western gale</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">'the sound of wings gigantic,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wings whose measure is the measure of the measureless Atlantic,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, after the storm,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The grim sea swell, grey, sleepless and sad as a soul estranged.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'A Swimmer's Dream' gives us the poetry of floating on the slow roll
+of the waves, some cloudy November morning.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'Loch Torridon' preserves the charm of what might be a landlocked
+lake, if it were not that the rippling tide flows in by an almost
+invisible inlet from the sea. From his earliest to his latest poems
+the magic of nature's changing aspects fascinates him; they inspire
+him with a kind of ecstasy that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> finds utterance in the variety of his
+verse, which reflects all the lights and shades of earth, sea, and
+atmosphere. One may remark, by the way, that in proportion as his
+poetic strength matures, the pagan gods and goddesses, who disported
+themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more
+rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic
+mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes
+are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in
+the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor and Woden.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It will be admitted by Mr. Swinburne's least indulgent critics that
+his poetry displays throughout a marvellous power of execution. He
+runs over all the lyrical and elegiac chords with unabated facility;
+his metrical variations and musical phrasing bring out and extend the
+capacity and fertility of our language as a poetic instrument; he is
+master of his materials. No doubt there is some repetition, some
+iteration, which becomes slightly wearisome, of his favourite rhymes,
+indicating, what has been observed independently of reference to this
+particular writer, that the resources of the English language for
+terminal assonance, under the stringent conditions required by the
+modern rules of versification, are inevitably limited and show signs
+of exhaustion.</p>
+
+<p>In a Note on Poetry appended to his latest volume of verses,<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> Mr.
+John Davidson has classed rhyme as a kind of disease of poetry. Rhyme,
+he says, is probably more than seven hundred years old&mdash;in Europe, he
+must mean, for it is far older in Asia, whence it originally came&mdash;and
+since the days of the troubadours and Minnesingers it has corrupted,
+in his opinion, the ear of the world. At best it is, he thinks, a
+decadent mode, imposing shackles on free<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> poetic expression; and
+though in these fetters great poets have done magnificent work, in
+their finest rhymed verse he finds a feeling of effort. They have
+always been obliged to throw in something that need not have been
+said, some words inserted under compulsion, to bring the rhyme about.
+Mr. Davidson declares that the true glory of free untrammelled poetry
+shines out in the rhythmic periods of blank verse. That there may be
+some truth, or at least some convenience, in this theory of the poetic
+art, the modern poet may not be concerned to deny; for, as we have
+already said, rhymes will not withstand incessant and familiar usage;
+they become commonplaces, and the rhymer wanders away from the natural
+direction of his thought in search of fresh ones. The most devout
+admirers of Browning must admit that his verse is often distorted in
+this way&mdash;so that a fine stanza sometimes finishes with a jolt and
+ends with a tag&mdash;and it must be allowed that this necessity of making
+both ends meet is bad for the poetic conscience, a temptation to
+indefensible laxities. Even Mr. Swinburne, the inventor of exquisite
+harmonies, whose work is indisputably sincere, can be occasionally
+observed to be diverging from the straight line of his impetuous
+flight, hovering and making circuits that lead up skilfully to the
+indispensable rhyme. More frequently, perhaps, there is a tendency to
+interpose some metaphor, or rather far-fetched allusion, for the sake
+of the clear, full, recurrent intonation of echoing words that can
+only be marshalled into their places by artistic ingenuity.</p>
+
+<p>We may so far agree with Mr. Davidson that most of the sublime
+passages in English poetry are in blank verse, though it may be
+noticed that the four lines which he quotes from <i>Macbeth</i>,<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> as
+containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> drama,'
+are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate
+art; it is an instrument that requires a first-class performer, like
+Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English
+lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr.
+Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's <i>New Poems</i> (1867), has
+said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in
+England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a
+modern song is a wilful abdication of half the charm and half the
+power of verse.' To this general rule he might possibly admit one
+exception&mdash;Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,'
+which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not
+missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this
+terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the
+other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a
+rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in
+maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present
+day, however, there is a tendency to run into excessive elaboration,
+largely due to superficial imitation of such masters of the poetic art
+as Tennyson, and especially Swinburne, so that we have a copious
+outpouring of feeble melodies.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, is never feeble; he combines technical
+excellence with the power of vehement, often much too violent,
+expression. His character may be defined by the French word 'entier';
+he is uncompromising in praise or blame. He insists (to quote his own
+words) that 'the worship of beauty, though beauty be itself
+transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be
+simple and absolute'; nor will he tolerate reserve or veiled
+intimations of a poet's inmost thought.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Nothing,' he has written, 'in verse or out of verse is more
+wearisome than the delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted
+hope and half-incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong
+desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot, may be
+worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity, until he begins to
+speak; and if he tries to speak in verse, he misses the implement
+of an artist.'</p></div>
+
+<p>He is pained by Matthew Arnold's 'occasional habit of harking back and
+loitering in mind among the sepulchres.... Nothing which leaves us
+depressed is a true work of art.' Yet, it may be answered, the habit
+of musing among tombs has inspired good poetry; and when doubt and
+dejection, perplexed meditation over insoluble problems, are in the
+air, a poet does well to express the dominant feelings of his time;
+and a modern Hamlet is no inartistic figure.</p>
+
+<p>In this respect, however, Mr. Swinburne may have found reason to
+qualify, latterly, the absoluteness of his poetic principles. He has
+been from the first a generous critic of those contemporary poets whom
+he recognised as kindred souls. He awards unmeasured praise to Matthew
+Arnold, while of his defects and shortcomings he speaks plainly. He
+does loyal homage to Browning in a sequence of sonnets, and his
+tribute to Tennyson was paid in a lofty 'Threnody,' when that noble
+spirit passed away. For Victor Hugo he proclaimed, as all know,
+nothing short of unbounded adoration&mdash;he is 'the greatest writer whom
+the world has seen since Shakespeare'; though it may be doubted
+whether in his own country Hugo now stands upon so supreme a pinnacle.
+To other eminent men of his time his poetry accords admiration,
+chiefly to the champions of free thought and of resistance to
+oppression; and, in a poem entitled 'Two Leaders,' he salutes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> two
+antagonists as he might do before crossing swords with them. The
+leaders are not named; the first is evidently Newman:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'O great and wise, clear-souled and high of heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">One the last flower of Catholic love, that grows<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Amid bare thorn their only thornless rose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the fierce juggling of the priest's loud mart<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet alien, yet unspotted and apart<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From the blind hard foul rout whose shameless shows<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Mock the sweet heaven whose secret no man knows<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With prayers and curses and the soothsayers' art.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The second is</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">'Like a storm-god of the northern foams<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strong, wrought of rock that breasts and breaks the sea,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>in whom we recognise Carlyle. They are the powers of darkness, doomed
+to fall and to vanish before the light; yet their genius commands
+respect and even sympathy.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Honour not hate we give you, love not fear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of great dead Gods with wrath and wail, nor hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Time's word and man's: "Go honoured hence, go home,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Night's childless children; here your hour is done;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pass with the stars, and leave us with the sun."'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The concise energy of these lines, their slow metrical movement,
+invest them with singular weight and dignity. The poet is confronting
+two representatives, in principle, of Force and Authority, whose
+prototypes in bygone times would undoubtedly have sent him to the
+scaffold or to the stake; nor is it improbable that both Carlyle and
+Newman, though in all other opinions they differed widely, would have
+agreed that a revolutionary firebrand and a pestilent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> infidel
+deserved some such fate. The poet might console himself with the
+reflection that they must have abhorred each other's principles quite
+as much as they detested his own.</p>
+
+<p>In his later verse Mr. Swinburne still continues to wield his flaming
+sword against priests and despots, against intellectual and political
+servility. What may be termed the historical plea, the excuse for
+ideas and institutions that they are the relics of evil days long
+past, is no palliation for them to his mind; he would stamp them out
+and utterly destroy them. In this respect his temperament has
+unconsciously a strong tincture of the intolerance which he denounces;
+he would sweep away Christianity as Christianity swept away
+polytheism. Toward its Founder, as the type of human love and purity,
+he is uniformly reverential; there is nothing in that supreme figure
+that jars with that Religion of Humanity, which 'The Altar of
+Righteousness' proclaims with high dithyrambic enthusiasm:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Christ the man lives yet, remembered of man as dreams that leave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Light on eyes that wake and know not if memory bids them grieve.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Far above all wars and gospels, all ebb and flow of time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lives the soul that speaks in silence, and makes mute the earth sublime.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But of theology reigning by force and terror he is the implacable
+enemy; and his intemperate violence leaves a stain on the bright
+radiance of his poetry. It amounts to an artistic fault, undiminished
+even in the later years which should have brought the philosophic
+mind. Moreover, it has materially lessened the influence which so fine
+a poetic genius should have exercised over the present generation,
+among whom polemical ardour and bitterness may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> be thought to have
+perceptibly cooled down, and to have become much less aggressive, in
+science, philosophy, and literature, than among the preceding
+generation. An age of tacit indifference, content with rationalistic
+explanations, with the slow working of disillusion, dislikes and
+discountenances outrageous scorn poured upon things that are
+traditionally sacred; and to the English character extremes are always
+distressing.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work, at any rate, takes us out of the strife
+and turmoil of theologic war; we are on firm historic ground, dealing
+with authentic events and persons. The plays of <i>Chastelard</i>,
+<i>Bothwell</i>, and <i>Mary Stuart</i> form a trilogy in which the most
+romantic and eventful period of Scottish history is presented; they
+constitute the epic-drama of Scotland, to adopt a definition applied
+by Victor Hugo to the tragedy of <i>Bothwell</i>. It is impossible, in this
+article, to find space for an adequate criticism of these remarkable
+productions. Every leading poet of the nineteenth century has made
+excursions into the dramatic field. We doubt whether any of them has
+come out of the adventure much better than Mr. Swinburne. All of them
+have given us, each in his own way, fine poetry, and, if we except
+Byron, they have shown that the masters of lyrical music can strike
+with power the high chords of blank verse. None of them have produced
+plays that took any hold of a theatrical audience; in most cases they
+were not intended for the stage.</p>
+
+<p>The play of <i>Chastelard</i> is too deeply saturated with amorous essences
+throughout to be forcibly dramatic. The hero is in a high love-fever
+from first to last, the passionate strain becomes monotonous, and
+though he dies to save the Queen's honour, our minds are not purged
+with much pity for him. In the long historical drama of <i>Bothwell</i>,
+which has twenty-one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> scenes in its two acts, we have spirited
+portraits of the fierce nobles who surrounded Mary Stuart during her
+brief and distracted reign. The love passages are pauses in a course
+of violent action, the assassination of Rizzio, the murder of Darnley
+are not overcoloured melodramatically, and the scenes in and about the
+Kirk of Field are darkened with the shadow of Darnley's imminent fate.
+But Darnley's dream, presaging his coming doom, inevitably recalls the
+dream of Clarence, and cannot but suffer from the reminiscence. We
+might have something to say on the metrical construction of
+Swinburne's blank verse, for he shares with Tennyson, though in a
+minor degree, the distinction of having enlarged its scope and varied
+its measure. But the subject would demand careful comparative
+examination and analysis of different styles, such as is to be read,
+with profit to all students of the art poetic, in Mr. J. B. Mayor's
+<i>Chapters on English Metres</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It will be understood that this article attempts no more than to
+review the salient characteristics of Mr. Swinburne's poetry, to
+indicate in some degree their connexion and development. It cannot but
+fall far short, obviously, of being a comprehensive survey of his
+contributions to English literature. We have made no reference, for
+lack of space, to his treatment of chivalrous romance in <i>Tristram of
+Lyonesse</i>, which Mr. Swinburne has rightly called 'the deathless
+legend,' though, since its fascination has made it a subject for three
+other contemporary poets, a comparison of their diverse manners of
+handling the story would be interesting. It is with regret that we
+have been compelled, also, to refrain from any adequate notice of Mr.
+Swinburne's prose writings, for in regard to the poetry of his own
+period the dissertations and judgments of one who combines high
+imaginative faculty with scientific mastery of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> the metrical art must
+have special value. Of the ordinary untrained criticism, the 'chorus
+of indolent reviewers,' to use Tennyson's phrase, he is, we think, too
+impatient. From a passage in his Dedicatory Epistle we gather that
+some of the tribe have ventured so far as to insinuate that poetry
+ought not to become a mere musical exercise. Mr. Swinburne's rejoinder
+is that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'except to such ears as should always be closed against poetry,
+there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness
+and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of
+thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind
+scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of
+malignity.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Apart from the wrathful form, the substance of what is here said
+merits consideration, for undoubtedly the most musical of our poets,
+from Shakespeare and Milton to Coleridge and Shelley, are those whose
+verse has embodied the richest thought and has been instinct with the
+deeper emotions. We must muster up courage to remark, nevertheless,
+that while in Mr. Swinburne's finest poems the musical setting
+accompanies and illuminates the thought or feeling, in some others the
+underlying idea is too unsubstantial; its real presence is only
+visible to the eye of implicit faith. Toward his fellow poets, his
+equals and contemporaries, Mr. Swinburne's attitude is that of
+generous enthusiasm, not excluding outspoken, yet courteous,
+indication of defects, as may be seen in the essay<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> on Matthew
+Arnold's <i>New Poems</i>, which is full of important observations on
+poetry in general, beside some well-deserved strictures on Arnold's
+shortcomings, in criticism as well as in verse. For Victor Hugo he has
+nothing but panegyric. His articles on Byron and Coleridge are
+luminous appreciations <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>of the very diverse excellences belonging to
+two illustrious predecessors; while in his <i>Notes on the Text of
+Shelley</i>, high-soaring and incomparable, an unlucky emendation of a
+line in 'The Skylark&mdash;the insertion of a superfluous word
+conjecturally&mdash;by an editor whose work he commends on the whole,
+provokes him to sheer exasperation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible;
+for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would
+be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and
+desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of
+Shelley with this damnable corruption.'</p></div>
+
+<p>'Fas est et ab hoste doceri.' Mr. Swinburne has borrowed the style of
+sacerdotal anathema from his mortal enemies, and pronounces it no less
+inexorably. But these Notes were written nigh forty years ago, so we
+may hope that by this time he has cast out, or at least subdued by
+diligent exorcism, that same hyperbolic fiend which entered in and
+rent him at certain seasons of his youth.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Swinburne has, indeed, the defects of his qualities. He is an
+ardent friend and an unflinching adversary, but we have seen that in
+prose no less than in poetry, in polemics as in politics, his style is
+liable to become overheated and thunderous. He has no patience with
+mediocrity in art; he disdains the <i>via media</i> in thought and action.
+In these respects he stands alone among the Victorian poets, most of
+whom anticipate with misgivings the evaporation of faith in the
+supernatural, while they acknowledge that for themselves such faith
+has little meaning, and are inclined to melancholy musing over the
+'doubtful doom of human kind' which haunted the imagination of
+Tennyson. And his attitude is still further apart from the
+intellectual tendencies discernible at the present moment in pure
+literature, which is now less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> concerned, we think, with these
+questions than when Mr. Arnold wrote <i>Literature and Dogma</i>, and seems
+more disposed to leave theology in the hands of the physical
+scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be,
+it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory,
+unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which
+the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless
+extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from
+him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The
+sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him;
+it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, whom he
+so much admired, meant by the word <span title="aidos">&alpha;&iota;&delta;&omicron;&sigma;</span>. But we very
+willingly acknowledge that of these excesses hardly a trace is to be
+found in the very numerous pieces that fill the later volumes of his
+collected poetry.</p>
+
+<p>From these causes it has resulted that Mr. Swinburne does not, in our
+opinion, now hold the position or command the influence which would
+otherwise be accorded to one who may be reckoned the chief lyrical
+poet of the second half of the nineteenth century; for after the
+publication, in 1855, of <i>Maud</i>, Tennyson had passed his lyrical
+climax, and Mr. Swinburne's superiority, as a lyrist, over all other
+writers of that period is incontestable. His neo-paganism, moreover,
+jars upon the realistic modernity of a generation for whom primitive
+symbolism is obsolete as a form of expression, and whose prevailing
+thought is too profoundly rationalistic to be attracted by a pagan
+paradise. All this is to be regretted, since Mr. Swinburne undoubtedly
+has the pagan virtues. His aspirations are concentrated on ideals that
+ennoble the present life, on justice, inflexible courage, patriotism,
+the unsophisticated intelligence; he loves liberty and he hates
+oppression in all their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> shapes. He is throughout an optimist, who
+believes and predicts that a clearer and brighter prospect is before
+humanity. To Mr. Swinburne, in short, may be applied the words with
+which Matthew Arnold summed up his essay upon Heine: 'He is not an
+adequate interpreter of the modern world; he is a brilliant soldier in
+the liberation war of humanity.' And future generations may remember
+him as the poet who passed on to them the message of his spiritual
+forefather, Shelley:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'O man, hold thee on in courage of soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the billows of clouds that round thee roll<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When heaven and hell shall leave thee free<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the universe of destiny.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> <i>The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne.</i> In six
+volumes. With a dedicatory epistle to Theodore Watts-Dunton. London,
+Chatto and Windus, 1904.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, October 1906.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> 'Out, hyperbolic fiend! how vexest thou this
+man?'&mdash;<i>Twelfth Night.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> Dedicatory Preface.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> Dedicatory Preface.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Holiday and Other Poems</i>, 1906.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> Note on Poetry, p. 144.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> <i>Essays and Studies</i>, 1867.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>It may be doubted whether many students of history are aware that the
+demarcation of frontiers, of precise lines dividing the possessions of
+adjacent sovereignties and distinguishing their respective
+jurisdictions, is a practice of modern origin. At the present time it
+is the essential outcome of territorial disputes, it is the operation
+by which they are formally settled at the end of a war: it registers
+conquests and cessions; and occasionally it has been the result of
+pacific arbitration. Among compact and civilised nationalities an
+exterior frontier, thus carefully defined, remains, like the human
+skin, the most sensitive and irritable part of their corporate
+constitution. The slightest infringement of it by a neighbouring Power
+is instantly resented; to break through it violently is to be
+inflicting a wound which may draw blood; and even interference with
+any petty State that may lie between the frontiers of two great
+governments is regarded as a serious menace.</p>
+
+<p>The whole continent of Europe has now been laid out upon this system
+of strict delimitation. Yet it may be maintained that among the
+kingdoms of the ancient world no such exact and recognised
+distribution of territory existed; and, further, that up to a very
+recent period none of the great empires in Asia had any boundaries
+that could be traced on a map.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> Their landmarks were incessantly
+shifting forward or backward as their military strength rose or fell;
+and where their territories marched with some rough mountainous tract
+inhabited by warlike tribes, they were perpetually plagued by petty
+warfare on a zone of debateable land. On both sides some temporary
+intrusion upon or occupation of country held by a neighbour, which
+would now be the signal for mobilising an army, was treated as a
+trespass of small importance, to be resented and rectified at leisure.
+It is true that in earlier times the Romans marked off distinct
+frontiers, and guarded them by military posts; but their policy was to
+acknowledge no frontier power with equal rights, and their actual
+political jurisdiction usually extended far beyond their lines of
+defence, which were advanced or withdrawn as political or military
+considerations might require. In fact, the Roman empire, like the
+British empire in Asia, was a great organised State, surrounded, for
+the most part, by small and weak principalities, or by warlike tribal
+communities, and it grew by a natural process of inevitable expansion.
+The emperors were often reluctant to enlarge their possessions; but
+the raids and incursions of intractable barbarians, or the revolt of
+some protected chiefship, frequently left them no option but to
+conquer and annex. They soon found themselves compelled to overstep
+the limits of empire prescribed by the policy of Augustus, and to lay
+down an advanced frontier in the lands beyond the Rhine and the
+Danube.</p>
+
+<p>In Europe, where, as we have said, all national frontiers are now
+fixed and registered, the position of a civilised government entangled
+in chronic border warfare has long been unknown; the tradition of such
+a state of things is preserved in popular recollection mainly by local
+records and old ballads.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> Yet for Englishmen the subject possesses
+peculiar interest, since it is connected with their earlier history;
+and moreover our dominion in India invests it with special importance,
+for it is there a matter of immediate experience and active concern.
+We may recollect, in the first place, that Britain was an outlying
+province of the Roman empire, for at this moment we are excavating the
+ruins of the wall built by the Romans to protect their northern
+frontier from the incursions of the warlike tribes beyond it, by the
+first administration that established, for a time, peace and
+civilisation in England. Then, in the middle ages, and long
+afterwards, the border between the kingdoms of England and Scotland
+which ran northward of the old Roman line, was for centuries the scene
+of plundering raids, punitive expeditions, and internecine feuds that
+often laid waste the countryside with fire and sword. We may observe,
+in this instance, how shifting and indeterminate was the exact
+frontier line between the two kingdoms, and how the local fighting,
+the inroads from one side or the other, did not necessarily involve a
+rupture of their formal relations. The wardens on each side executed
+rough justice upon marauding clans; they wasted and slaughtered in
+reprisal for raids; the great nobles engaged in a kind of private
+warfare; but all this might go on without embroiling the two
+governments in a national war. On the western English border the Welsh
+hillmen kept the neighbouring counties in continual alarm; and their
+chiefs played an important part in the civil wars and rebellions of
+England. They were at last quieted by Edward <span class="smcap">I.</span>, who succeeded in
+subduing Wales though he failed in Scotland. Lastly, though the union
+of the two kingdoms brought peace to the Anglo-Scottish border, the
+Highland line along the Forth river still kept up, though in a much
+less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> serious degree, the troubles of a regular government in contact
+with restless tribes. Nor was it until the middle of the eighteenth
+century that these relics of an archaic condition of society, which
+had long ago disappeared in other parts of western Europe, were
+finally effaced in Great Britain. Long afterwards, in the nineteenth
+century, when the conquest of the Punjab carried the north-western
+frontier of British India up to the slopes of the Afghan mountains,
+the scene of perpetual strife between a strong settled administration
+and turbulent borderers which had passed away on the Tweed or the
+Forth, and on the Welsh Marches, reappeared in the districts beyond
+the Indus.</p>
+
+<p>To Englishmen, therefore, whose experience of this situation is long,
+varied, and actual, Mr. Baddeley's book on the Russians in the
+Caucasus should be of exceptional interest. It is indeed well worth
+studying by those upon whom, whether at home or in India, has been
+imposed the arduous duty of superintending our policy in dealing with
+the Afghan tribes for the protection of our Indian districts. It is
+true that the conditions and circumstances, military and political,
+under which Russia prosecuted her long war with the Caucasian
+mountaineers, rendered her position in many respects different from
+that in which the English found themselves when they first came into
+contact with Afghanistan, and which has changed very little in the
+course of sixty years. The aims and purposes of the two governments
+were by no means the same. Yet in both cases we have a story of the
+obstinate resistance opposed by fierce and free clans to the arms of a
+powerful empire, of perilous campaigns amid rugged hills and passes,
+of the hazards and misfortunes to which disciplined troops are always
+liable when they encounter resolute and fanatical defenders of a
+difficult country.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p><p>Mr. Baddeley's book contains an authentic narrative, founded on
+diligent study of official documents and on the accounts of those who
+took part in the fighting, of the operations by which the Mohammedan
+tribes of the Caucasus were finally subdued, after fierce and
+protracted resistance, by Russian armies, and their country was
+annexed to the dominions of the Czar. His knowledge of this region is
+evidently derived from personal exploration; and in the Introduction
+to his book he has spared no pains to explain to his readers its
+geographical position, its topography, its physical features, and the
+extraordinary diversity of races and languages which it contained. We
+learn that the chain of mountains which was originally known by the
+name of the Caucasus stretches, with a total length of 650 miles, from
+the Caspian to the Black Sea. Toward the north is a tract of dense
+forest, intersected by numerous streams flowing down from the
+mountains; and beyond lies the high plateau of Daghestan, 'through
+which the rivers have cut their way to a depth often of thousands of
+feet, the whole backed and ribbed, south and west, by mountain ranges
+having many peaks often over 13,000 feet in height.' In the forest
+tract, to which the Russians gave the name of Tchetchnia, their armies
+were constantly entangled; and their difficulties in reducing the
+inhabitants to subjection were quite as great as in conquering the
+highland tribes of Daghestan. Throughout the eighteenth century, and
+even earlier, the Russians had been pushing southward toward the Black
+Sea and the Caspian, and had gradually taken under their authority and
+protection the Cossack tribes who were settled on the steppes that
+spread along the northern border of the Caucasus. On this border they
+had established by the end of the century the Cossack line of forts,
+military colonies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> and plantations of armed cultivators, linked
+together to form a barrier against the incursions and marauding raids
+of the wild folk in the woods and mountains in front of them, and
+gradually strengthened and supported by stations of regular troops in
+the background. On the south of the central mountain ranges the
+Russians held Georgia, inhabited by Christian races whom the Russians
+had liberated from the Turkish or Persian yoke before the close of the
+eighteenth century, and who ever afterwards remained loyal subjects of
+the Czar. The Georgian road which traversed the whole Caucasian region
+from north to south, formed a most important line of communication
+which was never seriously interrupted. To the south-east, when the
+nineteenth century opened, lay Mohammedan khanates, vassals of Persia;
+on the south-west were the semi-independent pachaliks of the Ottoman
+empire.</p>
+
+<p>We must pass over, reluctantly, Mr. Baddeley's very interesting sketch
+of the gradual approach made by Russia toward the Caucasus during the
+eighteenth century, which may be said to have begun in earnest with
+the expedition of Peter the Great, who led an army to the Caspian
+shore and captured Derbend about 1722. This threatening movement upon
+the confines of Asia inevitably involved Russia in war with the Turks
+and with the Persians, for whom the Caucasian mountains represented a
+great fortress, barring the onward march of a powerful Christian
+empire toward their dominions. For the Russians, on their side, it
+became of vital importance to break through the barrier that separated
+them from Georgia, to occupy the country between the two seas, and to
+make an end of the perpetual warfare with the tribes, who kept their
+frontier on the Cossack line in unceasing agitation and disorder, and
+were a standing menace to the Christian population of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> Georgia. It
+should be understood, however, that the Cossacks discharged their
+duties of watch and ward after a very rough fashion, raiding and
+fighting on their own account, making incursions upon their Mohammedan
+neighbours in retaliation for attacks and forays, and laying waste the
+enemy's country with the bitter vindictiveness of antagonistic races
+and religions.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of the nineteenth century Georgia and some other
+Christian principalities in Trans-Caucasia&mdash;that is, on the southern
+border of the mountains&mdash;had been absorbed into the Russian empire,
+which now held continuous territory on this line from the Black Sea to
+the Caspian. Along the Caspian shore the vassal States of Persia had
+been reduced to submission, while the Turks had been driven back from
+their fortified posts on the Black Sea. The Turkish and Persian
+governments naturally took alarm at the approach of a military power
+whom they had already good reason to mistrust and dread; the Russian
+viceroys and generals on the frontier treated these Oriental kingdoms
+with high-handed arrogance, and gave ample provocation for the wars
+which speedily broke out with both of them. The annals of the next few
+years record many vicissitudes of fortune. The Russian armies achieved
+some brilliant victories, and suffered some heavy disasters. By
+disease and the strain of forced marches through rugged and almost
+pathless country, by the storming of petty fortresses, by incessant
+skirmishing and treacherous surprises, the troops were reduced in
+number and gradually worn out; they were outnumbered by the Persian
+and Turkish soldiery, whose military qualities were at that time by no
+means despicable; while at this time the great European wars against
+Napoleon made reinforcements hard to obtain. In 1811 the Russians
+could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> barely hold their ground against the combined forces of Turkey
+and Persia; but just when the whole situation was at its worst the
+Russian Government, under the imminent emergency of Napoleon's march
+upon Moscow, patched up a peace (May 1812) with Turkey that reinstated
+the Sultan in some important positions on the Black Sea coast, and
+made considerable retrocessions of territory. By strenuous exertion
+the Persians were defeated and beaten off, and next year there was
+comparative peace on the Caucasian border. Yet it was but a calm
+interval before storms, for Mr. Baddeley remarks that nearly half a
+century of fighting was to elapse before the conquest of the mountains
+could be completed.</p>
+
+<p>This era of long and sanguinary contest may be said to have begun, on
+a deliberate plan, with the appointment of General Yermoloff, in 1816,
+to be commander-in-chief in Georgia, with jurisdiction over the whole
+Caucasus. It was carried on with undaunted courage, hardihood, and
+obstinate endurance on both sides; and in the matter of merciless
+ferocity there was little to choose between the two antagonists.
+Yermoloff appears to have belonged to the type of military commander
+whom the Russian soldier follows with complete trust and unhesitating
+devotion&mdash;a leader inured to hardship and perils, treating his men as
+comrades but unsparing of their lives, rigid in discipline, reckless
+of bloodshed, a relentless conqueror yet capable of occasional
+generosity. His stern and implacable temper recognised but one method
+of dealing with barbarian enemies&mdash;the unflinching use of fire and
+sword, the policy of devastation and massacre. 'I desire,' said
+Yermoloff, 'that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more
+potently than chains of fortresses; that my word shall be for the
+natives a law more inevitable than death. Condescension in the eyes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+of Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am
+inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of Russians from
+destruction, and thousands of Mussulmans from treason.' He demanded
+unconditional submission from all the tribes of the Caucasus; and he
+substituted for the former system of bribery and subsidies the policy
+of treating all resistance as rebellion, and suppressing it with cruel
+severity, 'but' (says one writer) 'always combined with justice and
+magnanimity.' Upon this Mr. Baddeley remarks that it is difficult to
+see where justice came in, 'but in this respect Russia was only doing
+what England and all other civilised States have done, and still do,
+wherever they come into contact with savage or semi-savage races. By
+force or fraud a portion of the country is taken and sooner or later,
+on one excuse or another, the rest is sure to follow.' To this it may
+be rejoined that on the north-west frontier of India, and nowhere
+else, England has come into contact with a race quite as savage and
+untamable as the Caucasian mountaineers, but that it would be a great
+mistake to suppose that the methods of Yermoloff have ever been
+adopted in dealing with the turbulent fanaticism of the Afghan tribes.</p>
+
+<p>On the Cossack line, when Yermoloff assumed charge of operations,
+'there was no open warfare, but there was continual unrest. No man's
+life was safe outside the forts and stanitzas; robbery and murder were
+rife; raiding parties, great and small, harried the fields, the farms
+and the weaker settlements.' To this state of things he was resolved
+to put an end. He built fortresses, pushed forward his outposts,
+formed moving columns of troops, and assiduously trained his soldiers
+to the peculiar conditions of warfare on this borderland. The Russian
+regiments, like the Roman legions, were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> often stationed in their
+camps or garrisons for twenty-five years; and for the service required
+of them their efficiency was admirable. For ten years Yermoloff
+carried on this tribal war with inflexible rigour, by expeditions to
+punish some marauding village, which was razed to the ground, and most
+of the men, women and children burnt or killed after defending the
+place with the fury of despair; by night marches to surprise and storm
+the hill forts; by exterminating bands of brigands; and more than once
+by laying deathtraps for notorious rebels or fanatics. There can be no
+doubt that this system of ruthless chastisement, of beating down the
+enemy's defences by sharp and rapid strokes, by sudden and daring
+inroads into the heart of their country, intimidated the tribes, and
+went far toward compelling them to sullen acquiescence in the Russian
+overlordship. Of the petty independent chiefships some were seized
+forcibly, others submitted and paid tribute. The Russians were
+advancing step by step into the interior of the country, piercing it
+with roads and riveting their hold on it by throwing forward their
+chain of connected forts. By 1820 Yermoloff appears to have convinced
+himself that in a few years the whole of the Caucasus&mdash;mountain and
+forest&mdash;would be permanently conquered and pacified; and for some time
+after that date there was little or no fighting, though the border was
+frequently disquieted by outbreaks that were sternly crushed. With the
+Persians and the Turks there was an interval of peace.</p>
+
+<p>But the harsh measures taken by the Russians to bring the forest
+tribes under their authority were bitterly resented; and in 1824 two
+of their generals were fatally stabbed in Tchetchnia by one of several
+villagers whom they were disarming. This murder was avenged by
+Yermoloff, as usual, relentlessly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> but it was his last campaign in
+the Caucasus. In 1826 the Persians, who had been incensed by
+Yermoloff's rough ways on their frontier and by his insolent
+diplomacy, invaded Russian territory with a strong army. The Russians
+were unprepared, and at first could only act on the defensive. The
+flames of insurrection at once broke out among the tribes; the whole
+country fell back into confusion, and the Emperor Nicholas, holding
+Yermoloff responsible for this disastrous state of affairs,
+reprimanded and recalled him. He lived in retirement until 1861,
+revered by the Russian nation as the type and model of a valiant
+soldier and a devoted patriot who won brilliant victories and
+conquered large territories for the empire. But on his system and its
+consequences Mr. Baddeley pronounces a judgment which in fact points
+the moral of his whole narrative, and explains the history of the
+events that followed Yermoloff's departure:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'He gained brilliant victories at slight cost; and brought for a
+time the greater part of Daghestan under Russian dominion.... He
+absorbed the Persian and Tartar khanates, and treated Persia with
+astonishing arrogance. But it was these very measures and successes
+that led, on the one hand, to the Persian War and the revolt of the
+newly-acquired provinces; on the other, to that great outburst of
+religious and racial fanaticism which, under the banner of
+Muridism, welded into one powerful whole so many weak and
+antagonistic elements in Daghestan and Tchetchnia, thereby
+initiating the bloody struggle waged unceasingly for the next forty
+years. Daghestan speedily threw off the Russian yoke, and defied
+the might of the mother empire until 1859. In Tchetchnia mere
+border forays conducted by independent partisan leaders ...
+developed into a war of national independence under a chieftain as
+cruel, capable, and indomitable as Yermoloff himself.'</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p><p>The Persian War ended in 1828, but in the same year hostilities broke
+out with Turkey, involving the Russian troops on the Georgian frontier
+in hard and hazardous fighting, which lasted, with a great expenditure
+of men and money, until peace was concluded in 1829. From that year
+until 1854, when the Crimean War began, Russia had a free hand in the
+Caucasus, and applied her strength with inexorable energy to its
+subjugation. And it is to the rise and spread of the ferocious
+enthusiasm which Mr. Baddeley has called <i>Muridism</i> that he attributes
+the striking fact that the complete conquest of the country was only
+accomplished in 1864&mdash;that the tribes held out against the forces of
+the Russian empire for more than thirty years.</p>
+
+<p>Muridism, in which this spirit of heroic and hopeless resistance by
+armed peasants against the Russian armies was, so to speak, incarnate,
+is a word employed by Mr. Baddeley with a special purpose and meaning,
+which he explains at some length. For our present purpose it may be
+sufficient to say that <i>Murshid</i> denotes a religious teacher who
+expounds the mystic Way of Salvation to his <i>Murids</i>, or disciples,
+who gather round him, adopt his doctrines, obey his commands, and
+cheerfully accept martyrdom in his service. Muridism, therefore, may
+be taken to signify the passionate fanaticism of religious devotees,
+of warriors who follow a spiritual leader and fight in the sacred
+cause of Islam against the infidel. It was this movement that united
+the Mohammedan tribes in a holy war against the Russians, who, as our
+author observes, had never gauged correctly the latent forces of the
+twin passions, religious fanaticism and the love of liberty&mdash;two
+elements which always form a very dangerous compound, and which became
+heated up to the point of explosion as the tribes found the iron
+framework of Russian administration steadily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> closing up around them.
+Any attempt to break out of this house of bondage was repulsed with
+inflexible severity. In this inflammable atmosphere, charged with
+ferocious suspicion, hatred, and superstition, one Kazi Mullah was
+elected to the rank of 'Imam'; and on his proclamation of holy war
+against the infidel oppressor the whole country rose and rallied to
+his standard. He was, if we may borrow Mr. Baddeley's description of
+the class, 'one of those strange beings, compounded of fanaticism,
+military ardour, and a nature prone to adventure, for whom only the
+dreaming, fighting, tumultuous, ignorant East, in its days of trouble
+and unrest, can supply a fitting field of action.' He came forward as
+a man sent by God to deliver the faithful from their servitude,
+holding in his hands the power of life or death, and those who refused
+to obey him or denied his authority were denounced and slain without
+mercy. Under such leadership the war spread again along the border,
+some Russian detachments were cut to pieces, and even when the
+insurgents were defeated the troops suffered terribly, for as no
+quarter was asked or expected none was given on either side. After
+some two years of incessant fighting Kazi Mullah made his last stand
+in a mountain stronghold, where he was surrounded by the Russian
+troops, who in their first assault were repulsed with heavy loss; but
+on a second attempt the place was stormed, and Kazi Mullah with a band
+of devoted Murids died sword in hand on the last breastwork.</p>
+
+<p>Of the sixty men who stood by their chief to the end two only escaped;
+but one of these was Shamil, who became afterwards the most famous and
+formidable champion of the Mohammedan tribes in the Caucasus.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'His marvellous strength, agility, and swordsmanship served him in
+good stead. With an Alvarado's leap he landed behind the line of
+soldiers about to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> fire a volley through the raised doorway where
+he stood, and whirling his sword in his left hand he cut down three
+of them, but was bayoneted by the fourth clean through the breast.
+Undismayed, he grasped the weapon in one hand, cut down its owner,
+pulled it out of his own body, and escaped into the forest, though
+in addition to the bayonet wound he had a rib and shoulder broken
+by stones.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Shamil had been born and bred in the same village with Kazi Mullah,
+whose disciple he became, and whose rules of rigid adherence to the
+strictest injunctions of Islam he adopted and enforced. He even
+attempted to put down, as a practice forbidden by the law of Mahomet,
+the inveterate blood feuds that divided and weakened the tribes, with
+the politic object of uniting them in the holy war against the
+infidels; and when the Kazi had been killed his mantle fell upon
+Shamil, who soon proved himself a far more able and terrible leader of
+fanatic insurrection. The Russians, who at first believed that the
+Kazi's death was a decisive and final blow to the cause of Muridism,
+soon found that they were grievously mistaken. Mr. Baddeley's
+narrative shows occasionally some disregard of orderly arrangement, so
+that the sequence in time and interconnection of incidents is not
+always clear. We gather from this part of it, however, that very soon
+after Shamil took command the whole country had risen against the
+Russians, that their posts were attacked and their detachments cut
+off, and that expeditions sent to seize the positions or disperse the
+gatherings of the tribes paid dearly for their victories, while they
+were more than once repulsed with defeat and disaster. Villages were
+burnt; the vineyards and orchards were destroyed; desperate fights,
+hand to hand, ended only with the extermination of the defenders by
+the exasperated Russian soldiers; and after one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> campaign, when the
+Russian Commander-in-Chief led a considerable force against Shamil's
+stronghold, he was content to conclude, in the emperor's name, a
+treaty of peace with the tribal chief, being 'compelled to retire by
+the total disorganisation of the expeditionary corps, the enormous
+loss in <i>personnel</i>, and the want of ammunition.' A treaty with the
+Russian emperor raised Shamil's reputation high among the tribes;
+while the slaughter and devastation inflamed his revengeful temper.
+When the Emperor Nicholas came next year to the Caucasus, General
+Klugenau met Shamil and tried to persuade him to tender submission in
+person, with the result that Klugenau narrowly escaped assassination
+at the interview. He was saved by Shamil's intervention. In 1839
+almost all the tribes were united under Shamil's command; and the
+Russian Government, seriously alarmed, determined that he must be
+effectively crushed. In the story of this campaign we have a signal
+and striking example of the perils that beset regular troops who
+encounter fierce and fearless barbarians on their own ground. The
+Russians had a powerful artillery; they were led by experienced
+commanders; their officers and soldiers fought with astonishing
+courage and endurance. After several bloody actions Shamil was shut up
+in the hill fort of Akhlongo, and here the undaunted Murids turned to
+bay. It was a stronghold surrounded by ravines and sheer precipices,
+accessible only along narrow ridgeways. Mr. Baddeley has related in
+full detail the operations and incidents of this eventful siege. The
+first assault failed after a prolonged and desperate struggle. 'Only
+at nightfall,' writes an eye-witness, 'and at the word of command, did
+our troops retire from the bloodstained rock.' The bombardment went on
+'until the castle was reduced to a heap of ruins, in which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> the heroic
+defenders seemed literally buried.' After a siege which lasted eighty
+days the place was at last taken with a total loss of 3000 Russians,
+including 116 officers, killed and wounded. The defenders were
+slaughtered almost to the last man; many women and children were
+killed; but Shamil again escaped miraculously.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Vanquished, wounded, a homeless fugitive, without means, with
+hardly a follower, it might well seem that nothing was left to the
+indomitable chieftain but the life of a hunted outlaw ... yet
+within a year Shamil was again the leader of a people in arms;
+within three he had inflicted a bloody defeat on his present
+victor; yet another, and all northern Daghestan was reconquered,
+every Russian garrison there beleaguered or destroyed, and Muridism
+triumphant in the forest and on the mountain, from the Samour to
+the Terek river, from Vladikavkaz to the Caspian.'</p></div>
+
+<p>By 1840 the Tchetchnia tribes of the wooded lowlands under the
+mountains had broken out into outrageous rebellion, for Shamil had
+established himself in the forests, and was harassing the whole
+Russian border. 'We have never,' wrote General Golovine, 'had in the
+Caucasus an enemy so savage and dangerous as Shamil'; and it was again
+decided to send an overwhelming army against him. The two first
+expeditions virtually failed. Between 1839 and 1842 the Russians had
+lost in killed or wounded 436 officers and 7930 men, and 'had
+accomplished little or nothing.' In 1844 the Emperor Nicholas had
+despatched large reinforcements to the Caucasus, with stringent orders
+to make an end of Shamil's 'terrible despotism' and to subdue the
+whole country. On his side Shamil mustered all his forces for an
+energetic defence. His mounted bands traversed the borderlands with
+amazing rapidity, rushing in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> suddenly upon the Russian outposts,
+waylaying detachments, and bewildering the commanders by the speed and
+secrecy of their movements. Count Vorontzoff marched against him with
+an army of about 18,000, horse, foot, and artillery. Shamil retreated
+gradually before him, drawing on the Russians, and abandoning his
+forward positions after a show of defending them. He had laid waste
+the country on the line of the Russian advance; so, as supplies were
+running very short, Vorontzoff pushed on hastily toward Shamil's
+headquarters at Dargo. This place, surrounded by forests,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'lay along the crest of a steep wooded spur of the Betchel ridge,
+nowhere very broad, narrowed here and there to a few feet, and
+consisting of a series of long descents with shorter intervening
+rises. Abattis of giant trunks with branches cunningly interlaced
+barred the way at short intervals, and the densely-wooded ravines
+on either side swarmed with hidden foes.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Baddeley's vivid description of the hurried advance upon Dargo,
+and of the Russian retreat after capturing it, has all the tragic
+interest of a situation where heroic valour strives vainly against
+calamitous misfortune, and brave men, caught in a well-laid snare,
+tear their way out of it with the energy of despair. The six barriers
+of twisted branches were attacked and carried without serious loss,
+though at one point, where the path along the hill-top was narrowest,
+the troops fell into confusion, suffered heavily, and were rescued
+with some difficulty. Dargo was then occupied without resistance; but
+the army had only food for a few days, and Vorontzoff, instead of
+retiring immediately, resolved to wait for a convoy that was coming up
+from the rear and had reached the edge of the forest. But the force
+despatched to protect and bring it into camp had to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> pass again over
+the strait ridgeway, where all the barriers had been reconstructed;
+and the Russians again ran the gauntlet of incessant and murderous
+fire, losing one of their generals with many officers and men. There
+still remained the most arduous task of all, to force a way for the
+third time along the ridge with weakened and disheartened troops
+encumbered by the provision train that they were escorting to Dargo.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The enemy were in greater numbers than before; the barriers had
+once more been renewed, and a heavy rain added greatly to the
+difficulties of the march.... On the narrow neck the advance guard
+found the breastwork of trees faced with the Russian dead of the
+previous day, stripped, mutilated, and piled up; it was enfiladed
+by four smaller breastworks on each side.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Passek, a daring and fearless commander, was killed in leading the
+attack with other officers and many men. The foremost regiments fell
+back in disorder. Yet the main body, with their general, who charged
+at the head of companies like any captain, struggled along the ridge,
+fighting all the way, though the Mohammedans kept up an unceasing
+rifle-fire, and from time to time they dashed right into the Russian
+line. Nevertheless the predicament of the Russians was becoming
+hopeless, when a fresh regiment sent out to their rescue from Dargo
+threw itself between the exhausted troops and their assailants, and
+thus enabled them to reach the camp. But most of the convoy had been
+lost, the total list of casualties was frightful, and for Vorontzoff,
+with little to eat, surrounded by victorious hordes, encumbered with
+more than a thousand wounded men, the only prospect of saving the rest
+of his army lay in cutting his way homeward through many miles of
+forest. Mr. Baddeley's description of the retreat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> is intensely
+dramatic. After fighting every step of the road the starving and
+demoralised army was brought to a standstill, and was eventually saved
+from annihilation by fresh troops that arrived just in time under the
+Russian commander on the frontier, who had foreseen the emergency, and
+made forced marches to the rescue of his chief.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the attempt to piece the heart of Shamil's country had been
+completely foiled; and Vorontzoff now confined himself to
+strengthening his fortified posts, linking up more effectively their
+connection, and improving his communications. But in this situation
+the Russians were acting upon the outer circle of Shamil's central
+position in the mountains, whereas their enemy held the interior
+lines, and could choose his point of attack. Shamil's strategy was
+directed toward keeping the whole Russian frontier in constant alarm,
+breaking in upon various and distant parts of the line by incessant
+raids and surprises, in order to prevent concentration of the Russian
+forces on either flank. He made a daring attempt to seize Kabarda, on
+the extreme west of the border, but was hunted out of it by the
+activity of Freytag, the general whose foresight and promptitude had
+extricated Vorontzoff from destruction. This desultory warfare went on
+until in 1847 Vorontzoff, having secured his base, again tried
+conclusions with Shamil, being resolved that it was necessary to
+reduce the fortified village (or <i>aoul</i>) of Ghergebil, which Shamil
+was no less determined to defend. On the morning of the assault the
+Russians, in their camps below the precipitous rocks, above which
+stood the aoul, 'heard the melancholy, long-drawn notes of the
+death-chant rising from behind its wall as from an open grave,' the
+sure prelude to a stubborn and sanguinary fight.</p>
+
+<p>The forlorn hope rushed forward, but lost its way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> and suffered
+severely; the supports kept the right direction and made for the
+breach.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'A withering fire from hundreds of rifles mowed down the troops
+like grass. Their gallant commander, Yeodskeemoff, fell dead,
+pierced by a dozen bullets. The captain of the grenadier company
+strode over his body and gained the top of the breach, to fall in
+turn; the men were exasperated rather than daunted; a Danish
+officer, more fortunate and not less brave than his predecessors,
+led them forward, and the wall was won. In front was the first row
+of low <i>saklias</i> (stone houses) and, climbing their walls, the
+attackers rushed forward, when to their horror the ground gave way
+beneath their feet, and amid shouts of demoniac laughter they fell
+on to the swords and daggers of the Murids below. The flat roofs
+had been taken off the whole row of houses and replaced by layers
+of brushwood thinly covered with earth; every house, in fact, was a
+death-trap.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the troops came on, and most of them got inside the
+village, but they were entangled in the labyrinth of narrow streets,
+and were obliged to retire. Another assault ended with another
+repulse, 'and the victorious Murids, driving the broken columns before
+them, followed until stopped by the bayonets of the reserve.'</p>
+
+<p>Vorontzoff had now been twice beaten off by Shamil: he had been
+repulsed, and had nearly lost his army in the forests; his troops had
+been hurled back with slaughter from the mountain fort. Next year he
+despatched another large army, furnished with heavy artillery, against
+Ghergebil, which drove out the Murid garrison by a tremendous
+bombardment, but retired without occupying the place. During the next
+few years, though wild work went on as usual along the border, where a
+sharp guerilla warfare was kept up, neither Shamil nor Vorontzoff
+attempted to strike any decisive blow. But the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> lowlands were
+devastated by perpetual incursions and reprisals, and the forest
+tribes, placed between two fires, driven to choose between the Murids
+and the Russians, gradually transferred their allegiance to the side
+best able to protect them, and migrated northward across the Russian
+line. The uninhabited woodlands became a kind of neutral ground which
+neither side cared to occupy; and from this time Shamil's sphere of
+action was confined to the mountains of Daghestan. Then, in 1854,
+began the war in the Crimea, when according to Mr. Baddeley the Allies
+might have ruined Russia in the Caucasus by making common cause with
+Shamil and supporting him vigorously. But England and France were
+absorbed in besieging Sebastopol, and Omar Pasha's Transcaucasian
+campaign was undertaken too late for any effective result. Mr.
+Baddeley considers that in neglecting their opportunity of backing
+Shamil the Allies made a strategic blunder; yet we agree with him that
+this is not to be regretted. For the credit of civilisation it is well
+that they did not let loose the savage Mohammedan fanatics upon
+Christian Georgia and the peaceful Russian settlements beyond the
+frontier, to their own dishonour, and to the misery of the people whom
+Russia was protecting. Shamil did make one foray into Georgia, when a
+party of his men carried off two Georgian princesses, the wife and
+sister of the Viceroy, who were kept by Shamil in rigorous captivity
+and treated cruelly for eight months while negotiations went on for
+their release. His object was to exchange them for his son, who had
+been captured by the Russians some fourteen years earlier, had been
+brought up from childhood among them, and at this time was a
+lieutenant in a Russian lancer regiment. As Shamil demanded not only
+his son but a large ransom for the princesses, there was long haggling
+over the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> money, but this point was at last settled, and the exchange
+took place on the banks of the river. The princesses and Jamal-ud-deen
+crossed from opposite banks to the escorts appointed to deliver and
+receive them; the youth was then made to change his Russian uniform
+for a native dress and rode up the hill to his father, who welcomed
+him with tears and embraces.</p>
+
+<p>The scene must have been strangely picturesque; and the whole story
+illustrates the accidents and incongruities of warfare between nations
+whose standard of morals and manners is entirely different. The
+abduction and brutal treatment of the princesses were altogether
+contrary to the rules and ideas of modern belligerents; but what would
+have been to the Russians a foul disgrace was to the rude Caucasian
+chief no more than a simple and justifiable method of extorting his
+son's release. On the other hand the Russians had bred up their
+captive at their capital; they had converted him to their own social
+habits and ways of life. And the sequel is instructive for those who
+have yet to learn how completely European education may incapacitate
+an Asiatic from returning to associate with his own people, how
+effectually it may obliterate the early influences of race and
+religion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The fate of Jamal-ud-deen was indeed a sad one. Brought up from
+the age of twelve years in St. Petersburg and entered in the
+Russian army, he was now a stranger to his own father, an alien in
+the land of his birth, and totally unfitted to resume his place
+among a semi-barbarous people. He had looked forward to his return
+with the gloomiest forebodings, which were fully justified by the
+event. As a matter of fact, there could be little real sympathy
+between his fellow-countrymen and himself; they soon began to look
+upon him with suspicion and distrust. Even Shamil was estranged
+when he found his son imbued<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> with Russian ideas, and convinced of
+Russia's right to the extent of counselling surrender.' ... Nothing
+'could reconcile him to the change from civilisation to barbarism;
+he grew melancholy, fell into a decline, and died within three
+years.'</p></div>
+
+<p>After the end of the Crimean War the Russian Government could turn its
+undivided attention to the enterprise of finishing the conquest of the
+Caucasus. The preliminary work of cutting roads through the forests,
+throwing bridges over rivers and ravines, destroying the enemy's petty
+forts, and throwing forward detachments to occupy important points,
+was carried out actively during 1857; and in the next summer three
+separate columns, under one supreme command, drove back Shamil's
+bands, and took up strong positions in the heart of his country. The
+inhabitants, severely harried by the Murids, who maltreated
+ferociously all villages that would not join them, took refuge under
+Russian protection; and though Shamil made several bold attempts to
+break through the circle that was gradually encompassing him, he was
+compelled to abandon Ved&eacute;n, so long his home, which was taken in April
+1859. The forest tracts were now entirely under Russian control, and
+the highland tribes were rapidly surrendering to the Russian
+commanders, whose strategy it was to avoid frontal attacks upon large
+bodies prepared to fight behind entrenchments, but to make resistance
+impossible by enveloping movements. In the mountains, which had so
+long defied the armies of the Czar, the local chiefs and their
+clansmen were now falling away from Shamil, who was forced to retreat
+hastily with a few hundred followers to his stronghold at Gooneeb,
+where he entrenched himself for a final stand, knowing well that
+defence was hopeless, yet resolved to die fighting. But his men were
+almost exterminated by the overpowering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> numbers which the Russians
+threw upon the fortifications in their assault. When the outworks had
+fallen, and the place was practically won, the Russian commander, who
+desired to capture Shamil alive, suspended the final rush upon the
+spot where he still held out, and sent him a message that his life
+would be spared on surrender. He yielded, and rode out to meet the
+Russian lines; but a burst of cheering from the Russian soldiers at
+sight of him so startled him that he went back. A Russian officer
+persuaded him to turn again.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Followed by about fifty of his Murids, the sole remnant of his
+once mighty hosts, he rode towards where Bariatinsky, surrounded by
+his staff, sat waiting on a stone. Shamil dismounted and was led to
+the feet of his conqueror, who told him that he answered for his
+personal safety and that of his family; but he had refused terms
+when offered, and all else must now depend on the will of the
+emperor. The stern Imam bowed his head in silence and was led off
+captive. Next day he was sent to Shoura, and thence to Russia,
+where later on his family was allowed to join him.'</p></div>
+
+<p>In the foregoing pages we have run rapidly over Mr. Baddeley's
+narrative of the long and laborious operations by which the Russians
+gradually made good their footing in the Caucasus, and at last
+consolidated their dominion. We have necessarily omitted many curious
+incidents and exploits characteristic of a deadly struggle between
+antagonists representing the collision of archaic with modern
+societies, the clash of two religions eternally irreconcilable, the
+deadly wrestle of assailants and defenders unlike in everything but
+their tenacious intrepidity. The story, until Mr. Baddeley wrote it,
+has hitherto been little known in England. Yet Englishmen should be
+interested in this singular and striking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> example of the obstinate
+resistance that can be opposed by free and warlike tribes to the
+organised military forces of a first-class European Government; for
+they are not without similar experiences of their own. And moreover
+the long contest for possession of the tracts lying between the Black
+Sea and the Caspian, on the borderland between Europe and Asia, had
+its effect in the wider sphere of Asiatic politics. If the Russians,
+in their wars with Turkey and Persia, had not been constantly
+distracted by the raids and revolts of the Caucasian highlanders, the
+consequences to these two Eastern kingdoms might have been much more
+serious. It will be remembered that at this period (1826-8) we were
+actively concerned in preserving Persia's independence insomuch that
+the Russians had accused us of fomenting hostilities against them. At
+a later time also Sir Henry Rawlinson, writing in 1849, when Shamil
+was still formidable and undefeated, observes that it would have been
+impossible for Russia, with her communications at the mercy of such an
+enemy, to carry her arms farther eastward into Asia, or to contemplate
+territorial extension in that direction. And in a subsequent Note, of
+1873, he points out that not until after Shamil's surrender in 1859
+did Russia begin to push her way continuously along the upper course
+of the Jaxartes river toward Tashkend and the Asiatic midlands. So
+long, indeed, as the mountains between the two seas were unsubdued,
+they formed an effectual barrier to the expansion of Russia into
+Central Asia; but when that frontier fortress of Islam had been
+captured, and when the Circassians had emigrated into Turkish
+territory, the onward march of Russia went on securely and speedily.
+Tashkend was taken and Kokand annexed in 1866; and soon afterward the
+communications between the Russian base in Georgia and the Russian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+garrisons in Turkestan were firmly established. Thereafter the flood
+of Russian conquest overflowed irresistibly the plains of Central
+Asia, until it was arrested by another breakwater, the kingdom of
+Afghanistan. It is true that the North-western Afghan borderlands were
+comparatively open and easily penetrable by an invading force; but
+beyond them lie lofty ranges with passes at high altitudes, guarded by
+a hard-fighting and intractable people, and on the farther side of
+these mountains stands the rival European Power whose policy it had
+been always to retard and obstruct the Russian advance across the
+Asiatic Continent. We may conjecture that if Afghanistan had been
+left, as the Caucasus was left after the Crimean War, isolated and
+obliged to rely on its own resources for defence, the drama of the
+Caucasian wars would have been repeated. The Russians would have
+besieged and reduced without great difficulty this second mountain
+fortress; and after another similar though less protracted struggle
+the Afghans would have undergone the same fate as the Daghestanis. The
+Czar's rulership, solidly established in the two natural strongholds
+that stand on either side of the great central plains, and command,
+east and west, the exits and entrances, would have been supreme
+throughout Mohammedan Asia.</p>
+
+<p>That the Russian armies were forced to halt on the edge of Afghanistan
+is thus a point of cardinal importance, and it marks a turning-point
+in the career of her expansion. It also produced a situation that is
+the outcome of the different strategy adopted by England and Russia
+respectively, in circumstances not otherwise very dissimilar. For
+whereas the Russians had been compelled by imperative political and
+military exigencies to conquer and occupy the Caucasian highlands, the
+policy of the British Government has always been not to subjugate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>
+Afghanistan, but to preserve its independence and to fortify it as an
+outwork for the protection of the gates of India. It is due to this
+fundamental distinction of aim and object that the history of the
+relations of the British with Afghanistan during the nineteenth
+century, and of their management of the tribes on the Afghan border,
+differs widely from Mr. Baddeley's narrative of events and
+transactions in the Caucasus. Nevertheless in both instances the
+general situation presented a strong resemblance. The Russians,
+pushing their dominion down from the north to the Black Sea and the
+Caspian, were checked and baffled for many years by the woods and
+precipices that lay across the line of their march into Trans-Caspia.
+The British, moving up by long strides north-westward across India,
+came to a halt at the foot of the Afghan hills fifty years ago; and to
+this day they have scarcely moved farther. Here they were met by races
+almost identical in character and circumstances with the tribes of
+Daghestan, fanatically attached to the faith of Islam, profoundly
+influenced by religious preachers, prizing their liberty above their
+lives, and looking down from their rugged uplands upon a great
+military power that had swept away many principalities and subdued all
+the cities of the plain below. If the British had pressed onward and
+endeavoured to take possession of Afghanistan [which had indeed been
+occupied by the Moghul empire in its prime] they would certainly have
+been involved in a series of sanguinary conflicts, revolts, and costly
+expeditions not unlike those which put so severe a strain upon the
+Russian armies in the Caucasus. This, as we know, they did not do;
+they adopted the alternative of asserting an exclusive protectorate
+over the country; they were content to remain outside it so long as no
+rival power was allowed to set foot in it. Yet we know that even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> this
+much more prudent policy was carried out at a heavy cost. The British
+army suffered at least one grave disaster by the total destruction of
+a division in the retreat from Kabul in the winter of 1842-3. And the
+Afghan War of 1878-80, with the massacre of the British envoy and his
+escort at Kabul in 1879, showed us the perils and difficulties of even
+a temporary and partial occupation.</p>
+
+<p>At the present moment, however, the objects of our policy have been
+satisfactorily fulfilled. The Russians have settled with us the
+frontier line between their dominion and Afghanistan, and have bound
+themselves to respect it. With the Afghan Amir we are on friendly
+terms, and we have taken up our permanent position on his Eastern
+border towards India, reserving to ourselves the control of the tribes
+within a broad belt of territory, otherwise independent, between the
+Afghan kingdom and British India. This tract is intersected by lofty
+ridges running parallel for the most part to our frontier, with
+precipitous slopes toward India, with a few practicable passes and
+numerous gorges formed by the drainage from the watershed, enclosing
+some fertile valleys along the courses of the rivers, inhabited by a
+hardy population that is broken up into manifold clans and sects by
+the configuration of their country. The Caucasus, as we learn from Mr.
+Baddeley, 'is peopled by a greater number of different tribes and
+races than any similar extent on the surface of the globe'; and it is
+precisely from the same causes, difficulty of intercourse between
+villages secluded in the valleys or perched on the heights, scarcity
+of sustenance, inbred jealousy of each other, feuds and factions, that
+the groups of the Afghan borderland dwell apart, become estranged or
+hostile, are at constant war with each other, and cannot unite against
+a common enemy. But while in the Caucasus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> this trituration of the
+people has produced a multiplicity of dialects, the Afghan borderers
+speak a language that is generally the same.</p>
+
+<p>In Dr. Pennell's book, the title of which stands at the head of this
+article, we have a vivid description, drawn from life, of the names,
+habits, and peculiarities of these primitive communities, with many
+incidental examples of the relations existing between them and the
+British officers who are in touch with them on the frontier. Lord
+Roberts, in a short introduction that may be taken as a guarantee of
+the accuracy and authenticity of the volume's contents, tells us that
+it is a valuable record of sixteen years' good work by a medical
+missionary in charge of a mission station at Bannu, on the
+north-western frontier of India. And Dr. Pennell's experience,
+acquired in the prodigious enterprise of taming and converting to
+Christianity some of the most murderous ruffians and inveterate
+robbers in Asia, has provided him with a rare insight into their
+character, and furnished him with numerous anecdotes of their strange
+inconsistencies and wayward, impulsive nature. On the Afghan frontier,
+indeed, we may survey a situation that has frequently recurred in the
+history of organised governments, whenever they have found themselves
+in contact, and therefore in collision, with intractable barbarism.
+Immediately across the border line may be seen in the Afridi tribes a
+complete and living picture of man in his aboriginal condition of
+perpetual war, under no government at all, in daily peril of ending by
+a violent death a life that in the pithy words of Hobbes is 'poor,
+nasty, brutish, and short.' A few steps back into the British district
+brings us among men, often of the same breed and tribe, dwelling
+without arms in peace and security, pleading before regular law
+courts, learning in English schools, occupied in commerce and industry
+under the protection <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>of magistrates and police. The contrast in
+morals and manners is as abrupt as the transition from the Afghan
+hills to the Indian plains. Such is the frontier along which British
+officers are charged with duties of watch and ward. Their business is
+to guard the Indian districts that march with the wild borderland, to
+prevent or punish incursions by the marauding tribes who have
+continued from time immemorial to live in practical anarchy. They obey
+no laws and acknowledge no ruler, though in emergencies they appeal
+alternately to the Afghan Amir for assistance against the British and
+to the British Government against any encroachments by the Amir.</p>
+
+<p>The Afghan character, writes Dr. Pennell, is a strange medley of
+contradictory qualities, in which courage blends with stealth, the
+basest treachery with the most touching fidelity, intense religious
+fanaticism with an avarice that will even induce a man to play false
+with his faith, and a lavish hospitality with an irresistible
+propensity for thieving. It will be remembered how 'Muridism,' the
+spirit of religious enthusiasm inflaming political hostility, was
+stirred up by the Mullahs of the Caucasus against the Russians, and
+embittered the resistance of the tribes. The same elements of fiery
+hatred lie close below the surface on the Afghan borderland. Dr.
+Pennell tells us that there is no section of the Afghan people which
+has a greater influence on their life than the Mullahs, who sometimes
+use their power to rouse the tribes to join in warfare against the
+English infidels; and that a prelude to one of the little frontier
+wars has often been some ardent Mullah going up and down the frontier,
+like Peter the Hermit, inciting them to break out. The notorious
+Mullah Powindah, who is still a firebrand on the border, is reported
+to possess a magical charm that renders his followers invulnerable
+before English<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> bullets. Whether he led them in person to battle is
+not mentioned; though he could hardly adopt the excuse of Friar John,
+who, as Rabelais tells us, made a liberal distribution of mirific
+amulets to his soldiers, assuring them that those who had firm faith
+in their efficacy would come to no harm. He added, however, that to
+himself the charm would be useless, because unfortunately he could not
+believe in it. Such an explanation would be coldly received among the
+Afghans.</p>
+
+<p>Under the exhortations of these Mullahs their students often became
+Ghazis.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The Ghazi is a man who has taken an oath to kill some
+non-Mohammedan, preferably a European, as representing the ruling
+race, but, failing this, a Hindu or a Sikh is a lawful object of
+his fanaticism.... When the disciple has been worked up to the
+requisite degree of religious excitement, he is usually further
+fortified by copious draughts of intoxicating drugs.... Not a year
+passes on the frontier but some young officer falls a victim to one
+of these Ghazis.'</p></div>
+
+<p>It is manifest that this sporadic Muridism might become epidemic under
+serious and widespreading excitement, but the provocation that leads
+to petty frontier wars comes entirely from the tribes, who make
+predatory incursions upon the Indian villages and refuse all
+reparation. In every tribe, as Dr. Pennell tells us, the outlaws who
+live by raiding and robbery, and the Mullahs who detest the infidel
+and fear his rule, are the fomenters of crime and outrage.</p>
+
+<p>The vendetta, or blood-feud, our author tells us, has eaten into the
+very core of Afghan life. At present some of the best and noblest
+families in Afghanistan are on the verge of extermination through this
+wretched system. Even the women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> are not exempt. In a village which
+the missionary visited he noticed that the houses communicated
+laterally by little doors all down one long street; and on inquiry he
+was told that some time before a great faction fight had been carried
+on between the two rows of houses. The villagers 'were always in
+ambush to fire at each other across the street. The only way to get to
+the supply of water was to go from house to house to the bottom, and
+in order to do this without exposure the doors had been made, while by
+common consent they had agreed not to shoot while getting their
+supplies from the stream.' Another anecdote relates how a British
+officer visited a petty chief in his tower, and would have opened a
+window to look at the country round. 'He was hurriedly and
+unceremoniously pulled back by the Afghan, who told him that his
+cousin had been watching that window for months in the hope of an
+opportunity of shooting him there.' In fact the chief was actually
+shot at this window a short time after the visit. From the universal
+enmity existing between cousins in Afghanistan the proverb 'as great
+an enemy as a cousin' has become a household word. 'The causes of 90
+per cent. of these feuds are described by the Afghans as belonging to
+one of three heads&mdash;women, money, and land; and on such matters
+disputes are more likely to arise between cousins than strangers.' We
+may compare Mr. Baddeley's account of an almost identical state of
+things in Daghestan. It was split up (he says) 'into numerous khanates
+and free communities of many different races and languages, for the
+most part bitterly hostile one to another. Strife and bloodshed were
+chronic between village and village, between house and house ... and
+of many contributory causes none had operated so powerfully in
+originating and perpetuating this state of things as the elaborate
+system<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> of blood-feud and vengeance.' And he gives one instance of a
+quarrel that arose from the theft of a hen from a villager, who
+retaliated by appropriating a cow. The retort was by taking a horse,
+upon which the murders began.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The blood-feud was now in full swing, and was kept up for three
+centuries, during which some scores, some say hundreds, were
+sacrificed in the name of honour to this terrible custom; and all
+for a hen.'</p></div>
+
+<p>But it may be more interesting to remind our readers that these feuds
+were 'in full swing' not so very long ago in our own island. A
+remarkable description of the state of the Border between England and
+Scotland in the sixteenth century and earlier has recently been
+published.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> In a chapter headed 'The Deadly Feud' the author tells
+us that blood-feuds set family against family and clan against clan;
+and he quotes from a report submitted by Burghley to the English
+Government a passage in which the term is defined thus:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Deadly Foed, the word of enmytie on the Borders, implacable
+without the blood and whole family destroyed.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Feuds of the most bitter and hostile character, we are told, were an
+everyday occurrence, and were carried on with the most ferocious
+animosity on both sides. The feud was inherited along with the rest of
+the family property. It was handed down from generation to generation.
+The son and grandson maintained it with a bitterness which in some
+cases<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> seemed year by year to grow more intense. It affected a man's
+whole social relationship, and gave rise to endless animosities and
+heart-burnings.</p>
+
+<p>In fact the whole description in Mr. Borland's book of the feuds
+prevalent three centuries ago on our own Border might be applied to
+those now actually raging among the Afghans, with the simple
+alteration of time, places, and names. The comparison is worth making,
+if only to show that similar conditions and circumstances produce
+everywhere the same results; and that there is yet hope for the wild
+Afghan, if hereafter it should be his destiny to fall under a strong
+government that can enforce laws, though this is the fate which he
+most dreads. No axiom is more easily refuted by historic experience
+than the commonplace saying that men cannot be made moral by statutes;
+the truth is that respect for a neighbour's purse or person cannot be
+inculcated by any other method.</p>
+
+<p>It was the political division along the Scottish Border that so long
+prevented the suppression of lawlessness, and when the two kingdoms
+were united it gradually ceased. On the frontier between Afghanistan
+and India the British Government keeps the peace within its own
+districts, but maintains only a fluctuating and ineffectual control
+over the tribal territory. Yet it is manifest that no permanent
+pacification can be accomplished until both sides of the line are
+brought under the same firm and civilised administration. For such a
+purpose it would be necessary, and would be practicable, to establish
+strong posts among the turbulent highlanders, to make roads, and
+probably to insist on a general disarmament, as the Russians did in
+the Caucasus. But the British Government has always been reluctant to
+undertake so arduous and so costly a task; though until some measure
+of that kind is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> found possible, the intestine strife and chronic
+disorder must continue; and in fact it is the natural and inevitable
+solution of the problem.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'No doubt,' Dr. Pennell observes, 'the Government desires not to
+make any further annexation of this barren, mountainous, and
+uninviting region, but it is not always easy to avoid doing so; and
+it is an universal experience of history that when there are a
+number of disorganised and ill-governed units on the borders of a
+great power, they become inevitably, though it may be gradually and
+piece by piece, absorbed into the latter.'</p></div>
+
+<p>In short, to manage a country without occupying it is no less
+impossible than to steer a boat without taking a seat in it. The
+process of subordinating the Afghan tribes to effective control will
+probably go forward slowly and at intervals. It may be that when one
+part of the country is taken resolutely into hand, the rest will be
+overawed and quieted; but we doubt whether any other remedy can be
+found for the feuds and forays that from time immemorial have
+distracted this borderland, which has preserved the primitive
+conditions of life and habits that have long disappeared from the
+frontiers of all other civilised nations. Yet the objections to
+pushing forward our landmarks into these mountains are great and
+manifest, while the disadvantages of the present system are equally
+patent. The attempt to protect our subjects by a line of outposts, to
+adopt the tactics of stationary defence, varied by occasional sallies
+forth from our cantonments to pursue assassins or to punish
+depredators by destroying houses and crops, is to assume a somewhat
+impotent and undignified attitude, hardly creditable in the case of a
+mighty empire worried by mere highland caterans. The Indian
+Government, therefore, finds itself placed in a dilemma: to advance or
+to stand still is equally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> difficult; nor is any practicable issue out
+of this situation to be foreseen.</p>
+
+<p>We are compelled, unwillingly, to pass over without the notice that it
+undoubtedly deserves Dr. Pennell's very impressive accounts of his
+intercourse, as medical missionary, with the strange folk whom he was
+trying to reclaim from savagery, of the risks which he faced with cool
+courage and self-command in his travels among them, and of his quaint
+theological disputations with arrogant Mullahs, whose invincible
+ignorance easily convinced a congenial audience of their argumentative
+superiority. His skill in surgery naturally invested him with a high
+reputation among people who were incessantly fighting&mdash;he had more
+success in healing their wounds than in curing their vices. His
+general 'Deductions' in regard to the present state and prospect of
+Christian missions in India are well worth attention, and with his
+survey of the existing conditions and tendencies of religious
+movements in India all who have studied the subject will generally
+agree. He lays stress on the delusion that to assault and overthrow
+the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, if such an achievement were
+possible, would be to lay open a clear field for the success of
+Christianity. 'Much more probably we should find an atheistic and
+materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and
+Worldliness had become new gods.' Such attacks upon Eastern religion
+'may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory ... but they are at the same
+time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the
+unquestioning devotion which have been the crown and glory of India
+for ages.' The wisdom and enlightened morality of these warnings are
+incontestable. But at such questions we can only glance, although from
+one point of view they may be said to have an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> important bearing upon
+the main subject of this article.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, we may observe that the frontiers of European dominion
+in Asia are the battleground upon which the forces of archaic and
+modern societies meet in arms for decisive conflict. In the ancient
+world the contest was only ethnical and political; the rude tribes
+were coerced into amalgamation with an expanding State, far superior
+in power and usually more humane. 'The nations of the empire<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a>
+insensibly melted away into the Roman name and people.' But the
+antique polytheism had no fanatical element; the deities of the
+victorious Romans were often acknowledged and accepted by the
+conquered population. Whereas in these latter days the Russians in the
+Caucasus and the English on the Afghan border have discovered that in
+the passionate religious animosity between Islam and Christendom lies
+the mainspring of the stubborn energy and fierce hatred that so long
+held their armies in check, and that still prevents the establishment
+of even a pacific <i>modus vivendi</i> on the most important frontier of
+India.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> (1) <i>The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus.</i> By John F.
+Baddeley. London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1908. (2) <i>Among the Wild
+Tribes of the Afghan Frontier.</i> By J. L. Pennell, M.D., F.R.C.S.
+London, Seeley and Co., 1909.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, July 1909.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> <i>Border Raids and Reivers</i>, by Robert Borland, Minister
+of Yarrow (1898). This valuable work, founded entirely on the study of
+original documents, may be heartily commended to all who are
+interested in the political and social life, the customs and
+traditions, of the old Border.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> Gibbon.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>L'EMPIRE LIB&Eacute;RAL<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>The fourteenth volume of <i>L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral</i>, issued in 1909, carries
+M. &Eacute;mile Ollivier's very interesting reminiscences of that eventful
+period up to the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870. It
+contains many curious particulars of the incidents and transactions
+culminating in the rupture with Prussia that brought about the
+downfall of his ministry and the ruin of the Second Empire.
+Autobiographies by men who have taken a prominent part in the
+momentous scenes which they describe have often the powerful effect of
+a dramatic representation: the actors reappear on the stage; they
+plead for themselves; they give vivid impressions of the scenes; they
+repeat the very words that were spoken; they revive the intense
+emotion of the audience during the contest between those who are
+hurrying on toward some fatal catastrophe and those who are striving
+to prevent it. M. Ollivier's volume is the story of a great historic
+tragedy; the principal <i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> are celebrities of the first
+rank; on their speech and action depend the destinies of France, and
+the spectators are the nations of Europe. If we make due allowance for
+the fact that the author's main object is to explain and defend the
+part which he himself played in these important affairs, we may credit
+him with an honest desire to set a strange, complicated, and oft-told
+story in a clear light before the present generation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span></p><p>M. Ollivier cites, in the first page of this volume, Machiavelli's
+observation that mankind at large judges those who give advice in
+affairs of state not by the wisdom of their counsels but by the
+results. He agrees that this method is not rational, looking to the
+haphazard course of human affairs, but he admits that the multitude
+can judge by no other standard; and he appeals to historians for an
+impartial revision of the popular verdict, founded on careful
+examination of the real facts and circumstances. Yet he fears lest in
+his own country the decline of patriotic enthusiasm, the cooling of
+military ardour, that he notices in France at the present time, may
+have rendered Frenchmen incapable of realising the hot resentment, the
+intense susceptibility to affronts, the element of heroism, which were
+dominant forty years ago in the national character. And he therefore
+has little or no expectation that the falsehood of legends which have
+been circulated regarding the events of 1870 will be proved, to his
+countrymen, even by the most irrefragable demonstration. All political
+parties in France, he says, have combined to hold their own ministry
+responsible for that calamitous war; he despairs of obtaining from
+them a hearing. He awaits with resignation the time when some
+inquisitive student of history may light upon a dusty copy of his book
+in the recesses of a library, and may set himself to explain how these
+things actually happened to readers of the future.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the decline and fall of the second French empire has
+often been told; yet it may be worth while to remind English readers
+of the political situation in France just forty years ago. The Emperor
+Napoleon <span class="smcap">III.</span>, importuned by reformers and reactionaries, by those who
+pressed him to step forward into Liberalism, and by those who insisted
+that he must stand still, had at last decided upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> making those
+changes in the form of his government that inaugurated the Liberal
+Empire; and on January 3, 1870, the new ministry took office,
+supported by the goodwill of the moderate party in the Chamber of
+Deputies and by the general approval of the country. M. Ollivier was
+recognised as its leader and spokesman, chosen by the emperor, and
+enjoying his particular confidence; though he was not prime minister
+in the English constitutional sense, for the power of issuing direct
+orders, and of overruling the Cabinet, was still reserved to the
+sovereign; nor was he always consulted in important military or
+foreign affairs. The complex and enigmatic character of Napoleon <span class="smcap">III.</span>
+is becoming gradually intelligible to the world at large, and public
+opinion has lately been veering round to a less unfavourable
+conclusion upon it than heretofore. He had long been reviled as a
+truculent despot, artful and dangerous, powerful and perfidious; the
+genius of Victor Hugo had set on him a brand of infamy. In reality, if
+we may trust later French writers, there was much that was good in his
+nature, and they are disposed to regard him with compassion. M. de la
+Gorce says that throughout his life Napoleon had been a humane prince.
+From the entertaining memoirs of General du Barail, whose military
+services brought him into frequent relations with the emperor, we
+should draw the impression that the emperor was affable, considerate,
+and sincerely well-intentioned. Giuseppe Pasolini, the Italian
+statesman, found him simple and easy in conversation, naturally
+right-minded and kindly,<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> though weak and irresolute. He was
+equally capable of forming bold projects or adopting cautious
+decisions; but he was apt to hesitate and turn round at the moment for
+action; and it was just here that he was so unlike his uncle, Napoleon
+<span class="smcap">I.</span>, who would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> have classed him among the <i>id&eacute;ologues</i> whom he
+despised. He invented the theory of nationalities to justify his
+polity of encouraging the unification of Italy, and of permitting the
+aggrandisement of Germany; in the former instance he alienated the
+Italians by refusing obstinately to allow them to occupy Rome; in the
+latter case his neutrality when Prussia attacked Austria in 1866 was
+the proximate cause of his ruin. He might have read in Machiavelli's
+<i>Principe</i> a warning of the danger of standing aside when the
+neighbouring potentates come to blows. The result, it is there said,
+is that the winner in such a contest becomes doubly formidable, while
+the loser resents your neutral attitude, and will not help you when
+the victor turns upon you with all his strength. Machiavelli declares
+that this policy has always been <i>perniciosissimo</i>; and so it proved
+to be in the case of the French Empire. In domestic affairs also the
+Liberal Empire took up a kind of half-way position, which was assailed
+by the extreme parties on both sides; for thorough-going Imperialists
+like Rouher asserted that a Napoleon could only rule by retaining
+absolute authority; while uncompromising Liberals demanded full
+parliamentary control. Ollivier's ministry took office with the avowed
+object of gradually extending constitutional administration; but he
+found that, as Tocqueville had said in his <i>Ancien R&eacute;gime</i>, the most
+dangerous moment for an absolute government is when it endeavours to
+introduce reforms.</p>
+
+<p>General du Barail, in the memoirs already quoted, gives M. Ollivier
+full credit for his honesty, ability, and sincere patriotism in
+undertaking his difficult task, which was begun in an evil hour, and
+failed through adverse circumstance. In May 1870, Ollivier, who was
+holding the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, transferred it to the Duc de
+Gramont, foreseeing no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> troubles abroad, and desiring to give his
+whole attention to politics at home. The external policy of the
+ministry was decidedly pacific; they relied on a quiet moment for
+developing the new constitutional system; they had no notion of
+changing horses in mid-stream, yet most unluckily they were caught by
+a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that
+Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the
+crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim;
+and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting
+of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of
+French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence
+in Spain was essential to the security of France; while, on the other
+hand, a complete subordination of Spanish to French interests has been
+held by other governments to be dangerous to the balance of power in
+Europe. The collision between these two principles had been the cause
+of great wars and diplomatic quarrels. Louis <span class="smcap">XIV.</span> only succeeded in
+securing the Spanish throne for his grandson after a long war. When
+Napoleon <span class="smcap">I.</span> made his nefarious attempt to impose his brother on the
+Spaniards as their king, his pretext was that under the Bourbon
+dynasty Spain had always been a dependency of France; and it had been
+the invariable aim of English policy to prevent a close association of
+the two kingdoms. The question had long been regarded on all sides as
+one of vital importance; and in 1869, when some information of secret
+negotiations between Bismarck and Marshal Prim had leaked out, the
+French ambassador at Berlin, Benedetti, had warned Bismarck that
+France would oppose the election of a Prussian prince to the vacant
+throne of Spain. Bismarck had treated the information as an improbable
+rumour, yet he had carefully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> abstained from a formal assurance that
+the king would forbid Prince Leopold to accept any such offer.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> It
+was therefore quite certain that in 1870, when the relations between
+France and Prussia were in a very critical state, the announcement
+that Prince Leopold had been chosen for Spain would be treated as a
+most threatening move on the political chessboard. Italy was under
+deep obligation to Prussia for aid in expelling the Austrians from
+Venice; the St. Gothard railway had been openly promoted and
+subsidised by Germany for direct and secure communication with Italy
+in case of need; and now the family connection which was obviously
+contemplated would bring Spain into the circle of alliances that
+Bismarck was drawing round the French frontier. It was a strategical
+man&oelig;uvre that the imperial government was bound to resist. Within
+France all factions were for once unanimous in demanding immediate and
+resolute protest; and the clerical party, very powerful in that
+country, were especially vehement in denouncing the project of placing
+the scion of a great Protestant dynasty on the 'throne of Charles <span class="smcap">V.</span>'
+M. Ollivier tells us that when the news first reached him it brought
+upon him suddenly and painfully the presentiment of impending war, to
+the discomfiture of all his efforts for the preservation of peace
+until the Liberal Empire should have been consolidated in France.</p>
+
+<p>The plot&mdash;for it was nothing less&mdash;had been skilfully concerted
+between Berlin and Madrid; and even the parts to be played in
+anticipation of French remonstrances had been rehearsed. When
+Benedetti went to the Berlin Foreign Office for explanations, he found
+that Bismarck was absent at his country house and the king at Ems; and
+Von Thiele, the Under-Secretary, cut short his interrogation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>by
+replying at once that the Prussian Government knew nothing of, and had
+no concern with, the Hohenzollern candidature, adding that the Spanish
+people had a right to choose their own king. At Madrid,
+notwithstanding the French ambassador's attempts to check Prim's
+jubilant activity, Leopold's acceptance of the crown was proclaimed to
+all the foreign courts as a matter for joyful congratulation; and the
+Cortes were summoned for July 20 to elect their new monarch. To demand
+satisfaction from Spain would have been to fall into Bismarck's net;
+for the Hohenzollern prince would have been elected nevertheless, and
+if French troops had then marched into Spain the Prussian army would
+have crossed the Rhine, whereby the French would have been placed
+between two fires. It was necessary to fix the responsibility for
+these proceedings upon Prussia, and to act promptly; but the precise
+line to be adopted was the subject of anxious deliberation in the
+emperor's council&mdash;that is, in a meeting of the Cabinet presided over
+by him. Finally, Ollivier proposed, as he has told us, to speak out so
+plainly that Prussia must understand France to be in earnest, and to
+say that the Hohenzollern could not be permitted to reign at Madrid.
+Marshal Le B&oelig;uf had assured the council that the army was in the
+highest condition of efficiency and readiness; and when M. Ollivier
+inquired whether, in the event of war, any help from other governments
+could be relied upon, Napoleon produced certain letters from the
+Austrian emperor and the King of Italy, which he interpreted as
+distinct assurances of armed support in the case of a rupture with
+Prussia. The wording of a declaration to be made before the French
+Chamber of Deputies was carefully settled&mdash;it was delivered next day
+(July 6) by the Duc de Gramont, and received with immense enthusiasm.
+Some objection<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> was taken, then and afterwards, to its menacing tone;
+but we may agree with M. Ollivier that this outspoken warning to
+Prussia was at the moment judicious and effective; and we may admit
+that up to this point no exception could be taken to the procedure of
+the French Government.</p>
+
+<p>M. Ollivier dates from July 6 the first of five phases, or alternating
+changes (<i>p&eacute;rip&eacute;ties</i>), which the diplomatic campaign, as he terms it,
+traversed in its headlong course. They are successively described and
+commented upon in the chapters of his volume; and they may be here set
+down in his own language, for the guidance of our readers through the
+complicated transactions that ensued:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Le premier moment est la d&eacute;claration minist&eacute;rielle du 6 juillet;
+le second, la renonciation du Prince Antoine (11 juillet); le
+troisi&egrave;me, la demande de garanties de la droite (12 juillet); le
+quatri&egrave;me, le soufflet de Bismarck et la fabrication de la d&eacute;p&ecirc;che
+d'Ems; le cinqui&egrave;me, notre r&eacute;ponse au soufflet de Bismarck par
+notre d&eacute;claration de guerre du 15 juillet.'</p></div>
+
+<p>These are, in fact, the five acts of a portentous drama, full of
+shifting scenes and striking situations, on the issues of which
+depended the fortunes of France and of Germany; it was played out with
+ill-omened rapidity in nine days. In regard to the train of causes and
+consequences that brought France to the tremendous disaster upon which
+the curtain fell, diverse accounts have been given to the world by the
+leading actors&mdash;by M. de Gramont, by Bismarck, Benedetti, and, the
+latest by many years, by M. Ollivier. His narrative does raise
+somewhat higher the veil which has hitherto kept in partial obscurity
+certain dark corners of the stage upon which these things went on. We
+know more now of the precise motives and considerations, the personal
+influences<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> and impulses which diverted the Cabinet, after starting on
+the right path, into leaving it for rash and perilous adventures. On
+some points of interest he is, indeed, still reticent, and on others
+his evidence is in conflict with different narratives; but in regard
+to facts actually known to him we may accept his testimony, though in
+matters of opinion we may sometimes differ from him.</p>
+
+<p>M. Ollivier insists that Gramont's declaration of July 6 was
+altogether <i>irr&eacute;prochable</i>; he writes that he has read it again after
+so many years with satisfaction. He admits that it contained,
+substantially, an intimation to Prussia that she must choose between
+withdrawing the Hohenzollern candidate and accepting war with France;
+but he argues that this straightforward and peremptory warning was
+justified by its effects; that Bismarck was taken aback and
+discomfited by the resolute attitude of the French ministry, supported
+enthusiastically by the Chamber of Deputies; and that Prince Antoine
+was thereby so intimidated as to compel his son Leopold to retract his
+acceptance of the Spanish crown. On the other hand, this stern
+language alarmed cautious deputies, and though it stirred Paris to a
+pitch of wild excitement it was read with uneasiness in the cooler air
+of the French provinces, where the prospect of imminent war met with
+scanty welcome.<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> The foreign governments were startled. Bismarck,
+in his <i>Reminiscences</i>, says that it was an 'official international
+threat, uttered with the hand on the sword-hilt,' From the Austrian
+chancellor, Count Beust, came earnest advice against marching hastily
+into Prussia; while the British Cabinet, in particular, doubted the
+wisdom of taking up such high ground, from which it might be difficult
+to retreat, at the opening of a grave and complicated question. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>
+our ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons, whose calm judgment and friendly
+counsels M. Ollivier acknowledges unreservedly, exerted himself
+throughout this critical time to deprecate precipitate words and
+deeds.</p>
+
+<p>Simultaneously Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, had been
+ordered to seek an interview with the Prussian king, and to impress
+upon him the necessity of appeasing the just indignation of the French
+people by forbidding Leopold to accept the crown of Spain. The king
+replied, as is well known, that he had treated the candidature
+entirely as a family matter, quite apart from the sphere of
+international politics; that he had nevertheless communicated with
+Leopold, and could give Benedetti no positive answer until he should
+have heard from that prince. If, as has been asserted, the king had
+been cognisant of Bismarck's secret negotiations, this reply was more
+evasive than ingenuous; and we may note that he immediately directed
+his own ambassador, Werther, who was present at Ems, to return at once
+to Paris. M. Ollivier scores the king's order to the credit of
+Benedetti's diplomacy, since it amounted to an admission that the
+question in debate was much more than a mere family concern. And he
+adds that he immediately urged Gramont to allow no more equivocation
+upon this essential point, but to press Werther for a straightforward
+reply upon it. It will be seen that this pressure was carried rather
+too far at the French Foreign Office, with an important effect upon
+the course of negotiations.</p>
+
+<p>But at this juncture supervened the <i>coup de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>, as M. Ollivier
+styles it, which opens the second act of the drama. Olozaga, the
+Spanish ambassador at Paris, had been left in complete ignorance of
+the privy correspondence between Prim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> and Bismarck for procuring the
+nomination of a king from the Hohenzollern family, and this sudden
+revelation of its result by no means pleased him. He proposed to the
+Emperor Napoleon to despatch to Prince Antoine at Sigmaringen (in
+Prussian territory) an agent of his own, who should use every effort
+to convince the prince that his son must be imperatively commanded to
+withdraw his acceptance of Prim's offer. The emperor, whose sincere
+wish was for peace, consented willingly, and the mission was entirely
+successful. By long and strenuous argument the envoy had finally
+persuaded the father that his son, Leopold, would find himself in a
+precarious position on the Spanish throne, with France alienated and
+openly hostile; and the result was that Prince Antoine not only laid
+on his son a positive command to withdraw, but also telegraphed the
+decision to the principal German newspapers, to Olozaga at Paris, and
+to Madrid. According to M. Ollivier, Bismarck felt the blow keenly; it
+shattered his carefully organised plans; he found himself baffled and
+humiliated; he has himself said that his first thought was to resign
+office.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> To the king, on the other hand, the news brought welcome
+relief; he supposed that he had now only to await Prince Antoine's
+letter confirming the public telegram, when the dispute would
+naturally drop with the disappearance of its cause. This was,
+moreover, the expectation at that moment of the French emperor, who
+observed that, if France and England were preparing to fight for the
+possession of an island in the Channel, it would be absurd to go to
+war after discovering that the island had sunk to the bottom of the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>In those days, M. Ollivier explains, any telegram of political
+interest that passed over the Paris wires<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> was communicated, by
+special arrangement, to the Minist&egrave;re de l'Int&eacute;rieur; and accordingly
+he received a copy of Prince Antoine's message to Olozaga before it
+reached its address. The contents filled him with exultation&mdash;he could
+feel no doubt that peace had now been triumphantly secured, mainly by
+the unflinching tone of the Cabinet's declaration. He carried the
+paper with him to the Chamber, where Olozaga rushed up to him in the
+lobby, drew him into a corner, read to him with much obvious
+excitement the telegram which Ollivier had already in his pocket, and
+hurried on to the Foreign Office. Naturally the incident aroused
+general curiosity; the deputies surrounded the minister, and eagerly
+pressed him for information. M. Ollivier tells us that he hesitated
+for some time before divulging his secret; but that on the whole he
+found no good reason for withholding news that would certainly appear
+within a few hours in the evening papers, so he read out the telegram
+to all present. We believe that few men, who had not been trained by
+experience to the cautious habits of official life, would have done
+otherwise. But M. de la Gorce<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> has pointed out that the chief
+minister ought to have kept silence until the renunciation had been
+approved and confirmed by the King of Prussia, who was in hourly
+expectation of Prince Antoine's letter, and whose acquiescence,
+transmitted through Benedetti to the French Government, would have
+probably brought the whole affair to an honourable termination. It may
+be objected that this is to argue from consequences, since known,
+which could hardly be foreseen at the moment; yet one must admit that
+reticence would have been preferable, for we have to remember that M.
+Ollivier was disclosing a telegram intercepted, so to speak, on its
+passage to a foreign embassy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> thereby forestalling not only the
+Spanish ambassador but also the French Foreign Office.</p>
+
+<p>The news ran round the Palais L&eacute;gislatif, inside and outside, and
+spread through Paris with electrical rapidity.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'En m&ecirc;me temps d&eacute;bouchait du Palais L&eacute;gislatif une bande agit&eacute;e;
+c'&eacute;tait &agrave; qui envahirait les fiacres de la place, &agrave; qui les
+escaladerait, &agrave; qui les prendrait d'assaut. &Agrave; la Bourse, criaient
+les hommes d'affaires; nous doublons le prix de la course, et au
+triple galop. Parmi les journalistes, m&ecirc;me empressement et concert
+de m&ecirc;me nature, et on voyait les haridelles de la place sortir
+l'une apr&egrave;s l'autre et s'&eacute;lancer rapides comme des fl&egrave;ches.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Apparently all this stir and hurry had already affected M. Ollivier
+with some misgivings; for when, on going into one of the
+committee-rooms, he met Gressier, formerly a minister, he assured him
+that he (Ollivier) had no intention of making the renunciation a
+stepping-stone toward further demands. 'To take up that ground,'
+replied Gressier, 'will be a proof of courage, but it will bring down
+your ministry, for the country will never be content with this degree
+of satisfaction.' M. Ollivier soon found that he was right; for a
+crowd of deputies began to protest against the faint-heartedness of a
+government that seemed willing to drop the whole affair, leaving
+Prussia to escape scot-free; and M. Ollivier had scarcely entered the
+Chamber when Cl&eacute;ment Duvernois rose with an interpellation asking what
+guarantees the Cabinet proposed to require for the purpose of
+restraining Prussia from inventing more complications of this sort.</p>
+
+<p>Olozaga had taken his telegram to M. de Gramont, who by no means
+shared M. Ollivier's joy over it. He observed that the effect was
+rather to embarrass his negotiations with Prussia, since that
+government<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> could now make the renunciation a pretext for disowning
+the responsibility which he desired to fix upon the king with regard
+to the whole business; and, moreover, he added, public opinion in
+France will consider such a conclusion unsatisfactory. He was at that
+moment engaged in colloquy with Werther, the Prussian ambassador, who
+had presented himself at the Foreign Office, where presently M.
+Ollivier joined them, Olozaga having departed. What followed is
+treated by some French writers as the most ill-conceived of all the
+false moves made by the French players in this hazardous diplomatic
+game. Gramont had been urging Werther to advise the Prussian king to
+write a letter to the emperor, to the effect that in authorising the
+acceptance of the Spanish throne by Leopold he had no idea of giving
+umbrage to France; that the king associated himself with the prince's
+renunciation, and hoped that all causes of misunderstanding between
+the two governments were thereby removed. Gramont sketched out what he
+thought the king might say, and actually made over his note to the
+Prussian ambassador, by way of <i>aide-m&eacute;moire</i>; precisely as in 1867
+Benedetti had trusted Bismarck with his draft of the secret treaty
+proposed for the annexation of Belgium to France, which Bismarck
+afterwards published in the <i>Times</i> of July 1870. M. Ollivier, who
+agreed with and supported Gramont, now maintains that his arrival
+changed the character of the conference, that it ceased to be an
+official interview between the Minister of Foreign Affairs and an
+ambassador, and thenceforward became merely one of those free
+unofficial conversations in which politicians explain their views
+without compromising their respective governments. But we are obliged
+to remark that in our judgment this plea is inadmissible, for M. de
+Gramont has explicitly stated that the interview, so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> far as he was
+concerned, was official,<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> and Werther could not have been expected
+to appreciate this subtle yet important distinction&mdash;of which nothing
+seems to have been said to him&mdash;while M. Ollivier should have foreseen
+that Bismarck would certainly ignore it. The result was that Werther
+did transmit to his king the suggestion of the two French ministers;
+that the king was deeply offended at having been required to send what
+he called, not unreasonably, a letter of excuses; that Bismarck used
+Werther's despatch to kindle national indignation throughout Germany;
+and that Werther himself was reprimanded and recalled.</p>
+
+<p>The scene now shifts to St. Cloud, where the poor emperor, who had
+supposed that Prince Antoine's telegram signified peace with honour,
+found a military party eager for war, and hotly asserting that the
+empire would be totally discredited unless satisfaction were demanded
+from Prussia for conniving at the Hohenzollern candidature. The
+interpellation of Duvernois in the Chamber was cited as a forcible
+expression of public opinion. M. Gramont now arrived at the palace
+with his report of the interview with Werther, in which the latter had
+persistently declared that the king had nothing whatever to do with
+Leopold's withdrawal. The emperor's unstable mind began to waver; he
+forgot or put aside his arrangement with M. Ollivier&mdash;that the
+ministers should meet him next morning for consultation over this new
+aspect of the affair&mdash;and he proceeded then and there to hold a
+Cabinet Council.</p>
+
+<p>What passed at this Council has never been exactly known. The reproach
+of a ruinous blunder lies heavy on those who took part in it. Gramont
+says no more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> than that the deliberations were conscientious, and that
+every one, including the emperor, earnestly desired peace.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> M.
+Ollivier tells us, in the volume now before us, that of all the
+Cabinet ministers the Duc de Gramont alone was summoned; whether he
+learnt subsequently who were also present, and what share they took in
+promoting the decision, he leaves his readers to guess. It is clear
+that the proceeding was irregular and totally unconstitutional, and
+other French writers hint that Gramont's silence is intended to shield
+<i>une personne auguste</i> from responsibility for a decision that was
+fatally wrong. When the Council broke up at 7 <span class="smcap">P. M.</span> (July 12) Gramont
+immediately despatched from the Foreign Office his famous telegram to
+Benedetti at Ems, instructing him to require from the Prussian king a
+positive assurance that he would not authorise the renewal of
+Leopold's candidature&mdash;a demand, in short, for guarantees. At his
+office he met Lord Lyons, to whom he expounded his reasons for
+treating the single renunciation as inadequate, to the great surprise
+of our ambassador, who objected so strenuously to Gramont's views and
+intentions that the minister, somewhat shaken, merely said that the
+formal decision would be made public next morning. While the emperor
+and two councillors were then taking irrevocable steps toward a
+collision, and were unconsciously playing into the hands of their
+arch-enemy, the leaders of the warlike faction in the Chamber and the
+Parisian press were clamouring with fury and vitriolic sarcasm against
+a faint-hearted and contemptible ministry that shrank from seizing the
+opportunity of humbling Prussia.</p>
+
+<p>Again the scene changes, this time to the Foreign Office, where M.
+Ollivier, in total ignorance of that evening's Council at St. Cloud,
+sought and found the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> Duc de Gramont about midnight. He had come to
+ask whether any fresh news had been received from Benedetti at Ems;
+and Gramont answered by showing him the telegram just despatched by
+the Council's order to Benedetti, with a letter to himself from the
+emperor desiring that its language should be stiffened. Naturally M.
+Ollivier could hardly control his resentment at discovering that an
+extremely grave resolution had been adopted and acted upon without
+consulting or even warning him beforehand; that the emperor, in spite
+of his promises to govern constitutionally, had reverted to such an
+extreme use of autocratic power; and that Gramont had made no attempt
+to check it, had even abetted the irregularity. However, the telegram
+had gone to Ems&mdash;it was too late to remedy that mischief&mdash;but the
+Cabinet would have to answer before the Chamber for its despatch. He
+said to Gramont:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'On va vous accuser d'avoir pr&eacute;m&eacute;dit&eacute; la guerre et de n'avoir vu
+dans l'incident Hohenzollern qu'un pr&eacute;texte de la provocation.
+N'accentuez pas votre premi&egrave;re d&eacute;p&ecirc;che comme vous le prescrit
+l'Empereur, att&eacute;nuez la. Benedetti aura d&eacute;j&agrave; accompli sa mission
+lorsque cette att&eacute;nuation lui parviendra, mais devant la Chambre
+vous y trouverez un argument pour &eacute;tablir vos intentions
+pacifiques.'<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>And he at once drafted a telegram instructing Benedetti to require
+from the king no more than that he should agree not to permit Leopold
+to retract the particular renunciation which his father had obtained
+from him; instead of requiring a general assurance against <i>any
+future</i> retractation. Gramont telegraphed accordingly, but in
+continuation, not in correction, of his earlier message, so that the
+latter part of the instructions to Benedetti was inconsistent with the
+former part. But this second telegram reached Ems,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> as M. Ollivier had
+foreseen, too late, for Benedetti had already seen the king, and had
+been urging him persistently to satisfy the French Government by
+conceding the general assurance.</p>
+
+<p>M. Ollivier's description of the distress and perplexity that kept him
+without sleep during the rest of that eventful night will be read with
+a feeling of sincere commiseration. This, then, he reflected, was the
+first fruit of imperial liberalism, that the chief minister was
+slighted by his sovereign, ill-served and even betrayed by his
+colleagues, and committed, behind his back, to a most hazardous
+policy. He had been too soft-hearted to insist on making a clean sweep
+of the old official class in forming his Cabinet; he had thought to
+replace the decrepit absolutism by a young and liberal empire; and
+here was the personal power reappearing at the first crisis. The idea
+of having given the signal for war was abhorrent to him; he felt
+violently tempted to resign and retire. Yet, on reflection, to tender
+his resignation at such a moment would be, he felt, an act of culpable
+egoism, it would inevitably bring on the war; for the government would
+pass into the hands of a rash and impetuous war-party, manifestly bent
+on marching against Prussia if the king persisted in refusing, as on
+hearing of Ollivier's resignation he would assuredly refuse, the
+guarantees that had been demanded by the Council held at St. Cloud. On
+the other hand, by remaining in the ministry he might still command a
+majority in the Cabinet; nor did he despair of a majority in the
+Chamber to support him in cancelling, at some future stage of the
+negotiations, this demand for guarantees if he could recover the
+emperor's confidence. He might fail, but then he would fall
+honourably, having subordinated personal susceptibilities to
+considerations of his country's interest; so he finally determined not
+to resign office.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p><p>Our sympathies are unquestionably due to a minister who, finding
+himself placed, by no act of his own, in a situation of the utmost
+perplexity, resolves to take no account of his political reputation
+and personal interests, and to choose the course that he believes to
+be necessary, in arduous circumstances, for the honour and safety of
+his country. To a British prime minister his duty would have been
+clear, he would have tendered his resignation immediately; but under
+the Liberal Empire the ultimate decision upon questions before the
+Cabinet still lay with the sovereign, and thus the responsibilities of
+his principal minister remained ambiguous and indefinite.
+Nevertheless, though it is easy to be wise after the event, our
+opinion must be that M. Ollivier would have done his country better
+service by resigning office; for though it is very probable that war
+could not have been thereby averted, yet unqualified disapproval of
+the demand for guarantees might have rallied to his side all those
+who, in the Cabinet, the Chamber, and the country, were undoubtedly
+opposed to incurring terrible risks in order to obtain pledges against
+future contingencies. Among the late Lord Acton's <i>Historical Essays</i>
+there is a remarkable paper on 'The Causes of the Franco-Prussian
+War,' in which the considerations that may justify Gramont's demand
+for guarantees are fairly stated. It is there argued that the Prussian
+king, who had first 'sanctioned' Prince Leopold's candidature, and
+afterwards its withdrawal, had left the initiative in both cases to
+Prince Leopold. He had thus kept himself quite free to sanction a
+second acceptance as he had done the first&mdash;'he held in his hands a
+convenient <i>casus belli</i>, to be used or dropped at pleasure';
+remembering that the Hohenzollern candidature had been 'a meditated
+offence, long and carefully prepared, insolently denied, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+demanded reparation.'<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> But one might reply that the best way of
+foiling these deep and deliberate designs, manifestly contrived to
+provoke war, was to give the adversary no such plausible pretext for
+driving France into hostilities as was furnished to Bismarck by
+Gramont's demand. It is evident, however, that in July 1870 all Paris
+was in a state of irrepressible agitation, that the Imperialists in
+the Chamber were determined to push the Government into a defiant and
+warlike policy, and that they were acting in the foolhardy conviction
+that the French army could beat the Prussians, and that a victorious
+campaign would consolidate the Napoleonic dynasty.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, July 13, is an evil date in the history of France, when
+she was hurried into war by a swift succession and very unlucky
+conjunction of incidents. The Council met early, and decided by a
+majority not to call out the army reserves, although Marshal Le
+B&oelig;uf energetically declared that if there were any prospect of war,
+not an hour should be lost in preparation. M. de la Gorce relates that
+four of the councillors passed grave censure on the irregular
+proceedings of the previous evening, and condemned Gramont's telegram.
+M. Ollivier says that it was resolved not to insist further if the
+guarantees were refused by the king, and for the moment to keep the
+demand for them secret, merely informing the Chamber that negotiations
+with Prussia were in progress. Ollivier took his <i>d&eacute;jeuner</i> at the
+palace, where the household staff greeted him very coldly, and the
+empress, by whom he sat, turned her back on him. In the Chamber
+Duvernois asked in a surly tone when the debate on his interpellation
+would come on, and July 15 was fixed for it. Everything now depended
+on the issue of Benedetti's interview with the king at Ems, which took
+place<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> early on the morning of the 13th, when they met as the king was
+returning by the public promenade from taking the waters. What
+followed is well known. The king was surprised and disappointed at
+learning from the ambassador that Prince Leopold's resignation had not
+settled everything; Benedetti pressed on him Gramont's new demand for
+ulterior guarantees; the king positively refused to give them, and
+parted from him coldly though courteously, promising, however, to see
+him again after receiving the letter expected from Prince Antoine. But
+in the course of that day came Werther's report of his conversation
+with the two French ministers, which the king's private secretary
+opened and carried, in some trepidation, to his majesty. The king was
+grievously offended; he wrote to Queen Augusta that to require him to
+stand before the world as a repentant sinner was nothing less than
+impertinence, and he sent his aide-de-camp, Prince Radziwill (one of
+the highest Prussian nobles), to inform Benedetti that Leopold's
+letter of resignation had arrived, and that, as the affair was thus
+completely ended, no further audience was necessary. The ambassador
+replied that he was particularly instructed to obtain the king's
+specific approbation of Leopold's action, and was therefore obliged to
+solicit another interview. The king replied by his aide-de-camp that
+so far as he had approved Leopold's acceptance of the crown he
+approved the retractation; but the request for another interview,
+though it was twice repeated during the day, was civilly and firmly
+refused.</p>
+
+<p>M. Ollivier argues that Werther's report in no way affected the king's
+behaviour to Benedetti; he affirms that it made no difference at all,
+and that the king's determination to hold no further intercourse with
+him was entirely due to Benedetti's indiscreet importunity at the
+morning's meeting, which was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> witnessed, it may be noted, by a crowd
+of observant bystanders. We may assume that the king had at no time
+the slightest intention of acceding to the demand for guarantees; but
+it seems to us impossible to maintain that Werther's report, which was
+put into his majesty's hand at such a critical moment, and which
+undeniably gave serious offence, did not exacerbate relations which
+had already been strained, or induce the king to break off abruptly
+the personal negotiations with the French minister. And we may add
+that if Benedetti had been cognisant of this report, he might have
+understood the king's sudden change of temper, and might have spared
+himself some rebuffs. When the matter came afterwards to his
+knowledge, he declared that the effect on the king of Werther's report
+had been deplorable.</p>
+
+<p>Bismarck had been telegraphing from Berlin to Ems that if the king
+accorded to Benedetti any more interviews he must resign office; and
+the news of Prince Leopold's renunciation seemed to cut away the
+ground upon which he had been man&oelig;uvring for a quarrel with France.
+But his spirits revived on receiving by telegraph from the king a
+brief summary of the Ems incidents, stating that Benedetti's
+importunate requisition for guarantees had been rejected by his
+majesty, who had subsequently resolved</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'de ne plus recevoir le comte Benedetti &agrave; cause de sa pr&eacute;tention,
+et de lui faire dire simplement par un aide de camp ... que sa
+Majest&eacute; avait re&ccedil;u du prince L&eacute;opold confirmation de la nouvelle
+mand&eacute;e de Paris, et qu'elle n'avait plus rien &agrave; dire &agrave;
+l'ambassadeur.'</p></div>
+
+<p>The telegram also authorised Bismarck to communicate this statement to
+the foreign courts and to the press, whereupon Bismarck gave it
+immediate publication, having made (to use his own phrase) 'some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>
+suppressions'; having, in fact, maliciously tampered with the text and
+falsified the tone, according to M. Ollivier and other French writers.
+His official organ, the <i>North German Gazette</i>, was directed to print
+off a supplement and to paste it up all over Berlin, and copies of
+this supplement were distributed gratis in the streets. A thrill of
+patriotic enthusiasm electrified the nation, who were unanimous in
+applauding the king in defying the French, and mocking at their
+ambassador's humiliation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Dans toutes les langues, dans tous les pays, courait la
+falsification offens&eacute;e lanc&eacute;e par Bismarck. L'effet de cette
+publicit&eacute; effroyable se produisit d'abord en Allemagne avec autant
+d'intensit&eacute; qu'&agrave; Berlin. Les journaux faisaient rage.'</p></div>
+
+<p>This is what M. Ollivier has called 'Le soufflet de Bismarck'; and
+never was the art of changing the tone and import of words without
+altering their substance more effectively employed; for it must be
+acknowledged that the communication to the press was an accurate
+rendering of the facts contained in the king's telegram, which was
+stiff but not actually discourteous; whereas Bismarck put the sting
+into it by little more than adroit condensation. We are told that when
+the king received this revised edition of his message he read it
+twice, was much moved, and said, 'This means war'; and that it rang
+throughout Europe like an alarm-bell. At the same time, and before
+Bismarck's action had been known in Paris, M. Ollivier, as he tells
+us, was struggling vigorously against the torrent of reproaches and
+imputations of cowardice which threatened to overthrow his Cabinet if
+they flinched from the demand for guarantees.</p>
+
+<p>Late on July 13 came a telegram from Benedetti that the king had
+consented to approve unreservedly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> Prince Leopold's renunciation, but
+distinctly refused any further concession. This, cried the war-party
+at St. Cloud, is totally insufficient; the emperor was irresolute, and
+merely summoned his Council for next day. Ollivier was determined, for
+his part, to accept the king's assurance as conclusively satisfactory;
+and he relates how, on the morning of the 14th, he was engaged in
+drafting, for approval by the Council, a ministerial declaration to
+that effect, when the Duc de Gramont entered his room with a copy of
+Bismarck's circular telegram, and said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'"Mon cher, vous voyez un homme qui vient de recevoir une gifle."
+Il me tend alors une petite feuille de papier jaune que je verrai
+&eacute;ternellement devant mes yeux.... On n'&eacute;choua jamais plus pr&egrave;s du
+port. Je restai quelques instants silencieux et atterr&eacute;.'</p></div>
+
+<p>At the Council, which was immediately summoned, Gramont threw his
+portfolio on the table, saying that after what had happened a Foreign
+Minister who should not vote for war would be unworthy to hold office;
+and Marshal Le B&oelig;uf informed his colleagues that they had not a
+moment to lose, for Prussia was already arming. Nevertheless the
+Council set themselves to a deliberate investigation of the actual
+facts. Their conclusion, after six hours of discussion, was that,
+according to diplomatic rule and international custom, no exception
+could have been taken to the king's refusal, courteously worded, of
+the interview which Benedetti had, it seemed to them, rather
+pertinaciously desired; but that a reasonable refusal had been
+converted into one that was offensive by its publication in terms that
+were intentionally curt and stinging. Nevertheless Ollivier, clinging
+to any slight chance of avoiding war, persuaded the emperor and the
+Council to agree that Leopold's resignation, as approved by the
+Prussian king,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> should be accepted by France, and that, on the further
+question, whether members of a reigning family in one country could be
+permitted to become kings in another, an appeal for some authoritative
+ruling should be made to a general congress. But in the course of that
+day the ministers received from various quarters more evidence that
+Bismarck's inflammatory telegram had been sent officially to the
+Prussian diplomatists at all the foreign courts; and they heard that
+Paris was literally foaming with exasperation at their dilatory
+indecision, while the temper of the Chamber convinced them that the
+proposal for a congress would be rejected with fiery scorn. Berlin and
+Paris vied with each other in turbulent patriotism and warlike fury,
+and Marshal Le B&oelig;uf, being again and for the last time questioned
+by the Council, replied positively that the French army was quite
+ready, and that no better opportunity of settling accounts with
+Prussia could be expected. The Council rescinded its former decision,
+and voted unanimously for war. The empress alone (Ollivier notes
+particularly) expressed no opinion and gave no vote.</p>
+
+<p>On July 15 Ollivier pronounced in the Chamber the declaration that had
+been drawn up by himself and the Duc de Gramont. It was to the effect
+that the Cabinet had throughout made every possible exertion to
+preserve peace, but that their patience was exhausted when they found
+that the King of Prussia had sent an aide-de-camp to the French
+ambassador informing him that no more interviews could be granted, and
+that the Prussian Government, by way of giving point and unequivocal
+significance to this message, had circulated it to all other foreign
+governments in Europe. Having spared no pains to avoid war, the
+ministers would now accept the challenge, and prepare for the
+consequences.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span></p><p>M. Ollivier has given a vivid description of the scene that ensued.
+His final words were barely audible in the storm of applause that
+swept through the assembly, and the vote of urgency for the motion to
+provide the necessary war-funds was demanded with enthusiastic
+outcries, varied by angry vituperation of the few deputies who stood
+up to oppose it. But Thiers immediately arose and, in spite of many
+disorderly interruptions, made a passionate appeal to the assembly to
+reflect before precipitating the country into war. His speech, with
+the violent cries of dissent interjected by the war-party, is
+reproduced by M. Ollivier in order, as he says, that his readers may
+judge for themselves how far it merited the unstinted eulogy that has
+since been bestowed upon it; for M. Ollivier evidently considers that
+those who have credited Thiers with heroic patriotism in making this
+strenuous effort to avert the catastrophe have over-praised him. Yet
+with this view we believe that few of those who read the pages in this
+volume which contain the speech will agree. They will admire, rather,
+the courage and fervid eloquence of a veteran statesman who vainly
+strove to persuade a frantic assembly that it was fatally misled, that
+it was plunging the nation into war on a mere point of form, grasping
+at a shadow after the substantial and reasonable demand for
+satisfaction had been obtained by Leopold's renunciation; who reminded
+the deputies that the official papers authenticating the supposed
+insult had never been laid before them, and implored them not to risk
+the issues of a terrible contest upon a doubtful question of national
+susceptibility. M. Ollivier goes so far as to affirm that no one could
+be more justly accused of having brought on the war of 1870 than
+Thiers himself, because it was his vehement condemnation of the policy
+which allowed Prussia to beat down Austria in 1866, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> to set up a
+formidable military power on the frontier of France, that inspired the
+whole French people with the suspicion, jealous animosities, and alarm
+which rendered a war on the Rhine between the two nations eventually
+unavoidable. But Thiers in his speech emphatically repeated his
+conviction that sooner or later France must fight Prussia to redress
+the balance of military power between the rival countries; and the
+whole point of his speech lay in one sentence: 'Je trouve l'occasion
+d&eacute;testablement choisie' ('Your <i>casus belli</i> is ill chosen and utterly
+indefensible'). It cannot be denied that in 1870 the public opinion of
+Europe was on his side: for England and Austria, whose goodwill toward
+France was unquestionable, were foremost in their efforts to deter the
+French ministers from war and in deploring their infatuation when it
+had been proclaimed. At St. Petersburg the Russian emperor told the
+French ambassador plainly that the demand for guarantees was
+unreasonable. Nor is it likely that the general judgment of the
+time&mdash;that Thiers did his best to save the empire from a disastrous
+blunder&mdash;will have been revoked by posterity, or affected by anything
+that has since been pleaded in extenuation.</p>
+
+<p>'If (said Thiers) the Hohenzollern candidature had not been withdrawn,
+all France would have rallied to the support of your declaration, and
+all Europe would have held you to be in the right; but it <i>has</i> been
+withdrawn with the approbation of the Prussian king, and you had
+absolutely no pretext for making any further demand. What will Europe
+say when you shed torrents of blood on a point of form?' M. Thiers
+concluded his speech by urging the ministers to lay before the Chamber
+the actual documents which, as they asserted, rendered war inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>M. Ollivier, in his reply, declined to communicate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> certain documents
+which, he said, were confidential and could not be produced without
+infringement of diplomatic rules; and he laid stress on the
+impossibility of tolerating the affront which had been intentionally
+put upon France by Bismarck's circular telegram. And it was at the end
+of this speech that he made use of the phrase which has become
+historical as the typical expression of the levity and rashness with
+which his ministry threw their nation into a tremendous war, insomuch
+that it has become one main cause why he is so commonly charged, very
+unfairly, with the whole responsibility for the blind haste that led
+to the defeat and dismemberment of his country. 'Oui, de ce jour
+commence pour les ministres mes coll&egrave;gues et pour moi, une grande
+responsabilit&eacute;. Nous l'acceptons le c&oelig;ur l&eacute;ger.' The words were at
+once taken up sharply and severely; and M. Ollivier went on to explain
+that he meant a heart not weighted by remorse, since he and his
+colleagues had done everything that was consistent with humanity and
+with honour to avert a dire necessity; and since the armies of France
+would be upholding a cause that was just. He now comments bitterly on
+the malignity which has fastened this stigma on his name, merely
+because in the heat and flurry of debate, which left him not a moment
+to pick his words or arrange his sentences, he said something that he
+is sure no honest man who listened to his explanation could
+misconstrue into unfeeling frivolity. And in his criticism of the
+speech in which M. Thiers so vehemently condemned the conduct of the
+ministers he repeats emphatically that the war was not brought on by
+the demand for guarantees, but by Bismarck's false and insulting
+publication of the king's refusal to consider that demand. This
+affront, he maintains, was insufferable. Yet we learn from his
+narrative that before entering the Chamber<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> on this eventful day M.
+Ollivier had found at the Foreign Office Benedetti, just arrived from
+Ems, who had already seen Bismarck's telegram in a newspaper, and
+could have assured the ministers that it was a perfidious
+misrepresentation, since the king had not treated him with actual
+discourtesy. Nevertheless M. Ollivier quotes and entirely adopts the
+'proud and manly' utterances of the Duc de Gramont who stood up and
+addressed the assembly towards the close of the debate.</p>
+
+<p>'After what you have just heard,' he said, 'one fact is enough. The
+Prussian Government has informed all the Cabinets of Europe of the
+refusal to receive our ambassador or to continue the discussion with
+him. That is an affront to the emperor and to France, and if (<i>par
+impossible</i>) a Chamber could be found in my country to bear or suffer
+it, I would not remain Minister of Foreign Affairs for five minutes.'</p>
+
+<p>These haughty words (we are told) electrified the Chamber, and a
+committee to examine the papers on which the ministers relied to prove
+their case was immediately appointed. These were brought by Gramont,
+who, however, said that he would not lay before the committee the
+precise words of Bismarck's insulting telegram, because his knowledge
+of it came only from a very confidential communication made to him by
+the French representatives at certain foreign courts who had been
+permitted to see the original, so that the authentic text was not in
+his possession. This excuse was accepted, somewhat imprudently, by the
+committee; and their chairman proceeded to question Gramont closely on
+one point&mdash;whether, after Leopold's retirement had become known, the
+King of Prussia had been required at one and the same time to approve
+it formally and to promise that the candidature should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> never be
+revived. During the debate it had been objected by those who opposed
+the war-party that after obtaining the king's approval, and not till
+then, the Foreign Secretary demanded this promise, and that on this
+new demand the king took offence and briefly declined any further
+interview with Benedetti. Gramont answered the chairman with a direct
+affirmative; he stated that the two concessions had been required
+simultaneously, and M. Ollivier undertakes to prove that this
+statement was correct. He argues, if we understand him rightly, that
+before Leopold had withdrawn his candidature, the king had been
+pressed to advise or order him to do so, and that this requisition
+included by implication the demand for a guarantee against its
+renewal. When Leopold had retired without the king's intervention, the
+royal order became unnecessary; but the implied demand still remained
+in force, and was merely repeated in subsequent telegrams.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> On this
+we must remark that both Benedetti and the Prussian king entirely
+missed the alleged implication; that the question of guarantees was
+never raised by the telegrams interchanged between Gramont and
+Benedetti before Leopold's retirement had become public, when both the
+king and the ambassador treated it as entirely new; and that at any
+rate such an important and highly contentious demand should obviously
+have been stated with unequivocal distinctness, since any other course
+was quite certain to produce misunderstandings and recriminations. And
+it is no matter for surprise that various French writers have since
+accused the Duc de Gramont of misstating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> the facts upon which the
+committee reported to the Chamber that the papers laid before them
+amply sustained the ministerial request for the grant of an urgent
+war-subsidy, which was thereupon voted by an immense majority. In the
+Senate, where the money was granted with even more promptitude and
+with zealous unanimity, the proceedings were expedited by a report
+from Marshal Le B&oelig;uf that the enemy had already crossed the French
+frontier, and M. Rouher, a thorough Imperialist, headed a deputation
+of senators to congratulate the emperor, in the name of the Senate, on
+having drawn the sword when the Prussian king rejected the demand for
+guarantees. M. Ollivier reasonably complains that this unauthorised
+demonstration was awkward and mischievous; for while the Senate was
+thus made to attribute the rupture to the king's refusal, the ministry
+was declaring war on account of the 'soufflet de Bismarck'&mdash;the insult
+embodied in the Prussian telegram. Yet M. Ollivier, looking back in
+the calm evening of life on these stormy days, might have brought
+himself by reflection to admit that between these two pretexts there
+was little to choose&mdash;that neither of them justified a government in
+staking the fortunes of the nation and the empire on the hazard of a
+great war. When Rouher had read his address, the sovereigns conversed
+with the senators, and it was remarked that while the empress was
+lively and confident of success, the emperor spoke sadly of the long
+and difficult task, requiring a most violent effort, that lay before
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Having brought his narrative up to the moment when the Chamber by
+voting the subsidy had practically determined upon war, M. Ollivier
+stops to comment upon and explain the strenuous opposition made to the
+vote by M. Thiers and by the small section of deputies who represented
+the Radical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> Left. He is convinced that this latter party were mainly
+actuated in their ardent protests by a desire to embarrass and, if
+possible, to overthrow his Government, of which they had been
+consistent adversaries. They had calculated, he explains, on the
+probability that the ministry would flinch from the rupture with
+Prussia, would adopt some pacific compromise that would be rejected
+with indignation by the Chamber, and would be contemptuously expelled
+from office. When this calculation had been foiled by the resolutely
+courageous attitude of the Cabinet, they foresaw (he believes) that a
+triumphant campaign would greatly strengthen the Government and would
+utterly discredit the Opposition, so they changed their tactics and
+fought against the ministerial proposals with accusations of criminal
+recklessness and prophecies of disaster. It is hardly possible, after
+so long an interval of time, to form any opinion upon these somewhat
+invidious suggestions. The action of those who opposed the war,
+whatever may have been their motives, was outwardly consistent enough,
+and the construction placed upon it by M. Ollivier may seem rather
+subtle and far-fetched. At the present day, however, this question
+does not particularly concern any one, though we may agree that at
+that moment no one in France contemplated the possibility of defeat in
+the field. The French army was assumed by all parties to be
+invincible, and the minority in opposition did undoubtedly believe and
+fear that the empire would be consolidated by victories. M. Thiers in
+his speech only touched generally upon the chances and perils of war,
+and even Gambetta voted with the Government upon the conviction that
+success was beyond doubt; while not only in Paris, but in all the
+great towns, the determination to fight was acclaimed because a
+triumphant campaign was supposed to be certain.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> It was to be
+anticipated, indeed, that a brave and high-spirited nation, very
+sensitive on the point of honour, and confident in its military
+superiority, would respond enthusiastically to the signal of war
+against a rival whose ill-will was notorious, who was accused of
+plotting the injury of their country and of deliberately insulting
+their Government.</p>
+
+<p>A public declaration of hostilities was sent to Berlin, though M.
+Ollivier tells us that his ministry regarded it as a superfluous
+formality which they would have preferred leaving to Prussia.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'La d&eacute;claration fut libell&eacute;e d'une mani&egrave;re assez maladroite par les
+commis des Affaires &eacute;trang&egrave;res, et elle ne fut pas m&ecirc;me lue au
+Conseil. Elle fut communiqu&eacute;e uniquement par la forme et sans
+discussion aux Assembl&eacute;es, et envoy&eacute;e &agrave; la Prusse le 19 juillet.'</p></div>
+
+<p>This perfunctory method of composition is characteristic of the
+prevailing official atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>The document was delivered by the French charg&eacute; d'affaires to
+Bismarck, and in the dialogue that followed between the two
+diplomatists, which M. Ollivier relates in full, we have an excellent
+sample of the Prussian Chancellor's sardonic and incisive manner.
+Bismarck asserted that if he had been present at the interviews with
+Benedetti he might have prevented the war, whereas the king's
+conciliatory tone at Ems had misled the French ministers into the
+blunder of using threats and making intolerable demands, until at last
+they found themselves confronted by a strong Government, backed by the
+Prussian nation in the firm resolution to defend itself. In reporting
+this conversation to the Foreign Office the charg&eacute; d'affaires said
+that Bismarck appeared to be sincerely afflicted with regret for the
+rupture between the two countries, that he evidently saw, too late,
+his error in having secretly encouraged the Hohenzollern candidature,
+and that the result of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> all these unhappy complications had left the
+well-meaning chancellor inconsolable. Such a candid confession of
+remorse and regret moved the Frenchman's compassion to a degree that
+profoundly irritates M. Ollivier:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Un tel exc&egrave;s de cr&eacute;dulit&eacute; finit par exasp&eacute;rer. Et la plupart des
+diplomates de ce temps-l&agrave; &eacute;taient de cette force. Bien pi&egrave;tre
+serait l'histoire qui se mod&eacute;lerait sur leurs appr&eacute;ciations.'</p></div>
+
+<p>We may agree that the sympathy of the charg&eacute; d'affaires with
+Bismarck's ingenuous contrition was ill-bestowed. But the tendency to
+fix upon French diplomacy a responsibility for national calamities
+that is much more justly chargeable to the account of the Imperial
+Government, is somewhat unduly prominent in certain parts of M.
+Ollivier's otherwise fair and conscientious narrative of the
+transactions that culminated in the war.</p>
+
+<p>When Bismarck announced to the Prussian Reichstag that war had been
+declared, he was interrupted by an outburst of long and enthusiastic
+cheering. He said, briefly, that he had no papers to lay before them,
+because the single official document received from the French
+Government was the declaration of war; and the only motive for
+hostilities he understood to be his own circular <i>t&eacute;l&eacute;gramme de
+journal</i> addressed to Prussian envoys abroad and to other friendly
+Powers for the purpose of explaining what had occurred. This, he
+observed, was not at all an official document. He added that a demand
+for a letter of excuses had been made through Werther to the king; and
+the real origin of the war he alleged to be the hatred and jealousy
+with which the independence and prosperity of Germany were regarded in
+France. Upon this adroit but incomplete exposition of causes and
+circumstances M. Ollivier comments<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> with intelligible severity, laying
+stress on the fact that afterwards Bismarck threw off his disguise,
+and openly took to himself the credit of having deliberately contrived
+to bring on the war at his own time. In fact, the later German
+historians have confirmed this statement by their critical examination
+of the records and other evidence; though instead of concluding that
+his conduct was immoral they unite, according to M. Ollivier, in
+applauding his political genius. Almost the whole story of the
+connected machinations by which France was led step by step into war
+have since been disclosed, and the only part which is still unrevealed
+relates to the original devices by which Bismarck and Marshal Prim
+concerted the preliminaries to the offer of the Spanish throne to
+Leopold.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is cheerfully admitted by the German historians who are cited in
+this volume that the train of incidents which produced so well-timed
+an explosion was scientifically laid by the Prussian chancellor. But
+they maintain that he was only countermining the underground
+combinations of the French, who were known to be organising a triple
+alliance with Italy and Austria for a combined assault upon Prussia;
+and that the journey of the Austrian Archduke<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> Albert to Paris in
+March 1870 convinced Bismarck that he had no time to lose, because war
+must be provoked before these alliances were consummated. And they
+cite the example of Frederick the Great, who disconcerted the secret
+preparations of his enemies by the sudden dash upon Dresden which
+opened the Seven Years' War. This defence of his own very skilful and
+not less astute man&oelig;uvres was endorsed by Bismarck in a speech
+before the Chamber in 1876; nor does it appear to us so untenable as
+M. Ollivier holds it to be. He argues that the fear of being attacked
+by France, if it had really influenced Bismarck's conduct in 1870,
+must have been a wild hallucination, for the chancellor must have been
+well aware that the emperor's policy at that time was decidedly
+pacific, and that his own (Ollivier's) views were still more so. He
+assures us that the project of a triple alliance was intended to be
+exclusively defensive, that it never passed beyond the 'academic'
+stage, or reached any practical form. The confidential negotiations of
+1869 with Austria and Italy had been left, he says, in the stage of
+unfinished outline, nor was it even suspected either by the French or
+by the Italian ministry that they had been carried further. On the
+other hand, it cannot be denied that in 1869 these negotiations had
+been carried quite far enough to inspire the Prussian chancellor with
+serious disquietude, if, as is very probable, he had good information
+of them. We know, from M. Ollivier's very interesting account of what
+passed at the first meeting of the Cabinet on July 6, when the
+ministers resolved to announce to the Chamber their determination to
+resent and resist the Hohenzollern candidature, that the emperor and
+M. de Gramont regarded the understanding with Italy and Austria as
+being much more than academic. It is there stated that when Ollivier
+hesitated to accept Gramont's assurance that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> assistance of these
+two Powers, in the event of hostilities with Prussia, had been
+virtually secured, the Emperor Napoleon took from a drawer in his
+bureau certain letters written in 1869 by the Austrian emperor and the
+King of Italy, and, after reading them aloud, told the ministers that
+these writings undoubtedly amounted to promises of help in the
+circumstances that were then actually under discussion. The Cabinet
+accepted these proofs that the alliances might be reckoned upon as
+substantial, so that it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bismarck
+had drawn the same conclusion from the intimations that had reached
+him, and had set himself to provoke a war before the secret
+combinations against him should be ready for action. It must be borne
+in mind that from 1866 he had been deliberately preparing for it,
+being convinced, as he said later, that until France had been defeated
+in the field, his grand design of founding a German empire, with its
+capital at Berlin, could not be realised.</p>
+
+<p>We may therefore be permitted to suggest that the discussion with
+which M. Ollivier closes this volume is to some extent superfluous,
+for it is incontestable that Bismarck had reasons for desiring the
+war, and that France was inveigled into declaring it. In the final
+section he returns to the question whether France or Prussia were
+responsible for the rupture; and after summing up the evidence he
+pronounces judgment against Prussia. It was Prussia that invented the
+Hohenzollern candidature, against which France was bound to protest
+forcibly; and even if it be admitted, he says, that the French Cabinet
+was wrong in taking mortal offence at the insolent official version of
+the king's refusal to receive the French ambassador, there can be no
+doubt that this public affront infuriated the French nation, and drove
+it to the extremity of war. That the explosion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> was instantaneous he
+regards as a proof that it had not been expected nor premeditated by
+France. All these things are, indeed, neither denied nor deniable, for
+Bismarck's own arrogant revelations leave no doubt that the war had
+been desired and premeditated by that astute and far-seeing
+politician; and though upon the methods by which the Hohenzollern
+candidature was originally started Bismarck is judiciously silent, we
+may be morally certain that the instigation came from Berlin. The
+maxim <i>Fecit cui prodest</i> affords fair ground for this inference,
+particularly when we remember the obvious improbability that the
+Spanish ministry would have gratuitously set up a candidature which
+must infallibly have brought their country into collision with its
+formidable neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>How the French Government fell into a net that had been spread for
+them is to most of us sufficiently clear. Whether the emperor and his
+ministers ought to have detected and avoided it, is the real question,
+and it is practically the only question that concerns M. Ollivier. In
+the final pages of his book, which touch in dignified and pathetic
+words upon the injustice of the reproaches that have been heaped upon
+him and the rancorous calumnies by which he has been pursued, his
+readers are told that, having done his best to defend the cause of his
+nation, he will terminate his work without taking up his personal
+justification, though on one point he desires not to be misunderstood.
+It has been pleaded on his behalf, he says, that he was in fact
+opposed to the declaration of war, but agreed to it under the violent
+pressure of public opinion, or else from reluctance to betray internal
+dissensions that would have broken up the ministry, or for other
+reasons. M. Ollivier insists, on the contrary, that after Bismarck's
+'soufflet' he was convinced that peace could be maintained only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> at
+the price of his country's abject humiliation; and that he chose the
+alternative of war as infinitely preferable, without the least regard
+to his personal reputation or interests. We may willingly agree that
+M. Ollivier acted throughout from motives of high-minded patriotism,
+and although we cannot acquit him on the charge of grave imprudence we
+may freely admit that he was entangled in a situation of extraordinary
+difficulty. To Englishmen, who are familiar with the regular and
+recognised working of constitutional government, it will be plain that
+he was the victim of a system that had placed him before the public as
+the nominal head of a Cabinet that he was supposed to have formed, and
+of a party in the Chamber that he was expected to lead. Whereas in
+fact he had no proper control over the policy of the Cabinet, and no
+solid support in the Chamber. The emperor presided at the meetings of
+the Cabinet; and it is clear that the ultimate decision in the
+supremely important departments of the army and of foreign affairs was
+still reserved to the sovereign, on whom the Foreign Secretary (as we
+should call him) could urge his views separately, and from whom he
+could take orders independently of the first minister. In this
+radically false position M. Ollivier found himself committed to
+measures on which he had not been consulted, and hurried into
+dangerous courses of action for which he had no recognised official
+responsibility, since they were sanctioned by the emperor's
+unquestionable authority. We have to remember, also, that in July
+1870, liberal institutions had been no more than six months under
+trial after eighteen years of autocratic rule, that the advocates of
+the old <i>r&eacute;gime</i> were numerous and openly hostile to the reforms, and
+that all the ministers of the new <i>r&eacute;gime</i> lacked experience in the
+art and practice of constitutional administration. It is among<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> those
+conditions and circumstances that we must find some explanation of
+their imprudence, and of their inability to make a stand against the
+emperor's weakness, the clamour of hot-headed deputies, and the
+war-cries of journalists; some excuse, in short, for the heedlessness
+with which a well-meaning ministry stepped into the snare that had
+been laid for them.</p>
+
+<p>When, in 1871, the ex-emperor was told of M. Ollivier's earnest
+protest against the cruel injustice of holding him alone answerable
+for the national disasters, Napoleon is reported to have replied that
+this responsibility must be shared by the ministry, the Chamber, and
+himself.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Si je n'avais pas voulu la guerre, j'aurais renvoy&eacute; mes ministres;
+si l'opposition &eacute;tait venue d'eux, ils auraient donn&eacute; leur
+d&eacute;mission; enfin, si la Chambre avait &eacute;t&eacute; contraire &agrave; l'entreprise,
+elle e&ucirc;t vot&eacute; contre.'<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>In a broad and general sense this conclusion may be accepted, for all
+parties concerned were heavily to blame; and manifestly the disasters
+were the outcome of a situation in which weakness and rashness were
+matched against unscrupulous statecraft and the deep-laid combinations
+of a consummate strategist.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> <i>L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral: &Eacute;tudes, R&eacute;cits, Souvenirs.</i> Par &Eacute;mile
+Ollivier. Vol. xiv.: La Guerre. 1909.&mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, January
+1910.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> 'Animo retto e buono' (<i>Memorie</i>, p. 407).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Benedetti, <i>Ma Mission en Prusse</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Papiers Secrets: Les Pr&eacute;fets.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>Reflections and Reminiscences of Prince Bismarck.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> <i>Histoire du Second Empire</i>, vi. 258.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> 'Rien n'&eacute;tait plus officiel que l'entretien qui se
+poursuivait en ce moment entre le ministre des affaires &eacute;trang&egrave;res et
+l'ambassadeur de Prusse.'&mdash;Gramont, <i>La France et la Prusse</i>, p. 168.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> <i>La France et la Prusse</i> (1872), pp. 131-2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> <i>L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral</i>, p. 270.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Historical Essays</i>, p. 222.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> 'Au d&eacute;but nous avions demand&eacute; au Roi de conseiller ou
+d'ordonner &agrave; son parent de renoncer, ce qui entra&icirc;nait implicitement
+une garantie que la candidature ne se reproduirait plus. Le Roi ayant
+refus&eacute; d'intervenir, et la candidature ayant disparu &agrave; son insu, nous
+avions r&eacute;clam&eacute; sous une forme explicite, notre premi&egrave;re
+demande.'&mdash;<i>L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral</i>, p. 453.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> Some light is thrown on these obscure intrigues by Lord
+Acton in the essay already cited. He writes that in 1869 Bismarck
+learned from Florence that Napoleon was preparing a triple alliance
+against him, and sent a Prussian officer, Bernhardi, to Madrid. 'What
+he did in Spain has been committed to oblivion. Seven volumes of his
+diary have been published; the family assures me (Acton) that the
+Spanish portion will never appear.... The Austrian First Secretary
+said that he betrayed his secret one day at dinner. Somebody spoke
+indiscreetly on the subject, and Bernhardi aimed a kick at him under
+the table, which caught the shin of the Austrian instead. He was
+considered to have mismanaged the thing, and it was whispered that he
+had gone too far&mdash;I infer that he offered a heavy bribe to secure a
+majority in the Cortes. Fifty thousand pounds of Prussian bonds were
+sent to Spain at midsummer 1870.... I know the bankers through whose
+hands they passed.'&mdash;<i>Historical Essays</i>, p. 214.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> <i>L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral</i>, p. 475, footnote. Prince Napoleon
+told M. Ollivier that the emperor repeated this to him several times.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>SIR SPENCER WALPOLE<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a></h2>
+
+<p class="subhead2">1839-1907</p>
+
+
+<p>Sir Spencer Walpole's death in 1907 left a gap in the front rank of
+contemporary English Historians. To a volume of his collected essays,
+published in the following year, his daughter, Mrs. F. Holland,
+prefixed an admirable memoir of his private life and character, with
+affectionate reminiscences of her father's 'strenuous work, his
+universal kindliness, and his simplicity of soul.' On this personal
+subject, therefore, little or nothing remains to be said. I will only
+add that during several years of intimacy with him I had every reason
+to feel honoured by his friendship, to set high value on his literary
+judgments, and to appreciate his scrupulous intellectual integrity.</p>
+
+<p>From that memoir I take the main incidents that belong to Sir Spencer
+Walpole's personal biography. After leaving Eton he entered the Civil
+Service at an early age, and worked for some time in the War Office,
+until he was transferred to a position of larger independence. He was
+subsequently appointed to the Governorship of the Isle of Man, where
+he remained for about twelve years; and afterwards he became Secretary
+to the Post Office until his retirement in 1899. In the discharge of
+the duties of these offices he was indefatigable; his services were
+fully approved by all with whom he came into public relations; yet
+throughout these years he found time for hard and unceasing literary
+work. In his earlier<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> days he was a regular contributor to the
+periodical press, mainly on questions of finance; he wrote the lives
+of two Prime Ministers&mdash;his grandfather Spencer Perceval and Lord John
+Russell&mdash;while from 1876 up to the year of his death he was engaged
+upon his <i>History of England</i>. Five volumes were published, at
+intervals, on the period between 1815 and 1857; and four subsequent
+volumes, under the title of the <i>History of Twenty-five Years</i>,
+brought the whole narrative up to 1880. But the proofs of the two
+final volumes had not been revised by his hand, when he was struck
+down by a sudden and fatal malady of the brain. Other recent
+publications were a small book on the Isle of Man, entitled the <i>Land
+of Home Rule; Studies in Biography</i>; and the collection of essays to
+which I have already referred.</p>
+
+<p>It is upon this History of England from 1815 to 1880 that Sir Spencer
+Walpole's lasting reputation, as a man of letters, will rest. To have
+combined the writing of such a book with the duties of a very diligent
+official is no slight achievement; though one may observe that direct
+contact with administration, with political affairs, and with
+parliamentary leaders, is for the historian a distinct advantage. It
+is worth remarking that his family connections, which brought Walpole
+into the Civil Service, in no way biased his judgment on public
+questions. The grandson of a high Tory Prime Minister, the son of a
+Conservative Secretary of State, he was throughout his life an
+advanced Liberal, with an unswerving trust in popular government as
+essential to the welfare of his country and to the just and proper
+management of its affairs at home and abroad. His literary bent was
+evidently taken from hereditary association with politics, and from
+his own official training. As an historian he enters with intense
+interest into the strife of parties, the parliamentary vicissitudes,
+into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> the swing backward and forward of reform and reaction, into the
+exact causes and incidents that affected the rise and the fall of
+ministries. In describing the state of manners at certain periods, and
+the changes wrought in the national life by the efforts of philosophic
+writers and philanthropists, his facts and figures are always ample
+and accurate; he pays close attention to financial and economical
+movements. As a politician he distrusted the spirited policy that
+involved England in the warlike adventures and hazards of an eventful
+and stirring time. The Afghan war of 1838-43 was, he said, the most
+ruinous and unnecessary war which the English had ever waged. The
+Crimean war he evidently regarded as a useless expenditure of blood
+and money, which might well have been avoided. On Lord Beaconsfield's
+Imperialism he passes severe censure: and the interference of that
+statesman in 1877 to protect the Turkish Sultan against Russia is very
+sharply condemned. He has even some doubt whether the purchase of the
+Suez Canal Shares was a wise stroke of policy. This book, in short, is
+a corroboration of the well-known remark that the history of our
+country has been mainly written by Whigs and Liberals, with the
+exception of a few authors who, like Hume and Alison, have hardly
+preserved an historic reputation. Nevertheless, whether we agree or
+not with the prudent and pacific views towards which Walpole
+manifestly leaned, his narrative, his statements of disputable cases,
+his distribution of the arguments for and against his conclusions, are
+invariably accurate, fair, and dispassionate. His anxiety to give full
+authority for facts and opinions is shown in an almost too copious
+supply of foot-notes. Lord Acton, who found the late Bishop Creighton
+too economical of these citations, compares his practice to Mr.
+Walpole's if several hundred references to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> Hansard and the Annual
+Register had been struck out from the History of England.</p>
+
+<p>In his preface to the first volume the author explains briefly the
+method that he has adopted. History, he says, may be written in two
+ways&mdash;you may relate each event in chronological order, or you may
+deal with each subject in a separate episode&mdash;and he tells us that he
+has chosen the latter way. This method enabled him to introduce
+sketches of the state of English society at different periods, by way
+of illustrating his narrative, which are certainly attractive and
+impressive. They are composed to a large degree upon the model set by
+Macaulay, by grouping together a number of characteristic particulars
+to bring out into strong relief the morals and manners of the time.
+Walpole's picture of the Eton boy in the early nineteenth century, who
+could write admirable Greek and Latin verse but knew not a word of any
+modern language&mdash;'who regarded the Gracchi as patriots but had only an
+obscure notion that Adam Smith was a dangerous character'&mdash;is almost a
+parody of Macaulay's style. Nevertheless these sketches are on the
+whole truthful and instructive, if we allow for some exuberance of
+colouring that may have been thought necessary for artistic effect.</p>
+
+<p>But Walpole studied literature, as the measure of intellectual
+evolution, with the same interest that he devoted to economical and
+administrative developments. His aim was to show how all kinds of
+mental and material activity acted and reacted upon each other, how
+the feelings and aspirations of the nation were reflected in
+philosophy and in poetry, and how literary genius could stir the
+imagination of the people. He observes that while English literature
+had declined towards the close of the eighteenth century, it rose
+again rapidly with the opening of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> the nineteenth century. For a short
+time, indeed, the furious outbreak of the French Revolution had scared
+men of letters into recoil from the optimistic speculations of the
+preceding age&mdash;they abandoned the worship of Liberty. But the storm
+blew over; and a general revival of literary animation signalised the
+end of the long war-time, with a magnificent efflorescence of poetry.
+Walpole records, as notable signs of this intellectual expansion, the
+appearance of women in the field of literature, the immediate success
+of the two famous reviews, the <i>Edinburgh</i> and the <i>Quarterly</i>, and
+the rapid growth of journalism. The whole subject of mental progress
+has, indeed, a peculiar charm for him. He insists that 'the history of
+human thought is the most comprehensive and the most difficult subject
+which can occupy the student's attention, far more interesting and
+important than the progress of society.' He would probably have agreed
+with Coleridge that knowledge of current speculative opinions is the
+surest ground for political prophecy; and he delights in tracing back
+to distant sources the religious movements of the nineteenth century.
+He declares that the heroic measures introduced by legislation within
+our own recollections are the links of a continuous chain extending
+from a prehistoric past to an invisible future. We have here a writer
+who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical
+calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal
+pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas and the
+march of mind.</p>
+
+<p>There are at least two chapters in the History that exemplify the
+attention given by Walpole to ecclesiastical controversies, and to the
+significance of the antagonism between the New Learning and dogmatic
+orthodoxy. In his fourth volume the story of the Oxford Tractarians is
+related at some length, and he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> remarks on the singular coincidence,
+that almost simultaneously with the secession of the English High
+Churchmen the Free Church was established by disrupture from the
+Established Church in Scotland. He affirms that both these schisms, so
+different in motive and direction, had their origin in events dating
+from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The disintegrating
+forces of geology, astronomy, and scientific research generally upon
+the received tradition are examined; the beginning of modern Church
+reform is noted; and in a chapter of the final volume of the <i>History
+of Twenty-five Years</i> it is maintained that the great question before
+the religious world in the middle of the nineteenth century was the
+possibility of resisting the inroads of science. He describes the
+vigour with which the polemical campaign was conducted on both sides;
+how the orthodox position was assailed by writers of the <i>Essays and
+Reviews</i>, by the criticism of Bishop Colenso, by Broad Churchmen and
+the champions of free thought; how it was defended by prosecutions in
+the ecclesiastical courts and in appeals to the Privy Council from
+both parties. It was certainly a remarkable epoch in the history of
+opinions, when the country was agitated by the ardent zeal of
+disputants over questions of ritual and dogma that now seem to have
+fallen into cool neglect; and Walpole gives, as usual, a careful array
+of the particular cases, with the points in debate, and the
+characteristics of the prominent leaders in each party. To estimate
+the position of the clergy as a body, and to show, as Walpole
+undertakes to do, that in the middle of the nineteenth century they
+were losing caste as a class, and that between the middle and end of
+that century they had fallen in social status, was a much more
+difficult and delicate problem. All generalisations upon the condition
+of society in times that have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> passed away, however recently, are of
+doubtful value, because the evidence of documents must always be
+incomplete, and even personal recollections are partial and become
+indistinct; they are all seen in a fading and uncertain light.
+Moreover the chronicler of disputations over ritual and articles, and
+of matters concerning churches and the clergy, may be said to move
+over the surface of the spiritual waters; and Walpole draws nearer to
+the deeper undercurrents when he appeals to the higher literature for
+signs of alternating tendencies of religious thought in that
+generation; though the famous stanzas from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,'
+which he quotes at the end of his chapter, represent rather the poetic
+than the philosophic conclusions of thinkers in the nineteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>But Walpole was quite aware of the difficulties that beset any writer
+who endeavours to relate the history of a very recent period,
+especially of that part to which his own lifetime belongs, and to pass
+judgments on the conduct or opinions of statesmen and writers who may
+be still living, or have only lately departed. Yet, as Lord Acton has
+said, the secrets of our own time cannot be learnt from books, but
+from men; and Walpole's social relations, his personal popularity, his
+familiarity with official business, and his literary culture, provided
+him with valuable opportunities for composing his last four volumes
+from direct impressions of his subject, for preserving the right
+atmosphere. His studies in biography show an aptitude for personal
+delineation; and in one of his earlier volumes there is a full-length
+portrait of Sir Robert Peel, executed with much skill and
+comprehension. Therein lay the artistic quality of his work; he aimed
+at the presentation of individual character and action; he laid stress
+on the influence of remarkable men on their country's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> fortunes; for
+true historical art is concerned with bringing prominent figures into
+formal relief, and with arranging a mass of disorderly facts under
+some scheme that produces a definite impression. Otherwise Walpole's
+style was clear, level, and straightforward; with no pretence to be
+ornamental. Perhaps the best example of his talent for well-ordered
+and compact narrative is found in two chapters of the fifth volume of
+the History, which contain an excellent summary of the rise and
+expansion of British dominion in India during the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries, with a very correct appreciation of the causes
+and circumstances to which that memorable episode in the annals of the
+British Empire is due.</p>
+
+<p>Walpole lived just long enough to bring his historical work, which
+occupied him for about thirty years, to the end which he had assigned
+to it. In traversing such an extensive and varied field of arduous
+labour some errors and shortcomings were inevitable, for the history
+of England in the nineteenth century is the history of the British
+Empire at its climacteric, of moral and material changes and
+developments more numerous and perhaps more important than in any
+former century. Nor did he limit his survey to the particular period
+that he had chosen; for his theory, as he has stated it, of the
+function of history, was that it shall not merely catalogue events but
+shall go back to an analysis of their causes, and of the general
+progress of the human family. He believed, with Lord Acton, that the
+recent past contained the key to the present time. It has been said
+that Walpole undertook to do for the nineteenth century what Lecky did
+for the eighteenth century: and we may agree that both historians have
+filled up, with distinguished merit and ability, large vacant spaces
+in the history of our country. Perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> Lecky had more of the
+philosophic mind, while the distance of time that lay between that
+writer and his period enabled him to see men and things in their true
+proportion, and to judge of events by their outcome. Walpole, on the
+other hand, wrote under the disadvantages as well as the advantages of
+close proximity to the scenes which he described; and the conclusion
+of his history marks the fall of the curtain on a drama of which the
+final acts are still to be played out.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> <i>Proceedings of the British Academy</i>, vol. iii.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Since I have accepted, at the request of your Warden, the honour of
+delivering an inaugural address on this occasion, it has appeared to
+me appropriate to choose, for such an audience, some literary subject.
+And I propose, with some diffidence, to offer a few observations on
+the reading of history, because in these latter days, when education
+has come in upon us like a flood, rising higher and spreading wider
+every year among our people, no part of literature is more sedulously
+studied than the field of history. On the other hand, this field is
+being very rapidly enlarged. It has been said that the output of
+histories during the nineteenth century has exceeded in bulk and
+volume the production of all previous centuries. And in all the
+countries now standing in the forefront of civilisation, the chief
+product of their serious literature is at this time historical and
+biographical&mdash;for I take authentic biography to be a kind of handmaid
+of history. It has been reported that during the ten years ending 1907
+there were published in England 5498 books under the head of history,
+and 1059 biographies. Moreover, of those who are not actually writing
+history, an important number are occupied in criticising the
+historians.</p>
+
+<p>Now the first observation that I submit to you is that the production
+of all history has been almost entirely the work of Europeans, among
+whom I reckon the American writers, as belonging by language<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> and
+culture to Europe. So far as the African continent has any trustworthy
+history, it is in some European language. In Asia there have been
+annalists, chroniclers, and genealogists, mostly Mohammedan, who
+narrate the wars and exploits of great conquerors, the succession of
+kings, and the rise and fall of dynasties. And I believe that in China
+official record of public events and transactions has been kept up
+from very early ages. But if we measure these Asiatic narratives by
+the standard of literary merit and the demand for authentication of
+facts, I fear that they will be found wanting; though they may be
+relied upon to give the general course of important events, and an
+outline of the result of battles and the upsetting of thrones.</p>
+
+<p>When these Asiatic chroniclers wrote of the times in and near which
+they were living, they were fairly trustworthy. But whenever they
+attempted to write of times long past and of countries unknown to them
+personally, their narratives became for the most part fabulous and
+romantic, confused and improbable, with some grains of truth here and
+there. Our best information regarding the earlier ages of Asia is
+derived, I think, from Greek and Latin literature, and latterly from
+the researches of quite modern scholars and arch&aelig;ologists. So that it
+may be affirmed that authentic history began in Europe, and that to
+Europe it has ever since been practically confined. At this day the
+history of all parts of the world is being written by Europeans. The
+result has been that for the last 2500 years historical material,
+collected from and relating to all parts of the world, has been
+accumulating in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Such masses of records and monuments necessarily require methodical
+treatment by men of trained intelligence and of untiring industry,
+learned, and accurate. Their systematic labours, their acute<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> and
+intelligent criticism, have created what is now usually termed the
+Science of History, which abstracts general conclusions from the mass
+of particulars. And so, I think, we may agree with Renan, who has
+declared that to the nineteenth century may be accorded the title of
+the Age of Historians, and that this has been the special distinction
+of that century's literature.</p>
+
+<p>Now I believe that the question, whether history is an art or a
+science, is not yet universally settled. But whatever may be the case
+in these modern days, I submit that in earlier times, and certainly
+when history began to be written, it was mainly an art. Indeed, it
+could hardly have been otherwise. In all ages and countries, from the
+time when men first attained to some stage of elementary culture, they
+have been curious about the past, they have enjoyed hearing of the
+deeds and fame of their ancestors, of far-off things and battles long
+ago. But the primitive chronicler had very slight material for his
+stories of bygone times&mdash;he had few, if any, documents&mdash;he was himself
+creating the documentary evidence for those who came after him; he
+could only compile his narratives from tradition, legends, anecdotes
+of heroic ancestors, from information picked up by travel to famous
+places, and so on. Yet from sources of this kind he composed tales of
+inestimable value as representing the ideas, habits, and social
+condition of preceding generations that were very like his own.
+Herodotus, who is our best example of the class, reconstructs,
+revives, and relates conversations that neither he nor his informants
+could have actually heard; but he does this in order to give a
+dramatic version of great events. In the opening sentence of his first
+book he says that he has written in order that the actions of men may
+not be effaced by time, nor great and wondrous deeds be deprived of
+renown.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> And one may notice the same style and method in the
+historical books of the Old Testament. In both these ancient histories
+the narratives represent life, action, speech, situations.</p>
+
+<p>It is futile, I may suggest, to subject work of this sort to critical
+analysis by attempting to sift out what is probably true from what is
+certainly false. You only break up the picture, you destroy the
+artistic effect, which is at least a true reflection of real life.
+Moreover, it is dangerous for learned men sitting in libraries to
+regard as incredible facts stated by these old writers. The legend of
+Romulus and Remus having been suckled by a wolf has been dismissed as
+a childish fable. Yet it is certain that this very thing has happened
+more than once in the forests of India within the memory of living
+men. You cannot be particular about details, you must take the story
+as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>From this standpoint we may agree, I think, that in illiterate times,
+and, indeed, throughout the middle ages of Europe, history-writing was
+practised as an art. The unlearned chronicler wrote in no fear of
+critics or sceptics; he drew striking scenes and portraits; he
+described warlike exploits; he related characteristic sayings and
+dialogues which completely satisfied his audience or his readers. The
+society in which he lived was not far different, in morals and
+manners, from that which he portrayed, so that he can have committed
+very few anachronisms or incongruities; and in sentiments and
+character-drawing he could not go far astray. He produced, at any
+rate, vivid impressions of reality, just as Shakespeare's historical
+plays have stamped upon the English mind the figures of Hotspur or
+Richard III., which have been thus set up in permanent type for all
+subsequent ages. At any rate portraits of this kind have not been
+modernised to suit the taste of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> later age, as has been done with
+King Arthur in Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King.' And when work of this
+sort has been finely executed, the question whether the details are
+untrustworthy or even fictitious is immaterial, particularly in cases
+where the precise facts can never be recovered. We do not know exactly
+how the battle of Marathon, or, indeed, the battle of Hastings, was
+fought, but we have in the chronicles something of great value&mdash;a true
+outline of the general situation, and some stirring narratives of the
+clash and wrestling of armed men, compiled either at first hand from
+the recollections of those who were actually on the field, or else
+taken at second hand from others who made notes of what had been told
+them by those present at the battles. This, then, is what I meant when
+I said that in early times history was an art. Its method was
+picturesque.</p>
+
+<p>Now my next observation is that, although the science of history has
+since been invented, we have, among quite modern English writers, men
+of singular genius, who have to some extent followed the example,
+adopted the manner, of the ancient annalist. Like him, they are
+artists, their aim has been to depict famous men, to reproduce
+striking incidents and scenes dramatically. Their technical methods,
+so to speak, are entirely different from those of the old chronicler,
+who sketched with a free hand, and trusted largely to his
+inspirations, to his own experience of what was likely to have been
+said or done, or to popular tradition, which is always animated and
+distinct. The modern historian, of what I may call the school of
+impressionists, has no such experience, he knows nothing personally of
+violent scenes or fierce deeds; he composes his picture of things that
+happened long ago from a mass of papers, books, memoirs, that have
+come down to us. Yet although style and substance are quite different,
+the chief aim,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> the design, of the ancient and modern artist in
+history is the same. They both strive to set before their reader a
+vision of certain scenes and figures at moments of energetic
+action&mdash;not only to tell him a story, but to make him see it. Let me
+give an example. Every one here may remember the story in the Old
+Testament (2nd Book of Kings) of Jehu driving furiously into Jezreel,
+how on his way he smote Ahaziah, king of Judah, with an arrow, and how
+Jezebel, the Ph&oelig;nician Queen, was hurled down out of her palace
+window to be devoured by dogs in the street. And some of you may have
+read in Froude's <i>History of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth</i> his
+description of the murder of David Rizzio by the fierce Scotch nobles,
+how he was killed clinging to Queen Mary's knees in her chamber in
+Holyrood Palace. Now the manner, the artistic presentation of
+ferocious action, are in both cases alike; we have the words spoken
+and the deeds done; we can look on at the bloody tragedy; we have a
+dramatic version of the story. The ancient writer of the Old Testament
+probably did his work naturally, instinctively; he tells the story as
+he received it by word of mouth, briefly&mdash;laying stress only on the
+things that cut into the imagination of an eye-witness, and remain in
+the memory of those to whom they were related. He troubles us with no
+moral reflections, but goes on quietly to the next chapter of
+incidents. The modern historian has composed his picture from details
+collected by study of documents; he puts in adjectives as a painter
+lays on colour; yet the effect, the impression, is of the same
+quality: it is artistic.</p>
+
+<p>Now the principal English historians of the modern school, who revived
+what one may call the dramatic presentation of history, I take to be
+Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle. They all worked upon genuine material,
+upon authentic records of the period which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> they were writing about.
+Lord Acton mentions that Froude spoke of having consulted 100,000
+papers in manuscript, at home and abroad, for one of his histories.
+Macaulay was industrious and indefatigable. Yet Ranke, the great
+German historian, said of Macaulay that he could hardly be called a
+historian at all, judged by the strict tests of German criticism. And
+Freeman, the English historian, brought violent charges against Froude
+of deliberately twisting his facts and misquoting his authorities;
+though I believe that Freeman's bitter jealousies led him into grave
+exaggerations. Then take Carlyle. His Cromwell is a fine portrait by
+an eminent literary artist. But is it a genuine delineation of the man
+himself, of his motives, of the working of his mind in speech and
+action? Later investigation, minute scrutiny of old and new material,
+suggest doubts, different interpretations of conduct and character.
+Take, again, his description of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell's great
+victory. Carlyle explains to us the nature of the ground, the
+movements of the troops, the tactics, the points of attack, with
+admirable force and clearness&mdash;it is a marvellous specimen of literary
+execution. Yet recent and very careful examination of the locality,
+and a comparison of the evidence of eye-witnesses, have proved beyond
+doubt that Carlyle had not studied the ground, had made some important
+errors. He was, in fact, giving a dramatic representation of the
+battle, which, if it had come down to us from some medi&aelig;val annalist,
+would have been universally accepted as genuine. In short, these three
+artists have all suffered damage under scientific treatment.</p>
+
+<p>Now I am not here to disparage Macaulay, Froude, or Carlyle. They were
+all, in my opinion, authors of rare genius, whose places in the
+forefront of the literature of the nineteenth century are permanently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span>
+secure. Yet I fear that the tendency of the twentieth century is
+unfavourable to the artistic historian. It seems to me probable, much
+to my personal regret, that the scientific writing of history, based
+upon exhaustive research, accumulation and minute sifting of all
+available details, relentless verification of every statement, will
+gradually discourage and supersede the art of picturesque composition.
+In the first place the spirit of doubt and distrust is abroad, every
+statement is scrutinised and tested. The imaginative historian cannot
+lay on his colours, or fill up his canvas, by effective and lively
+touches without finding his work placed under the microscope of
+erudite analysts, some of whom, like Iago, are nothing if not
+critical, are not only exact but very exacting. In these days a writer
+who endeavours to illuminate some scene of ages past, to show us, as
+by a magic lantern, the moving figures brought out in relief against
+the surrounding darkness, is liable to be set down as an illusionist,
+possibly even as a charlatan or conjurer. Yet one feels the charm of
+the splendid vision, though it may fade into the light of common day
+when it falls under relentless scrutiny, and one is haunted by the
+doubt whether the scientific historian, with all his conscientious
+accuracy, is after all much nearer the reality than the literary
+artist. For it is seriously questionable whether the precise truth
+about bygone events and men long dead can ever actually be discovered,
+whether, by piecing together what has come down to us in documents, we
+can resuscitate from the dust-heap of records the state of society
+many centuries ago. And in regard to historical portrait painting Lord
+Acton has warned intending historians to seek no unity of
+character&mdash;to remember that allowance must always be made for human
+inconsistencies; that a man is never all of one piece. But cautious
+conclusions, nice weighing of evidence,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> do not satisfy the ordinary
+reader. The vivid impressions that are stamped on his mind by the
+power of style are what he mostly requires and retains; and these we
+are all reluctant to lose. We must concede to the writer, as to the
+painter, some indulgence of his imaginative faculty. Otherwise we must
+leave the battle scenes and the national portrait gallery to the poets
+and romancers of genius&mdash;to Shakespeare and Walter Scott, whose art
+had nothing to gain from accuracy, who have only to give us the types,
+the right colouring and strong outline of life and character in days
+bygone.</p>
+
+<p>However, I think we shall be compelled to accept the change from the
+artistic to the scientific school of historians, though we may regret
+it as unavoidable. It is the vast enlargement of the field of
+historical study, the strong critical searchlight that is turned on
+all the dark corners and outlying tracts of this field, that is
+irresistibly affecting the work of writers, enforcing the need of
+caution, of scrutinising every point, of weighing evidence in the
+finest scales, of assaying its precise value. The contemporary writer
+has to deal with the huge accumulation of material to which I have
+already referred; he must ransack archives, hunt through records piled
+up, public and private, must decipher ancient manuscript, must follow
+the labours of the wandering collector of inscriptions and the
+excavator of old tombs. He has to make extracts from correspondence,
+diaries, and notes of travel which are coming for the first time to
+the light; he must keep abreast of foreign literature and criticism.
+The mass and multiplicity of documentary evidence now at his disposal,
+most of which may not have been available to his predecessors, is
+enormous. Some twelve years ago Lord Acton wrote: 'The honest student
+has to hew his way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>
+and official publications, where it is difficult to sweep the horizon
+or to keep abreast. The result has been that the classics of
+historical literature are found inadequate, are being re-written, and
+the student has to be warned that they have been superseded by later
+discoveries.'</p>
+
+<p>What has been the effect of this altered situation upon the writer of
+history at the present time? On such an extensive field of operations,
+which has to be cultivated so intensely, he finds himself compelled to
+contract the scope of his operations; he can only take up very narrow
+ground. So in many instances he limits himself to a period, or even to
+a single reign, to a particular class of historical personage, or to
+some special department of human activity. He looks about for a plot
+that he can work thoroughly; he concentrates his attention upon some
+line or aspect of a subject in which he may hope that he has not been
+anticipated by others. Lord Acton has laid down that 'every student
+ought to know that mastery is acquired by acknowledged limitation'&mdash;he
+must peg out his small holding and keep within its bounds. Histories
+are now written by many and various hands&mdash;as in the case of the
+Cambridge Modern History, which already counts numerous volumes&mdash;and
+so the general area is divided and subdivided among experts, each of
+whom dips deeply into his particular allotment, and takes heavy crops
+off his ground. Yet the productiveness of the field at large seems
+still inexhaustible, for there is always some new theory to be
+established, some fresh vein of facts to be opened, some corrections
+or additions to be made. Moreover, the experts, while they toil at
+their own special work, while they attack a difficult problem from
+different sides, must nevertheless co-operate with each other. Sir
+William Ramsay, a noted arch&aelig;ologist, tells us that for a new study<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span>
+of history there is needed a group of scholars working in unison; that
+the solitary historian is doomed to failure. He adds that the history
+of the Roman empire has still to be re-written. The late Lord Acton,
+when as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge he drew out his plan
+for a modern history that would satisfy the scientific demand for
+completeness and exactitude, proposed to distribute the work among
+more than a hundred writers. He observed that the entire bulk of new
+matter which the last forty years have supplied amounts to many
+thousand volumes. When history becomes the product of many hands and
+various minds the artistic element is likely to disappear.</p>
+
+<p>One obvious result of this state of things is that we hear no more of
+the old-fashioned histories embracing vast subjects, the work of a
+single author&mdash;of histories of the world, or a history of Europe like
+Alison's in thirty volumes. Indeed it is not long since Buckle found
+his <i>History of European Civilisation</i> unmanageable; he died before he
+could finish it. At the present time historical subjects are divided
+and subdivided by classes, periods, or even single events. Art,
+literature, philosophy, war, diplomacy, receive separate treatment. We
+have colonial histories in numerous thick volumes; though no English
+colony has a long past. We have histories of the queens who have
+reigned in their own right, like Queen Elizabeth, and of Queens
+Consort: we have even a book on the bachelor kings of England, written
+by a lady who proves undeniably that these unlucky bachelors&mdash;there
+were only three of them&mdash;all came to a bad or sad end. As to military
+historians, Kinglake's <i>History of the Crimean War</i> takes up, I think,
+some eight volumes. The whole course of the recent Boer War has been
+related in five substantial volumes. Neither of these wars<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> lasted
+more than two years, yet both histories are many times larger than
+Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War in Germany. The only
+edition of Schiller's work that I have found in the library of this
+University is in four small volumes.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the drawback to the composition of histories on this ample and
+elaborate scale is obviously this&mdash;that the ordinary man or woman can
+hardly be expected to read them, or at most to read more than two or
+three of them. So there has sprung up a natural demand for something
+lighter and shorter; the amplification has produced a supply of
+abbreviation. The massive volumes, the heaps of material, are taken in
+hand by very capable writers with a clear eye for the main points, for
+striking incidents and personalities. The big books are sliced up into
+convenient portions, and served up in attractive form and manageable
+quantities. The work is often done with admirable skill and judgment.
+You thus obtain a bird's-eye view of the past; you have the loftier
+prominences and bold outlines of the historic landscape.</p>
+
+<p>In these serials, which are deservedly popular, you can read short
+biographies, for example, of English Men of Letters, of English Men of
+Action, of famous Scotsmen, Rulers of India, Heroes of the Nation. You
+have also a story of all the nations in series, and thus you can limit
+your mental survey to separate periods, events, countries, and
+figures. You are carried swiftly and adroitly over the dry interspaces
+which lie between startling incidents or between supremely interesting
+epochs.</p>
+
+<p>Now I have no doubt that these series, which contain much sound
+information very skilfully condensed, have been of real service in the
+propagation of historical knowledge. On the other hand, we have to
+consider that this kind of reading is disconnected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> in style and
+subject. The reader can make a long jump from one period to another,
+or from the statesman of one century to another who flourished in a
+very different country and age. And the handling of these diverse
+subjects is not uniform; the points of view or lines of thought are
+various, and may be contradictory. It may be expedient to warn those
+who use these excellent summaries against the habit of neglecting the
+great English classics for short biographies or compendious sketches
+of periods and personages, as if one could learn enough of Edmund
+Burke, or Milton, or Oliver Cromwell, or master the events of some
+important period, from a well-written serial in some two hundred
+pages.</p>
+
+<p>The demand for these historical handbooks has evidently been created
+by the spread of general education, which stimulates the laudable
+desire to learn something about subjects of which it is hardly
+respectable, in these days, to be ignorant. Such knowledge is very
+useful to those who have no leisure for more; and it is far superior
+to mere desultory reading, to the habit of picking out amusing bits
+here and there. Yet I hope it is unnecessary to impress on earnest
+students of history that they must go further; must push up as near as
+possible to the fountain heads of the rivers of knowledge; must make
+acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature&mdash;that their reading
+must be continuous and consecutive.</p>
+
+<p>Now those among you who are studying for University honours have no
+need for any advice from me; they are well aware that the wide
+expansion, in these days, of the field of history has raised the
+standard of examinations, and that they must be prepared for questions
+testing a candidate's critical acumen, the breadth and depth of his
+reading, much more closely than was required formerly. But there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> must
+also be many here present who have no examinations in front of them,
+who have no ardent inclination or even leisure for abstruse labours.
+And I presume that all of you read history for a clear understanding
+of past ages, of the acts and thoughts of the great men who illustrate
+those times. You all desire to comprehend the sequence and
+significance of events. You feel the intellectual pleasure of
+appreciating rightly the character and motive of the men and women who
+stand in the foreground of our country's annals, and also of those who
+are famous in other countries, to know how and why they rose or fell,
+whether they deserved the success that they won, or won it without
+deserving it. Moreover, for us English folk, who live at the centre of
+an empire containing races and communities in various stages of
+political development, the lessons of history have a special value.
+They teach us to judge leniently of acts and opinions that appear to
+us irrational and even iniquitous as we see them in other backward
+countries at the present day. We learn that manners and morals may not
+be unchangeable in a nation; that fallacies and prejudices are not
+ineradicable; that even cruelty, tyranny, reckless bloodshed, are not
+incurable vices. For history tells us that some of the nations now
+foremost in the ranks of civilisation have passed through the stages
+of society in which such things are possible. And thus we can study
+the circumstances and conditions of political existence which have
+retarded the upward progress of certain nations and accelerated the
+advance of others. Such inquiries belong to the philosophy of history.
+When we read, for example, the history of England in the fifteenth or
+sixteenth century, we find that our ancestors, born and bred in this
+same island, kindly men in private life and sincerely religious,
+intellectually not our inferiors, yet, when they took sides in
+politics<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> or Church questions, did things which appear to us utterly
+cruel, against reason, justice, and humanity. To remember this helps
+us to realise the difficulty of passing fair judgment not only on the
+conduct of our forefathers, but upon the actions and character of
+other peoples and governments that are doing very similar things at
+the present time in other parts of the world. We shall find it an
+arduous task to assign motives, to weigh considerations, to acquit or
+condemn. So that, to the politician of to-day, history ought to be an
+invaluable guide and monitor for taking an impartial measure of the
+difficulties of government in troubled or perilous circumstances. Yet
+one sometimes wishes that the record of the fierce and bitter
+struggles of former days had been forgotten, for it still breeds
+rancour and resentment among the descendants of the people that fought
+for lost causes, and suffered the penalty of defeat. The remembrance
+keeps alive grievances, and the ancient tale of wrongs that have long
+been remedied survives to perpetuate national antipathies. Moreover,
+in some of the most celebrated cases known to our own annals, we are
+never sure that we have the whole case before us, for the historians
+give doubtful help, since the best authorities often take opposite
+views, as, for instance, on the question whether Mary Queen of Scots
+was her husband's murderess, or a much injured and calumniated lady.
+The admitted facts are valued differently, interpreted variously, and
+made to support contradictory conclusions. The latest historian of
+Rome, Signor Ferrero, sums up a long and elaborate dissertation on the
+acts and character of Julius C&aelig;sar by a judgment which differs
+emphatically from the views of all preceding historians. On some of
+these disputed questions we may make up our minds after studying the
+evidence; but many historical problems are in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> truth insoluble; the
+evidence is imperfect and untrustworthy.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, are some of the warnings we may take from history. We
+must not be hasty about condemning misdeeds of past generations,
+whether of the rulers or their people. The times were hard, so were
+the men; they were encompassed by dangers, while we who criticise them
+live in ease and safety. And when we hear at the present day of
+misrule and strife and bloodshed among other races&mdash;in Asia, for
+example&mdash;we may remember our own story, and we may trust that they
+also will work their way upward to peace and concord.</p>
+
+<p>But the truth is that, as our knowledge of the past is very imperfect,
+so also our predictions of the future are very fallible. The best
+observers can see only a very short way ahead. History shows us how
+frequently the course of affairs has taken quite unexpected turns, for
+good or for ill, forward or backward. On the whole, we may believe
+that the main direction is certainly toward the gradual betterment of
+the world at large, though the theory of progress is quite modern, for
+the ancients looked behind them for the Golden Age. Nowadays we
+trumpet the glory of our British empire; yet at intervals our
+confidence in its fortunes is shaken by some sharp panic; the decline
+and fall of England is predicted. It is, indeed, perilous to be
+overconfident, to live in a fool's paradise, for some of us have seen
+in our lifetime the sudden catastrophes that have overtaken great
+empires. But history may comfort us when we read how often the
+downfall of England has been predicted, how we have been on the brink
+of shooting down Niagara, as Carlyle declared, or threatened with
+imminent invasion, with total loss of commerce and colonies, with
+defeat abroad and bankruptcy at home. And yet our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> country is still
+fairly prosperous and free, and as for invasions, we may still trust
+that, as Coleridge has written:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Ocean 'mid the uproar wild<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Speaks safety to his island child.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But on the whole history gives political prophets little
+encouragement&mdash;we cannot foretell the future from the past.
+Nevertheless, there is some truth in the saying that history is like
+an old almanac, if we may take this to mean that, although the same
+events never happen again in the same way, yet in the great movements
+of the tide of the world's affairs a sort of periodical recurrence, an
+ebb and flow, may be noticed. For example, we know that from the
+fifteenth until near the end of the seventeenth century the Asiatic
+armies of the Turkish Sultans were invading and conquering
+South-Eastern Europe&mdash;they reached the gates of Vienna. Then followed
+a swing backward of the pendulum, and from the eighteenth to the end
+of the nineteenth century the European Powers, Russia and England,
+were each extending a great dominion over Asia. Again, up to a few
+years ago, the Turkish empire was a barbarous despotism, and we all
+believed that it must break up and be extinguished. Yet it has now
+revived in a new form, which may possibly restore its power and
+prosperity. To search for and distinguish the operating causes, the
+powers that underlie these incalculable changes, is a task for the
+student of history.</p>
+
+<p>There must be many of you for whom these high problems have a strong
+attraction, who enjoy rapid flights over the broad surface of history,
+wide outlooks over the past and future. Now, I admit that bold
+generalisations are hazardous, unless founded upon very solid
+knowledge; but in historical as well as in physical science they are
+needed to sum up results,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> to bring facts into focus. They enable us,
+so the late Lord Acton has said, to fasten on abiding issues, to
+distinguish the temporary from the transient.</p>
+
+<p>The late Lord Acton, who, as you may remember, was Professor of Modern
+History at Cambridge, is reckoned by general consent to have surpassed
+all his contemporaries, at least in England, by his encyclop&aelig;dic,
+accurate, and profound knowledge of history. His reading was vast, his
+learning prodigious, his industry never slackened. Yet the literary
+production of his life is contained in three volumes of essays,
+lectures, and articles; he has left us no complete book. Indeed, his
+writing is so disproportionate to his reading that one is tempted to
+liken his luminous intellect to a fire on which too much fuel had been
+heaped; the ardent mind glowed and shot up its streaks of radiance
+through the weight of erudition that overlaid it. Among Lord Acton's
+published papers is a 'Note of Advice to Persons about to Write
+History,' of which the first word is <i>Don't</i>. But he then proceeds to
+jot down some hints and maxims, brief and caustic, for the benefit of
+those who nevertheless persist in writing; and to some of these I
+commend the attention of readers, since upon readers as well as upon
+writers lies the duty of forming careful opinions, of judging
+impartially, in working out their conclusions upon the events and
+personages of past times. For Lord Acton was an indefatigable
+researcher after truth; his standard of public morality was austere,
+lofty, and uncompromising. I myself venture to think that he was too
+rigid; he admitted no excuse for breaches of the moral law on the
+pretext, however urgent, of political necessity; he refused to allow
+extenuation of violence or bloodshed even in times of great emergency.
+'The inflexible integrity of the moral code,' he said, 'is to me the
+secret of the authority, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> dignity, the utility of history.' Now
+this is hard doctrine for most of us to follow when we set ourselves,
+as students, to condemn or acquit, to blame or to praise the prominent
+actors in the drama of our national history. On that stage, as we all
+know, the real tragedies that stand on record were sanguinary enough,
+and the parts occasionally played in them by our ancestors were of a
+sort that now appear most unnatural and indefensible to their
+descendants. Yet most of us are disposed to regard with some leniency
+even the crimes of a violent and lawless age.</p>
+
+<p>But however this may be, some of Lord Acton's counsels are undoubtedly
+valuable as warnings or for guidance, either as lamps to show the
+right road, or as lighthouses to keep us from going wrong. His
+inaugural lecture at Cambridge on the Study of History is full of
+precepts, maxims, warnings, injunctions, all of which may be pondered
+by students with advantage. We are enjoined, for example, to beware of
+permitting our historic judgment to be warped by influences, whether
+of Country, Class, Church, College, or Party; and it is said, by way
+of driving home the warning, that the most respectable of these
+influences is the most dangerous. But very few writers, and, I
+suspect, not many readers, can hold their mental balance quite
+steadily, can weigh testimony on either side of a question quite
+dispassionately, when our Church, or our Country, perhaps even our
+University, is concerned. Nor is it easy for students to find
+historians who are entirely unmoved by bias of these kinds, who have
+neither a theory to prove, nor a cause to support, nor a hero to be
+exalted, nor a sinner to be whitewashed. Indeed, the wicked men of
+history have always found some ingenious advocate to defend them by
+attempting to justify bad acts on the ground of excellent motives<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> and
+intentions, of the exigencies of the situation, or other excuses and
+explanations. It is certain that some of the worst crimes on record,
+assassinations and savage persecutions, have been defended on pretexts
+of this kind, by allegations of patriotism or devotion to a faith. Not
+many weeks have passed since a dastardly murder was perpetrated in
+London, close to this spot, by a crazy wretch who declared himself a
+patriot.</p>
+
+<p>So we may profitably lay to mind Lord Acton's stern denunciation, not
+only of criminals in high places, but of all, high or low, who pretend
+that foul deeds may be justified by asserting pure motives. Let me
+quote again from Lord Acton. He has said: 'Of killing, from private
+motives or from public, <i>eadem est ratio</i>, there is no difference.
+Morally, the worst is the last; the fanatic assassin, the cruel
+inquisitor, are the worst of all; they are more, not less, infamous,
+because they use religion or political expediency as a cloak for their
+crimes.' He affirms elsewhere that crimes by constitutional
+authorities&mdash;by Popes and Kings&mdash;are more indefensible than those
+committed by private malefactors. And he holds that the theorist is
+more guilty than the actual assassin; that the worst use of theory is
+to make men insensible to fact, to the real complexion and true
+quality of conduct. He would probably have insisted that journalists
+and others who instigate political crimes are at least quite as bad as
+the actual criminal. Herein, at any rate, we may thoroughly agree with
+him, though the question whether the intercourse of nations and their
+Governments can be strictly regulated by the same moral standard which
+rules among individuals, does raise difficult points for the
+conscientious student of history. We have to remember that no power
+exists to enforce international laws or police, so that every
+Government has to rely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> upon its own strength for the defence of its
+people and the preservation of its rights.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, I do not know any recent works that may be more
+profitable for advice and guidance in reading history than these three
+volumes of Lord Acton's. They contain the essence of his unceasing
+labours in collecting, comparing, and testing an immense quantity of
+historic material. They are particularly valuable for the flashes of
+insight into the deeper relations of events, for brief, sententious
+observations in which he sums up his judgments upon men and their
+doings. They are not to be taken lightly; they demand all your
+attention, for the style is compressed and packed with meaning; and
+the author seems to expect his readers to be prepared with more
+knowledge than, I think, most of us possess. His allusions take for
+granted so much learning that they occasionally puzzle the average
+man. For example, in one of his essays he makes a passing reference to
+'those who in the year 1348 shared the worst crimes that Christian
+nations have committed.' What these crimes were he does not say; and
+how many of us could answer the question off-hand? Certainly I could
+not. But the lectures and essays abound in far-ranging ideas, and show
+profound penetration into historic causes and consequences. Some of
+the essays, written in comparative youth, betray here and there a
+natural leaning towards the Church of Rome, in which he was born, and
+against Protestantism; yet his hatred of intolerance and despotism,
+spiritual or temporal, was sincere and intense. In politics he was a
+Liberal, yet he saw that Liberal institutions, representative
+government, are by no means a sure and speedy remedy for misrule in
+all times and countries, as in our day simple folk are apt to suppose.
+In writing of the condition of Europe during the earlier middle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> ages
+he observes: 'To bring order out of chaotic mire, to rear a new
+civilisation and blend hostile and unequal races into a nation, the
+thing wanted was not Liberty, but Force.'</p>
+
+<p>Here is a bold and clear-sighted deduction from the lessons of
+history, which revolutionary politicians in Asia, where no
+nationalities have yet been formed, may well take to heart.
+Parliamentary institutions, as Lord Acton has well said, presuppose
+unity of a people.</p>
+
+<p>Scattered through these volumes may be found, indeed, certain brief
+paragraphs which, as they contain the essence of much learning and
+deep thought, may well set us all thinking. In a remarkable essay on
+the historical relations of Church and State Lord Acton observes: 'The
+State is so closely linked with religion, that no nation that has
+changed its religion has ever survived in its old political form.'
+Here again is a striking generalisation which a student might set
+himself to verify by careful examination of the facts.</p>
+
+<p>And now I will make an end of my address by quoting one more remark of
+Lord Acton, in which he gives his definition of history taken as a
+whole. 'By universal history,' he says, 'I understand that which is
+distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a
+rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the
+memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to
+which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for
+their own sake, but in subordination to a higher series, according to
+the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common
+fortunes of mankind.'</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> Inaugural Address to the Students of King's College for
+Women, University of London, October 8, 1909.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>RACE AND RELIGION<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>I propose to offer for consideration some very general views upon the
+effects and interaction of the ideas of Race and Religion upon the
+political grouping of the population in various countries of Eastern
+Europe and of Asia, with the object of showing how they unite and
+divide mankind over a great portion of the earth. It will be
+understood, I hope, that it is impossible in a brief discussion to go
+far or thoroughly over such a wide field. I can only try to indicate
+some salient points that may be worth attention.</p>
+
+<p>If we look back upon the ancient world, as it was known to Greece and
+to Rome, and as it can be dimly surveyed through the records of
+classic antiquity, we find that before the Christian era the
+populations were divided and subdivided into races or tribes, with
+names signifying a common origin or descent; at any rate some kind of
+tribal association. The designation of their country was usually
+derived from the name of some dominant race, as Gallia from the Gauls
+or Judea from the Jews; indeed I might say, as France from the Franks
+or England from the Angles. Religious denominations of any large
+community were, I venture to suggest, unknown, at any rate in ancient
+Europe. The polytheism of these ages was too local and miscellaneous
+to weld together any considerable groups on the basis of a common
+worship or belief; for although three great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> religions then existed,
+Buddhism, Hinduism, and the faith of Zoroaster (still represented by
+the Parsees), these were confined to Central and Eastern Asia. And,
+moreover, these religions had not the missionary spirit; I mean that
+they made no vigorous open attempts to spread and gain proselytes,
+still less did they use force to convert great multitudes. But after
+the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world.
+The Roman empire&mdash;that greatest monument of human power, as Dean
+Church has called it&mdash;began the fusion of races into one vast
+political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on
+the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea;
+it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment
+of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political
+history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that
+changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world&mdash;the
+rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions.
+First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had
+levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the
+conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal
+spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the
+temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia. In Asia the
+victorious creed of Mohammed imposed upon immense multitudes a
+religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the
+dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was
+torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire
+was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered
+together all races of the West under the common denomination of
+Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> the
+primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there
+were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes
+contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this
+strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the
+formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we
+may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when
+the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when
+the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that
+may be called national. In these countries the subdivisions according
+to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the
+sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The
+great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into
+two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has
+gradually subsided, and at the present time all minor groups of the
+population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national
+designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers,
+and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western
+Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his
+religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory
+he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or
+Italian.</p>
+
+<p>Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West
+into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to
+the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the
+earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of
+mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My
+present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and
+understanding them. And I may begin by throwing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> out the suggestion
+that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have
+great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in
+France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that
+arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclop&eacute;distes, as
+they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French
+Encyclop&aelig;dia, treated in theory all notions of separate races,
+religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a
+common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general
+principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from
+local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much
+practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the
+French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very
+seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded
+the kingdoms of Western Europe with the war-cry of universal
+fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and
+religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all
+peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended
+to include the people of every country to which it extended,
+superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national
+character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling
+was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in
+the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when
+Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger
+than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclop&eacute;distes were inherited
+by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two
+Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the
+chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard
+difference of race as indelible. In fact, all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> this school, which had
+considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and
+social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against
+rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to
+save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that
+modify human character.</p>
+
+<p>There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view.
+In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race
+and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for
+political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will
+remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay
+stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion,
+politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some
+Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and
+concerned. For, in the first place, there has been a notable revival
+of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread
+of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most
+prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of
+the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of
+politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing
+upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race
+and religion.</p>
+
+<p>The plan which I shall attempt to follow in making a brief survey of
+my subject, is to begin with a glance at the political condition of
+Central Europe, and to travel rapidly Eastward. In the West, as I have
+said, we have compact and permanently established States with national
+governments. But as soon as we pass to Central Europe we find the
+Austro-Hungarian empire distracted and threatened by internal feuds,
+arising out of the contention for ascendency of two races, Germans and
+Slavonians, and also out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> of the demands of the various provinces and
+dependencies for political recognition of their separate identities,
+founded on claims to represent internal sections or subdivisions of
+the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the north-west of the
+empire are parted asunder from those in the south-east by the
+Hungarians, who came in from the east, and are of a different stock,
+and who have succeeded in establishing the federated kingdom of
+Hungary. I will not trouble you with statistical or geographical
+details. For my present purpose it is enough to mention that the
+subjects of Austria, apart from Hungary, are classed in eight separate
+sections, differentiated by separate languages, and that Poles,
+Bohemians, Germans, and Italians, are all and each claiming a kind of
+home rule within the empire, and show an increasing tendency to group
+themselves by distinctions of race. In Bohemia the population is
+nearly equally divided between Germans and Slavs, who speak different
+languages, have separate schools, and contend violently for political
+preponderance. In Moravia and Silesia, where the Slav element is
+stronger, the same conflict goes on. In Galicia the contest is between
+Poles and Ruthenians, between the Roman Catholic and the Greek
+churches. In Hungary proper the Magyars have political predominance,
+but the population of German descent and language is more numerous
+than the Magyars: in Transylvania, further eastward, the Magyars are
+politically overriding the Slav races; in Croatia to the southward a
+similar struggle is going on. Throughout every province of the
+Austro-Hungarian empire we see the same intermixture of races,
+religions, and languages&mdash;the more numerous and better united sections
+are striving for political ascendency: the weaker sections contend
+against them by demanding autonomy. And, as all these various
+antipathies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> and jealousies are represented in the Parliament of the
+empire, the peaceful consolidation of the empire into a large national
+State is interrupted by resistance under the watchword of separate
+nationalities. Religious differences between Roman Catholicism,
+Calvinism, and the Greek Church in the Eastern provinces, accentuate
+the incoherence. Each separate group takes for its symbol, the
+standard round which people rally, a language&mdash;German, Polish,
+Tcheque, Ruthenian, and so on. They are all being energetically
+maintained and jealously preserved in speech and writing in the
+schools and the assemblies. Moreover, three different churches, at
+least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of
+religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions
+and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose
+each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They
+are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil
+society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small
+States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in
+Western Europe. In Western Europe the principle of nationalities has
+been a method not of disintegration, but of concentration. It has led
+within the last fifty years to the establishment of two States of
+first-class magnitude, Germany and Italy; and Louis Napoleon, who had
+proclaimed the idea of national unification, was ruined by his own
+policy, for the Germans destroyed his dynasty, and Italy gave him no
+help. But in Austro-Hungary, on the contrary, the movement is not
+toward centralisation&mdash;it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it
+continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an
+ancient and powerful empire.</p>
+
+<p>You will observe that since we entered, in our survey, the Austrian
+territories, we have found ourselves <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span>within the jurisdiction of an
+empire in the true sense of that word, which I take to mean the
+dominion of one superior sovereignty over many subordinate races,
+tribes, or petty States that obey its authority. I may be permitted to
+regard the German emperor as the military head of a constitutional
+federation, which is a different thing. Now I think it may be said
+that from Austria eastward across South-Eastern Europe and Asia, from
+Vienna to Pekin, the general form of government is not national but
+imperial. Every government is holding together a number of different
+groups, all jealous of each other, all of whom would fall apart and
+probably fight among themselves, if they were not kept under by one
+ruler over them. It may be affirmed, broadly, that the structure of
+modern Europe, as represented by the massing of the populations into
+great homogeneous nations within fixed limits, has now been completely
+left behind in the West, and that from the shores of the Adriatic Sea
+right across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the real subdivisions of the
+people, the bonds that unite and separate them into different groups,
+are denoted by Race and Religion, sometimes by one, sometimes by the
+other, occasionally by both.</p>
+
+<p>Our first step over the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
+proceeding south-east beyond the Danube and the Carpathian mountains,
+brings us into the various principalities and provinces that were once
+under the dominion of the Ottoman empire, though almost all of them
+are now independent of it. Nearly all of them lie in the region south
+of the Danube, which is usually known as the Balkan Peninsula. Here
+the complexities of race and religion are abundantly manifest, and
+these archaic divisions of political society surround us everywhere.
+This region has indeed been parcelled out, within our own time, into
+territories of diverse States, but this is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> quite a modern formation,
+and the idea of such political citizenship has been very recently
+introduced.</p>
+
+<p>If, now, it is asked why, in this corner of South-Eastern Europe, this
+medley of internal distinctions, which was the prevailing
+characteristic of the ancient world, has been so long preserved, the
+answer is that all this country, the Balkan Peninsula, was under the
+direct government of the Ottoman empire up to about seventy years ago,
+and that most of the provinces were only liberated from the Turkish
+yoke in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of the
+long dominion of the Turks over this country had been to perpetuate
+the state of things which existed when they first conquered it. Their
+policy, the policy of all Asiatic empires, was not to consolidate, or
+to obliterate differences produced by race and religion, but to
+maintain them in order to rule more securely. And here I may quote
+from a book recently published under the title of <i>Turkey in Europe</i>,
+which is unique of its kind, for in no other work can we find so
+complete and particular a history of the Balkan lands, or so accurate
+a description of the grouping of the people, taken from personal
+knowledge and local investigation. The author, who calls himself
+Odysseus, reminds us that the Ottoman Sultans acquired these
+territories when they were in the confusion and dismemberment which
+followed the decay and fall of the Byzantine empire; and he explains
+that the Turks, who have been always inferior in number to the
+aggregate of their Christian subjects, could hardly have kept up their
+dominion if at any time the Christians had united against them. As the
+Christians were not converted, religious unification, which in Asia
+was the basis of Mohammedan power, was here impossible, so the Turks
+divided that they might rule. 'The Turks have thoroughly learned,' he
+says, 'and daily put into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> practice with admirable skill, the lesson
+of <i>divide et impera</i>, and hence they have always done, and still do,
+all in their power to prevent the obliteration of racial, linguistic,
+and religious differences.' They have perpetuated and preserved, as if
+in a museum, the strange medley that was existing when these lands
+were first conquered by Turkish Sultans nearly five hundred years ago.
+Their idea of government has always been simply to take tribute and
+secure their paramount supremacy. The result has been that the
+confusion, intermixture, and rivalry of race and religion is far more
+intricate than even in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the central
+government has tried to reconcile and amalgamate. In Turkey, Odysseus
+tells us, 'not only is there a medley of races, but the races inhabit,
+not different districts, but the same district. Of three villages
+within ten miles of one another, one will be Turkish, one Greek, one
+Bulgarian&mdash;or perhaps one Albanian, one Bulgarian, and one Servian,
+each with their own language, dress, and religion, and eight races and
+languages may be found in one large town.'</p>
+
+<p>What has been the upshot and consequence of this Turkish system? It
+has been to make the Balkan Peninsula a battlefield, during the last
+four centuries, of two great militant creeds, Christianity and Islam,
+collecting the population into two religious camps; while inside these
+two main religious divisions there are manifold subdivisions of race.
+Men of the same creed are in different groups of race; nor are the
+race-groups always of the same creed, for one section may have become
+fanatic Mohammedans, while the rest have adhered to Christianity. The
+intermixture is the more complicated because one cannot attempt to
+distinguish a race by physical characteristics, by their personal
+appearance or features as marking descent from one stock. The
+practices of polygamy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> slavery, of the purchase of women, and their
+capture in the interminable wars, have produced incessant crossing of
+breeds. It is not often understood or remembered that in former times
+a tribe or band of foreign invaders, when they had to cross the sea or
+to make long expeditions, very rarely brought women with them. So when
+they settled on the conquered lands they must have intermarried,
+forcibly or otherwise, with the subject race. If they massacred the
+men, the women were part of their booty. Neither is the test of
+language a sure one, though it is the best we have, and is becoming
+more and more the criterion of race; for a kind of struggle for
+existence goes on among the languages, they spread or contract under
+various influences, mainly political. The folk may change their
+language as they may change their creed; and, what is more remarkable,
+they may even change their race. According to the book I have just
+quoted, the Ottoman Government classes all its subject population into
+religious communities. Whatever be a man's race or language, if he
+professes Islam, he is called a Mohammedan; if he is of the orthodox
+Greek Church at Constantinople, he is Greek or R&ucirc;mi, for Stambul was
+the capital of the Roman empire; or else he is Katholik, Armenian, or
+Jew, according to his creed, not according to his birthplace or his
+blood. So the official designations are religious, while the popular
+usage is various, sometimes following race, sometimes creed, and it is
+still constantly shifting, as I shall presently try to explain.</p>
+
+<p>And here it may be interesting to mention a peculiarity of the growth
+and constitution of the Eastern or Greek Church, in contrast with the
+Western Church of Rome. The Roman Church has always claimed
+universality&mdash;it has ignored and attempted to trample down all
+political and national divisions; it demands of all Roman Catholics,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span>
+whoever they may be, submission to the supreme spiritual dictation of
+the Roman pontiff, and those who accept any other authority are
+outside the pale. From the beginning the Roman Catholic Church has
+made incessant war upon every kind of heresy or dissent, transforming
+the old rites and worships where they could not be exterminated. It
+proclaims independence of the State, it has no local centres or
+national branches. The Pope at Rome claims spiritual authority over
+all Roman Catholics everywhere. But the historical fact that the
+Eastern or Greek Church was always under the control of the Byzantine
+empire at Constantinople, has kept this Church much more closely
+allied to the temporal power; and the result has been that throughout
+its development it has remained closely connected with the State. So
+that wherever a fresh State has been formed, the Greek Church has
+become national, and the spiritual authority, adapting itself to
+political changes, has become a separate institution. The most signal
+example of this is to be seen in Russia, where the Greek Church, being
+cut off from Constantinople, had its own independent Patriarch up to
+the time of Peter the Great; and very lately, when Bulgaria became a
+State, it set up its own head of the Church, or Exarch. When Bosnia
+and Herzegovina were ruled by the Turkish Sultan, the chief of the
+Greek Church in that country was the Patriarch at Constantinople. Now
+that these provinces have passed under the administration of Austria,
+the ecclesiastical authority has also been transferred from the
+Patriarch to local Metropolitans. Each new State shows a tendency to
+establish what I may call spiritual Home Rule. We know that in Western
+Europe the establishment of National Churches came in by one great
+religious upheaval that is called the Reformation. In Eastern Europe
+the movement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> has proceeded gradually, keeping pace with the rise and
+recognition of separate governments, and the result has been the
+multiplication of internal ecclesiastical divisions.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that the Ottoman empire recognises only religious
+denominations in the classification of the people. Apparently this was
+the general usage in former times. A Greek meant a member of the
+orthodox Greek Church, who might or might not be an inhabitant of
+Greece, nor would he necessarily have spoken the Greek tongue. If a
+Christian changed his religion, as a matter of course he changed his
+name and his designation; he was placed in another group. But the
+pressure of political independence has been latterly bringing into
+prominence the idea of Race. Odysseus, from whose book I quote again,
+gives us the very curious fact that even race is not immutable, it
+changes like religion, with the political movement; it has become a
+question of political expediency. When a separate State has been
+organised, as in Bulgaria, or when a league for shaking off the
+Turkish yoke is being organised, as in Macedonia, the plan of the
+leaders is to induce the people to drop minor distinctions of origin
+and to unite for the purposes of political combination, under some
+larger national name, to call themselves Hellenes in Greece,
+Bulgarians in Bulgaria, and Macedonians in the Turkish province of
+Macedonia. Moreover, when a new State has been thus formed, like
+Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, on the principle of Race, the patriotic
+party begins to discover that many Greeks or Bulgarians are outside
+the territory, and they set up a claim to enlarge their boundaries in
+order to bring these people inside. So that the questions of races and
+churches are used to keep up continual intrigues, dissensions, and a
+lively agitation throughout these countries. For since religion is
+always a powerful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> uniting force, there is a constant effort to bring
+the people to congregate under the Established Church of their new
+State, to renounce their obedience to any spiritual head outside its
+limits. We have, therefore, the curious spectacle of a frequent
+shifting of denominations of Race and Creed for the purpose of
+political consolidation. In fact we are witnessing in the Balkan
+Peninsula a struggle among the petty States to strengthen themselves
+by capturing each other's population.</p>
+
+<p>I think I may have said enough to prove, briefly and superficially,
+the importance, in Central and South-Eastern Europe, of the ideas of
+Race and Religion, the necessity of understanding their strength and
+operation. So soon as we cross into Asia we find these ideas
+universally paramount. It will perhaps be remembered that Henry Maine
+pointed out long ago, in his book on Ancient Law, that during a large
+part of what we call modern history no such conception was entertained
+as that of territorial sovereignty, as indicated by such a title as
+the King of France. 'Sovereignty,' he said, 'was not associated with
+dominion over a portion or subdivision of the earth.' Now I do not
+believe that a territorial title is assumed at this moment by any of
+the great Asiatic sovereigns in Asia. Here in Europe we talk of the
+Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, or the Emperor of China; but
+these are not the styles or designations which are actually used by
+these potentates; they are each known, on their coins, and in their
+public proclamations, by a string of lofty titles, generally
+religious, like our 'Defender of the Faith,' which make no reference
+to their territories. Such were the titles of the Moghul emperors of
+India, and I may here observe that the term Emperor of India, now
+borne by the English king, is entirely of British manufacture. The
+truth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> is that Asiatic kingdoms have no settled territorial
+boundaries, they are always changing, just as our Indian frontiers are
+constantly moving forward; and wherever in Asia there exists a
+demarcated line of frontier, it has been fixed by the intervention of
+European governments interested in maintaining order. In Mohammedan
+lands the basis of a ruler's authority, in theory at least, is
+religious, and all through Western Asia there is the closest
+connection between the State and the dominant creed of Islam; for a
+Mohammedan sovereign's authority is ecclesiastical, so to speak, as
+well as civil; he is bound, in the words of our Litany, not only to
+'execute justice,' but to 'maintain truth'; and the theory of two
+separate jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal, is practically
+unknown, though of course in dealing with religious questions the
+ruler must be supported by the chief expounders of the law of Islam.
+To borrow a phrase from Hobbes, 'the religion of the Mohammedans is a
+part of their policy,' as it is also the fundamental bond of their
+whole society.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen that in South-Eastern Europe there is an intricate
+intermixture of the distinctions of race and religion, with a tendency
+of race to win the mastery. This is because the people of those
+countries were conquered by Islam, but only partially converted, and
+the Turkish Sultans, as I have already said, encouraged discord among
+their Christian subjects. But in Western Asia the faith of Islam not
+only conquered but converted much more completely; it almost
+extirpated other faiths in Asia Minor and Persia, leaving in Asia
+Minor only a few obscure sects, like the Nestorians, in a region that
+had been wholly Christian, and leaving in Persia only some scattered
+relics of the great Zoroastrian religion, still represented in two or
+three towns by those whom we call Parsees. In these lands, therefore,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span>religion has generally mastered race, for the laws that regulate the
+whole personal condition and property of the people are determined by
+their religion, with a certain variety of local customs. Nevertheless,
+beneath the overspreading religious denomination there are a large
+number of tribal groups, all of whom are known by tribal names. Most
+of these tribes are fanatic Islamites, but in the midst of them is one
+group which is distinct by religion and probably by race&mdash;I mean the
+Armenians. They do not form a majority of the population in Armenia,
+they are scattered about Western Asia, and are divided into two
+Christian sects, which under the Turkish empire are regarded as two
+religious communities. Their recent terrible misfortunes afford a
+signal and melancholy warning of the danger of interfering in Oriental
+affairs without a full understanding of the complications arising out
+of these very differences and antagonisms of race and religion that I
+have been endeavouring to explain. And the whole story is a striking
+example of the tremendous power of religion in Asiatic politics. In
+1895 the European Powers interposed in the name of justice and
+humanity to press upon the Turkish Government the reforms that had
+been promised by treaty, and thus to better the condition of the
+Armenians, by securing to them a certain share in the local and
+municipal government. But the Armenians are a scattered and subject
+people, different in race and religion and language from the ruling
+Turks, and the demand for giving them some kind of independence
+alarmed the Turkish Government and inflamed the fanaticism of the
+Mohammedans. The only result of European intervention was a frightful
+massacre of the Armenians, which the European Powers witnessed without
+any serious attempt to stop. Such are the consequences<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> of
+misunderstanding the real political situation and the forces at work.
+Probably many people in England had a very hazy notion of what the
+Armenians were, or what their name signified. We have always to
+remember that throughout Asia, and indeed over the greater part of the
+non-Christian world, the various sections of the population very
+rarely use for themselves, or indeed for the country that they dwell
+in, the name that is used for them by Europeans. As our own system has
+become territorial, as we call any natural-born inhabitant of France a
+Frenchman, and so on, we are led by a false analogy to talk of Turkey
+and the Turks, Persia and the Persians, India and the Indians, China
+and the Chinese. But these broad designations denoting modern
+nationalities are not used in Asia by the people themselves, to whom
+such a conception is foreign. I know of no terms in the languages of
+these countries that correspond to our words, Turkey, India, China, as
+geographical expressions, and I think that the names used by Europeans
+for outlying countries or peoples often come from some accident or
+chance, or mistake, or by taking the name of a part of a country for
+the name of the whole. In Asia the people still class themselves, in
+their ordinary talk, by names designating religion or race. A curious
+example of a religious designation still survives, by the way, among
+Europeans in South Africa. When the first Portuguese explorers of the
+African coast asked the Arab traders about the indigenous tribes,
+they, being Mohammedans, said that the natives were all Kafirs, which
+means Infidels. This was supposed to be the general name of a people,
+and it has been handed down to us so that we still call the South
+African natives Kaffirs. I doubt whether the tribes concerned have
+ever used or recognised among themselves this unsavoury name.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> I may
+note, by the way, that one of the most ancient tribal names in Asia is
+that by which the Greeks, outside the Turkish empire, are often
+known&mdash;Yun&acirc;ni, or Ionian&mdash;which must have been in use from the days
+when the Greek colonies settled on the coast of Asia Minor, many
+centuries before the Christian era.</p>
+
+<p>We are pushing our survey eastward across Asia. The kingdom known to
+Europe by the name of Persia is styled by its inhabitants <i>Ir&acirc;n</i>,
+though I doubt whether a Persian subject belonging to a particular
+tribe or sect would call himself <i>Ir&acirc;ni</i>. The next independent
+kingdom, beyond Persia, is Afghanistan; and here we have an example of
+a designation originally implying race, gradually merging into one
+that is territorial and political. Afghanistan originally meant, I
+believe, the great central mass of mountains occupied by a tribe
+called Afghans; it is now becoming a name that includes the whole
+territory ruled by the Afghan Amir at Kabul. The causes that are
+producing this change in the signification of the word are, first,
+that the Amir of Kabul has subdued, more or less, all the tribes
+inhabiting the country; and secondly, that the pressure of England and
+Russia on two sides of that country has necessitated an accurate
+demarcation of frontiers all round it, in order that the Amir's
+territories, which are under our protection, may be precisely known.
+The kingdom is thus acquiring a territorial designation. But this
+kingdom of Afghanistan is really composed of a number of chiefships
+and provinces very loosely knit together under the sway of the Amir,
+which might fall asunder again if the rulership at Kabul became weak.
+And the population is all parcelled out into various races and tribes,
+usually dwelling in separate tracts under local chiefs; they are
+always known among themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> by names, denoting race or tribe;
+sometimes patriarchal, like the Children of Israel, or the clans of
+our own Highlands; sometimes local, and in one case historical, for
+the dominant tribe to which the Amir belongs has called itself Dur&acirc;ni
+or royal.</p>
+
+<p>It is therefore the distinction of race or tribe, not of religion,
+that governs the whole interior population throughout this vast region
+of high mountains and valleys in the centre, with comparatively open
+country on the north and south; the whole area has been peopled by a
+conflux of tribes. Yet Afghanistan has some of the symptoms of
+national growth&mdash;I mean that if it could hold together as one kingdom
+it might grow into a nationality. In religion the Afghans are almost
+all fanatical Mohammedans, for Afghanistan is the great bulwark and
+citadel on the eastern frontier of Islam, and beyond it, in Eastern
+Asia, there are no independent Mohammedan principalities. The kingdom
+has a strictly defined territory, and a dynasty which has risen from
+the chiefship of a powerful tribe to the heritable possession of that
+territory. This dynasty, moreover, is identical in race and religion
+with a large majority of its subjects, which is another peculiar
+source of strength; for almost all the other first-class kingdoms of
+Asia are ruled by dynasties of alien race, who sometimes profess a
+religion different from that of many of their subjects. We are
+frequently reminded of the important fact that in India the English
+rulers are aliens in race and religion from the people; but we may
+also remember that after all this is only a difference of degree, a
+wider separation between the governors and the governed than elsewhere
+in Asia. The principal kingdoms of Asia are ruled by foreign families
+or dynasties that have come in by conquest. The Moghul dynasty that
+preceded our own government<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> in India was foreign; and it was a
+Mohammedan rulership over an enormous Hindu population. The Ottoman
+Turk was a foreign invader from Central Asia, who still governs a
+variety of races and religions. In Persia the Shah's family is of a
+Turkish tribe. And the Emperor of China is a Mandchoo Tartar, of a
+race quite apart from that of the immense majority of the Chinese. Of
+course the Russians are as much aliens in Central Asia as the English
+in India; they govern from St. Petersburg as we do from London. I
+doubt, therefore, whether there is any other kingdom in Asia that has
+more of the element of national unity than Afghanistan, though
+unfortunately its political condition is precarious, because there is
+still much tribal disunion inside it.</p>
+
+<p>Eastward again beyond Afghanistan we enter the Indian empire, a vast
+dominion stretching south-eastward from the slopes of the outer Afghan
+hills and the Persian border to the western frontiers of the Chinese
+empire and of Siam, and controlling the whole seaboard of Southern
+Asia, from Aden to Singapore. It is the possession of this wide
+territory that has given to the English a direct and most important
+interest in the problems of race and religion. For, in the first
+place, in this empire we have to deal with three out of the four great
+faiths of the world&mdash;Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism&mdash;and we have to
+uphold for ourselves the fourth, Christianity. Secondly, we have also
+within the borders of our empire a multiplicity of races and tribes;
+and we have the peculiar Indian institution of Caste, which marks off
+all Hindu society into innumerable groups, distinguished one from
+another by the rules that forbid intermarriage and (in most cases) the
+sharing of food. Now the word Hindu requires a special explanation,
+because there is nothing exactly like it elsewhere in the world; it is
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> exclusively a religious denomination; it denotes also a country
+and a race. When we speak of a Christian, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist,
+we mean a particular religious community without distinction of race
+or country. When we talk of Persians or Chinese, we indicate country
+or parentage without any necessary distinction of creed. But when a
+man tells me he is a Hindu, I know that he means all three things
+together&mdash;religion, race and country. I can be almost sure that he is
+an inhabitant of India, quite sure that he is of Indian parentage; and
+as to religion, the word Hindu undoubtedly locates him within one of
+the manifold groups who follow the ordinances and worship the gods of
+Hinduism. Next in importance to the Hindus, as a religious community,
+come the Mohammedans, who number over sixty millions in India. The two
+faiths, Hinduism and Islam&mdash;polytheism and monotheism&mdash;are in strong
+opposition to each other; yet they are not quite clean cut apart, for
+some Hindu tribes that have been converted to Islam retain in part
+their primitive customs of worship and caste. And in Burmah, as in
+Ceylon, the population is almost wholly Buddhist.</p>
+
+<p>In a very able article that has recently appeared in an Indian
+magazine, the writer, a Hindu, observes: 'The Hindus offer a curious
+instance of a people without any feeling of nationality.' He finds an
+explanation in 'the intensity of religiousness, which led to
+sectarianism, and allying itself with caste, tended to preserve all
+local and tribal differences.' Other causes, historical, political,
+and geographical, might be mentioned, but I agree that the chief
+separating influence has been religious. And, however this may be, it
+may be affirmed that within our Indian empire at the present moment
+the primary superior designation of a man is according to his
+religion&mdash;he is either a Hindu, a Mohammedan, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span> a Buddhist. But
+inside these general religious denominations are very many
+distinctions of caste, race, or tribe. The Sikhs are a sect of Hindus
+who belong exclusively to the Punjab. The Marathas and Rajp&ucirc;ts are
+races who profess Hinduism and who always call themselves by their
+racial names: and there are many aboriginal tribes, like the Bheels
+and Gonds, who are being gradually absorbed into Hinduism. Race and
+religion are, in fact, more profoundly intermixed in India than
+perhaps in any other country of the world; and into such an intricate
+subject I cannot now enter. My present point is that in India we are
+governing an empire of the antique pattern, quite different from the
+western nationalities, a country where complexities of race and creed
+meet us at every turn in the course of our administration; an empire
+which, as Mr. Bryce has pointed out in a recent essay that is full of
+light and knowledge, has many striking resemblances with the dominion
+of Imperial Rome.<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> There is the same miscellany of tribes and races
+in diverse stages of civilisation, warlike and half-tamed on the
+frontiers, softened and reconciled by peace, prosperity, and culture
+in the older provinces of the empire, wild and barbarous in remote
+interior tracts. There is just visible in India a similar though much
+slighter tendency of the language of the ruling race to prevail among
+the educated classes, because the English language, like the Latin,
+has greater literary power, and conveys to the Indians the latest
+ideas and scientific discoveries of the foremost nations of the world.
+There is also a certain diffusion of European manners and even dress,
+resembling in some degree what took place even in such a remote
+province of the Roman empire as Britain, where, as we know from
+Tacitus, it was made a reproach against the Romanising <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span>Britons that
+they were abandoning their own costume for the Roman toga and adopting
+the manners of their conquerors. All these tendencies are slightly
+affecting distinctions of race and religion; though in India these
+distinctions are far deeper than they were under the Roman empire, and
+so far as one can judge they are ineffaceable.</p>
+
+<p>In regard to religious differences, so long as the people were almost
+universally polytheistic the Romans had little trouble on this score,
+since every deity and every ritual was tolerated indifferently by
+their government, provided that public order and decency were
+observed; and this is the practice of our Government in India. But we
+have one difficulty in governing India that did not trouble the Romans
+at the time when they first founded their empire by conquest. I think
+that religion had then very little influence on politics. It was the
+advent of two great militant and propagating faiths, first
+Christianity, next Islam, that first made religion a vital element in
+politics, and afterwards made a common creed the bond of union for
+great masses of mankind. It has now become in Asia a powerful
+instrument of political association. Therefore when we proclaim for
+our government in India the principle of religious neutrality we do
+indeed avoid collision with other faiths, but we are without the
+advantage that is possessed by a State which represents and is
+supported by the religious enthusiasm of a great number of its
+subjects. I take the separation of the State from religion to be a
+principle that is quite modern in Europe; and outside our Indian
+empire it is unknown in Asia. Everywhere else the ruler is the head of
+some dominant church or creed. On the other hand our neutral attitude
+enables us to arbitrate and keep the peace between the two formidable
+rivals, Islam and Hinduism, which in a large<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> measure balance and
+restrain each other. And it is easier to govern a great empire full of
+diverse castes and creeds when you only demand from them obedience to
+the civil law, than when the Government takes one side on religious
+questions. Nevertheless, though in India we proclaim and practise
+religious neutrality, we must always remember that India is, of all
+great countries in the world, that in which religious beliefs and
+antagonisms affect the administration most profoundly, and subdivide
+the population with the greatest complexity. For the empire contains a
+wonderful variety of races and tribes, especially on its frontiers; it
+has the fierce Afghan tribes under our protectorate on the north-west,
+a cluster of utterly barbarous tribes in the north-east, and in the
+Far East beyond Burmah we have undertaken the control of a border
+tract, full of petty rival chiefships, where the language, manners and
+origins are related to the neighbouring population of China.</p>
+
+<p>In China we have the true type of Asiatic empire, by far the oldest in
+the world, a sovereignty that, with various changes of dynasty, has
+governed the Far East of Asia from time almost immemorial; an immense
+conglomeration of different races under the rulership of a dynasty
+that is foreign to the great majority of its subjects. Here again I
+must remark on the absence of territorial or national designations.
+The word China, as designating this empire, is not used by the people
+themselves; the official name means, I believe, the Great Pure
+Kingdom; and the emperor himself is known by various titles signifying
+august, lofty, or sacred. I suppose that almost the whole population
+belongs to the great Mongolian or Tartar family of mankind; but the
+subdivisions of different tribes, races, and languages must be
+numerous, as might be expected in such a vastly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span> extended empire, and
+the tribesmen are all known by their tribal names. In regard to
+Religion the situation is peculiar, it is without parallel elsewhere
+in Asia; for three great systems exist in China separately and
+independently, each of them working in peace side by side with the
+others: the religion founded by Confucius, which is a great system of
+morals; Buddhism, which is a Church with a splendid ritual,
+priesthood, and monastic orders; and Taoism, which is a kind of
+naturalistic religion, the worship of stars, natural forces, spirits,
+deified heroes and local gods. It is said to be a common thing for one
+person to belong to all three religions, and the State superintends
+them all impartially. One very remarkable and peculiar fact, which I
+give on excellent authority, is that in China religious denominations
+are never used to denote sections of the people, except by the
+Mohammedans, who are not numerous and form a class apart. But any
+attempt to describe the religion of China would lead me far beyond the
+scope of this address. My present point is only to lay stress on the
+enormous political importance, in China as elsewhere in Asia, of the
+religious idea. For whereas powerful religious movements, affecting
+the destinies of kingdoms and causing great wars, have ceased in
+Western and Central Europe, in Asia all governments have constantly to
+apprehend some fresh outburst of religious enthusiasm, the appearance
+of some prophet or new spiritual teacher, who gathers a following,
+like the Mahdi in the Soudan, and attacks the ruling power. The
+Taeping rebellion, which devastated China some forty years ago, is a
+case in point; it was begun by a fanatic leader who denounced the
+established religions, and it soon became a dangerous revolt against
+the Imperial dynasty. And the outbreak against the foreigners in China
+last year is understood to have originated in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> religious fanaticism.
+These events go to illustrate the enormous influence on politics which
+Religion, whether you call it enthusiasm or superstition, exercises
+everywhere in Asia.</p>
+
+<p>But of all empires in Asia, the Russian empire is the greatest and the
+most powerful. I have only space to say here that it is of the same
+type with the others; it is a vast dominion over an infinite variety
+of races, tribes, and creeds; it is a government which has come in by
+foreign conquest; a Christian Power which has among its subjects a
+great number of Mohammedans. It differs from our Indian empire in this
+respect, that the Russian conquests were made gradually by land,
+across Central Asia, or by slow immigration and extension, as in
+Siberia, whereas the English reached India by a long sea-journey. So
+that in the Asiatic empire of Russia the separation of race between
+the rulers and their subjects is not so sharply defined as between
+England and India. Nevertheless the problems that confront Russia in
+Asia are similar in kind to those which face us in India; she has to
+reconcile to her permanent dominion a miscellany of alien peoples,
+whom it is almost impossible to fuse and consolidate into anything
+like a nationality.</p>
+
+<p>I have now endeavoured, very imperfectly, to show how Race and
+Religion still powerfully affect society, and trouble politics,
+throughout a great part of the world. How far they influence and
+interact upon each other is a difficult problem; but one may say that
+some religions seem to accord with the peculiar temperament and
+intellectual disposition of certain races; that, for instance, the
+active propagating spirit of Islam flourishes in Western Asia, while
+in Eastern Asia a quiet and contemplative faith, with little
+missionary impulse, no strong desire to make converts, has always
+prevailed. But in the East<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> everywhere Race and Religion still unite
+and isolate the populations in groups&mdash;they are the great dividing and
+disturbing forces that prevent or delay the consolidation of settled
+nationalities; and so far as our experience goes, a fixed nationality
+of the Western type is the most solid and permanent form of political
+government and social aggregation. An empire is a different and looser
+mode of binding people together, yet at certain stages of civilisation
+and the world's progress it is a necessity; and an empire well
+administered is the best available instrument for promoting
+civilisation and good order among backward races. So managed it may
+last long; and its dominion may be practically permanent, for commerce
+and industry, literature and science, rapid and easy communication by
+land and sea, spread far more quickly, and connect distant countries
+far more closely, in modern times than in the ancient world. Yet there
+is always an element of unrest and insecurity underlying the position
+of imperial rulership over different and often discordant groups of
+subjects; and this has been one main cause of the immemorial weakness
+of Asiatic empires, and of the indifference of the people to a change
+of masters, because no single dynasty represented the whole people. It
+is just this weakness of the native rulers that has enabled the
+European to make his conquests in Asia; and we have carefully to
+remember that although our governments are superior in skill and
+strength, we have inherited the old difficulties. For it is my belief
+that in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, the strength of
+the racial and religious sentiments is rather increasing than
+diminishing. This is indeed the view&mdash;the fact, if I am right&mdash;that I
+especially desire to press home, because it is of the highest
+importance at the present time, when all the European nations, and
+England among the foremost, are extending their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> dominion over peoples
+of races and creeds different from their own. Our governments are now
+no longer confined to the continent which we inhabit; we are acquiring
+immense possessions in Asia and Africa; we can survey the whole earth
+with its confusion of tongues; its multitude of beliefs and customs,
+its infinitely miscellaneous populations. We must recognise the
+variety of the human species; we must acknowledge that we cannot
+impose a uniform type of civilisation, just as we admit that a uniform
+faith is beyond mere human efforts to impose, and that to attempt it
+would be politically disastrous. This is the conclusion upon which I
+venture to lay stress, because some such warning seems to me neither
+untimely nor unimportant.</p>
+
+<p>For there is still a dangerous tendency among the enterprising
+commercial nations of the West to assume that the importation into
+Asia of economical improvements, public instruction, regular
+administration, and religious neutrality will conquer antipathies,
+overcome irrational prejudices, and reconcile old-world folk to an
+alien civilisation. Undoubtedly a foreign government that rules
+wisely, justly, and very cautiously, acquires a strong hold on its
+subjects, and may stand, like the Roman empire, for centuries. But
+this can only be achieved by recognising, instead of ignoring, certain
+ineffaceable characteristics in the origins and history of the people,
+for whom the tradition and sentiment of race is often their bond of
+union and the base of their society, as their religion is the
+embodiment of their spiritual instincts and imaginations.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> Address delivered as President of the Social and
+Political Education League, May 5, 1902.&mdash;<i>Fortnightly Review</i>,
+December 1902.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> <i>Studies in History and Jurisprudence</i>, vol. I., chap.
+i.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS</h2>
+
+
+<p>In considering the subject of my address,<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> I have been confronted
+by this difficulty&mdash;that in the sections which regulate the order of
+our proceedings, we have a list of papers that range over all the
+principal religions, ancient and modern, that have existed and still
+exist in the world. They are to be treated and discussed by experts
+whose scholarship, particular studies, and close research entitle them
+all to address you authoritatively. I have no such special
+qualifications; and in any case it would be most presumptuous in me to
+trespass upon their ground. All that I can venture to do, therefore,
+in the remarks which I propose to address to you to-day, is to attempt
+a brief general survey of the history of religions from a standpoint
+which may possibly not fall within the scope of these separate papers.</p>
+
+<p>The four great religions now prevailing in the world, which are
+historical in the sense that they have been long known to history, I
+take to be&mdash;Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Having regard
+to their origin and derivation, to their history and character, I may
+be permitted, for my present purpose only, to class the two former as
+the Religions of the West, and the two latter as the Religions of the
+East. These are the faiths which still maintain a mighty influence
+over the minds of mankind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> And my object is to compare the political
+relations, the attitude, maintained toward them, from time to time, by
+the States and rulers of the people over which these religions have
+established their spiritual dominion. The religion of the Jews is not
+included, though its influence has been incalculable, because it has
+been caught up, so to speak, into Christianity and Islam, and cannot
+therefore be counted among those which have made a partition of the
+religious world. For this reason, perhaps, it has retained to this day
+its ancient denomination, derived from the tribe or country of its
+origin; whereas the others are named from a Faith or a Founder. The
+word Nazarene, denoting the birthplace of Christianity, which is said
+to be still used in that region, was, as we know, very speedily
+superseded by its wider title, as the Creed broke out of local limits
+and was proclaimed universal.</p>
+
+<p>There has evidently been a fore-time, though it is prehistorical,
+when, so far as we know, mankind was universally polytheistic; when
+innumerable rites and worships prevailed without restraint, springing
+up and contending with each other like the trees in a primeval forest,
+reflecting a primitive and precarious condition of human society. I
+take polytheism to have been, in this earliest stage, the wild growth
+of superstitious imagination, varied indefinitely by the pressure of
+circumstance, by accident, by popular caprice, or by the good or evil
+fortunes of the community. In this stage it can now be seen among
+barbarous tribes&mdash;as, for instance, in Central Africa. And some traces
+of it still survive, under different pretexts and disguises, in the
+lowest strata of civilised nations, where it may be said to represent
+the natural reluctance of the vagrant human fancy to be satisfied with
+higher forms and purer conceptions that are always imperfectly
+assimilated by the multitude.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span></p><p>Among primitive societies the spheres of human and divine affairs
+were intermixed and identical; they could not be disentangled. But
+with the growth of political institutions came gradual separation, or
+at any rate the subordination of religion to the practical necessities
+of orderly government and public morals. That polytheism can exist and
+flourish in the midst of a highly intellectual and civilised society,
+we know from the history of Greece and Rome. But in ancient Greece its
+direct influence upon political affairs seems to have been slight;
+though it touched at some points upon morality. The function of the
+State, according to Greek ideas, was to legislate for all the
+departments of human life and to uphold the moral standard. The law
+prohibited sacrilege and profanity; it punished open impiety that
+might bring down divine wrath upon the people at large. The
+philosophers taught rational ethics; they regarded the popular
+superstitions with indulgent contempt; but they inculcated the duty of
+honouring the gods, and the observance of public ceremonial. Beyond
+these limits the practice of local and customary worship was, I think,
+free and unrestrained; though I need hardly add that toleration, as
+understood by the States of antiquity, was a very different thing from
+the modern principle of religious neutrality. Under the Roman
+government the connection between the State and religion was much
+closer, as the dominion of Rome expanded and its power became
+centralised. The Roman State maintained a strict control and
+superintendence over the official rituals and worships, which were
+regulated as a department of the administration, to bind the people
+together by established rites and worships, in order to cement
+political and social unity. It is true that the usages of the tribes
+and principalities that were conquered and annexed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span> were left
+undisturbed; for the Roman policy, like that of the English in India,
+was to avoid giving offence to religion; and undoubtedly this policy,
+in both instances, materially facilitated the rapid building up of a
+wide dominion. Nevertheless, there was a tendency to draw in the
+worship toward a common centre. The deities of the conquered provinces
+were respected and conciliated; the Roman generals even appealed to
+them for protection and favour, yet they became absorbed and
+assimilated under Roman names; they were often identified with the
+gods of the Roman pantheon, and were frequently superseded by the
+victorious divinities of the new rulers&mdash;the strange deities, in fact,
+were Romanised as well as the foreign tribes and cities. After this
+manner the Roman empire combined the tolerance of great religious
+diversity with the supremacy of a centralised government. Political
+amalgamation brought about a fusion of divine attributes; and latterly
+the emperor was adored as the symbol of manifest power, ruler and
+pontiff; he was the visible image of supreme authority.</p>
+
+<p>This <i>r&eacute;gime</i> was easily accepted by the simple unsophisticated
+paganism of Europe. The Romans, with all their statecraft, had as yet
+no experience of a high religious temperature, of enthusiastic
+devotion and divine mysteries. But as their conquest and commerce
+spread eastward, the invasion of Asia let in upon Europe a flood of
+Oriental divinities, and thus Rome came into contact with much
+stronger and deeper spiritual forces. The European polytheism might be
+utilised and administered, the Asiatic deities could not be
+domesticated and subjected to regulation; the Oriental orgies and
+strange rites broke in upon the organised State worship; the new ideas
+and practices came backed by a profound and fervid spiritualism.
+Nevertheless the Roman policy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> of bringing religion under
+authoritative control was more or less successful even in the Asiatic
+provinces of the empire; the privileges of the temples were
+restricted; the priesthoods were placed under the general
+superintendence of the proconsular officials; and Roman divinities
+gradually found their way into the Asiatic pantheon.</p>
+
+<p>But we all know that the religion of the Roman empire was falling into
+multitudinous confusion when Christianity arose&mdash;an austere exclusive
+faith, with its army of saints, ascetics, and unflinching martyrs,
+proclaiming worship to be due to one God only, and sternly refusing to
+acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. Against such a faith an
+incoherent disorderly polytheism could make no better stand than
+tribal levies against a disciplined army. The new religion struck
+directly at the sacrifices that symbolised imperial unity; the passive
+resistance of Christians was necessarily treated as rebellion, the
+State made implacable war upon them. Yet the spiritual and moral
+forces won the victory, and Christianity established itself throughout
+the empire. Universal religion, following upon universal civil
+dominion, completed the levelling of local and national distinctions.
+The Churches rapidly grew into authority superior to the State within
+their own jurisdiction; they called in the temporal government to
+enforce theological decisions and to put down heresies; they founded a
+powerful hierarchy. The earlier Roman constitution had made religion
+an instrument of administration. When one religion became universal,
+the churches enlisted the civil ruler into the service of orthodoxy;
+they converted the State into an instrument for enforcing religion.
+The pagan empire had issued edicts against Christianity and had
+suppressed Christian assemblies as tainted with disaffection; the
+Christian emperors enacted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> laws against the rites and worships of
+paganism, and closed temples. It was by the supreme authority of
+Constantine that, for the first time in the religious history of the
+world, uniformity of belief was defined by a creed, and sanctioned by
+the ruler's assent.</p>
+
+<p>Then came, in Western Europe, the time when the empire at Rome was
+rent asunder by the inrush of barbarians; but upon its ruins was
+erected the great Catholic Church of the Papacy, which preserved in
+the ecclesiastical domain the autocratic imperial tradition. The
+primacy of the Roman Church, according to Harnack, is essentially the
+transference to her of Rome's central position in the religions of the
+heathen world; the Church united the western races, disunited
+politically, under the common denomination of Christianity. Yet
+Christianity had not long established itself throughout all the lands,
+in Europe and Asia, which had once been under the Roman sovereignty,
+when the violent irruptions of Islam upset not only the temporal but
+also the spiritual dominion throughout Western Asia, and along the
+southern shores of the Mediterranean. The Eastern empire at
+Constantinople had been weakened by bitter theological dissensions and
+heresies among the Christians; the votaries of the new, simple,
+unswerving faith of Mohammed were ardent and unanimous. In Egypt and
+Syria the Mohammedans were speedily victorious; the Latin Church and
+even the Latin language were swept out of North Africa. In Persia the
+Sassanian dynasty was overthrown, and although there was no immediate
+and total conversion of the people, Mohammedanism gradually superseded
+the ancient Zoroastrian cultus as the religion of the Persian State.
+It was not long before the armies of Islam had triumphed from the
+Atlantic coast to the Jaxartes river in Central Asia; and conversion
+followed, speedily or slowly, as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> direct result of conquest.
+Moreover, the Mohammedans invaded Europe. In the south-west they
+subdued almost all Spain; and in the south-east they destroyed, some
+centuries later, the Greek empire, though not the Greek Church, and
+consolidated a mighty rulership at Constantinople.</p>
+
+<p>With this prolonged conflict between Islam and Christianity along the
+borderlands of Europe and Asia began the era of those religious wars
+that have darkened the history of the Western nations, and have
+perpetuated the inveterate antipathy between Asiatic and European
+races, which the spread of Christianity into both continents had
+softened and might have healed. In the end Christianity has fixed
+itself permanently in Europe, while Islam is strongly established
+throughout half Asia. But the sharp collision between the two faiths,
+the clash of armies bearing the cross and the crescent, generated
+fierce fanaticism on both sides. The Crusades kindled a fiery militant
+and missionary spirit previously unknown to religions, whereby
+religious propagation became the mainspring and declared object of
+conquest and colonisation. Finally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries the great secession from the Roman Church divided the
+nations of Western Europe into hostile camps, and throughout the long
+wars of that period political jealousies and ambitions were inflamed
+by religious animosities. In Eastern Europe the Greek Church fell
+under almost complete subordination to the State.</p>
+
+<p>The history of Europe and Western Asia records, therefore, a close
+connection and community of interests between the States and the
+orthodox faiths; a combination which has had a very potent influence,
+during many centuries, upon the course of civil affairs, upon the
+fortunes, or misfortunes, of nations. Up to the sixteenth century, at
+least, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> was universally held, by Christianity and by Islam, that
+the State was bound to enforce orthodoxy; conversion and the
+suppression or expulsion of heretics were public duties. Unity of
+creed was thought necessary for national unity&mdash;a government could not
+undertake to maintain authority, or preserve the allegiance of its
+subjects, in a realm divided and distracted by sectarian
+controversies. On these principles Christianity and Islam were
+consolidated, in union with the States or in close alliance with them;
+and the geographical boundaries of these two faiths, and of their
+internal divisions respectively, have not materially changed up to the
+present day.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Let me now turn to the history of religion in those countries of
+further Asia, which were never reached by Greek or Roman conquest or
+civilisation, where the ancient forms of worship and conceptions of
+divinity, which existed before Christianity and Islam, still flourish.
+And here I shall only deal with the relations of the State to religion
+in India and China and their dependencies, because these vast and
+populous empires contain the two great religions, Hinduism and
+Buddhism, of purely Asiatic origin and character, which have
+assimilated to a large extent, and in a certain degree elevated, the
+indigenous polytheism, and which still exercise a mighty influence
+over the spiritual and moral condition of many millions.</p>
+
+<p>We know what a tremendous power religion has been in the wars and
+politics of the West. I submit that in Eastern Asia, beyond the pale
+of Islam, the history of religion has been very different. Religious
+wars&mdash;I mean wars caused by the conflict of militant faiths contending
+for superiority&mdash;were, I believe, unknown on any great scale to the
+ancient civilisations. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span>It seems to me that until Islam invaded India
+the great religious movements and changes in that region had seldom or
+never been the consequence of, nor had been materially affected by,
+wars, conquests, or political revolutions.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout Europe and Mohammedan Asia the indigenous deities and their
+temples have disappeared centuries ago; they have been swept away by
+the forces of Church and State combined to exterminate them; they have
+all yielded to the lofty overruling ideal of monotheism. But the tide
+of Mohammedanism reached its limit in India; the people, though
+conquered, were but partly converted, and eastward of India there have
+been no important Mohammedan rulerships. On this side of Asia,
+therefore, two great religions, Buddhism and Brahmanism, have held
+their ground from times far anterior to Christianity; they have
+retained the elastic comprehensive character of polytheism, purified
+and elevated by higher conceptions, developed by the persistent
+competition of diverse ideas and forms among the people, unrestrained
+by attempts of superior organised faiths to obliterate the lower and
+weaker species. In that region political despotism has prevailed
+immemorially; religious despotism, in the sense of the legal
+establishment of one faith or worship to the exclusion of all others,
+of uniformity imposed by coercion, of proselytism by persecution, is
+unknown to history: the governments have been absolute and personal;
+the religions have been popular and democratic. They have never been
+identified so closely with the ruling power as to share its fortunes,
+or to be used for the consolidation of successful conquest. Nor, on
+the other hand, has a ruler ever found it necessary, for the security
+of his throne, to conform to the religion of his subjects, and to
+abjure all others. The political maxim, that the sovereign and his
+subjects<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span> should be of one and the same religion,<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> has never
+prevailed in this part of the world. And although in India, the land
+of their common origin, Buddhism widely displaced and overlaid
+Brahmanism, while it was in its turn, after several centuries,
+overcome and ejected by a Brahmanic revival, yet I believe that
+history records no violent contests or collisions between them; nor do
+we know that the armed force of the State played any decisive part in
+these spiritual revolutions.</p>
+
+<p>I do not maintain that Buddhism has owed nothing to State influence.
+It represents certain doctrines of the ancient Indian theosophy,
+incarnate, as one might say, in the figure of a spiritual Master, the
+Indian prince, Sakya Gautama, who was the type and example of ascetic
+quietism; it embodies the idea of salvation, or emancipation
+attainable by man's own efforts, without aid from priests or
+divinities. Buddhism is the earliest, by many centuries, of the faiths
+that claim descent from a personal founder. It emerges into authentic
+history with the empire of Asoka, who ruled over the greater part of
+India some 250 years before Christ, and its propagation over his realm
+and the countries adjacent is undoubtedly due to the influence,
+example, and authority of that devout monarch. According to Mr.
+Vincent Smith, from whose valuable work on the Early History of India
+I take the description of Asoka's religious policy, the king,
+renouncing after one necessary war all further military conquest, made
+it the business of his life to employ his autocratic power in
+directing the preaching and teaching of the Law of Piety, which he had
+learnt from his Buddhist priesthood. All his high officers were
+commanded to instruct the people in the way of salvation; he sent
+missions to foreign countries; he issued edicts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span> promulgating ethical
+doctrines, and the rules of a devout life; he made pilgrimages to the
+sacred places; and finally he assumed the yellow robe of a Buddhist
+monk. Asoka elevated, so Mr. Smith has said, a sect of Hinduism to the
+rank of a world-religion. Nevertheless, I think it may be affirmed
+that the emperor consistently refrained from the forcible conversion
+of his subjects, and indeed the use of compulsion would have
+apparently been a breach of his own edicts, which insist on the
+principle of toleration, and declare the propagation of the Law of
+Piety to be his sole object. Asoka made no attempt to persecute
+Brahmanism; and it seems clear that the extraordinary success of
+Buddhism in India cannot be attributed to war or to conquest. To
+imperial influence and example much must be ascribed, yet I think
+Buddhism owed much more to its spiritual potency, to its superior
+faculty of transmuting and assimilating, instead of abolishing, the
+elementary instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher
+significance, attracting and stimulating devotion by impressive rites
+and ceremonies, impressing upon the people the dogma of the soul's
+transmigration and its escape from the miseries of sentient existence
+by the operation of merits. And of all great religions it is the least
+political, for the practice of asceticism and quietism, of monastic
+seclusion from the working world, is necessarily adverse to any active
+connection with mundane affairs.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know that the mysterious disappearance of Buddhism from India
+can be accounted for by any great political revolution, like that
+which brought Islam into India. It seems to have vanished before the
+Mohammedans had gained any footing in the country. Meanwhile Buddhism
+is said to have penetrated into the Chinese empire by the first
+century of the Christian era. Before that time the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span> doctrines of
+Confucius and Laotze were the dominant philosophies; rather moral than
+religious, though ancestral worship and the propitiation of spirits
+were not disallowed, and were to a certain extent enjoined. Laotze,
+the apostle of Taoism, appears to have preached a kind of
+Stoicism&mdash;the observance of the order of Nature in searching for the
+right way of salvation, the abhorrence of vicious sensuality&mdash;and the
+cultivation of humility, self-sacrifice, and simplicity of life. He
+condemned altogether the use of force in the sphere of religion or
+morality; though he admitted that it might be necessary for the
+purposes of civil government. The system of Confucius inculcated
+justice, benevolence, self-control, obedience and loyalty to the
+sovereign&mdash;all the civic virtues; it was a moral code without a
+metaphysical background; the popular worships were tolerated,
+reverence for ancestors conduced to edification; the gods were to be
+honoured, though it was well to keep aloof from them; he disliked
+religious fervour, and of things beyond experience he had nothing to
+say.</p>
+
+<p>Buddhism, with its contempt for temporal affairs, treating life as a
+mere burden, and the soul's liberation from existence as the end and
+object of meditative devotion, must have imported a new and disturbing
+element into the utilitarian philosophies of ancient China. For many
+centuries Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are said to have
+contended for the patronage and recognition of the Chinese emperors.
+Buddhism was alternately persecuted and protected, expelled and
+restored by imperial decree. Priesthoods and monastic orders are
+institutions of which governments are naturally jealous; the
+monasteries were destroyed or rebuilt, sacerdotal orders and celibacy
+suppressed or encouraged by imperial decrees, according to the views
+and prepossessions of successive dynasties or emperors. Nevertheless
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span> general policy of Chinese rulers and ministers seems not to have
+varied essentially. Their administrative principle was that religion
+must be prevented from interfering with affairs of State, that abuses
+and superstitious extravagances are not so much offences against
+orthodoxy as matters for the police, and as such must be put down by
+the secular arm.</p>
+
+<p>Upon this policy successive dynasties appear to have acted
+continuously up to the present day in China, where the relations of
+the State to religions are, I think, without parallel elsewhere in the
+modern world. One may find some resemblance to the attitude of the
+Roman emperors towards rites and worships among the population, in the
+Chinese emperor's reverent observance and regulation of the rites and
+ceremonies performed by him as the religious chief and representative
+before Heaven of the great national interests. The deification of
+deceased emperors is a solemn rite ordained by proclamation. As the
+<i>Ius sacrum</i>, the body of rights and duties in the matter of religion,
+was regarded in Rome as a department of the <i>Ius publicum</i>, belonging
+to the fundamental constitution of the State, so in China the ritual
+code was incorporated into the statute books, and promulgated with
+imperial sanction. Now we know that in Rome the established ritual was
+legally prescribed, though otherwise strange deities and their
+worships were admitted indiscriminately. But the Chinese Government
+goes much further. It appears to regard all novel superstitions, and
+especially foreign worships, as the hotbed of sedition and disloyalty.
+Unlicensed deities and sects are put down by the police; magicians and
+sorcerers are arrested; and the peculiar Chinese practice of
+canonising deceased officials and paying sacrificial honours to local
+celebrities after death is strictly reserved by the Board of
+Ceremonies for imperial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span> consideration and approval. The Censor, to
+whom any proposal of this kind must be entrusted, is admonished that
+he must satisfy himself by inquiry of its validity. An official who
+performs sacred rites in honour of a spirit or holy personage not
+recognised by the Ritual Code, was liable, under laws that may be
+still in force, to corporal punishment; and the adoration by private
+families of spirits whose worship is reserved for public ceremonial
+was a heinous offence. No such rigorous control over the
+multiplication of rites and deities has been instituted elsewhere. On
+the other hand, while in other countries the State has recognised no
+more than one established religion, the Chinese Government formally
+recognises three denominations. Buddhism has been sanctioned by
+various edicts and endowments, yet the State divinities belong to the
+Taoist pantheon, and their worship is regulated by public ordinances;
+while Confucianism represents official orthodoxy, and its precepts
+embody the latitudinarian spirit of the intellectual classes. We know
+that the Chinese people make use, so to speak, of all three religions
+indiscriminately, according to their individual whims, needs, or
+experience of results. So also a politic administration countenances
+these divisions and probably finds some interest in maintaining them.
+The morality of the people requires some religious sanction; and it is
+this element with which the State professes its chief concern. We are
+told on good authority that one of the functions of high officials is
+to deliver public lectures freely criticising and discouraging
+indolent monasticism and idolatry from the standpoint of rational
+ethics, as follies that are reluctantly tolerated. Yet the Government
+has never been able to keep down the fanatics, mystics, and heretical
+sects that are incessantly springing up in China, as elsewhere in
+Asia; though they are treated as pestilent rebels<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span> and law-breakers,
+to be exterminated by massacre and cruel punishments; and bloody
+repression of this kind has been the cause of serious insurrections.
+It is to be observed that all religious persecution is by the direct
+action of the State, <i>not</i> instigated or insisted upon by a powerful
+orthodox priesthood. But a despotic administration which undertakes to
+control and circumscribe all forms and manifestations of superstition
+in a vast polytheistic multitude of its subjects, is inevitably driven
+to repressive measures of the utmost severity. Neither Christianity
+nor Islam attempted to regulate polytheism, their mission was to
+exterminate it, and they succeeded mainly because in those countries
+the State was acting with the support and under the uncompromising
+pressure of a dominant church or faith.</p>
+
+<p>Some writers have noticed a certain degree of resemblance between the
+policy of the Roman empire and that of the Chinese empire toward
+religion. We may read in Gibbon that the Roman magistrates regarded
+the various modes of worship as equally useful, that sages and heroes
+were exalted to immortality and entitled to reverence and adoration,
+and that philosophic officials, viewing with indulgence the
+superstitions of the multitude, diligently practised the ceremonies of
+their fathers. So far, indeed, his description of the attitude of the
+State toward polytheism may be applicable to China; but although the
+Roman and Chinese emperors both assumed the rank of divinity, and were
+supreme in the department of worships, the Roman administration never
+attempted to regulate and restrain polytheism at large on the Chinese
+system.</p>
+
+<p>The religion of the Gentiles, said Hobbes, is a part of their policy;
+and it may be said that this is still the policy of Oriental
+monarchies, who admit no separation between the secular and the
+ecclesiastic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span> jurisdiction. They would agree with Hobbes that temporal
+and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to
+make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign. But while in
+Mohammedan Asia the State upholds orthodox uniformity, in China and
+Japan the mainspring of all such administrative action is political
+expediency. It may be suggested that in the mind of these far-Eastern
+people religion has never been conceived as something quite apart from
+human experience and the affairs of the visible world; for Buddhism,
+with its metaphysical doctrines, is a foreign importation, corrupted
+and materialised in China and Japan. And we may observe that from
+among the Mongolian races, which have produced mighty conquerors and
+founded famous dynasties from Constantinople to Pekin, no mighty
+prophet, no profound spiritual teacher, has arisen. Yet in China, as
+throughout all the countries of the Asiatic mainland, an enthusiast
+may still gather together ardent proselytes, and fresh revelations may
+create among the people unrest that may ferment and become heated up
+to the degree of fanaticism, and explode against attempts made to
+suppress it. The Taeping insurrection, which devastated cities and
+provinces in China, and nearly overthrew the Manchu dynasty, is a
+striking example of the volcanic fires that underlie the surface of
+Asiatic societies. It was quenched in torrents of blood after lasting
+some ten years. And very recently there has been a determined revolt
+of the Lamas in Eastern Tibet, where the provincial administration is,
+as we know, sacerdotal. The imperial troops are said to be crushing it
+with unrelenting severity. These are the perilous experiences of a
+philosophic Government that assumes charge and control over the
+religions of some three hundred millions of Asiatics.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span></p><p>I can only make a hasty reference to Japan. In that country the
+relations of the State to religions appear to have followed the
+Chinese model. Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, are impartially
+recognised. The emperor presides over official worship as high priest
+of his people; the liturgical ordinances are issued by imperial
+rescripts not differing in form from other public edicts. The dominant
+article of faith is the divinity of Japan and its emperor; and Shinto,
+the worship of the gods of nature, is understood to be patronised
+chiefly with the motive of preserving the national traditions. But in
+Japan the advance of modern science and enlightened scepticism may
+have diminished the importance of the religious department. Shinto,
+says a recent writer, still embodies the religion of the people; yet
+in 1877 a decree was issued declaring it to be no more than a
+convenient system of State ceremonial.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> And in 1889 an article of
+the constitution granted freedom of belief and worship to all Japanese
+subjects, without prejudice to peace, order, and loyalty.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In India the religious situation is quite different. I think it is
+without parallel elsewhere in the world. Here we are at the
+fountain-head of metaphysical theology, of ideas that have flowed
+eastward and westward across Asia. And here, also, we find every
+species of primitive polytheism, unlimited and multitudinous; we can
+survey a confused medley of divinities, of rites and worships
+incessantly varied by popular whim and fancy, by accidents, and by the
+pressure of changing circumstances. Hinduism permits any doctrine to
+be taught, any sort of theory to be held regarding the divine
+attributes and manifestations, the forces of nature, or the
+mysterious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span> functions of mind or body. Its tenets have never been
+circumscribed by a creed; its free play has never been checked or
+regulated by State authority.</p>
+
+<p>Now, at first sight, this is not unlike the popular polytheism of the
+ancient world, before the triumph of Christianity. There are passages
+in St. Augustine's <i>Civitas Dei</i>, describing the worship of the
+unconverted pagans among whom he lived, that might have been written
+yesterday by a Christian bishop in India. And we might ask why all
+this polytheism was not swept out from among such a highly
+intellectual people as the Indians, with their restless pursuit of
+divine knowledge, by some superior faith, by some central idea.
+Undoubtedly the material and moral conditions, and the course of
+events which combine to stamp a particular form of religion upon any
+great people, are complex and manifold; but into this inquiry I cannot
+go. I can only point out that the institution of caste has riveted
+down Hindu society into innumerable divisions upon a general religious
+basis, and that the sacred books separated the Hindu theologians into
+different schools, preventing uniformity of worship or of creed. And
+it is to be observed that these books are not historical; they give no
+account of the rise and spread of a faith. The Hindu theologian would
+say, in the words of an early Christian father, that the objects of
+divine knowledge are not historical, that they can only be apprehended
+intellectually, that within experience there is no reality. And the
+fact that Brahmanism has no authentic inspired narrative, that it is
+the only great religion not concentrated round the life and teachings
+of a person, may be one reason why it has remained diffuse and
+incoherent. All ways of salvation are still open to the Hindus; the
+canon of their scripture has never been authoritatively closed. New
+doctrines, new sects, fresh theological controversies, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span>are
+incessantly modifying and superseding the old scholastic
+interpretations of the mysteries, for Hindus, like Asiatics
+everywhere, are still in that condition of mind when a fresh spiritual
+message is eagerly received. Vishnu and Siva are the realistic
+abstractions of the understanding from objects of sense, from
+observation of the destructive and reproductive operations of nature;
+they represent among educated men separate systems of worship which,
+again, are parted into different schools or theories regarding the
+proper ways and methods of attaining to spiritual emancipation. Yet
+the higher philosophy and the lower polytheism are not mutually
+antagonistic; on the contrary, they support each other; for Brahmanism
+accepts and allies itself with the popular forms of idolatry, treating
+them as outward visible signs of an inner truth, as indications of
+all-pervading pantheism. The peasant and the philosopher reverence the
+same deity, perform the same rite; they do not mean the same thing,
+but they do not quarrel on this account. Nevertheless, it is certainly
+remarkable that this inorganic medley of ideas and worships should
+have resisted for so many ages the invasion and influence of the
+coherent faiths that have won ascendancy, complete or dominant, on
+either side of India, the west and the east; it has thrown off
+Buddhism, it has withstood the triumphant advance of Islam, it has as
+yet been little affected by Christianity. Probably the political
+history of India may account in some degree for its religious
+disorganisation. I may propound the theory that no religion has
+obtained supremacy, or at any rate definite establishment, in any
+great country except with the active co-operation, by force or favour,
+of the rulers, whether by conquest, as in Western Asia, or by
+patronage and protection, as in China. The direct influence and
+recognition of the State has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span> an indispensable instrument of
+religious consolidation. But until the nineteenth century the whole of
+India, from the mountains to the sea, had never been united under one
+stable government; the country was for ages parcelled out into
+separate principalities, incessantly contending for territory. And
+even the Moghul empire, which was always at war upon its frontiers,
+never acquired universal dominion. The Moghul emperors, except
+Aurungzeb, were by no means bigoted Mohammedans; and their obvious
+interest was to abstain from meddling with Hinduism. Yet the irruption
+of Islam into India seems rather to have stimulated religious activity
+among the Hindus, for during the Mohammedan period various spiritual
+teachers arose, new sects were formed, and theological controversies
+divided the intellectual classes. To these movements the Mohammedan
+governments must have been for a long time indifferent; and among the
+new sects the principle of mutual toleration was universal. Towards
+the close of the Moghul empire, however, Hinduism, provoked by the
+bigotry of the Emperor Aurungzeb, became a serious element of
+political disturbance. Attempts to suppress forcibly the followers of
+Nanak Guru, and the execution of one spiritual leader of the Sikhs,
+turned the Sikhs from inoffensive quietists into fanatical warriors;
+and by the eighteenth century they were in open revolt against the
+empire. They were, I think, the most formidable embodiment of militant
+Hinduism known to Indian history. By that time, also, the Marathas in
+South-West India were declaring themselves the champions of the Hindu
+religion against the Mohammedan oppression; and to the Sikhs and
+Marathas the dislocation of the Moghul empire may be very largely
+attributed. We have here a notable example of the dynamic power upon
+politics of revolts that are generated by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span> religious fermentation, and
+a proof of the strength that can be exerted by a pacific inorganic
+polytheism in self-defence, when ambitious rebels proclaim themselves
+defenders of a faith. The Marathas and the Sikhs founded the only
+rulerships whose armies could give the English serious trouble in the
+field during the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, however, when we survey the history of India, and
+compare it with that of Western Asia, we may say that although the
+Hindus are perhaps the most intensely religious people in the world,
+Hinduism has never been, like Christianity, Islam, and to some extent
+Buddhism, a religion established by the State. Nor has it suffered
+much from the State's power. It seems strange, indeed, that
+Mohammedanism, a compact proselytising faith, closely united with the
+civil rulership, should have so slightly modified, during seven
+centuries of dominion, this infinitely divided polytheism. Of course,
+Mohammedanism made many converts, and annexed a considerable number of
+the population&mdash;yet the effect was rather to stiffen than to loosen
+the bonds that held the mass of the people to their traditional
+divinities, and to the institution of castes. Moreover the antagonism
+of the two religions, the popular and the dynastic, was a perpetual
+element of weakness in a Mohammedan empire. In India polytheism could
+not be crushed, as in Western Asia, by Islam; neither could it be
+controlled and administered, as in Eastern Asia; yet the Moghul
+emperors managed to keep on good terms with it, so long as they
+adhered to a policy of toleration.</p>
+
+<p>To the Mohammedan empire has succeeded another foreign dominion, which
+practises not merely tolerance but complete religious neutrality.
+Looking back over the period of a hundred years, from 1757 to 1857,
+during which the British dominion was gradually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span> extended over India,
+we find that the British empire, like the Roman, met with little or no
+opposition from religion. Hindus and Mohammedans, divided against each
+other, were equally willing to form alliances with, and to fight on
+the side of, the foreigner who kept religion entirely outside
+politics. And the British Government, when established, has so
+carefully avoided offence to caste or creed that on one great occasion
+only, the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, have the smouldering fires of
+credulous fanaticism broken out against our rule.</p>
+
+<p>I believe the British-Indian position of complete religious neutrality
+to be unique among Asiatic governments, and almost unknown in Europe.
+The Anglo-Indian sovereignty does not identify itself with the
+interests of a single faith, as in Mohammedan kingdoms, nor does it
+recognise a definite ecclesiastical jurisdiction in things spiritual,
+as in Catholic Europe. Still less has our Government adopted the
+Chinese system of placing the State at the head of different rituals
+for the purpose of controlling them all, and proclaiming an ethical
+code to be binding on all denominations. The British ruler, while
+avowedly Christian, ignores all religions administratively,
+interfering only to suppress barbarous or indecent practices when the
+advance of civilisation has rendered them obsolete. Public
+instruction, so far as the State is concerned, is entirely secular;
+the universal law is the only authorised guardian of morals; to
+expound moral duties officially, as things apart from religion, has
+been found possible in China, but not in India. But the Chinese
+Government can issue edicts enjoining public morality and rationalism
+because the State takes part in the authorised worship of the people,
+and the emperor assumes pontifical office. The British Government in
+India, on the other hand, disowns official connection <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span>with any
+religion. It places all its measures on the sole ground of reasonable
+expediency, of efficient administration; it seeks to promote industry
+and commerce, and material civilisation generally; it carefully avoids
+giving any religious colour whatever to its public acts; and the
+result is that our Government, notwithstanding its sincere professions
+of absolute neutrality, is sometimes suspected of regarding all
+religion with cynical indifference, possibly even with hostility.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, religious neutrality, though it is right, just, and the only
+policy which the English in India could possibly adopt, has certain
+political disadvantages. The two most potent influences which still
+unite and divide the Asiatic peoples, are race and religion; a
+Government which represents both these forces, as, for instance, in
+Afghanistan, has deep roots in a country. A dynasty that can rely on
+the support of an organised religion, and stands forth as the champion
+of a dominant faith, has a powerful political power at its command.
+The Turkish empire, weak, ill-governed, repeatedly threatened with
+dismemberment, embarrassed internally by the conflict of races, has
+been preserved for the last hundred years by its incorporation with
+the faith of Islam, by the Sultan's claim to the Caliphate. To attack
+it is to assault a religious citadel; it is the bulwark on the west of
+Mohammedan Asia, as Afghanistan is the frontier fortress of Islam on
+the east. A leading Turkish politician has very recently said: 'It is
+in Islam pure and simple that lies the strength of Turkey as an
+independent State; and if the Sultan's position as religious chief
+were encroached upon by constitutional reforms, the whole Ottoman
+empire would be in danger.' We have to remember that for ages
+religious enthusiasm has been, and still is in some parts of Asia, one
+of the strongest incentives to military ardour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span> and fidelity to a
+standard on the battlefield. Identity of creed has often proved more
+effective, in war, than territorial patriotism; it has surmounted
+racial and tribal antipathies; while religious antagonism is still in
+many countries a standing impediment to political consolidation.</p>
+
+<p>When, therefore, we survey the history of religions, though this
+sketch is necessarily very imperfect and inadequate, we find
+Mohammedanism still identified with the fortunes of Mohammedan rulers;
+and we know that for many centuries the relations of Christianity to
+European States have been very close. In Europe the ardent
+perseverance and intellectual superiority of great theologians, of
+ecclesiastical statesmen supported by autocratic rulers, have hardened
+and beat out into form doctrines and liturgies that it was at one time
+criminal to disregard or deny, dogmatic articles of faith that were
+enforced by law. By these processes orthodoxy emerged compact, sharply
+defined, irresistible, out of the strife and confusion of heresies;
+the early record of the churches has pages spotted with tears and
+stained with blood. But at the present time European States seem
+inclined to dissolve their alliance with the churches, and to arrange
+a kind of judicial separation between the altar and the throne, though
+in very few cases has a divorce been made absolute. No State, in
+civilised countries, now assists in the propagation of doctrine; and
+ecclesiastical influence is of very little service to a Government.
+The civil law, indeed, makes continual encroachments on the
+ecclesiastical domain, questions its authority, and usurps its
+jurisdiction. Modern erudition criticises the historical authenticity
+of the scriptures, philosophy tries to undermine the foundations of
+belief; the governments find small interest in propping up edifices
+that are shaken by internal controversies. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span> Mohammedan Asia, on the
+other hand, the connection between the orthodox faith and the States
+is firmly maintained, for the solidarity is so close that disruptions
+would be dangerous, and a Mohammedan rulership over a majority of
+unbelievers would still be perilously unstable.</p>
+
+<p>I have thus endeavoured to show that the historical relations of
+Buddhism and Hinduism to the State have been in the past, and are
+still in the present time, very different from the situation in the
+West. There has always existed, I submit, one essential distinction of
+principle. Religious propagation, forcible conversion, aided and
+abetted by the executive power of the State, and by laws against
+heresy or dissent, have been defended in the West by the doctors of
+Islam, and formerly by Christian theologians, by the axiom that all
+means are justifiable for extirpating false teachers who draw souls to
+perdition. The right and duty of the civil magistrate to maintain
+truth, in regard to which Bossuet declared all Christians to be
+unanimous, and which is still affirmed in the Litany of our Church, is
+a principle from which no Government, three centuries ago, dissented
+in theory, though in practice it needed cautious handling. I do not
+think that this principle ever found its way into Hinduism or
+Buddhism; I doubt, that is to say, whether the civil government was at
+any time called in to undertake or assist propagation of those
+religions as part of its duty. Nor do I know that the States of
+Eastern Asia, beyond the pale of Islam, claim or exercise the right of
+insisting on conformance to particular doctrines, because they are
+true. The erratic manifestations of the religious spirit throughout
+Asia, constantly breaking out in various forms and figures, in
+thaumaturgy, mystical inspiration, in orgies and secret societies,
+have always disquieted these Asiatic States, yet, so far as I can
+ascertain, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span> employment of force to repress them has always been
+justified on administrative or political grounds, as distinguishable
+from theological motives pure and simple. Sceptics and agnostics have
+been often marked out for persecution in the West, but I do not think
+that they have been molested in India, China, or Japan, where they
+abound, because they seldom meddle with politics.<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> It may perhaps
+be admitted, however, that a Government which undertakes to regulate
+impartially all rites and worship among its subjects is at a
+disadvantage by comparison with a Government that acts as the
+representative of a great church or an exclusive faith. It bears the
+sole undivided responsibility for measures of repression; it cannot
+allege divine command or even the obligation of punishing impiety for
+the public good.</p>
+
+<p>To conclude. In Asiatic States the superintendence of religious
+affairs is an integral attribute of the sovereignty, which no
+Government, except the English in India, has yet ventured to
+relinquish; and even in India this is not done without some risk, for
+religion and politics are still intermingled throughout the world;
+they act and react upon each other everywhere. They are still far from
+being disentangled in our own country, where the theory that a
+Government in its collective character must profess and even propagate
+some religion has not been very long obsolete. It was maintained
+seventy years ago by a great statesman who was already rising into
+prominence, by Mr. Gladstone. The text of Mr. Gladstone's argument, in
+his book on the relations of the State with the Church, was Hooker's
+saying, that the religious duty of kings is the weightiest part of
+their sovereignty; while Macaulay, in criticising this position,
+insisted that the main, if not the only, duty of a Government, to
+which all other objects<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span> must be subordinate, was the protection of
+persons and property. These two eminent politicians were, in fact, the
+champions of the ancient and the modern ideas of sovereignty; for the
+theory that a State is bound to propagate the religion that it
+professes was for many centuries the accepted theory of all Christian
+rulerships, though I think it now survives only in Mohammedan
+kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>As the influence of religion in the sphere of politics declines, the
+State becomes naturally less concerned with the superintendence of
+religion; and the tendency of constitutional Governments seems to be
+towards abandoning it. The States that have completely dissolved
+connection with ecclesiastical institutions are the two great
+republics, the United States of America and France. We can discern at
+this moment a movement towards constitutional reforms in Mohammedan
+Asia, in Turkey, and Persia, and if they succeed it will be most
+interesting to observe the effect which liberal reforms will produce
+upon the relation of Mohammedan Governments with the dominant faith,
+and on which side the religious teachers will be arrayed. It is
+certain, at any rate, that for a long time to come religion will
+continue to be a potent factor in Asiatic politics; and I may add that
+the reconciliation of civil with religious liberty is one of the most
+arduous of the many problems to be solved by the promoters of national
+unity.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> Delivered as President of the Congress for the History
+of Religions, September 1908.&mdash;<i>Fortnightly Review</i>, November 1908.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> 'Cujus regio ejus religio.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>The Development of Religion in Japan</i>, G. W. Knox,
+1907.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> 'Atheism did never disturb States' (Bacon).</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+Acton, Lord:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On causes of Franco-German War, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_362">362</a> (footnote), <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Advice to writers of history, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Also <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Addison's <i>Blenheim</i> criticised in <i>Esmond</i>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Adventure, see Novels of.<br />
+<br />
+Adventures of Moreau de Jonn&eacute;s, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Popularity of, in short stories, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Afghan:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Blood feuds, border forays, etc., <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">War, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Songs, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Frontier and frontier policy, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Character, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Afghanistan:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Barrier to Russian advance in Asia, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">British policy towards, compared with Russian policy in Caucasus, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is acquiring a territorial connotation, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Eastern bulwark of Islam, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Akhlongo, siege of, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Althorp, Lord, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Armenians, their position and misfortunes, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Arnold, Matthew:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Morley's article on his letters, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His letters reviewed, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Praised and criticised by Swinburne, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Also <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Asia and foreign dynasties, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Asoka, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Austen, Jane, as novelist of manners, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Austria-Hungary, intermixture of races and religions in, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Balfour, Arthur James, <i>Foundations of Belief</i>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Balkans, policy of the Turks in the, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Balzac, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bariatinsky, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Beauchamp and the Utilitarian rejection of theology, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Behn, Mrs. Aphra, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Benedetti, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, etc.<br />
+<br />
+Bentham, see 'Utilitarians.'<br />
+<br />
+Beowulf, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bismarck, see 'L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral,' <i>passim</i>.<br />
+<br />
+Blavatsky, Madame, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Blood feuds in Afghanistan, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On the Scotch borders, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Bonaparte, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bossuet, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Braddock, General, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Braddon, Miss, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bret Harte, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bright, John: 'Force no remedy,' <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Broad Church, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bront&euml;, Charlotte, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Broughton, Miss, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Brown: definition of 'Intuition,' <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Browning, Robert, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swinburne's homage to, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Buckle, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Buddhism, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>, and see 'The State in Relation to Religion.'<br />
+<br />
+Bulwer-Lytton, Sir E., <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Burial of Sir John Moore</i>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Burke's letters, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span>Burney, Miss, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Butler's <i>Analogy</i>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>Byron, Works of Lord</b>, <a href="#Page_177">177-209</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Additions to his published letters, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Their bearing on his reputation, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Causes affecting his popularity, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comparison with Chateaubriand, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His success in oriental romance, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and in heroic verse, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Defects, tendency to declamation, etc., <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Carelessness, contrast between his theory and practice, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comparison with Scott, <i>The Giaour</i>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Metre of his romantic poems, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His dramas, failure in blank verse, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His lyrical power, examples, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Beppo</i> and <i>Don Juan</i>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Founder of modern realism in poetry, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Vision of Judgment</i>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conclusions: value of his influence, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Byron, Lord, as realist, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Also 13 and <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, and see under 'Letter-writing.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Campbell, Thomas:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Carlyle's description, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As heroic poet, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Carlyle, Thomas, see 'Letter-writing.'<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Denounces Utilitarianism, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swinburne's tribute, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His descriptive method, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">See also <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Castlereagh, Lord, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Caucasus, see 'Frontiers,' <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, etc.<br />
+<br />
+Cavagnari, in Afghan ballads, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cervantes, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chanson de Roland, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Charles Edward, Prince, authentic incident in <i>Esmond</i>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chateaubriand, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185-187</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chaucer, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Chevy Chase</i>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chillianwalla in fiction, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br />
+<br />
+China, religious systems, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Religious polity, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Christian missions in India, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Christianity and Islam, as militant religions, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Compared with Buddhism, etc., <a href="#Page_427">427</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Form alliances with the State, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Church and State:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Acton on, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Separation a modern idea, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Importance to the Church of recognition, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Diminishing closeness of the connection, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gladstone and Macaulay on, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Clough, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Coleridge, S. T., see 'Letter-writing.'<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Connection of speculative ideas and political movements, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Also mentioned, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Colvin, Sidney, quoted, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Comte and J. S. Mill, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cooper, Fenimore, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cowper, as letter-writer, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Crabbe, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Crimean War, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Cujus regio ejus religio</i>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Dante, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dargo, in the Caucasus, attack on, <a href="#Page_307">307-308</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Darmesteter, Afghan ballads, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Davidson on rhyme in poetry, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Defoe, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br />
+<br />
+De la Gorce:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On Napoleon III., <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On the French ministry, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+De Musset, Alfred, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
+<br />
+De Sta&euml;l, Madame, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.<br />
+<br />
+De Tocqueville, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.<br />
+<br />
+De Vog&uuml;&eacute;, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dickens, Charles, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Direct narration in fiction, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Disraeli, Benjamin, as novelist, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Drama, rival of the novel, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Du Barail, General:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On Napoleon III., <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">On Ollivier, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Due de Gramont, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, etc.<br />
+<br />
+Duvernois' interpellation in French Chamber, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Edgeworth, Miss, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Eliot, George:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Romola</i>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Adam Bede</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Empire, defined, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ems, Benedetti and King of Prussia at, <a href="#Page_343">343-350</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Encyclop&eacute;distes, ancestors of the Utilitarians, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.<br />
+<br />
+European dominion in Asia, importance of, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Farrar, Archdeacon, quoted, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ferozeshah, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ferrero on Julius C&aelig;sar, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fiction and fact in the novel and in history, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fiction, doubt as to its value as evidence of manners, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">See also <a href="#Page_91">91</a> and <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Fielding, Henry, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Tom Jones</i>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Influence on Thackeray, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Fitzgerald, Edward, see 'Letter-writing,' <a href="#Page_66">66-70</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Franco-German War, see 'L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral.'<br />
+<br />
+French Revolution, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>Frontiers, Ancient and Modern</b>, <a href="#Page_291">291-327</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Demarcation of frontiers a modern development, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Interest of the subject to England, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mr. Baddeley's work on the Caucasus, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Description of the Caucasus, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The Russian advance, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Yermoloff and his policy, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Its failure for the time, and his recall, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rise of Muridism, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Shamil succeeds Kazi Mullah, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Capture of Akhlongo, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Repulse of Vorontzoff at Dargo; <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">and at Ghergebil, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Shamil ransoms his son, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Surrenders at Gooneeb (1857), <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Effect on Asiatic politics, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Russian policy compared with British in Afghanistan, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dr. Pennell on the Afghans, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ghazis, blood feuds, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dr. Pennell on missions, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Frontiers, not strictly demarcated in the East, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Froude, J. A., quoted, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His methods as a historian, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Gambetta votes for war with Prussia, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Garibaldi, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gaskell, Mrs., <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Gesta Romanorum</i>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Gil Blas</i>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gladstone, W. E., <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Godwin, William:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As recipient of good letters, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His tragedy, <i>Antonio</i>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Carlyle's description, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A peaceful anarchist, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Goethe, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gordon, Lindsay, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Grand Cyrus</i>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gray, Thomas, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Greek Church, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comparison with Rome, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hemans, Mrs., <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Herodotus, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>Heroic Poetry</b>, <a href="#Page_155">155-176</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Definition, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor Ker's <i>Epic and Romance</i>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Early bards and chroniclers, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Their work based on fact, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The hero and the heroic poet, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Icelandic Sagas, and Afghan songs, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Homer, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Position of women in Homeric poetry, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The heroic style in the Old Testament, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Romantic poetry of England, <i>Morte d Arthur</i> and ballads, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sir Walter Scott, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Limitations of heroic poetry, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Its decline, unfavourable influences of both the romantic and the realistic spirit, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Hindu, meaning of, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span>Hinduism, not a missionary religion, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Never established by the State, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Historical romance brought to perfection in nineteenth century, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>History, Remarks on the Reading of</b>, <a href="#Page_377">377-398</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Almost all real history written in some European language, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">History, formerly an art, becoming a science, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle as historical artists, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The scientific method, possible drawbacks, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Limitation and subdivision necessary, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Short abstracts, their use and abuse, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Motives for studying history, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Our knowledge imperfect, and our predictions fallible, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Acton's advice and principles, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Hobbes, Thomas, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Followed by Bentham, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Hogarth, William, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hookham Frere, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hugo, Victor, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swinburne's admiration, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Hume, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Influence on Bentham, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">on Mill, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Humphry Ward, Mrs., example of her descriptive method, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hutcheson, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Iliad, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Impressionist school in fiction, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Inchbald, Mrs., quoted, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.<br />
+<br />
+India, Mill's history of, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Importance of frontier questions, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Indian Empire:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Resemblance to Roman, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comparison with Russian, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">See also 'Race and Religion,' and 'The State in Relation to Religion.'</span><br />
+<br />
+Irish characters, Thackeray's partiality for, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Islam:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Its militant policy, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spread of, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In India, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Importance to Turkey of Sultan's position in, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+James, G. P. R., <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jeffrey, Thomas, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jehu's story, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>John Inglesant</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jones, Paul, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jowett, Benjamin, quoted, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Kaffir, origin of the name, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Keats, John, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">See also 'Letter-writing.'</span><br />
+<br />
+Kemble, Fanny, FitzGerald's letters to, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ker's <i>Epic and Romance</i>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Kidnapped</i>, direct narration in, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Kingsley, Charles, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Klugenau, Russian General, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Lamartine, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Lansdowne, Lord, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Laotze, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Le B&oelig;uf, Marshal, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lecky, W. E. H., on American Loyalists, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comparison with Walpole, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral</b>, <a href="#Page_328">328-367</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Constitutional reforms and character of Napoleon III., <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ollivier's difficult position as chief minister, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Crown of Spain accepted by Leopold, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Effect in France, warning to Prussia, <a href="#Page_333">333-336</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Benedetti's interview at Ems, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Leopold's compulsory renunciation, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Incautious action of Ollivier, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and of Gramont, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Assurances demanded from Prussia, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ollivier meditates resignation, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Benedetti at Ems, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">'Le Soufflet de Bismarck,' <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Declaration of war, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thiers' opposition, Ollivier's defence, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">French enthusiasm, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Reception of declaration by Bismarck; <a href="#Page_360">360</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and by the Reichstag, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bismarck's real responsibility, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ollivier's acts and motives examined, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>Letter-writing (English) in the Nineteenth Century</b>, <a href="#Page_34">34-75</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conditions of fine letter-writing, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Affinities with the diary and the essay, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Poets as good letter-writers, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Value of letters for biographical and other purposes, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Earlier writers&mdash;Keats, Scott, Southey, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Lamb, <a href="#Page_39">39-47</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Morley's canon, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Later writers and their difficulties, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dean Stanley's letters, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Matthew Arnold's, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thomas Carlyle's, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Edward Fitzgerald's, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">R. L. Stevenson's, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Lever, Charles, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Liverpool, Lord, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lucretius, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Macaulay, T. B., <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On Byron, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His rejoinder to James Mill, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Influence on Walpole, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ranke's criticism, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Machiavelli:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On judging by results, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On standing neutral in war, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Mackintosh, as typical Whig, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Maine, Sir H., on 'Sovereignty,' <a href="#Page_412">412</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Malthus, T., <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Manning, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Marbot, success of his Memoirs, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Marcella</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Marlborough, Thackeray's description of, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Marryat, Captain, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Master of Ballantrae</i>, direct narration in, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Maurice, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mayor's <i>English Metres</i>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mazzini, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Memoirs and fiction, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Memorials of Coleorton</i>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Meredith, George, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mill, see 'Utilitarians.'<br />
+<br />
+Milton, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Mongolians have not produced spiritual teachers, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Moore, Thomas, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His sham Orientalism, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His dealings with Byron's letters, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mullahs, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Muridism, see 'Frontiers,' <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Murray, John, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Murray, Professor, and solar myths, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Myths, historical value of, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Napoleon:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His story adapted to myth-making, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Transformer of democracy into Imperialism, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Napol&eacute;on Intime</i>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Napoleon III; and see 'L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral.'<br />
+<br />
+Nationalities, formation of, in Europe, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Naturalism or realism defined, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Newman, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swinburne's tribute to, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>Novels of Adventure and Manners</b>, <a href="#Page_1">1-33</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mr. Raleigh on origins of fiction, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Metrical tales, heroic romance, the eighteenth-century school of novelists, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Novel of adventure derived from the fabulous romance, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Scott's influence, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Later tendencies, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Approximation of the historian and novelist, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">The novelist rivalled by the writer of Memoirs, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Adventures of de Jonn&eacute;s reviewed, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Causes limiting the sphere of the Novel of Adventure, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Novel of Manners, its pedigree: Fielding, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Influence of women writers: Miss Austen, etc., <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Growth of Realism, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Description of nature, its uses, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Danger of excessive Realism, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Short stories: the Impressionist School, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>Novelist, The Anglo-Indian</b>, <a href="#Page_121">121-154</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Causes affecting output of good fiction in India, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Tara</i>, a successful historical novel, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Pandurang Hari</i>, valuable as picture of pre-English times, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Oakfield</i>, good battle pictures, absence of native characters noted, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Wetherbys</i>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>A True Reformer</i>, and <i>The Dilemma</i>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Mr. Isaacs</i>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Helen Treveryan</i>, assigned a high place as a historical novel, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>On the Face of the Waters</i>, Indian characters freely introduced, minute adherence to fact, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Bijli the Dancer</i>, a purely native story, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Chronicles of Dustypore</i>, a picture of Anglo-Indian life, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Bond of Blood</i>, a dramatic presentation of incidents of Indian life, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Naulakha</i>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Transgression</i>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conclusions: uniformity of Anglo-Indian society, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conditions favour the novel of action, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Absence of the psychological vein, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O'Connell, Daniel, described by Carlyle, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Odyssey</i> quoted, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Old Testament and heroic narration, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Oliphant, Mrs., <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ollivier, see 'L'Empire Lib&eacute;ral.'<br />
+<br />
+Olozaga, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ottoman Empire, its complexities of Race and Religion, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ouida, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Paley, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Parr, Dr., <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Patmore, Coventry, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pearson, Hugh, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Peel, Sir Robert, quoted, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Peninsular War and heroic poetry, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Peter the Great's Caspian expedition, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Phingari, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Polytheism, formerly universal, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gives way to Christianity, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Pope, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Byron's praise, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Porter, Jane, and historical romance, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Rabelais, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>Race and Religion</b>, <a href="#Page_399">399-426</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ancient groupings of peoples, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Effect of (1) the Roman Empire, (2) Christianity and Islam, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Consolidation of States in the West, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Importance of 'Race' overlooked by Utilitarians, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gravity of the question in Austria, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Its complexity in Turkey, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Maintenance of racial and religious differences by Asiatic Empires, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Close alliance of Greek Church with the State, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Classification of the people by religion in Ottoman Empire, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Importance of 'Race and Religion' in Asia, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Religious distinctions predominant in Western Asia, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Causes of the Armenian massacres, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Racial distinctions predominant in Afghanistan, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">India, connotation of 'Hindu,' <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Complexities of race and creed, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Policy of religious neutrality, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Peculiarity of religious situation in China, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Russian Empire, conclusions, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Race distinctions, increasing influence of, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Radcliffe, Mrs., the novelist, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Raleigh, Sir Walter, on <i>The English Novel</i>, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ramsay, Sir William, on writing of history, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rawlinson on the effect of troubles in the Caucasus on Russian policy, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Realism defined, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Its dangers, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, (cf. <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>).</span><br />
+<br />
+Reform Bill, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>Religions, The State in its Relation to Eastern and Western</b>, <a href="#Page_427">427-453</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism; Western, Christianity and Islam, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Growth of State domination under Roman Empire, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Domination of the Church when Christianity established, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conflict with Islam, its effects, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Close alliance of both faiths with the State, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Absence of religious wars and of persecution in ancient India, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The situation in China, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and in Japan, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">India, political independence of Hinduism, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Toleration by Mohammedan rulers, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hinduism never an established religion, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">British policy of neutrality, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Some political disadvantages, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conclusions: difference in relations of Eastern and Western religions to the State, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Renan, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ricardo, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Richardson, the novelist, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ritchie, Lady Richmond, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Robert Elsmere</i>, its popularity, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Roberts, Lord, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rodney, Admiral, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Roman Catholic Church, its polity compared with the Greek, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Inheritor of Imperial tradition, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Roman Empire, its frontier policy, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>; also <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Roman Naturaliste</i>, by Bruneti&egrave;re, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rousseau, J. J., <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Sagas, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sainte-Beuve, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Say, L&eacute;on, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Scotch common sense philosophy, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Scotsman, the, in fiction, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Scott, Michael, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Scott, Sir Walter:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Head of modern romantic school of fiction, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Abandoned poetry for prose, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Transferred dialogue from the drama to the novel, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His historical insight, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His descriptions of fighting, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Shakespeare, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Shamil, see 'Frontiers,' <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, etc.<br />
+<br />
+Shelley, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His letters, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comparison with Swinburne, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swinburne's admiration, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Shintoism, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Shorthouse, J. H., <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Smollett, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
+<br />
+South African War, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Southey, Robert, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Carlyle's description, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Type of Conservatism, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Sovereignty, Territorial, a modern idea, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span>Spenserian stanza, Byron's admiration for, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Stanley, Dean, see 'Letter-writing.'<br />
+<br />
+Stendhal, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sterne, Laurence, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Stevenson, R. L., see 'Letter-writing,' also <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Surtees and the Sporting Novel, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Swift, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thackeray's description, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Swinburne, A. C., <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On Byron, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>Swinburne, Characteristics of his Poetry</b>, <a href="#Page_263">263-290</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swinburne's predecessors and contemporaries, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Earlier poems, <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i>, <i>Chastelard</i>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Poems and Ballads</i>, published and withdrawn, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">reissued with reply to critics, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Songs and Ballads</i>, war upon theology, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Songs of the Four Seasons</i>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>A Midsummer Holiday</i>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Love of the sea and of his country, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His power of musical phrasing, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His attitude to eminent contemporaries, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His dramas, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Concluding remarks: his high aspirations and his defects, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Taeping rebellion, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Taoism, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tchetchnia, in the Caucasus, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, etc.<br />
+<br />
+Tennyson, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quoted, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Absence of rhyme in 'Tears, idle tears,' <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swinburne's tribute, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Thackeray, W. M., <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>Thackeray, William Makepeace</b>, <a href="#Page_76">76-120</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lady Ritchie's biographical contributions, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brief sketch of his life, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Early works, <i>Yellowplush Papers</i>, etc., <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His rare qualities first shown in <i>Barry Lyndon</i>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His defence of taking a rogue for hero, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Vanity Fair</i>, his irony and pathos, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His merciless war on snobbery, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His pictures from military life, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Pendennis</i>, a novel of manners, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tendency to moralise, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Esmond</i>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thackeray as historical novelist contrasted with Scott, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Virginians</i>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Newcomes</i>, a return to the novel of society, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tendency to caricature, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Denis Duval</i>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Classification of his works as historical novels and novels of manners, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His character, religion and influence, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Thiers, opposed to war of 1870, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>, etc.<br />
+<br />
+Thorburn's <i>Bannu</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tolstoi, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tractarians, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Walpole's account of, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Trollope, Anthony, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Turgot, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<b>Utilitarians, The English</b>, <a href="#Page_210">210-262</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Objects of Mr. Stephen's history, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A system with a practical aim, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Its influence on government, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Philosophy of Reid and Stewart, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bentham's doctrines, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brief account of his life, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mr. Stephen's criticisms, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bentham's neglect of history, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">James Mill, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Attitude to the Church, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His 'Essay on Government,' Macaulay's attack, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Position of Southey and Coleridge, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">English and Greek theories of the State, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Criticism of Malthus and Ricardo, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and of James Mill, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">John Stuart Mill, his life and training, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His doctrines and policy, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His <i>Political Economy</i>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His later writings criticised, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Subjection of Women</i>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mill's theology, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Opposition to Utilitarianism, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mr. Stephen's position, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Voltaire, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Vorontzoff, Russian General, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Walpole, Horace, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<b>Walpole, Sir Spencer</b>, <a href="#Page_368">368-376</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His literary bent as an historian, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His method described by himself, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His treatment of ecclesiastical controversies, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comparison with Lecky, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Waterloo in Scott and Byron's verse, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br />
+<br />
+'Waverley' Novel, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>. See 'Scott.'<br />
+<br />
+Wellington, Duke of, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Werther, Prussian minister at Paris, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Whately, <i>Historic Doubts</i>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wolfe, General, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wordsworth, William:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His letters, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Described by Carlyle, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Criticised by Byron, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Also <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yermoloff, General, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Zola, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Zoroaster, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p class="subhead2">Printed by T. and A. <span class="smcap">Constable</span>, Printers to His Majesty at the
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Studies in Literature and History, by Sir
+Alfred Comyn Lyall
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Studies in Literature and History
+
+
+Author: Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 30, 2008  [eBook #25937]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND
+HISTORY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Stacy Brown, Thierry Alberto, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY
+
+by the Late
+
+SIR ALFRED C. LYALL
+
+P.C., G.C.I.E., K.C.B., D.C.L., LL.D.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.
+1915
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In the Second Series of his _Asiatic Studies_ the late Sir Alfred
+Lyall republished a number of articles that he had contributed to
+various Reviews up to the year 1894. After that date he wrote
+frequently, especially for the _Edinburgh Review_, and he left amongst
+his papers a note naming a number of articles from which he considered
+that a selection might be made for publication.
+
+The present volume contains, with two exceptions, the articles so
+mentioned, together with one that was not included by the author.
+
+A large number of Sir Alfred Lyall's contributions[1] to the Reviews
+deal, as might be expected, with India--with its political and
+administrative problems, or with the careers of its statesmen and
+soldiers. He appears, however, to have regarded such articles as not
+of sufficient permanent value for republication, and his selection was
+confined almost exclusively to writings on literary, historical or
+religious subjects. He made an exception in favour of an essay on his
+old friend Sir Henry Maine; but as the limitations imposed by the
+publisher made it necessary to sacrifice one of the larger articles,
+this essay was, with some reluctance, excluded. It dealt chiefly with
+Maine's influence on Indian administration and legislation; and would
+more appropriately be included in a collection of his writings on
+India, should these ever be published.
+
+While Indian official subjects have been excluded, readers of the
+earlier 'Studies' will recognise that many of the writings in this
+volume follow out lines of thought suggested in the earlier works, or
+apply in a larger sphere the results of observations made when the
+author was studying Indian myths and Indian religions in Berar, or the
+'rare and antique stratification of society' in Rajputana. The two
+addresses on religion placed at the end of the volume form the most
+obvious example, but there is a close connection between a group of
+the other articles and the views developed in _Asiatic Studies_.
+
+In the last edition of that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was
+inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views
+'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that
+may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid
+survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through
+the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At
+their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and
+again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and
+there is always an element of history in one particular sort of
+fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of
+'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further
+illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another
+standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'--a short
+address, which it has been thought worth while to reprint, though it
+was not specially indicated by the author for publication.
+
+Several of the other articles contain criticism of a more purely
+literary character; the article on 'Frontiers,' which recounts
+exciting but little-known episodes in the Russian advance in Asia, has
+an important bearing on a branch of Indian policy in which Sir Alfred
+Lyall to the end of his career took a deep interest, and of which he
+had a profound knowledge; and 'L'Empire Liberal' may, it is thought,
+be found to contain much that is of special interest at the present
+time.
+
+These articles have not had the benefit of any general revision by
+their author, but in a few cases he had indicated in the printed
+copies alterations or additions that he desired to be made.
+
+    _The Quarterly._
+    _The Anglo-Saxon._
+    _The Edinburgh._
+    _The Fortnightly._
+
+Except that the two essays on 'Race and Religion' and 'The State in
+its Relation to Religion' have been brought together at the end of the
+volume, the chronological order of original publication has been
+observed. The source from which each article is drawn has in all cases
+been indicated, and this opportunity is taken of acknowledging the
+permission to republish that has courteously been accorded by the
+editors or proprietors of the Reviews concerned.
+
+Permission has also been given to publish the article on 'Sir Spencer
+Walpole' written for the British Academy, and the address on the
+'Reading of History.'
+
+John O. Miller
+
+_December 1914._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                               PAGE
+
+NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS                                   1
+
+ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY                 34
+
+THACKERAY                                                        76
+
+THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST                                       121
+
+HEROIC POETRY                                                   155
+
+THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON                                         177
+
+THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS                                        210
+
+CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY                       263
+
+FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN                                    291
+
+L'EMPIRE LIBERAL                                                328
+
+SIR SPENCER WALPOLE                                             368
+
+REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY                               377
+
+RACE AND RELIGION                                               399
+
+THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS      427
+
+INDEX                                                           454
+
+
+
+
+NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS[2]
+
+
+Mr. Raleigh[3] very rightly goes back to mediaeval romance for the
+origins of English fiction. In all countries the metrical tale is many
+generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a
+refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has
+become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of _memoria
+technica_ used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the
+heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an
+audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of
+saints--love, fighting, and theology--form the subject matter of these
+stories in verse. They are, as Mr. Raleigh says, epical in spirit
+though not in form: 'they carry their hero through the actions and
+adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds
+done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability
+of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle
+and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came
+Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward
+perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth
+century both of the ancestors of the modern novel--that is, the
+novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and
+the romance of chivalry--appear in an English prose dress.' But the
+genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory
+and pedantic moralisation; and in the _Gesta Romanorum_, the most
+popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated
+from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are
+mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediaeval thought and
+mediaeval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover
+the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the
+closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'
+
+The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist,
+insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our
+author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the
+seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and
+fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its
+vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves
+skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading
+public--a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a
+self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and
+portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that
+these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for
+the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable
+reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two
+centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and
+developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back
+to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century,
+Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the
+service of her fiction, she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr.
+Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with
+contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and
+character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh holds, however, that
+this attempt was abortive; that it failed at the time; and that the
+great eighteenth-century school of English novelists, with Richardson
+and Fielding at their head, took its rise, quite independently of
+predecessors in the seventeenth century, out of the general stock of
+miscellaneous literature--plays, books of travel, adventures, satires,
+journals, and broadsides--which had been drawn at first hand from
+observation and experience of the various forms of surrounding life.
+
+We are quite ready to agree that the eighteenth-century Novel of
+Manners belongs to a family distinct from that of the Romantic story,
+or is at any rate very distantly connected with it. But when Mr.
+Raleigh goes on to say that the heroic romance died in the seventeenth
+century and left no issue, although it was revived again in the latter
+half of the eighteenth century, to this view we are much inclined to
+demur. Such complete interruptions in the transmission of species are
+as rare in the intellectual as in the physical world; and we prefer to
+maintain that the romance, although it was for a time eclipsed by the
+brilliancy of the writers who described the manners and sentiments of
+contemporary society, was never extinguished, but became transformed
+gradually, by successive modifications of environment, into the modern
+novel of adventure. It is true that Defoe entirely rejected the
+marvellous, while Horace Walpole, fifty years later, dealt
+immoderately in the elements of mystery and wonder; yet,
+notwithstanding these violent oscillations of style and method, we
+believe that the great historical novels of the early nineteenth
+century, and the tales of stirring incident which flourish at the
+present day, descend by an unbroken filiation from the fabulous
+romance of elder times.
+
+Mr. Raleigh does not carry his brief yet instructive history of the
+English novel beyond the time of Walter Scott, with whom, he says,
+'the wheel has come full circle,' the Romantic revival was victorious,
+prose finally superseded verse as the vehicle of adventurous story,
+and realism was wedded to romance. We trust that in some future work
+he will carry on up to a later date his survey of the course and
+currents of imaginative fiction. In the meantime, it may not be
+irrelevant to follow up further and a little more closely the ruling
+characteristics and the formative influences that have contributed
+toward the production of English light literature as it exists at the
+present day.
+
+The novels with which our fortunate generation is so abundantly
+supplied may be divided broadly into two classes, overlapping and
+interlaced with each other, yet on the whole distinguishable as
+separate species--the Novel of Adventure and the Novel of Manners. The
+former class has a very long pedigree. The early romance writer drew
+his incidents from the field of heroic action and marvellous
+enterprise; he revelled in noble sentiments, astonishing feats, and
+the exhibition of all the cardinal virtues in tragic situations; his
+mission was to preserve and hand down to us magnified figures of
+mighty men, or the pictures of great events, as they had impressed
+themselves upon the popular imagination. For such material he was
+obliged to travel abroad into remote countries, or backward to bygone
+ages; but if his images of gallant knights and fair damsels were well
+modelled, if the language was superb, and the deeds or sufferings
+sufficiently astonishing, no one cared about anachronisms,
+incongruities, or improbabilities.
+
+But as the heroic romance dwindled and withered under the dry light of
+precise knowledge and extending erudition, the purveyors of fiction,
+accommodating themselves to a more exacting taste, applied themselves
+seriously to the reproduction of famous scenes and portraits by the
+aid and guidance of historic documents and antiquarian research. The
+modern romantic school, of whom the master, if not the founder, is
+Scott, represented a clear step forward to what is now called Realism,
+and a proportionate abandonment of the classic convention, or the
+method of drawing from traditional or imaginary models. To Scott may
+be ascribed the authoritative introduction of descriptions of
+landscape, of storms, sunsets, and picturesque effects; not the
+artificial scene-painting of Mrs. Radcliffe, but artistic delineations
+of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky which gave depth and atmosphere
+to his dramatic situations. From this period, also, may be dated the
+practice, so entirely contrary to the spirit of true romance, of
+verifying by documentary evidence the details of a story. It was Scott
+who, in the first years of this century, set prominently the example
+of appending copious notes to his stories in verse or prose, wherein
+he displayed his archaeologic lore and produced his authorities for any
+striking illustration of manners or characteristic incident. This
+practice, which was largely adopted by others, was at least an
+improvement upon the old unregenerate system of seasoning the
+conversation of warriors and peasants with uncouth phrases picked up
+at random, or trusting to mere fancy or accepted formula for the
+description of battles or of the ways of folk in mediaeval castles and
+cottages. But the process savoured too much of the workshop. A novel
+or poem that required an appendix of notes and glossaries must be of
+high excellence to avoid suspicious resemblance to an elaborate
+literary counterfeit, since open and avowed borrowing from
+dictionaries of antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the
+illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's
+fantastic metrical romance of _Lalla Rookh_ the system was carried to
+an extent that now seems ridiculous, for certain passages are loaded
+with outlandish phrases or metaphors that are unintelligible except by
+reference to the notes. Nevertheless the English public, being then
+quite ignorant of the true East, tolerated Moore's sham Orientalism,
+even though Byron's fine poems were just then exposing the difference
+between working up the subject in a library and wandering in Asiatic
+countries. Byron's language seems in the present day turgid, and his
+Greeks and Turks may have a theatrical air, but his splendid
+descriptive passages were drawn by a master hand straight from nature,
+while his colouring, landscape, and costume are usually excellent; so
+that his work also is a distinct movement in the direction of realism.
+Yet it is to be observed that after Byron and Scott the metrical
+romance, that most ancient form of tale-telling, fell rapidly into
+disuse. The fact that Byron's latest poem, _Don Juan_, belonged
+essentially to the coming realistic school, is a significant
+indication of transition; and Scott's abandonment of poetry for prose,
+which was a necessary consequence of his advance toward realism, gave
+its death-blow to the earlier fashion.
+
+By this time, indeed, the conventional writer of adventures, though he
+held his ground up to or even beyond the middle of the century, was in
+a state of incurable decadence. He was losing the confidence of the
+general reader, who had picked up some precise notions regarding
+appropriate scenery, language, and costume in sundry periods and
+divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that
+mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who trampled
+even upon a commonplace book well filled with references to standard
+authorities, insisting upon careful study of the whole environment,
+the dexterous incorporation of details, and delicate blending of local
+colours. Severe pedagogic handling of a historic novel, as if it were
+a paper done at some competitive examination, was too much for the old
+school, which finally subsided into cheap popular editions, making way
+for a new class of writers that adapted the Novel of Adventure to the
+requirements of latter-day taste, to the widening of knowledge, and
+the diversified expansion of our national life. The prevailing
+tendency was now to confine the range of scene and action more and
+more approximately to the contemporary period, to insist on genuine
+materials, and to observe a stricter canon of probabilities, wherein
+the discriminating reader fancied himself to be a judge. The use of
+notes was discarded as contrary to the high artistic principle that in
+fiction everything must resemble reality while nothing must be
+demonstrably matter of fact. The appearance of famous personages must
+be occasional, after the manner of gods in an epic poem; they must not
+be, as formerly, the leading characters and chief actors in the drama.
+And great battles, instead of marking the grand climacteric of a
+story's development, were now merely traversed, so to speak, on their
+outskirts, or were only approached near enough to throw a glowing
+sidelight on certain groups and situations. The gradual adoption of
+these limitations may be traced back to the naval and military novels
+that reflect the traditions of the great French war. No one even then
+thought of writing a romance with Nelson or Bonaparte as the hero, or
+of finishing off in the full blaze of Trafalgar or in the rout of
+Waterloo; although with Marryat and Lever the English reader revelled
+in the dashing exploits or bacchanalian revels of sailors and
+soldiers. Lever did indeed give glimpses of Wellington or Napoleon;
+but his business was with Connaught Rangers and French guardsmen;
+while Marryat and Michael Scott gave us daring sea-captains and
+reckless sailors with inimitable vigour and animation.
+
+But as the echo of thunderous battles by sea and land died away, this
+particular offshoot of modern romance ceased to flourish, and has
+never had any considerable revival. The tale-teller of adventure, like
+his ancestor the epic poet, requires a certain haziness of atmosphere;
+he must have elbow room for his inventive faculty; and he is liable to
+be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let
+loose upon recent events in our day by complete histories, personal
+memoirs, public documents, war correspondence, and all-pervading
+journalism. This is probably the main reason why the Crimean War and
+the Indian Mutiny, which broke for brief intervals the long peace of
+England, have furnished no fresh material contribution of importance
+to the romance of war, either in prose or poetry, to stamp the memory
+of a long weary siege, or of a short and bloody struggle, upon the
+popular imagination. Another reason must be, of course, the
+non-appearance in England of the _vates sacer_; for Tolstoi has shown
+us that within and without Sebastopol there might be found material
+for work of the highest order. However this may be, it is a remarkable
+fact that just about that time the novel of adventure turned back for
+a moment, in Kingsley's hands, to the spacious times of great
+Elizabeth, to the Armada and the legends of filibustering on the
+Spanish main; and at the present time we may observe that the leading
+writer of this school goes back at least a hundred years for the field
+of his best stories. The eighteenth century, whose politics,
+philosophy, and literature seemed to Carlyle's somewhat bookish
+conception to be flat, prosaic, and comparatively uninteresting, was
+in truth for Englishmen pre-eminently the age of energetic activity,
+which touched the high level of romantic enterprise at two points, the
+Scottish rebellions and the exploits of famous buccaneers. Mr.
+Stevenson has reopened, with great skill and success, these mines of
+literary ore that had been discovered but only partially worked by
+Walter Scott. His rare artistic instinct divined the rich veins which
+they still contained; while in other stories his intimate acquaintance
+with actual life and circumstance on the coasts and islands of the
+Pacific Ocean has provided him with those elements of distance and
+unfamiliarity which are essential, as we have suggested, to the
+composition of the novel of adventure. Other less original writers
+have travelled in search of these elements to the Australian bush or
+the outlying half-explored regions of South Africa.
+
+This very cursory survey of the main influences and circumstances that
+have shaped the course and set the fashion of our modern novel of
+adventure may be useful in explaining its actual position at the
+present moment. Scepticism and research have effectually retrenched
+the very liberal credit formerly assigned to romance writing; the art
+now consists in spinning a long narrative out of authentic materials
+which must be disguised or kept hidden; while its leading features are
+a delight in elaborate accessories and that very modern sentiment, a
+horror of anachronism. A few living artists, like Mr. Shorthouse and
+Mr. Stevenson, can still excel under these difficult conditions,
+which have driven a crowd of second-rate novelists into the extreme of
+minute realism. Into this retreat, however, they have been followed by
+a host of readers; for in these days of universal instruction and flat
+uneventful existence nothing satisfies the average mind like
+photographic detail, which is a commodity to be had of every
+industrious or studious composer. As the range of accurate information
+extends, as the dust heap of old records, private as well as public,
+is sifted more narrowly, as the antique habit of taking things readily
+for granted disappears, the novel becomes more and more an arrangement
+of genuine facts and circumstances, interleaved by such fiction as the
+skill and imagination of the author can produce. It may be worth
+observing that this demand for exact verification has affected the use
+of the early chronicles in two contrary ways; they are relied upon
+implicitly or they are arbitrarily discredited, in proportion as the
+facts stated appear credible or not credible to critics or professors
+who are working upon them. All the particulars of a great battle or of
+some famous event that can be gleaned out of some ancient monkish
+annalist, who must always have collected his information by hearsay
+and often after many years, are treated as authentic so long as they
+do not sound improbable; but if they offend against the canon of
+probability set up by a library-hunting student, they are liable to be
+summarily rejected. We may venture upon the conjecture that the true
+result of this process is to assimilate the work of the critical
+historian much more nearly than he would for a moment allow to that of
+a skilful historic novelist. A romancer of insight and imaginative
+power, who studied his period, would be quite as likely to make a
+lucky selection of real incidents, motives, and characters, in a story
+of the Roman Empire or of England under the Plantagenets, as an
+erudite writer of history. Perhaps the best measure available to us of
+what we may believe in regard to far-off times is afforded by
+observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places;
+and this test the novelist is rather more apt, on the whole, to employ
+than the historian.
+
+In the novels, as upon the stage, this demand for minute accuracy of
+scenic or historical details has necessarily elicited an abundant
+supply; though whether the entire picture is rendered much more
+natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be
+questioned. 'La recherche exageree du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It
+is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a
+life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its
+ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter
+studies archaeology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local
+colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The
+result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be
+great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be
+undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of
+motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern
+novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his
+time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is
+moulded by the environment of ideas and circumstances within which he
+lives. The Myth, the Romance, the Historic Novel, each in its
+successive period, did at least this service to later generations:
+they preserved and handed down to us the popular impressions, the
+figures or pictures of great men and striking events, as they were
+reflected upon the imagination of subsequent ages. It can never be
+discovered, and it does not very much matter, whether these images
+have any close resemblance to the lost originals; it may be that some
+artists in some periods saw far more clearly than in others. The true
+criterion for estimating the true value of romantic fiction, of tales
+of action and adventure, must be always its artistic and intellectual
+qualities, the question whether it succeeds in filling a broad canvas,
+in dealing with masculine sentiment and stirring action, in striking
+the deeper chords of human emotion and energy.
+
+But the historic novel of our day strives principally after exact
+reproduction, as may be seen even in a book of such incontestable
+talent as _Marius the Epicurean_, and very notably in Archdeacon
+Farrar's book, _Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero_
+(1891), which may stand as the type and complete specimen of Erudite
+Fiction. In his preface he tells us that
+
+     'those who are familiar with the literature of the first century
+     will recognise that even for the minutest allusions and particulars
+     I have contemporary authority. Expressions and incidents which to
+     some might seem startlingly modern, are in reality suggested by
+     passages in the satirists, epigrammatists, and romancers of the
+     (Roman) Empire, or by anecdotes preserved in the grave pages of
+     Seneca and the elder Pliny.'
+
+Here we have reached, in this conscientious explanation of method, the
+extreme point of remoteness from the original spirit of historic
+romance. Archdeacon Farrar's figures and descriptions are worked out
+upon the pattern of a mosaic, by piecing together the loose
+fragmentary bits of our knowledge regarding life and society under
+Nero. A glance at these books shows that they belong to the latest
+school of nineteenth-century fiction, to a period when careful
+scholarly accumulation of accessories and adroit adaptation of history
+have taken the place, not only of convention and clumsy invention,
+but also of the free untrammelled handling of types and traditions
+which gave freshness and originality to the simpler forms of early
+romance.
+
+We believe, then, that these attempts at exact reproduction, this
+method of the multiplication of particulars, involve a fallacy, and
+are detrimental to the more enduring forms of art. But the people is
+willing to be deceived; the general reader has acquired a taste that
+must be gratified; with the result that the elder romancers in prose
+and verse, including Scott and Byron, are falling out of fashion with
+the middle classes, though Scott holds his own in the sixpenny
+edition. The rule of Realism is becoming so despotic that the story of
+adventure is reverting more and more to that shape which lends itself
+most completely to life-like narrative, the shape of a Memoir. And it
+may be pointed out accordingly that in France the Editor of Memoirs
+has lately entered into substantial rivalry with the Novelist of
+Adventure.
+
+It must have been noticed by those who attend to the course of French
+literature, that of late years the publication of Memoirs relating to
+the period of the Revolutionary war, and especially of the First
+Empire, has rather suddenly increased. The causes are undoubtedly to a
+considerable degree political, connected with the reorganisation of
+the French army and navy, which has revived the military ardour of the
+nation, and has given an edge to the deep-seated spirit of rivalry
+with Germany on land and with England at sea. Whatever immediately
+interests a nation gives a sharp turn to its literature, and the
+immense success of General Marbot's book, containing the extraordinary
+personal experiences of one who passed through the most famous scenes
+of the heroic era, exactly hit off the public taste at a moment when
+various motives combined to revive the Napoleonic legend. The
+historians of that era had done their harvesting; the crop had been
+reaped, raked, and gleaned; the time was too near and too thoroughly
+known for fiction; and yet there never was a finer field for the
+production of romance. No one can doubt that if Napoleon Bonaparte had
+conquered half Europe, won his tremendous battles, and founded his
+empire in an illiterate prehistoric age, he would have taken
+everlasting rank with Alexander the Great and Charlemagne as the
+central figure of a third world-wide cycle of heroic myths; nor is it
+necessary to read Archbishop Whately's _Historic Doubts_ to perceive
+how readily Napoleon's real story lends itself to extravagant
+myth-making. At a later period he might have been the leading
+character in some prolix and pedantic romance, and still more recently
+his life and deeds would have been built up into the scaffolding
+within which the historic novelist used to construct his love idylls,
+his tragic situations, or even his illustrations of some social
+theory. All these methods and devices have become obsolete; and though
+the spirit of hero-worship that animated those who listened to the
+ancient tales still possesses mankind at certain seasons, Romance must
+now submit to the hard conditions of modern Realism. In this
+predicament it finds a new and satisfactory embodiment in the form of
+Memoirs concerning the great Emperor and his companions, which
+dispense copious anecdotes of his court and camp, his sayings and
+doings, his domestic habits, his private manners and peccadilloes. If
+these particulars can be served up as sauce to the description of
+mighty events, the contrast renders them all the more savoury. But
+there is now a large class of readers who care less about Jena and
+Austerlitz than for such books as _Napoleon Intime, Napoleon et les
+Femmes_, which have all the attraction always possessed by the
+intermixture of love and war, and by the blending of arms with amours
+in the conventional style of historic fiction. The lowest depth is
+reached when the reminiscences of an Emperor's valet, to whom he is
+still a kind of hero, are served up with that succulent dressing of
+vivid particularity which is swallowed with relish because it brings
+down a great man to the level of the most trivial experience.
+
+How far these Memoirs are genuine in the sense which makes them so
+attractive--that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great
+man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by
+his intimates--must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True
+reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose
+together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent,
+clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and
+setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a
+solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of
+them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the
+very latest type, such as Zola's _Debacle_, which contains a very
+strong and pervading mixture of pure historical fact.
+
+But whatever may be the exact proportion of authenticity which this
+class of Memoirs can justly claim, they completely fulfil the prime
+conditions of popularity prescribed for the modern novel, which must
+work out minute details with the greatest possible resemblance to
+actual life and circumstance. Upon this ground, indeed, the ablest
+professors of fiction might despair of competing with those who
+exhibit a mighty man of valour in undress, who lead us where we may
+hear him talk, watch him eat or shave, and study his conjugal
+relations. It is to be feared that if the multiplication of such
+Reminiscences continues, they will seriously trench upon the province
+of the novelist, who will be left no scope for the employment of his
+craft in a field that has been thoroughly ransacked, and who must
+inevitably retire before writers who have discovered the art of making
+truth quite as amusing as fiction, than which it must always be more
+interesting. The brilliant success of Marbot's Memoirs, which were
+undoubtedly written by himself, seems to have warmed into activity and
+circulation various other volumes of similar reminiscences that must
+have been hibernating for one or two generations in the family
+archives, or have otherwise fallen into temporary oblivion; for in
+many cases one is inclined to wonder why authentic documents of such
+value and interest were not sooner produced.
+
+The latest example of this class of Memoirs, belonging to the
+Revolutionary or Napoleonic cycle, is to be found in the _Adventures_
+of A. Moreau de Jonnes, who died in 1870 at the age of ninety-two,
+having been for fifty years a member of the Institut and a great
+authority on statistics. 'We should never have supposed,' says M. Leon
+Say in his preface to this book, 'that Moreau had been the hero of
+warlike adventures, or that he might possibly have been placed in a
+line with Marbot.' The men of M. Say's generation who knew Marbot were
+quite unaware, he adds, that here was a naval and colonial Marbot,
+whose fighting life was one of the strangest of stories. M. Say's
+preface seems to be intended as a guarantee of this story's
+authenticity, though he notices casually the remarkable fact that 'on
+every occasion when Moreau is on the brink of destruction, it is his
+luck to be saved by a pretty girl'; also that 'a charming
+portrait-gallery might be made of the women who, between 1793 and
+1805, rescued this hardy rover, who was both sailor and soldier, from
+death by sword or sickness in divers parts of the world,' from the
+West India Islands to the banks of the Thames. His guarantee must be
+accepted; yet if this book had not been the genuine autobiography of a
+known personage, there would really be nothing to distinguish it from
+the historic novel, in which an imaginary person, such as Thackeray's
+Esmond, describes well-known scenes of history as an eye-witness and
+actor in them. Moreau was present at the great naval engagement of
+June 1, 1794; at the hanging of Parker, the ringleader of the famous
+mutiny at the Nore, when he was saved by Parker's widow; he was in
+Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed
+with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some
+marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion
+of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony
+in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in
+competition with literature of this class.
+
+'Times are changed,' observes M. Leon Say in his preface. 'The taste
+of the public of our own day grows more and more keen for the romance
+of the cloak and rapier, when the heroes relate their own adventures.
+The authentic Memoirs of the d'Artagnans of our own century are now
+preferred even to the works of Alexandre Dumas, so dear to our youth.'
+Undoubtedly they must be preferred, for being more real than the most
+realistic novel, and just as full of fascinating adventures, the
+Memoir is superior precisely at those points which have given the
+modern romance an advantage over its more conventional predecessors.
+There may be consolation for the novelist in the reflection that the
+fund from which these Memoirs are drawn must soon be running low,
+whereas the resources of fiction are comparatively inexhaustible. In
+the meantime one result, already perceptible, will be that the novel
+will tend more and more to imitate the personal memoir, by reverting
+to the autobiographical form which, since Defoe's day, has always been
+fiction's most effective disguise, permitting the author to efface
+himself completely, while it gives the whole composition an air of
+dramatic vigour. It will have been observed that the most vivid
+modern English romances, from _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_ to
+_John Inglesant_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Master of Ballantrae_,
+are all written as the direct narratives of men who have taken a
+comparatively secondary or even humble share in great transactions. On
+the other hand, the famous characters who stand in the foremost line of
+history, and who were the delight and ornament of the elder romances,
+must now be struck out of the repertory of the modern story-teller,
+since the public now will no longer tolerate ancient or mediaeval heroes,
+while the great men of recent times have been too often photographed.
+The only novelist of our own day who has attempted with some success to
+draw thinly-veiled portraits of contemporary celebrities is Disraeli,
+and his whole style and treatment show him to be a true-bred
+descendant of the old romantic stock.
+
+Our argument is, therefore, that various causes and tendencies, the
+change of environment, the limitation of the average reader's
+experiences, his taste for accuracy, his rejection of tradition,
+convention, anachronism and improbabilities, the extension of exact
+knowledge and the critical spirit, have all combined to limit the
+sphere of the Novel of Adventure and to check the free sweep of its
+inventive genius. To these conditions the first-class artist can
+accommodate himself; but for the average writer they serve fatally to
+expedite his descent into the regions of everyday life, among all the
+emotions known to middle-class folk, from murders, bankruptcies, and
+railway accidents down to their religious doubts and the psychology of
+their love-making.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Against all these adverse circumstances the Novel of Adventure strives
+gallantly, and, of late years, with such conspicuous success, that it
+is difficult to decide whether the tide of popular inclination has not
+turned against the Novel of Manners. This branch of the great
+story-telling family has, as we know, a long descent and an
+illustrious pedigree, although for our present purpose we need not go
+back further than the eighteenth century, to _Gil Blas_ in France and
+_Tom Jones_ in England. It will be found that these masterpieces
+consist principally of a series of scenes and comical or semi-tragical
+situations, rather loosely strung together on the thread of the
+experiences undergone by the principal personages. The main object is
+not so much ingenuity of plot as the presentation with much humour,
+some strokes of caricature, and a touch of pathos, of morals and
+manners, of public abuses and private vices, the way of living and
+standard of thinking, the distinctive prejudices and ingrained
+beliefs, that characterised different classes at a time when their
+ideas and habits were often in sharp contrast. The sketches are
+admirably done, the conversation is full of wit, the whole work may be
+relied upon as a faithful though coarsely drawn picture of
+contemporary society. Fielding constantly makes a halt in his
+narrative to moralise and discourse ironically with the reader, in a
+vein that was reopened a century later by Thackeray, and by him pretty
+nearly exhausted, for at any rate it has since been closed.
+
+Mr. Raleigh's book contains a just and discriminating appreciation of
+Fielding's place in the line of great novelists, and of the strong
+formative influence that his work exercised over the early development
+of what is now called Naturalism. This note is struck, as he points
+out, in the invocation at the beginning of the thirteenth book of _Tom
+Jones_, addressed to Experience, to the inspiration which is derived
+from what one has actually seen and known among all sorts and
+conditions of men:
+
+     'Others before him had seen and known these things, but in
+     Fielding's pages they are for the first time introduced, with no
+     loss of reality, to subserve the ends of fiction; common life is
+     the material of the story, but it is handled here for the first
+     time with the freedom and imagination of a great artist.'[4]
+
+And here, we may add, is the fruitful and vigorous stock out of which
+has since radiated that immense growth of realistic novels which now
+tends to overshadow and supersede the earlier species of romance
+literature.
+
+But Fielding's style is unblushingly masculine; his scenes are in the
+street, the tavern, the sponging-house, and other places
+unmentionable. By the end of his century the Novel of Manners had
+fallen into very different hands, and to these it owes mainly the
+shaping, both as to tone and subject, that decisively laid down its
+course of future development. The electricity of that stormful period
+which comprises the last years of the eighteenth and the opening of
+the nineteenth century seems to have generated an efflorescence of
+high original capacity in the department of imagination as well as of
+action. Nevertheless nothing is more remarkable, probably nothing was
+less expected, than the sudden accession of women to the first rank
+of popular novelists. Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen (not to
+mention Miss Ferrier), entered upon the same field from different
+points and divided it among them. They may be said to have virtually
+created the decent story of contemporary life, the light satirical
+pictures of familiar folk, the representation of ordinary society in
+the form of a delicate comedy, which rose to the pitch of racy humour
+when the scenes and characters were Irish. Under the touch of this
+feminine genius convention vanishes altogether; the painting is direct
+from nature; the plot and incidents are saturated with probability;
+the personages might be met at the corner of any street in town or
+village; the very voice, gesture, and language are almost ludicrously
+familiar. No heroics, not much use of the pathetic; very slight
+landscape-painting and background; no psychology; there is no
+systematic attempt to introduce, under the story's disguise, the
+serious discussion of social, political, or polemical questions.
+
+For an artist who deals so largely with country life, the absence of
+landscape-painting in Miss Austen is very noticeable. The fine vein of
+satire that pervades all her work, the constant presence of the human
+element, leave her no room for expatiating on the aspects of nature;
+and indeed she was manifestly impatient with enthusiasts over the
+picturesque. She only touched upon such tastes in order to bring out
+character:
+
+     '"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape
+     scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and
+     tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first
+     defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind;
+     and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could
+     find no language to describe them in but what was worn and
+     hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."
+
+     '"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the
+     delight in a fair prospect which you profess to feel. But, in
+     return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I
+     like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; I do not
+     like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if
+     they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
+     tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath
+     blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a
+     watch-tower, and a troop of tidy happy villagers please me better
+     than the finest banditti in the world."'[5]
+
+There can be no doubt, indeed, that in the novels of this period two
+main features of the modern story, the word-painting of scenery and
+the analysis of subjective emotions, are conspicuously absent. Yet
+among the manifold causes to which may be ascribed the wide recent
+expansion of the Novel of Manners, we may well reckon the decisive
+impulse that it received from these famous authoresses. They were, in
+fact, the founders of the dominion which women bid fair to establish
+over this class of fiction, where they are already extending it to a
+degree that threatens to evict the men. Various circumstances have
+co-operated toward this curious literary revolution. The conventional
+romance, though apparently flourishing, was in their time on the brink
+of a decline; and as women have never succeeded in the Novel of
+Adventure--for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences
+are opposed to success--they had no difficulty in abandoning a
+decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and
+subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited
+their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and
+writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine
+novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that
+has joined the camp of Manners, to which alliance it may be noticed
+that, with very few exceptions, the women have faithfully adhered. For
+although in the last century Mrs. Radcliffe had revived, as Mr.
+Raleigh observes, the Romance proper, and Miss Jane Porter claimed in
+the first years of this century the honour of having invented the
+historical romance, women have been practically superseded in this
+class of literature, so far as it survives, by men, George Eliot's
+_Romola_ being the only notable exception. The true representatives of
+female novelists are now the leaders of that school which confines
+itself to minute observation, whether of outward facts or inward
+feeling, and which is above all things devoted to the close
+delineation of contemporary society. The analysis of character within
+the range of ordinary experience, the play of civilised emotion, the
+vicissitudes of grief or joy in the parsonage, the ball-room, and the
+village, the troubled course of legitimate love-making, have all
+contributed the congenial material whereby the Novel of Manners
+treated realistically, as the phrase goes, has been moulded by the
+adroit hands of women.
+
+We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have
+appeared in this century were male authors--Thackeray and Dickens. But
+we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English
+fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament.
+Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have
+produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of
+the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think,
+proportionate to the rare and original value of their work. Both of
+them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time
+afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of
+loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty
+that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying
+effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar
+qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary;
+and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the
+popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an
+enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great
+proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the
+lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their
+type and forerunner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example,
+follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion
+and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured
+descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and
+occasionally in the higher walks of society--they are always decorous
+and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or
+adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's
+literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever
+but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations
+and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by
+phonograph, is essentially feminine.
+
+Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished
+for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did
+for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped
+its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure
+as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has
+been since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of
+convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from
+the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts
+and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of
+everyday existence. In _Le Roman Naturaliste_, by M. Brunetiere, one
+chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares
+that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of
+_Adam Bede_, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says,
+has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school.
+Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a
+faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her
+mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I
+can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating
+my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious
+quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.'
+But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her
+power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a
+poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital
+relations of common things. In Charlotte Bronte, again, we have
+Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality;
+the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who
+strives against adverse circumstance upon an ordinary, often an
+humble, plane of society, never travelling for a moment beyond the
+possibilities of everyday existence. This ominous dismissal of the
+male hero from his previous position in the centre of the story's
+movement may be taken as a sign that he is not of so much account in
+the sphere of domestic fiction as he was erst in the arena of perilous
+adventure. It is true that mankind is still glorified by Ouida, a
+lady who may yet be occasionally found sitting, almost alone, by the
+shores of old Romance; but with Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss
+Broughton, and even Miss Braddon, the majority of their leading
+characters may be said to be female. And the most deservedly popular
+of our latest novels by women is _Marcella_.
+
+We must not be understood to maintain that the Novel of Manners has
+been, or is being, completely monopolised, as a department of light
+literature, by women, for of course there are many men who are
+achieving success in that field, among whom Henry James holds a high
+place for distinction and delicacy of workmanship. And among certain
+special branches in which women have not as yet competed at all, we
+may mention the Sporting Novel, where provincial manners and the
+humour of the coverside have been portrayed by Surtees with wonderful
+exactitude and a kind of coarse yet irresistible comicality that
+remind one of Fielding. It is true that he never moralises, as
+Fielding does; but then the interjection by the author of moral
+reflections went out, as we have said, with Thackeray. The description
+of landscape drawn from nature occupies large and extending space in
+the latter-day novel of manners, where it is used very sparingly as
+subservient to character or situation, but commonly as an illustration
+or pictorial background. Let us compare the two following extracts.
+The first is from Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_:
+
+     'Now we shall have no more rough road, Miss Crawford; our
+     difficulties are over. The rest of the way is such as it ought to
+     be. Mr. Rushworth has made it since he succeeded to the
+     estate.--Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a
+     disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am
+     glad the church is not so close to the great House as often happens
+     in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There
+     is the parsonage, a tidy-looking house, and I understand the
+     clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are
+     almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the
+     steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to
+     the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still.
+     It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber,
+     but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it
+     for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an
+     ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'
+
+The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+_Marcella_:
+
+     'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care
+     of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some
+     Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow
+     selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing
+     here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there
+     the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing
+     back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent
+     indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of
+     the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular
+     avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last
+     in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate of some
+     importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the
+     trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
+     avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
+     steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
+     lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried
+     with them a confused general impression of well-being and of
+     dignity. Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at
+     the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the
+     end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on
+     either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting
+     the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'
+
+In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the
+writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human
+character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece
+of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture,
+from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is
+excellently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected
+estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and
+might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut.
+Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic
+feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised
+finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element
+of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened
+by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight
+account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that
+may be roused by using language as an instrument for the
+interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself,
+as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are
+told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon
+pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote[6]
+proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and
+vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how
+'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes,
+buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by
+reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river
+winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number
+of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the
+leading lines of the mental picture produced by the words. The
+drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been
+confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the
+pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this
+fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing
+methods.
+
+Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who
+exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one
+can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this
+ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed,
+lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance,
+which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and
+action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it
+reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the
+street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the
+commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in
+writing as in painting; nor can very clever dialogue, ingenious
+situations, variety of style and subject, or even a high average
+morality, preserve such literature from triviality and gradual
+degradation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is the saying of a French writer, that the novel of to-day has
+abjured both the past and the future, and lives wholly in the present.
+We are so far of his opinion in regard to the past, that we doubt, for
+reasons already given, whether the reading public can be induced to
+travel backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even
+though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be
+scrupulously and historically exact. The future is a domain upon which
+the novelist has rarely trespassed; but in close propinquity to it
+lies theologic speculation, and we have not long ago witnessed the
+fascination that can be exercised over a multitude of readers by a
+novel which described the unhappiness brought upon the peaceful home
+of an Anglican clergyman who was driven forth from his parsonage by
+imbibing some tincture of modern Biblical criticism. The sensation,
+for so it must be called, produced by _Robert Elsmere_, illustrated
+the degree to which in these days popularity depends on hitting the
+intellectual level of the general reader, and on touching the fancy or
+the conscience of that very numerous class whose culture is of the
+medium sort, neither high nor low. For while it seems certain that to
+a great many people the views and arguments which overthrew Elsmere's
+orthodoxy and brought him to martyrdom must have seemed profound,
+daring, and novel, to others they are but too familiar and by no means
+fresh. To some of us, indeed, the overpowering effect produced on
+Elsmere's mind by his remarkable discoveries may be not unlike the awe
+and gratitude with which an African chief receives the present of an
+obsolete cannon. But the main reason why the future is no better field
+than the distant past for the modern novelist, is that in both cases
+there is a want of actuality, and that the positive temper of the age
+requires in either case something more definite and verifiable.
+
+It may be affirmed, moreover, as a general observation, that the
+spirit of realism is hostile to the Novel with a Purpose, whether it
+be that species which undertakes to argue or instruct under the cloak
+of agreeable fiction, or that other species, much cultivated by
+Dickens in his later works, which attacks antiquated institutions and
+public abuses in a story so contrived as to expose their absurdity and
+injustice. There is an air of artificiality about such compositions
+which damages the artistic illusion, the photographic rendering of
+actual life, upon which the author relies, because it throws over the
+stage a shadow of his own personality. For one tendency of excessive
+realism is to encourage an approximation between literary and
+theatrical effects, since the whole interest becomes concentrated upon
+figures acting and moving under a strong light in the foreground of
+scenes carefully adjusted, so that anything which betrays the author's
+presence interrupts the performance.
+
+Yet although our contemporary novelist is thus subjected, in respect
+of his period and his repertory, to limitations from which his
+predecessors were free, there has never been a time when English
+fiction has exhibited, in competent hands, greater fertility of
+invention and resource, or so high an average proficiency in the art
+of writing. The vastly increased demand for amusement in modern life
+has stimulated the production of light literature, which is now
+cultivated far more widely than heretofore, like tea, and the market
+is flooded with an article of sound moderate quality. At this moment
+we have in very truth a democracy of letters, for while no mighty
+masters overtop the rest, the number of writers who stand on an
+equality of merit, who can produce one or more excellent stories, is
+very large. Their field has widened with the expansion of British
+enterprise; they can draw their plots, descriptions, and characters
+from the colonies, from Africa, from the South Sea Islands, or from
+India; and it will be observed that not only the tale of adventure,
+but also the quiet story of domestic interiors and family troubles, is
+easily acclimatised, and gains something from a sparing use of variety
+of dialect and landscape. As for the Novel of Adventure, it is drawing
+copious sustenance from these outlying regions. For although it is
+only from first favourites that the home-keeping reader will tolerate
+an elaborate romance about Africa or the Pacific, he has taken a very
+strong liking to short stories of scenes and actions strictly
+contemporaneous, written in a rough, vigorous, and utterly
+unconventional style, which convey to his mind impressions as
+distinctly as a set of pictorial sketches.
+
+We believe that this style, which retains a strong flavour of its
+American origin (it can hardly be dated earlier than Bret Harte), may
+be reckoned to be peculiar to the light literature of the English
+language. We are not aware that it prevails to any extent in other
+countries; for although the short story of love, intrigue, and manners
+in general has flourished from mediaeval times, and at this moment is
+almost exclusively confined to these subjects in France, the class of
+works to which we are now referring differs entirely in subject and
+style. In England and America the roving life of the colonies, the
+backwoods, the Western States, and the Indian frontiers has created an
+unique school of realistic fiction in which Mr. Kipling is at this
+moment the chief professor. There is moreover a manifest affinity
+between these short prose narratives and the strain of racy strenuous
+versification upon the quaint unvarnished notions and hardy exploits
+of the bush, the prairie, or the frontier, by which Bret Harte,
+Lindsay Gordon, and again Kipling have attained celebrity. As these
+poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture
+to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to
+modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its
+picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in
+its long evolution. Such a tale will squeeze into fifty or a hundred
+pages what Fenimore Cooper or G. P. R. James would have distended into
+three volumes of slow-moving narrative, whereby infinite labour is
+saved to the hasty and indolent reader of these railroad days.
+
+Here, in short, we perceive the influence of that very characteristic
+school of contemporary art, which we know to have always existed, but
+to which men have recently given the exceedingly modern title of
+Impressionist,--the school of authors who desire to strike the
+imagination vividly and with a few sharp strokes, grouping their
+figures in a strong light, rounding off their compact story upon a
+small canvas, and rejecting every detail that is not strictly
+accessory to the main purpose. Already it is beginning to be said in
+France that Zola with his laborious particularism has passed his
+climacteric of fashion, and that the swift impressionist is sailing in
+on a fair wind of spreading popularity. Now in France, though no
+longer in England, the critics still do their duty; they are not
+merely, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge, the eunuchs who guard the
+temple of the Muses; they are often prolific authors who exercise
+great influence upon public opinion, so that their forecast of the
+course and tendencies of fiction is worth bearing in mind. We
+ourselves are ever a restless, bustling, far-wandering folk, great
+lovers of fiction and travel, who not only carry forth the English
+language into the uttermost parts of the earth, to be moulded in
+strange dialects to queer uses, but also bring back fresh ideas and
+incidents, and various aspects of a many-sided world-ranging life. If,
+as has been often asserted, literature be the collective expression of
+the ideas and aspirations, the tastes, feelings, and habits of the
+generation which produces it, we may not be altogether wrong in
+treating the short highly finished story, whether of adventure or
+manners, as the impress and reflection of modern English society. But
+no operation is more delicate than the endeavour to trace the subtle
+connection between constant modifications of literary form and the
+pressure of its ever-changing moral and material environment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The list of these contributions at page 477 of his _Life_ is not
+complete.
+
+[2] (1) _The English Novel._ By Walter Raleigh. Being a short Sketch
+of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of
+'Waverley.' London, 1894. (2) _Aventures de Guerre au temps de la
+Republique et du Consulat._ Par A. Moreau de Jonnes. Preface de M.
+Leon Say. Paris, Guillaumin et Cie., 1893.--_Quarterly Review_,
+October 1894.
+
+[3] Now Sir Walter Raleigh.
+
+[4] Page 179.
+
+[5] _Sense and Sensibility._
+
+[6] _The Art of Illustration_, by Henry Blackburn, 1894.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[7]
+
+
+The preservation and posthumous publication of private correspondence
+has supplied modern society with one of its daintiest literary
+luxuries. The art of letter-writing is, of course, no recent
+invention; it reached a high level of excellence, like almost every
+other branch of refined expression in prose or verse, in the older
+world of Rome. Nevertheless, the exceeding rarity of the specimens
+that have come down to us from those times is an important element of
+their value; while in our own day the letters of eminent persons fill
+many book-shelves in every decent library, and their quantity
+increases out of all proportion to their quality.
+
+It may be said, generally, of fine letter-writing that it is a
+distinctive product of a high civilisation, denoting the existence of
+a cultured and leisurely class, implying the conditions of secure
+intercourse, confidence, sociability, many common interests, and that
+peculiar delight in the stimulating interchange of ideas and feelings
+which is one characteristic of modern life. The language of a country
+must have thrown off its archaic stiffness, must have acquired
+suppleness and variety; the writer's instrument must be a style that
+combines familiarity with distinction, correctness of thought with
+easy diction. It is from the lack of these conditions that the Asiatic
+world has given us no such letters; the material as well as the
+intellectual environment has been wanting. For similar reasons the
+middle ages of Europe produced us none of the kind with which we are
+now dealing; the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries have left us
+very few samples of them; and since in this article we propose to
+treat only of English letter-writers, we may affirm that the art did
+not flourish in England until the eighteenth century, when according
+to certain authorities it rose to something like perfection. It is a
+notable observation of Hume's that Swift is the first Englishman who
+wrote polite prose; and Swift is one of the earliest, as he is still
+one of the pleasantest, writers of private correspondence that has
+taken a permanent place in our literature.
+
+We can understand without difficulty why the eighteenth century was a
+period favourable to the growth of excellent letter-writing. There
+were very few newspapers, and those which appeared were low in tone
+and ill-informed--political pamphleteers abounded and the essayists on
+morals and manners were numerous--but it was chiefly by private hands
+that accurate information and ideas were circulated in a small and
+highly cultivated society with an exquisite taste in literature, with
+a keen interest in public affairs, and a very strong appetite for
+philosophic discussion. Side by side with the intellectual conditions
+we may take into account the national circumstances of that age. The
+post was expensive, with a slow and intermittent circulation, so that
+letters, being infrequent, were worth writing carefully and at
+length; while correspondents were nevertheless not separated by
+distances of time and space sufficient to weaken or extinguish the
+desire of interchanging thoughts and news. For it is within the
+experience of most of us that the difficulty of keeping up regular
+correspondence increases with distance; that friends who meet seldom
+write to each other rarely; and that, although letters are most valued
+by those who are far from home and long absent, yet it is precisely in
+the case of prolonged separation that the chain of friendly
+communication is apt gradually to slacken until it becomes entirely
+disconnected. So long, indeed, as men depended for news on private
+sources, there was always a kind of obligation to write; but the
+telegraph and the newspaper have now monopolised the Intelligence
+Department. On the whole, it may be concluded that the art of
+letter-writing flourishes best within a limited radius of distance,
+among persons living neither very near to each other nor yet far
+apart, who meet occasionally yet not often, and who are within the
+same range of social, political, and intellectual influences. Its best
+period is probably before the advent of copious indefatigable
+journalism, before men have taken to publishing letters in the morning
+papers, and when they have not yet acquired the economical habit of
+reserving all their valuable ideas and information for signed articles
+in some monthly review.
+
+It was under these conditions that the letters of eminent men in the
+eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century were
+generally written. In the former century letter-writing was
+undoubtedly a recognised form of high literary workmanship, with close
+affinities on one side to the diary or private journal, and on another
+to the essay. Long, continuous, and intimate correspondence, as in the
+case of Swift and Walpole, gravitated toward the journal;
+dissertations on literature, politics, and manners were more akin to
+the essay; while in the hands of the novelist the journalistic series
+of letters took artificial development into a method of story-telling.
+On the other side, the tendency of epistles to become essays reached
+its climax in the letters of Burke, some of which are only
+distinguishable from brilliant pamphlets by the formal address and
+subscription.
+
+With the nineteenth century begins an era of amusing and animated
+letter-writing. The classic and somewhat elaborate style of the
+preceding age falls into disuse; the essayist draws gradually back
+into a department of his own; the new school reflects, as is natural,
+the general tendency of English literature toward a livelier and more
+varied movement, with a wider range of subjects and sympathies. In his
+letters, as in his poetry, the precursor of the Naturalistic school
+was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy
+and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his
+reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and somewhat commonplace
+society in the English midlands. That poets should usually have been
+good letter-writers is probably no more than might have been expected,
+for imagination and word-power must tell everywhere; yet the list is
+so long as to be worth noticing. Swift, Pope, Gray, and Cowper in the
+last century, and in the present century Scott, Byron, Shelley,
+Coleridge, and Southey, have all left us distinctive and copious
+correspondence. Wordsworth may, perhaps, be classed as a notable
+exception; for Wordsworth's letters are dull, being at their best more
+like essays or literary dissertations than the free outpouring of
+intimate thought. They have none of the charm which comes from the
+revelation of private doubt or passionate affection that is
+ordinarily stifled by convention; they are, on the contrary, eminently
+respectable, deliberate, and carefully expressed. 'It has ever been
+the habit of my mind,' he writes, 'to trust that expediency will come
+out of fidelity to principles, rather than to seek my principles of
+action in calculations of expediency.' This is what the Americans call
+'high toned'; but the metal is too heavy for the light calibre of a
+letter.
+
+Whether Tennyson had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to
+judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it
+will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of
+language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal
+interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite
+legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of
+considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual
+quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's
+character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and
+reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his
+domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and
+what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional
+insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor
+sees fit to let the dead man speak for himself; they may be employed
+as an advocate chooses the papers in his brief, for attack or defence.
+Or they may be produced without commentary, sifting, or omissions, as
+the unvarnished presentation of a man's private life and particular
+features which a candid friend commits to the judgment of posterity.
+Or, lastly, they may be mere relics, not much more in some instances
+than curiosities, valued for much the same reasons that would set a
+high price on the autograph or the inkstand of a celebrated man, on
+his furniture, his house, or anything that was his. In proportion as
+little or nothing is known of such a man's private life, every scrap
+of his writing increases in value; and so a letter of Shakespeare or
+of Dante would be priceless. But of Shakespeare no letter has come
+down to us; and of Dante not even, we believe, his signature; though
+we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion
+and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's
+works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme
+poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains
+to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when
+a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary
+letters upon petty domesticities.
+
+It is evidently impossible to draw a line that shall accurately divide
+the interest that men feel in a celebrated person from the interest
+that they take in his posthumous correspondence; so as to determine
+how far the letters are good in themselves. When the writer is well
+known, he and his writings are inseparable. Yet some attempt must be
+made, for the purposes of this article, to distinguish critically
+between letters that are readable and will survive by their own
+literary quality, as fine specimens of the art, and those which are
+preserved and published on the score of the writer's name and fame,
+with little aid from their merits. In which category are we to place
+the letters of Keats, including those that have been very recently
+unearthed by diligent literary excavation? His poetry is so exquisite,
+so radiant with imaginative colour, that to see such a man in the
+light of common day, among the ordinary cares and circumstances of the
+lower world, is necessarily a descent and a disillusion. He was young,
+he was poor, he had few acquaintances worthy of him; he roved about
+England and Scotland without adventures; his letters were perfectly
+familiar and unsophisticated. As Mr. Sidney Colvin has written, in an
+excellent preface to an edition of 1891, 'he poured out to those he
+loved his whole self indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness,
+ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good
+sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a
+spirit unsurpassed for native gift and insight.' Every now and then
+the level of his easygoing discourse is lit up by a flash of wit, and
+occasionally by a jet of brilliant fancies among which some of his
+finest poetry may be traced in the process of incubation. His whole
+mind is set upon his art; for that only, and for a few intimate
+friends, does he care to live and work; his letters often tell us when
+and where, under what influences, his best pieces were composed; one
+likes to know, for example, that the _Ode to Autumn_ came to him on a
+fine September day during a Sunday's walk over the stubbles near
+Winchester. His criticisms are always good, and their form
+picturesque. He compares human life to a chamber that becomes
+gradually darkened, in which one door after another is set open,
+showing only dim passages leading out into darkness. This, he says, is
+the burden of the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to
+explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though
+he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious
+advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as
+spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas,
+taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence
+in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless
+there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would
+have left any but a most ephemeral mark apart from their connection
+with his poetry.
+
+In the case of other poets, who were his contemporaries, the verdict
+will be different. They are all to be classed, though not in the same
+line, as writers of letters that have great original and intrinsic
+value. Scott's letters exhibit his generous and masculine nature; the
+buoyancy of his spirits in good or bad fortune; and that romantic
+attachment to old things and ideas which hardened latterly into
+inveterate Toryism. Southey's prose writings will probably survive his
+metrical compositions, which indeed have already fallen into oblivion.
+There is life in a poet so long as he is quoted; but no verses or even
+lines of Southey have fixed themselves in the popular memory. And
+whereas the letters of Keats disclose a mind filled with the sense of
+beauty and rich with poetic seedlings that blossomed into beautiful
+flowers, in Southey's correspondence we discern only an erudite man of
+taste labouring diligently upon epics which he expected to be
+immortal. The letters of Byron stand upon broader ground, because
+Byron was so much more of a personage than either Keats, or Southey,
+or Wordsworth. They supply, in the first place, an invaluable, and
+indeed indispensable, interpretation of his poetry, which is to a
+great extent the imaginative and romantic presentation of his own
+feelings, fortunes, and peculiar experiences. Secondly, they are full
+of good sayings and caustic criticism; they touch upon the domain of
+politics and society as well as upon literature; they give the
+opinions passed upon contemporary events and persons, during a
+stirring period of European history, by a man of genius who was also a
+man of the world; they float on the current of a strangely troubled
+existence. In these letters we have an important contribution to our
+acquaintance with literary circles and London society, and with
+several notable figures on either stage, during the years immediately
+before and after Waterloo. They were published in an introduction to
+the works of a famous poet; yet, although they cannot be detached from
+his poetry, they possess great independent merits of their own. They
+echo the sounds of revelry by night; they strike a note of careless
+vivacity, the tone of a man who is at home alike in good and bad
+company, whose judgment on books and politics, on writers and
+speakers, is always fresh, bold, and original. We may lament that the
+spirit of reckless devilry and dissipation should have entered into
+Byron; and the lessons to be drawn from the scenes and adventures in
+Venice and elsewhere, described for the benefit of Tom Moore, are very
+different from the moral examples furnished by the tranquil and
+well-ordered correspondence of our own day. Yet the world would have
+been poorer for the loss of this memorial of an Unquiet Life, and the
+historical gallery of literature would have missed the full-length
+portrait of an extraordinary man.
+
+The letters of Coleridge, like their writer, belong to another class,
+yet, like Byron's, they have the clear-cut stamp of individuality.
+Here again we have the man himself, with his intensity of feeling, his
+erratic moods and singular phraseology, the softness of his heart and
+the weakness of his will. He belongs to the rapidly diminishing class
+of notable men who have freely poured their real sentiments and
+thoughts out of their brain into their letters, who have given their
+best (without keeping their worst) to their correspondents, so that
+the letters abound with pathetic and amusing confessions, and with
+ideas that bear the stamp of the author's singular idiosyncrasy. The
+_Memorials of Coleorton_ are a collection of letters written to the
+Beaumont family by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott; the
+reader may pass from one to another by taking them as they come; the
+book is like the _menu_ of a dinner with varied courses. Wordsworth's
+letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural
+scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class
+_litterateur_, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in
+both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is
+the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When
+Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of
+divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and
+remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the
+humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society
+plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to
+confess that he found 'bodily relief in weeping.'
+
+     'On Tuesday evening Mr. R----, the author of ----, drank tea and
+     spent the evening with us at Grasmere; and this had produced a very
+     unpleasant effect upon my spirits.... If to be a poet or man of
+     genius entailed on us the necessity of housing such company in our
+     bosoms, I would pray the very flesh off my knees to have a head as
+     dark and unfurnished as Wordsworth's old Molly's.... If I believed
+     it possible that the man liked me, upon my soul I should feel
+     exactly as if I were tarred and feathered.'
+
+And so on through the whole letter, with a comical energy of phrase
+that scorns reserve or compass in giving vent to the misery caused by
+uninteresting conversation. We may contrast this melancholy
+tea-drinking with Byron's rollicking account of a dinner with some
+friends 'of note and notoriety':
+
+     'Like other parties of the same kind, it was first silent, then
+     talking, then argumentative, then disputatious, then
+     unintelligible, then altogethery, then articulate, and then drunk.
+     When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder it was
+     difficult to get down again without stumbling; and, to crown all,
+     Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew
+     staircase, which had been certainly constructed before the
+     invention of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however
+     crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. Both he and Coleman
+     were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the
+     wine carried away my memory, so that all was hiccup and happiness
+     for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the
+     conversation.'
+
+We are, of course, not reviewing Byron or Coleridge; we are only
+giving samples by the way. Here are two great poets, remote from each
+other as the two poles in social circumstances and habit of mind, but
+at any rate alike in this one quality--that their life is in their
+letters, and that in such passages as these the genuine undisguised
+temperament of each writer stands forth in a relief that could only be
+brought out by his own unintentional master-strokes. For neither of
+them was aware that in these scenes he was describing his own
+character--though Byron may have intended to display his wit, and
+Coleridge may have been to some extent conscious of his own humour. In
+the way of literary criticism, again, Coleridge throws out the quaint
+and uncommon remark upon Addison's Essays, that they 'have produced a
+passion for the unconnected in the minds of Englishmen.' And he
+touches delicately upon the negative or barren side of the critical
+mind in his observation that the critics are the eunuchs that guard
+the temple of the Muses.
+
+Of Shelley's letters, again, we may say that they are unconsciously
+autobiographical; they are confessions of character, spontaneous,
+unguarded, abounding with brilliancies and extravagances. They betray
+his shortcomings, but they attest his generosity and courage; they are
+the outpourings of a new spirit, who detests what would now be called
+Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his
+words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He
+abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he
+ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which
+convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which
+astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of
+ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
+despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine
+its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with
+scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,'
+for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to
+persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example
+against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service,
+which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable
+and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the
+letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses to
+character, as reflecting the vicissitudes of a life which was to the
+writer more like the 'fierce vexation of a dream' than a well-spent
+leisurely existence, and as the sincere unstudied expression of his
+emotions. For all these reasons they are essential to a right
+appreciation of his magnificent poetry.
+
+William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come
+down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which
+included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the
+somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not
+worthy. By reason of this position, and because Shelley married his
+daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing,
+though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It
+is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he
+discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics;
+and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent
+paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English
+language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that
+Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'--not
+that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'--whereby he had been seduced
+into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly
+established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other
+talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a
+greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally
+propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the
+whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and
+press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The
+effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly
+against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we
+owe this diverting palinodia. And all Englishmen should be grateful to
+Godwin for having written the tragedy of _Antonio_; for not only was
+it most justly damned, but it also elicited some letters to the
+unlucky author that are unmatched in the record of candid criticism.
+Mrs. Inchbald writes, briefly:
+
+     'I thank you for the play of Antonio, and I most sincerely wish you
+     joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being
+     classed with the successful dramatists of the present time, but
+     which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured few who,
+     during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the
+     stage.'
+
+Coleridge goes to work more elaborately:
+
+     'In the tragedy I have frequently used certain marks (which he
+     gives). Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions
+     that your language is false or intolerable English. The second
+     marks the passages that struck me as _flat_ or mean. The third is a
+     note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have
+     adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book
+     language. The last mark implies bad metre.'
+
+All this is free speaking beyond the compass of modern literary
+consultations. It may be added that Lamb also discussed the play,
+before it was performed, in his letters to Godwin; and that his
+description of Godwin's deportment, of his own feelings, and of the
+behaviour of the audience on the memorable night that witnessed its
+utter failure, has bequeathed to us a comedy over which the tragic
+Muse herself might well become hysterical.
+
+There is, indeed, in the correspondence of this remarkable group a
+tone of frankness and sincerity which, combined with the absence of
+malice and a strong element of fun, distinguishes it from the
+half-veiled disapproval and prudish reserve of later days. 'When you
+next write so eloquently and well against law and lawyers,' says
+Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your
+wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.'
+Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works,
+I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the
+author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half
+understanding of your principles, and the _not_ half understanding of
+my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.'
+His moods and circumstances, his joys and pains, are reflected in his
+language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with
+his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear
+like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct--in brief, he is worth a
+hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is
+like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now
+and then _irradiates_.' In the best letters of this remarkable group
+we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds,
+giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and
+disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their
+correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very
+rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate
+living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar
+key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of
+borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come
+but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third
+shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out
+its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as
+it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a
+stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of
+some of us.
+
+     'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The
+     streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The
+     bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that
+     lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I
+     took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling
+     rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn
+     to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
+     forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house,
+     large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of
+     friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled
+     to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that
+     I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat
+     in my corner.'
+
+We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the
+correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its
+spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and
+natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the
+kind has come down to us from the eighteenth century; and the last
+fifty years of this century, so prolific in biographies and posthumous
+publications of the papers of eminent men, go to prove that in the
+general transformation of letter-writing these peculiar qualities have
+almost, though not altogether, disappeared. Probably conversation has
+suffered a like change; and we may ascribe it generally to a lowering
+of the social temperature, to the habits of reserve, respectability,
+and conventional self-restraint that in these days govern so largely
+the intercourse of men. Something may be due to cautious expurgation
+of passages which tell against the writer, or might offend modern
+taste; yet in other respects contemporary editors have been
+sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so
+discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly
+ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject
+stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and
+which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to
+all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private
+letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but
+it is quite clear that this fine art is undergoing certain
+transmutations, and that on the whole it does not flourish quite so
+vigorously as heretofore.
+
+In a recent article upon Matthew Arnold's letters it is laid down by a
+consummate critic[8] that the first canon of unsophisticated
+letter-writing is that a letter is meant for the eye of a friend, and
+not for the world. 'Even the lurking thought in anticipation of an
+audience destroys the charm; the best letters are always
+improvisations; the public breaks the spell.' In this, as we have
+already suggested, there is much truth; yet the conditions seem to us
+too straitly enjoined; for not every man of genius has the gift of
+striking out his best thoughts, in their best form, clear and true
+from the hot iron of his mind; and in some of our best writers the
+improvising spirit is very faint. If a man writes with leisurely care,
+selecting deliberately the word that exactly matches his thought,
+aiming directly at the heart of his subject and avoiding prolixity, he
+may, like Walpole, Gray, and others, produce a delightful letter,
+provided only that he is sincere and open, has good stuff to give, and
+does not condescend to varnish his pictures. We want his best
+thoughts; we should like to have his best form; we do not always care
+so much for negligent undress. And as for the copious outpouring of
+his personal feelings, one says many things to a friend or kinsman
+that are totally without interest to the public, unless they are
+expressed in some distinctive manner or embody some originality of
+handling an ordinary event. This a writer may have the knack of doing
+artistically, even in a private and confidential letter, without
+betraying the touch of art; nor, indeed, can we ever know how many of
+the best modern letters are really improvised. Then, again, with
+regard to the anticipation of an audience, it is a risk to which
+every man of note must feel that he is exposed; the shadow of
+eventual publicity is always in the background; his letters have
+passed out of his control during his lifetime, and he can only trust
+in the uncertain discretion of his literary executor. He does not care
+to leave the record of his passing moods, his confessions of weakness,
+his personal likings and antipathies, to be discussed by the general
+reader; and it is probable that he only lets his pen run freely when
+he feels assured that his confidential improvisations will be
+judiciously omitted.
+
+It is, we think, impossible to suppose that these considerations have
+not weighed materially upon the minds of eminent men in our own day,
+when biographies have become so much more numerous, and when they are
+so much more closely criticised than formerly. And in comparing the
+letters written in the early part of this century--such as those from
+which we have given a few characteristic quotations--with those which
+have been recently published, we have to take account of these things,
+among other changes of the social and literary environment.
+Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier
+writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more
+biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time.
+There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which
+may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets,
+whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died
+young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by
+the chilly caution of middle or declining age. Their spirits were
+high, they were ardent in the pursuit of ideals; they were defying
+society, they either had no family or were at feud with it, and they
+gave not a thought to the solemn verdict of posterity. For
+correspondents who were brimming over with humour, imagination, and
+enthusiasm, no situation could be more thoroughly favourable to
+sparkling improvisation; and accordingly they have left us letters
+which will be a joy for ever.
+
+The correspondence of our own generation has been written under a
+different intellectual climate, and various circumstances have
+combined to lower the temperature of its vivacity. Posthumous
+publicity is now the manifest destiny that overhangs the private life
+of all notable persons, especially of popular authors, who can observe
+and inwardly digest continual warnings of the treatment which they are
+likely to receive from an insatiable and inconsistent criticism. They
+may have lived long and altered their opinions; they may have
+quarrelled with friends or rivals, and may have become sworn allies
+later; they may have publicly praised one whom in private they may
+have laughed at; for when you have to think what you say, it does not
+follow that you say what you think. All these considerations, enforced
+by repeated examples, are apt to damp the natural ardour of
+improvisation; the more so because the writer may be sure either that
+his genuine utterances will be suppressed by the editor, or that, if
+they are produced, the editor will be roundly abused for giving him
+away. For in these matters the judgment of the general reader is
+wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy.
+The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of
+a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous
+temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest
+animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the
+public. But if all letters that record such scenes and sayings are
+faithfully reproduced in preparing the votive tablet upon which the
+dead man's life is to be delineated, the ungrateful reader answers
+with an accusation of imprudence, indiscretion, and betrayal of
+confidence; and the surviving friends protest still more vehemently.
+Within the last three months these consequences have been forcibly
+illustrated by the reception of Cardinal Manning's Life, in which the
+letters are of extraordinary value toward the formation of a right
+understanding of that remarkable personage. Much of all this
+sensitiveness is clearly due to the hasty fashion of publishing
+private correspondence within a few years of the writer's decease, but
+more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of an inquisitive yet
+censorious society.
+
+If, on the other hand, expurgation is freely employed, the result is a
+kind of emasculation. Nothing is left that can offend or annoy living
+people, or that might damage the writer's own reputation with an
+audience that enjoys, yet condemns, unmeasured confidences. And so we
+get clever, sensible letters of men who have travelled, worked, and
+mixed much in society, who have already put into essays or reviews all
+that they wanted the public to know, and whose private doubts, or
+follies, or frolics, have been neatly removed from their
+correspondence. Let us take, for example, two batches of letters very
+lately published, and written by two men who have left their mark upon
+their generation. Of Dean Stanley it may be affirmed that no
+ecclesiastic of his time was better known, or had a higher reputation
+for strength of character and undaunted Liberalism. His public life
+and his place in the Anglican Church had been already described in a
+meritorious biography; and it might have been expected that these
+letters would bring the reader closer to the man himself, would
+accentuate the points of a striking individuality. There are few of
+these letters, we think, by which such expectations have been
+fulfilled to any appreciable degree. In one or two of them Stanley
+writes with his genuine sincerity and earnestness on the state of his
+mind in regard to the new spirit of ecclesiasticism that had arisen in
+Oxford nearly sixty years ago; we see that he saw and felt the
+magnitude of a coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the
+opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his
+career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature--and he never
+lost his trust in reason--was against the high Roman or sacerdotal
+absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and
+he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government
+which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he
+discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement that was bringing
+about a Roman Catholic revival.
+
+     'Not that I am turned or turning Newmanist, but that I do feel that
+     the crisis in my opinions is coming on, and that the difficulties I
+     find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and
+     that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent
+     system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it
+     is weak and grovelling.' (Letter to C. J. Vaughan, 1838.)
+
+'I expect,' he writes a year later, 'that the whole thing will have
+the effect of making me either a great Newmanite or a great Radical';
+and it did end in making him an advanced Liberal. His practical
+genius, and his free converse with general society (from which Manning
+deliberately turned away as fatal to ecclesiasticism), very soon
+parted him from the theologians.
+
+     'I think it is true,' he writes to Jowett (1849), 'that we have not
+     the same mental interest in talking over subjects of theology that
+     we had formerly. They have lost their novelty, I suppose; we know
+     better where we are, having rolled to the bottom together, and
+     being now able only to make a few uphill steps. I acknowledge fully
+     my own want of freshness; my mind seems at times quite dried up....
+     And at times I have felt an unsatisfied desire after a better and
+     higher sort of life, which makes me impatient of the details of
+     theology.'
+
+In these, and perhaps one or two other passages, we can trace the
+development of character and convictions in the man to whom Jowett
+wrote, thirty years afterwards, that he was 'the most distinguished
+clergyman in the Church of England, who could do more than any one
+towards the great work of placing religion on a rational basis.'[9]
+
+But, on the whole, the quality of these letters is by no means equal
+to their quantity; and too many of them belong to a class which,
+though it may have some ephemeral interest among friends and kinsfolk,
+can retain, we submit, no permanent value at all. It is best described
+under a title common in French literature--_impressions de voyage_. A
+very large part of the volume consists of letters written by Stanley,
+an intelligent and indefatigable tourist, from the countries and
+cities which he visited, from Petersburg and Palestine, from Paris and
+Athens, from Spain and Scotland. The standpoint from which he surveys
+the Holy Land is rather historical and archaeological than devotional;
+but he had everywhere a clear eye for the picturesque in manners and
+scenery. He had excellent opportunities of seeing the places and the
+people; his descriptive powers are considerable; and there is a finely
+drawn picture of All Souls' Day in the Sistine Chapel, written from
+Rome to Hugh Pearson, although a ludicrous incident comes in at the
+end like a false note. Such correspondence might be so arranged
+separately as to make an interesting narrative of travel, but when
+judged by a high literary or intellectual criterion of letter-writing
+it is out of court. It is not too much to aver that most, if not all,
+of these letters might have been written by any refined and cultivated
+Englishman, whose education and social training had given him correct
+tastes and a many-sided interest in the world. They belong to the type
+of private diary or chronicle, and as such they inevitably include
+trivialities, though not many. Some of Stanley's letters are from
+Scotland, where he travels about admiring its wildness, and with a
+cultured interest in its antiquities. But no country has been better
+ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original
+hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it
+to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more
+than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or,
+indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are
+none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the
+beauties of Nature.
+
+     'For my part,' he wrote, 'with reference to my friends northwards,
+     I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth
+     and sea and sky (when all is said) is but a house to dwell in. If
+     the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits
+     at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly,
+     I have no need to stand staring at the gilded looking-glass, nor at
+     the five-shilling print over the mantelpiece. Just as important to
+     me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world; eye pampering,
+     but satisfies no heart.'
+
+This may be Cockney taste, yet it is better reading than Stanley's
+account of Edinburgh or the valley of Glencoe.
+
+The editor assures us, in his preface, that none of these letters
+touch upon theological controversies, yet many readers might have been
+very willing to part with some of the travelling journal for closer
+knowledge of Stanley's inward feelings while he was bearing up the
+fight of liberty and toleration against the gathering forces that have
+since scattered and well-nigh overwhelmed the once flourishing Broad
+Church party. Well might Jowett write to him in 1880, 'You and I, and
+our dear friend Hugh Pearson, and William Rogers, and some others, are
+rather isolated in the world, and we must hold together as long as we
+can.' All those who are here named have passed away, leaving no party
+leaders of equal rank and calibre, and if Stanley's letters survive at
+all, they will live upon those passages which remind us how
+strenuously he contended for the intellectual freedom that he believed
+to be the true spiritual heritage of English churchmen.
+
+The latest contribution to the department of national literature that
+we have been surveying is the volume containing the letters of Matthew
+Arnold (1848-88). 'Here and there,' writes their editor, 'I have been
+constrained, by deference to living susceptibilities, to make some
+slight excisions; but with regard to the bulk of the letters this
+process had been performed before the manuscript came into my hands.'
+No one has any business to question the exercise of a discretion which
+must have been necessary in publishing private correspondence so
+recently written, and only those who saw the originals can decide
+whether they have been weakened or strengthened by the pruning. On the
+other hand, the first canon of unsophistical letter-writing, as laid
+down by the eminent critic already cited--that they should be written
+for the eye of a friend, never for the public--is amply fulfilled. 'It
+will be seen' (we quote again from the preface) 'that the letters are
+essentially familiar and domestic, and were evidently written without
+a thought that they would ever be read beyond the circle of his
+family.' They are, in short, mostly family letters that have been
+necessarily subjected to censorship, and it would be unreasonable to
+measure a collection of this kind by the high standard that qualifies
+for admission to the grade of permanent literature. As these letters
+are to supply the lack of a biography (which was expressly prohibited
+by his own wish), we are not to look for further glimpses of a
+character which his editor rightly terms 'unique and fascinating.' The
+general reader may therefore feel some disappointment at finding that
+the correspondence takes no wider or more varied range; for Matthew
+Arnold's circle of acquaintances must have been very large, and he
+must have been in touch with the leading men in the political,
+academical, and official society of his day.
+
+The letters are as good as they could be expected to be under these
+conditions, which are to our mind heavily disadvantageous. We must set
+aside those which fall under the class of _impressions de voyage_, for
+the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling
+correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold
+was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the
+vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his
+prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters,
+as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of
+thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance,
+in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong
+desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen:
+
+     'The want of independence of mind, the shutting their eyes and
+     professing to believe what they do not, the running blindly
+     together in herds for fear of some obscure danger and horror if
+     they go alone, is so eminently a vice of the English, I think, of
+     the last hundred years, has led them and is leading them into such
+     scrapes and bewilderment, that,' etc., etc.
+
+It is certainly hard to recognise in this picture the features of the
+rough roving Englishman who in the course of the last hundred years
+has conquered India, founded great colonies, and fought the longest
+and most obstinate war of modern times: who has been the type of
+insularity and an incurable antinomian in religion and politics. Not
+many pages afterwards, however, we find Arnold sharing with the herd
+of his countrymen the shallow 'conviction as to the French always
+beating any number of Germans who come into the field against them.'
+He adds that 'they will never be beaten by any other nation but the
+English, for to every other nation they are in efficiency and
+intelligence decidedly superior'--an opinion which contradicts his
+previous judgment of them, and replaces the national superiority on a
+lofty though insecure basis; for if he was wrong about the French, he
+may be wrong about us whom he puts above them. Arnold admired the
+French as much as Carlyle liked the Germans, and both of them enjoyed
+ridiculing or rating the English; but each was unconsciously swayed by
+his own particular tastes and temperament, and neither of them had the
+gift of political prophecy, which is, indeed, very seldom vouchsafed
+to the highly imaginative mind. He had a strong belief, rare among
+Englishmen, in administrative organisation. 'Depend upon it,' he
+writes, 'that the great States of the Continent have two great
+elements of cohesion, in their administrative system and in their
+army, which we have not.' The general conclusion which Arnold seems to
+have drawn from his travels in Europe and America is that England was
+far behind France in lucidity of ideas, and inferior to the United
+States in straightforward political energy and the faculties of
+national success. 'Heaven forbid that the English nation should become
+like this (the French) nation; but Heaven forbid that it should remain
+as it is. If it does, it will be beaten by America on its own line,
+and by the Continental nations on the European line. I see this as
+plain as I see the paper before me.' Since this was written in 1865,
+England has been perversely holding her own course, nor has she yet
+fulfilled Arnold's melancholy foreboding, by which he was 'at times
+overwhelmed with depression' that England was sinking into a sort of
+greater Holland, 'for want of perceiving how the world is going and
+must go, and preparing herself accordingly.'
+
+On the other hand, his imaginative faculty comes out in his
+speculation upon the probable changes in the development of the
+American people that might follow their separation into different
+groups, if the civil war between the Northern and Southern States
+(which had just begun) should break up the Union.
+
+     'Climate and mixture of race will then be able fully to tell, and I
+     cannot help thinking that the more diversity of nation there is on
+     the American continent, the more chance there is of one nation
+     developing itself with grandeur and richness. It has been so in
+     Europe. What should we all be if we had not one another to check us
+     and to be learned from? Imagine an English Europe. How frightfully
+     _borne_ and dull! Or a French Europe either, for that matter.'
+
+The suggestion is, perhaps, more fanciful than profound; for history
+does not repeat itself; and, in fact, the result of breaking up South
+America into a dozen political groups has not yet produced any very
+satisfactory development of national character. Much more than
+political subdivision goes to the creation of a new Europe;
+nevertheless Arnold is probably right in supposing that uniformity of
+institutions and a somewhat monotonous level of social conditions over
+a vast area, may have depressed and stunted the free and diversified
+growth of North American civilisation.
+
+The literary criticism to be found in these letters shows a fastidious
+and delicate taste that had been nurtured almost too exclusively upon
+the masterpieces of classic antiquity. Homer he ranked far above
+Shakespeare, though one might think them too different for comparison;
+and he praises 'two articles in _Temple Bar_ (1869), one on Tennyson,
+the other on Browning,' which were afterwards republished in a book
+that made some stir in its day, and has brought down upon its author
+the unquenchable resentment of his brother poets. He thought that both
+Macaulay and Carlyle were encouraging the English nation in its
+emphatic Philistinism, and thus counteracting his own exertions to
+lighten the darkness of earnest but opaque intelligences. As his
+interest in religious movements was acute, so his observations
+occasionally throw some light upon the exceedingly complicated problem
+of ascertaining the general drift of the English mind in regard to
+things spiritual. The force which is shaping the future, is it with
+the Ritualists or with the undogmatical disciples of a purely moral
+creed? With neither, Arnold replies; not with any of the orthodox
+religions, nor with the neo-religious developments which are
+pretending to supersede them.
+
+     'Both the one and the other give to what they call religion, and to
+     religious ideas and discussions, too large and absorbing a place in
+     human life. Man feels himself to be a more various and richly
+     endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life
+     allowed, and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long
+     suppressed and imperfectly understood instincts of their varied
+     nature.'
+
+No man studied more closely than Arnold the intellectual tendencies of
+his generation, so that on the most difficult of contemporary
+questions this opinion is worth quoting, although the ritualistic
+leanings of the present day hardly operate to support it. But here, as
+in his published works, his religious utterances are somewhat
+ambiguous and oracular; and one welcomes the marking of a definite
+epoch in Church history when he writes emphatically that 'the Broad
+Church _among the clergy_ may be said to have almost perished with
+Stanley.'
+
+But correspondence that was never meant for publication is hardly a
+fair subject for literary criticism. Arnold seems to have written
+hurriedly, in the intervals of hard work, of journeyings to and fro
+upon his rounds of inspection, and of much social bustle; he had not
+the natural gift of letter-writing, and he probably did it more as a
+duty than a pleasure. He had none of the ever-smouldering irritability
+which compelled Carlyle to slash right and left of him at the people
+whom he met, at everything that he disliked, and every one whom he
+despised. Nor was he born to chronicle the small beer of everyday life
+in that spirit of contemplative quietism which is bred out of abundant
+leisure and retirement. A few lines from one of Cowper's letters may
+serve to indicate the circumstances in which 'our best letter-writer,'
+as Southey calls him, lived and wrote a hundred years ago in a muddy
+Buckinghamshire village:
+
+     'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in
+     the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravel walk, thirty yards
+     long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet
+     it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year,
+     during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'
+
+If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty
+and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand
+that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste
+nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for
+throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's
+correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must
+undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have
+been published upon their own intrinsic merits.
+
+Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category;
+they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and
+character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively
+insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the
+humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer
+did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be
+published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised
+conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has
+been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some
+doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so
+clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the
+mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether
+unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any
+other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it,
+is, in our judgment, an open question; but surely Carlyle must have
+selected and sharpened with some care the barbed epithets upon which
+he suspends his grotesque and formidable caricatures.
+
+For example, he writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in
+advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing--'A
+bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long
+blunt characterless nose--the whole visit the most unutterable
+stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered,
+farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with
+a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the
+House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the
+poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and
+shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an
+auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite
+prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman
+nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes
+I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so
+Carlyle goes on hanging up portraits of the notables whom he met and
+conversed with, to the great edification of these latter days. No more
+dangerous interviewer has ever practised professionally than this
+artist in epithets, on whom the outward visible figure of a man
+evidently made deep impressions; whereas the ordinary letter-writer is
+usually content to record the small talk. As material for publication
+his correspondence had three singular advantages. His earlier letters
+were excellent, and we may hazard the generalisation that almost all
+first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the
+ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that
+these letters could be published very soon after his death without
+much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting
+might concern; and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who
+loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor
+considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait.
+Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue--that they largely
+contribute to the creation of a true likeness of the writer, for in
+sketching other people he was also drawing himself. He could also
+paint the interior of a country house, as at Fryston, and his
+landscapes are vivid. He was, in short, an impressionist of the first
+order, who grouped all his details in subordination to a general
+effect, and never gave his correspondent a mere catalogue of trivial
+particulars.
+
+It was originally in a letter to his brother that Carlyle wrote his
+celebrated description of an interview with Coleridge. No two men
+could be more different in taste or temperament, and yet any one who
+reads attentively Coleridge's letters may observe a certain similarity
+to Carlyle's writing, not only in the figured style and prophetic
+manner, but also in the tendency of their political ideas. In the
+matter of linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of
+them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in
+politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the
+ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic
+philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief
+in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that
+salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound
+metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies
+were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual
+forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable
+conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous
+mental constitution of mind, on whom the ideas and impressions that
+had been secreted produced an excitability that was discharged upon
+correspondents in a torrent of language, sweeping away considerations
+of reserve or self-regard, and submerging the commonplace bits of news
+and everyday observations which accumulate in the letters of
+respectable notabilities. To whomsoever the letters may be addressed,
+they are in consequence equally good and characteristic. Carlyle's
+epistles to his wife and brother are among the best in the collection;
+and Coleridge threw himself with the same ardour into letters to
+Charles Lamb and to Lord Liverpool. It is this capacity for pouring
+out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of one's heart
+to a friend, which, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of
+spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water
+mark of English literature.
+
+But in saying that these conditions are eminently favourable to the
+production of fine letter-writing, we do not mean to affirm that they
+are essential. Against such a theory it would be sufficient to quote
+Cowper, though he had the poetic fire, and was subject to the
+religious frenzy; and we know that repose and refinement have a
+tendency to develop good correspondents. Among these we may number
+Edward FitzGerald, whose letters are, perhaps, the most artistic of
+any that have recently appeared, and may be placed without hesitation
+in the class of letters that have a high intrinsic merit independently
+of the writer's extraneous reputation; for FitzGerald was a recluse
+with a tinge of misanthropy, nearly unknown to the outer world, except
+by one exquisite paraphrase of a Persian poem, and his popularity
+rests almost entirely upon his published correspondence. Of these
+letters, so excellent of their kind, can it be said that they have the
+note of improvisation, that they were written for a friend's eye,
+without thought or care for that ordeal of posthumous publication
+which has added, as we have been told, a fresh terror to death? The
+composition is exactly suited to the tone of easy, pleasant
+conversation; the writing has a serene flow, with ripples of wit and
+humour; sometimes occupied with East Anglian rusticities and local
+colouring, sometimes with pungent literary criticisms; it is never
+exuberant, but nowhere dull or commonplace; the language is concise,
+with a sedulous nicety of expression. A man of delicate irony, living
+apart from the rough, tumbling struggle for existence, he was in most
+things the very opposite to Carlyle, whose _French Revolution_ he
+admired not much, and who, he thinks, 'ought to be laughed at a
+little.' Such a man was not likely to write even the most ordinary
+letter without a certain degree of mental preparation, without some
+elaboration of thought, or solicitude as to form and finish, for all
+which processes he had ample leisure. It may be noticed that he never
+condescends to the travelling journal, and that his voyaging
+impressions are given in a few fine strokes; but, although he was a
+home-keeping Englishman, he was free from household cares, nor did he
+keep up that obligatory family correspondence which, when it is
+published to exhibit the domestic habits and affections of an eminent
+person, becomes ever after a dead-weight upon his biography.
+
+In endeavouring to analyse the charm of these delightful letters, we
+may suggest that they gain their special flavour from his talent for
+compounding them, like a skilful _chef de cuisine_, out of various
+materials or intellectual condiments assorted and dexterously blended.
+He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern
+Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree,
+in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the sedentary to the
+stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years
+earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had
+few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for
+perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ancient and
+modern, and for surveying the field of contemporary literature. His
+letters to Fanny Kemble have the advantage of unity in tone that
+belongs to a series written to the same person, though the absence of
+replies is apt to produce the effect of a monologue. How far good
+letter-writing depends upon the course of exchange, upon the stimulus
+of pleasant and prompt replies, is a question not easily answered,
+since the correspondence on both sides of two good writers is very
+rarely put together. Mrs. Kemble had certain fixed rules which must
+have been fatal to the free epistolary spirit. 'I never write,' she
+said, 'until I am written to; I always write when I am written to, and
+I make a point of always returning the same amount of paper that I
+receive;' but at any rate it is evident that FitzGerald's letters to
+her were regularly answered. He had a light hand on descriptions of
+season and scenery; he could give the autumnal atmosphere, the
+awakening of leaf and flower in spring, the distant roar of the German
+Ocean on the East Anglian coast. As he could record his daily life
+without the minute prolixity of a diary, so he could throw off
+criticisms on books without falling into the manner of an essayist. In
+regard to the 'fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle,' he asks doubtfully
+whether he with all his genius will not subside into the Level that
+covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens,
+with all _his_ genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already
+after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the
+contemporary poets--Tennyson, Browning, or Swinburne--seem to have
+entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales
+of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with manifest
+enjoyment the lines:
+
+    'In a small cottage on the rising ground,
+    West of the waves, and just beyond the sound.'
+
+'The sea,' he writes, 'somehow talks to one of old things,' probably
+because it is changeless by comparison with the land; and a man whose
+life is still and solitary is affected by the transitory aspect of
+natural things, because he can watch them pass. As old friends drop
+off he touches in his letters upon the memories of days that are gone,
+and he consorts more and more with the personages of his favourite
+poets and romancers, living thus, as he says, among shadows.
+
+Here is a man to whom correspondence was a real solace and a vehicle
+of thought and feeling, not a mere note-book of travel, nor a conduit
+of confidential small talk. A faint odour of the seasons hangs round
+some of these letters, of the sunshine and rain, of dark days and
+roads blocked with snow, of the first spring crocus and the faded
+autumnal garden plots. We can perceive that, as his retirement became
+habitual with increasing age, the correspondence became his main
+outlet of ideas and sensations, taking more and more the place of
+friendly visits and personal discussion as a channel of intercourse
+with the external world. The Hindu sages despised action as
+destructive of thought; and undoubtedly the cool secluded vale of life
+is good for the cultivation of letter-writing, in one who has the
+artistic hand, and to whom this method of gathering up the fruits of
+reading and meditation, the harvest of a quiet eye, comes easily. In
+many respects the letters of FitzGerald, like his life, are in strong
+contrast to Carlyle's; and FitzGerald was somewhat startled by the
+publication of Carlyle's 'Reminiscences.' He thinks that, on the
+whole, 'they had better have been kept unpublished;' though on reading
+the 'Biography' he writes: 'I did not know that Carlyle was so good,
+grand, and even lovable, till I read the letters which Froude now
+edits.' He himself was not likely to give the general reader more than
+he wished to be known about his private affairs; and if one or two
+remarks with a sting in them appeared when these letters were first
+published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the
+book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative
+attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and
+twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious
+spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes
+humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in
+which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends,
+to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and FitzGerald,
+each in his very different manner, at the head of all the
+letter-writers of the generation to which they belong, which is not
+precisely our own. It is to be recollected that a man must be dead
+before he can win reputation in this particular branch of literature,
+and that he cannot be fairly judged until time has removed many
+obstacles to unreserved publication. But both Carlyle and FitzGerald
+had long lives.
+
+Mr. Stevenson, whose letters are the latest important contribution to
+this department of the national library, died early, in the full force
+of his intellect, at the zenith of his fame as a writer of romance.
+His letters have been edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin, with all the
+sympathy and insight into character that are inspired by congenial
+tastes and close friendship; and his preface gives an excellent
+account of the conditions, physical and mental, under which they were
+written, and of the limitations observed in the editing of them.
+
+     'Begun,' Mr. Colvin says, 'without a thought of publicity, and
+     simply to maintain an intimacy undiminished by separation, they
+     assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable,
+     and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts,
+     that it by-and-by occurred to him ... that "some kind of a book"
+     might be extracted out of them after his death.... In a
+     correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection
+     must needs be delicate. Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas,
+     of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less
+     to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.... He was a
+     watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own
+     mind.'
+
+The whole passage, too long to be quoted, suggests an instructive
+analysis of the mental qualities and disposition that go to make a
+good letter-writer--a dash of egotism, sensitiveness to outward
+impressions, literary charm, the habit of keeping a frank and familiar
+record of every day's moods, thoughts, and doings, the picturesque
+surroundings of a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa
+the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for
+Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing
+influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in
+tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech
+with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege
+of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none
+of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the
+incidents are uncommon or uncommonly well told, and the writer is
+never caught looking over his shoulder at posterity.
+
+For extracts there is now little space left in this article; but we
+may quote, to show Stevenson's style of landscape-painting, a few
+lines describing a morning in Samoa after a heavy gale:
+
+     'I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was
+     all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward
+     slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not
+     a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on
+     the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall,
+     and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a
+     thoroughfare close by.'
+
+It is good for the imaginative letter-writer to live within sight and
+sound of the sea, to hear the long roll, and to see from his window 'a
+nick of the blue Pacific.' It is also good for him to be within range
+of savage warfare, and to take long rough rides in a disturbed
+country. On one such occasion he writes:
+
+     'Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in
+     Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence
+     that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride,
+     sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven
+     of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours'
+     political discussions with an interpreter; to say nothing of
+     sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati
+     would look askance of itself.'
+
+The feat might not seem miraculous to a captain of frontier irregulars
+in hard training; but for a delicate novelist in weak health it was
+pluckily done. These letters would be readable if Stevenson had
+written nothing else, though of course their worth is doubled by our
+interest in a man of singular talent who died prematurely. They
+illustrate the tale of his life and portray his character; and they
+form an addition, valuable in itself, and unique as a variety, to the
+series of memorable English letter-writers.
+
+Mr. Colvin mentions, in his preface, that Stevenson's talk was
+irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, full of matter and mirth. It
+cannot be denied that between correspondence and conversation,
+regarded as fine arts, there is a close kinship; and very similar
+reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the
+decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of
+letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this
+sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated
+periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that
+nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge
+early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters
+from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written
+must have increased enormously; it is also true that many more are
+published than heretofore, and that as a great many of these are not
+above mediocrity, are valueless as literature, and of little worth
+biographically, they produce on the disappointed reader the effect of
+a general depreciation of the standard. Nevertheless, this article
+will have been written to little purpose, unless it has shown fair
+cause for rejecting such a conclusion, and for maintaining that,
+although fine letter-writers, like poets, are few and far between, yet
+they have not been wanting in our own time, and are not likely to
+disappear. There will always be men, like Coleridge or Carlyle, whose
+impetuous thoughts and humoristic conceptions cannot perpetually
+submit to the forms and limitations and delays of printing and
+publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and
+prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And
+although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet
+corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of
+literary recluses--of those who pass their days in reading books, in
+watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select
+circle of friends--will also continue. Whether Englishwomen, who write
+letters up to a certain point better than Englishmen, will now rise,
+as Frenchwomen have done, to the highest line, and why they have not
+done so heretofore, are points that we have no space here for taking
+up.
+
+But it is the exceptional peculiarity of letters, as a form of
+literature, that the writer can never superintend their publication.
+During his lifetime he has no control over them, they are not in his
+hands; and they do not appear until after his death. He must rely
+entirely, therefore, upon the discretion of his editor, who has to
+balance the wishes of a family, or the susceptibilities of an
+influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of
+duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination
+toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some
+remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of
+Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring
+fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the
+underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse,
+as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened
+monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may
+insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and
+shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But
+such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the
+larger field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present
+occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history
+and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly
+the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is
+universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely
+attained.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] (1) _The Letters of Charles Lamb._ Edited, with Introduction and
+Notes, by Alfred Ainger. London, 1888. (2) _Letters of John Keats to
+his Family and Friends._ Edited by Sidney Colvin. London, 1891. (3)
+_Letters and Verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley._ Edited by Rowland E.
+Prothero. London, 1895. (4) _Letters of Matthew Arnold_, 1848-88.
+Collected and arranged by George Russell. London and New York, 1895.
+(5) _Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble._ Edited by William
+Aldis Wright. London, 1895. (6) _Vailima Letters, from Robert Louis
+Stevenson to Sidney Colvin_, 1890-94. London, 1895.--_Edinburgh
+Review_, April 1896.
+
+[8] Mr. John Morley, _Nineteenth Century_, December 1895.
+
+[9] _Dean Stanley's Letters_, p. 440.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+
+It is remarkable that in a century which is far more profusely
+supplied with biographies than any preceding age, and at a time when
+chronicles of small beer no less than of fine vintages seem to gratify
+the rather indiscriminate taste of the British public, no formal life
+has ever been produced of Thackeray. That this omission has been due
+to his express wish is well understood, and at any rate it may be
+cited as a praiseworthy breach of the latter-day custom of publishing
+a man's private affairs and correspondence as soon as possible after
+his funeral. Nevertheless the generation of those who knew Thackeray,
+for whom and among whom he wrote, is now rapidly vanishing; so that it
+would have been a kind of national misfortune if posterity had been
+left without some authentic record of his personal history, his
+earlier experiences, his characteristic sayings and doings, and the
+general environment in which he worked.
+
+For the biographical introductions, therefore, which are appended to
+each volume of this new edition,[10] we owe gratitude to his daughter,
+Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.[11] No more than seven volumes have been
+actually published up to this date, but since these include a large
+proportion of Thackeray's most important and characteristic work, we
+make no apology for anticipating the completion of the series by an
+attempt to make a critical examination of the salient points which
+distinguish his genius, and mark his place in general literature. Mrs.
+Ritchie tells us in a brief prefatory note that although her father's
+wishes have prevented her from writing his complete biography she has
+at last determined to publish memories which chiefly concern his
+books. Her desire has also been 'to mark down some of the truer chords
+to which his life was habitually set'; and accordingly we have in
+every volume an instalment, too brief and intermittent for such
+interesting matter, of the incidents and vicissitudes belonging to
+successive stages of his life and work, with glimpses of his mind and
+tastes, of the friendships that he made, and the society in which he
+moved. The form in which these reminiscences and _reliquiae_ appear has
+necessarily disconnected them, since they have been evidently chosen
+on the plan of connecting each novel with the circumstances or
+particular field of observation which may have suggested the plot, the
+scenery, or the characters. One can thus see that Thackeray's mind,
+like his sketch-book, was constantly taking down vivid impressions of
+people and places, and in some of his notes of travel can be easily
+traced the sources whence he took hints for elaborate studies. But
+under this arrangement the chronology becomes here and there somewhat
+entangled. _Pendennis_, for example, was finished in 1850, but as the
+hero's life at Oxbridge is described in the novel, its introduction
+takes us back to the period when the writer himself was at Cambridge
+in 1829. _Vanity Fair_, again, written in 1845, contains a well-known
+episode of Dobbin's school life, and the story carries us more than
+once to the Continent; so the introduction gives us recollections of
+Charterhouse, where Thackeray went in 1822, and of travels about
+Germany in the early thirties. The _Contributions to Punch_, which
+form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten
+years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for
+references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most
+successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines
+cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a
+connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as
+the system fortunately affords room and reason for giving many fresh
+details of his daily life, with some of his letters, or extracts from
+them, which are fresh and amusing, we may cheerfully pass over these
+petty drawbacks. We are heartily thankful for our admission to a
+closer acquaintance with an author who has drawn some immortal
+pictures of English society, its manners, prejudices, and
+characteristic types, in novels that will always hold the first rank
+in our lighter literature.
+
+How his boyhood was passed is tolerably well known already. Returning
+home in childhood from India he was put first to a preparatory school,
+and afterwards, for nigh seven years, to Charterhouse. At eighteen he
+went up to Cambridge, where he spoke in the Union, wrote in university
+magazines, criticised Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_, 'a beautiful poem,
+though the story is absurd,' and composed a parody on Tennyson's prize
+poem, _Timbuctoo_. In 1830 he travelled in Germany, and had his
+interview at Weimar with Goethe; and from 1831 we find him settled in
+a London pleader's office, reading law with temporary assiduity,
+frequenting the theatres and Caves of Harmony, making many literary
+acquaintances, taking runs into the country to canvass for Charles
+Buller, and trying his 'prentice hand at journalism. His vocation for
+literature speedily damped his legal ardour, and drew him out of Mr.
+Tapsell's chambers, where he left a desk full of sketches and
+caricatures. In May 1832 he wrote: 'This lawyer's preparatory
+education is certainly one of the most cold-blooded, prejudicial
+pieces of invention that ever a man was slave to;' and he longs for
+fresh air and fresh butter. By August he had fled to Paris, where he
+read French, worked at a painter's _atelier_, and took seriously to
+the work of a newspaper correspondent. On the romantic school, which
+was just then at its height, he makes the following remark, which
+betrays the antipathy to artificial and theatrical tendencies in
+literature that always provoked his satire:
+
+     'In the time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine
+     gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet
+     and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more
+     poetical than their rigid predecessors.'
+
+He had little taste, in fact, for mediaevalism in any shape, and 'old
+Montaigne' was more to his liking. We are told, also, that he became
+absorbed in Cousin's _Philosophy_, noting upon it that 'the excitement
+of metaphysics must equal almost that of gambling'; and finding,
+perhaps, no great attraction in either. After his marriage in 1836 he
+settled down in London, devoting himself thenceforward to literature
+as a profession; the _Yellowplush Papers_, published in 1837 by
+_Fraser's Magazine_, being his earliest contribution of any length or
+significance. In the introductory chapter Mrs. Ritchie says:
+
+     'I hardly know--nor, if I knew, should I care to give here--the
+     names and the details of the events which suggested some of the
+     _Yellowplush Papers_. The history of Mr. Deuceace was written from
+     life during a very early period of my father's career. Nor can one
+     wonder that his views were somewhat grim at that particular time,
+     and still bore the impress of an experience lately and very dearly
+     bought.... As a boy he had lost money at cards to some cardsharpers
+     who scraped acquaintance with him. He never blinked at the truth or
+     spared himself; but neither did he blind himself to the real
+     characters of the people in question, when once he had discovered
+     them. His villains became curious studies in human nature; he
+     turned them over in his mind, and he caused Deuceace, Barry Lyndon,
+     and Ikey Solomons, Esq., to pay back some of their ill-gotten
+     spoils, in an involuntary but very legitimate fashion, when he put
+     them into print and made them the heroes of those grim early
+     histories.'
+
+We may infer from this passage that Thackeray's mind acted not only as
+a microscope but as a magnifying glass; he had an eye, as one knows,
+for characteristic details, and it appears that he could also enlarge
+the small fry of scoundrelism into magnificent rascals. There can be
+no doubt that he had the image-making faculty of sensitive genius, and
+that much of all he saw and felt went to fill up his canvas and fix
+his point of view. Writing to his mother, he once said, 'It is the
+fashion to say that people are unfortunate who have lost their money.
+Dearest mother, we know better than that;' though 'for years and years
+he had to face the great question of daily bread.' But while he could
+battle stoutly against losses of this kind, he had no mercy on the
+rogues who caused them; and his indignation, accentuated by the strain
+of married life on a very narrow income, may account in some degree
+for the cynical tone, now sombre, now mocking, which so perceptibly
+dominates his earlier writings, and pervades all his books, though in
+a lesser and more tolerant way, up to the end. Against this shaded
+background, however, we may set many kindly figures, and the contrast
+is heightened by the humorous joviality which finds vent in his
+talent for caricature. To this we owe the full-length portrait of
+Major Gahagan, and a whole gallery of other drawings, usually of
+Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The
+striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct,
+between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic
+unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later
+and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic
+proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so
+predominate as to disconcert the judgment of a generation which has
+become habituated, at the present day, to a less energetic and
+uncompromising style of exposing fools and gibbeting knaves. And after
+making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste
+which separate us from our fathers in every region of art--and even
+admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality,
+snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays--we
+are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is
+superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier
+stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some
+passages in them it might be inferred by foreigners that the better
+born Englishmen habitually indulged in rudeness toward their social
+inferiors, and that English domestics in good houses broke out into
+vulgar insolence whenever they could do so with impunity.
+
+Take, for an example, in the scene from _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_,
+the behaviour of Mr. Preston, 'one of her Majesty's Secretaries of
+State,' to an underbred but good-tempered little city clerk, whom Lady
+Drum takes in her carriage for a drive in Hyde Park, and whom she
+hints he might ask to dinner. Mr. Preston acts on the hint, but with
+savage sarcasm, and Titmarsh, the clerk, accepts in order to plague
+the minister for his astounding rudeness:
+
+     '"I did not," he says, "intend to dine with the man, but only to
+     give him a lesson in manners."'
+
+And so, when the carriage drove up to Mr. Preston's door, he says to
+him:
+
+     '"When you came up and asked who the devil I was, I thought you
+     might have put the question in a more polite manner, but it wasn't
+     my business to speak. When, by way of a joke, you invited me to
+     dinner, I answered in a joke too, and here I am. But don't be
+     frightened, I'm not agoing to dine with you."...
+
+     '"Is that all, sir?" says Mr. Preston, still in a rage. "If you
+     have done, will you leave the house, or shall my servants turn you
+     out? Turn out this fellow; do you hear me?"'
+
+Assuming that sixty years ago a Secretary of State was much the same
+sort of man that he is to-day, what are we to think of this spirited
+colloquy? and what kind of impression will it, and others no less
+forcible, produce upon the future student of manners who turns to
+light literature as the mirror of contemporary society?
+
+With regard, again, to the _Yellowplush Papers_, is it from
+unpardonable fastidiousness, the affectation of an over-refined
+literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have
+been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The
+use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of
+ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr.
+Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we
+meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the
+cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most
+appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary
+novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this
+dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old
+acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with
+Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt
+whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the
+author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the
+legitimate boundaries of literature as a fine art, and whether they do
+not much rather harm than heighten his permanent reputation when they
+are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It
+is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken
+record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the
+Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is no subject for dramatic
+treatment.
+
+Yet we are aware that it may be practically impossible to publish
+incomplete editions of a very popular writer; and in the extravagances
+of his youth one may discern the promise of much higher things. Very
+rapidly, in fact, in the work which comes next, Thackeray rises at
+once to a far superior level of artistic performance. We are not
+indisposed to endorse the opinion, pronounced more than once by good
+judges, that the high-water mark of his peculiar genius was touched by
+_Barry Lyndon_, which first exhibits the rare and distinctive
+qualities that were completely developed in his later and larger
+novels. It may be affirmed, as a general rule, that most of our
+eminent writers of fiction have leapt, as Scott did, into the arena
+with some work of first-class merit, which has immediately caught
+public attention and established their position in literature. Their
+fugitive pieces, their crudities and imperfect essays, have been
+either judiciously suppressed or consigned to oblivion. They have
+followed, one may say, the goodly custom prescribed by the governor
+of the Cana marriage feast; they put forth in the beginning their good
+wine, and they fall back upon inferior brands only when the public,
+having well drunk of the potent vintage, will swallow anything from a
+favourite author. We may regret that Thackeray's start as a man of
+letters should have furnished an exception to this salutary rule; and
+in surveying, after the lapse of many years, his collected works, we
+are disposed to observe that no first-class writer has suffered more
+from the enduring popularity which has encouraged the republication of
+everything that is his, from the finished _chefs-d'oeuvres_ down to
+the ephemeral and unripe products of an exuberant youth. He would have
+given the world a notable confirmation of the rule that a great author
+usually leads off on a high note, if he had opened his munificent
+literary entertainment with _Barry Lyndon_. We quote here from Mrs.
+Ritchie's introduction:
+
+     'My father once said to me when I was a girl, "You needn't read
+     _Barry Lyndon_; you won't like it." Indeed it is scarcely a book to
+     _like_, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power
+     and mastery.... Barry Lyndon tells his own story, so as to enlist
+     every sympathy against himself, and yet all flows so plausibly, so
+     glibly, that one can hardly explain how the effect was produced.
+     From the very first sentence, almost, one receives the impression
+     of a lawless adventurer, brutal, heartless, with low instincts and
+     rapid perceptions. Together with his own autobiography, he gives a
+     picture of the world in which he lives and brags, a picture so
+     vivid ... that as one reads one almost seems to hear the tread of
+     remorseless fate sounding through all the din and merriment. Take
+     those descriptions of the Prussian army during the Seven Years'
+     War, and of that hand of man which weighs so heavily upon man--what
+     a haunting page in history!'
+
+These remarks are very justly appreciative, for the book stamps
+Thackeray as a fine impressionist, as an artist who skilfully mixes
+the colours of reality and imagination into a composition of striking
+scenes and the effective portrayal of character. With extraordinary
+ability and consistency to the type he works out the gradual evolution
+of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring
+impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the
+intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish
+profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county
+magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which
+were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex
+strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action
+lifted above the platform of city swindlers, insignificant scoundrels,
+and needy cardsharpers, up to a stage exhibiting historic personages
+and scenes, courts and battlefields; and we breathe freely in the
+wider air of immorality on a grand scale. As a sample of spirited
+freehand drawing, the sketches of Continental society, 'before that
+vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world,' are admirable for
+their force and originality; and what can be better as a touch of
+character than the following defence of his profession by a prince of
+gamblers?
+
+     'I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of
+     the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served
+     them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an
+     honourable man--a swindling quack, who does not believe in the
+     nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering
+     in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant
+     man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers,
+     his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed
+     by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle
+     classes against gentlemen; it is only the shopkeeper cant which is
+     to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of
+     chivalry; it has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of
+     birth.'
+
+Here we have the romance of the gaming-table; and in the same chapter
+Barry Lyndon recounts the evil chance that befell him at cards with
+two young students, who had never played before:
+
+     'As ill luck would have it, they were tipsy, and against tipsiness
+     I have often found the best calculations of play fail entirely. A
+     few officers joined; they played in the most perfectly insane way,
+     and won always.... And in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick
+     with tobacco smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and
+     liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and beardless
+     students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe
+     lost seventeen hundred louis. It was like Charles xii. or Richard
+     Coeur de Lion falling before a petty fortress and an unknown
+     hand.'
+
+The picture of gamblers in a grimy tavern, the unconscious humour of
+Lyndon's heroic lament, the comparison between the cardsharpers'
+discomfiture and the fall of mighty warriors, make up a fine example
+of Thackeray's eye for graphic detail, and prove the force and temper
+of his incisive irony.
+
+Yet, in spite of its great excellence, the book still labours under
+the artistic disadvantage of having a rogue for its hero. Thackeray
+was too good an artist to be unconscious of this defect, and in a
+footnote to page 215 he defends his choice characteristically. After
+admitting that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way,
+bullied her, robbed her to spend the money in gambling and taverns,
+kept mistresses in her house, and so on, he argues:
+
+     'The world contains scores of such amiable people, and, indeed, it
+     is because justice has not been done them that we have edited this
+     autobiography. Had it been that of a mere hero of romance--one of
+     those heroic youths who figure in the novels of Scott or James,
+     there would have been no call to introduce the reader to a
+     personage already so often and so charmingly depicted. Mr. Barry is
+     not, we repeat, a hero of the common pattern; but let the reader
+     look round and ask himself, "Do not as many rogues succeed in life
+     as honest men, more fools than men of talent?" And is it not just
+     that the lives of this class should be described by the students of
+     human nature as well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes,
+     those perfectly impossible heroes,' etc., etc.
+
+One would be almost inclined to infer from this passage that the
+author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as
+to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry;
+for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are
+no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the
+truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject
+for character-drawing than in the blameless hero, while he was deeply
+implicated in the formidable revolt which Carlyle was leading against
+the respectabilities of that day.
+
+It is worth notice that in Barry Lyndon's military reminiscences, done
+with great vigour and fidelity of detail, we have a very early example
+of the realistic as contrasted with the romantic treatment of
+campaigns, of life in the bivouac and the barrack. This method, which
+has latterly had immense vogue, seems to have been first invented in
+France, where Thackeray may have taken the hint from Stendhal; but we
+are disposed to believe that he was the first who proclaimed it in
+England. As it professes to give the true unvarnished aspect of war it
+would certainly have accorded with Thackeray's natural contempt, so
+often shown in his writings, for the commonplaces of the military
+romancer who revelled in the pomp and circumstance of glorious
+battles, the charges, the heroic exploits, the honours, rather than
+the horrors, of the fighting business. Moreover, it is not only in
+style and treatment but also in sentiment and in certain peculiar
+prepossessions, that we can trace in this novel the lines which the
+writer followed throughout his narratives, and his favourite
+delineations of character. For diplomatists he has always a curious
+contempt, and he never misses an opportunity of ridiculing them. 'Mon
+Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what
+fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the
+world, this diplomacy'--as if it were not also a most important and
+difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great
+folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen;
+and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord
+Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was
+ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.'
+And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about
+women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of
+them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry
+on the subject of matrimony:
+
+     'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household
+     drudge, who loves you. _That_ is the most precious sort of
+     friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The
+     man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's
+     an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his
+     ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born
+     to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks,
+     as it were.'
+
+Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of Thackeray's genius.
+In _Vanity Fair_, his next work, it has attained its climax; the
+dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and
+more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and
+whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a
+fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in
+this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone
+is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly
+excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the
+superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and
+unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer
+hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted
+virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the
+human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their
+virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated,
+for the purposes of the social drama. The book's very title, _Vanity
+Fair_, denotes a transition from the scathing satire of his earlier
+manner to more indulgent irony, from Swift to Sterne, two authors whom
+Thackeray had evidently studied attentively. In his short preface the
+author preludes with the gentler note when he invites people of a
+lazy, benevolent, or sarcastic mood to step into the puppet show for a
+moment and look at the performance.
+
+The book's success, Mrs. Ritchie tells us, was slow; the sale hung
+fire. 'One has heard of the journeys which the manuscript made to
+various publishers' houses before it could find any one ready to
+undertake the venture, and how long its appearance was delayed by
+various doubts and hesitations, until it was at last brought out in
+its yellow covers by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans on January 1, 1847.'
+But when the last numbers were appearing Thackeray wrote that,
+'although it does everything but sell, it appears really to increase
+my reputation immensely'--as it assuredly did. That a signal success
+in literature is nearly always achieved, not by following the beaten
+road, but by a bold departure from it, is a principle that could be
+abundantly established by examples, and which seems almost a truism
+when it is stated. _Vanity Fair_ was decidedly a work of great
+freshness and originality; but publishers are circumspect and rarely
+adventurous, they distrust novelties and prefer to follow the
+prevailing fashion as far as it will go, wherein we may discern one
+reason why the accouchement of the first literary child is usually so
+laborious.
+
+To criticise at length any single novel of Thackeray's would be far
+beyond the scope or purpose of this article. Our object is rather to
+illustrate the course and development of his distinctive literary
+qualities, the slow effacement of prejudices which never entirely
+disappeared, and the rapid expansion of his highest artistic
+faculties. To begin with the prejudices. In _Vanity Fair_ he still
+makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose
+to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form;
+though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last
+fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration. And another important
+reform of manners must have supervened in the same period if we are to
+believe that in these novels the English servant is not unfairly
+caricatured. As we know him at the present day, in the class that
+lives with gentle-folk, he may be touchy and troublesome, with much
+self-assertiveness, but also with much self-respect. He has as many
+faults as other people, but among them brutal rudeness is practically
+unknown; yet when Rebecca Sharp is driven in Mr. Sedley's carriage to
+Sir Pitt Crawley's, having given nothing to the domestics on leaving
+the Sedleys, the coachman is ludicrously rude to a poor governess.
+
+     '"I shall write to Mr. Sedley, and inform him of your conduct,"
+     said Miss Sharp to him.
+
+     '"Don't," replied that functionary; "I hope you've forgot nothink?
+     Miss 'Melia's gownds--have you got them--as the lady's maid was to
+     have 'ad? I hope they'll fit you. Shut the door, Jim, you'll get no
+     good out of _'er_," continued John, pointing with his thumb towards
+     Miss Sharp; "a bad lot, I tell you, a bad lot."'
+
+One may conjecture that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque,
+which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and
+inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in
+setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the
+perfection of his higher composition. It might well produce, among
+foreigners at any rate, an unreal impression of the true relations
+existing between different classes of English society.
+
+But these are slight blemishes upon the surface of an epoch-making
+book, for _Vanity Fair_ inaugurated a new school of novel-writing
+in this country, with its combined vigour and subtlety of
+character-drawing, and with the marvellous dexterity of its scenes and
+dramatic situations. The army and military life in all its phases had
+a remarkable attraction for him; in all his larger books one or more
+officers are brought prominently upon the foreground of his canvas. He
+hits off the strong and weak points of the profession, in war and
+peace, with a truth and humour that gave freshness and originality to
+the whole subject, and the best of these pictures are in _Vanity
+Fair_. There is not one of its leading _militaires_--Dobbin and
+Osborne, Crawley and Major O'Dowd--in whom a typical representative of
+well-known varieties may not be recognised. His fine picturesque
+handiwork, his consistent preference of the real to the romantic, and
+his reserve in the use of such tempting materials as the battlefield
+affords to the story-teller, are shown in his treatment of the episode
+of Waterloo. He is far too good an artist to lay out for us a grand
+scene of fierce fighting and carnage; nor does he, like Lever, produce
+Wellington and Bonaparte acting or speaking up to the popular
+conception of these mighty heroes. He is content to follow his own
+personages into that famous field, and to show how perilous
+circumstance brings out the force or feebleness of each character,
+male and female, whether of the wives left behind at Brussels, or the
+soldiers in the fighting line at Waterloo. It is only at the end of
+his chapter, after some seriocomic incidents and dialogues exhibiting
+the behaviour of the non-combatants--of Jos Sedley, Mrs. O'Dowd, Lady
+Bareacres, and the rest--that his narrative rises suddenly to the epic
+note in a brief passage full of admirable energy and pathos:
+
+     'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great
+     field. All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away,
+     the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and
+     repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns which
+     were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades
+     falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Toward evening the
+     attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened
+     in its fury ... they were preparing for a final onset. It came at
+     last, the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of St.
+     Jean.... Unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled
+     death from the English line, the dark rolling column pressed on and
+     up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began
+     to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at
+     last the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy
+     had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.
+
+     'No more firing was heard at Brussels; the pursuit rolled miles
+     away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was
+     praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
+     through his heart.'
+
+The military critic might pick holes in this description, and
+Thackeray might as well have thrown the English infantry into squares
+instead of into line. Yet the passage is instinct with compressed
+emotion; and the sudden transition from the general battle to the
+single death is a good touch of tragic art.
+
+In _Pendennis_ (1850) we may discern the slowly softening influences
+of years that bring the philosophic mind, of a calmer and easier time,
+and perhaps also of a different class of readers. Thackeray has now
+discovered that, as he says in his preface, 'to describe a real rascal
+you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not
+tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in
+_Pendennis_, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse
+than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for
+whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and
+subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described
+a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is
+another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention
+may undergo in the course of a generation; for surely not even the
+straitest middle-class sect would in our day banish _Pendennis_ on the
+score of impropriety. Mrs. Ritchie mentions that the author's
+descriptions of literary life were criticised on the ground that he
+was trying to win favour with the non-literary classes by decrying his
+own profession--an absurd accusation which nettled him into replying.
+The truth seems to be that Thackeray, who poked fun at the weak sides
+of every class and calling, saw no reason why he should leave out his
+own; and the men of letters might have been comforted by observing
+that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural
+enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have
+ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in
+Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer
+confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of
+people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as
+literary men.'
+
+_Pendennis_ is in Thackeray's best style, as the novelist of manners.
+It opens, like _Vanity Fair_, with a short amusing scene that poses,
+as the French say, some leading actor in the play, and encourages the
+reader to go on. Next follows, as is usual with our author, a short
+retrospective account of the people and places among whom the plot is
+laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting
+his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys,
+the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity,
+Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English
+provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who
+brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the
+English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer
+and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for
+inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and
+strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless
+hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel
+Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last
+moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical
+plea that the author had not sufficient experience of gaol-birds and
+the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free
+with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the
+condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking
+unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to
+see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he
+prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain
+of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his
+stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down
+into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests
+that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and
+does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs
+and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth
+and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune
+or failure. The voyage of life
+
+     'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people
+     huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the
+     ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that
+     nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a
+     solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one
+     are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time
+     when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out
+     of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'
+
+In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the
+antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human
+efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with
+humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops
+his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation,
+after the manner of Fielding, whose leisurely tone of satire is so
+audible in the following quotation from _Pendennis_ that he might well
+have written it:
+
+     'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart
+     and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian
+     charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those
+     who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a
+     dispute?'
+
+As we have said that _Vanity Fair_ touches the climax of Thackeray's
+peculiar genius, so in our judgment _Esmond_ shows the gathered
+strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an
+eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We
+may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection
+in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the
+eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic
+events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns
+upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt
+largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in
+marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served
+as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts
+the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and
+conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the
+period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the
+society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of
+glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are
+sometimes (as in the _Grand Cyrus_) thinly veiled portraits of
+contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures
+representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The
+virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are
+chaste and beauteous damsels--Joan of Arc herself appears in one
+romance as an adorable shepherdess--and love-making is conducted after
+the model of a Parisian _precieuse_.
+
+It is the opinion of a recent French critic, who has made careful
+study of his subject, that the new school was founded by
+Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to
+the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque
+incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping
+them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by
+picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and
+conditions of existence of the time and country in which he might be
+unwinding his tale. But Chateaubriand, like Byron (who was of a
+similar temperament), never could put himself, to use a French phrase,
+into another man's skin; he is to be detected soliloquising and
+dispensing noble sentiments under the costume of a Christian martyr or
+an American savage, and thus the fidelity of his scene-painting was
+still marred by the artificiality of the discourse. It was the
+Waverley novel that lifted the historical romance far beyond
+Chateaubriand's level, that established it, in England, France, and
+Italy on the true principle of creating vivid representations of a
+bygone age by a skilful mixture of fact and fiction, and by a correct
+and harmonious combination of characters, manners, and environment.
+
+But during the twenty years that intervene between the dates, taken
+roughly, of Scott's worst novel and Thackeray's best, the flood tide
+of romanticism had risen to its highest point, and had then ebbed very
+low, on both sides of the British Channel. And we can see that the
+younger writer was no votary of the older school of high-flying
+chivalrous romance, with its tournaments, its crusaders, its valiant
+warriors, and distressed maidens. His youthful aversion for shams and
+conventionalities, his strong propensity toward burlesque and
+persiflage, his early life among cities and commonplace folk, seem to
+have obscured in some degree his appreciation of even such splendid
+compositions as _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; or, at any rate, his
+sense of the ridiculous overpowered his admiration. The result was
+that, as Scott had exalted his mediaeval heroes and heroines far above
+the level of real life, had revived the legendary age of chivalry and
+adventure with all the magnificence of his poetic imagination,
+Thackeray had at first set himself, conversely, to strip the trappings
+off these fine folk, and to poke his fun at the feudal lords and
+ladies by treating them as ordinary middle-class men and women
+masquerading in old armour or drapery. He came in as a writer on the
+ebb-tide of romanticism, when the reaction showed its popular form in
+a curious outburst of the taste for burlesques and parodies on the
+stage and in the light reading of the time. Whether the creation of
+this taste is to be ascribed to the appearance of two writers with
+such genius for wit and fun as Thackeray and Dickens, or whether they
+only supplied a natural demand, may be questionable; they undoubtedly
+headed the army of Comus, and thereby raised the whole standard of
+facetious literature. But the defect of this school was its propensity
+to take a hilarious or sardonic view, not only of mediaeval romance,
+but of quaint old times generally; and one leading embodiment of this
+mocking spirit was _Punch_ founded in 1841. A'Beckett's _Comic History
+of England_, which ran through many numbers, seems to this generation
+a dreary and deleterious specimen of misplaced farce; though
+historically it is not quite such bad work as Dickens's _Child's
+History of England_, which he meant to be serious. Among Thackeray's
+very numerous contributions to _Punch_ are _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
+on English History_, which might well have been consigned to
+oblivion, _Rebecca and Rowena_, and _The Prize Novelists_. The
+sarcastic and the sentimental temper must always be hostile to each
+other; between romance and ridicule the antipathy is fundamental; and
+although one regrets that he ever wrote _Rebecca and Rowena_, the
+melodramatic novels of Bulwer-Lytton were fair enough game for the
+parodist. However, it is certain that in his earlier writings
+Thackeray did much to laugh away the novel of mediaeval chivalry; and
+while we think he often carried his irreverent jocosity much too far,
+since after all chivalry is better than cockneyism, we may award him
+the very high honour of becoming, latterly, one of the founders of a
+new and admirable historical school in England.
+
+The eighteenth century was always Thackeray's favourite period; he
+liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its
+practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of
+keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world
+as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that
+possessed great imaginative faculty; Defoe was a master of minute
+life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings
+are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished
+denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy,
+large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery,
+loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage,
+and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated
+manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to
+Fielding than to any other single literary ancestor; but all these
+influences were most congenial to his temperament, and informed his
+best work. His instinctive dislike of unreality, exaggeration, and
+fanciful ideals would have always prevented him from laying the
+situation of his story in some distant age, of which hardly anything
+is known accurately, and supplementing his ignorance by giving free
+scope to fantastic invention, as was the usage of the humble followers
+who tried in vain to conjure with the wand of Scott. He required a
+period which he could study, master, and sympathise with, and he found
+it in the eighteenth century; though in _Esmond_ the plot, being
+founded on Jacobite intrigues and conspiracies, opens with the
+Revolution of 1688. He had taken great trouble, as usual, with the
+localities, knowing well that you never understand a battle clearly
+until you have seen its field.
+
+     '"I was pleased to find Blenheim," he wrote to his mother, "was
+     just exactly the place I had figured to myself, except that the
+     village is larger; but I fancied I had actually been there, so like
+     the aspect of it was to what I looked for. I saw the brook which
+     Harry Esmond crossed, and almost the spot where he fell wounded."'
+
+Mrs. Ritchie quotes this letter as illustrating 'a sort of second
+sight as to places which my father used to speak of'; and it certainly
+attests his possession of the strong imaginative faculty which puts
+together vivid mental pictures.
+
+The first page strikes the note of disenchantment, of escape from the
+spell of conventionalism and the shores of romance. Colonel Esmond,
+who tells his own tale, wishes the Muse of History to disrobe, to
+discard her buskins, and to deliver herself like a woman of the
+everyday world.
+
+     'I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be
+     court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides
+     Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne tearing down the Park
+     slopes after her staghounds, in her one-horse chaise--a hot
+     redfaced woman.... She was neither better bred nor wiser than you
+     and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand basin.
+     Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for
+     having her rise off her knees, and take her natural posture, not to
+     be for ever performing cringes and congees like a Court
+     chamberlain, and shuffling backward out of doors in the presence of
+     the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar rather than
+     heroic.'
+
+No very deep philosophy in this, we might say, for surely historians
+up to Esmond's day had not all been pompous and servile, while
+something like dignity is desirable. But here we have Thackeray
+speaking through Esmond his own thoughts about history, and
+proclaiming the rise of naturalism against the romantic high-heeled
+school. And in a much later chapter, where Esmond visits Addison, we
+have the true realistic method of Tolstoi and other quite modern
+novelists, as compared with the old classic style of describing war.
+Addison has been writing a poem on the Blenheim campaign:
+
+     '"I admire your art," says Esmond to Addison; "the murder of the
+     campaign is done to military music, like a battle at the opera, and
+     the virgins shriek in harmony, as our victorious grenadiers march
+     into their villages. Do you know what a scene it was? what a
+     triumph you are celebrating, what scenes of shame and horror were
+     enacted, over which the commander's genius presided as calm as
+     though he didn't belong to our sphere? You talk of 'the listening
+     soldier fixed in sorrow,' the 'leader's grief swayed by generous
+     pity'; to my belief the leader cared no more for bleating flocks
+     than he did for infants' cries, and many of our ruffians butchered
+     one or the other with equal alacrity. You hew out of your polished
+     verses a stately image of smiling victory; I tell you 'tis an
+     uncouth, distorted, savage idol, hideous, bloody, and barbarous.
+     The rites performed before it are shocking to think of. You great
+     poets should show it as it is, ugly and horrible, not beautiful and
+     serene."'
+
+When Colonel Esmond has to describe the battles in which he himself
+took part, he avoids, as might be supposed, the high romantic style.
+But he does not, therefore, fall on the other side, into the mire of
+the writers who at the present day conscientiously give us the horrors
+of the hospital and all the brutalities of war, which Esmond knows,
+but does not choose to set down in his memoir. In his account of the
+Blenheim victory there is a skilful touch of the professional soldier,
+who records briefly the position of the armies and the tactical
+movements; and it lights up with suppressed enthusiasm when he records
+the intrepidity of the English regiments in that fierce and famous
+struggle. We read of Major-General Wilkes,
+
+     'on foot, at the head of the attacking column, marching with his
+     hat off intrepidly in the face of the enemy, who was pouring in a
+     tremendous fire from his guns and musketry, to which our people
+     were instructed not to reply except with pike and bayonet when they
+     reached the French palisades. To these Wilkes walked intrepidly,
+     and struck the woodwork with his sword before our people charged
+     it. He was shot down on the instant, with his colonel, major, and
+     several officers,'
+
+and the assault was repelled with great slaughter.
+
+In this and other similar passages, you have the historic novelist at
+his best; the true facts are selected and arranged so as to form
+pictures of soul-stirring action; while their connection with his
+story is maintained by giving Esmond himself a very modest and natural
+share in the glorious victory:
+
+     'And now the conquerors were met by a furious charge of the English
+     horse under Esmond's general, Lumley, behind whose squadrons the
+     flying foot took refuge and formed again, while Lumley drove back
+     the French horse, charging up to the village of Blenheim and the
+     palisades where Wilkes, and many hundred more gallant Englishmen,
+     lay in slaughtered heaps. Beyond this moment, and of this famous
+     victory, Mr. Esmond knows nothing, for a shot brought down his
+     horse and our young gentleman on it, who fell crushed and stunned
+     under the animal.'
+
+A lesser artist would have made his hero perform some brilliant
+exploit; but Thackeray prefers to sketch the scene as Wouvermans might
+have done it. We have not here the incomparable fire and spirit which
+Scott throws into the skirmishes at Bothwell Brig and Drumclog; we see
+the difference of mind and method; but we can have nothing except
+admiration for the rare imaginative faculty which enabled a quiet man
+of letters to deal so finely and faithfully, with such reserve and
+discrimination, with a subject that might easily have been spoiled by
+the noisy clatter and coarse colouring of the inferior artist. His
+full length portrait of Marlborough has been too often quoted to be
+reproduced here--'impassible before victory, before danger, before
+defeat; the splendid calm of his face as he rode along the lines to
+battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling
+before the enemy's charge or shot.' Of Swift, Esmond says--'I have
+always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of
+that age ... a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vultures tear
+him'; and with a few such strokes he gives etchings of other
+celebrities in letters and politics. One may observe with astonishment
+that the youthful Thackeray, who delighted in suburban chronicles, in
+mean lives and paltry incidents, has risen by middle age to the rank
+of an illustrious painter on the broad canvas of history. The annals
+of literature contain few, if any, other examples of so remarkable a
+transformation.
+
+It is evident that Thackeray, like Scott, was an industrious collector
+of material for his novels from all sources; we may refer, for an
+instance, to a scene which will have left a passing impression upon
+many readers, where, as the French and English armies are facing each
+other on two sides of a little stream in the Low Countries, Prince
+Charles Edward rides down to the French bank and exchanges a salute
+with Esmond. It falls quite naturally and easily into the narrative,
+and reads like a very happy original conception; yet the incident,
+which is quite authentic, may be found in the papers obtained in the
+last century from the Scottish convent at Paris by Macpherson.
+
+In _The Virginians_, which might have had for its second title _Forty
+Years Later_, the chronicle of the Esmond family is continued; with
+North America during the French war for the battlefields, Braddock,
+Wolfe, and Washington for the military figures, and Esmond's grandsons
+as the personages round whom the story's interest centres. It is a
+novel of very great merit, skilfully constructed, full of vivacious
+writing and delineation of character; and the novelist avails himself
+with his usual adroitness of the celebrated incidents of this period
+and the salient features of English society in the middle of the last
+century. Yet we must reluctantly admit that Thackeray has passed his
+climacteric, and that as a work of the historical school this book
+cannot claim parity with Esmond. George Warrington was on Braddock's
+staff at the fatal rout and massacre on the Ohio; his brother Harry
+was with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham; they witnessed a battle lost
+and a battle won, and each saw his commander fall. But George's
+recital of his hairbreadth escape lacks the stern simplicity with
+which his grandfather told the story of Marlborough's wars; and the
+device of his being saved from the Indians by a French officer, who
+was his intimate friend, is so ingenious as to be a trifle
+commonplace. The author does not sketch in any details or personal
+adventures from the great fight under the walls of Quebec; he has
+fallen back, at this part of the story, into personal narrative, and
+_The Warrington Memoirs_ only describe how the news of Wolfe's victory
+and death were acclaimed in London. In the War of Independence, George
+Warrington, who takes the British side, records the feelings and
+situation of an American Loyalist--a class to whom only Mr. Lecky,
+among historians, has done fair justice. There is much acute and
+well-informed reflection upon the state of the colonies at this time,
+the strong currents of party politics, and the exasperation which
+brought about the rebellion; but, on the whole, this part of the
+narrative has too much resemblance to real history. It has not enough
+of the imaginative and picturesque element to lift it above the
+comparatively prosaic level of an interesting memoir, though some good
+scenes and situations are obtained by making the two Warrington
+brothers take opposite sides. When we learn that, in 1759, the English
+Lord Castlewood repaired his shattered fortunes by marrying an
+American heiress, we are inclined to suspect that our author has taken
+a hint from the fashion of a century later.
+
+In the story of _Esmond_ Thackeray dropped the satirical tone, and
+indulged very rarely indeed in the habit of pausing to moralise, as
+writer to reader, upon social hypocrisy, servile obsequiousness, and
+whited sepulchres generally. In _The Virginians_ he is less attentive
+to dramatic propriety; he begins again to turn aside and lecture us,
+in the midst of his tale, upon the text of _De te fabula narratur_.
+Sir Miles and Lady Warrington are scandalised by their nephew's
+extravagance, and refuse all help to the spendthrift.
+
+     'How much of this behaviour goes on daily in respectable society,
+     think you? You can fancy Lord and Lady Macbeth concocting a murder,
+     and coming together with some little awkwardness, perhaps, when the
+     transaction was done and over; but my Lord and Lady Skinflint, when
+     they consult in their bedroom about giving their luckless nephew a
+     helping hand, and determine to refuse, and go down to family
+     prayers and meet their children and domestics, and discourse
+     virtuously before them...?'
+
+And so on, for a page or two, in a tone that some may think almost as
+sophistical as the reasoning by which the Skinflints might excuse to
+themselves their pharisaical behaviour. Such interpolations are
+artistically incorrect, and out of harmony with the proper conception
+of a well-wrought work of fiction, in which the moral should be
+conveyed through the action and the dialogue, and the meditations
+should be left to be done by the reader himself.
+
+We must, therefore, place _The Virginians_ below _Esmond_ in the order
+of merit. Nevertheless, these two novels, with _Barry Lyndon_, are
+most important and valuable contributions to the English historical
+series. Nothing like them had been written before, and nothing equal
+has been written after them, with the single exception of _John
+Inglesant_. They possess one essential quality that ought to
+distinguish all fiction founded on the history of bygone times--they
+are, so far as posterity can judge at all, faithful and effective
+representations of manners. Now, the inferior practitioner in this
+particular school, being prevented by indolence or incapacity from
+mastering his period and acquiring insight into its ways of thought
+and living, is too often content to cover up his deficiencies by
+indenting freely on the theatrical wardrobe and armoury. He deals
+largely in the costumes of the day; he supplies himself plentifully
+with old-fashioned phrases; he is fond of old furniture; he is
+strongest, in fact, upon the external and decorative aspect of the
+society to which he introduces us. Most of the romances written in
+imitation of Scott had this tendency; and this same feebleness
+underlies the superfluous minuteness of detail that may be observed in
+the decadent realists of the present day. Nothing of this sort can be
+alleged against Thackeray, who works from inward outwardly in his
+creations of character, and whose personages are truly historical in
+the sense that they move and speak naturally according to the ideas
+and circumstances of their age, the dialect and dress being merely
+added as appropriate colouring. It is, indeed, a peculiarity of
+Thackeray's novels, which distinguishes him alike from the romancer
+and the modern naturalist that they contain hardly any description,
+that he is never professedly picturesque, that he relies entirely on
+passing strokes and effective details given by the way. In Scott we
+have superb descriptive pieces of scenery, of storms, of the interiors
+of a castle or a Gothic cathedral; and some of the best living
+novelists are much given to elaborate landscape painting. But we doubt
+whether half a page of deliberately picturesque description can be
+found in any of Thackeray's first-class works. He will sometimes
+sketch off the inside of a house or the look of a town, but with
+natural scenery he does not concern himself; he is, for the most part,
+entirely occupied with the analysis of character, or with the
+emotional side of life; and he seems constantly to bear in mind the
+Aristotelian maxim that life consists in action. His principal
+instrument for the exhibition of motive, for the evolution of his
+story, for bringing out qualities, is dialogue, which he manages with
+great dexterity and effect, giving it point and raciness, and
+avoiding the snare--into which recent social novelists have been
+falling--of insignificance and prolixity. The method of easy,
+sparkling, natural dialogue for developing the plot and distinguishing
+the personages is said to have been first transferred from the theatre
+to the novel by Walter Scott. At any rate, the use of it on a large
+scale, which has since been carried to the verge of abuse, began with
+the Waverley novels; where we find abundance of that humorous
+vernacular talk in which Shakespeare excelled, though for the romance
+Cervantes may be registered as its inventor. In Thackeray's hands
+dramatic conversation, as of actors on the stage, becomes of very
+prominent importance, not only for the illustration of manners in
+society, but also for dressing up the subordinate figures of his
+company. He is now no longer the caricaturist of earlier days; he
+employs the popular dialect and comic touches with effective
+moderation. And he avails himself very freely, in _The Virginians_, of
+the privilege which belongs to the historical novelist, who is allowed
+to make the reader acquainted with the notabilities of the period not
+only for the movement of his drama, but also for a passing glance or
+casual introduction, as might happen in any place of public resort or
+in a crowded _salon_. Franklin, Johnson, and Richardson, George Selwyn
+and Lord Chesterfield, cross the stage and disappear, after a few
+remarks of their own or the author's. For military officers, who
+figure in all his novels, he has ever a kindly word; and also for
+sailors, although it is only in his last (unfinished) novel that he
+takes up the navy. For English clergymen, especially for bishops, he
+has no indulgence at all; and he seems to be possessed by the
+commonplace error of believing that the prevailing types of the
+Anglican Church in the eighteenth century were the courtier-bishop
+and the humble obsequious chaplain. The typical Irishman of fiction,
+with his mixture of recklessness and cunning, warm-hearted and
+unveracious, is to be found, we think, in every one of Thackeray's
+larger novels, except in _The Virginians_; the Scotsman is rare,
+having been considerably used up by Walter Scott and his assiduous
+imitators. We may notice (parenthetically) that our own day is
+witnessing a marvellous revival of Highlanders and Lowlanders in
+fiction, from Jacobite adventures to the pawky wit and humble
+incidents of the kailyard.
+
+In _The Newcomes_ we return regretfully to the novel of contemporary
+society; wherewith disappears all the light haze of enchantment that
+hangs over the revival of distant times, even though they lie no
+further behind us than the eighteenth century. Such a change of scene
+necessitates and completes the transition from the romantic to the
+realistic; for how can a picture of our own environment, which any one
+can verify, avoid being more or less photographic? In one sense
+it is a continuation of the historic novel, which has only to put
+off its archaic or literary costume to appear as a presentation of
+social history brought up to date; the method of minute description,
+the portrayal of manners, are the same, with the drawback that
+the celebrities of the day must be kept off the stage. Any
+eighteenth-century personage might figure, with effect, in _The
+Virginians_, while Macaulay and Palmerston could hardly have been
+sketched off, however briefly and good-naturedly, in _The Newcomes_.
+In all essential respects the tone and treatment are unaltered in the
+two stories; although the ironical spirit, restrained in the
+historical novels by a sense of dramatic consistency, is again among
+us having great wrath, as Thackeray surveys the aspect of the London
+world around him. The character of Colonel Newcome, his distinguished
+gallantry, his spotless honour, his simplicity and credulity, is
+drawn with truth and tenderness; and some of the lesser folk are
+admirable for their kindliness and unselfishness. But what a society
+is this in which the Colonel is landed upon his return from India! He
+calls, with his son, at his brother's house in Bryanston Square:
+
+     '"It's my father," said Clive to the "menial" who opened the door;
+     "my aunt will see Colonel Newcome."
+
+     '"Missis not at home," said the man. "Missis is gone in the
+     carriage. Not at this door. Take them things down the area steps,
+     young man," bawls out the domestic to a pastry-cook's boy ... and
+     John struggles back, closing the door on the astonished Colonel.'
+
+An astonishment that most Londoners of his time would have assuredly
+shared; unless, indeed, the West-end doorstep has gained wonderfully
+by the scrubbing of sixty years. On the relations between masters and
+servants Thackeray was never more severe than in this book; he is
+irritated by the marching in of the household brigade to family
+prayers, and he declares that we 'know no more of that race which
+inhabits the basement floor, than of the men and brethren of
+Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send missionaries'--a monstrous
+imputation. He constantly resumes the moralising attitude; and his
+pungent persiflage is poured out, as if from an apocalyptic vial, upon
+worldliness and fashionable insolence. Sir Barnes Newcome's divorce
+from the unhappy Lady Clara furnishes a text for sad and solemn
+anathema upon the mercenary marriages in Hanover Square, where 'St.
+George of England may behold virgin after virgin offered up to the
+devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away,
+just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to
+come to the rescue.' We would by no means withhold from the modern
+satirist of manners the privilege of using forcibly figurative
+language or of putting a lash to his whip. Yet if his novels are, as
+we have suggested, to be regarded as historical, in the sense of
+recording impressions drawn from life for the benefit of posterity,
+such passages as those just quoted from Thackeray raise the general
+question whether documentary evidence of this kind as to the state of
+society at a given period is as valuable and trustworthy as it has
+usually been reckoned to be. He has himself declared that 'upon the
+morals and national manners, works of satire afford a world of light
+that one would in vain look for in regular books of history'--that
+_Pickwick_, _Roderick Random_, and _Tom Jones_, 'give us a better idea
+of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any
+pompous or authentic histories.' Whether Fielding and Smollett's
+contemporaries would have endorsed this opinion is the real question;
+for on such a point the judgment of Thackeray, who lived a century
+after them, cannot be conclusive. It is probable that to an Englishman
+of that day the novels of these two authors appeared to be
+extraordinary caricatures of actual society, in town or country.
+
+On the other hand, the story is excellently conducted, and each actor
+performs with consummate skill his part or hers; for in none of his
+works has Thackeray given higher proof of that dramatic power which
+brings out situations, leads on to the _denouement_, and points the
+moral of the story, by a skilful manipulation of various incidents and
+a remarkably numerous variety of characters. There, is one chapter
+(ix. of vol. II.), headed 'Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy,'
+where he carries on the plot entirely by a light and sparkling
+dialogue which may be compared to some of A. de Musset's wittiest
+_Proverbes_. It is a book that could only have been composed by a
+first-class artist in the maturity of his powers; and for that very
+reason we must regret that it is steeped in bitterness; while
+Thackeray's rooted hostility to mothers-in-law misguides him into the
+aesthetic error of admitting a virago to scold frantically almost over
+the colonel's death-bed. The unvarying meanness and selfishness of
+Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for
+whereas in the delineation of his amiable and high-principled
+characters Thackeray is careful to shade off their bright qualities by
+a mixture of natural weakness, these ill-favoured portraits stand out
+in the full glare of unredeemed insolence and low cunning.
+
+In his last novel, broken off half-way by his death, Thackeray went
+back once more to that eighteenth century, which, as he says in one of
+his letters, 'occupied him to the exclusion almost of the nineteenth,'
+and to the method of weaving fiction out of historical materials. We
+have already remarked upon his practice of opening with a kind of
+family history, which explains the antecedent connections,
+relationship, and pedigree of the persons who are coming upon the
+stage, and marks out the background of his story. In _Denis Duval_ he
+carries this preamble through two chapters, and arranges all the
+pieces on his board so carefully that an inattentive reader might lose
+his way among the preliminary details. One sees with what pleasure he
+has studied his favourite period in France and England, and how he
+enjoyed constructing, like Defoe, a fictitious autobiography that
+reads like a picturesque and genuine memoir of the times. Having thus
+laid out his plan, and prepared his _mise en scene_, he begins his
+third chapter with an animated entry of his actors, who thenceforward
+play their parts in a succession of incidents and adventures, that are
+all adjusted and fitted in to the framework of time and place that he
+has taken so much pains to design for them. In this manner he touches
+upon the great events of contemporary history, like the French War, or
+illustrates the state of England by bringing in highwaymen and the
+press-gang; while a minute description of localities lends an air of
+simplicity to the tale of an old man who has (as he says) an
+extraordinarily clear remembrance of his boyhood.
+
+The Notes which appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_, June 1864, as an
+epilogue to the last lines written by Thackeray, when the story
+stopped abruptly, throw curious light on the methods of gathering his
+material and preparing his work. Just as he visited the Blenheim
+battlefield, when he was engaged upon _Esmond_, so he went down to
+Romney Marsh, where Denis Duval was born and bred, surveyed Rye and
+Winchelsea as if he were drawing plans of those towns, and collected
+local traditions of the coast and the country, of the smugglers, the
+Huguenot settlements, and the old war time of 1778-82. The _Annual
+Register_ and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ furnished him with suggestive
+incidents and circumstantial reports which he expanded with admirable
+fertility of imagination; so that by combining what he saw with what
+he read he could lift the curtain and light up again an obscure corner
+of the Kentish coast, and the doings of the queer folk who lived on it
+a century before he went there. That he never finished this novel is
+much to be lamented, for Denis had just become a midshipman on board
+the _Serapis_, and we learn from these 'Notes' that he was to take
+part in the great fight which ended in the capture of that ship by
+Paul Jones, after the most bloody and desperate duel in the long and
+glorious record of the British Navy. Captain Pearson, who commanded
+the _Serapis_, reported his defeat to the Admiralty in a letter of
+which 'Mr. Thackeray seems to have thought much,' and, indeed, it is
+precisely the sort of document--quiet, formal, with a masculine
+contempt for adjectives (there is not one in the whole letter)--which
+denotes a character after Thackeray's own heart.
+
+     'We dropt alongside of each other, head and stern, when, the fluke
+     of our spare anchor hooking his quarter, we became so close, fore
+     and aft, that the muzzles of our guns touched each other's sides.'
+
+Here we have the style which Thackeray loved; and 'tis pity that we
+have so narrowly missed the picture of a fierce naval battle by an
+artist who could describe strenuous action in steady phrase, and who
+knew that the hard-fighting commander is usually a cool, resolute,
+resourceful man, for whom it is a matter of plain duty to fight his
+ship till he is fairly beaten, and to report the result briefly,
+whatever it may be, to his superiors. One can observe the mellowing
+influence upon Thackeray of the atmosphere of past times and the
+afterglow of heroic deeds; for in _Denis Duval_ there is no trace of
+the scorching satire which pursues us in _The Newcomes_; nor does he
+once pause to moralise, or to enlarge upon the innumerable hypocrisies
+of modern society. It is questionable, indeed, whether this fine
+fragment binds up well in a volume with the _Roundabout Papers_, which
+bring the author back into the light of common day, and to the
+trivialities of ordinary society.
+
+It has not been thought necessary, in this biographical edition, to
+issue the several volumes in the order of the dates at which they were
+written; nor has the attempt been made to preserve some serial
+continuity of their style or subject. The arrangement, moreover,
+serves to accentuate unnecessarily the undeniable imparity of
+Thackeray's different books; for _Punch_ and the _Sketch Books_ are
+interposed between _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_; while even the wild
+and wicked Lyndon hardly deserved to be handcuffed in the same volume
+with Fitzboodle, whom in the body he would have crushed like an
+insect. Yet the classification of Thackeray's novels might be easily
+made, for _Barry Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, and _Denis
+Duval_ fall together in one homogeneous group, having a strong family
+resemblance in tone and treatment, and following generally the
+chronological succession of the periods with which they are concerned.
+If to Esmond is awarded the precedence that is due to him not by
+seniority, but by importance, we have the wars of the eighteenth
+century between England and France from Marlborough's campaigns down
+to Rodney's great naval victory of 1783, in which Duval was destined
+to take part. These works represent Thackeray's very considerable
+contribution to the Historic School of English novelists; and we may
+count them also a valuable commentary upon English history, for
+without doubt every luminous illustration of past times and personages
+acts as a powerful stimulant to the national mind, by exciting a
+keener interest in the nation's story and a clearer appreciation of
+its reality. Chateaubriand has affirmed that Walter Scott's romances
+produced a revolution in the art of writing histories, that no greater
+master of the art of historical divination has ever lived, and that
+his profound insight into the mediaeval world, its names, the true
+relation between different classes, its political and social aspects,
+originated a new and brilliant historical method which superseded the
+dim and limited views of scholarly erudition. For Thackeray we make no
+such extensive or extravagant claims; but it may be said that the
+dramatic conception of history in his novels and lectures was of
+great service to his readers and hearers by the vivid impressions
+which they conveyed of the life, character, and feelings of their
+forefathers, of their failings, virtues, and memorable achievements.
+Some material objections may be taken to the system of teaching by
+graphic pictures in Thackeray, as in Carlyle's _French Revolution_,
+and in both cases the philosophy leaves much to be desired, for the
+writer's own idiosyncrasy colours all his work. Yet when we remember
+how few are the readers to whom the accurate Dryasdust, with his
+careful research and well attested facts, brings any lasting
+enlightenment, we may well believe that very many owe their distinct
+ideas of the state of England and its people during the last century
+to Thackeray's genius for carefully studied autobiographical fiction.
+
+To the four historical novels mentioned above let us add three novels
+of nineteenth-century manners--_Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The
+Newcomes_--and we have seven books (one incomplete) upon which
+Thackeray's name and fame survive, and will be handed down to
+posterity. The list is by no means long if it be compared with the
+outturn of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton, or of his foremost contemporary
+Dickens; and Stevenson, who resembles him in the subdued realistic
+style of narrating a perilous fight or adventure, has left us a larger
+bequest. But they are amply sufficient to build up for him a lasting
+monument in English literature; and their very paucity may serve as a
+warning against the prevailing sin of copious and indiscriminate
+productiveness, by which so many second-rate novelists of the present
+day exhaust their powers and drown a respectable reputation in a flood
+of writing, which sinks in quality in proportion to the rise in
+quantity.
+
+How far the character and personal experiences of an author are
+revealed or disguised in his writings is a question which has often
+been discussed. Bulwer once endeavoured, in a whimsical essay, to
+prove that men of letters are the only people whose characters are
+really ascertainable, because you may know them intimately by their
+works; but herein he merely touched upon the general truth or truism
+that society at large judges every man only by his public
+performances, and does not trouble itself at all about anything else.
+In the category of those who display in their writings their tastes
+and prejudices, their feelings and the special bent of their mind, we
+may certainly place Thackeray, who was a moralist and a satirist, very
+sensitive to the ills and follies of humanity, and impressionable in
+the highest degree. For such a man it was impossible to refrain from
+giving his opinions, his praise or his blame, in all that he wrote
+upon everything that interested him; and in portraying the society
+which surrounded him, he inevitably portrayed himself. He displayed as
+much as any writer the general complexion of his intellectual
+propensities and sympathies; and we can even trace in him the
+existence of some of the minor human frailties which he was most apt
+to condemn, an unconscious tendency which is not altogether uncommon.
+But he is essentially a high-minded man of letters, acutely sensitive
+to absurdities, impatient of meanness, of affectation, and of
+ignominious admiration of trivial things; a resolute representative of
+the independent literary spirit, with a strong desire to see things as
+they are, and with the gift of describing them truthfully. He
+repudiated 'the absurd outcry about neglected men of genius'; and in a
+letter quoted by Mrs. Ritchie he writes:
+
+     'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty
+     years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time,
+     please God, never lost my own respect.'
+
+His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States,
+where he was lecturing--
+
+     'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the
+     friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure
+     independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I
+     choke on the instant'--
+
+having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the
+_American Notes_.
+
+On the other hand, he was not free from the defects of his qualities,
+mental and artistic, from the propensity to set points of character in
+violent relief, or from the somewhat unfair generalisation which grows
+out of the habit of drawing types and distributing colours for
+satirical effect.
+
+In regard to his religion, it appears to have been of the
+rationalistic eighteenth-century order in which moral ideas are
+entirely dominant, to the exclusion of the deeply spiritual modes of
+thought; and we may say of him, as of Carlyle, that his philosophy was
+more practical than profound. The subjoined quotation is from a letter
+to his daughter:
+
+     'What is right must always be right, before it was practised as
+     well as after. And if such and such a commandment delivered by
+     Moses was wrong, depend upon it, it was not delivered by God, and
+     the whole question of complete inspiration goes at once. And the
+     misfortune of dogmatic belief is that, the first principle granted
+     that the book called the Bible is written under the direct
+     dictation of God--for instance, that the Catholic Church is under
+     the direct dictation of God, and solely communicates with Him--that
+     Quashimaboo is the directly appointed priest of God, and so
+     forth--pain, cruelty, persecution, separation of dear relatives,
+     follow as a matter of course.... Smith's truth being established in
+     Smith's mind as the Divine one, persecution follows as a matter of
+     course--martyrs have roasted over all Europe, over all God's world,
+     upon this dogma. To my mind Scripture only means a writing, and
+     Bible means a book.... Every one of us in every part, book,
+     circumstance of life, sees a different meaning and moral, and so it
+     must be about religion. But we can all love each other and say "Our
+     Father."'
+
+This is true, stout-hearted, individualistic liberty of believing--an
+excellent thing and wholesome, though it by no means covers the whole
+ground, or meets all difficulties. The logical consequence is a strong
+distaste for theology, and no very high opinion of the priesthood,
+wherein we may probably find the root of Thackeray's proclivity,
+already mentioned, toward unmerited sarcasm upon the clergy. In the
+Introduction to _Pendennis_ is a letter written from Spa, in which he
+says, 'They have got a Sunday service here in an extinct
+gambling-house, and a clerical professor to perform, whom you have to
+pay just like any other showman who comes.' It does not seem to have
+occurred to Thackeray that the turning of a gambling-house into a
+place of prayer is no bad thing of itself, or that you have no more
+right to expect your religious services to be done for you in a
+foreign land without payment than your newspapers or novels.
+
+But these are blemishes or eccentricities which are only worth notice
+in a character of exceptional interest and a writer of great
+originality. Thackeray's work had a distinct influence on the light
+literature of his generation, and possibly also on its manners, for it
+is quite conceivable that one reason why his descriptions of snobbery
+and shams appear to us now overdrawn, may be that his trenchant blows
+at social idols did materially discredit the worship of them. His
+literary style had the usual following of imitators who caught his
+superficial form and missed the substance, as, for example, in the
+habit which arose of talking with warm-hearted familiarity of great
+eighteenth-century men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy
+enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with
+Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in _Pyramus and
+Thisbe_, 'you can do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.'
+
+Thackeray will always stand in the front rank of the very remarkable
+array of novelists who have illustrated the Victorian era; and this
+new edition is a fresh proof that his reputation is undiminished, and
+will long endure.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] _The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with Biographical
+Introductions by his daughter_, Anne Ritchie. In 13 volumes. London,
+1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1898.
+
+[11] Now Lady Ritchie.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST[12]
+
+
+For the last one hundred and fifty years India has been to Englishmen
+an ever-widening field of incessant activity, military, commercial,
+and administrative. They have been occupied, during a temporary
+sojourn in that country, in acquiring and developing a great dominion.
+No situation more unfavourable to the development of imaginative
+literature could be found than that of a few thousand Europeans
+isolated, far from home, among millions of Asiatics entirely different
+from them in race, manners, and language. Their hands have been always
+full of business, they have been absorbed in the affairs of war and
+government, they have been cut off from the culture which is essential
+to the growth of art and letters, they have had little time for
+studying the antique and alien civilisation of the country. It seldom
+happens that the men who play a part in historical events, or who
+witness the sombre realities of war and serious politics, where
+kingdoms and lives are at stake, have either leisure or inclination
+for that picturesque side of things which lies at the source of most
+poetry and romance. And thus it has naturally come to pass that while
+Englishmen in India have produced histories full of matter, though
+often deficient in composition, and have also written much upon
+Oriental antiquities, laws, social institutions, and economy, they
+have done little in the department of novels.
+
+That a good novel should have been produced in India was, therefore,
+until very recent times improbable; that it should have been
+successful in England was still less to be expected. For the modern
+reader will have nothing to do with a story full of outlandish scenes
+and characters; he must be told what he thinks he knows; he must be
+able to realise the points and the probabilities of a plot and of its
+personages; he wants a tale that falls more or less within his
+ordinary experience, or that tallies with his preconceived notions.
+Accordingly, any close description of native Indian manners or people
+is apt to lose interest in proportion as it is exact; its value as a
+painting of life is usually discernible only by those who know the
+country. The popular traditional East was long, and indeed still is,
+that which has been for generations fixed in the imagination of
+Western folk by the _Arabian Nights_, by the legends of Crusaders, and
+by pictorial editions of the Old Testament. It is seen in the Oriental
+landscape and figures presented by Walter Scott in _The Talisman_,
+which every one, at least in youth, has read; whereas _The Surgeon's
+Daughter_, where the scene is laid in India, is hardly read at all. Of
+course there are other reasons why the former book is much more liked
+than the latter; yet it was certainly not bad local colouring or
+unreality of detail that damaged _The Surgeon's Daughter_, for Scott
+knew quite as much about Mysore and Haidar Ali as he did about Syria
+in the thirteenth century and Saladin. But in _The Talisman_ he was on
+the well-trodden ground of mediaeval English history and legend;
+whereas the readers of his Indian tale found themselves wandering in
+the fresh but then almost unknown field of India in the eighteenth
+century.
+
+These are the serious obstacles which have discouraged Anglo-Indians
+from attempting the pure historical romance. They knew the country too
+well for concocting stories after the fashion of Thomas Moore's _Lalla
+Rookh_, with gallant chieftains and beauteous maidens who have nothing
+Oriental about them except a few set Eastern phrases, turbans,
+daggers, and jewellery. They could not use the true local colour, the
+real temper and talk of the Indian East, without great risk of
+becoming neither intelligible nor interesting to the English public at
+large. It may be said that before our own day there has been only one
+author who has successfully overcome these difficulties--Meadows
+Taylor, who wrote a romantic novel, now almost forgotten, founded upon
+the history of Western India in the seventeenth century. The period
+was skilfully chosen, for it is the time of the Moghul emperor
+Aurungzeb's long war against the Mohammedan kingdoms in the Dekhan,
+and of the Maratha insurrection under Sivaji, which eventually ruined
+the Moghul empire. The daring murder of a Mohammedan governor by
+Sivaji, the Maratha hero who freed his countrymen from an alien yoke,
+is still kept in patriotic remembrance throughout Western India. Nor
+is there anything in such a natural sentiment that need give umbrage
+to Englishmen; although the liberality of a recent English governor of
+Bombay who headed a list of subscriptions for public commemoration of
+the deed, betrayed a somewhat simple-minded unreadiness to appreciate
+the significance of historical analogies.
+
+Meadows Taylor has treated this subject with very creditable success.
+He had lived long in that part of the country; he knew the localities;
+he was unusually conversant with the manners and feelings of the
+people, and he had the luck to be among them before the old and rough
+state of society, with its lawless and turbulent elements, had
+disappeared. He had himself been in the service of a native prince
+whose governing methods were no better, in some respects worse, than
+those of the seventeenth century; and his possession of good natural
+literary faculty made up in him a rare combination of qualifications
+for venturing upon an Indian romance. The result has been that _Tara_
+has not fallen into complete oblivion, though one may doubt whether it
+would now be thought generally readable. Although written so late as
+1863, the influence of Walter Scott's mediaeval romanticism shows
+itself in the chivalrous language of the nobles, and in a somewhat
+formal drawing of the leading figures, as if they were taken from a
+model. But all the details are truly executed. There are sketches of
+scenery, of interiors, of dress, arms, and manners, which are clearly
+the outcome of direct observation; and the incidents have a genuine
+flavour. The misfortune is that these are just the sterling qualities
+which require special knowledge and insight for their appreciation,
+and are therefore missed by the great majority of readers. The
+following picture of a party of Maratha horsemen returning from a raid
+may be taken as an example:
+
+     'There might have been twenty-five to thirty men, from the youth
+     unbearded to the grizzled trooper, whose swarthy, sunburnt face,
+     large whiskers and moustaches touched with grey, wiry frame, and
+     easy lounging seat in saddle, as he balanced his heavy Maratha
+     spear across his shoulder, showed the years of service he had done.
+     There was no richness of costume among the party; the dresses were
+     worn and weather stained, and of motley character. Some wore
+     thickly quilted white doublets, strong enough to turn a sword-cut,
+     or light shirts of chain-mail, with a piece of the mail or of
+     twisted wire folded into their turbans; and a few wore steel
+     morions with turbans tied round them, and steel gauntlets inlaid
+     with gold and silver in delicate arabesque patterns. All were now
+     soiled by the wet and mud of the day. It was clear that this party
+     had ridden far; and the horses, from their drooping crests and
+     sluggish action, were evidently weary. Four of the men had been
+     wounded in some skirmish, for they sat their horses with
+     difficulty, and the bandages about them were covered with blood.'
+
+No Indian novel, indeed, has been written which displays greater power
+of picturesque description, or better acquaintance with the
+distinctive varieties of castes, race, and habits, that make up the
+composite population of India. It was for a long time the only Indian
+novel in which the _dramatis personae_ are entirely native.
+
+Although _Tara_ is unique as an Indian romance, there is another story
+which renders Indian life and manners with equal fidelity. _Pandurang
+Hari_ was written by a member of the Indian Civil Service, and first
+published in 1826, though it reappeared in 1874, with a preface by Sir
+Bartle Frere. Here again the scene is in Western India, among the
+Marathas; but the period belongs to the first quarter of this century.
+It purports to be a free translation from a manuscript given to the
+author by a Hindu who had in his youth served with the Maratha armies,
+and latterly fell in with the Pindaree hordes, from whom he heard
+tales of their plundering raids. He eventually joins a band of
+robbers, and leads a wandering, adventurous life in the hills and
+jungles of the Dekhan, until the general pacification of the country
+by the British permits or obliges him to settle down quietly. The
+merit of the book consists entirely in its precise and valuable
+delineation of the condition of the country when it was harried by the
+freebooting Maratha companies, and in certain glimpses which are
+given of Anglo-Indian life in those rough days; for the writer, unlike
+Meadows Taylor, has no literary power, and can only relate accurately
+what he has seen or has carefully gathered from authentic sources.
+
+We have thus only two novels worth mention which have preserved true
+pictures of the times before all the wild irregularity of Indian
+circumstance and rulership had been flattened down under the
+irresistible pressure of English law and order. The historical romance
+has shared the general decline and fall of that school in Europe;
+while as for the exact reproduction of stories dealing entirely with
+native life, very few Anglo-Indians would now attempt it, for such a
+book would find very scanty favour in England. Nearly all recent
+Indian novels have for their subject, not native, but Anglo-Indian
+society; the heroes and heroines, in war or love, in peril or pastime,
+are English; the natives take the minor or accessory part in the
+drama, and give the prevailing colour, tragical or comical, to the
+background. One of the best and earliest novels of this class is
+_Oakfield_, written about 1853 by William Arnold, a son of Dr. Arnold
+of Rugby, who, after spending some years in one of the East India
+Company's sepoy regiments, obtained a civil appointment in India, and
+died at Gibraltar on his way homeward. Some pathetic lines in the
+short poem by Matthew Arnold called _A Southern Night_ commemorate his
+untimely death. The book is remarkable for the autobiographic
+description, too austere and censorious, of life in Indian
+cantonments, or during an Indian campaign, before the great Mutiny
+swept away the old sepoy army of Bengal. It represents the impression
+made upon a young Oxonian of high culture and serious religious
+feeling by the unmannerly and sometimes vicious dissipation of the
+officers' mess in an ill-managed regiment stationed up the country.
+
+Oakfield, a clergyman's son, carefully bred up in Arnold's school of
+indifference to dogma and strictness in morals, finds himself
+oppressed by the hollow conventionality of religious and social ideas
+at home, and sees no prospect of a higher level in the ordinary
+English professions. He leaves Oxford abruptly for an Indian
+cadetship, and sets out with the hope of finding wider scope for work
+and the earnest pursuit of loftier ideals in India. He is intensely
+disappointed and disgusted at finding himself, on joining his
+regiment, among men who have very slight education and wild manners,
+whose talk is coarse, who gamble, fight duels, dislike the country,
+and care nothing for the people. The aims and methods of the
+Government itself appear to him eminently unsatisfactory, being
+chiefly directed towards such grovelling business as revenue
+collection, superficial order, and public works, with little or no
+concern for the moral elevation of the people. When his friends urge
+him to study for the purpose of rising in the service, civil or
+military, he asks: 'What then? What if the extra allowances have
+really no attraction? I want to know what the life is in which you
+think it good to get on. It seems to me that my object in life must be
+not so much to get an appointment, or to get on in the world, as to
+work, and the only work worth doing in the country is helping to
+civilise it.'
+
+We have here the interesting, though not uncommon, case of a youthful
+enthusiast transported as if by one leap--for the sea voyage is a
+blank interval--from England to the Far East, from a sober and
+disciplined home to a loose society, from the centre of ancient peace
+and calm study to a semi-barbarous miscellany of races under an
+elementary kind of government. Ovid's banishment from Rome to the
+shores of the Euxine, to live among rude Roman centurions and subject
+Scythians, could have been no greater change, though Ovid and Oakfield
+are not comparable otherwise. The sight of a great Hindu fair on the
+river bank at Allahabad, as surveyed from the deck of a steamer,
+strikes him with that ever-recurrent feeling of a great gulf fixed
+between Europeans and natives: 'What an inconceivable separation there
+apparently and actually is between us few English, silently making a
+servant of the Ganges with our steam engines and paddles, and these
+Asiatics, with shouts and screams worshipping the same river!'
+
+He meets a cool and capable civilian, who expounds to him the
+practical side of all these questions and administrative problems; and
+he makes a few military friends of the higher stamp, who stand by him
+in his refusal to fight a duel and in the court-martial which follows.
+Then comes the second Sikh war, with a vivid description, evidently by
+an eye-witness, of an officer's share in the hard-fought action at
+Chillianwalla, and of the other sharp contests in that eventful
+campaign. It is an excellent example of the skilful interweaving of
+real incident with the texture of fiction, showing the clear-cut lines
+and colour of actual experience gained in the fiercest battle ever won
+by the English in India:
+
+     'The cavalry and horse-artillery dashed forward, and soon the
+     rolling of wheels and clanking of sabres were lost in one continual
+     roar from above a hundred pieces of artillery. On every side the
+     shot crashed through the jungle; branches of trees were shattered
+     and torn from their stems; rolling horses and falling men gave an
+     early character to this fearful evening.... The 3rd Division
+     advanced, with what fatal results to the gallant 24th Regiment is
+     well known.... Either by an injudicious order, or, as stated in the
+     official despatch, by mistaking a chance movement of their
+     commandant for a signal, the 24th broke into a double at a
+     distance from the guns far too great for a charge; they arrived
+     breathless and exhausted at the guns, where a terrific and hitherto
+     concealed fire of musketry awaited them. The native corps came up
+     and well sustained their European comrades; but both were
+     repulsed--not until twenty-one English officers, twelve sergeants,
+     and 450 rank and file of the 24th had been killed or wounded....
+     Oakfield counted the bodies of nine officers lying dead in as many
+     square yards; there lay the dead bodies of the two Pennycuicks side
+     by side; those of the men almost touched each other.'
+
+The transfer of Oakfield to a civil appointment in no way diminishes
+his dissatisfaction at the spectacle of a Government that has no
+apparent ethical programme and misconceives its true mission:
+
+     'The Indian Government is perhaps the best, the most perfect, nay,
+     perhaps the only specimen of pure professing secularism that the
+     civilised world has ever seen since the Christian era, and
+     sometimes, when our eyes are open to see things as they are, such a
+     secularism does appear a most monstrous phenomenon to be stalking
+     through God's world.... When the spirit of philosophy, poetry, and
+     godliness shall move across the world, when the philosophical
+     reformer shall come here as Governor-General, then the spirit of
+     Mammon may tremble for its empire, but not till then.'
+
+Yet, notwithstanding the author's solicitude for India's welfare, the
+natives make no figure at all in his story; they are barely mentioned,
+except where Oakfield denounces the unblushing perjury committed daily
+in our courts; and one can see that he does them the very common
+injustice of measuring their conduct by an ideal standard of morality.
+Anglo-Indian officials leave their country at an early age, in almost
+total ignorance of the darker side of English life, as seen in a
+police court or wherever the passions and interests of men come into
+sharp conflict. But this is just the side of Indian life that is
+brought prominently before them, at first, as junior magistrates and
+revenue officers, who sometimes do not care to look into any other
+aspects of it; and in consequence they stand aghast at the exhibition
+of vice and false-swearing. A London magistrate transferred to Lucknow
+or Lahore would find much less reason for astonishment.
+
+The same criticism applies, for similar reasons, to Oakfield's
+unmeasured censure of the tone and habits prevalent among officers of
+the old Indian army; he probably knew nothing of regimental life in
+the English army sixty years ago, and therefore supposed the
+delinquencies of his own mess to be monstrous. It must be admitted,
+however, that morals and manners were loose and low in a bad sepoy
+regiment before the Mutiny. No two men could have differed more widely
+in antecedents or character than William Arnold and John Lang, whose
+novel, _The Wetherbys; or, A Few Chapters of Indian Experience_, was
+written a few years earlier than _Oakfield_. It deals with precisely
+the same scenes and society, at the same period, in the form of an
+Indian officer's autobiography. The book is clever, amusing with a
+touch of vulgarity, yet undoubtedly composed with a complete knowledge
+of its subject; for Lang was the editor of a Meerut newspaper, who
+took his full share of Anglo-Indian revelry, and who knew the Indian
+army thoroughly. Whereas in _Oakfield_ the tone rises often to
+righteous indignation, in _The Wetherbys_ it falls to a strain of
+caustic humour, and in the modern reader's mouth it might leave an
+unpleasant taste; yet the verisimilitude of the narrative would be
+questioned by no competent judge. As Oakfield fought at Chillianwalla,
+so Wetherby fights in the almost equally desperate battle of
+Ferozeshah, where the English narrowly escaped a great disaster; and
+here, again, we have a momentary ray of vivid light thrown upon the
+battlefield by a writer who had associated with eye-witnesses, though
+he was not one of them. It is difficult to give an extract from this
+part of the tale, because Lang's power lies not in description, but in
+characteristic conversation; so we may be content, for the purpose of
+bringing out the contrast between two very diverse styles, with a
+specimen of his comic talent, as exhibited in the injunctions laid
+upon her husband by the vulgar half-caste wife of a poor henpecked
+officer just starting for the campaign:
+
+     'Well, then,' she continued, 'keep out of danger. If your troop
+     wishes to charge into a safe place, let 'em. _You_ don't want
+     brevet rank, or any of that nonsense, I hope. Make as much bluster
+     and row as you like, but for Heaven's sake keep out of harm's
+     way.... You need not write to me every day, but every third or
+     fourth day, for the postage is serious. If you should happen to
+     kill any Sikhs, search them, and pull down their back hair; that's
+     where they carry their money and jewels and valuables. A sergeant
+     of the 3rd Dragoons, like a good husband, has sent his wife down a
+     lot of gold mohurs and some precious stones that he found tied up
+     in the hair of a Sikh officer. And, by the by, you may as well
+     leave me your watch. You can always learn the time of day from
+     somebody; and if anything happened to you, it would be sold by the
+     Committee of Adjustment, and would fetch a mere nothing.'
+
+This is unquestionably a grotesque caricature; yet the ladies of mixed
+parentage were quaint and singular persons in the India of sixty years
+ago. As Arnold could hardly have failed to read _The Wetherbys_ before
+he wrote _Oakfield_, the book may have suggested to him the plan of
+going over the same ground upon a higher plane of thought and
+treatment. The two books stand as records of a state of society that
+has now entirely passed away, and from their perusal we may conclude
+that, among the many radical changes wrought upon India by the
+sweeping cyclone of the great Mutiny, not the least of them has been a
+thorough reformation of the native army.
+
+When we turn to the Indian novels written after the Mutiny we are in
+the clearer and lighter atmosphere of the contemporary social novel.
+We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the
+contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the
+old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions,
+serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments
+under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed
+Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and
+military, and sufficiently decorous, except where hill-stations foster
+flirting and the ordinary dissipation of any garrison town. It is,
+however, still a characteristic of the post-Mutiny stories that they
+find very little room for natives; the secret of successfully
+interpreting Indian life and ideas to the English public in this form
+still awaits discovery. One of the best and most popular of the new
+school was the late Sir George Chesney, whose _Battle of Dorking_ was
+a stroke of genius, and who utilised his Indian experiences with very
+considerable literary skill, weaving his projects of army reform into
+a lively tale of everyday society abroad and at home. The scene of _A
+True Reformer_ opens at Simla, under Lord Mayo's vice-royalty, names
+and places being very thinly disguised; the hero marries a pretty
+girl, and starts homeward on furlough, thereby giving the writer his
+opportunity for bringing in a description of a railway journey across
+India to Bombay in the scorching heat of May:
+
+     'And now the day goes wearily on, marked only by the change of the
+     sun's shadow, the rising of the day-wind and its accompaniment of
+     dust, and the ever-increasing heat. The country is everywhere the
+     same--a perfectly flat, desert-looking plain of reddish brown hue,
+     with here and there a village, its walls of the same colour. It
+     looks a desert, because there are no signs of crops, which were
+     reaped two months ago, and no hedgerows, but here and there an
+     acacia tree. Not a traveller is stirring on the road, not a soul to
+     be seen in the fields, but an occasional stunted bullock is
+     standing in such shade as their trees afford. At about every ten
+     miles a station is reached, each exactly like the previous one and
+     the next following.... Gradually the sun went down, the wind and
+     dust subsided, and another stifling night succeeded, with uneasy
+     slumbers, broken by the ever-recurring hubbub of the stoppages.'
+
+On reaching home Captain West learns, like the elder Wetherby in
+Lang's story, that an uncle has died leaving him a good income; so he
+enters Parliament, and the remainder of his autobiography is entirely
+occupied by an account of his efforts in the cause of army reform,
+which eventually succeed when he has overcome the scruples and
+hesitation of the prime minister--Mr. Merriman, a transparent
+pseudonym. The author's plan of endeavouring to interest his readers
+in professional and technical questions is very creditably carried
+out, for the book is throughout readable; and it also shows that on
+the subject of military organisation Chesney was often in advance of
+his time; but the scene changes from India to England so very early in
+the narrative that this novel takes a place on our list more by reason
+of its Anglo-Indian authorship than of its connection with India.
+
+In _The Dilemma_, on the other hand, Chesney gives us a story with
+characters and catastrophes drawn entirely from the sepoy mutiny. The
+main interest centres round the defence of a house in some up-country
+station that is besieged by the mutineers, and for such a purpose the
+writer could supply himself, at discretion, from the abundant
+repertory of adventures and the variety of personal conduct--heroic,
+humorous, or otherwise astonishing--which had been provided by actual
+and recent events. We have here, indeed, a dramatic version of real
+history; and, since the original of an intensely tragic situation must
+always transcend a literary adaptation of it, the fiction necessarily
+suffers by comparison with the fact. Yet the novel contends not
+unsuccessfully with this disadvantage, and in the lapse of years, as
+the real scenes and piercing emotions stirred up by a bloody struggle
+fade into distance, the value of Chesney's work may increase. For it
+preserves a true picture, drawn at first hand, of the time, the
+circumstances, and the behaviour of an isolated group of English folk
+who, while living in a state of profound peace and apparent security,
+found themselves suddenly obliged to fight desperately for their lives
+against an enemy from whom no quarter, even for women and children,
+could be expected in case of defeat.
+
+We may now take up a book of a very different kind, the production,
+not of an Anglo-Indian amateur, but of an eminent English novelist who
+has lived, though not long, in India--Mr. Marion Crawford. Here we are
+back again in the region of romance, for, although the story opens at
+Simla in Lord Lytton's reign and during the second Afghan War, Mr.
+Isaacs, the hero (whose name gives the book its title) is outwardly a
+Persian dealer in precious gems, but esoterically an adept in the
+mysteries of what has been called occult Buddhism. This queer science,
+as professed by a certain Madame Blavatsky, had much vogue in Northern
+India about 1879, particularly at Simla. To sceptics it appeared to be
+an adroit mixture of charlatanry and mere juggling tricks, with some
+elementary knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the true Indian
+Yogi, who seeks to attain supernatural powers by rigid asceticism, and
+who has really some insight into secret mental phenomena, being in
+this line of discovery the forerunner of the English Psychical
+Society.
+
+The part played in this story by Mr. Isaacs, who is not in all
+respects an imaginary personage, might remind one of Disraeli's
+Sidonia. He is an enigmatic character, versed in the philosophy of the
+East and the West, who excels on horseback and in tiger shooting, yet
+can discourse mystically and can bring the mysterious influences at
+his command to bear upon critical situations. The novel has thus two
+sides: we have the usual sketch of Anglo-Indian society--the soldiers,
+the civilians, the charming young English girl whom Mr. Isaacs
+fascinates. But a writer of Mr. Crawford's high repute is bound to put
+some depth and originality into his Indian tale, and so we have the
+Pandit Ram Lal, who is somehow also a Buddhist, and who is Mr.
+Isaacs's colleague whenever occult Buddhism is to give warning or
+timely succour. The chief exploit occurs in a wondrous expedition to
+rescue and carry away into Tibet the Afghan Amir, Sher Ali, who had
+just then actually fled from Kabul before the advance of an English
+army; and it must be confessed that so fantastic an adventure sounds
+rather startling in connection with a bit of authentic contemporary
+history.
+
+On the whole, whether we assume that the object of a novel is to
+illustrate history, or to present a faithful reflection of life and
+manners, or to render strenuous action dramatically yet not
+improbably--by whatever standard we measure Mr. Crawford's book, it
+cannot be awarded a high place on the list of Indian fiction. But we
+have run over this list so rapidly, touching only upon typical
+examples, that we are now among the latest writers of the present
+day; and we may take _Helen Treveryan_ (1892) as a very favourable
+specimen of their productions. Comparing it with earlier novels, we
+may remark, in the first place, that there is no great variety of plot
+or treatment, Anglo-Indian society being everywhere, and at most
+times, very much the same, except so far as closer intercourse with
+Europe softens down its roughness, materially and morally, increases
+the feminine element, and assimilates its outer form to the English
+model. _Helen Treveryan_, whose author is a very distinguished member
+of the Indian Civil Service, is, like all other novels of the kind,
+the narrative of the adventures, in love and war, of a young English
+military officer in India. The characters are evidently drawn from
+life; the main incidents belong to very recent Indian history; the
+description of society in an up-country station, with which the
+movement of the drama begins, is an exact and humorous photograph. A
+tiger hunt is done better, with more knowledge of the business, than a
+similar episode in Mr. Crawford's novel; and the passionate love
+between Guy Langley and Helen Treveryan is well painted in bright
+colours to intensify the gloom and pathos of Langley's death in
+battle.
+
+As Chesney went to the sepoy mutiny for his scenes of tragedy and
+heroism, so Sir Mortimer Durand (we believe that the original
+pseudonym has been dropped) takes them from the second Afghan War,
+having been at Kabul with General Roberts in the midst of hard
+fighting, where he first placed his foot on the ladder which has led
+him upward to high places and unusual distinction. In the chapters
+describing the march upon Kabul, its occupation, the rising of the
+tribes, and their attack upon the British army beleaguered in the
+Sherpur entrenchments, we have simply a memoir of actual events,
+written with truth, spirit, and with the pictorial skill of an artist
+who understands the value and proportion of romantic details. The
+English commanders, the Afghan sirdars, and several other well-known
+folk are mentioned by name; the skirmishes and perilous situations are
+described just as they really occurred. No book could better serve the
+purpose of a home-keeping Englishman who might desire to see as in a
+moving photograph what was going on in the British camp before Kabul
+during the perilous winter of 1879-80, to hear the camp-talk, and to
+realise the nature and methods of Afghan fighting.
+
+     'He turned to the westward, and as he did so there was a flicker in
+     the darkness, where the rugged top of the Asmai Hill could just be
+     made out. For an instant there was perfect silence; then, as the
+     flame caught and flared, there rose from the men around him a low,
+     involuntary "A--h," such as one may sometimes hear at Lord's when a
+     dangerous wicket goes down. Then in the distance two musket shots
+     rang out, and after them a few more; but along the cantonment wall
+     all was silent; men stood with beating hearts awaiting the
+     onslaught. For some minutes the suspense lasted, and then suddenly
+     burst from the darkness a wild storm of yells, "Allah, Allah,
+     Allah," and fifty thousand Afghans came with a rush at the wall,
+     shouting and firing. The cantonment was surrounded by a broad
+     continuous ring of rifle-flashes, and over the parapet and over the
+     trenches the bullets began to stream.'
+
+But the subjoined extract, which gives Langley's death, is a better
+example of the book's general style--cool, circumstantial, abhorrent
+of glitter or exaggeration, leaving a clear impression of things
+actually witnessed and done, a brief glimpse of one of the incidents
+that remain stamped on the brain of those who saw it, but are
+otherwise forgotten in war-time, after a day or two's regret for the
+lost comrade.[13]
+
+     'They were all weary, and marched carelessly forward in silence.
+     The night was closing fast, and a little fine snow was falling....
+     There was a sudden flash in the darkness to the right, a shot, and
+     then a scattering volley. Guy Langley threw up his arms with a cry,
+     and as the startled horse swerved across the road he fell with a
+     dull thud on the snow. There was a moment of confusion, but the
+     Sikhs, though careless, were good soldiers, and two or three of
+     them dashed towards the low wall from which the shots had come.
+     They were just in time to see four men running across a bit of
+     broken ground towards a deep water-cut, fringed with poplars. The
+     horsemen were very quick after them, being light men on hardy
+     horses; and one of the four Afghans, a big man in a dirty sheepskin
+     coat, lost his head, and ran down under a bit of wall; the other
+     three crossed the water-cut. The horsemen saw the position at once,
+     and rode after the man on their side of the trench. They were up to
+     him in a minute, and Atar Singh made a lunge at him with his lance;
+     but the Afghan avoided it, and swinging up his heavy knife cut the
+     boy across the hand. Before he could turn to run again a second
+     horseman was on him, and with a grim "Hyun--Would you?" drove the
+     lance through his chest.'
+
+The dialogue is occasionally used to bring out contending views in
+regard to Indian politics, as might be expected from a writer who has
+thoroughly studied them. At a Simla dinner-party the conversation
+turns upon the question whether, in the event of a collision between
+the armed forces of Russia and England on the Indian frontier, the
+Anglo-Indian army could hold its own successfully against such a
+serious enemy. We have on one side the man of dismal forebodings, so
+well known in India, and against him the hopeful, resolute officer,
+who lays just stress on England's superior position, with all the
+strength and resources of India and the British empire at her back.
+One supremely important point in the discussion is, by consent of both
+speakers, the probable behaviour in such a crisis of the native Indian
+army; and we may here express our agreement with the view that our
+best native regiments would prove themselves faithful soldiers and
+formidable antagonists to the Russians. As is well said in the course
+of the argument, the Sikhs and Goorkhas faced us well when they fought
+us, 'and with English officers to lead them, why should they not face
+the Russians?... I believe the natives will be true to us if we are
+true to ourselves; some few are actively disloyal, but not the mass of
+them. If we begin to falter they will go, of course; but if we show
+them we mean fighting they will fight too.' This is the true political
+creed for Englishmen in India, outside of which there is no salvation,
+but the reverse.
+
+It is perhaps to be regretted that so capable a writer upon Indian
+subjects has given us nothing of native life and character beyond a
+few silhouettes; and after Guy Langley's death, when the scene is
+transferred entirely to England, the story's interest decidedly flags.
+Yet we may fairly assign a high place in the series of Indian novels
+to _Helen Treveryan_, not only for its literary merits, but also for
+the historical value of the chapters which preserve the day by day
+experience of one who took his share in the culminating dangers and
+difficulties of an arduous campaign.
+
+Mrs. Steel's book, _On the Face of the Waters_, has been so widely
+read and reviewed since it appeared, so lately as 1897, that another
+criticism of it may appear stale and superfluous; yet to omit
+mentioning in this article the most popular of recent Indian novels
+would be impossible. Here, at any rate, is a book which is not open to
+the remark that the Anglo-Indian novelist usually leaves the natives
+in the background, or admits them only as supernumeraries. For Mrs.
+Steel's canvas is crowded with Indian figures; their talk, their
+distinctive peculiarities of character and costume, their parts in the
+great tragedy which is taken as the ground-plan of her story, are so
+abundantly described as occasionally to bewilder the inexperienced
+reader. The scene of action is the Sepoy mutiny at Meerut and the
+siege of Delhi, and while the Indian _dramatis personae_ are mainly
+types of different classes and castes--except where, like the King of
+Delhi, they are historical--the English army leaders act and speak
+under their own names, as in Durand's book, being of course modelled
+upon the ample personal knowledge of them still obtainable from their
+surviving contemporaries in India.
+
+The book, in fact, attempts, as is frankly stated in its preface, 'to
+be at once a story and a history.' And we observe that Mrs. Steel
+tells us, as if it were a credit and a recommendation to her work,
+that she 'has not allowed fiction to interfere with fact in the
+slightest degree.'
+
+     'The reader may rest assured that every incident bearing in the
+     remotest degree on the Indian Mutiny, or on the part which real men
+     took in it, is scrupulously exact, even to the date, the hour, the
+     scene, the weather. Nor have I allowed the actual actors in the
+     great tragedy to say a word regarding it which is not to be found
+     in the accounts of eye-witnesses, or in their own writings.'
+
+Is such minute matter-of-fact copying a virtue in the novelist? or is
+it not rather a defect arising out of a misunderstanding of the
+principles of his art? In our opinion the business of the novelist,
+even when he chooses an historical subject, is not to reproduce as
+many exact details as he can pick out of memoirs, official reports,
+and histories, but, on the contrary, to avoid making up his story out
+of a string of extracts and personal reminiscences, or at any rate to
+use his skill rather for disguising than for disclosing the precise
+verbal accuracy of his borrowed material. What would be thought of a
+naval romance that adopted, word for word, the authentic account of
+Nelson's death, or of a military novel that seasoned a full and
+particular account of Waterloo with a few imaginary characters and
+incidents? Any one who has observed how two fine writers, Thackeray
+and Stendhal, have brought that famous battle into the plot of their
+masterpieces (_Vanity Fair_ and _La Chartreuse de Parme_), will have
+noticed that they carefully avoid the crude and undisguised employment
+of detail, either in words or incidents; they allow fiction to
+interfere very constantly with fact in all petty matters of this sort;
+their art consists, not in historical accuracy, but in verisimilitude;
+they discard authentic phrases and incidents; they do not aim at
+precision, but at dramatic probabilities. But Mrs. Steel does not only
+draw too copiously, for a novelist, upon history; she also undertakes
+to pass authoritative judgments upon disputable questions of fact and
+situation, with which fiction, we submit, has no concern. She very
+plainly intimates that nothing but culpable inaction and want of
+energy prevented instant pursuit by a force from Meerut of the
+mutineers who made a forced march upon Delhi on the night of May 10,
+and whose arrival produced the insurrection in that city.
+
+     'Delhi lay,' she says, 'but thirty miles distant on a broad white
+     road, and there were horses galore and men ready to ride them--men
+     like Captain Rosser, of the Carabineers, who pleaded for a
+     squadron, a field battery, a troop, or a gun--anything with which
+     to dash down the road and cut off that retreat to Delhi.'
+
+To argue the point in this review would be to fall into the very error
+on which we desire to lay stress, of attempting to deal with serious
+history in a light, literary way. We shall therefore be content with
+reminding our readers that Lord Roberts, who is perhaps the very best
+living authority on the subject, has come to the conclusion, after a
+careful survey of the circumstances, that the refusal of the Meerut
+commanders to pursue the mutineers was justifiable.
+
+Yet Mrs. Steel's performance is better than her principles. The
+unquestionable success of _On the Face of the Waters_ is in no way due
+to her scrupulous exactitude in particulars, for if this had been the
+book's chief feature it would have failed. She has a clear and
+spirited style; she knows enough of India to be able to give a fine
+natural colour to the stirring scenes of the Sepoy mutiny, and to
+execute good character-drawing of the natives, as they are to be
+studied among the various classes in a great city. And whenever her
+good genius takes her off the beaten road of recorded fact her
+narrative shows considerable imaginative vigour. The massacres at
+Meerut and Delhi, the wild tumult, terror, and agony, are
+energetically described; and her picture of the confusion inside Delhi
+during the siege is admirably worked up, remembering that she wrote
+forty years after the event, at a time when the people and even the
+places had very greatly changed. The storming of the breach at the
+Kashmir gate by the forlorn hope that led the English columns is
+dexterously brought into an animated narrative; and although that
+story has been much better told in Lord Roberts's autobiography, we
+need not look too austerely on the crowd of readers who find history
+more attractive under a thin and embroidered veil of fiction.
+
+A still more recent novel, entitled _Bijli the Dancer_ (1898), should
+be mentioned here, not only for its intrinsic merits, but also because
+the author has boldly faced the problem of constructing a story out of
+the materials available from purely native society, the stock themes
+and characters of Anglo-India being entirely discarded. Bijli is a
+professional dancing girl, whose grace and accomplishments so
+fascinate a great Mohammedan landholder of North India, that he
+persuades her to abandon her profession and to abide with him as his
+mistress. This arrangement is correctly treated in the book as quite
+consistent with the maintenance of due respect and consideration for
+the Nawab's lawful wife, who occupies separate apartments, and,
+according to Mohammedan ideas in that rank of society, has no
+reasonable ground for complaint. Yet Bijli, though she has every
+comfort, and is deeply attached to her lord, grows restless in her
+luxurious solitude; she pines for the excitement and triumphs of
+singing and dancing before an assembly. So, in the Nawab's absence,
+she takes professional disguise, and sings with a lute in the harem
+before his wife. To those who would like to see a Mohammedan lady of
+high rank in full dress, the following description of costume may be
+commended:
+
+     'She was dressed and adorned with scrupulous care; her eyebrows
+     trimmed of every stray hair that might deform the beauty-arch; the
+     lids pencilled with lampblack; the palms of her hands and the soles
+     of her feet stained with henna; not one stray lock encroached on
+     the straight parting of her glossy hair.
+
+     'She wore gold-embroidered trousers of purple satin, loose below
+     the knee and full over the ankles, and fastened round her waist by
+     a gold cord with jewelled tassels. A black crape bodice adorned
+     with spangles and gold edging confined her full bosom, and an open
+     vest of grey gauze with long, tight sleeves hung loosely over her
+     waistband. Upon the back of her head was thrown a veiling-sheet of
+     the fine muslin known as the dew of Dacca. Her feet and hands, arms
+     and wrists and neck, were adorned with numerous rings, jewels, and
+     chains, and from her nose was hung a ring of gold wire, on which
+     was strung a ruby between two grey pearls.'
+
+But Bijli's intrusion into the harem is a grave breach of etiquette;
+she is detected, and told to be gone, though the lady bears her no
+malice. The incident brings home to her a sense of degradation; she
+asks the Nawab to marry her, and her discontent is increased by his
+refusal, until at last she escapes secretly from his house. The Nawab
+follows, and finds her in a hut on the bank of a flooded river which
+has stopped her flight; but after a really pathetic interview she
+returns to her free life--and 'thus ended the romance of Bijli the
+Dancer.'
+
+In this short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style
+and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up
+European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we
+have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and
+the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with
+romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often
+exercise over natives of the highest rank is a well-known feature of
+Indian society; and although the dancer is always a courtesan, yet to
+invest her with a capacity for tender and honourable affection is by
+no means to overstep the limits of probability. We have noticed this
+book because it proves that the study of native manners, and
+sympathetic insight into their feelings and character, still survive
+among Anglo-Indians, albeit officials; and because it stands out in
+quiet relief among tales of fierce wars and savage mutiny; it neither
+chronicles the heroic deeds of Englishmen, nor does it devote even a
+single page to the loves, sorrows, or comic misadventures that break
+the monotony of a British cantonment.
+
+_The Chronicles of Dustypore_, by H. S. Cunningham, takes us back
+again from the sombre, half-veiled interior of an Indian household,
+into the fierce light which beats upon English society at some station
+in the sun-dried plains of the Punjab. We have here a sketch, half
+satirical, half in earnest, of official work and ways, with one or two
+personages that can be easily identified from among the provincial
+notabilities of twenty years ago. The book, which had considerable
+success in its time, will still provide interest and amusement for
+those who enjoy an exceedingly clever delineation of familiar scenes
+and characters; and it is in the main as true and lively a picture of
+Anglo-Indian life as when it was first written. Here is the summer
+landscape of the Sandy Tracts, a region just annexed to British
+administration after the usual skirmish with, and discomfiture of, the
+native ruler:
+
+     'Vast plains, a dead level but for an occasional clump of palms or
+     the dome of some despoiled and crumbling tomb, stretched away on
+     every side and ended in a hazy, quivering horizon that spoke of
+     infinite heat. Over these ranged herds of cattle and goats,
+     browsing on no one could see what; or bewildered buffaloes would
+     lie, panting and contented, in some muddy pool, with little but
+     horns, eyes, and nostrils exposed above the surface. Little
+     ill-begotten stunted plants worked hard to live and grow and to
+     weather the roaring fierce winds. The crows sat gasping,
+     open-beaked, as if protesting against having been born into so
+     sulphurous an existence. Here and there a well, with its huge
+     lumbering wheel and patient bullocks, went creaking and groaning
+     night and day, as if earth grudged the tiny rivulet coming so
+     toilfully from her dry breast, and gave it up with sighs of pain.
+     The sky was cloudless, pitiless, brazen. The sun rose into it
+     without a single fleck of vapour to mitigate its fierceness ... all
+     day it shone and glistened and blazed, until the very earth seemed
+     to crack with heat and the mere thought of it was pain.'
+
+Such is the environment in which many English officers live and labour
+for years; and this is the side of Anglo-Indian existence that is
+unknown to, and consequently unappreciated by, the rapid tourist, who
+runs by railway from one town to another during the bright cold winter
+months, is delighted with the climate and the country, takes note of
+the deficiencies or peculiarities of Anglo-Indians, and has a very
+short memory for their hospitality. The narrative carries us, as a
+matter of course, to a Himalayan Elysium, with its balls, picnics, and
+its flirtations, among which the leading lady of the piece is drawn to
+the brink of indiscretion, but steps happily back again into the
+secure haven of domestic felicity. A good deal of excellent light
+comedy and sparkling dialogue will always maintain for this novel a
+creditable place upon the Indian list; and as an indirect illustration
+of the social wall that separates ordinary English folk from the
+population which surrounds them, it is complete, since we have here a
+story plotted out upon the stage of a great Indian province which
+contains absolutely no mention of the natives beyond occasional
+necessary reference to the servants.
+
+For a strong contrast to _Dustypore_, both in subject and style of
+treatment, we may take a story which merits notice, even though it be
+hardly long enough to be ranked among Indian novels. _The Bond of
+Blood_, by R. E. Forrest (1896), draws, like _Bijli the Dancer_, its
+incidents and their environment exclusively from Indian life; and the
+book may be placed high in this class of difficult work, which few
+have ventured to attempt, and where success has been very rare. It is
+a study of peculiarly local manners, that may be also called
+contemporary; for though the period belongs to the early years of this
+century, yet the sure drawing from life of a skilful hand may still be
+verified by those readers who actually know the customs and feelings
+at the present day of the Rajput clans, among whom primitive ideas and
+institutions have been less obliterated in the independent States than
+in any other region of India. The descriptive and personal sketches
+attest the writer's gift of close observation; there is good
+workmanship in all the details; his sentences hit the mark and are
+never overcharged or superfluous. The tale is of a dissipated Rajput
+chief, to whom a moneylender has lent a large sum upon a bond which
+has been endorsed by the sign-manual of the family Bhat, or hereditary
+bard, herald, and genealogist--an office of great repute and
+importance in every noble Rajput house. Debauchees and cunning
+gamblers empty the chief's purse; the moneylender, an honest man
+enough in his way, is obliged to press him for the sum due; until at
+last the bewildered chief is persuaded by one of the gamblers to
+declare flatly that he will not pay at all, whereupon the creditor
+falls back upon the surety. Now the Bhat has pledged upon the bond not
+his property but his life, according to an ancient and authentic
+custom among Rajput folk, as formerly throughout India, whereby a man
+who has no other means of enforcing a just claim against a powerful
+debtor has always the resource of bringing down upon him a fearful
+curse by committing suicide before his door. The Rajput chief pretends
+that the bond is illegal and void, being founded upon an obsolete
+custom disallowed by the English rulers; but in truth he has brought
+himself to believe that the blood penalty will not really be paid, and
+he is struck with horror when the Bhat, after formal and public
+warning, stabs his own mother in the chief's presence, whereupon the
+curse falls and clings to the family. We may add that the substitution
+of the Bhat's mother for himself as an expiatory victim is in
+accordance with accepted precedents on such occasions, while it makes
+room for a pathetic situation, and greatly enhances the dramatic
+interest of the closing scene. Here we have the antique Oriental
+version of the story in Shakespeare's _Merchant of Venice_, where
+Shylock takes the same kind of security from Antonio, upon whose
+person he subsequently demands execution of his bond of blood; nor
+does the law refuse it to him. But the Hindu custom is so far milder
+than the Venetian code that the Rajput Shylock could not have rejected
+a tender of full payment in cash. Mr. Forrest's tale might be turned
+into an effective stage-tragedy if the main incident were not too
+shockingly improbable for Europeans, although to an Indian audience it
+would be credible enough. The final scene of the mother's death is
+stamped on the reader's imagination by the writer's power of giving
+intense significance not only to the speech but to slight movements of
+the actors, so that the mental picture becomes almost objective, while
+the strained expectation of the crowd makes itself felt by the force
+of the words.
+
+     '"Will you redeem the bond?" asks the herald once more.
+
+     '"Say 'No,'" exclaims Takht Singh.
+
+     '"No," shouts Hurdeo Singh (the chief).
+
+     '"Then blood must be shed at your door, and the life forfeit paid
+     at your threshold, so that the curse may alight upon you and your
+     house."
+
+     'He draws the dagger from its sheath. He had not laid his hand
+     upon its handle in the same manner that he would have laid it on
+     the hilt of his sword, but the reverse way to that; he puts the
+     palm of his hand under it and not over it, so he could best use it
+     in the way he intended to use it--so could he best strike the blow
+     he meant to strike.
+
+     '"Begone! Begone!" shouts Hurdeo Singh, waving him away with his
+     hand.
+
+     'The people around stand fixed as statues, eyes straining, necks
+     craning. The herald stretches his left arm behind his mother, and
+     she, throwing open her _chudder_, leans back against it....
+
+     'The money-lender had given a sudden cry, stretched out his hand,
+     uttered some words.
+
+     'When Hurdeo Singh had beheld the herald raise his right arm, his
+     own had gone up with it, and from his mouth had come the cry,
+     "Don't! Don't."
+
+     'But it was too late. The herald had raised his arm, turned round
+     his head, and plunged the sharp stiletto into his mother's breast.'
+
+It would be scarcely possible in an article that ranges over the light
+literature of Anglo-India to omit mentioning the name of Mr. Rudyard
+Kipling, who is the most prominent and by far the most popular of
+Anglo-Indian authors. Yet our reference to his writings must be very
+brief, since most of them lie beyond the scope of our present subject;
+for although Mr. Kipling's short stories are famous, and he is a
+consummate artist in black and white, yet in the complete edition of
+his volumes up to date there is, in fact, but one full-sized Indian
+novel, and for this he is only responsible in part. Nor, assuming that
+the Indian chapters of the _Naulakha_[14] may be ascribed to him,
+would it be fair criticism to treat them as good samples of his work,
+or as illustrating his distinctive genius. The attempt in this story
+to bring together West and East, and to strike bold contrasts by
+setting down a Yankee fresh from Colorado before the palace gate of a
+Maharaja in the sands of western Rajputana, is too daring a venture;
+and the plot's development, though here and there are some touches of
+true vision and some vigorous passages, labours under the weight of
+its extravagant improbability. The American's restless energy, brought
+face to face with Oriental immobility, expresses itself in the
+following way:
+
+     'It made him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and
+     lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up
+     and stirring by rights--trading, organising, inventing, building
+     new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying
+     new railroads, going in for fresh enterprises, and keeping things
+     humming.
+
+     '"They've got resources enough," he said. "It isn't as if they had
+     the excuse that the country's poor. It's a good country. Move the
+     population of a lively Colorado town to Rhatore, set up a good
+     local paper, organise a board of trade, and let the world know what
+     is here, and we'd have a boom in six months that would shake the
+     empire. But what's the use? They're dead. They're mummies. They're
+     wooden images. There isn't enough real, old-fashioned, downright
+     rustle and razzle-dazzle and 'git up and git' in Gokral Seetaram to
+     run a milk-cart."'
+
+Such indeed might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found
+himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole
+piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring
+sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and
+flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediaeval crusaders. This must
+be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own
+short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the
+contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in
+the rapid, unerring delineation of characters that stand out in clear
+relief, yet blend with and act upon each other when they encounter.
+But Mr. Kipling's volumes would require a separate article to
+themselves, so that we will merely take this occasion of recording our
+wish that he may some day turn his unique faculty of painting real
+Indian pictures toward the composition of a novel which shall _not_ be
+about Anglo-Indian society (for the thin soil of that field has
+already been over-harrowed), but shall give a true and lively
+rendering of the thoughts which strike an imaginative Englishman when
+he surveys the whole moving landscape of our Indian empire, watches
+the course of actual events, and tries to forecast its probable
+destiny.
+
+It has been manifestly impossible in this brief article to do more
+than touch upon a few books that may illustrate the prominent
+characteristics, and the general place in light literature, of Indian
+novels. This must explain why we have omitted several other works, of
+which _Transgression_[15] is the latest. In this tale we have a sketch
+of life on the North-West Frontier at the present day, with some
+well-known incidents of the Afridi War of 1897-98 introduced, and so
+coloured from the writer's own point of view as to convey, under a
+thin varnish of fiction, some sharp and sarcastic criticism on the
+management of affairs, the politics of the Government, and the
+personal behaviour of certain officials, who can be at once
+identified. Although the book is not without interest as a true
+account of hazardous and stirring frontier duties, we are bound to
+repeat our warning that this abuse of the novel for controversial
+purposes is not only unfair, but profoundly inartistic. No literary
+success, but failure and the confusion of styles, lies that way.
+
+What, then, are the conclusions which we may draw from this brief
+survey of the more prominent and typical Indian novels? To the
+repertory of English fiction, which is perhaps the largest and most
+varied that any national literature contains, they have undoubtedly
+made a not unworthy contribution; for we may agree that fiction has
+some, if not the highest, value when it produces an animated
+representation of life and manners, even upon a limited and distant
+field. In the present instance the narrow range of plot and character
+that may be observed in the pure Anglo-Indian novel reflects the
+uniformity of a society which consists almost entirely, outside the
+Presidency capitals on the sea-coast, of civil and military
+officials--a society that is also upon one level of class and of age,
+for among the English in India there are neither old men nor boys and
+girls; the men and women are in the prime of life, with a number of
+small children. This age-limit lops off from both ends of human
+existence a certain proportion of the characters that are available
+for filling up the canvas of the social novelist at home. And it is in
+truth a peculiar feature, not only of Anglo-Indian society, but of the
+Anglo-Indian administration, because the enforced retirement of almost
+every officer after the age of fifty-five years greatly diminishes the
+influence of weighty and mature experience exercised by the senior men
+in the services and government of most countries. In regard to the
+equality of class it may be observed that here also the lack of
+variety produces a similar dearth of materials; we miss the
+picturesque contrasts of rich and poor, of townsfolk and country folk,
+of the diverse groups which make up a European population. The 'short
+and simple annals of the poor' cannot be woven into the Indian
+tapestry which records higher and broader scenes; the peasantry, for
+example, whose quaint figures and idioms are so useful in English
+novels, do not come into the Anglo-Indian tale. They cannot be blended
+in fiction with the foreign element because they are wholly apart in
+reality. In short, the whole company that play upon the exclusively
+Anglo-Indian stage belong to one grade of society, and the hero is
+invariably a military officer.
+
+The most popular of Anglo-Indian novels are probably those which deal
+in exact reproduction of ordinary incidents and conversation, related
+in a sprightly and humorous style. This accords with the taste of
+present-day readers, many of whom take up a book only for the
+momentary amusement that it gives them, and are well content with
+interminable dialogues that do little more than echo, with a certain
+spice of epigram and smart repartee, the commonplaces interchanged
+among clever people at a country house or in a London drawing-room.
+Nevertheless, we believe that Anglo-Indian fiction is seen at its best
+in the novel of action, since war and love-making must still, as
+formerly, rule the whole kingdom of romance; since as emotional forces
+they are the same in every climate and country. Each successive
+campaign in India, from the first Afghan War to the latest expedition
+across the Afridi frontier, has furnished the Anglo-Indian writer with
+a new series of striking incidents that can be used for his heroic
+deeds and dire catastrophes, for new landscapes and figures, all of
+them bearing the very form and stamp of impressive reality. If he is
+artist enough to avoid abusing these advantages, if he is neither an
+extravagant colourist nor a mere copyist or compiler, he has this
+fresh field to himself, he can give us a stirring narrative of
+frontier adventures, he can sketch in the aspect of a country or the
+distinctive qualities of a people that have preserved many of the
+features which in Europe have now vanished into the dim realms of
+early romance. His danger lies, as we have seen from some examples
+already quoted, in the temptation to make too much use of the
+attractive materials that are readily found to hand in military
+records or in such a real tragedy as the Sepoy mutiny, so that the
+novel is liable to become little more than authentic history related
+in a glowing, exuberant style of writing and portraiture.
+
+In short, the Indian novel belongs to the objective outdoor class; it
+is full of open air and activity, and the introspective psychological
+vein is almost entirely wanting. There are, indeed, passages which
+indicate that peculiar sense of the correlation, so to speak, of the
+environment with the moods and feelings of men, the influence upon the
+human mind of nature--a sense which has inspired some of our finest
+poetry, and which is so well rendered by the best Russian novelists,
+by Tourgueneff and by Tolstoi. One work of Tolstoi's, _Les Cosaques_,
+might be especially recommended for study to the Anglo-Indian novelist
+of the future, as an example of the true impress that can be made upon
+a reader's mind by the literary art, when it succeeds in giving vivid
+interest to the picture of a solitary officer's life upon a dull and
+distant frontier.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] (1) _Tara._ By Meadows Taylor. London, 1898. (2) _Oakfield._ By
+William D. Arnold. London, 1853. (3) _The Wetherbys, Father and Son._
+By John Lang. London, ?1850. (4) _Mr. Isaacs._ By F. Marion Crawford.
+London, 1898. (5) _Helen Treveryan._ By John Roy. London, 1892. (6)
+_On the Face of the Waters._ By Mrs. Steel. London, 1896. (7) _Bijli
+the Dancer._ By James Blythe Patton. London, 1898. (8) _The Chronicles
+of Dustypore._ By H. S. Cunningham. London, 1875. And other
+Novels.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1899.
+
+[13] [Greek]
+    'alla chre ton katathaptein, hos ke thanesi,
+    nelea thumon echontas, ep hemati hoakrusants.'
+
+    (_Iliad_, xix. 228, 229.)
+
+[14] _Naulakha_, by Rudyard Kipling and W. Balestier. London, 1892.
+
+[15] _Transgression_, by S. S. Thorburn. London, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+HEROIC POETRY[16]
+
+
+I have taken the words 'Heroic Poetry' to signify the poetry of
+strenuous action, the art of describing in vigorous animating verse
+those scenes and emergent situations in which the energies of mankind
+are strung up to the higher tones, and where the emotions are brought
+into full play by the exhibition of valour, endurance, and suffering.
+It seems to me remarkable that modern English poetry, with all its
+splendid variety, should have produced very little in this particular
+form; because no one can deny that the latter-day story of the English
+has been full of enterprise and perilous adventure, providing ample
+material to the artist who knows how to use it. Nor can it be said
+that there is any lack of demand for this sort of poetry, and
+consequently little inducement to supply it. On the contrary, any one
+can see that hero worship is as strong as ever, that any striking
+incident, or example of personal valour, or exploit of war, brings out
+the verse-writer, and that his efforts, if only very moderately
+successful, are sure to win him great popularity.
+
+But it must be admitted that most of these efforts fail rather
+lamentably, insomuch that at the present day we may seem to be losing
+one of the finest forms of a noble art. From this point of view there
+may be some advantage in looking back to the heroic poetry of earlier
+ages, and in endeavouring to mark briefly and imperfectly its
+distinctive qualities, to recall the conditions and circumstances in
+which it flourished, and possibly to hazard some suggestions as to
+the causes of its decline.
+
+I do not know any recent book which throws more light upon this
+subject than Professor Ker's book on _Epic and Romance_, published in
+1897. It is, to my mind, most valuable as an exposition of the right
+nature and methods of heroic narrative, in poetry and in prose. The
+author has the rare gift of insight into the ways and feelings of
+primitive folk, and the critical faculty of discerning the
+characteristics of a style or a period, showing how men, who knew what
+to say and the right manner of saying it, have shaped the true form of
+heroic poetry. We can see that its elementary principles, the methods
+of composition in verse and prose, are essentially the same in all
+times and countries, in the _Iliad_, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the
+old Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon poems, and to some extent in the French
+Chansons de Geste; they might be used to-morrow for a heroic subject
+by any one gifted with the requisite skill, imagination, and the eye
+for impressive realities.
+
+     'Few nations have attained, at the close of their heroic age, to a
+     form of poetical art in which men are represented freely in action
+     and conversation. The labour and meditation of all the world has
+     not discovered, for the purposes of narrative, any essential
+     modification of the procedure of Homer.'
+
+Professor Ker's essays are a brilliant and scholarly contribution to
+the external history of poetical forms: and it would be great
+presumption in me to attempt a review of his work. But it is so
+eminently suggestive, and to my mind so valuable as a study for verse
+writers of the present day, that I have ventured to place this book in
+the foreground of an attempt to sketch rapidly some clear outline of
+the conditions and the essential qualities of heroic poetry, which is
+too commonly regarded as an easy off-hand kind of versification,
+largely made up of dash, glowing words, and warlike clatter; although
+in reality nothing is more rare or difficult than success in it.
+
+We may say, then, that the first heroic poets and tale-tellers were
+those who related the deeds and sufferings, the life and death of the
+mighty men of earlier times; and that their verse was the embodiment
+of the living traditions of men and manners. They were bards and
+chroniclers who lived close enough to the age of which they wrote to
+understand and keep touch with it--an age when battles and adventures
+were ordinary incidents in the annals of a tribe, a city, or a
+country--when valour, skill at arms, and a stout heart were supremely
+important, being almost the only virtues that led to high distinction
+and a great career. Heroic poetry of the higher kind could not exist
+in a period of mere barbarism, for among barbarous folk there is no
+art of poetic form. It could not have arisen before the people were so
+far civilised as to have among them artistic singers or story-tellers
+who gave fine and forcible expression to the acts they celebrated or
+the scenes they described.
+
+The old heroic poets were neither too near to the time of which they
+sung or wrote, nor too far from it; and this gave them another special
+advantage, they had a good audience. The song, or the story, must have
+often been recited before listeners to whom the whole subject was more
+or less familiar, who knew the facts and ways of war, the true aspect
+and usages of a rough and perilous existence. They were too well
+acquainted, at any rate, with such things to be captivated by vague
+imaginative descriptions of fighting and refined chivalrous methods of
+dealing with a mortal foe, such as are found in the later Romance.
+Among primitive folk there would have been no taste for fantastic,
+allegoric, and extravagant though highly poetical accounts of
+valorous exploits by noble knights, with their tournaments and their
+adventures with giants, dwarfs, or enchanters. The tradition was of a
+community encompassed by dangers for men and for women, where life and
+goods depended on strength and sagacity. And so the original hero was
+strictly a practical soldier, a man who knew his business, who had
+very few troublesome scruples; he was a man of war from his youth up,
+struggling with arduous circumstance; and he usually came at last, as
+in actual life, to a bloody though glorious end. For the experience of
+a rough age is that the drama mostly finishes tragically, not happily
+as in a modern novel. There was always a strain of Romance in the
+heroic tale, and softer feelings were never quite absent: but all this
+was subordinate to facts: whereas Romance seems to have prevailed and
+grown popular in proportion as the writer stood further away from the
+actualities, trusted to imagination rather than to authentic
+experience, preferred literary ornament to probability, and indeed
+took his readers as far away as possible from scenes or situations
+which they could recognise or verify.
+
+It may thus be suggested that the essential quality of Heroic poetry
+is this--that it gives a true picture of the time. Not that the poet
+was an eye-witness of what he narrated, or even that he lived in the
+same generation with the men or the events that he celebrated. On the
+contrary, the distance which lends enchantment to the view is needed
+to surround heroes with a golden haze of glorification. But the bard
+did live on the outer edge, so to speak, of the period which he wrote
+about; he was more or less in the same atmosphere; his audience kept
+him very near the truth because they could detect any exaggeration,
+absurdity, or very unlikely incident; just as we should mark and
+reject any particularly foolish story of the war that might appear in
+to-morrow's newspaper. They would indeed swallow strange marvels of a
+supernatural kind, the doings of gods and goddesses, and of magicians.
+But I think it will be agreed that in all ages this has been a
+separate matter, because men will believe what is plainly miraculous,
+when they will not accept what is merely improbable. So far as the
+natural world was concerned, the heroic artist worked upon genuine
+material, transmitted orally or by fragmentary records, producing a
+right image of remarkable men and the world in which they lived. It
+was a world, in most cases, of small communities and petty wars, in
+which a good chief or warrior came rapidly to the front, and was
+all-important individually.
+
+The word Hero is one of those Greek words which have been adopted into
+all European languages, because they signify precisely a universal
+idea of the thing. He must be strong and able in battle, for a lost
+fight might mean the death or slavery of all his people. If the hero
+does his living and dying in a noble fashion, the folk trouble
+themselves very moderately about minor questions of religion or
+ethics, and are very moderately scandalised by occasional ferocity.
+Such a man is not to be hampered by ordinary rules; he is like a
+general commanding in the field, who may do anything for the
+preservation of his army, and the consequence is that he is seldom
+expected to moralise. He acknowledges and pays great honour to the
+cardinal virtues of truth-speaking, mutual fidelity, hospitality,
+strict observance of pledges. He is in many ways a religious man;
+though he is apt to break away from the priests when they interfere
+seriously with the business in hand. For the chastity of wives he has
+a high esteem, yet although he and his people are constantly brought
+into trouble about women, he is tolerant of them, even when their
+behaviour is what might be called regrettable; he treats them in some
+degree as irresponsible beings, on the ground, perhaps, that they are
+the only non-combatants in the world as he knows it, and that this
+gives them special privileges. We can measure the importance of such a
+personage in ancient days, by the noise which a first-class hero made
+in the primitive world. He became literally and figuratively immortal:
+he was regarded as a god, or at least godlike--the greatest of them
+were actually deified. He was seized upon by fable, myth, miraculous
+legend, and poetry--his name was handed down for centuries until the
+heroic lineaments were softened down, disfigured, and at last faded
+away in the magical haze of later Romance. But in very rare instances
+he had the good luck to be taken in hand, before it was too late, by
+some man of genius, who knew the temper of heroic times because he
+lived within range of them, and who has preserved for us a story, an
+incident, or a typical character--not, indeed, an authentic narrative,
+for the true story disappears under the tradition which is built over
+it; nor would such accurate knowledge be of much use to the poet,
+whose business it is only to give us a fine spirited account of what
+might have occurred. For the evidence that an ancient battle was
+really fought we must go to the historian; the poet will tell us how
+it was fought, he stirs the blood and fires the imagination by his
+tale of noble deeds and deaths. His strength rests upon the foundation
+of reality that underlies his artistic construction: he has never let
+go his hold upon sound experience: and the truth is felt in all the
+colour and detail of the picture, though the whole is a work of vivid
+imagination. We cannot verify, obviously, the facts and motives which
+led to the siege of Troy, although Herodotus appears to agree that the
+cause of that war was a Spartan woman's abduction, and only examines
+the point whether the Asiatic or the European Greeks were first to
+blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth
+growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the
+rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common
+enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right?
+We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life,
+manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose
+origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous story,
+divine or human, is first planted in fact, not in fancy; just as the
+Chanson de Roland is founded on a real battle in the pass of
+Roncevalles.
+
+Such, therefore, were the conditions and fortunate coincidences which
+produced the finest heroic poetry. You had the popular hero--the noble
+warrior who knew his business; and you had also the poet or
+story-teller who knew his art, could give you a dramatic picture
+founded upon fact, and could always keep close to reality, without
+crowding his canvas with unnecessary particulars; he gave you the
+ruling motives, actions, and feelings of the age. The excellence of
+the work lay in simplicity and directness of treatment, in a sureness
+of line drawing, in a power of striking the right note, whether of
+praise or sorrow, of glory or grief. There is no staginess or
+far-fetched emotion, or artificial scene-painting: the style strikes
+the right chords of passion or pity, and stamps upon the mind a vivid
+impression of situation and character. Moreover, the heroic poet, as a
+composer, had this advantage in early days, that continual recital
+before an appreciative public must have had the effect of polishing up
+his best verses, and polishing off his bad ones. As the theme was
+always some well-known story or personage, it was possible to omit
+details and explanations, and to go straight to the points that
+repetition had proved to be the most effective, so that the criterion
+of excellence must have been immediate popularity with the audience as
+in a play. It may be conjectured also that the metre, in length of
+line and cadence, formed itself to a great degree on the natural
+conditions of oral delivery and listening. For all poetry, I think,
+makes its primary appeal to the ear; and the modern habit of reading
+it seems to me to have thrown this essential test of quality somewhat
+into the background. The arrangement of metre and rhyme may have been
+gradually invented to correspond with and satisfy that natural
+expectation of the recurrence of certain tones and measures which
+always delights primitive men, and of which one may possibly trace
+some symptoms even in animals, as when the snake sways slowly to the
+simple sounds of a snake-charmer's pipe. The order of all modern
+versification (except in blank verse, which is never popular) depends
+on the echoing rhyme, which marks time like the stroke of a bell, and
+is waited for with keen anticipation by the sensitive listener. It is
+strange, to my mind, that such a beautiful creation as the beat of
+tonic sounds at a line's terminal should have been comparatively so
+recent a discovery in European poetry.
+
+That a master of this art must have been very rare is shown by the
+very few pieces of first-class heroic poetry still extant out of the
+immense quantity that must have been attempted in different ages and
+countries. Yet the materials lie strewn around us, awaiting the
+skilful hand; they are to be found wherever a high-spirited warlike
+race is fighting its way upward out of barbarism into some less
+wretched stage of society that may allow breathing time for working
+the precious mines of recent traditions. The state of society
+described in some Icelandic Sagas, for example, with its hereditary
+blood feuds and perpetual assassinations, with its code of honour
+making vengeance a pious duty, its tariff of blood money, and its
+council for adjusting civil and criminal wrongs, has a close
+resemblance to everyday life among the free Afghan tribes beyond the
+North-West Frontier of India. But the Saga writers flourished, I
+understand, when this state of things had passed or was passing away;
+while the Afghans are still a rude illiterate folk who have only
+songs, recited by the professional bards. The best collection of these
+popular songs has been made by a Frenchman, the late James
+Darmesteter, who remarks that 'English people in India care little for
+Indian songs'; though one may reply that he has made use of English
+writers and collectors of frontier folklore, and indeed he
+acknowledges his debt to Mr. Thorburn's excellent book on _Bannu or
+our Afghan Frontier_. However that may be, we have here, in these
+unwritten lays, the stuff out of which is developed, first, the
+established tradition, and, secondly, not only poetry but also the
+beginnings of history, for these lays are the oral records of
+contemporary events--'c'est le cri meme de l'histoire.' They tell of
+the last Afghan War, and of the most famous border forays made by the
+English lords on the Afghan marches: they preserve the names and deeds
+of English officers and of the leading warriors of the Afghan tribes:
+they tell how Cavagnari 'drank the stirrup-cup of the great journey'
+when the English mission was slaughtered at Kabul in 1879, and how
+General Roberts, his heart shot through with grief, set out in fiery
+speed on his avenging march against the Afghan capital. Here then is
+for the modern historian a rare opportunity of comparing the
+contemporary popular version of events with exact authentic official
+record; and the result ought to aid him in deciding, by analogy, what
+value is to be placed on similar material that has been handed down
+in the ancient songs and stories of other countries. He will be
+fortified, I think, in the sound conclusion that all far-sounding
+legend has a solid substratum of fact. As poetry, these songs render
+forcibly the temper and feelings of the people; they illustrate their
+virtues and vices, their worship of courage and devotion to the clan,
+their fanaticism and ferocity. The sense of Afghan honour, in the
+matter of sheltering a guest, is shown in the ballad which relates how
+a son killed his father for violating this law of hospitality. Like
+all popular verse, the Afghan songs have their recurrent phrases and
+familiar commonplaces; yet, says Darmesteter,
+
+     'in spite of the limited range of ideas and interests, and a rather
+     low ideal, all such defects find their excuse in the passion, the
+     simplicity, the direct spontaneous outspeaking, that supreme gift
+     which has been lost in our intellectual decadence.'
+
+The stirring events of the time have been immediately put into verse;
+the scenes and feelings are struck off in the die of actual
+circumstance; the heated metal takes a clear-cut impression. It is in
+rough songs like these that are to be found the germs of the higher
+heroic poetry. The ballad, the short stories, the favourite anecdotes
+of remarkable men at their exploits, have the luck to fall, later,
+into the hands of a skilful reciter or verse-maker; they are enlarged,
+knit together, and fashioned according to the ideas of the day, with
+an infusion of rhetoric and literary decoration. The heroic ideal, to
+use Professor Ker's words, is thus worked up out of the sayings and
+doings of great men of the fore-time, who stand forth as the type and
+embodiment of the virtues and vices of their age, as it was conceived
+by poets who could handle the popular traditions. And we may guess
+that all anecdotes, words of might, and feats of arms that were
+current before and after him, if they were appropriate to the type,
+would cluster round the hero, and be used for bringing his character
+into strong relief. We can even discern this tendency in modern
+society, where a notable personage, like the Duke of Wellington or
+Talleyrand, is credited with any vigorous or caustic saying that suits
+the idea of him, and may be passed on in another generation to the
+account of the next popular favourite. The literary habit of providing
+impressive 'last words' for great men at death's door might be taken
+as another example of the magnetic attraction of types.
+
+Of course the perfect samples of heroic verse, of famous songs and
+stories woven into an epic poem, are to be found in Homer.[17]
+Nowhere, in the whole range of the world's poetry, can we see such
+splendid impersonations of primitive life and character treated
+artistically. Yet the plot is simple enough. Agamemnon, the chief
+commander of the Greek army, has carried off the daughter of a priest
+of Apollo, and flatly refuses to give her back; whereupon the priest
+appeals to the god, who brings the chief to reason by spreading a
+plague in the Grecian camp; and so the girl goes home with apologies.
+But Agamemnon indemnifies himself by seizing a captive damsel
+belonging to Achilles, who, being justly infuriated, will go no more
+to battle, but sits sulkily in his tent, until the Greek army is very
+nearly destroyed, for want of his help, by the Trojans.
+
+Here we have at once a picture of manners not unlike those of the
+Afghan tribes, though very differently treated. The poet is at no
+pains to put on any moral varnish, or to tone down the roughness
+romantically; because he is writing, or reciting, for people of much
+the same way of thinking as his heroes, who are fierce chiefs
+quarrelling over captured women; and the whole plot is developed by
+sheer pressure of circumstance and character. Then on the Trojan side
+we have the figure of Hector, the true patriotic hero, who is
+naturally displeased with Paris for the abduction of Helen, which has
+brought a disastrous war upon Troy; yet what is done cannot be undone,
+and his clear duty is to fight for his own people. To Helen herself he
+is gentle and kind; and the religious men only irritate him when they
+interfere in military matters. But although he is far the noblest
+character in the whole poem, he is eventually slain by Achilles, for
+the plain reason that Achilles is the most terrible warrior of both
+armies. It was Hector's fate, which is the poet's way of saying that
+the inexorable logic of facts, as he knows them, must always prevail.
+
+With regard to the position of women in Homeric poetry. They are
+mainly irresponsible creatures: how could they be otherwise, when
+everything depends on the sword, and a woman cannot wield it? As the
+equality of sexes implies a high state of civilisation and security,
+so in the old fighting times a woman had to stand aside; yet though
+she could not take part in a battle, there were incessant battles
+about her: the fatal woman, who is the ruin of her country, is
+well-known in all legend and romance, from Helen of Troy to La Cava,
+whose seduction by King Roderick brought the Moors into Spain.[18] In
+the _Iliad_ King Priam treats Helen with delicate consideration, as is
+seen in the beautiful passage that describes her sitting by him on the
+walls of Troy, and pointing out to him the leaders of the Greek army
+marshalled in the plain before them. Nor is any more perfect female
+character to be found in poetry than Andromache, Hector's wife,
+high-spirited, virtuous, and passionately affectionate. Yet Helen,
+the erring woman, is brought home eventually by Menelaus, and appears
+again in the _Odyssey_ as a highly respected matron, who has had an
+adventure in early life; while Andromache, having seen her husband
+slain and dragged round the walls of Troy behind the chariot of
+Achilles, is carried off a childless widow into dolorous servitude.
+
+Here one may feel the tragic power of an artist who draws life from
+the sombre verities, not as it is seen through the romantic colouring
+of a softer moralising age; he never wastes himself on vain
+lamentations, never suggests that virtue will save you from bitter
+unmerited calamity: he gives the true situation. There is one short
+passage in the _Odyssey_ where the poet, merely by the way, and to
+illustrate something else, lets us have a glimpse of an incident that
+was probably familiar to him and his audience. He wishes to show what
+he means by a burst of grief, and this he does, not by a string of
+epithets, but by a picture.[19]
+
+From the historic books of the Old Testament, particularly from the
+books of Samuel and the Kings, one might take some fine specimens of
+the peculiar quality distinguishing the heroic style, in prose that is
+very near poetry. Nothing can be more simple than the narrative, it is
+cool and quiet: there are whole chapters without an unnecessary
+adjective; and yet it is most impressive, both in the drawing of such
+characters as Saul, David, and Joab, who stand out dramatically, like
+Homeric heroes, and in the stories of their deeds and death.
+
+Professor Ker's essays contain a masterly and luminous survey of the
+vicissitudes undergone by the songs and legends of Western and
+Northern nations in the course of transmutation from the primitive
+heroic stage into deliberate literary composition. The original
+material never attained the grand epical form; the process was
+interrupted by the advancement of learning, by ecclesiastical
+influences, and by vast social changes.
+
+     'Even before the people had fairly escaped from barbarism, before
+     they had made a fair beginning of civilisation and of reflective
+     literature on their own account, they were drawn within the Empire,
+     within Christendom.'
+
+A similar fate, it may here be noticed, has overtaken, or awaits, the
+heroic songs of the Afghans; for Darmesteter tells us that as the oral
+tradition becomes written it falls into the net of translation and
+paraphrase, it is absorbed into the elegant literature of Persia,
+Arabia, and Hindustan, it becomes theological and romanesque. And
+another dangerous enemy has now appeared in the shape of the
+Anglo-Indian schools which follow and fix the English dominion; for
+the primitive folklore has no more chance against systematic education
+than the wild fighting men have against drilled and disciplined
+soldiers. In Europe the Sagas of Iceland, which lay furthest from the
+civilising influences, had the luck of preserving the true elements of
+heroic narrative; and the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, though it falls
+far short of the epic, has a certain Homeric flavour. The chief is the
+'folces-hyrde,' his people's shepherd; and we have Beowulf, like
+Hector,[20] desiring that after his death a mound may be raised at the
+headland which juts out into the sea, 'that seafaring men may
+afterward call it Beowulf's Mound, they who drive from far their
+roaring vessels over the mists of the flood.'[21]
+
+Let us turn now to the romantic poetry of England, which for some
+centuries ruled all our imaginative literature, and annexed, so to
+speak, almost the whole field of battles, adventures, and energetic
+activity generally. The subjects are much the same: the gallantry of
+men, the beauty, virtues, and frailties of women: but the writers have
+got a loose uncertain grip upon the actualities of life; they wander
+away into fanciful stories of noble knights, distressed damsels, and
+marvellous feats of chivalry--in short they are _romancing_. They care
+little whether the details accord with natural fact--whether, for
+instance, the account of a fight is incredible to any one who knows
+what a battle really is; the heroes are chivalrous knight-errants,
+noble, pious, devoted to their lady loves; but they are not
+hard-headed, hard-fisted men like Ulysses, David, or some old
+Icelandic sea-rover. The true heroic spirit shoots up occasionally,
+nevertheless the prevailing idea of the romance-writer is to tell a
+wondrous tale of love and adventure, in which he lets his fancy run
+riot, rather enjoying than avoiding magnificent improbabilities.
+Undoubtedly the beautiful mystic romance of the Morte d'Arthur does
+light up at the end with a true flash of heroic poetry, in the famous
+lamentation over Lancelot, when he is found at last dead in the
+hermitage: but in this passage the elegiac strain rises far above the
+ordinary level of romantic composers. Meanwhile, as the English nation
+at home settled down into peaceful habits under the strong organising
+pressure of Church and State, and arms gave way to laws, the hero's
+occupation disappeared from our everyday society, and the heroic
+tradition decayed out of imaginative literature, which was often
+picturesque, sublime, and profoundly reflective, but had parted with
+the special qualities of energetic simplicity and the vivid impression
+of fact. Nevertheless, heroic poetry in this sense has never been
+quite extinguished in Great Britain; it survived, naturally, wherever
+it could be preserved by a living popular tradition. And so it found a
+congenial refuge, though in greatly reduced circumstances, in the
+rough outlying regions where personal strength and daring were still
+vitally necessary--in the borderland between England and Scotland. An
+epic poem gave heroic poetry on a grand scale, it told the incidents
+of a great war: the ballad tells of a single skirmish or foray. Yet
+the difference is but one of degree, for both epic and ballad were
+composed for men and by men, who were in the right atmosphere; and so
+we have here very different work from that of the fanciful romancer.
+There are not many good examples; yet the antique tone rings out now
+and then, as in the ballad of Chevy Chase, which commemorates a fierce
+Northumbrian fight at Otterburne that must have stirred the hearts of
+the whole countryside. Here you have no knightly tournament, or duel
+for rescue of dames, but the sharp clash of bloody conflict between
+English and Scots borderers, the best fighting men of our island. Of
+course the genuine account, given in Froissart, is very different; but
+the ballad-singer knows his art; and whereas from history we only
+learn that a Scottish knight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, was slain in the
+medley, in the ballad an English archer draws his bow
+
+    'An arrow of a cloth yard long
+      To the hard head hayled he.'
+
+And then
+
+    'Against Sir Hugh Montgomery
+      So right his shaft he set,
+    The swan's feather that his arrow bare
+      In his heart's blood was wet.'
+
+In the compressed energy of these four lines, without an epithet or a
+superfluous word, we have a picture, drawn by a sure hand, of a man
+drawing his long bow, and driving it from steel to feathers through a
+knight in armour.
+
+Well, the border fighting disappeared with the union of the two
+kingdoms, and as Great Britain became civilised and began to transfer
+her wars oversea, the heroic verse decayed under the influence of the
+higher culture. For a civilised and literary society to have preserved
+its ancient lays and ballads is the rarest of lucky chances; the
+enthusiastic collector, like Percy or Walter Scott, is generally born
+too late, for indeed all antiquarianism is a very modern task. And
+poetry of this sort must decay under what Shakespeare calls 'the
+cankers of a calm world': while it also tends to disappear with the
+introduction of professional soldiers and great armies, where personal
+heroism counts for little. These may be, I suppose, the main reasons
+why great wars produce so little heroic verse: it may be questioned
+whether even our civil wars of the seventeenth century inspired any
+genuine poetry of this sort. And when in the eighteenth century the
+clang of arms had completely died away at home, the battle pieces were
+done after an artificial literary fashion, by writers who were content
+to describe vaguely the charging of hosts, the thunder of cannon, the
+groans of the wounded, and other such mechanical generalities.
+
+If any one could have revived the true heroic style, it would have
+been done by Walter Scott, with his delight in the border minstrelsy,
+and his martial ardour; but the romantic spirit was too strong upon
+him. He had laid hold of the right tradition, could give picturesque
+scenes and characters of a bygone time, and _Bonnie Dundee_ is a
+ringing ballad; yet his style in the longer metrical tales is
+distinctly romantic and conventional. If he had not been writing for
+readers to whom the rough riders of the Border in the sixteenth
+century were totally strange and unreal beings, he could never have
+said that they
+
+    'Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,
+    And drank the red wine through the helmet barred.'
+
+An unsophisticated audience would have laughed outright at such a
+comical performance. And we can see how Scott, as a poet of the
+battlefield, had become possessed with the idea that the grand style
+must be a lofty strain, something magnificently unusual, by his two
+poems upon Waterloo, which are fine failures; though we may admit the
+impossibility of making a heroic poem out of a battle that has just
+been minutely described in newspapers. On the other hand, his prose
+novels afford us a remarkable example of the two styles contrasted.
+When he wrote of the middle ages, as in _Ivanhoe_, _The Talisman_, and
+others, he was a pure romancer; whereas in his Tales of Scotland in
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the _Legend of Montrose_,
+_Old Mortality_, _The Bride of Lammermoor_, there are two or three
+rapid sketches of sharp fighting which are true and spirited, full of
+vivacity and character. On this ground he trod firmly, knowing the
+country, the times, and the people of Scotland: while the petty
+skirmishes at Drumclog or Bothwell Brig were easier to manage
+artistically than a great battle. Poetry, indeed, like painting, can
+do nothing on a vast scale, cannot manage masses of men; and moreover
+it fails to deal effectively with a state of war in which mechanical
+skill and the tactical movement of large bodies of troops win the day.
+There may be as much personal heroism as ever, but it is lost in the
+multitude. Nevertheless sea-fighting, where separate ships may
+encounter and grapple like two mortal foes, with the deep water
+around and beneath them, gives heroism a better chance; and the
+mariner is always a poetic figure. So Thomas Campbell did rise very
+nearly to the heroic level in his poem on the battle of the Baltic,
+written when the true story of Nelson's famous exploit was still
+fresh; we have a clear and forcible impression of the British ships
+moving silently to the attack; and the closing lines touch the ancient
+ever-living feeling of gratitude to Captain Riou and his brave
+comrades, 'so tried and yet so true,' who fell in the great victory.
+
+With this exception, the prolonged conflict between England and
+France, which lasted twenty years up to its end at Waterloo, struck
+out hardly a spark of heroic poetry. Yet the Peninsular War is full of
+splendid military exploits, of fierce battles and the desperate
+storming of fortresses: it was a period of great national energy, when
+the people were contending with all their heart and strength against a
+most dangerous enemy; it was also a time when England was singularly
+rich in poets of the highest order. Nevertheless the only verses that
+may be assigned to the peculiar class which I have been attempting to
+define, were written, not by one of the famous group of poets, but by
+an unknown hand; and they relate not to a great battle, but to a
+slight incident, not to a victory, but to a hasty retreat. I am
+alluding to the well-known stanzas on the _Burial of Sir John Moore_,
+who was killed at Corunna in 1809; and my apology for quoting anything
+so hackneyed must be that it is trite by reason of its excellence; for
+a short poem, like a single happy phrase, wins incessant repetition
+and lasting popularity, because the words precisely fit some universal
+feeling. Why have these verses made such an effect that they are
+familiar to all of us, and fresh as when they were first read? Is it
+not because the writer had one clear flash of imaginative light,
+which showed him the reality of the scene, so that the description
+speaks for itself, without literary epithets, creating, as the French
+say, the true image. He struck the right note of soldierly emotion,
+brief, stern, and compressed, when there is no time for vain
+lamentation--as when in the _Iliad_ Ulysses says to Achilles, who is
+inconsolable for the death of his friend, that a soldier must bury his
+comrade with a pitiless heart, and that in war a day's mourning is all
+that can be spared for slain men.[22]
+
+It may be allowable to suggest, therefore, among the reasons for the
+prevailing dearth and scarcity of first-class heroic poetry,
+notwithstanding the universal demand for it, the impossibility of thus
+handling war on a great scale, and also the serious difficulty of
+giving this poetic form to contemporary events, which are not easily
+grouped in artistic perspective because they are so accurately
+described elsewhere. This suggestion may derive support from the
+observation that whenever, in our own day, we have had brief samples
+of verse-writing with a strain of the genuine old quality, they have
+almost always come from a distant scene, usually from the frontiers of
+the British Empire, far away from the centres of academic culture and
+the fields of organised war. Two or three of Rudyard Kipling's short
+poems about life on the Afghan border and Indian camp life have the
+right ring: they are instinct with the colour and sensation of the
+environment: they stir the blood with a conviction of reality. If it
+be permissible for a moment to compare these rough energetic verses
+with the battle pieces of an immeasurably greater artist--with
+Tennyson's _Charge of the Light Brigade_, for example--one may see
+that in the poetry of action the grand style misses something which
+has been caught by the eye that has seen the thing itself; the Charge
+is a splendid composition, but the frontier ballad sets you down on
+the ground and shows you life.
+
+Undoubtedly, also, the romantic literary style, which prevailed so
+long in this country, and which is the natural product of high
+culture, has been unfavourable, because it was radically unsuitable,
+to the poetry of energetic action. It is true that all the highest
+compositions of the heroic poet are set off by a tinge of romance, as
+fine drawing is perfected by superb colouring; but the drawbacks of
+romance lie in a tendency to vagueness of thought, and to the
+preference of archaic words and overstrained sentiments which were
+given as poetic mainly because they were far-fetched and did not sound
+commonplace. In fact the later poets adopted mechanically the strong
+natural language of those who wrote under the inspiration of actual
+emotion or events, and therefore they used it awkwardly and
+ineffectively; or else in their consciousness of not knowing how
+things really happened, they kept within sonorous generalities, which
+are the resource of artistic impotence. In our own day we have
+witnessed a sharp revolt against romantic verse, and a reversion
+toward those forms of art which reflect the actual experience of men,
+toward precision and accurate detail: Romance has been abandoned for
+what is called Realism. But here we are threatened by a danger from
+the opposite direction: for a clumsy Realist is apt to suppose that
+his business is merely to describe facts without adding anything out
+of his own imaginative faculty, that he may bring his characters on
+the stage in their daily garb, in the dirty slovenliness with which
+they go about dreaming or acting in their own petty sphere,[23] and so
+he overcharges with technicalities or trivial particulars.
+Nevertheless one may say that the poetry of action has found better
+methods since it shook off the influence of fantastic romance, and is
+distinctly improving: though its strength lies in short pieces
+repeating some notable incident or dramatic situations bringing out
+character, which is just where it began originally, and where indeed
+it is likely to remain, for the epic poem, or heroic verse on the
+grand scale, may be thought to have disappeared finally.
+
+To conclude a very brief and inadequate dissertation, we may, I think,
+lay it down as a principle of the art, that heroic poetry must be true
+to circumstances and to character, must have the qualities of
+simplicity and sincerity, combined with the magnetic power of stirring
+the heart by showing how men and women can behave when really
+confronted by danger, death, or irremediable misfortune. Its
+background, in skilful hands, is the contrast of calm Nature looking
+on at human strife and sorrow, at stern fortitude and energetic effort
+in tragic situations. We are reading every day of such situations in
+the South African War, where there has been no lack of brave men 'so
+tried and yet so true,' who have found themselves back again suddenly
+in the rough fighting world of their forefathers, and have felt and
+acted like the men of old time. There is abundant proof that the
+English folk can display as much heroism as ever men did; but we may
+look in vain for the poet who knows how to commemorate their valour
+and patriotic self-sacrifice in heroic verse.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] _Anglo-Saxon Review_, June 1900.
+
+[17] _Epic and Romance_, p. 15.
+
+[18]
+    'Ay Espana
+        Perdita por un gusto y por La Cava.'
+
+    _Romance del Rey Rodrigo._
+
+[19]
+    So doth a woman weep, as her husband in death she embraces,
+    Him, who in front of his people and city has fallen in battle,
+    Striving in vain to defend his home from the fate of the vanquished.
+    She there, seeing him die, and gasping his life out before her,
+    Clings to him bitterly moaning. And round her the others, the foemen,
+    Beat her, and bid her arise, and stab at her back with the lances,
+    Dragging her off as a slave to the bondage of labour and sorrow.
+
+    _Odyssey_, viii. 523-29.
+
+[20] _Iliad_, vi. 86-90.
+
+[21] Arnold's translation.
+
+[22] _Iliad_, xix. 228-29.
+
+[23] Lessing.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON[24]
+
+
+'When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her
+poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first
+names will be Wordsworth and Byron.' Thus wrote Matthew Arnold in
+1881, and now that the century's last autumn is passing away, a new
+edition of Byron's works appears in the fullness of time to quicken
+our memories and rekindle our curiosity, by placing before us a
+complete record of the life, letters, and poetry of one whom Macaulay
+declared in 1830 to be the most celebrated Englishman of the
+nineteenth century, and who seventy years later may still be counted
+among its most striking and illustrious figures.
+
+As the new edition is issued by instalments, and several volumes are
+still to come, to compare its contents, arrangement, and the editorial
+accessories with those of preceding editions might be thought
+premature. We may say, however, that a large number of Byron's
+letters, not before printed, have now been added; and that the text of
+this new material has been prepared from originals, whereas it is now
+impossible so to collate the text of the greater number of the letters
+heretofore published. Moore is supposed to have destroyed many of
+those entrusted to him; and moreover he handled the originals very
+freely, making large omissions, and transposing passages from one
+letter to another, though we presume that he did not re-write and
+amplify passages after the fashion in which certain French editors
+have dealt with recent memoirs. The letters now for the first time
+published by Mr. Murray were for the most part inaccessible to Moore.
+But for all these details we may refer our readers to the concise and
+valuable prefaces appended to the three volumes of Letters and
+Journals.
+
+We have now, therefore, a substantial acquisition of fresh and quite
+authentic material, though it would be rash to assume that all
+important documents are included, for the family archives are still
+held in reserve. It is admitted by the editor that the literary value
+of the letters now printed for the first time is not high, but he
+explains that in publishing, with a few exceptions, the whole
+available correspondence, he has acted on the principle that they form
+an aggregate collection of great biographical interest, and may thus
+serve as the best substitute for the lost memoirs. We may agree that
+any scrap of a great man's writing, or even any words spoken, may
+throw some light upon his character, whether the subject be trivial or
+tremendous, a business letter to his solicitor or a defiance of
+society; for even though careless readers chance to miss some pearl
+strung at random on a string of commonplaces, to the higher criticism
+nothing is quite valueless. In this instance, at any rate, no pains
+have been spared to place the real Lord Byron, as described more or
+less unconsciously by himself, before his fellow-countrymen; and the
+result is to confirm his reputation as a first-class letter-writer.
+The private and confidential correspondence of eminent literary men
+would be usually more decorous than interesting; but Byron, though he
+is not always respectable, is never dull. The correspondence and
+journals, taken all together, constitute the most interesting and
+characteristic collection of its kind in English literature.
+
+In regard to the effect upon his personal reputation, we have long
+known what manner of man was Byron; nor is it likely that, after
+passing in review the complete array of evidence collected in these
+volumes, the general verdict of posterity will be sensibly modified.
+Those who judge him should bear in mind that perhaps no famous life
+has ever been so thoroughly laid bare, or scrutinised with greater
+severity. The tendency of biographers is to soften down errors and
+praise where they can; and in an autobiography the writer can tell his
+own story. But the assiduous searching out and publication of every
+letter and diary that can be gathered or gleaned is a different
+ordeal, which might try the reputation of most of us; while in the
+case of an impulsive, wayward, high-spirited man, exposed to strong
+temptations, with all a poet's traditional irritability, whose rank
+and genius concentrated public attention on his writings from his
+early youth, this test must be extremely severe. Many of the letters
+are of a sort that do not ordinarily appear in a biography. Byron's
+letters to his wife at the time of their separation, which are
+moderate and even dignified, are supplemented by his wife's letters to
+him and to her friends, full of mysterious imputations; and there are
+letters to and from the lady with whom his _liaison_ was notorious.
+His own reckless letters from Venice to Moore, and those from Shelley
+and others describing his dissipated habits, were clearly never
+intended for general reading after his death. Of course most of these
+are not now produced for the first time, nor do we argue that they
+ought never to have appeared, for the biographical interest is
+undeniable. Our point is that the publication of such private and
+damaging correspondence is so very unusual in biographies that it
+places Byron at a special disadvantage, and that when we pass our
+judgment upon him we are bound to take into account the unsparing use
+that has been made of papers connected with the most intimate
+transactions of a lifetime which was no more than a short and stormy
+passage from youth to manhood; for he was cut off before the age at
+which men abandon the wild ways of their springtide, and are usually
+disposed to obliterate the record of them. At least one recent
+biography might be mentioned which would have read differently if it
+had been compiled with similar candour.
+
+The annotations subjoined to almost every page of the text are so
+ample and particular as to furnish in themselves extensive reading.
+The notices of every person named would go far to serve as a brief
+biographical dictionary of Byron's contemporaries, whether known or
+unknown to fame. We get a concise account of Madame de Stael--her
+birth, books, and political opinions--very useful to those who had no
+previous acquaintance with her. Lady Morgan and Joanna Southcote
+obtain quite as much space as would be allotted to them in any
+handbook of celebrities. Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh are
+treated with similar liberality. There is a full account, taken from
+the _Examiner_, of the procession with which Louis XVIII. made his
+entry into London in 1814. The notes--of about four pages each--upon
+Hobhouse and Lord Carlisle may be justified by their close connection
+with Byron's affairs; though some of us might have been content with
+less. Allusions to such notorious evildoers as Tarquin are explained,
+and stock quotations from Shakespeare have been carefully verified.
+The result is that a reader might go through this edition of Byron
+with the very slightest previous knowledge of general literature or of
+contemporary history, and might give himself a very fair middle-class
+education in the process, although the consequence might be to imbue
+him with what Coleridge has called 'a passion for the disconnected.'
+Nevertheless we readily acknowledge the thorough execution of this
+part of the editorial work, and the very meritorious labour that has
+been spent upon bringing together every kind of document and reference
+that can inform or enlighten us upon the main subjects of Byron's life
+and writings. In the poems the practice of giving in notes the rough
+drafts and rejected versions of passages and lines, so as to show the
+poet at work, seems to us not altogether fair to him, and is
+occasionally distracting to those readers who enjoy a fine picture
+without asking how the colours were mixed, or are not anxious about
+the secrets of a good dinner. Yet to students of method, to the
+fellow-craftsman, and to the literary virtuoso, these variant
+readings, of which there are sometimes four to a single line, may
+often be of substantial interest, as throwing light on the tendencies
+and predilections of taste which are the formative influences upon
+style in prose or poetry.
+
+Probably the most favourable circumstance for a poet is that he should
+only be known, like the Divinity of Nature, from his works; or at
+least that, like Wordsworth, he should keep the noiseless tenor of his
+way down some secluded vale of life, whereby his poems stand out in
+clear relief like fine paintings on a plain wall. Is there any modern
+English poet of the first class, except Byron, whose entire prose
+writings and biography are bound up in standard editions with his
+poetry? The question is at any rate worth asking, because certainly
+there is no case in which the record of a poet's private life and
+personal fortunes has so greatly affected, for good or for ill, his
+poetic reputation. Those who detested his character and condemned his
+way of living found it difficult to praise his verses; they detected
+the serpent under every stone. For those who were fascinated by the
+picture of a reckless prodigal, always in love and in debt, with
+fierce passions and a haughty contempt for the world, who defied
+public opinion and was suspected of unutterable things--such a
+personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's
+whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with
+light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take
+up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main
+object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true
+value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems
+which must always hold a permanent place in the high imaginative
+literature of England.
+
+It may be said that every writer of force and originality traverses
+two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order
+of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted
+unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and
+praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse
+treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's
+reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen
+most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief
+lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon
+the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined
+slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this
+moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to
+whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so
+imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a
+character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose
+poetry, he admitted, had influenced his own later verse--one of those
+who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout
+England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who
+set the fashion of his day in England, stirred and shaped the popular
+imagination, and struck a far resonant note in our poetry. Yet after
+his death he suffered a kind of eclipse; his work was much more unduly
+depreciated than it had been extolled; while in our own time such
+critics as Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have been in profound
+disagreement on the question of his worth and value as a poet. Nor is
+it possible for impartial persons to accept the judgment of either of
+these two eminent artists in poetry, since Arnold placed Wordsworth
+and Byron by anticipation on the same level at this century's end,
+whereas Wordsworth stands now far higher. And the bitter disdain which
+Sir. Swinburne has poured upon Byron's verse and character, though
+tempered by acknowledgment of his strength and cleverness, and by
+approbation of his political views, excites some indignation and a
+sympathetic reaction in his favour. One can imagine the ghost of Byron
+rebuking his critic with the words of the Miltonic Satan, 'Ye knew me
+once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar'; for in
+his masculine defiant attitude and daring flights the elder poet
+overtops and looks down upon the fine musical artist of our own day.
+
+Some of the causes which have combined to lower Byron's popularity are
+not far to seek. The change of times, circumstance, and taste has been
+adverse to him. The political school which he so ardently represented
+has done its work; the Tory statesmen of the Metternich and
+Castlereagh type, who laid heavy hands upon nations striving for light
+and liberty, have gone down to their own place; the period of stifling
+repression has long ended in Europe. Italy and Greece are free, the
+lofty appeals to classic heroism are out of date, and such fiery
+high-swelling trumpet notes as
+
+    'Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner, torn, but flying,
+    Streams like a thunderstorm _against_ the wind,'
+
+fall upon cold and fastidious ears. 'The day will come,' said Mazzini
+in after-years, 'when the democracy will acknowledge its debt to
+Byron;' but the demos is notoriously ungrateful, and the subject races
+have now won their independence. The shadow of discouragement and
+weariness which passed over sensitive minds at the beginning of this
+century, a period of political disillusion, has long been swept away
+by the prosperity and sanguine activities of the Victorian era; and
+the literary style has changed with the times. Melancholy moods,
+attitudes of scornful despair, tales of fierce love and bloody revenge
+are strange and improbable to readers who delight in situations and
+emotions with which they are familiar, who demand exactitude in detail
+and correct versification; while sweet harmonies, perfection of metre,
+middle-class pastorals, and a blameless moral tone came in with
+Tennyson. In short, many of the qualities which enchanted Byron's own
+generation have disenchanted our own, both in his works and his life;
+for when Macaulay wrote in 1830 that the time would come when his
+'rank and private history will not be regarded in estimating his
+poetry,' he took no account of future editions enlarged and annotated,
+or of biographies of _The Real Lord Byron_; whereby it has come to
+pass, as we suspect, that the present world knows more of Byron's
+private history than of his poems. His faults and follies stand out
+more prominently than ever; his story is more attractive reading than
+most romances; and the stricter morality of the day condemns him more
+severely than did the society to which he belonged. Psychological
+speculation is now so much more practised in literature than formerly,
+there is so much more interest in 'the man behind the book,' that
+serious moral delinquencies, authentically recorded and eagerly read,
+operate more adversely than ever in affecting the public judgment upon
+Byron's poetry, because they provide a damaging commentary upon it.
+His contemporaries--Coleridge, Keats, Shelley--lived so much apart
+from the great world of their day that important changes in manners
+and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by
+which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry,
+moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own
+character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the
+man himself; and his _empeiria_ (as Goethe calls it), his too
+exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular
+class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative
+of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in
+his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to
+the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events
+and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw
+them, with comparisons of their visible condition and past glories,
+with Peninsular battlefields, and with Waterloo. Of worldliness in
+this objective meaning his contemporaries had some share, yet they
+instinctively avoided the waste of their power upon it; and so their
+finest poetry is beautiful by its detachment, by a certain magical
+faculty of treating myth, romance, and the mystery of man's
+sympathetic relations with universal Nature.
+
+A recent French critic of Chateaubriand, who defines the 'romantisme'
+of that epoch as no more than a great waking up of the poetic spirit,
+says that the movement was moral and psychological generally before it
+spread into literature. In criticising Byron's poetry we have to bear
+in mind that he came in on the first wave of this flood, which
+overflowed the exhausted and arid field of poetry at the end of the
+last century, fertilising it with colour and emotion. The comparison
+between Byron in England and Chateaubriand in France must have been
+often drawn. The similarity in their style, their moody, melancholy
+outlook upon common humanity, their aristocratic temper, their
+self-consciousness, their influence upon the literature of the two
+countries, the enthusiasm that they excited among the ardent spirits
+of the generation that reached manhood immediately after them, and the
+vain attempts of the elder critics to resist their popularity and deny
+their genius--form a remarkable parallel in literary history. As
+Jeffrey failed at first to discern the promise of Byron, so Morellet
+could only perceive the obviously weak points of Chateaubriand, laying
+stress on his affectations, his inflated language, his sentimental
+exaggeration, upon all the faults which were common to these two men
+of genius, the defects of their qualities, the energetic rebound from
+the classic level of orderly taste and measured style. It was the
+ancient _regime_ contending against a revolutionary uprising, and in
+poetry, as in politics, the leaders of revolution are sure to be
+excessive, to force their notes, to frighten their elders, and to
+scandalise the conservative mind. Yet just as Chateaubriand, after
+passing through his period of depression, is now rising again to his
+proper place in French literature, so we may hope that an impartial
+survey of Byron's verse will help to determine the rank that he is
+likely to hold permanently, although the high tide of Romance in
+poetry has at this moment fallen to a low ebb, and the spell which it
+laid upon our forefathers may have lost its power in an altered world.
+
+It must be counted to the credit of these Romantic writers that at any
+rate they widened and varied the sphere and the resources of their
+art, by introducing the Oriental element, so to speak, into the
+imaginative literature of modern Europe. They brought the lands of
+ancient civilisation again within the sphere of poetry, reviving into
+fresh animation the classic glories of Hellas, reopening the gates of
+the mysterious East, and showing us the Greek races still striving, as
+they were twenty-two centuries earlier, for freedom against the
+barbarous strength of an Asiatic empire. Byron was the first of the
+poets who headed this literary crusade for the succour of Christianity
+against Islam in the unending contest between East and West on the
+shores of the Mediterranean, and in this cause he eventually died.
+Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo were also travellers in
+Asia, and had drawn inspiration from that source; they all
+instinctively obeyed, like Bonaparte, the impulse which sends
+adventurous and imaginative spirits toward that region of strong
+passions and primitive manners, where human life is of little matter,
+and where the tragic situations of drama and fiction may at any time
+be witnessed in their simple reality. The effect was to introduce
+fresh blood into the veins of old romance; and Byron led the van of an
+illustrious line of poets who turned their _impressions de voyage_
+into glowing verse, for the others only trod in his footsteps and
+wrote on his model, while Lamartine openly imitated him in his
+_Dernier Chant de Childe Harold_. For the first time the Eastern tale
+was now told by a poet who had actually seen Eastern lands and races,
+their scenery and their cities, who drew his figures and landscape
+with his eye on the objects, and had not mixed his local colours by
+the process of skimming books of travel for myths, legends, costume,
+or customs, with such result as may be seen in Moore's _Lalla Rookh_
+and in Southey's _Thalaba_, or even in Scott's _Talisman_. The preface
+to this novel shows that Scott fully appreciated the risk of competing
+with Byron, albeit in prose, in the field of Asiatic romance, yet all
+his skill avails little to diminish the sense of conventional
+figure-drawing and of uncertainty in important details when they are
+not gathered in the field, but only transplanted from the library.
+
+Byron has noticed in one of his letters the errors of this kind into
+which a great poet must fall whose accurate observation has been
+confined mainly to his own country. 'There is much natural talent,' he
+writes, 'spilt over the _Excursion_, yet Wordsworth says of Greece
+that it is a land of
+
+    'Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores
+      Under a cope of variegated sky.
+
+The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, the shores
+still and tideless, the sky is anything but variegated, being for
+months and months beautifully blue.'
+
+This may be thought trivial criticism, yet it is evidence of the
+attention given by Byron to precise description. His accuracy in
+Oriental costume was also a novelty at that time, when so little was
+known of Oriental lore that even Mr. Murray 'doubted the propriety of
+putting the name of Cain into the mouth of a Mohammedan.' With regard
+to his characters, we may readily admit that in the _Giaour_ or the
+_Bride of Abydos_ the heroes and heroines behave and speak after the
+fashion of high-flying Western romance, and that their lofty
+sentiments in love or death have nothing specifically Oriental about
+them. But this was merely the romantic style used by all Byron's
+contemporaries, and generally accepted by the taste of that day as
+essential to the metrical rendering of a passionate love-story. It may
+be argued, with Scott, that when a writer of fiction takes in hand a
+distant age or country, he is obliged to translate ideas and their
+expression into forms with which his readers are, to some extent,
+familiar. Byron seasoned his Oriental tales with phrases and imagery
+borrowed from the East; but whatever scenic or characteristic effects
+might have thus been produced are seriously marred by the explanatory
+notices and erudite references to authorities that are appended to the
+text. This fashion of garnishing with far-fetched outlandish words, in
+order to give the requisite flavour of time or place, was peculiar to
+the new romantic school of his era; it was the poetical dialect of the
+time, and Byron employed it too copiously. Yet, with all his faults,
+he remains a splendid colourist, who broke through a limited mannerism
+in poetry, and led forth his readers into an unexplored region of
+cloudless sky and purple sea, where the serene aspect of nature could
+be powerfully contrasted with the shadow of death and desolation cast
+over it by the violence of man.
+
+Undoubtedly this contrast, between fair scenery and foul barbarism,
+had been presented more than once in poetry; yet no one before Byron
+had brought it out with the sure hand of an eye-witness, or with such
+ardent sympathy for a nation which had been for centuries trodden
+under the feet of aliens in race and religion, yet still clung to its
+ancient traditions of freedom. Throughout his descriptive poems, from
+_Childe Harold_ to _Don Juan_, it is the true and forcible impression,
+taken from sight of the thing itself, that gives vigour and animation
+to his pictures, and that has stamped on the memory the splendid
+opening of the _Giaour_, the meditations in Venice and Rome, the
+glorious scenery of the Greek islands, and even such single lines as
+
+    'By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone.'
+
+In the art of painting what may be called historical landscape, where
+retrospective associations give intellectual colour to the picture,
+Byron has very few rivals. His descriptions of the Lake of Geneva, of
+Clarens, of the Trojan plain--
+
+    'High barrows, without marble or a name,
+      A vast, untilled, and mountain-skirted plain,
+    And Ida in the distance'--
+
+have the quality of faithful drawing illumined by imaginative power.
+They have certainly touched the emotions and enhanced the pleasure of
+all travellers in the last three generations whose minds are
+accessible to poetic suggestion; and if at the present day their style
+be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be
+denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer
+without them. The stanzas in _Childe Harold_ on Waterloo are full of
+the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents
+of war--the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from
+the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the
+stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it
+may be said; yet the great difficulty of dealing adequately with
+heroic action in contemporary verse, of writing a poem on a campaign
+that has just been reported in the newspapers, is exemplified by the
+fact that Walter Scott's two compositions on Waterloo are failures;
+nor has any poet since Byron yet succeeded in giving us a good modern
+battlepiece.
+
+Nevertheless there is much in Byron's longer poems (excepting always
+_Don Juan_) that seems tedious to the modern reader; there are
+descriptions and declamations too long drawn-out to sustain the
+interest; and there are many lines that are superfluous, untidy, and
+sometimes ungrammatical. One can only plead, in extenuation of these
+defects, that the fashion of his day was for long metrical romance, in
+which it is difficult to maintain the high standard of careful
+composition exacted by the latest criticism. It is almost impossible
+to tell a long story in verse that shall be throughout poetical. And
+one main reason why this fashion has nearly passed away may be
+surmised to be that the versified narrative cannot adapt itself in
+this respect to the present taste, which is impatient of fluent
+lengthy heroics, refusing to accept them for the sake of some finely
+executed passages. Southey's epics are now quite unreadable, and many
+of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic
+style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much
+redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors
+often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded
+as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and
+costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and
+as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek
+patriots, he had actually seen the men and heard of their deeds. The
+fact that he also portrayed more unreal characters in dismal
+drapery--Lara, Conrad, and Manfred, as the mouthpieces of splenetic
+misanthropy--has led to some unjust depreciation of his capacity for
+veritable delineation. Macaulay, for example, in his essay on Byron,
+observes that 'Johnson, the man whom Don Juan met in the slave-market,
+is a striking failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have
+drawn a bluff, fearless Englishman in such a situation!' and Mr.
+Swinburne echoes this criticism. But it is unfair to compare a minor
+character, slightly sketched into a poem for the purposes of the plot,
+with the full-length portrait that might have been made of him by a
+first-class artist in prose. The proper comparison would be between
+the figures in the metrical romances of the two poets, whereby it
+might be shown that Scott could take as little trouble as Byron did
+about an unimportant subsidiary actor. In regard to the leading heroes
+and heroines, Scott's poetic creations are hardly more interesting or
+dramatic than Byron's; and whenever he makes, even in prose, an
+excursion into Asia, his figure-drawing becomes conventional. But he
+was usually at the disadvantage, from which Byron was certainly free,
+of being hampered by an inartistic propensity to make virtuous heroes
+triumph in the long run.
+
+Yet it must be admitted that no poet of the same calibre has turned
+out so much loose uneven work as Byron. His lapses into lines that are
+lame or dull are the more vexatious to the correct modern ear when, as
+sometimes happens, they spoil a fine passage, and in the midst of a
+superb flight his muse comes down with a broken wing. In the subjoined
+stanza, for example, from the Waterloo episode in _Childe Harold_, the
+first five lines are clear, strenuous, and concise, while the next
+three are confused and clumsy; so that though he recovers himself in
+the final line, the general effect is much damaged:
+
+    'Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
+      Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
+    The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,
+      The morn the marshalling in arms--the day
+    Battle's magnificently stern array.
+      The thunder-clouds close o'er it, _which when rent,
+      The earth is covered thick with other clay,
+      Which her own clay shall cover_, heaped and pent,
+    Rider and horse--friend, foe--in one red burial blent.'
+
+These blots, and there are many, become less pardonable when we
+observe, from the new edition, that Byron by no means neglected
+revision of his work. But his impetuous temper, and the circumstance
+of his writing far from the printing-press, encouraged hasty
+execution; and though the most true remark that 'easy writing is
+devilish hard reading' is his own, though he praised excessively the
+chiselled verse of Pope, he was always inclined to pose as one who
+threw off jets of boiling inspiration, and in one letter he compares
+himself to the tiger who makes or misses his point in one spring. He
+ranked Pope first among English poets, yet he learnt nothing in that
+school; he pretended to undervalue Shakespeare, yet he must have had
+the plays by heart, for his letters bristle with quotations from them.
+His avowed taste in poetry is hard to reconcile with his own
+performances: his verse was rushing, irregular, audacious, yet he
+overpraises the smooth composition of Rogers; he dealt in heroic
+themes and passionate love-stories, yet Crabbe's humble pastorals had
+their full charm for him. Except Crabbe and Rogers, he declared, 'we
+are all--Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I--upon a wrong
+revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among
+these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in
+English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural
+insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his
+clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc
+which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too
+incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy
+soliloquies of his dramatic characters we have an actor constantly
+reappearing in his favourite part. Yet this also was a novelty to the
+generation brought up on the impersonal poetry of the classic school;
+and here, again, he is a forerunner of the self-reflecting analytical
+style that is common in our own day; for there is a Byronic echo in
+the 'divine despair' of Tennyson. The melancholy brooding spirit,
+dissatisfied with society and detesting complacency, had for some time
+been in the air; it had affected the literature of France and Germany;
+Werther, Obermann, and Rene are all moulded on the same type with
+Childe Harold; yet Sainte-Beuve rightly says that this identity of
+type does not mean imitation--it means that the writers were all in
+the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against
+philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so
+vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or
+irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages,
+and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various
+personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw,
+in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven
+and humanity. Their literature, in short, however overcoloured it may
+have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among
+men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world
+around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must
+leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between
+this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the
+self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory
+contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in
+different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to
+have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour
+must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved
+his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in
+the same year (1818), and from the same place (Venice), he produced
+the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, full of deep longing for unbroken
+solitude:
+
+    'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
+      There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
+    There is society, where none intrudes,
+      By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;'
+
+and also _Beppo_, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian
+society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat
+ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in
+fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his
+_Memoires d'Outre Tombe_, if they had been preserved, would have been
+very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography.
+
+It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression,
+and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest
+poems, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of Abydos_, the _Siege of Corinth_. On
+this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose
+sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour
+and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of
+metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary;
+yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not
+even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level
+with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description
+of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action.
+The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the _Giaour_--
+
+    'Clime of the unforgotten brave!
+    Whose land from plain to mountain cave
+    Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'--
+
+has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the
+manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and almost illegible
+hand--an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate
+poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and
+melodramatic figuring--
+
+    'Dark and unearthly is the scowl
+    That glares beneath his dusky cowl'--
+
+are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the
+untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and
+sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally
+disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it
+is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring
+adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality
+that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are,
+perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to
+Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal
+explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition
+lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to
+write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of
+assiduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek [Greek:
+phengarion], and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared
+us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sirat's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's
+scythe,' we should have mixed up less desultory reading with the
+enjoyment of fine passages. He gives us too much of his local
+colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors,
+he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the
+dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the
+forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that
+in these poems Byron brought the classic lands of Greece and the
+Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably
+added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.
+
+Byron has told us why he adopted for the _Corsair_, and afterwards for
+_Lara_, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':
+
+     'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for
+     narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart;
+     Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed
+     completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and
+     this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in
+     blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons
+     that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren
+     rocks on which they are kindled.'[25]
+
+We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment
+of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line
+displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement;
+it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow
+processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room
+for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of
+describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy
+heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At
+moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled
+up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run
+over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes
+ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos--as in the following
+sample from the _Corsair_:
+
+    'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives
+    One female form--remember--_we_ have wives.'
+
+And the consequence has been that _Lara_ and the _Corsair_ are now,
+we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.
+
+Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own
+metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning
+from the beacons, and had given blank verse a wide berth, instead of
+setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is
+full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he
+could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved
+not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular
+alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them.
+His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about
+_Sardanapalus_, to have been 'to dramatise striking passages of
+history and mythology.'
+
+     'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike
+     Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon
+     him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of
+     writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as
+     Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to
+     common language.'
+
+And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his
+blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed
+in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which
+have no metrical construction at all:
+
+     'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such
+     high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'[26]
+
+     'Where thou shalt pass thy days in peace, but on condition that the
+     three young princes are given up as hostages,'[27]
+
+Many others of the same quality might be given, in which the
+_disjecti membra poetae_ would be exceedingly hard to find. It is
+surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into
+the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere
+use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple
+strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary
+vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse
+that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the
+most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood
+that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in
+this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats
+in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the
+construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of
+its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron
+should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a
+rough unpractised hand.
+
+There are some vigorous passages scattered through the plays, and we
+have it on record that Dr. Parr could not sleep a wink after reading
+_Sardanapalus_. Nevertheless, we fear that the present generation will
+find little cause for demurring to Jeffrey's judgment upon the
+tragedies, that they are for the most part 'solemn, prolix, and
+ostentatious.' They were not composed, as Byron himself explained,
+'with the most remote view to the stage,' so that he had not before
+his eyes the wholesome fear of a critical audience. In truth it must
+be admitted that he lacked the true dramatic instinct; he could only
+set up his leading figures to deliver imposing speeches appropriate to
+a tragic situation; and one may guess that the consciousness of
+awkward handling weighed upon the spirit and style of his blank verse,
+for his ear seems to have completely misled him when it had lost the
+guidance of recurrent rhyme. Of _Cain: a Mystery_, one must speak
+reverently, since Walter Scott, to whom it was dedicated, wrote that
+the author had 'matched Milton on his own ground'; yet in Lucifer, who
+leads the dialogue, we have little more than a spectral embodiment of
+Byron's own rebellious temper; and in this poem, as in _Manfred_, the
+discussion of metaphysical problems carries him beyond his depth.
+There are, nevertheless, some fine declamatory passages; and we may
+quote as a curiosity one soft line, fresh from the Swiss mountains:
+
+                         'Pipes in the liberal air
+    _Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd_,'
+
+which is to be found in _Manfred_ and might have been taken from the
+_Excursion_.
+
+When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the
+importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is
+the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter
+poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his
+popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very
+unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and
+glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead,
+as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout
+eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or
+overcharged:
+
+    'The better days of life were ours;
+      The worst can be but mine;
+    The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,
+      Shall never more be thine.
+    The silence of that dreamless sleep
+    I envy now too much to weep;
+      Nor need I to repine
+    That all those charms have passed away,
+    I might have watched through long decay.'
+
+There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of
+thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse
+has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which
+men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.
+
+In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare
+quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high
+vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic
+spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show
+that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and
+epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his
+strength freely:
+
+    'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free
+      Thou shalt not taste of death!
+    The generous blood that flowed from thee
+      Disdained to sink beneath;
+    Within our veins its currents be,
+      Thy spirit on our breath.
+
+    'Thy name, our charging hosts along,
+      Shall be their battle word!
+    Thy fall, the theme of choral song
+      From virgin voices poured!
+    To weep would do thy glory wrong;
+      Thou shalt not be deplored.'
+
+And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in
+the _Isles of Greece_, where the two lines,
+
+    'Ah, no! the voices of the dead
+      Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'
+
+drop suddenly into the elegiac strain, into a mournful echo that
+dwells upon the ear, followed by the rising note of a call to arms. It
+must be remembered that nothing is so rare as a stirring war-song, and
+that in our time we have had a good many attempts--almost all
+failures; whereas the _Isles of Greece_ will long continue to stir the
+masculine imagination of Englishmen.
+
+On the other hand, it must be admitted that Byron's Occasional Pieces
+abound with cheap pathos, dubious fervour, and a kind of commonplace
+sentimentality that comes out in the form as well as in the feeling of
+his inferior work. The rhymes are apt to be hackneyed, the similes are
+sometimes tagged on awkwardly instead of being weaved into the
+texture, the expression has often lost its strength, and the emotion
+lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what
+was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not
+been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so
+much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much _too_
+occasional, for he was prone to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the
+fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his
+own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world
+as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a false air of lamentation over
+the misfortunes which he had brought upon himself, as in the Poems of
+the Separation. Yet when he shook off his personal grief and took to
+politics, no other poet could more vividly express his intense living
+interest in the great events of his time, or strike the proper note of
+some great catastrophe. It may be affirmed that the _Ode to Napoleon_
+is better than anything else that has been written in English upon the
+most astonishing career in modern history:
+
+    'The triumph and the vanity,
+      The rapture of the strife--
+    The earthquake-voice of Victory,
+      To thee the breath of life;
+    The sword, the sceptre, and that sway
+    Which man seemed made but to obey,
+      Wherewith renown was rife--
+    All quelled; Dark Spirit, what must be
+    The madness of thy memory!
+
+    'The Desolator desolate!
+      The Victor overthrown!
+    The Arbiter of others' fate
+      A suppliant for his own!
+    Is it some yet imperial hope
+    That with such change can calmly cope?
+      Or dread of death alone?
+    To die a prince--or live a slave--
+    Thy choice is most ignobly brave.'
+
+In the first of these two stanzas the seventh line is weak and breaks
+the rapid rush of the verse; but the high pressure and impetus of the
+poem are sustained throughout twenty stanzas, producing the effect of
+an improvisatore who stops rather from want of breath than from any
+other lack of inspiration. In this respect the ode is a rare poetical
+exploit; for all poems composed under the spur of the moment, upon
+some memorable incident that has just startled the world, must be more
+or less improvised, and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary
+popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under
+such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded
+some unlucky laureate.
+
+There is one province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which
+Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of
+lyrics. In his latest and longest production, _Don Juan_, he tells us
+that his 'sere fancy has fallen into the yellow leaf':
+
+    'And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk
+    Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.'
+
+It was in _Beppo: a Venetian Story_ that he dropped, for the first
+time, the weapon of trenchant sarcasm and invective, with no very fine
+edge upon it, which he flourished in his youth, and took up the tone
+of light humorous satire upon society. He soon acquired mastery over
+the metre (which was suggested, as is well known, by Hookham Frere's
+_Whistlecraft_); and in _Don Juan_ he produced a long, rambling poem
+of a kind never before attempted, and still far beyond any subsequent
+imitations, in the English language. Of a certainty there is much that
+it is by no means desirable to imitate, for the English literature
+does not assimilate the element of cynical libertinism, which indeed
+becomes coarse on an English tongue. Yet it is remarkable that the
+Whistlecraft metre, although Byron could manage it with point and
+spirit, has never produced more than insipid _pastiche_ in later
+hands. But while _Beppo_ may be classed as pure burlesque, _Don Juan_
+strikes various keys, ironical and voluptuous, grave and gay, rising
+sometimes to the level of strenuous realistic narrative in the
+episodes of the shipwreck and the siege, falling often into something
+like grotesque buffoonery, with much picturesque description, many
+animated lines, and occasional touches of effective pathos. As a story
+it has the picaresque flavour of _Gil Blas_, presenting a variety of
+scenes and adventures strung together without any definite plot; as a
+poem its reputation rests upon some passages of indisputable beauty;
+while Byron's own experiences, grievances, and animosities, personal
+or political, run through the whole performance like an accompaniment,
+and break out occasionally into humorous sarcasm or violent
+denunciations. That the overheated fervour of a stormy youth should
+cool down into disdainful irony, under the chill of disappointment and
+exhaustion, was natural enough; and this unfinished poem may be
+regarded as typical of Byron's erratic life, full of loose intrigue
+and adventure, with its sudden and premature ending.
+
+It is in _Don Juan_ that Byron stands forth as the founder and
+precursor of modern realism in poetry. He has now finally exorcised
+the hyperbolic fiend that vexed his youth, he has cast off the
+illusions of romance, he knows the ground he treads upon, and his
+pictures are drawn from life; he is the foremost of those who have
+ventured boldly upon the sombre actualities of war and bloodshed:--
+
+    'But let me put an end unto my theme,
+      There was an end of Ismail, hapless town,
+    Far flashed her burning towers o'er Danube's stream,
+      And redly ran his blushing waters down.
+    The horrid warwhoop and the shriller scream
+      Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown;
+    Of forty thousand that had manned the wall
+    Some hundreds breathed, the rest were silent all.'
+
+'A versified paraphrase,' it may be said, 'of sober history,' yet
+withal very different from the most animated prose, which must be kept
+at a lower temperature of intense expression. If we turn to quieter
+scenes--which are called picturesque because the artist, like a
+painter, has selected the right subject and point of view, and has
+grouped his details with exquisite skill--we may take the stanzas
+describing the return of the pirate Lambro to his Greek island--
+
+    'He saw his white walls shining in the sun,
+    His garden trees all shadowy and green'--
+
+as a fine example of pure objective writing, which lays out the whole
+scene truthfully, with the direct vision of one who has seen it. One
+does not find here the suggestive intimations, the wide imaginative
+horizon of higher poetry; there are no musical blendings of sound and
+sense, as in such lines as Tennyson's
+
+    'By the long wash of Australasian seas.'
+
+Yet in these passages Byron has after his own fashion served Nature
+faithfully, and he has preserved to us some masterly sketches of life
+and manners that have long since disappeared. The Greek islands have
+since fallen under the dominion of European uniformity; the costume of
+the people, the form of their government, are shabby imitations of
+Western models. But the cloudless sky, the sun slowly sinking behind
+Morea's hills, the sea on whose azure brow Time writes no wrinkle, and
+the marbled steep of Sunium, are still unchanged; and the peaceful
+tourist in these waters will see at once that Byron was a true workman
+in line and colour, and will feel the intellectual pleasure that comes
+from accurate yet artistic interpretation of natural beauties.
+
+The poem of _Don Juan_ is, therefore, a miscellany, connected on the
+picturesque side with _Childe Harold_, and by its mocking spirit with
+_Beppo_ and the _Vision of Judgment_, the two pieces that may be
+classed as pure burlesque. The irreverent persiflage of the _Vision_
+belongs to the now obsolete school of Voltaire, and in biting wit and
+daring ridicule the performance is not unworthy of that supreme master
+in _diablerie_. Nor can it be asserted that this lashing sarcasm was
+undeserved, or that all the profanity was in Byron's parody, for
+Southey's conception of the Almighty as a High Tory judge, with an
+obsequious jury of angels, holding a trial of George III., browbeating
+the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that
+he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and
+abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron.
+There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a
+lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent
+attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have
+invariably failed. Southey's _Vision_, and Robert Montgomery's libel
+upon Satan, have each undergone the same fate of being utterly
+extinguished, knocked clean out of English literature by one single
+crushing onslaught of Byron and Macaulay respectively.
+
+Our conclusion must be brief, for in fact it is not easy to propound
+to the readers of this Review any general observations, which shall be
+new as well as true, upon a man's life and works that have been
+subjected to incessant scrutiny and criticism throughout the
+nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period Byron found
+himself matched, in the poetic arena, against contemporary rivals of
+first-class genius and striking originality. And from his death almost
+up to the century's close there has been no time when some
+considerable poet has not occupied the forefront of English letters,
+and stamped his impression on the public mind. Variety in style and
+ideas has produced many vicissitudes of taste in poetry; it has been
+discovered that narrative can be better done in prose, and so the
+novel has largely superseded story-telling in verse. There have also
+been great political and social changes, and all these things have
+severely tested the staying powers of a writer who is too closely
+associated with his own period to be reckoned among those wide-ranging
+spirits whom Shelley has called 'the kings of thought.' Nevertheless
+the new edition of Byron is appearing at a moment which is, we think,
+not inopportune. There is just now, as by a coincidence there was in
+the year 1800, a dearth of poetic production; we have fallen among
+lean years; we have come to a break in the succession of notable
+poets; the Victorian celebrities have one by one passed away; and we
+can only hope that the first quarter of the twentieth century may
+bring again some such bountiful harvest as was vouchsafed to our
+grandfathers at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the meantime the
+reading of Byron may operate as a wholesome tonic upon the literary
+nerves of the rising generation; for, as Mr. Swinburne has generously
+acknowledged, with the emphatic concurrence of Matthew Arnold, his
+poems have 'the excellence of sincerity and strength.' Now one
+tendency of latter-day verse has been toward that over-delicacy of
+fibre which has been termed decadence, toward the preference of
+correct metrical harmonies over distinct and incisive expression,
+toward vague indications of meaning. In this form the melody prevails
+over the matter; the style inclines to become precious and garnished
+with verbal artifice. Some recent French poets, indeed, in their
+anxiety to correct the troublesome lucidity of their mother-tongue,
+have set up the school of symbolism, which deals in half-veiled
+metaphor and sufficiently obscure allusion, relying upon subtly
+suggestive phrases for evoking associations. For ephemeral infirmities
+of this kind the straightforward virility of Byron's best work may
+serve as an antidote. On the other hand, we have the well-knit
+strenuous verse of extreme realism, wrought out by a poet in his
+shirt-sleeves, with rhymes clear-sounding like the tap of hammer on
+anvil, who sings of rough folk by sea and land, and can touch national
+emotion in regard to the incidents or politics of the moment. He
+paints without varnish, in hard outline, avoiding metaphor and
+ornamental diction generally; taking his language so freely out of the
+mouths of men in actual life that he makes occasional slips into
+vulgarity. He is at the opposite pole from the symbolist; but true
+poetry demands much more distinction of style and nobility of thought.
+And here again Byron's high lyrical notes may help to maintain
+elevation of tone and to preserve the romantic tradition. His poetry,
+like his character, is full of glaring imperfections; yet he wrote as
+one of the great world in which he made for a time such a noise; and
+after all that has been said about his moral delinquencies, it is
+certain that we could have better spared a better man.
+
+In one of Tennyson's earlier letters is the following passage, with
+reference to something written at the time in _Philip van Artevelde_:
+
+     'He does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar
+     strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however
+     mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart, and a
+     new pulse, and so we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease
+     the wheels of the old world.'
+
+This is the large-hearted, far-seeing judgment of one who could survey
+the whole line and evolutionary succession of English verse, being
+himself destined to close the long list of nineteenth-century poets,
+which was opened by Byron and his contemporaries. The time has surely
+now come when we may leave discussing Byron as a social outlaw, and
+cease groping after more evidence of his misdeeds. The office of true
+criticism is to show that he made so powerful an impression on our
+literature as to win for himself permanent rank in its annals, and
+that his work, with all its shortcomings, does yet mark and illustrate
+an important stage in the connected development of our English poetry.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[24] _The Works of Lord Byron: a New, Revised, and Enlarged
+Edition._--'Letters and Journals.' Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M.
+A. 'Poetry.' Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, M. A. London, John
+Murray, 1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1900.
+
+[25] Preface to the _Corsair_.
+
+[26] _The Deformed Transformed_ (part I. scene i.).
+
+[27] _Sardanapalus_ (act V. scene i.).
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS[28]
+
+
+Mr. Leslie Stephen combines the faculty of acute and searching
+criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact.
+His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he
+has given to the history of English opinions and controversies,
+speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an
+extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to
+disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a
+masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he
+published his work on _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, and
+his present book on the Utilitarians continues, and indeed brings down
+to our own time, a similar investigation of the course of certain
+views, principles, and doctrines which had taken their shape in
+England and France during the period preceding the French Revolution,
+and which profoundly influenced political discussion throughout the
+first half of the nineteenth century. But on this occasion Mr.
+Stephen's inquiry does not range over the whole area thus laid open,
+though his subject compels him to make several excursions into the
+general region of philosophical and political disputation. His main
+purpose is to relate the history of a creed propagated by a group of
+remarkable men, who took hold of some prominent theories and doctrines
+generated by the rationalism of the preceding century, and endeavoured
+to make them the basis and framework of a system for improving the
+condition of the English people. Their immediate object was to abolish
+intolerable abuses of power by the governing classes, and radically to
+reform on scientific principles the haphazard blundering
+administration which was assumed to be the source of all evil. Mr.
+Stephen describes and explains, in short, the rise, progress, and
+decay of Utilitarianism.
+
+Such a system, by its nature and aims, is evidently practical;
+it is directed towards a change of laws and an alteration of the
+prevailing methods of government. To the philosophic minds of the
+eighteenth-century reformers in England and France, it seemed evident,
+that any general conclusions upon questions vitally concerning the
+interests of mankind should be reached by convincing demonstration,
+should start from axioms, and proceed by a connected chain of logical
+argument. During the latter half of that century England and France,
+so incessantly at war and so different in character and in their
+governing institutions, were nevertheless in alliance intellectually.
+They were then (with Holland) the only countries in the world where
+public opinion had free play, and where discussion of philosophic
+problems was actively carried on; and between them there was a
+constant interchange of ideas. Now in all speculations, on things
+human or divine, there have existed immemorially two schools or
+tendencies of thought, two ways of approaching the subject,
+corresponding, we may conjecture, to a radical difference of
+intellectual predispositions. You may start by the high _a priori_
+road, or you may feel your way gradually by induction from verifiable
+experiences; and of these two main currents of speculative opinion
+whichever is the stronger at any given period will affect every branch
+of thought and action. Coleridge appealed to history as proving that
+all epoch-making revolutions coincide with the rise or fall of
+metaphysical systems, and he attributed the power of abstract theories
+over revolutionary movements to the craving of man for higher guidance
+than sensations. However this may be, it may be affirmed that the
+rationalism of the eighteenth century in England and France found room
+by replacing the decaying theologies and substituting reason for the
+traditional authority. This was the period that produced in France the
+philosophic conception of abstract humanity, everywhere the same
+naturally, with a superficial distinction of circumstances, but
+differentiated in the main by bad laws, artificial inequalities, and
+social injustice. In France the method of deducing conclusions from
+abstract principles concerning the rights of man and the social
+compact gained predominance, until they were shaped by Rousseau and
+others into the formal indictment of a corrupt society. It was the
+point and impulse thus given to very real grievances and irritation
+against privilege, that precipitated the French Revolution. Among the
+English, on the other hand, their public spirit, the connection of
+large classes with national affairs, and their habit of compromise,
+had predisposed the leading minds towards cautious views in philosophy
+and in politics; and at the century's end their inbred distrust of
+abstract propositions as a basis for social reconstruction received
+startling confirmation from the tremendous explosion in France.
+
+The foregoing remarks give in bare outline the conditions and
+circumstances, very carefully examined and skilfully analysed by Mr.
+Leslie Stephen, that prepared and cleared the ground for the
+Utilitarians. Their object was not to reconstruct, hardly to remodel,
+existing forms of government; it was to remove abuses, and to devise
+remedies for the evils of an unwieldy and complicated administrative
+machine, clogged by stupidity and selfishness. And the plan of Mr.
+Stephen's first volume is to describe the state of society at this
+period, the condition of agriculture and the industries, the position
+of the Church and the Universities, of the Army and Navy, the
+intellectual tendencies indicated by the philosophic doctrines, and
+generally to sketch the political and social aspects of England rather
+more than a hundred years ago. He is writing, as he says, the history
+of a sect; and in dealing with the tenets of that sect he lays
+prominent stress upon what may be called the environment, upon the
+various circumstances which may influence forms of belief, and
+particularly upon the idiosyncrasies of the men who held and
+propagated them. It is for this latter reason that he has given us
+brief and interesting biographies of those whose influence was
+greatest in shaping and directing the movement, illustrating his
+narrative by portraits of them as they lived and acted. All these
+things help us towards understanding how it comes to pass that
+conclusions which seem clear as daylight to earnest thinkers in one
+generation may be abandoned by succeeding generations as manifestly
+erroneous. The inquiry also shows why, and to what extent, some of the
+doctrines that were scientifically propounded by the Utilitarians did
+initiate and lead up to an important reformation in the methods of
+English government.
+
+     'It might be stated as a paradox' (Mr. Stephen observes) 'that,
+     whereas in France the most palpable evils arose from the excessive
+     power of the central government, and in England the most palpable
+     evils arose from the feebleness of the central government, the
+     French reformers demanded more government, and the English
+     reformers less government.... The solution seems to be easy. In
+     France, reformers such as Turgot and the economists were in favour
+     of an enlightened despotism, because ... it would suppress the
+     exclusive privileges of a class which, doing nothing in return, had
+     become a mere burthen, encumbering all social development. But in
+     England the privileged class was identical with the governing
+     class.'
+
+The English aristocracy, in fact, were actually doing the country's
+business, though they were doing it badly, and paid themselves much
+too highly for very indifferent administration. Yet the English nation
+acquiesced in the system, because the middle classes were growing rich
+and prosperous, and the State interfered very little with their
+private affairs. To this general statement of the case we agree; but
+we may point out that in terming our aristocracy a privileged class
+one material distinction has been passed over. For whereas the French
+_noblesse_ constituted a caste partly exempted by birthright from the
+general taxation, and vested with certain vexatious rights to which no
+duties corresponded, the English aristocracy possessed legally no
+privileges at all. It was not an exclusive order, but an upper class
+that was constantly recruited, being open to all successful men; and
+such a governing body is naturally indifferent to reforms, because it
+is very little affected by administrative imperfections or abuses.
+Pauperism and ignorance may fester long among the masses before
+wealthy and prosperous rulers discover that the interests of their own
+class are imperilled; the state of prisons does not concern them
+personally; and so long as life and property are fairly secure, they
+care little about an efficient police. The Englishman of whom a
+Frenchman reported with amazement that he consoled himself for having
+been robbed by the reflection that there were no policemen in his
+country, must have belonged to this comfortable class. And the
+inveterate conservation of abuses in the Church, the Law, and the Army
+may be partially explained in a similar way. In France the Church and
+the army were really privileged bodies: the vast ecclesiastical
+revenues were protected from taxation, and the commissioned ranks of
+the army were reserved for the _noblesse_; the French parliaments were
+close magisterial corporations. In England these were all open
+professions, with no special fiscal rights or social limitations; the
+prizes were available for general competition, and as every one had a
+chance of winning them by interest or even merit, there was no
+formidable outcry against the system.
+
+In politics, therefore, as well as in philosophy, the prevailing habit
+of the English mind was more moderate, less thorough-going and
+subversive, than in France. Mr. Stephen makes a keen and rapid
+analysis of the common-sense psychology, as expounded by Reid and
+Dugald Stewart, to show the correspondence at this period between
+abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the
+limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon
+the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their
+teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking
+experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off
+the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the
+derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics,
+there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was
+brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which
+were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of
+the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle said
+long afterwards, the Scottish philosophers started from the
+mechanical premises suggested by Hume. 'They let loose instinct as an
+indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against his conclusions; they
+tugged lustily against the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly
+towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of atheism and
+fatalism.' To save themselves from materialism they invented
+Intuitions, and thereby incurred the wrath of orthodox Utilitarianism,
+which was rigidly empirical. They were, however, accepted in England,
+where any haven was welcome, however uncertain might be the holding
+ground, which sheltered the vessel from being blown by windy
+speculation out into a shoreless sea.
+
+The Scottish philosophy therefore
+
+     'was in philosophy what Whiggism was in politics. Like political
+     Whiggism, it included a large element of enlightened and liberal
+     rationalism; but, like Whiggism, it covered an aversion to
+     thorough-going logic. The English politician was suspicious of
+     abstract principle, but would cover his acceptance of tradition and
+     rule of thumb by general phrases about liberty and toleration. The
+     Whig in philosophy equally accepted the traditional creed,
+     sufficiently purified from cruder elements, and sheltered his
+     doctrine by speaking of intuitions and laws of thought.'
+
+The foregoing quotation may serve to indicate briefly the situation,
+in politics and philosophy, at the time when Bentham, 'the patriarch
+of the English Utilitarians,' appeared upon the scene. Mr. Stephen's
+sketch of his life and doctrines, which occupies the latter half of
+the book's first volume, is eminently instructive and often amusing.
+He excels in tracing the continuity of ideas, and in showing how they
+converge upon the point of view that is gradually reached by some
+writer of superior force and activity, who rejects, alters, or uses
+them in the process of working out the doctrines of some new school.
+It was the spread of philanthropy, of a conscientious fellow-feeling
+for those classes of society who suffered from neglect and misrule,
+that fostered the movement towards political and social reform. This
+feeling was represented in Bentham's celebrated formula, originally
+invented by Hutcheson, about 'the greatest happiness of the greatest
+number'; and the criterion of utility was laid down as having the
+widest possible application to all sorts and conditions of men.
+Self-help, individualism, _laisser-faire_, the economic view that each
+should be left free to pursue his own interests, were principles
+intended to operate for the removal of abuses and the destruction of
+unfair privileges: they were promulgated for the relief of humanity at
+large, although the system which was built up on them came afterwards
+to be denounced as narrow, selfish, and materialistic. These ideas
+were undoubtedly congenial to the habits and character of Englishmen,
+who, like free men everywhere, had a traditional distrust of strong
+and active government, preferring King Log, on the whole, to King
+Stork. Inequalities and incomprehensible laws were to be seen in the
+course of Nature no less than in the English Constitution; and in
+either case a man might rely upon his wits and energy to deal with
+them. It might be that the defects in human government could only be
+remedied by employing the forces of government to cure them; but if
+you began to set going the administrative engine there was no saying
+where it might stop. Bentham held all government to be an evil, though
+he differed from the modern anarchist in holding it to be a necessary
+evil; yet he needed a strong scientific administration for the purpose
+of rooting out inveterate abuses. And this was the dilemma that
+confronted him. He worked out his solution of the problem by laying
+out a whole system of morals and a science of politics, with Utility
+as their base and standard, which has profoundly influenced all
+subsequent legislation, and led eventually to much more extensive
+theories regarding the sphere and duties of government than he himself
+would have advocated or approved.
+
+The principal events of Bentham's life, and the development of his
+opinions, are condensed by Mr. Stephen into one chapter with his usual
+biographical skill. Bentham started in life as a barrister, and
+attended Blackstone's lectures, with the result that he was deeply
+impressed by the fallacies of the legal theories there expounded, and
+soon afterward vowed eternal war against the Demon of Chicane. He
+struggled against narrow means and obscurity until he made the
+acquaintance of Lord Shelburne, through whom he became acquainted with
+other leading statesmen, and with Miss Caroline Fox, to whom he made a
+futile proposal of marriage some years later. At Bowood he also met
+Dumont, and thereby formed his connection with the French jurists,
+though in his old age he declared that Dumont, his chief interpreter
+abroad, 'did not understand a word of his meaning'; the true cause of
+his quarrel being that Dumont criticised Bentham's dinners. He
+travelled on the Continent, and lived some time in Russia. Soon
+afterward the Revolution made a clean sweep of all the old
+institutions in France, and thus laid open a bare and level ground
+just suited, as Bentham thought, for an architect who had his
+portfolio full of new administrative plans. It was long, indeed,
+before he could understand why systematic reforms were not immediately
+accepted as soon as their utility was logically demonstrated. He lost
+no time in providing the French National Assembly with elaborate
+schemes for the reconstruction of various departments of government,
+and he even offered to go to France to set up his model prison,
+proposing himself 'to become gratuitously the gaoler thereof.' The
+Assembly requited his zeal by conferring on him the title of a French
+citizen; but social reorganisation took the shape of September
+massacres and the Reign of Terror, whereat Bentham was disgusted,
+though in no way disheartened, as a theorist.
+
+     'Never' (says Mr. Stephen) 'was an adviser more at cross purposes
+     with the advised. It would be impossible to draw a more striking
+     portrait of the abstract reasoner, whose calculations of human
+     motives omit all reference to passion, and who fancied that all
+     prejudice can be dispelled by a few bits of logic.'
+
+Here, in fact, we have the key to Bentham's character, to its weakness
+and also to its strength. A philosopher who plunges into the practical
+affairs of the world without taking human feelings and imagination
+into account is sure to find himself stumbling about among blocks and
+blockheads, and tripped up by the ill-will of vested interests; but on
+the other hand, if he has taken the right direction, his ardent
+energies have the impetus of some natural force. Bentham's earlier
+notion had been that political reforms could be introduced like
+improvements in machinery; you had only to prove the superior utility
+of your new invention to obtain its adoption by all who were concerned
+in the business. Latterly he made the surprising discovery that in the
+public offices, in the Law, and in the Church, the heads of these
+professions are usually quite satisfied with their own monopolies, are
+opposed to change, and are always ready with a stock of plausible
+arguments to show the folly and danger of innovation. If the
+Utilitarian appeals to facts, common sense, and experience, so also
+does the Conservative; and until public opinion is decidedly for
+progress the dead weight prevails. Not for a day did Bentham relax his
+strenuous exertions, but he changed his tactics; he turned from his
+mechanical workshop to the study of political dynamics, and he found
+what he wanted in the rising radicalism--'his principal occupation, in
+a word, was to provide political philosophy for radical reformers.'
+
+Of the philosophic creed which Bentham undertook to proclaim from his
+hermitage at Ford Abbey, with James Mill as his leading apostle, Mr.
+Stephen gives us a very shrewd and incisively critical examination.
+The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and
+authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive
+doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the
+necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying
+ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his
+own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific
+principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete
+facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a
+single formula, to the destruction of idols of the market or tribe,
+and to the confusion of those who fattened upon antique superstitions.
+'All government is one vast evil,' and can only be kept from mischief
+by minute regulations and constant vigilance. Whatever is plainly
+illogical must be radically wrong--'to make a barrister a judge is as
+sensible as it would be to select a procuress for mistress of a girls'
+school;' and a parish boy, if he could read properly, might go through
+the Church services with the Prayer Book and the Homilies, so that an
+established Church is a costly and indefensible luxury. Taking
+Utility, founded on observation of actual facts, as his guide and his
+measure of existing institutions, he treated them as colossal
+iniquities, as frauds upon the people, as dead and ineffectual for the
+purposes of moral and political life. Nevertheless, although he
+condemned the whole fabric as it stood, Bentham was an absolute
+believer in the unlimited power of laws and institutions; nor was he
+far from wishing to deal with them on the principles applicable to the
+reform of prisons, as undesirable but necessary instruments of
+coercion to be despotically administered upon a scientific model,
+after the fashion of his favourite Panopticon. He was, in short, as
+Mr. Stephen points out, an unconscious follower of Hobbes, with this
+difference, that in Bentham's case the omnipotent Leviathan, for
+control and direction, was to be enlightened public opinion. And he
+was apparently convinced, without misgivings, that a model government,
+framed logically upon that common sense which is a public property,
+could be introduced and enforced under popular sanction as easily as
+new regulations for an ill-managed gaol. He was fully prepared to make
+liberal allowance, in framing his constitution, for the different
+needs, circumstances, and habits of communities; he was quite aware
+that precisely the same legislation would not suit England and India;
+but he believed national circumstance and character to be extensively
+modifiable by manifestly useful institutions, and he was ready to
+begin the operation at once, 'to legislate for Hindostan as well as
+for his own parish, and to make codes not only for England, Spain, and
+Russia, but also for Morocco.'
+
+Mr. Stephen has no difficulty in exposing the shortcomings and
+inadequacy of these doctrines. But he is writing the history of
+certain political ideas; so his main object is to show how such ideas
+are formed, the course they have followed, and their influence upon
+thought and action up to the present day. To trace the links and
+continuity of ideas is to analyse their elements, and to show the
+impress that they received from external circumstance, permanent or
+temporary; it is an important method in the science of politics. Upon
+the empiricism of English philosophy in the eighteenth century Bentham
+constructed a Theory of Morals that purported to rest exclusively on
+facts ascertained and verifiable, with happiness as our being's end
+and aim, with pain and pleasure as the ultimate principles of conduct;
+and upon this foundation he proceeded to build up his system of
+politics and legislation. Any attempt to derive morality from other
+sources, or to measure it by other standards, he denounced as
+arbitrary and misleading; he threw aside metaphysics, and therefore
+theology, as illusory. The exclusive appeal to experience, to plain
+reasoning from the evidence of our senses, from actual observation of
+human propensities, was sufficient for his purposes, and tallied with
+his designs as a practical reformer. In these views he was a disciple
+of Hume, whose influence has surreptitiously percolated all modern
+thought, and his unintentional allies were the teachers of Natural
+religion, with Paley as its principal exponent. Having thus defined
+and explained the basis of ethical philosophy, the Utilitarian has to
+build up the superstructure of legal ordinance; and he is at once
+confronted by the difficult problem of distinguishing the sphere of
+ethics from the province of law. Upon this vital question Mr. Stephen,
+as an expert in ethics, gives a dissertation that is exceedingly acute
+and instructive; and we may commend, in particular, his criticism of
+the doctrine that the morality of an act depends upon its
+consequences, not upon its motives. As he observes, this may be true,
+with certain reserves, in law, where the business of the legislature
+is to prohibit and punish acts that directly endanger the order and
+security of a community. But 'the exclusion of motive justifiable in
+law may take all meaning out of morality'; and yet nothing is more
+complicated than the question of demarcating a clear frontier between
+the two provinces. Mr. Stephen's examination of this question is the
+more important because it involves the problem of regulating private
+morals by public enactments; and also because the confusion of motives
+with intentions lies at the bottom of much mischievous sophistry, for
+some of the worst crimes in history have been suggested by plausible
+motives, and have been defended on that ground. He shows that
+Bentham's survey of the springs of human action was incomplete, that
+he overstrained his formula to make it universally applicable, and
+that he nevertheless gave a far-reaching impulse to clearer notions
+and an effective advance in the simplification of legal procedure and
+the codification of laws. As a moral philosophy, Bentham's system
+appeared so arid and materialistic that its unpopularity has obscured
+his real services. For he was the engineer who first led a scientific
+attack up to the ramparts of legal chicanery, and made a breach
+through which all subsequent reform found its entry.
+
+The axiom that utility is the source of justice and equity is of very
+ancient date, and indeed the word is sufficiently elastic to
+comprehend every conceivable human motive; but no one before Bentham
+had employed it so energetically as a lever to overturn ponderous
+abuses, or had pointed his theory so directly against notorious facts.
+On the other hand, since he despised and rejected historical studies,
+he greatly miscalculated the binding strength of long usage and
+possession. He forgot, what Hume had been careful to remember, that
+whether men's reasoning on these subjects be right or wrong, the
+conclusions have not really been reached by logic, but have grown up
+out of instincts, and correspond with certain immemorial needs and
+aspirations of humanity. Hume had sketched, before Bentham, his Idea
+of a Perfect Commonwealth; yet he begins by the warning that
+
+     'It is not with forms of government as with other artificial
+     contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected if we can
+     discover another more accurate and commodious ... the bulk of
+     mankind' (he adds) 'being governed by authority, not by reason, and
+     never attributing authority to anything that has not the
+     recommendation of antiquity.'
+
+Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter
+doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations
+prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his
+frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political
+projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power,
+and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he
+could only get the power he could radically change for the better the
+circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on
+the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is
+indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is
+constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is
+an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the
+natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may
+produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France;
+while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation,
+to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and
+wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public
+opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and protracted opposition. It
+is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and
+convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with
+it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his
+principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction
+of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century,
+though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired.
+He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify
+society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that
+power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the
+State, once established on a democratic basis, would exercise the
+power and disregard his carefully drawn limitations. A tendency toward
+State Socialism he would have detested above all things; and yet that
+is the direction inevitably taken by supreme authority when the
+responsibility for the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
+imposed upon it by popular demand.
+
+Mr. Stephen's second volume describes the later phase of the
+Utilitarian creed, when it passed from its founder into the hands of
+ardent disciples. The transition necessarily involves some divergence
+of views and methods. In religious movements it usually begins after
+the founder's death; but as Bentham lived to superintend his apostolic
+successors, his relations with them were not invariably harmonious.
+The leadership fell upon James Mill, whose early life and general
+character, the development of his opinions, and the bearing of his
+philosophy upon his politics, are the subjects of one of those
+condensed biographical sketches in which Mr. Stephen excels. In the
+_History of India_, which brought to James Mill reputation and
+pecuniary independence, he could apply his deductive theories to a
+remote and little known country without much risk of contradiction
+from actual circumstances or of checks from the misapprehension of
+facts. In England the Utilitarian doctrines, as propounded in Mill's
+writings, raised up opposition and hostile criticism from various
+quarters. The general current of ideas and feelings had now set
+decidedly toward the suppression of inveterate abuses, and toward
+constitutional reform. Radicalism was gaining ground rapidly, and even
+Socialism had come to the surface, while Political Economy was in the
+ascendant. But the old Tories closed their ranks for a fierce
+resistance against theories that menaced, as it seemed to them,
+nothing less than destruction to time-honoured institutions; and the
+Whigs had no taste for doctrines that pretended to be reasonable, but
+appeared to them in effect revolutionary. The different positions of
+contending parties were illustrated, as Mr. Stephen shows, by their
+respective attitudes towards Church Reform. The Tories defended
+ecclesiastical establishment as one of the main bastions of the
+citadel; the Whigs would preserve the Church in subjection to the
+State; while James Mill, in the _Westminster Review_, declared the
+Church of England to be a mere State machine, worked in subservience
+to the sinister interest of the governing classes. He desired 'to
+abolish all dogmas and ceremonies, and to employ the clergy to give
+lectures on ethics, botany, and political economy, with decent dances
+and social meals for the celebration of Sunday.' Mr. Stephen, after
+observing that this plan exemplifies 'the incapacity of an isolated
+clique to understand the real tone of public opinion,' adds that 'it
+seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman
+read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal
+instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a
+psychologist, to the strength and persistence of one of the most
+powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article
+proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the
+Oxford Movement was stirring up a wave of enthusiasm for the dogmas
+and ritual which he treated as obsolete and nonsensical; nor is there
+anything more remarkable or unexpected in the political changes of the
+last sixty years, than the discomfiture of those prophets who have
+foretold the decay of all liturgies and the speedy dissolution of
+ecclesiastical establishments. This phenomenon is by no means confined
+to England, or even to Europe; and at the present day, when the power
+of religious idealism is better understood upon wider experience, no
+practical politician attempts to disregard sentiments that defy logic
+and pass the understanding.
+
+Nevertheless Utilitarianism, as represented by James Mill's 'Essay on
+Government,' was attracting increased attention, and was provoking
+serious alarm. It was a period of confidence in theories which have
+been partly confirmed and partly contradicted by subsequent
+experiences of those 'principles of human nature' in which political
+speculators so unreservedly trusted. In France, some fifty years
+earlier, the destructive theorist had swept all before him; in
+England, while he was assaulting with effect the entrenchments of
+Conservatism, he was taken in flank by the moderate reformers. Mill
+had denounced the Whigs as half-hearted and even treacherous allies,
+who dallied with Radicalism to conceal their nefarious design of
+obtaining political mastery with the fewest concessions possible. He
+relied upon universal education to qualify the masses for the
+possession of an extensive franchise, and upon enlightened
+self-interest to guarantee their proper use of it. Macaulay rejoined,
+in the _Edinburgh Review_, that the masses might possibly conclude
+that they would get more pleasure than pain out of universal
+spoliation; and that if his opponent's principles were correct and his
+scheme adopted, 'literature, science, commerce, and manufactures might
+be swept away, and a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the
+owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities.' It was a
+notable controversial tournament, at which the intelligent bystander
+probably assisted with much satisfaction and no excessive alarm,
+having little faith in the absolute theorist, and not much in the
+disinterestedness of the Whigs. For the moment it was sufficient that
+both parties agreed in supporting the Reform Bill, although, as Mr.
+Stephen remarks, the Radical regarded it as a payment on account,
+while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge. We
+may observe, to the honour of a great Liberal family, that as the
+first Lord Lansdowne discerned Bentham's talents and gave him his
+start in life, so the impression made upon the second marquis by
+Macaulay's articles induced him to offer the writer his first seat in
+Parliament.
+
+Mr. Stephen deals with the duel between Mill and Macaulay from the
+standpoint of an impartial umpire, with an expert's appreciation of
+their logical fencing and some humorous glances at the heated
+combatants. Mill was an austere Puritan, who would fell the Tory like
+an ox and would trample upon the cunning self-seeking Whig. The
+Edinburgh Reviewers were a set of brilliant young men who represented
+intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become
+judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing in their
+social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social
+injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of
+Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of the
+French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a
+diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a
+type of Conservatism he gives us Robert Southey, whose fortune it was
+to be fiercely abused by the Utilitarians and ridiculed by the Whigs.
+Southey, like many others, had been frightened out of early Liberalism
+into the conviction that Reform would be the inevitable precursor of
+revolution; and in 1817 he had written to Lord Liverpool that the only
+hope of saving the country lay in gagging the seditious press.
+'Concessions,' he said, 'can only serve to hasten the catastrophe. Woe
+be to the garrison who hoist a white flag to an enemy that gives no
+quarter.' Yet Southey had a deep feeling for the misery of the lower
+classes at this period of widespread distress. In his belief in the
+power of Government to remedy social evils, he was much nearer the
+accepted line of later public opinion than Macaulay, who would have
+confined the State's business to the maintenance of order, the defence
+of property, and the practice of departmental economy. And when
+Southey, following Coleridge and preceding Gladstone, insisted upon
+the vital importance of religion as a principle of State policy,
+neither he nor Gladstone deserved all the ridicule cast upon them by
+Macaulay in his brilliant essays; for at any rate no first-class
+Government in Europe has hitherto ventured upon dissolving connection
+with the Church.
+
+For his philosophy, Mr. Stephen tells us, Southey was in the habit of
+referring to Coleridge, whose hostility to the Utilitarians went on
+different and deeper grounds. Coleridge had convinced himself that all
+the errors of the time, and their political dangers, arose from a
+false and godless empiricism. He declared that revolutionary periods
+have always been connected with the popular prevalence of abstract
+ideas, and that the speculative principles of men between twenty and
+thirty are the great source of political prophecy. He developed this
+view in a singular letter upon the state of affairs and opinions which
+he also, like Southey, addressed to Lord Liverpool in 1817, and which
+somewhat bewildered that veteran statesman. With the moderns, he said,
+'nothing grows, all is made'; whereas growth itself is but a disguised
+mode of being made by the superinduction of the _jam data_ on the _jam
+datum_; and he insisted that 'the flux of individuals at any moment in
+existence in a country is there for the value of the State, far more
+than the State for them, though both positions are true
+proportionately.' In other words, Coleridge pressed the evolutionary
+view against the sharp set, shortsighted Utilitarian propositions; and
+he would have agreed that antiquated prejudices are absurd only to
+those who have not looked back to their origin, when they can be found
+to proceed in logical order from natural causes. He had not been
+always a resolute opponent of the Utilitarian theory of morals; but,
+like other philosophers, he had become alarmed at the consequence of
+being shut up within the prison of finite senses, and he grasped at
+Kant's discovery of the difference between Understanding and Reason,
+in order to retire upon a metaphysical basis of religion and morality,
+and to withstand the prudential calculus. We are inclined to suggest
+that Mr. Stephen, who does little more than glance at Coleridge's
+position, has underestimated his influence upon the intellectual
+direction of politics in the first half of this century. Coleridge
+certainly provided an antidote to the crudity of eager Radicalism in
+Church and State, and his ideas may be recognised not only in the
+great High Church movement that was stirred up by the Tractarians, but
+also in the larger comprehension of the duties and attributes of the
+State that has been slowly gaining ground up to our own day.
+
+It is, indeed, the growth and development of English opinion regarding
+these public duties and attributes, as it is traced in Mr. Stephen's
+book, that forms, in our opinion, its chief value; and we are
+reviewing it mainly as a history of political ideas. This is, we
+believe, the practical outcome of the increasing feeling of sympathy
+between different classes of the community, of a sense of
+responsibility, of what is called altruism, of solidarity among all
+the diverse interests that have lately characterised our legislation:
+
+     'The two great rival theories of the functions of the State
+     are--the theory which was for so many years dominant in England,
+     and which may for convenience be called the Individualist theory;
+     and the theory which is stated most fully and powerfully by the
+     Greek philosophers, which we may call the Socialist theory. The
+     Individualist theory regards the State as a purely utilitarian
+     institution, a mere means to an end.... It represents the State as
+     existing mainly for the protection of property and personal
+     liberty, and as having therefore no concern with the private life
+     and character of the citizen, except in so far as these may make
+     him dangerous to the material welfare of his neighbour.
+
+     'The Greek theory, on the other hand, though it likewise regards
+     the State as a means to certain ends, regards it as something
+     more.... According to this theory, no department of life is outside
+     the scope of politics; and a healthy State is at once the end at
+     which the science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are
+     carried out.'[29]
+
+Accepting this passage as a philosophical statement of tendencies, we
+may observe that neither theory has ever been definitely adopted in
+England. The Utilitarians desired to recast institutions for the
+greater happiness of all citizens, but they were averse to investing
+the State with autocratic powers of interference. The Tories, on the
+other hand, were awakening to the conviction that the Government must
+do more for the people; but their fear of change and their own
+'sinister interests,' persuaded them that this might be done without
+radical reforms. The Whigs faced both ways, and since in England the
+truly valuable effect of extreme opinions is always to drive the
+majority into a middle course, they rose to power on that compromise
+which is represented by the Reform measures of 1832. The Reform Bill
+was accepted by the Utilitarians as an instalment of the rightful
+authority of the people over the conduct of public affairs, and
+therefore a provisional method of promoting their welfare. The first
+Tory statesman of that day, on the contrary, was convinced that for
+the public welfare the existing Constitution could not be bettered:
+
+     'During one hundred and fifty years the Constitution in its present
+     form has been in force; and I would ask any man who hears me to
+     declare whether the experience of history has produced any form of
+     government so calculated to promote the happiness and secure the
+     liberties of a free and enlightened people.'[30]
+
+Both parties, in fact, appealed to experience; but Peel took his stand
+upon history, which the Utilitarians disregarded as a mere record of
+unscientific errors, or at most as a lighthouse to give warning of
+rocks, rather than a lamp to show the road ahead. And the point upon
+which they joined issue was as to the consequences of staking the
+whole fabric of government upon the basis of public opinion, operating
+through almost unlimited popular suffrage. The Tory foretold that
+this would end in wrecking the Constitution, with the ship among
+breakers, and steering by ballot voting. The Benthamite persuaded
+himself that enlightened self-interest, empirical perceptions of
+utility, and general education, would prevail with the multitude for
+their support of a rational system. But with those who demanded
+sovereignty for the people a strict limitation of the sphere of
+government was one essential maxim; and the Utilitarians would have
+agreed with Guizot when he declared it to be 'a mere commonplace that
+as civilisation and reason progress, the sphere of public authority
+contracts.' They do not appear to have foreseen that whenever the
+masses should have got votes legislation would become democratic, or
+even socialistic, in order to capture them. This discovery was
+eventually made by the Tories, who availed themselves of it to dish
+the Whigs, and to come forward again upon a popular suffrage as the
+true friends and guardians of the people.
+
+In Mr. Stephen's second volume James Mill is the principal figure, as
+the apostle of Benthamism, though he also describes briefly, in his
+terse and incisive style, the lives and opinions of some notable men,
+foes as well as friends to the party, who represented different
+expressions of energetic protest against existing institutions. To
+each of them is allotted his proper place in the line of attack, and
+his due share in the general enterprise of rousing, by argument or
+invective, the slow-thinking English people to a sense of their
+lamentable condition. Cobbett and Owen were at feud with true
+Utilitarians, and in unconscious alliance, against the orthodox
+economists, with the Tories, who, as we have said, have eventually
+found their advantage in the democratic movement. Cobbett fought for
+the cause of the agricultural labourer, trodden under foot by squires
+and parsons. Owen believed that the grasping capitalist, with his
+steam machinery, would further degrade and impoverish the working
+classes. Godwin, who is merely mentioned by Mr. Stephen, was a
+peaceful anarchist, who proposed 'to abolish the whole craft and
+mystery of government,' to abandon coercion and rely upon just
+reasoning, upon the enlightened assent of individuals to the payment
+of taxes. They all embodied ideas that are incessantly fermenting in
+some ardent minds, and that maintain a perceptible influence on
+political controversies at the present day. Godwin agreed with the
+Utilitarians that government is a bad thing in itself, but he went
+beyond them in concluding that it is, or ought to be, unnecessary to
+society. To both Radical and Socialist, Utilitarianism, with its
+frigid philanthropy and its reliance on self-help, prudence, and free
+competition for converting miserable masses into a healthy and moral
+population, was the gospel of selfishness, invented for the salvation
+of landlords and capitalists. Malthus was the heartless exponent of
+natural laws that kept down multiplication by famine, while the rich
+man fared sumptuously every day; and the Ricardians, with their
+mechanical balancing of supply and demand, were mocking distress by
+solemn formulas. It must be admitted that these sharp assailants hit
+some palpable rifts in the Utilitarian armour of proof; and we know
+that popular sentiment has since been compelling later economists to
+take up much wider ground in defence of their scientific position.
+
+The doctrines of Malthus, of Ricardo and of Ricardo's disciples are
+subjected to a searching analysis by Mr. Stephen, who brings out their
+limitations very effectively. Yet it is by no means easy, even under
+our author's skilful guidance, to follow the Utilitarian track
+through the fields of economy, philosophy, and theology, and to show
+in what manner or degree it led up to the issues under discussion in
+our own time. All these 'streams of tendency' have had their influence
+on the main current and direction of contemporary politics, but they
+cannot be measured or mapped out upon the scale of a review. And, in
+regard to political economy, we may even venture to question whether
+the earlier dogmatic theories now retain sufficient interest to
+justify the space which, in this volume, has been devoted to a
+scrutiny of them; for their methods, as well as their conclusions,
+have now become to a certain extent obsolete. A strictly empirical
+science must be continually changing with fresh data and a broader
+outlook; it is always shifting under stress of new interests, changed
+feelings, and unforeseen contingencies; it is very serviceable for the
+exposure of errors, but its own demonstrations are in time proved to
+be erroneous or inadequate. Moreover, to explain the ills that afflict
+a society, and to declare them incurable except by patience and slow
+alterative medicines, is often to render them intolerable; nor is it
+of much practical importance to lay out, on hard scientific
+principles, the methodical operation of causes and effects that have
+always been understood in a rough experimental way.
+
+     'The truth that scarcity meant dearness was apparently well known
+     to Joseph in Egypt, and applied very skilfully for his purpose.
+     Economists have framed a theory of value which explains more
+     precisely the way in which this is brought about. A clear statement
+     may be valuable to psychologists; but for most purposes of
+     political economy Joseph's knowledge is sufficient,'
+
+If Joseph had written a treatise on the agrarian tenures of Egypt he
+might not have bought them up so easily at famine prices, and he
+might have entangled himself in a discussion upon peasant properties.
+The economist who makes an inductive demonstration of unalterable
+natural laws and propensities may be likened to the scientific
+legislator who undertakes to codify prevailing usages: he turns an
+elastic custom, constantly modified in practice by needs and
+sentiments, into an unbending statute, when the bare unvarnished
+statement of the principle produces an outcry. Natural processes will
+not bear calm philosophic explanations that are understood to imply
+approval of them as cruel but inevitable; not even in such an
+essentially moralistic argument as that of Butler's 'Analogy,' which
+some have regarded as a plea of ambiguous advantage to the cause of
+natural religion. Malthus, for example, proved undeniably the
+pernicious consequences of reckless propagation; but he who forces a
+great evil upon public attention is expected to find the practical
+remedy; and Malthus had little to prescribe beyond a few palliative
+measures and the expediency of self-restraint, while his proposal to
+abolish the poor laws in the interest of pauperism was interpreted as
+a recommendation that poor folk should be starved into prudential and
+self-reliant habits. Malthus held, indeed, that the improvement of the
+condition of the labouring classes should be considered as the main
+interest of society. But he also thought that
+
+     'to improve their condition, it is essential to impress them with
+     the conviction that they can do much more for themselves than
+     others can do for them, and that the _only_ source of their
+     permanent improvement is the improvement of their moral and
+     religious habits. What government can do, therefore, is to maintain
+     such institutions as may strengthen the _vis medicatrix_, or desire
+     to better our condition, which poor laws had directly tended to
+     weaken.'
+
+There is much wisdom to be found in these counsels; but good advice
+rather excites than allays the ignorant impatience of acute suffering,
+and popular opinion soon began to inquire whether the _vis medicatrix_
+might not be administered in some more drastic form by the State. The
+conception of a rational government superintending, without
+interference, the slow evolution of morals, had a kind of
+correspondence, in the religious sphere, with the doctrine of
+pre-established harmonies so clearly ordained that to suggest any need
+of further Divine interposition to readjust them occasionally was a
+reflection upon the wisdom and foresight of Providence. But the stress
+and exigencies of modern party politics has rendered this attitude
+untenable for the temporal ruler.
+
+The pure economists, however, prescribed moral remedies without
+investigating the elements of morality. They settled the laws of
+production and distribution as eliminated from the observation of
+ordinary facts; they corrected errors and registered the mechanical
+working of human desires and efforts. It is Mr. Stephen's plan,
+throughout this book, to show the bearing of philosophical speculation
+on practical conduct; and accordingly, after his chapter on Malthus
+and the Ricardians, he turns back again to philosophy and ethics. His
+clear and cogent exposition of the views and conclusions put forward
+on these subjects by Thomas Brown, with the express approval of James
+Mill, is an illustration of Coleridge's dictum regarding the
+connection between abstract theories and political movements.
+Admitting the connection, we may again observe that there is a certain
+danger in stating the theories too scientifically. Neither morals nor
+religion are much aided by digging down into their foundations. Yet
+the logical constructor of a new system usually finds himself driven
+by controversy into a discussion of ultimate ideas, though the
+Utilitarians refused to be forced back into metaphysics. No professor
+of philosophy, however, can altogether avoid asking himself what
+underlies experience and the formation of beliefs; and Brown did his
+best for the Utilitarians by defining Intuition as a belief that
+passes analysis, a principle independent of human reasoning, which
+'does not allow us to pass a single step beyond experience, but merely
+authorises us to interpret experience.' It was James Mill's mission to
+cut short and to simplify philosophical aberrations for his practical
+purposes:
+
+     'As a publicist, a historian, and a busy official, he had not much
+     time to spare for purely philosophic reading. He was not a
+     professor in want of a system, but an energetic man of business,
+     wishing to strike at the root of superstitions to which his
+     political opponents appealed for support. He had heard of Kant, and
+     seen "what the poor man would be at".'
+
+His own views are elaborated in his book on the _Analysis of the
+Phenomena of the Human Mind_, for a close criticism of which we must
+refer readers to Mr. Stephen's second volume. The connection of these
+dissertations with the social and political ends of the Utilitarians
+lies, it may be said briefly, in the support which a purely
+experiential psychology gives to the doctrine that human character
+depends on external circumstance, and that such vague terms as the
+'moral sense' only disguise the true identity of rules of morality
+with the considerations that can be shown to produce general
+happiness. Whenever there appears to be a conflict between these rules
+and considerations, utility is the only sure criterion. To the extreme
+situations in which casuistry revels, as when a man is called upon to
+sacrifice his life or his personal honour for his country's good, the
+Utilitarian would apply this unfailing test inexorably; in such cases
+a man ought to decide upon a calculation of the greatest happiness of
+the majority. He does not, in fact, apply this reckoning; he may
+possibly not have time, at the urgent moment, to work it out; his
+heroism is inspired by the universal praise or blame that reward
+self-devotion or punish shrinking from it, and thus render acts moral
+or immoral by the habitual association of ideas. The martyr or patriot
+does not, indeed, stop to calculate; he does not feel the subtle
+egoism that is hidden in the desire for applause; he believes himself
+to be acting with the perfect disinterestedness which can only be
+accounted for by superficial reasoners on the assumption of some such
+abstract notion as religion, moral sense, or duty. Since the behaviour
+of mankind at large, therefore, is invariably guided by a remote or
+proximate consideration of utility; since conduct depends upon
+character, and character is shaped by external conditions and positive
+sanctions, it is possible to frame, on utilitarian principles,
+scientific rules of behaviour which can be powerfully, though
+indirectly, promoted by legislation and a system of enlightened
+polity. For morality, it is argued, can be materially assisted by
+pointing to, or even providing, the serious consequences that are
+inseparable from human misdeeds, by proving that pain or pleasure
+follows different kinds of behaviour; while motives are so complex
+that they can never be verified with certainty, and must therefore be
+left out of account. This anatomy of the springs of action obviously
+lays bare some truths, although they fit in much better with the
+department of the legislator than of the moralist. As Mr. Stephen
+forcibly shows, although the consideration of motive may fall very
+seldom within the sphere of legislation, yet no theory which should
+exclude its influence on the moral standard could be tolerated, since
+the motive is of primary importance in our ethical judgment of
+conduct. Nor has motive, as discriminated from intention, ever been
+kept entirely outside the criminal law, notwithstanding the danger of
+admitting, as an extenuation of some violent crime, that the offender
+had convinced himself that some religious or patriotic cause would be
+served by it. James Mill's view of morals as theoretically coordinate
+with law--because in both departments the intention is the essential
+element in measuring actions according to their consequences--operated
+in practical contradiction to his principle of restraining State
+interference within narrow limits. It is this latter principle which
+has since given way. For the general trend of later political opinion
+has evidently been towards bringing public morality more and more
+under administrative regulation; and this manifestly indicates a
+growing expansion of ideas upon the legitimate duties and jurisdiction
+of the State.
+
+Upon James Mill's psychology Mr. Stephen's conclusion, with which we
+may agree, is that his analysis of virtue into enlightened
+self-interest is unsuccessful, and we have seen that his conception of
+government, as an all-powerful machine resting upon, yet strictly
+limited by, public opinion, has failed on the side of the limitations.
+Yet although Mill could not explain virtue, he was, after his fashion,
+a virtuous man, whose life was conscientiously devoted to public
+objects.
+
+     'His main purpose, too, was to lay down a rule of duty, almost
+     mathematically ascertainable, and not to be disturbed by any
+     sentimentalism, mysticism, or rhetorical foppery. If, in the
+     attempt to free his hearers from such elements, he ran the risk of
+     reducing morality to a lower level, and made it appear as unamiable
+     as sound morality can appear, it must be admitted that in this
+     respect, too, his theories reflected his personal character.'
+
+It is also probable that his theories, and his bitter controversies in
+defence of them, reacted on his personal character, and that both
+influences are to be traced beyond James Mill's own life, in the
+mental and social prepossessions which he bequeathed to his son.
+
+Mr. Stephen's third volume is chiefly occupied by the history of the
+later Utilitarians, and the expansion of their cardinal principle in
+its application to a changing temper of the times, under the
+leadership of John Stuart Mill. We have, first, a closely written and
+critical description of this remarkable man's early life, his
+stringent educational training, the development of his opinions, and
+their influence upon the orthodox tenets of the sect. Upon all these
+subjects Mill has left us, under his own hand, more intimate and
+circumstantial particulars than are to be found, perhaps, in any other
+personal memoir. The writer who tells his own story usually passes
+hastily over boyhood; the ordinary biographer gives some family
+details, or endeavours to amuse us with trivial anecdotes of the child
+who became an important man. J. S. Mill hardly alludes to any member
+of his family except his father, and his early days are marked by a
+total absence of triviality. He was bound over to hard intellectual
+labour at home during the years that for most of us pass so lightly
+and unprofitably at a public school; he was a voracious and
+indefatigable reader and writer from his youth up, with a wolfish
+hunger (as Browning calls it) for knowledge; he plunged into all the
+current discussions of philosophy and politics; he became a practised
+writer and made a good figure at debating clubs; he became so intent
+on the solution of complex social problems as to acquire a distaste
+for general society; his mental concentration blunted his sensibility
+to the physical passions that so powerfully sway mankind.
+
+Nevertheless, Mill's outlook upon the world was much wider than his
+father's, and his aim was so to adjust the Utilitarian creed as to
+bring it into closer working accord with the advancing ideas and
+projects of the political parties to whom he was nearest in sympathy.
+He allied himself in the beginning with the Philosophical Radicals, in
+the hope of organising them for active service in the cause. But this
+group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to
+their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is
+synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.'
+There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that
+the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active
+Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far
+behind the fighting line, although he may be useful in forging
+explosives in some quiet laboratory. Mill himself was continually
+hampered, as an ardent combatant, by the impedimenta which he brought
+into the field in the shape of abstract speculations, which could not
+be made to fit in with the immediate demands of thorough-going
+partisans. His democratic fervour was tempered by his conviction of
+the incapacity of the masses. He was a Socialist 'in the sense that he
+looked forward to a complete, though distant, revolution in the whole
+structure of society'; he discovered that the Chartists had crude
+views upon political economy; his attitude toward factory legislation
+was very dubious. Yet in the main purpose of his life and writings,
+which was to mend and guide public opinion on social and political
+questions by theoretical treatment--that is, by a logically connected
+survey of the facts--he was undoubtedly successful, as is shown by
+the popularity of his two great works on _Logic_ and _Political
+Economy_, which became the text-books of higher study on these
+subjects for a whole generation. On the other hand, he exposed himself
+to the distrust and hostility that are always aroused by philosophical
+arguments which strike at the roots of established beliefs and
+prejudices, and are discovered to be really more dangerous to them
+than a direct assault.
+
+It was the philosophic strategy of J. S. Mill to prosecute the
+Utilitarian war against metaphysics, and finally to exterminate
+Intuitions, being convinced, as he said, that the _a priori_ and
+spiritualistic thinkers still far exceeded the partisans of
+experience, and that a great majority of Englishmen were still
+Intuitionists. Is this actually a true account of English thought? Mr.
+Stephen thinks not, for he believes that if Mill had not lived much
+apart from ordinary folk he would have found Englishmen practically,
+though not avowedly, predisposed to empiricism, which has been the
+philosophic tradition in this country since Hobbes. We so far agree
+with Mr. Stephen that we believe Englishmen, in general, to practise a
+great deal more of empiricism than they avow. But Mill proposed to
+demonstrate and declare it as a weapon in polemics and an engine of
+action, and it was here, probably, that the main body of Englishmen
+deserted him. They were not ready to cut themselves off from theology
+and from all ideas that transcend experience, and they demurred to the
+paramount jurisdiction of logic in temporal affairs. To every section
+of Churchmen the relegation of moral sanctions within the domain of
+verifiable consequences was a doctrine to be resisted strenuously.
+With the high sacerdotalist it amounted to a denial of the Christian
+mysteries; to the Broad Churchman it was ethically inadequate and
+ignoble; to the scholastic professor of divinity it meant ruinous
+materialism.
+
+That a vigorous thinker should have begun by striking at what seemed
+to him the root of obstructive fallacies was natural enough. He
+supposed that a logical demonstration would clear the ground for his
+plans of reform; whereas, on the contrary, it entangled him in
+preliminary disputations, and his inflexible reasoning alarmed people
+who followed experience as the guide of life, but instinctively felt
+that there must be something beyond phenomenal existence. In political
+economy Mill relied upon common sense and practice in affairs to make
+the requisite allowance for general laws founded on human propensities
+regarded abstractedly. His conviction was, in short, that nothing
+should be taken for granted because everything might be explained; and
+he desired to tie men down to accepting no belief, or even feeling,
+that could not be justified by reason. His _System of Logic_ was, as
+he has himself written, a text-book for the doctrine 'which derives
+all knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual
+qualities principally from the direction given to the associations.'
+When he proceeded to construct a systematic psychology upon this
+basis, he fell into the fundamental perplexities that are concisely
+brought out by Mr. Stephen in his scrutiny of Mill's doctrine of
+Causation. He followed Hume in severing any necessary connection
+between cause and effect, and even invariable sequence became
+incapable of proof. But when he resolved Cause into a statement of
+existing conditions that can never be completely known until we have
+mastered the whole series of physical phenomena, and showed that all
+human induction is fallible because necessarily imperfect, it became
+clear that Mill had very little to offer in substitution for those
+grounds of ordinary belief that he was bent on demolishing. The word
+Cause is reduced, for ordinary use, to a signification not unlike that
+which is understood in loose popular language by the word Chance,
+since Chance means no more than ignorance of how an event came to
+pass; and in no case, according to Mill, can we ever calculate with
+security what undiscoverable conditions may suddenly bring about an
+unexpected event contrary to previous experience. The uniformity of
+Nature, as Mr. Stephen remarks, is thus made exceedingly precarious;
+and to the practical intelligence, which looks for some basis that
+cannot be argued about, there is still something to be said for
+Intuition. And when Mill, still in search of some precise formula,
+undertook to interpret persistent sequences by his theory of Real
+Kinds possessing an indeterminate number of coherent properties--so
+that our belief in the invariable blackness of crows is justified as a
+collocation of these visible properties--he merely throws the problem
+of Causation farther backward. We have to be content with direct
+observation of phenomena that can be classified as co-existent; we can
+perceive that things accompany each other, but we can never be sure
+that they follow each other, as they appear to do.
+
+It may be doubted whether Mill's treatment of these problems has
+materially affected subsequent psychological speculation, which has
+since taken different and deeper courses. His main objective was
+social and political.
+
+'The notion,' he has written, 'that truths external to the mind may be
+known by intuition, or consciousness, independently of observation and
+experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times the great intellectual
+support of false doctrines and bad institutions.' In confounding the
+metaphysicians, and eliminating all mysterious assumptions or axioms,
+he aimed at clearing the ground for a demonstrable science of
+character, and to establish the great principle that character can be
+indefinitely modified. The way is thus opened to questions of conduct,
+to positive remedies for social and political evils which, as they
+have been generated and fostered by external circumstances, can be
+removed by a change of those circumstances.
+
+     'The greatest problems of the time were either economical or
+     closely connected with economical principles. Mill had followed the
+     political struggles with the keenest interest; he saw clearly their
+     connection with underlying social movements; and he had thoroughly
+     studied the science--or what he took to be the science--which must
+     afford guidance for a satisfactory working out of the great
+     problems. The Philosophical Radicals were deserting the old cause,
+     and becoming insignificant as a party. But Mill had not lost his
+     faith in the substantial soundness of their economic doctrines. He
+     thought, therefore, that a clear and full exposition of their views
+     might be of the highest use in the coming struggle.... The
+     _Political Economy_ speedily acquired an authority unapproached by
+     any work published since the _Wealth of Nations_.'
+
+We cannot follow Mr. Stephen through his elaborate and effective
+review of this celebrated book. Its appearance marked an epoch in the
+history of Utilitarianism, for it took a much wider survey of social
+and political considerations, and the author undertook to expand the
+orthodox economic theories so that they might embrace and be
+reconciled with some daring projects of comprehensive reform. But Mill
+had to put some strain on the principles to which he adhered, and to
+accommodate certain inconsistencies in order to keep pace with moving
+ideas. He held on with some effort to the cardinal tenets of the older
+Utilitarians, to a dislike of interference by governments, to
+reliance on individual effort, to protest against the deadening
+influence of paternal administration, to his own trust in the gradual
+effect of educational agencies, and in the slow emancipation of the
+popular mind from unreasoning prejudices. On the other hand, he
+advocated a radical reform of the land laws, peasant proprietorship,
+the acquisition by the State of railways and canals, the limitation of
+the right of bequest; and he went even so far as to speak with
+approval of laws in restraint of improvident marriages. All these
+proposals could only be carried out by arbitrary and drastic
+legislation. As he put it, the State must interfere for the purpose of
+making the people independent of further interference; and he
+overlooked or set aside the question whether the eventual result of
+thus calling in the State's agency would not be contrary to the
+principles and professed intentions of the Utilitarian school, whether
+the provisional _regime_ would not become permanent, as, in fact, it
+has been rapidly becoming ever since.
+
+We can see, moreover, that while J. S. Mill's sympathy with the
+popular cause and with the most ardent reformers was sincere, he was
+at issue with them in regard to the means, though not in regard to the
+ends; he wished to better the intelligence of the people as the first
+step toward bettering their condition. But when he had convinced
+himself, as he said, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind
+are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental
+constitution of their modes of thought, he had still to persuade men
+who were stirring and pressing for immediate action that gradual
+methods were the best. Most of them may have preferred to try whether,
+if the lot of mankind were improved materially, the moral changes and
+mental habits would not follow; for indeed Mill's proposition might
+stand examination and hold good either way. It may be argued that an
+elevation or widening of intellectual views is the consequence, as
+often as it is the cause, of increasing comfort and leisure. He
+thought that all reading and writing which does not tend to promote a
+renovation of the world's belief is of very little value beyond the
+moment, which is, of course, true in a general sense; though
+literature can act much more directly than by dealing with first
+principles. He welcomes Free Trade as one triumph of Utilitarian
+doctrines, yet he sadly observes that the English public are quite as
+raw and undiscerning on subjects of political economy since the nation
+was converted to Free Trade as before. The nation, in fact, went
+straight at the immediate point, got what it wanted at the moment, and
+was satisfied.
+
+Mr. Stephen's criticism of Mill's later writings exhibits further his
+difficulties in adjusting the essential Utilitarian principles to
+closer contact with the urgent questions of the day. Mill still held
+to competition, to the full liberty of individuals, to the inevitable
+mechanical working of economic laws; he still doubted the expediency
+of factory legislation, and condemned any laws in restraint of usury.
+He was opposed, broadly, to all authoritative intrusion upon human
+existence wherever its necessity could not be proved conclusively to
+be in the interest of a self-reliant community. Yet he was forced to
+make concessions and exceptions in the face of actual needs and
+grievances; and especially he found himself more and more impelled to
+tolerate and even advocate interference by the State as the only
+effective instrument for demolishing obstacles to the moral and
+material betterment of the people. Since unjust social inequalities
+could be traced to an origin in force or fraud, the legislature might
+be logically called in to remove them; and as this is manifestly the
+revolutionary argument (as embodied, for example, in the writings of
+Thomas Paine), it enabled him to join hands with Radicalism in
+proposing some very thorough-going measures. 'Landed property in
+Europe derives its origin from force;' so the legislature is entitled
+to interpose for the reclamation of rights unjustly usurped from the
+community; while, as economical science shows that the value of land
+rises from natural causes, the conclusion is that the State may
+confiscate the unearned increment. But it was not so easy to convince
+the hungry mechanic, by rather fine-drawn distinctions, that the
+capitalist had a better right to monopolise profits than the landlord;
+for the rise of value in manufactured commodities has very complex
+causes, some of them superficially natural. So here, again, is a
+plausible case of social injustice. Again, it may be affirmed that all
+powerful associations, private as well as public, operate in
+restriction of individual liberty. You may argue that great industrial
+companies are voluntary; the question is whether they are innocuous to
+the common weal, and we may add that this point is coming seriously to
+the front at the present time. The distinction, as Mr. Stephen
+remarks, drawn by the old individualism between State institutions and
+those created by private combination is losing its significance; and,
+what is more, public bodies are now continually encouraged to absorb
+private enterprise in all matters that directly concern the people.
+
+In short, we are on the high road to State Socialism, though Mill
+helps us to console ourselves with having taken that road on strictly
+scientific principles. It is the not unusual result of stating large
+benevolent theories for popular application; the principle is accepted
+and its limitations are disregarded. Nevertheless Mill contends
+gallantly in his later works for intellectual liberty, complete
+freedom of discussion, and the utility of tolerating the most
+eccentric opinions. Into what practical difficulties and questionable
+logical distinctions he was drawn by the necessity of fencing round
+his propositions and making his reservations is well known; and Mr.
+Stephen hits the weak points with keen critical acumen. We all agree
+that persecution has done frightful mischief, at times, by suppressing
+the free utterance of unorthodox opinions. But Mill argues that
+contradiction, even of truth, is desirable in itself, because a
+doctrine, true or false, becomes a dead belief without the
+invigorating conflict of opposite reasonings. Resistance to authority
+in matters of opinion is a sacred privilege essential to the formation
+of belief; wherefore originality, even when it implies stupidity, is
+to be carefully protected as a factor of human progress. We need not
+follow Mr. Stephen in his victorious analysis of the arguments
+wherewith Mill seeks to uphold this uncompromising individualism, and
+to guard human perversity against the baneful influence of authority.
+It is clear enough that society cannot waste its time in perpetual
+wrangling over issues upon which an authoritative verdict has been
+delivered; and for most of us a reasonable probability, founded on the
+judgment of experts, is sufficient in moral or physical questions as
+well as in litigation. The religious arena still remains open, where
+experts differ and decisions are always disputable. Yet Mr. Arthur
+Balfour devotes a chapter in his _Foundations of Belief_ to the
+contention that our convictions on all the deeper subjects of thought
+are determined not by reason but by authority; whereby he provides us
+with an escape from the scepticism that menaces a philosopher who has
+proved all experience to be at bottom illusory. Mill, on the other
+hand, would make short work with authority wherever it checks or
+discourages the unlimited exercise of free individual inquiry; and in
+politics he would entrust the sovereign power to a representation of
+the entire aggregate of the community, with the most ample
+encouragement of incessant discussion. This is, indeed, the system
+actually in force, and in England it has answered very well; but Mill
+hardly foresaw that its tendency would be to make the State, as the
+embodiment of popular will, not less but more authoritative, with a
+tendency to encroach steadily upon the sphere of individual effort and
+private enterprise.
+
+It may be said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its
+high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which
+Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular
+enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to
+regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as
+innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women
+he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at
+any rate be recognised by law; the proper test was, he argued, to
+leave free competition to determine whether the distinction is radical
+or merely the result of external circumstance. But, as Mr. Stephen
+answers, such a plain physiological difference is at least not
+negligible; and competition between the sexes may favour the despotism
+of the stronger, while complete independence on both sides implies
+freedom to separate at will; and Mill had only glanced evasively at
+the question of divorce. Here, again, is a theory which the pressure
+of social conditions, much more than abstract reasoning, is bringing
+more and more into prominence with our own generation. On the wider
+and more complicated question of race distinctions Mill never worked
+out his argument against their indelibility into a regular treatise;
+nor could he foresee the increasing influence upon contemporary
+politics that is now exercised by racial feelings and their claims to
+recognition. In the eighteenth century the French Encyclopedistes, who
+were the direct philosophic ancestors of the Utilitarians, regarded
+frontiers, classes, and races as so many barriers against the spread
+of universal fraternity; and the revolutionary government took up the
+idea as a war-cry. The armies of the French Republic proclaimed the
+rights of the people in all countries, until Napoleon turned the
+democratic doctrine into the form of Imperialism. M. Eugene de Voguee
+has told us recently that this armed propaganda produced a reaction in
+Europe toward that strong sentiment of nationality which has been
+vigorously manifested during the second half of the nineteenth
+century. The assertion of separate nationalities, by the demand for
+political autonomy and by the attempt to revive the public teaching of
+obscure languages, is the form taken in western and central Europe by
+the problem of race. No movement could be more contrary to the views
+or anticipations of the Utilitarians, for whom it would have been
+merely a recrudescence of one of those inveterate and unreasoning
+prejudices which still retard human progress, a fiction accepted by
+indolent thinkers to avoid the trouble of investigating the true
+causes that modify human character. Yet not only is national
+particularism making a fresh stir in Europe, but the spread of
+European dominion over Asia has forced upon our attention the immense
+practical importance of racial distinctions. We find that they signify
+real and profound characteristics; the European discovers that in Asia
+he is himself one of a ruling race, and thereby isolated among the
+other groups into which the population is subdivided. If he is a
+sound Utilitarian he will nevertheless cherish the belief that
+economical improvements, public instruction, good laws, and regular
+administration will obliterate antipathies, eradicate irrational
+prejudices, and reconcile Asiatic folk to the blessings of scientific
+civilisation. But he will confess that it is a stubborn element, if
+not innate yet very like such a quality; if not ineffaceable yet
+certain to outlast his dominion. It is at least remarkable that Mill's
+protest against explaining differences of character by race, to which
+Buckle 'cordially subscribed,' should have been answered in our time
+by a clamorous demand for the recognition of those very differences,
+and by an increasing tendency to admit them.
+
+Upon Mill's theological speculations Mr. Stephen has written an
+interesting chapter, illustrating Mill's desire to treat religion more
+sympathetically, with a deeper sense of its importance in life, than
+in the absolute theories of the older Utilitarians. Bentham had
+declared that the principle of theology, of referring everything to
+God's will, was no more than a covert application of the test of
+utility. You must first know whether a thing is right in order to
+discover whether it is conformable to God's pleasure; and a religious
+motive, he said, is good or bad according as the religious tenets of
+the person acting upon it approach more or less to a coincidence with
+the dictates of utility. The next step, as Bentham probably knew well,
+is to throw aside an abstraction that has become virtually
+superfluous, and to march openly under the Utilitarian standard. But
+there was in Mill a moral and emotional instinct that deterred him
+from resting without uneasiness upon such a bare empirical conclusion.
+He rejected all transcendental conceptions; yet he did his best, as
+Mr. Stephen shows, to find reasonable proofs of a Deity whose
+existence and attributes may be inferred by observation and
+experience. He agreed that such an inference is not inconsistent, _a
+priori_, with natural laws, and the argument from design was admitted
+as providing by analogy, or even inductively, a large balance of
+probability in favour of creation by Intelligence. The difficulty is
+to attain by these methods the idea of a Deity perfect in power,
+wisdom, and goodness; for the order of Nature, apart from human
+intervention and contrivances for making the earth habitable,
+discloses no tincture of morality. We are thus reduced to the dilemma
+propounded by Hume, between an omnipotent Deity who cannot be
+benevolent because misery is permitted, and a benevolent Deity with
+limited powers; and Mill sums up the discussion, doubtfully, in favour
+of a Being with great but limited powers, whose motives cannot be
+satisfactorily fathomed by the human intellect.
+
+This halting conclusion indicates a departure from the pure empiricism
+of his school, and even the inadequacy of the argument shows the
+effort that Mill was making towards some fellow-feeling with spiritual
+conceptions. As Mr. Stephen points out, there is a curious
+approximation, on some points, between Mill and his arch-enemy
+Mansel--between the conditioned and unconditioned philosophies. Both
+of them lay stress on the moral perplexities involved in arguing from
+the wasteful and relentless course of Nature to an estimate of the
+divine attributes. And both agree that the existence of evil is a
+serious difficulty; though Mansel's solution, or evasion, of it is by
+insisting that the ways of the unconditioned are necessarily for the
+most part unknowable, while Mill leans to the possibility that God's
+power or intelligence may be incomplete. Upon either hypothesis we
+must confess that our knowledge is imperfect and very fallible.
+Mr. Stephen has no trouble in exposing the philosophical weakness
+of Mill's attitude; but we are mainly concerned to compare it
+briefly with the position of his predecessors, for the purpose of
+continuing a rapid survey of the course and filiation of Utilitarian
+doctrines. When the orthodox Utilitarians definitely rejected all
+theology--though until Philip Beauchamp appeared, in 1822, they made
+no direct attack upon it--they believed that the fall of theology
+would also bring down religion, which they regarded as the source of
+motives that were fictitious, misleading, and profoundly unscientific.
+Mill agreed that a supernatural origin could not be ascribed to
+received maxims of morality without harming them, because to
+consecrate rules of conduct was to interdict free examination of them,
+and to paralyse their natural development in accordance with changes
+of circumstance. Looking back over the interminable controversies, and
+the successive variations in form and spirit that every great religion
+has undergone, this objection does not seem to us very formidable. But
+Mill's evident object was to reconcile the cultivation of religious
+feelings with his principle of free thought for individuals. In
+accepting Comte's ideal of a religion of humanity, he had entirely
+condemned Comte's reproduction of the spiritual authority in the shape
+of a philosophical priesthood. And it is remarkable, as indicating a
+radical discordance between the French and the English moralist, that
+while Comte's adoration, in his later years, of a woman led him to
+ordain a formal worship of the feminine representative of the Family,
+coupled with the strict seclusion of women from politics, Mill's
+lifelong attachment greatly strengthened his ardour for the complete
+emancipation of the whole sex.
+
+Our readers will bear in mind that we are endeavouring to measure the
+permanent influence of Utilitarian doctrines, to determine how far
+they have fixed the direction, and shaped the ends, of contemporary
+thought and political action. It cannot be said that these doctrines
+are now predominant in either of these two closely interacting
+departments. National instincts and prepossessions have lost none of
+their force; national character now divides neighbouring peoples more
+sharply, perhaps, than a hundred years ago. Militarism is stronger
+than ever; cosmopolitan philanthropy is overridden by the growth of
+national interests; political economy is overruled by political
+necessities; nor have ethical systems displaced the traditional
+religions. Empiricism has fallen into discredit as a narrow and
+inadequate philosophy; it is superseded in the spiritual world by
+transcendental interpretations of dogmas as metaphysical
+representations of underlying realities. Mr. Stephen's most
+instructive work draws to its close with a dissertation on Liberalism
+and Dogmatism, showing how and why Utilitarianism failed in convincing
+or converting Englishmen to a practical assent to its principles and
+modes of thought. Upon many minds they produced more repulsion than
+attraction. Maurice earnestly protested that we were to believe in
+God, not in a theory about God, though the distinction, as Mr. Stephen
+says, is vague; he appealed to the inner light, to the conscience of
+mankind; he went back into the slough of Intuitionism. Carlyle cried
+aloud against materialistic views and logical machinery; he denounced
+'the great steam-engine, Utilitarianism'; he was for the able despot
+and hero-worship against grinding competition and government by
+discussion. In theology the mystical spirit rose again with its
+immemorial power of enchanting human imagination; the moral law is
+discerned to be the vesture of Divinity, in which He arrays Himself
+to become apprehensible by the finite intellect; and a Science that
+tries to understand everything explains nothing. Authority, instead of
+being discarded, is invoked to deliver men out of the great waters of
+spiritual and political anarchy. The Tractarians struck in with a
+fierce attack on Rationalism, propounding Faith and Revelation as
+imperative grounds of belief. You must accept the dogmas, not as
+useful, not as moral or reasonable, not even as derived intuitively,
+but as the necessary fundamental truths declared by the infallible
+Church to be essential to salvation. Those who could not find
+infallibility in a State Church went over to Rome, abandoning the Via
+Media; others were content with the high sacramental position of
+Anglicanism; the moderate Rationalists took shelter with the Broad
+Church; a few retreated into the cloudy refuge of transcendental
+idealism. The two extreme parties, the Broad Church and the
+Sacerdotalists, were at bitter feud with each other; yet they both
+denounced the common enemy. Arnold 'agreed with Carlyle that the
+Liberals greatly overrate Bentham, and the political economists
+generally; the _summum bonum_ of their science is not identical with
+human life ... and the economical good is often, from the neglect of
+other points, a social evil.' Newman held that to allow the right of
+private judgment was to enter upon the path of scepticism; and the
+latest infidel device, he says, is to leave theology alone. He set up
+the argument, well-worn but always impressive, that science gives no
+certainty; and Mr. Stephen contends against it with the weapons of
+empiricism:--
+
+     'The scientific doctrines must lay down the base to which all other
+     truth, so far as it is discoverable, must conform. The essential
+     feature of contemporary thought was just this: that science was
+     passing from purely physical questions to historical, ethical, and
+     social problems. The dogmatist objects to private judgment or free
+     thought on the ground that, as it gives no criterion, it cannot
+     lead to certainty. His real danger was precisely that it leads
+     irresistibly to certainty. The scientific method shows how such
+     certainty as is possible must be obtained. The man of science
+     advocates free inquiry precisely because it is the way to truth,
+     and the only way, though a way which leads through many errors.'
+
+Mr. Stephen is himself a large-minded Utilitarian. He will have
+nothing to do with a transcendental basis of morals; and the dogmatist
+who dislikes cross-examination is out of his court. Dogmatic
+authority, he says, stands only on its own assertions; and if you may
+not reason upon them, the inference is that on those points reason is
+against them. You may withdraw beyond this range by sublimating
+religion into a philosophy, but then it loses touch with terrestrial
+affairs, and has a very feeble control over the unruly affections of
+sinful men. Newman himself resorted to scientific methods in his
+theory of Development, that is, of the growth and evolution of
+doctrine. We may agree that these destructive arguments have much
+logical force, yet on the other hand such certitude as empiricism can
+provide brings little consolation to the multitude, who require some
+imperative command; they look for a pillar of cloud or fire to go
+before them day and night, and a land of promise in the distance.
+Scientific exposition works slowly for the improvement of ethics,
+which to the average mind are rather weakened than strengthened by
+loosening their foundations; and religious beliefs suffer from a
+similar constitutional delicacy. Conduct is not much fortified by
+being treated as a function of character and circumstance; for in
+religion and morals ordinary humanity demands something impervious to
+reasoning, wherein lies the advantage of the intuitionist.
+
+Mr. Stephen, however, is well aware that empirical certitude will not
+supply the place of religion. In his concluding pages he states,
+fairly and forcibly, the great problems by which men are still
+perplexed. Religion, as J. S. Mill felt, is a name for something far
+wider than the Utilitarian views embrace.
+
+     'Men will always require some religion, if religion corresponds not
+     simply to their knowledge, but to the whole impression made upon
+     feeling and thinking beings by the world in which they must live.
+     The condition remains that the conception must conform to the
+     facts; our imagination and our desires must not be allowed to
+     over-ride our experience, or our philosophy to construct the
+     universe out of _a priori_ guesses.... To find a religion which
+     shall be compatible with all known truth, which shall satisfy the
+     imagination and the emotions, and which shall discharge the
+     functions hitherto assigned to the churches, is a problem for the
+     future.'
+
+The Utilitarian doctrines, in short, though propagated by leaders of
+high intellectual power, and inspired by a pure unselfish morality,
+achieved little success in the enterprise of providing new and firmer
+guidance and support to mankind in their troubles and perplexities.
+But they were not content to look down from serene heights upon the
+world, leaving the crowd
+
+    'Errare atque viam palantes quaerere vitae.'
+
+They laboured devotedly to dispel ignorance and to advance knowledge;
+they spared no pains to promote the material well-being of society.
+They helped to raise the wind that filled the sails of practical
+reform; they headed the attack upon legal and administrative abuses;
+they stirred up the national conscience against social injustice; they
+proclaimed a lofty standard of moral obligation. They laid down
+principles that in the long run accord with human progress, yet in
+their hopes of rapidly modifying society by the application of those
+principles they were disappointed; for their systematic theories were
+blocked by facts, feelings, and misunderstandings which had not been
+taken into calculation. They were averse to coercion, as an evil in
+itself; but though they would have agreed with Mr. Bright's dictum
+that 'Force is no remedy,' they were latterly brought to perceive that
+in another sense there is no remedy except force, and that the vested
+interests and preconceptions of society make a stiff and prolonged
+opposition to enlightened persuasion. They were disposed to rely too
+confidently upon the spread of intelligence by general education for
+preparing the minds of people to accept and act upon doctrines that
+were logically demonstrable, and to reject what could not be proved.
+Mr. Stephen has somewhere written that to support a religion by force
+instead of by argument is to admit that argument condemns it. The
+proposition is too absolutely stated even for the domain of spiritual
+authority, since it might be replied that no great religion, certainly
+no organised Church, has existed by argument alone, and it has usually
+been supported by laws. But at any rate the temporal power subsists
+and operates by coercion, and the sphere of the State's direct action,
+instead of diminishing, as the earlier Utilitarians expected it to do,
+with the spread of education and intelligence, is perceptibly
+extending itself. The Utilitarians demurred to religion as an ultimate
+authority in morals, and substituted the plain unvarnished criterion
+of utility. Upon this ground the State steps in, replaces religious
+precept by positive law, and public morality is enforced by Acts of
+Parliament. They were for entrusting the people with full political
+power, to be exercised in vigilant restraint of the interference by
+Government with individual rights and conduct; the people have
+obtained the power, and are using it more and more to place their
+affairs and even their moral interests under the control of organised
+authority. We do not here question the expediency of the movement; we
+are simply registering the tendency.
+
+There are few literary enterprises more arduous than the task of
+following and demarcating from the written record of a period the
+general course of political and philosophic movements. The tendencies
+are so various, the conditions which determine them are so
+complicated, that it is difficult to keep hold of the clue which
+guides and connects them. Mr. Leslie Stephen's _History of English
+Thought in the Eighteenth Century_ took the broad ground that is
+denoted by its title; but, as he now tells us in his preface, he has
+found it expedient to reduce his present work within less
+comprehensive limits, by confining it to 'an account of the compact
+and energetic school of the English Utilitarians.' This reduction of
+its scope has not, however, damaged the continuity of the narrative,
+since in the great departments of morals, religion, and political
+philosophy the Utilitarians were mainly the lineal heirs of the
+characteristic English writers in the preceding century. It is true
+that Mr. Stephen has not been able to bring within the compass of his
+three volumes the subject of general literature, especially of poetry
+and novels, which in the nineteenth century have given their vivid
+expression to the doubts and the hopes, to the aims and aspirations of
+the time. But we can see that such an enlargement of his plan would
+have rendered it unmanageable, and that Mr. Stephen may have wisely
+considered the example of Buckle's _History of Civilisation in
+England_, which was projected on too large a scale, exhausted the
+author's strength, and remains unfinished. Mr. Stephen's present work
+fulfils its promise and completes its design. The Utilitarians are
+very fortunate in having found a historian whose vivacity of style,
+consummate literary knowledge, and masculine power of thought will
+have revived their declining reputations, and secured to them their
+proper place in the literature of the nineteenth century.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[28] _The English Utilitarians._ By Leslie Stephen. 3 vols. London,
+Duckworth and Co., 1900.--_Edinburgh Review_, April 1901.
+
+[29] _The Greek Theory of the State_, by Charles John Shebbeare, B.A.,
+1895.
+
+[30] Sir Robert Peel's speech on Reform, March 1831.
+
+
+
+
+CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY[31]
+
+
+There is probably some foundation for the belief, often held in these
+days, that the production of high poetry is becoming more difficult,
+partly because the environment of modern civilisation lends itself
+less and less to artistic treatment, as mechanism supersedes human
+effort, and partly through the operation of other causes. It has been
+plausibly argued that most things worth saying have been said already;
+that even the words best fitted for poetic expression have been worn
+out, have been weakened by familiar usage or soiled by misuse, and
+that the resources of language for adequate presentation of ideas and
+feelings are running very low. Nevertheless, we all look forward
+hopefully to the coming of the original genius who is to strike a
+fresh note and inaugurate a new era, as pious Mohammedans expect
+another Imam. Yet his coming may not be in our time, and meanwhile the
+poetic lamp is burning dimly; it is just kept alight by the assiduous
+trimming of the disciples of the great men who have passed or are
+passing away, by the minor poets who strike a few musical chords that
+catch the ear, but who are not recalled by the audience when they have
+played their part and left the stage. The stars that shone in the
+bright constellation of Victorian poets have been setting one by one,
+until two only remain of those who were the pride of the generation
+to which they belong, for whom we may predict that they will hold a
+permanent place in English literature. It is now nearly sixty years
+since Mr. Meredith's first poems were published. Mr. Swinburne is
+about ten years his junior, both in age and in authorship; one may
+perhaps assume that the work upon which their reputations will rest is
+finished for both of them. Mr. Meredith's poetry has very recently
+been the subject of a very complete and sympathetic study by Mr.
+George Trevelyan. In this article we shall make an attempt to
+delineate, briefly of necessity and therefore inadequately, the
+characteristic qualities of form and thought, the technical methods
+and intellectual temperament which distinguish the younger poet, who
+may be destined to be the last survivor of an illustrious company.
+
+If we accept the theory that art, like nature, follows the principle
+of continuous development, that its existing state is closely linked
+with its past, it is not easy to affiliate Mr. Swinburne to any direct
+literary predecessors. Undoubtedly we may assign to him poetical
+kinship with Shelley; he has the same love for classical myths and
+allegories, for the embodiment of nature in the beautiful figures of
+the antique. Light and shade, a quiet landscape, a tumultuous storm,
+stir him with the same sensuous emotion. He has Shelley's passion for
+the sea; he is fond of invoking the old divinities who presided over
+the fears, hopes, and desires of mankind. He has also Shelley's
+rebellious temper, the unflinching revolt against dogmatic authority
+and fundamental beliefs which rightly shocked our grandfathers in
+'Queen Mab' and a few other poems; he is even less disposed than
+Shelley to the hypocrisy which does unwilling homage to virtue. On the
+other hand, Mr. Swinburne's pantheism has not Shelley's metaphysical
+note; the conception of an indwelling spirit guiding and moulding the
+phenomenal world has dropped out; there is no pure idealism of this
+sort in Mr. Swinburne's verse.
+
+It may be said, truly, that some of Mr. Swinburne's poetry shows the
+influence of the later French Romanticists, of the reaction toward
+mediaevalism which is represented in England by Scott, and which
+culminated in France with Victor Hugo, for whom the English poet's
+admiration is unmeasured. That movement, however, had almost ceased on
+our side of the Channel at the time when it had reached, or was just
+passing, its climax in France. And, indeed, by 1835 the style and
+sentiment of English poetry was undergoing a remarkable change. Its
+magnificent efflorescence, which the first quarter of the nineteenth
+century had seen in full bloom, had faded away. It had sprung up in an
+era of great wars and revolution, amid the struggles of nations to
+shake off the incubus of despotisms, to free themselves from the yoke
+of foreigners. The cause of political liberty inspired the noblest
+verse of Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron:
+
+    Yet Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,
+    Streams like a thunderstorm against the wind--'
+
+But in England this ardent spirit had evaporated during the years of
+industrial prosperity and mechanical progress which came in with a
+long peace after twenty years of fighting; and during the next
+generation a milder tone prevailed. For an interval we had only
+second-rate artists in verse. The fiery enthusiasts, the despisers of
+respectability, were succeeded by poets who were decently emotional,
+pensive in thought, tame or affected in style, domestic in theme, with
+feeble echoes of the true romantic note in Mrs. Hemans and others.
+Next, in the fulness of time, came Tennyson and Browning, to raise
+the level of English poetry by their deeper views of life, their
+elevation of thought, and their incomparably greater imaginative
+power. Tennyson's composition is pellucid and exquisitely refined.
+Browning is rugged and often obscure; he cares more for the force than
+for the form of expression. The great problems of religion and
+politics are seriously and cautiously handled. Browning analyses them
+with caustic irony, while Tennyson, after making vain attempts to
+solve them, finds consolation in the 'Higher Pantheism.' They are soon
+joined by Matthew Arnold and Clough, who represent the melancholy
+resignation of sensitive minds that have discarded the creeds, for
+whom the miraculous history of Christianity is an illusion that has
+faded into the common light of day. Meredith, poet and novelist, falls
+back upon communion with Nature; he preaches the doctrine of duty, of
+working while the light lasts; he is a high moralist who accepts
+stoically the conclusion that nothing beyond terrestrial existence is
+knowable.
+
+Thus Mr. Swinburne's elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry
+were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in
+their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic
+beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the
+Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a
+vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by
+intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the
+central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry
+we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of
+love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not
+a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the
+principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy,
+or caught in the garden with Maud--with intentions strictly honourable
+in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is
+chiefly psychological; they are usually concerned with the tragic
+situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of sexual
+infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these
+poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore
+liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of
+misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world's evolution
+toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian
+period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral
+standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from
+irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing
+cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they
+belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas
+of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing
+distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early
+'sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.
+
+Mr. Swinburne's first publications were two historic plays, of which
+something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from
+modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he
+aroused immediate attention by _Atalanta in Calydon_, which reproduced
+the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The
+dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong
+to its Hellenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of
+sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of
+foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the
+hero's unmerited fate. The exquisite modulations of the verse, the
+splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the
+enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language
+to quantitative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary
+skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and
+cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in
+style and character as the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came
+_Chastelard_, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told
+us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek
+tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt,
+for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of
+heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his
+life for an hour in his lady's chamber, tears up the warrant
+reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary's
+fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne's coming
+poetry is struck in _Chastelard_--the overpowering enthralment of
+Love, a joy to live and die for--
+
+    'The mistress and mother of pleasure,
+      The one thing as certain as death'--
+
+yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost
+immediately.
+
+Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society,
+much moved by Tennyson's 'Idylls,' and altogether sympathetic with the
+misfortunes of the blameless king--justly appreciative of the domestic
+affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the
+House'--Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his _Poems and
+Ballads_, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence,
+kicking over screens and rending drapery--a reckless votary of
+Astarte, chanting the 'Laus Veneris' and the worship of 'Dolores, Our
+Lady of Pain.' From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is
+turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism
+which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The
+burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love,
+the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the
+dread goddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man's
+brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and
+covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of
+the 'Triumph of Time,' who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers'
+delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets 'for days that are over and
+dreams that are done,' and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a
+surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea,
+changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling
+surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is
+the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is
+set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of
+language, profusion of metaphor, and classic allusion; in rhymes that
+strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and
+his wild Maenads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The
+long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the 'Hymn to
+Proserpine' and of 'Hesperia,' with their subtle music, lay the reader
+under their charm; but too many of these poems are tainted by a
+flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown
+by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.
+
+It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems,
+saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in
+the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works,
+'as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard
+or read of.' The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly
+violent--the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had
+given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The
+current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken
+than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of
+Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the
+middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no
+means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who
+presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than
+somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry
+to Our Lady of Pain, the 'noble and nude and antique.' The result was
+that the first edition of the _Poems and Ballads_ was withdrawn,
+though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne
+published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver
+and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a
+nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied
+that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of
+Mr. Swinburne's intoxicating love-potions--were sorely tempted to dash
+down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance
+round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.
+
+In the _Poems and Ballads_ Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to
+speak, with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God
+discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before
+Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people
+implore mercy--a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the
+flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of
+the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he
+looks back with aesthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over
+the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this
+volume is the 'Hymn to Proserpine,' where a votary of the ancient
+divinities confesses sorrowfully that a new and austere faith has
+triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline
+and fall like the empire of the elder gods--
+
+    'All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and
+      be past;
+    Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you
+      at last.
+    In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes
+      of things,
+    Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you
+      for kings.'
+
+The 'Hymn to Proserpine' is a fine conception of the champion of a
+lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the
+quiet dignity of his attitude is marred by the lines in which the
+votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has
+conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent
+invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and
+highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that
+Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the
+evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have
+replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or
+fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these
+evils enormously increased, and that the sacrifice of Iphigenia in
+Aulis was as nothing to the hecatombs of the Inquisition.
+
+His intense imagination summons up a bright and luxurious vision of
+the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little
+affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in
+contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old
+nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts,
+by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal
+with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed
+animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to
+follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own
+art; since his early defects and excesses are mainly due to his having
+missed their lesson by disregarding the limitations which they
+scrupulously observed.
+
+When he reissued the _Poems and Ballads_, Mr. Swinburne took occasion,
+as we have said, to reply, in a pamphlet, to the strictures and strong
+protests which they had aroused. He was at some trouble to discover
+the passages or phrases 'that had drawn down such sudden thunder from
+the serene heavens of public virtue': he was comically puzzled to
+comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with
+sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient
+prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found
+in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there
+is nothing more famous in later Hellenic art, than the statue of
+Hermaphroditus, yet his translation of a sculptured poem into written
+verse has given offence! One might reply that a subject which is
+irreproachable, on the score of purity, in cold marble, may take a
+very different colour when it is dilated upon in burning verse.
+
+The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of
+stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr.
+Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of _Songs and
+Ballads_, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of
+concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening
+five years the empire of Napoleon III. had fallen with a mighty
+crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had
+become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian
+kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the
+ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and
+political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. The 'Song of
+the Standard,' the 'Halt before Rome,' the 'Marching Song,' the
+'Insurrection of Candia,' are poems that reflect current events; and
+the 'Litany of Nations' is the national anthem of peoples striving for
+freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the
+glorification of emancipation of Man. The final line of the 'Hymn to
+Man' is
+
+    'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things';
+
+and in one stanza of 'Hertha' is condensed all the wild declamation
+against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage,
+with his joy in the deification of humanity:
+
+                 'A creed is a rod,
+                    And a crown is of night;
+                  But this thing is God,
+                    To be man with thy might,
+    To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life
+                    As the light.'
+
+There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the
+uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce assailant of
+tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches
+and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish
+Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom
+of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the
+'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a
+fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time
+forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he
+is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano
+Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for
+Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of
+intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to
+him relics of mediaeval superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic--he
+contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old
+world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty
+world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the _juventus
+mundi_ had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the
+earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour
+for civic liberties, the Hellenic delight in noble form and in
+physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian
+authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns
+the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the multitude
+before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial
+recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the 'sleep eternal in an
+eternal night'; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He
+is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the passions a loose
+rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie
+
+    'Deep in dim death, beneath the grass
+    Where no thought stings.'
+
+Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair
+quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer
+influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the association of places
+with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his
+earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the
+impressions of natural beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in
+the 'Songs of the Four Seasons,' where the approach of a storm from
+the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the
+peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:
+
+             'As men's cheeks faded
+              On shores invaded
+              When shorewards waded
+                The lords of fight;
+              When churl and craven
+              Saw hard on haven
+              The wide-winged raven
+                At mainmast height;
+              When monks affrighted
+              To windward sighted
+              The birds full-flighted
+                Of swift sea-kings;
+              So earth turns paler
+              When Storm the sailor
+    Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings.'
+
+But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague
+yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he
+transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees,
+feels, and remembers. In the poem of 'Hesperia' the view of the sunset
+over the sea stirs tender memories; the 'deep-tide wind blowing in
+with the water' seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and
+his heart floats out toward her 'as the refluent seaweed moves in the
+languid exuberant stream.' In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession
+has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare's[32]
+hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in
+the beautiful verses of 'A Forsaken Garden,' where his consummate
+faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense and sound are matched
+and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:
+
+    'Over the meadows that blossom and wither
+      Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
+    Only the sun and the rain come hither
+                  All year long.'
+
+In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the title of _A
+Midsummer Holiday_, published nearly twenty years after the _Poems and
+Ballads_, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The
+impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the
+spectator's mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that
+
+     'mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind is
+     exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness:
+     it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the
+     presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it
+     felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or
+     even a right to live.'[33]
+
+This is the right doctrine, and we may add that it is applicable as a
+criticism to some of his earlier descriptive pieces, where the intense
+personal feeling is somewhat too intense and disproportionate; so that
+a reader gifted with less keenness of sensibility is disconcerted by
+insistence on effusive moods with which he cannot be expected to be in
+full sympathy. Mr. Swinburne might reply that for such dullards he
+does not write; but the finest wines are too heady for a morning's
+draught. In his more mature poems he appears to have deliberately held
+back what may be termed the subjective emotion; the landscapes are no
+longer peopled by figures or memories of the past; the thoughts which
+they suggest are such as find response in all minds that are in accord
+with the deeper and more subtle relations of human life to its
+environment. He himself has indeed told us[34] that to many of his
+studies of English land and sea no intimacy of years and no
+association with the past has given any colour of emotion, that only
+so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring
+these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive
+that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the
+spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or
+woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the
+sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The _Midsummer Holiday_ group
+has two pictures of sweet homeliness--'The Mill Garden' and 'On a
+Country Road'--the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth's phrase),
+such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch
+book, of value the more remarkable because they are not in Mr.
+Swinburne's usual manner. They give relief to the breadth and grandeur
+of the other descriptions of the ocean, the crags, and the storms. For
+to Swinburne, as to all the romantic English poets, the ocean stream
+which encircles their island is an inexhaustible source of delight and
+pride; it is our ever present defence in time of trouble; the fountain
+of our country's wealth and honour; it is our traditional battlefield;
+the winds and the waves are the breath and the force of our national
+being. And through Mr. Swinburne's poetry runs a vein of undiluted
+love for his native land. In his poem 'On the South Coast' he looks
+out from 'the green, smooth-swelling downs' over the broad blue water,
+and his thought is expressed in its final stanza:
+
+    Fair and dear is the land's face here, and fair man's work as a
+      man's may be:
+    Dear and fair as the sunbright air is here the record that speaks
+      him free;
+    Free by birth of a sacred earth, and regent ever of all the sea.'
+
+The 'Autumn Vision' is an ode to the south-west wind, which has so
+often filled the sails of the English warships:
+
+    'Wind beloved of earth and sky and sea beyond all winds that blow,
+    Wind whose might in fight was England's on her mightiest warrior
+      day,
+    South-west wind, whose breath for her was life, and fire to scourge
+      her foe,
+    Steel to smite and death to drive him down an unreturning way,
+    Well-beloved and welcome, sounding all the clarions of the sky,
+    Rolling all the marshalled waters toward the charge that storms
+      the shore.'
+
+Charles Kingsley, like a hardy Norseman, preferred the north-east
+gale. To him the south-west wind is
+
+    'The ladies' breeze,
+    Bringing back their lovers
+    Out of all the seas,'
+
+while Mr. Swinburne hears in the rushing south-western gale
+
+                   'the sound of wings gigantic,
+    Wings whose measure is the measure of the measureless Atlantic,'
+
+and, after the storm,
+
+    'The grim sea swell, grey, sleepless and sad as a soul estranged.'
+
+'A Swimmer's Dream' gives us the poetry of floating on the slow roll
+of the waves, some cloudy November morning.
+
+    'Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,
+      Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.'
+
+'Loch Torridon' preserves the charm of what might be a landlocked
+lake, if it were not that the rippling tide flows in by an almost
+invisible inlet from the sea. From his earliest to his latest poems
+the magic of nature's changing aspects fascinates him; they inspire
+him with a kind of ecstasy that finds utterance in the variety of his
+verse, which reflects all the lights and shades of earth, sea, and
+atmosphere. One may remark, by the way, that in proportion as his
+poetic strength matures, the pagan gods and goddesses, who disported
+themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more
+rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic
+mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes
+are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in
+the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor and Woden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be admitted by Mr. Swinburne's least indulgent critics that
+his poetry displays throughout a marvellous power of execution. He
+runs over all the lyrical and elegiac chords with unabated facility;
+his metrical variations and musical phrasing bring out and extend the
+capacity and fertility of our language as a poetic instrument; he is
+master of his materials. No doubt there is some repetition, some
+iteration, which becomes slightly wearisome, of his favourite rhymes,
+indicating, what has been observed independently of reference to this
+particular writer, that the resources of the English language for
+terminal assonance, under the stringent conditions required by the
+modern rules of versification, are inevitably limited and show signs
+of exhaustion.
+
+In a Note on Poetry appended to his latest volume of verses,[35] Mr.
+John Davidson has classed rhyme as a kind of disease of poetry. Rhyme,
+he says, is probably more than seven hundred years old--in Europe, he
+must mean, for it is far older in Asia, whence it originally came--and
+since the days of the troubadours and Minnesingers it has corrupted,
+in his opinion, the ear of the world. At best it is, he thinks, a
+decadent mode, imposing shackles on free poetic expression; and
+though in these fetters great poets have done magnificent work, in
+their finest rhymed verse he finds a feeling of effort. They have
+always been obliged to throw in something that need not have been
+said, some words inserted under compulsion, to bring the rhyme about.
+Mr. Davidson declares that the true glory of free untrammelled poetry
+shines out in the rhythmic periods of blank verse. That there may be
+some truth, or at least some convenience, in this theory of the poetic
+art, the modern poet may not be concerned to deny; for, as we have
+already said, rhymes will not withstand incessant and familiar usage;
+they become commonplaces, and the rhymer wanders away from the natural
+direction of his thought in search of fresh ones. The most devout
+admirers of Browning must admit that his verse is often distorted in
+this way--so that a fine stanza sometimes finishes with a jolt and
+ends with a tag--and it must be allowed that this necessity of making
+both ends meet is bad for the poetic conscience, a temptation to
+indefensible laxities. Even Mr. Swinburne, the inventor of exquisite
+harmonies, whose work is indisputably sincere, can be occasionally
+observed to be diverging from the straight line of his impetuous
+flight, hovering and making circuits that lead up skilfully to the
+indispensable rhyme. More frequently, perhaps, there is a tendency to
+interpose some metaphor, or rather far-fetched allusion, for the sake
+of the clear, full, recurrent intonation of echoing words that can
+only be marshalled into their places by artistic ingenuity.
+
+We may so far agree with Mr. Davidson that most of the sublime
+passages in English poetry are in blank verse, though it may be
+noticed that the four lines which he quotes from _Macbeth_,[36] as
+containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the drama,'
+are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate
+art; it is an instrument that requires a first-class performer, like
+Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English
+lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr.
+Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's _New Poems_ (1867), has
+said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in
+England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a
+modern song is a wilful abdication of half the charm and half the
+power of verse.' To this general rule he might possibly admit one
+exception--Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,'
+which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not
+missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this
+terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the
+other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a
+rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in
+maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present
+day, however, there is a tendency to run into excessive elaboration,
+largely due to superficial imitation of such masters of the poetic art
+as Tennyson, and especially Swinburne, so that we have a copious
+outpouring of feeble melodies.
+
+Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, is never feeble; he combines technical
+excellence with the power of vehement, often much too violent,
+expression. His character may be defined by the French word 'entier';
+he is uncompromising in praise or blame. He insists (to quote his own
+words) that 'the worship of beauty, though beauty be itself
+transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be
+simple and absolute'; nor will he tolerate reserve or veiled
+intimations of a poet's inmost thought.
+
+     'Nothing,' he has written, 'in verse or out of verse is more
+     wearisome than the delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted
+     hope and half-incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong
+     desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot, may be
+     worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity, until he begins to
+     speak; and if he tries to speak in verse, he misses the implement
+     of an artist.'
+
+He is pained by Matthew Arnold's 'occasional habit of harking back and
+loitering in mind among the sepulchres.... Nothing which leaves us
+depressed is a true work of art.' Yet, it may be answered, the habit
+of musing among tombs has inspired good poetry; and when doubt and
+dejection, perplexed meditation over insoluble problems, are in the
+air, a poet does well to express the dominant feelings of his time;
+and a modern Hamlet is no inartistic figure.
+
+In this respect, however, Mr. Swinburne may have found reason to
+qualify, latterly, the absoluteness of his poetic principles. He has
+been from the first a generous critic of those contemporary poets whom
+he recognised as kindred souls. He awards unmeasured praise to Matthew
+Arnold, while of his defects and shortcomings he speaks plainly. He
+does loyal homage to Browning in a sequence of sonnets, and his
+tribute to Tennyson was paid in a lofty 'Threnody,' when that noble
+spirit passed away. For Victor Hugo he proclaimed, as all know,
+nothing short of unbounded adoration--he is 'the greatest writer whom
+the world has seen since Shakespeare'; though it may be doubted
+whether in his own country Hugo now stands upon so supreme a pinnacle.
+To other eminent men of his time his poetry accords admiration,
+chiefly to the champions of free thought and of resistance to
+oppression; and, in a poem entitled 'Two Leaders,' he salutes two
+antagonists as he might do before crossing swords with them. The
+leaders are not named; the first is evidently Newman:
+
+    'O great and wise, clear-souled and high of heart,
+      One the last flower of Catholic love, that grows
+      Amid bare thorn their only thornless rose,
+    From the fierce juggling of the priest's loud mart
+    Yet alien, yet unspotted and apart
+      From the blind hard foul rout whose shameless shows
+      Mock the sweet heaven whose secret no man knows
+    With prayers and curses and the soothsayers' art.'
+
+The second is
+
+        'Like a storm-god of the northern foams
+    Strong, wrought of rock that breasts and breaks the sea,'
+
+in whom we recognise Carlyle. They are the powers of darkness, doomed
+to fall and to vanish before the light; yet their genius commands
+respect and even sympathy.
+
+    'With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate,
+      High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher,
+
+    *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Honour not hate we give you, love not fear,
+      Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome
+    Of great dead Gods with wrath and wail, nor hear
+      Time's word and man's: "Go honoured hence, go home,
+    Night's childless children; here your hour is done;
+    Pass with the stars, and leave us with the sun."'
+
+The concise energy of these lines, their slow metrical movement,
+invest them with singular weight and dignity. The poet is confronting
+two representatives, in principle, of Force and Authority, whose
+prototypes in bygone times would undoubtedly have sent him to the
+scaffold or to the stake; nor is it improbable that both Carlyle and
+Newman, though in all other opinions they differed widely, would have
+agreed that a revolutionary firebrand and a pestilent infidel
+deserved some such fate. The poet might console himself with the
+reflection that they must have abhorred each other's principles quite
+as much as they detested his own.
+
+In his later verse Mr. Swinburne still continues to wield his flaming
+sword against priests and despots, against intellectual and political
+servility. What may be termed the historical plea, the excuse for
+ideas and institutions that they are the relics of evil days long
+past, is no palliation for them to his mind; he would stamp them out
+and utterly destroy them. In this respect his temperament has
+unconsciously a strong tincture of the intolerance which he denounces;
+he would sweep away Christianity as Christianity swept away
+polytheism. Toward its Founder, as the type of human love and purity,
+he is uniformly reverential; there is nothing in that supreme figure
+that jars with that Religion of Humanity, which 'The Altar of
+Righteousness' proclaims with high dithyrambic enthusiasm:
+
+    'Christ the man lives yet, remembered of man as dreams that leave
+    Light on eyes that wake and know not if memory bids them grieve.
+
+    *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Far above all wars and gospels, all ebb and flow of time,
+    Lives the soul that speaks in silence, and makes mute the earth
+      sublime.'
+
+But of theology reigning by force and terror he is the implacable
+enemy; and his intemperate violence leaves a stain on the bright
+radiance of his poetry. It amounts to an artistic fault, undiminished
+even in the later years which should have brought the philosophic
+mind. Moreover, it has materially lessened the influence which so fine
+a poetic genius should have exercised over the present generation,
+among whom polemical ardour and bitterness may be thought to have
+perceptibly cooled down, and to have become much less aggressive, in
+science, philosophy, and literature, than among the preceding
+generation. An age of tacit indifference, content with rationalistic
+explanations, with the slow working of disillusion, dislikes and
+discountenances outrageous scorn poured upon things that are
+traditionally sacred; and to the English character extremes are always
+distressing.
+
+Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work, at any rate, takes us out of the strife
+and turmoil of theologic war; we are on firm historic ground, dealing
+with authentic events and persons. The plays of _Chastelard_,
+_Bothwell_, and _Mary Stuart_ form a trilogy in which the most
+romantic and eventful period of Scottish history is presented; they
+constitute the epic-drama of Scotland, to adopt a definition applied
+by Victor Hugo to the tragedy of _Bothwell_. It is impossible, in this
+article, to find space for an adequate criticism of these remarkable
+productions. Every leading poet of the nineteenth century has made
+excursions into the dramatic field. We doubt whether any of them has
+come out of the adventure much better than Mr. Swinburne. All of them
+have given us, each in his own way, fine poetry, and, if we except
+Byron, they have shown that the masters of lyrical music can strike
+with power the high chords of blank verse. None of them have produced
+plays that took any hold of a theatrical audience; in most cases they
+were not intended for the stage.
+
+The play of _Chastelard_ is too deeply saturated with amorous essences
+throughout to be forcibly dramatic. The hero is in a high love-fever
+from first to last, the passionate strain becomes monotonous, and
+though he dies to save the Queen's honour, our minds are not purged
+with much pity for him. In the long historical drama of _Bothwell_,
+which has twenty-one scenes in its two acts, we have spirited
+portraits of the fierce nobles who surrounded Mary Stuart during her
+brief and distracted reign. The love passages are pauses in a course
+of violent action, the assassination of Rizzio, the murder of Darnley
+are not overcoloured melodramatically, and the scenes in and about the
+Kirk of Field are darkened with the shadow of Darnley's imminent fate.
+But Darnley's dream, presaging his coming doom, inevitably recalls the
+dream of Clarence, and cannot but suffer from the reminiscence. We
+might have something to say on the metrical construction of
+Swinburne's blank verse, for he shares with Tennyson, though in a
+minor degree, the distinction of having enlarged its scope and varied
+its measure. But the subject would demand careful comparative
+examination and analysis of different styles, such as is to be read,
+with profit to all students of the art poetic, in Mr. J. B. Mayor's
+_Chapters on English Metres_.
+
+It will be understood that this article attempts no more than to
+review the salient characteristics of Mr. Swinburne's poetry, to
+indicate in some degree their connexion and development. It cannot but
+fall far short, obviously, of being a comprehensive survey of his
+contributions to English literature. We have made no reference, for
+lack of space, to his treatment of chivalrous romance in _Tristram of
+Lyonesse_, which Mr. Swinburne has rightly called 'the deathless
+legend,' though, since its fascination has made it a subject for three
+other contemporary poets, a comparison of their diverse manners of
+handling the story would be interesting. It is with regret that we
+have been compelled, also, to refrain from any adequate notice of Mr.
+Swinburne's prose writings, for in regard to the poetry of his own
+period the dissertations and judgments of one who combines high
+imaginative faculty with scientific mastery of the metrical art must
+have special value. Of the ordinary untrained criticism, the 'chorus
+of indolent reviewers,' to use Tennyson's phrase, he is, we think, too
+impatient. From a passage in his Dedicatory Epistle we gather that
+some of the tribe have ventured so far as to insinuate that poetry
+ought not to become a mere musical exercise. Mr. Swinburne's rejoinder
+is that
+
+     'except to such ears as should always be closed against poetry,
+     there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness
+     and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of
+     thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind
+     scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of
+     malignity.'
+
+Apart from the wrathful form, the substance of what is here said
+merits consideration, for undoubtedly the most musical of our poets,
+from Shakespeare and Milton to Coleridge and Shelley, are those whose
+verse has embodied the richest thought and has been instinct with the
+deeper emotions. We must muster up courage to remark, nevertheless,
+that while in Mr. Swinburne's finest poems the musical setting
+accompanies and illuminates the thought or feeling, in some others the
+underlying idea is too unsubstantial; its real presence is only
+visible to the eye of implicit faith. Toward his fellow poets, his
+equals and contemporaries, Mr. Swinburne's attitude is that of
+generous enthusiasm, not excluding outspoken, yet courteous,
+indication of defects, as may be seen in the essay[37] on Matthew
+Arnold's _New Poems_, which is full of important observations on
+poetry in general, beside some well-deserved strictures on Arnold's
+shortcomings, in criticism as well as in verse. For Victor Hugo he has
+nothing but panegyric. His articles on Byron and Coleridge are
+luminous appreciations of the very diverse excellences belonging to
+two illustrious predecessors; while in his _Notes on the Text of
+Shelley_, high-soaring and incomparable, an unlucky emendation of a
+line in 'The Skylark--the insertion of a superfluous word
+conjecturally--by an editor whose work he commends on the whole,
+provokes him to sheer exasperation:
+
+     'For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible;
+     for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would
+     be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and
+     desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of
+     Shelley with this damnable corruption.'
+
+'Fas est et ab hoste doceri.' Mr. Swinburne has borrowed the style of
+sacerdotal anathema from his mortal enemies, and pronounces it no less
+inexorably. But these Notes were written nigh forty years ago, so we
+may hope that by this time he has cast out, or at least subdued by
+diligent exorcism, that same hyperbolic fiend which entered in and
+rent him at certain seasons of his youth.
+
+Mr. Swinburne has, indeed, the defects of his qualities. He is an
+ardent friend and an unflinching adversary, but we have seen that in
+prose no less than in poetry, in polemics as in politics, his style is
+liable to become overheated and thunderous. He has no patience with
+mediocrity in art; he disdains the _via media_ in thought and action.
+In these respects he stands alone among the Victorian poets, most of
+whom anticipate with misgivings the evaporation of faith in the
+supernatural, while they acknowledge that for themselves such faith
+has little meaning, and are inclined to melancholy musing over the
+'doubtful doom of human kind' which haunted the imagination of
+Tennyson. And his attitude is still further apart from the
+intellectual tendencies discernible at the present moment in pure
+literature, which is now less concerned, we think, with these
+questions than when Mr. Arnold wrote _Literature and Dogma_, and seems
+more disposed to leave theology in the hands of the physical
+scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be,
+it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory,
+unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which
+the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless
+extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from
+him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The
+sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him;
+it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, whom he
+so much admired, meant by the word [Greek: aidos]. But we very
+willingly acknowledge that of these excesses hardly a trace is to be
+found in the very numerous pieces that fill the later volumes of his
+collected poetry.
+
+From these causes it has resulted that Mr. Swinburne does not, in our
+opinion, now hold the position or command the influence which would
+otherwise be accorded to one who may be reckoned the chief lyrical
+poet of the second half of the nineteenth century; for after the
+publication, in 1855, of _Maud_, Tennyson had passed his lyrical
+climax, and Mr. Swinburne's superiority, as a lyrist, over all other
+writers of that period is incontestable. His neo-paganism, moreover,
+jars upon the realistic modernity of a generation for whom primitive
+symbolism is obsolete as a form of expression, and whose prevailing
+thought is too profoundly rationalistic to be attracted by a pagan
+paradise. All this is to be regretted, since Mr. Swinburne undoubtedly
+has the pagan virtues. His aspirations are concentrated on ideals that
+ennoble the present life, on justice, inflexible courage, patriotism,
+the unsophisticated intelligence; he loves liberty and he hates
+oppression in all their shapes. He is throughout an optimist, who
+believes and predicts that a clearer and brighter prospect is before
+humanity. To Mr. Swinburne, in short, may be applied the words with
+which Matthew Arnold summed up his essay upon Heine: 'He is not an
+adequate interpreter of the modern world; he is a brilliant soldier in
+the liberation war of humanity.' And future generations may remember
+him as the poet who passed on to them the message of his spiritual
+forefather, Shelley:
+
+    'O man, hold thee on in courage of soul
+      Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way;
+    And the billows of clouds that round thee roll
+      Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
+    When heaven and hell shall leave thee free
+      To the universe of destiny.'
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] _The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne._ In six volumes. With a
+dedicatory epistle to Theodore Watts-Dunton. London, Chatto and
+Windus, 1904.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1906.
+
+[32] 'Out, hyperbolic fiend! how vexest thou this man?'--_Twelfth
+Night._
+
+[33] Dedicatory Preface.
+
+[34] Dedicatory Preface.
+
+[35] _Holiday and Other Poems_, 1906.
+
+[36] Note on Poetry, p. 144.
+
+[37] _Essays and Studies_, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN[38]
+
+
+It may be doubted whether many students of history are aware that the
+demarcation of frontiers, of precise lines dividing the possessions of
+adjacent sovereignties and distinguishing their respective
+jurisdictions, is a practice of modern origin. At the present time it
+is the essential outcome of territorial disputes, it is the operation
+by which they are formally settled at the end of a war: it registers
+conquests and cessions; and occasionally it has been the result of
+pacific arbitration. Among compact and civilised nationalities an
+exterior frontier, thus carefully defined, remains, like the human
+skin, the most sensitive and irritable part of their corporate
+constitution. The slightest infringement of it by a neighbouring Power
+is instantly resented; to break through it violently is to be
+inflicting a wound which may draw blood; and even interference with
+any petty State that may lie between the frontiers of two great
+governments is regarded as a serious menace.
+
+The whole continent of Europe has now been laid out upon this system
+of strict delimitation. Yet it may be maintained that among the
+kingdoms of the ancient world no such exact and recognised
+distribution of territory existed; and, further, that up to a very
+recent period none of the great empires in Asia had any boundaries
+that could be traced on a map. Their landmarks were incessantly
+shifting forward or backward as their military strength rose or fell;
+and where their territories marched with some rough mountainous tract
+inhabited by warlike tribes, they were perpetually plagued by petty
+warfare on a zone of debateable land. On both sides some temporary
+intrusion upon or occupation of country held by a neighbour, which
+would now be the signal for mobilising an army, was treated as a
+trespass of small importance, to be resented and rectified at leisure.
+It is true that in earlier times the Romans marked off distinct
+frontiers, and guarded them by military posts; but their policy was to
+acknowledge no frontier power with equal rights, and their actual
+political jurisdiction usually extended far beyond their lines of
+defence, which were advanced or withdrawn as political or military
+considerations might require. In fact, the Roman empire, like the
+British empire in Asia, was a great organised State, surrounded, for
+the most part, by small and weak principalities, or by warlike tribal
+communities, and it grew by a natural process of inevitable expansion.
+The emperors were often reluctant to enlarge their possessions; but
+the raids and incursions of intractable barbarians, or the revolt of
+some protected chiefship, frequently left them no option but to
+conquer and annex. They soon found themselves compelled to overstep
+the limits of empire prescribed by the policy of Augustus, and to lay
+down an advanced frontier in the lands beyond the Rhine and the
+Danube.
+
+In Europe, where, as we have said, all national frontiers are now
+fixed and registered, the position of a civilised government entangled
+in chronic border warfare has long been unknown; the tradition of such
+a state of things is preserved in popular recollection mainly by local
+records and old ballads. Yet for Englishmen the subject possesses
+peculiar interest, since it is connected with their earlier history;
+and moreover our dominion in India invests it with special importance,
+for it is there a matter of immediate experience and active concern.
+We may recollect, in the first place, that Britain was an outlying
+province of the Roman empire, for at this moment we are excavating the
+ruins of the wall built by the Romans to protect their northern
+frontier from the incursions of the warlike tribes beyond it, by the
+first administration that established, for a time, peace and
+civilisation in England. Then, in the middle ages, and long
+afterwards, the border between the kingdoms of England and Scotland
+which ran northward of the old Roman line, was for centuries the scene
+of plundering raids, punitive expeditions, and internecine feuds that
+often laid waste the countryside with fire and sword. We may observe,
+in this instance, how shifting and indeterminate was the exact
+frontier line between the two kingdoms, and how the local fighting,
+the inroads from one side or the other, did not necessarily involve a
+rupture of their formal relations. The wardens on each side executed
+rough justice upon marauding clans; they wasted and slaughtered in
+reprisal for raids; the great nobles engaged in a kind of private
+warfare; but all this might go on without embroiling the two
+governments in a national war. On the western English border the Welsh
+hillmen kept the neighbouring counties in continual alarm; and their
+chiefs played an important part in the civil wars and rebellions of
+England. They were at last quieted by Edward I., who succeeded in
+subduing Wales though he failed in Scotland. Lastly, though the union
+of the two kingdoms brought peace to the Anglo-Scottish border, the
+Highland line along the Forth river still kept up, though in a much
+less serious degree, the troubles of a regular government in contact
+with restless tribes. Nor was it until the middle of the eighteenth
+century that these relics of an archaic condition of society, which
+had long ago disappeared in other parts of western Europe, were
+finally effaced in Great Britain. Long afterwards, in the nineteenth
+century, when the conquest of the Punjab carried the north-western
+frontier of British India up to the slopes of the Afghan mountains,
+the scene of perpetual strife between a strong settled administration
+and turbulent borderers which had passed away on the Tweed or the
+Forth, and on the Welsh Marches, reappeared in the districts beyond
+the Indus.
+
+To Englishmen, therefore, whose experience of this situation is long,
+varied, and actual, Mr. Baddeley's book on the Russians in the
+Caucasus should be of exceptional interest. It is indeed well worth
+studying by those upon whom, whether at home or in India, has been
+imposed the arduous duty of superintending our policy in dealing with
+the Afghan tribes for the protection of our Indian districts. It is
+true that the conditions and circumstances, military and political,
+under which Russia prosecuted her long war with the Caucasian
+mountaineers, rendered her position in many respects different from
+that in which the English found themselves when they first came into
+contact with Afghanistan, and which has changed very little in the
+course of sixty years. The aims and purposes of the two governments
+were by no means the same. Yet in both cases we have a story of the
+obstinate resistance opposed by fierce and free clans to the arms of a
+powerful empire, of perilous campaigns amid rugged hills and passes,
+of the hazards and misfortunes to which disciplined troops are always
+liable when they encounter resolute and fanatical defenders of a
+difficult country.
+
+Mr. Baddeley's book contains an authentic narrative, founded on
+diligent study of official documents and on the accounts of those who
+took part in the fighting, of the operations by which the Mohammedan
+tribes of the Caucasus were finally subdued, after fierce and
+protracted resistance, by Russian armies, and their country was
+annexed to the dominions of the Czar. His knowledge of this region is
+evidently derived from personal exploration; and in the Introduction
+to his book he has spared no pains to explain to his readers its
+geographical position, its topography, its physical features, and the
+extraordinary diversity of races and languages which it contained. We
+learn that the chain of mountains which was originally known by the
+name of the Caucasus stretches, with a total length of 650 miles, from
+the Caspian to the Black Sea. Toward the north is a tract of dense
+forest, intersected by numerous streams flowing down from the
+mountains; and beyond lies the high plateau of Daghestan, 'through
+which the rivers have cut their way to a depth often of thousands of
+feet, the whole backed and ribbed, south and west, by mountain ranges
+having many peaks often over 13,000 feet in height.' In the forest
+tract, to which the Russians gave the name of Tchetchnia, their armies
+were constantly entangled; and their difficulties in reducing the
+inhabitants to subjection were quite as great as in conquering the
+highland tribes of Daghestan. Throughout the eighteenth century, and
+even earlier, the Russians had been pushing southward toward the Black
+Sea and the Caspian, and had gradually taken under their authority and
+protection the Cossack tribes who were settled on the steppes that
+spread along the northern border of the Caucasus. On this border they
+had established by the end of the century the Cossack line of forts,
+military colonies and plantations of armed cultivators, linked
+together to form a barrier against the incursions and marauding raids
+of the wild folk in the woods and mountains in front of them, and
+gradually strengthened and supported by stations of regular troops in
+the background. On the south of the central mountain ranges the
+Russians held Georgia, inhabited by Christian races whom the Russians
+had liberated from the Turkish or Persian yoke before the close of the
+eighteenth century, and who ever afterwards remained loyal subjects of
+the Czar. The Georgian road which traversed the whole Caucasian region
+from north to south, formed a most important line of communication
+which was never seriously interrupted. To the south-east, when the
+nineteenth century opened, lay Mohammedan khanates, vassals of Persia;
+on the south-west were the semi-independent pachaliks of the Ottoman
+empire.
+
+We must pass over, reluctantly, Mr. Baddeley's very interesting sketch
+of the gradual approach made by Russia toward the Caucasus during the
+eighteenth century, which may be said to have begun in earnest with
+the expedition of Peter the Great, who led an army to the Caspian
+shore and captured Derbend about 1722. This threatening movement upon
+the confines of Asia inevitably involved Russia in war with the Turks
+and with the Persians, for whom the Caucasian mountains represented a
+great fortress, barring the onward march of a powerful Christian
+empire toward their dominions. For the Russians, on their side, it
+became of vital importance to break through the barrier that separated
+them from Georgia, to occupy the country between the two seas, and to
+make an end of the perpetual warfare with the tribes, who kept their
+frontier on the Cossack line in unceasing agitation and disorder, and
+were a standing menace to the Christian population of Georgia. It
+should be understood, however, that the Cossacks discharged their
+duties of watch and ward after a very rough fashion, raiding and
+fighting on their own account, making incursions upon their Mohammedan
+neighbours in retaliation for attacks and forays, and laying waste the
+enemy's country with the bitter vindictiveness of antagonistic races
+and religions.
+
+At the beginning of the nineteenth century Georgia and some other
+Christian principalities in Trans-Caucasia--that is, on the southern
+border of the mountains--had been absorbed into the Russian empire,
+which now held continuous territory on this line from the Black Sea to
+the Caspian. Along the Caspian shore the vassal States of Persia had
+been reduced to submission, while the Turks had been driven back from
+their fortified posts on the Black Sea. The Turkish and Persian
+governments naturally took alarm at the approach of a military power
+whom they had already good reason to mistrust and dread; the Russian
+viceroys and generals on the frontier treated these Oriental kingdoms
+with high-handed arrogance, and gave ample provocation for the wars
+which speedily broke out with both of them. The annals of the next few
+years record many vicissitudes of fortune. The Russian armies achieved
+some brilliant victories, and suffered some heavy disasters. By
+disease and the strain of forced marches through rugged and almost
+pathless country, by the storming of petty fortresses, by incessant
+skirmishing and treacherous surprises, the troops were reduced in
+number and gradually worn out; they were outnumbered by the Persian
+and Turkish soldiery, whose military qualities were at that time by no
+means despicable; while at this time the great European wars against
+Napoleon made reinforcements hard to obtain. In 1811 the Russians
+could barely hold their ground against the combined forces of Turkey
+and Persia; but just when the whole situation was at its worst the
+Russian Government, under the imminent emergency of Napoleon's march
+upon Moscow, patched up a peace (May 1812) with Turkey that reinstated
+the Sultan in some important positions on the Black Sea coast, and
+made considerable retrocessions of territory. By strenuous exertion
+the Persians were defeated and beaten off, and next year there was
+comparative peace on the Caucasian border. Yet it was but a calm
+interval before storms, for Mr. Baddeley remarks that nearly half a
+century of fighting was to elapse before the conquest of the mountains
+could be completed.
+
+This era of long and sanguinary contest may be said to have begun, on
+a deliberate plan, with the appointment of General Yermoloff, in 1816,
+to be commander-in-chief in Georgia, with jurisdiction over the whole
+Caucasus. It was carried on with undaunted courage, hardihood, and
+obstinate endurance on both sides; and in the matter of merciless
+ferocity there was little to choose between the two antagonists.
+Yermoloff appears to have belonged to the type of military commander
+whom the Russian soldier follows with complete trust and unhesitating
+devotion--a leader inured to hardship and perils, treating his men as
+comrades but unsparing of their lives, rigid in discipline, reckless
+of bloodshed, a relentless conqueror yet capable of occasional
+generosity. His stern and implacable temper recognised but one method
+of dealing with barbarian enemies--the unflinching use of fire and
+sword, the policy of devastation and massacre. 'I desire,' said
+Yermoloff, 'that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more
+potently than chains of fortresses; that my word shall be for the
+natives a law more inevitable than death. Condescension in the eyes
+of Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am
+inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of Russians from
+destruction, and thousands of Mussulmans from treason.' He demanded
+unconditional submission from all the tribes of the Caucasus; and he
+substituted for the former system of bribery and subsidies the policy
+of treating all resistance as rebellion, and suppressing it with cruel
+severity, 'but' (says one writer) 'always combined with justice and
+magnanimity.' Upon this Mr. Baddeley remarks that it is difficult to
+see where justice came in, 'but in this respect Russia was only doing
+what England and all other civilised States have done, and still do,
+wherever they come into contact with savage or semi-savage races. By
+force or fraud a portion of the country is taken and sooner or later,
+on one excuse or another, the rest is sure to follow.' To this it may
+be rejoined that on the north-west frontier of India, and nowhere
+else, England has come into contact with a race quite as savage and
+untamable as the Caucasian mountaineers, but that it would be a great
+mistake to suppose that the methods of Yermoloff have ever been
+adopted in dealing with the turbulent fanaticism of the Afghan tribes.
+
+On the Cossack line, when Yermoloff assumed charge of operations,
+'there was no open warfare, but there was continual unrest. No man's
+life was safe outside the forts and stanitzas; robbery and murder were
+rife; raiding parties, great and small, harried the fields, the farms
+and the weaker settlements.' To this state of things he was resolved
+to put an end. He built fortresses, pushed forward his outposts,
+formed moving columns of troops, and assiduously trained his soldiers
+to the peculiar conditions of warfare on this borderland. The Russian
+regiments, like the Roman legions, were often stationed in their
+camps or garrisons for twenty-five years; and for the service required
+of them their efficiency was admirable. For ten years Yermoloff
+carried on this tribal war with inflexible rigour, by expeditions to
+punish some marauding village, which was razed to the ground, and most
+of the men, women and children burnt or killed after defending the
+place with the fury of despair; by night marches to surprise and storm
+the hill forts; by exterminating bands of brigands; and more than once
+by laying deathtraps for notorious rebels or fanatics. There can be no
+doubt that this system of ruthless chastisement, of beating down the
+enemy's defences by sharp and rapid strokes, by sudden and daring
+inroads into the heart of their country, intimidated the tribes, and
+went far toward compelling them to sullen acquiescence in the Russian
+overlordship. Of the petty independent chiefships some were seized
+forcibly, others submitted and paid tribute. The Russians were
+advancing step by step into the interior of the country, piercing it
+with roads and riveting their hold on it by throwing forward their
+chain of connected forts. By 1820 Yermoloff appears to have convinced
+himself that in a few years the whole of the Caucasus--mountain and
+forest--would be permanently conquered and pacified; and for some time
+after that date there was little or no fighting, though the border was
+frequently disquieted by outbreaks that were sternly crushed. With the
+Persians and the Turks there was an interval of peace.
+
+But the harsh measures taken by the Russians to bring the forest
+tribes under their authority were bitterly resented; and in 1824 two
+of their generals were fatally stabbed in Tchetchnia by one of several
+villagers whom they were disarming. This murder was avenged by
+Yermoloff, as usual, relentlessly, but it was his last campaign in
+the Caucasus. In 1826 the Persians, who had been incensed by
+Yermoloff's rough ways on their frontier and by his insolent
+diplomacy, invaded Russian territory with a strong army. The Russians
+were unprepared, and at first could only act on the defensive. The
+flames of insurrection at once broke out among the tribes; the whole
+country fell back into confusion, and the Emperor Nicholas, holding
+Yermoloff responsible for this disastrous state of affairs,
+reprimanded and recalled him. He lived in retirement until 1861,
+revered by the Russian nation as the type and model of a valiant
+soldier and a devoted patriot who won brilliant victories and
+conquered large territories for the empire. But on his system and its
+consequences Mr. Baddeley pronounces a judgment which in fact points
+the moral of his whole narrative, and explains the history of the
+events that followed Yermoloff's departure:
+
+     'He gained brilliant victories at slight cost; and brought for a
+     time the greater part of Daghestan under Russian dominion.... He
+     absorbed the Persian and Tartar khanates, and treated Persia with
+     astonishing arrogance. But it was these very measures and successes
+     that led, on the one hand, to the Persian War and the revolt of the
+     newly-acquired provinces; on the other, to that great outburst of
+     religious and racial fanaticism which, under the banner of
+     Muridism, welded into one powerful whole so many weak and
+     antagonistic elements in Daghestan and Tchetchnia, thereby
+     initiating the bloody struggle waged unceasingly for the next forty
+     years. Daghestan speedily threw off the Russian yoke, and defied
+     the might of the mother empire until 1859. In Tchetchnia mere
+     border forays conducted by independent partisan leaders ...
+     developed into a war of national independence under a chieftain as
+     cruel, capable, and indomitable as Yermoloff himself.'
+
+The Persian War ended in 1828, but in the same year hostilities broke
+out with Turkey, involving the Russian troops on the Georgian frontier
+in hard and hazardous fighting, which lasted, with a great expenditure
+of men and money, until peace was concluded in 1829. From that year
+until 1854, when the Crimean War began, Russia had a free hand in the
+Caucasus, and applied her strength with inexorable energy to its
+subjugation. And it is to the rise and spread of the ferocious
+enthusiasm which Mr. Baddeley has called _Muridism_ that he attributes
+the striking fact that the complete conquest of the country was only
+accomplished in 1864--that the tribes held out against the forces of
+the Russian empire for more than thirty years.
+
+Muridism, in which this spirit of heroic and hopeless resistance by
+armed peasants against the Russian armies was, so to speak, incarnate,
+is a word employed by Mr. Baddeley with a special purpose and meaning,
+which he explains at some length. For our present purpose it may be
+sufficient to say that _Murshid_ denotes a religious teacher who
+expounds the mystic Way of Salvation to his _Murids_, or disciples,
+who gather round him, adopt his doctrines, obey his commands, and
+cheerfully accept martyrdom in his service. Muridism, therefore, may
+be taken to signify the passionate fanaticism of religious devotees,
+of warriors who follow a spiritual leader and fight in the sacred
+cause of Islam against the infidel. It was this movement that united
+the Mohammedan tribes in a holy war against the Russians, who, as our
+author observes, had never gauged correctly the latent forces of the
+twin passions, religious fanaticism and the love of liberty--two
+elements which always form a very dangerous compound, and which became
+heated up to the point of explosion as the tribes found the iron
+framework of Russian administration steadily closing up around them.
+Any attempt to break out of this house of bondage was repulsed with
+inflexible severity. In this inflammable atmosphere, charged with
+ferocious suspicion, hatred, and superstition, one Kazi Mullah was
+elected to the rank of 'Imam'; and on his proclamation of holy war
+against the infidel oppressor the whole country rose and rallied to
+his standard. He was, if we may borrow Mr. Baddeley's description of
+the class, 'one of those strange beings, compounded of fanaticism,
+military ardour, and a nature prone to adventure, for whom only the
+dreaming, fighting, tumultuous, ignorant East, in its days of trouble
+and unrest, can supply a fitting field of action.' He came forward as
+a man sent by God to deliver the faithful from their servitude,
+holding in his hands the power of life or death, and those who refused
+to obey him or denied his authority were denounced and slain without
+mercy. Under such leadership the war spread again along the border,
+some Russian detachments were cut to pieces, and even when the
+insurgents were defeated the troops suffered terribly, for as no
+quarter was asked or expected none was given on either side. After
+some two years of incessant fighting Kazi Mullah made his last stand
+in a mountain stronghold, where he was surrounded by the Russian
+troops, who in their first assault were repulsed with heavy loss; but
+on a second attempt the place was stormed, and Kazi Mullah with a band
+of devoted Murids died sword in hand on the last breastwork.
+
+Of the sixty men who stood by their chief to the end two only escaped;
+but one of these was Shamil, who became afterwards the most famous and
+formidable champion of the Mohammedan tribes in the Caucasus.
+
+     'His marvellous strength, agility, and swordsmanship served him in
+     good stead. With an Alvarado's leap he landed behind the line of
+     soldiers about to fire a volley through the raised doorway where
+     he stood, and whirling his sword in his left hand he cut down three
+     of them, but was bayoneted by the fourth clean through the breast.
+     Undismayed, he grasped the weapon in one hand, cut down its owner,
+     pulled it out of his own body, and escaped into the forest, though
+     in addition to the bayonet wound he had a rib and shoulder broken
+     by stones.'
+
+Shamil had been born and bred in the same village with Kazi Mullah,
+whose disciple he became, and whose rules of rigid adherence to the
+strictest injunctions of Islam he adopted and enforced. He even
+attempted to put down, as a practice forbidden by the law of Mahomet,
+the inveterate blood feuds that divided and weakened the tribes, with
+the politic object of uniting them in the holy war against the
+infidels; and when the Kazi had been killed his mantle fell upon
+Shamil, who soon proved himself a far more able and terrible leader of
+fanatic insurrection. The Russians, who at first believed that the
+Kazi's death was a decisive and final blow to the cause of Muridism,
+soon found that they were grievously mistaken. Mr. Baddeley's
+narrative shows occasionally some disregard of orderly arrangement, so
+that the sequence in time and interconnection of incidents is not
+always clear. We gather from this part of it, however, that very soon
+after Shamil took command the whole country had risen against the
+Russians, that their posts were attacked and their detachments cut
+off, and that expeditions sent to seize the positions or disperse the
+gatherings of the tribes paid dearly for their victories, while they
+were more than once repulsed with defeat and disaster. Villages were
+burnt; the vineyards and orchards were destroyed; desperate fights,
+hand to hand, ended only with the extermination of the defenders by
+the exasperated Russian soldiers; and after one campaign, when the
+Russian Commander-in-Chief led a considerable force against Shamil's
+stronghold, he was content to conclude, in the emperor's name, a
+treaty of peace with the tribal chief, being 'compelled to retire by
+the total disorganisation of the expeditionary corps, the enormous
+loss in _personnel_, and the want of ammunition.' A treaty with the
+Russian emperor raised Shamil's reputation high among the tribes;
+while the slaughter and devastation inflamed his revengeful temper.
+When the Emperor Nicholas came next year to the Caucasus, General
+Klugenau met Shamil and tried to persuade him to tender submission in
+person, with the result that Klugenau narrowly escaped assassination
+at the interview. He was saved by Shamil's intervention. In 1839
+almost all the tribes were united under Shamil's command; and the
+Russian Government, seriously alarmed, determined that he must be
+effectively crushed. In the story of this campaign we have a signal
+and striking example of the perils that beset regular troops who
+encounter fierce and fearless barbarians on their own ground. The
+Russians had a powerful artillery; they were led by experienced
+commanders; their officers and soldiers fought with astonishing
+courage and endurance. After several bloody actions Shamil was shut up
+in the hill fort of Akhlongo, and here the undaunted Murids turned to
+bay. It was a stronghold surrounded by ravines and sheer precipices,
+accessible only along narrow ridgeways. Mr. Baddeley has related in
+full detail the operations and incidents of this eventful siege. The
+first assault failed after a prolonged and desperate struggle. 'Only
+at nightfall,' writes an eye-witness, 'and at the word of command, did
+our troops retire from the bloodstained rock.' The bombardment went on
+'until the castle was reduced to a heap of ruins, in which the heroic
+defenders seemed literally buried.' After a siege which lasted eighty
+days the place was at last taken with a total loss of 3000 Russians,
+including 116 officers, killed and wounded. The defenders were
+slaughtered almost to the last man; many women and children were
+killed; but Shamil again escaped miraculously.
+
+     'Vanquished, wounded, a homeless fugitive, without means, with
+     hardly a follower, it might well seem that nothing was left to the
+     indomitable chieftain but the life of a hunted outlaw ... yet
+     within a year Shamil was again the leader of a people in arms;
+     within three he had inflicted a bloody defeat on his present
+     victor; yet another, and all northern Daghestan was reconquered,
+     every Russian garrison there beleaguered or destroyed, and Muridism
+     triumphant in the forest and on the mountain, from the Samour to
+     the Terek river, from Vladikavkaz to the Caspian.'
+
+By 1840 the Tchetchnia tribes of the wooded lowlands under the
+mountains had broken out into outrageous rebellion, for Shamil had
+established himself in the forests, and was harassing the whole
+Russian border. 'We have never,' wrote General Golovine, 'had in the
+Caucasus an enemy so savage and dangerous as Shamil'; and it was again
+decided to send an overwhelming army against him. The two first
+expeditions virtually failed. Between 1839 and 1842 the Russians had
+lost in killed or wounded 436 officers and 7930 men, and 'had
+accomplished little or nothing.' In 1844 the Emperor Nicholas had
+despatched large reinforcements to the Caucasus, with stringent orders
+to make an end of Shamil's 'terrible despotism' and to subdue the
+whole country. On his side Shamil mustered all his forces for an
+energetic defence. His mounted bands traversed the borderlands with
+amazing rapidity, rushing in suddenly upon the Russian outposts,
+waylaying detachments, and bewildering the commanders by the speed and
+secrecy of their movements. Count Vorontzoff marched against him with
+an army of about 18,000, horse, foot, and artillery. Shamil retreated
+gradually before him, drawing on the Russians, and abandoning his
+forward positions after a show of defending them. He had laid waste
+the country on the line of the Russian advance; so, as supplies were
+running very short, Vorontzoff pushed on hastily toward Shamil's
+headquarters at Dargo. This place, surrounded by forests,
+
+     'lay along the crest of a steep wooded spur of the Betchel ridge,
+     nowhere very broad, narrowed here and there to a few feet, and
+     consisting of a series of long descents with shorter intervening
+     rises. Abattis of giant trunks with branches cunningly interlaced
+     barred the way at short intervals, and the densely-wooded ravines
+     on either side swarmed with hidden foes.'
+
+Mr. Baddeley's vivid description of the hurried advance upon Dargo,
+and of the Russian retreat after capturing it, has all the tragic
+interest of a situation where heroic valour strives vainly against
+calamitous misfortune, and brave men, caught in a well-laid snare,
+tear their way out of it with the energy of despair. The six barriers
+of twisted branches were attacked and carried without serious loss,
+though at one point, where the path along the hill-top was narrowest,
+the troops fell into confusion, suffered heavily, and were rescued
+with some difficulty. Dargo was then occupied without resistance; but
+the army had only food for a few days, and Vorontzoff, instead of
+retiring immediately, resolved to wait for a convoy that was coming up
+from the rear and had reached the edge of the forest. But the force
+despatched to protect and bring it into camp had to pass again over
+the strait ridgeway, where all the barriers had been reconstructed;
+and the Russians again ran the gauntlet of incessant and murderous
+fire, losing one of their generals with many officers and men. There
+still remained the most arduous task of all, to force a way for the
+third time along the ridge with weakened and disheartened troops
+encumbered by the provision train that they were escorting to Dargo.
+
+     'The enemy were in greater numbers than before; the barriers had
+     once more been renewed, and a heavy rain added greatly to the
+     difficulties of the march.... On the narrow neck the advance guard
+     found the breastwork of trees faced with the Russian dead of the
+     previous day, stripped, mutilated, and piled up; it was enfiladed
+     by four smaller breastworks on each side.'
+
+Passek, a daring and fearless commander, was killed in leading the
+attack with other officers and many men. The foremost regiments fell
+back in disorder. Yet the main body, with their general, who charged
+at the head of companies like any captain, struggled along the ridge,
+fighting all the way, though the Mohammedans kept up an unceasing
+rifle-fire, and from time to time they dashed right into the Russian
+line. Nevertheless the predicament of the Russians was becoming
+hopeless, when a fresh regiment sent out to their rescue from Dargo
+threw itself between the exhausted troops and their assailants, and
+thus enabled them to reach the camp. But most of the convoy had been
+lost, the total list of casualties was frightful, and for Vorontzoff,
+with little to eat, surrounded by victorious hordes, encumbered with
+more than a thousand wounded men, the only prospect of saving the rest
+of his army lay in cutting his way homeward through many miles of
+forest. Mr. Baddeley's description of the retreat is intensely
+dramatic. After fighting every step of the road the starving and
+demoralised army was brought to a standstill, and was eventually saved
+from annihilation by fresh troops that arrived just in time under the
+Russian commander on the frontier, who had foreseen the emergency, and
+made forced marches to the rescue of his chief.
+
+Thus the attempt to piece the heart of Shamil's country had been
+completely foiled; and Vorontzoff now confined himself to
+strengthening his fortified posts, linking up more effectively their
+connection, and improving his communications. But in this situation
+the Russians were acting upon the outer circle of Shamil's central
+position in the mountains, whereas their enemy held the interior
+lines, and could choose his point of attack. Shamil's strategy was
+directed toward keeping the whole Russian frontier in constant alarm,
+breaking in upon various and distant parts of the line by incessant
+raids and surprises, in order to prevent concentration of the Russian
+forces on either flank. He made a daring attempt to seize Kabarda, on
+the extreme west of the border, but was hunted out of it by the
+activity of Freytag, the general whose foresight and promptitude had
+extricated Vorontzoff from destruction. This desultory warfare went on
+until in 1847 Vorontzoff, having secured his base, again tried
+conclusions with Shamil, being resolved that it was necessary to
+reduce the fortified village (or _aoul_) of Ghergebil, which Shamil
+was no less determined to defend. On the morning of the assault the
+Russians, in their camps below the precipitous rocks, above which
+stood the aoul, 'heard the melancholy, long-drawn notes of the
+death-chant rising from behind its wall as from an open grave,' the
+sure prelude to a stubborn and sanguinary fight.
+
+The forlorn hope rushed forward, but lost its way and suffered
+severely; the supports kept the right direction and made for the
+breach.
+
+     'A withering fire from hundreds of rifles mowed down the troops
+     like grass. Their gallant commander, Yeodskeemoff, fell dead,
+     pierced by a dozen bullets. The captain of the grenadier company
+     strode over his body and gained the top of the breach, to fall in
+     turn; the men were exasperated rather than daunted; a Danish
+     officer, more fortunate and not less brave than his predecessors,
+     led them forward, and the wall was won. In front was the first row
+     of low _saklias_ (stone houses) and, climbing their walls, the
+     attackers rushed forward, when to their horror the ground gave way
+     beneath their feet, and amid shouts of demoniac laughter they fell
+     on to the swords and daggers of the Murids below. The flat roofs
+     had been taken off the whole row of houses and replaced by layers
+     of brushwood thinly covered with earth; every house, in fact, was a
+     death-trap.'
+
+Nevertheless the troops came on, and most of them got inside the
+village, but they were entangled in the labyrinth of narrow streets,
+and were obliged to retire. Another assault ended with another
+repulse, 'and the victorious Murids, driving the broken columns before
+them, followed until stopped by the bayonets of the reserve.'
+
+Vorontzoff had now been twice beaten off by Shamil: he had been
+repulsed, and had nearly lost his army in the forests; his troops had
+been hurled back with slaughter from the mountain fort. Next year he
+despatched another large army, furnished with heavy artillery, against
+Ghergebil, which drove out the Murid garrison by a tremendous
+bombardment, but retired without occupying the place. During the next
+few years, though wild work went on as usual along the border, where a
+sharp guerilla warfare was kept up, neither Shamil nor Vorontzoff
+attempted to strike any decisive blow. But the lowlands were
+devastated by perpetual incursions and reprisals, and the forest
+tribes, placed between two fires, driven to choose between the Murids
+and the Russians, gradually transferred their allegiance to the side
+best able to protect them, and migrated northward across the Russian
+line. The uninhabited woodlands became a kind of neutral ground which
+neither side cared to occupy; and from this time Shamil's sphere of
+action was confined to the mountains of Daghestan. Then, in 1854,
+began the war in the Crimea, when according to Mr. Baddeley the Allies
+might have ruined Russia in the Caucasus by making common cause with
+Shamil and supporting him vigorously. But England and France were
+absorbed in besieging Sebastopol, and Omar Pasha's Transcaucasian
+campaign was undertaken too late for any effective result. Mr.
+Baddeley considers that in neglecting their opportunity of backing
+Shamil the Allies made a strategic blunder; yet we agree with him that
+this is not to be regretted. For the credit of civilisation it is well
+that they did not let loose the savage Mohammedan fanatics upon
+Christian Georgia and the peaceful Russian settlements beyond the
+frontier, to their own dishonour, and to the misery of the people whom
+Russia was protecting. Shamil did make one foray into Georgia, when a
+party of his men carried off two Georgian princesses, the wife and
+sister of the Viceroy, who were kept by Shamil in rigorous captivity
+and treated cruelly for eight months while negotiations went on for
+their release. His object was to exchange them for his son, who had
+been captured by the Russians some fourteen years earlier, had been
+brought up from childhood among them, and at this time was a
+lieutenant in a Russian lancer regiment. As Shamil demanded not only
+his son but a large ransom for the princesses, there was long haggling
+over the money, but this point was at last settled, and the exchange
+took place on the banks of the river. The princesses and Jamal-ud-deen
+crossed from opposite banks to the escorts appointed to deliver and
+receive them; the youth was then made to change his Russian uniform
+for a native dress and rode up the hill to his father, who welcomed
+him with tears and embraces.
+
+The scene must have been strangely picturesque; and the whole story
+illustrates the accidents and incongruities of warfare between nations
+whose standard of morals and manners is entirely different. The
+abduction and brutal treatment of the princesses were altogether
+contrary to the rules and ideas of modern belligerents; but what would
+have been to the Russians a foul disgrace was to the rude Caucasian
+chief no more than a simple and justifiable method of extorting his
+son's release. On the other hand the Russians had bred up their
+captive at their capital; they had converted him to their own social
+habits and ways of life. And the sequel is instructive for those who
+have yet to learn how completely European education may incapacitate
+an Asiatic from returning to associate with his own people, how
+effectually it may obliterate the early influences of race and
+religion.
+
+     'The fate of Jamal-ud-deen was indeed a sad one. Brought up from
+     the age of twelve years in St. Petersburg and entered in the
+     Russian army, he was now a stranger to his own father, an alien in
+     the land of his birth, and totally unfitted to resume his place
+     among a semi-barbarous people. He had looked forward to his return
+     with the gloomiest forebodings, which were fully justified by the
+     event. As a matter of fact, there could be little real sympathy
+     between his fellow-countrymen and himself; they soon began to look
+     upon him with suspicion and distrust. Even Shamil was estranged
+     when he found his son imbued with Russian ideas, and convinced of
+     Russia's right to the extent of counselling surrender.' ... Nothing
+     'could reconcile him to the change from civilisation to barbarism;
+     he grew melancholy, fell into a decline, and died within three
+     years.'
+
+After the end of the Crimean War the Russian Government could turn its
+undivided attention to the enterprise of finishing the conquest of the
+Caucasus. The preliminary work of cutting roads through the forests,
+throwing bridges over rivers and ravines, destroying the enemy's petty
+forts, and throwing forward detachments to occupy important points,
+was carried out actively during 1857; and in the next summer three
+separate columns, under one supreme command, drove back Shamil's
+bands, and took up strong positions in the heart of his country. The
+inhabitants, severely harried by the Murids, who maltreated
+ferociously all villages that would not join them, took refuge under
+Russian protection; and though Shamil made several bold attempts to
+break through the circle that was gradually encompassing him, he was
+compelled to abandon Veden, so long his home, which was taken in April
+1859. The forest tracts were now entirely under Russian control, and
+the highland tribes were rapidly surrendering to the Russian
+commanders, whose strategy it was to avoid frontal attacks upon large
+bodies prepared to fight behind entrenchments, but to make resistance
+impossible by enveloping movements. In the mountains, which had so
+long defied the armies of the Czar, the local chiefs and their
+clansmen were now falling away from Shamil, who was forced to retreat
+hastily with a few hundred followers to his stronghold at Gooneeb,
+where he entrenched himself for a final stand, knowing well that
+defence was hopeless, yet resolved to die fighting. But his men were
+almost exterminated by the overpowering numbers which the Russians
+threw upon the fortifications in their assault. When the outworks had
+fallen, and the place was practically won, the Russian commander, who
+desired to capture Shamil alive, suspended the final rush upon the
+spot where he still held out, and sent him a message that his life
+would be spared on surrender. He yielded, and rode out to meet the
+Russian lines; but a burst of cheering from the Russian soldiers at
+sight of him so startled him that he went back. A Russian officer
+persuaded him to turn again.
+
+     'Followed by about fifty of his Murids, the sole remnant of his
+     once mighty hosts, he rode towards where Bariatinsky, surrounded by
+     his staff, sat waiting on a stone. Shamil dismounted and was led to
+     the feet of his conqueror, who told him that he answered for his
+     personal safety and that of his family; but he had refused terms
+     when offered, and all else must now depend on the will of the
+     emperor. The stern Imam bowed his head in silence and was led off
+     captive. Next day he was sent to Shoura, and thence to Russia,
+     where later on his family was allowed to join him.'
+
+In the foregoing pages we have run rapidly over Mr. Baddeley's
+narrative of the long and laborious operations by which the Russians
+gradually made good their footing in the Caucasus, and at last
+consolidated their dominion. We have necessarily omitted many curious
+incidents and exploits characteristic of a deadly struggle between
+antagonists representing the collision of archaic with modern
+societies, the clash of two religions eternally irreconcilable, the
+deadly wrestle of assailants and defenders unlike in everything but
+their tenacious intrepidity. The story, until Mr. Baddeley wrote it,
+has hitherto been little known in England. Yet Englishmen should be
+interested in this singular and striking example of the obstinate
+resistance that can be opposed by free and warlike tribes to the
+organised military forces of a first-class European Government; for
+they are not without similar experiences of their own. And moreover
+the long contest for possession of the tracts lying between the Black
+Sea and the Caspian, on the borderland between Europe and Asia, had
+its effect in the wider sphere of Asiatic politics. If the Russians,
+in their wars with Turkey and Persia, had not been constantly
+distracted by the raids and revolts of the Caucasian highlanders, the
+consequences to these two Eastern kingdoms might have been much more
+serious. It will be remembered that at this period (1826-8) we were
+actively concerned in preserving Persia's independence insomuch that
+the Russians had accused us of fomenting hostilities against them. At
+a later time also Sir Henry Rawlinson, writing in 1849, when Shamil
+was still formidable and undefeated, observes that it would have been
+impossible for Russia, with her communications at the mercy of such an
+enemy, to carry her arms farther eastward into Asia, or to contemplate
+territorial extension in that direction. And in a subsequent Note, of
+1873, he points out that not until after Shamil's surrender in 1859
+did Russia begin to push her way continuously along the upper course
+of the Jaxartes river toward Tashkend and the Asiatic midlands. So
+long, indeed, as the mountains between the two seas were unsubdued,
+they formed an effectual barrier to the expansion of Russia into
+Central Asia; but when that frontier fortress of Islam had been
+captured, and when the Circassians had emigrated into Turkish
+territory, the onward march of Russia went on securely and speedily.
+Tashkend was taken and Kokand annexed in 1866; and soon afterward the
+communications between the Russian base in Georgia and the Russian
+garrisons in Turkestan were firmly established. Thereafter the flood
+of Russian conquest overflowed irresistibly the plains of Central
+Asia, until it was arrested by another breakwater, the kingdom of
+Afghanistan. It is true that the North-western Afghan borderlands were
+comparatively open and easily penetrable by an invading force; but
+beyond them lie lofty ranges with passes at high altitudes, guarded by
+a hard-fighting and intractable people, and on the farther side of
+these mountains stands the rival European Power whose policy it had
+been always to retard and obstruct the Russian advance across the
+Asiatic Continent. We may conjecture that if Afghanistan had been
+left, as the Caucasus was left after the Crimean War, isolated and
+obliged to rely on its own resources for defence, the drama of the
+Caucasian wars would have been repeated. The Russians would have
+besieged and reduced without great difficulty this second mountain
+fortress; and after another similar though less protracted struggle
+the Afghans would have undergone the same fate as the Daghestanis. The
+Czar's rulership, solidly established in the two natural strongholds
+that stand on either side of the great central plains, and command,
+east and west, the exits and entrances, would have been supreme
+throughout Mohammedan Asia.
+
+That the Russian armies were forced to halt on the edge of Afghanistan
+is thus a point of cardinal importance, and it marks a turning-point
+in the career of her expansion. It also produced a situation that is
+the outcome of the different strategy adopted by England and Russia
+respectively, in circumstances not otherwise very dissimilar. For
+whereas the Russians had been compelled by imperative political and
+military exigencies to conquer and occupy the Caucasian highlands, the
+policy of the British Government has always been not to subjugate
+Afghanistan, but to preserve its independence and to fortify it as an
+outwork for the protection of the gates of India. It is due to this
+fundamental distinction of aim and object that the history of the
+relations of the British with Afghanistan during the nineteenth
+century, and of their management of the tribes on the Afghan border,
+differs widely from Mr. Baddeley's narrative of events and
+transactions in the Caucasus. Nevertheless in both instances the
+general situation presented a strong resemblance. The Russians,
+pushing their dominion down from the north to the Black Sea and the
+Caspian, were checked and baffled for many years by the woods and
+precipices that lay across the line of their march into Trans-Caspia.
+The British, moving up by long strides north-westward across India,
+came to a halt at the foot of the Afghan hills fifty years ago; and to
+this day they have scarcely moved farther. Here they were met by races
+almost identical in character and circumstances with the tribes of
+Daghestan, fanatically attached to the faith of Islam, profoundly
+influenced by religious preachers, prizing their liberty above their
+lives, and looking down from their rugged uplands upon a great
+military power that had swept away many principalities and subdued all
+the cities of the plain below. If the British had pressed onward and
+endeavoured to take possession of Afghanistan [which had indeed been
+occupied by the Moghul empire in its prime] they would certainly have
+been involved in a series of sanguinary conflicts, revolts, and costly
+expeditions not unlike those which put so severe a strain upon the
+Russian armies in the Caucasus. This, as we know, they did not do;
+they adopted the alternative of asserting an exclusive protectorate
+over the country; they were content to remain outside it so long as no
+rival power was allowed to set foot in it. Yet we know that even this
+much more prudent policy was carried out at a heavy cost. The British
+army suffered at least one grave disaster by the total destruction of
+a division in the retreat from Kabul in the winter of 1842-3. And the
+Afghan War of 1878-80, with the massacre of the British envoy and his
+escort at Kabul in 1879, showed us the perils and difficulties of even
+a temporary and partial occupation.
+
+At the present moment, however, the objects of our policy have been
+satisfactorily fulfilled. The Russians have settled with us the
+frontier line between their dominion and Afghanistan, and have bound
+themselves to respect it. With the Afghan Amir we are on friendly
+terms, and we have taken up our permanent position on his Eastern
+border towards India, reserving to ourselves the control of the tribes
+within a broad belt of territory, otherwise independent, between the
+Afghan kingdom and British India. This tract is intersected by lofty
+ridges running parallel for the most part to our frontier, with
+precipitous slopes toward India, with a few practicable passes and
+numerous gorges formed by the drainage from the watershed, enclosing
+some fertile valleys along the courses of the rivers, inhabited by a
+hardy population that is broken up into manifold clans and sects by
+the configuration of their country. The Caucasus, as we learn from Mr.
+Baddeley, 'is peopled by a greater number of different tribes and
+races than any similar extent on the surface of the globe'; and it is
+precisely from the same causes, difficulty of intercourse between
+villages secluded in the valleys or perched on the heights, scarcity
+of sustenance, inbred jealousy of each other, feuds and factions, that
+the groups of the Afghan borderland dwell apart, become estranged or
+hostile, are at constant war with each other, and cannot unite against
+a common enemy. But while in the Caucasus this trituration of the
+people has produced a multiplicity of dialects, the Afghan borderers
+speak a language that is generally the same.
+
+In Dr. Pennell's book, the title of which stands at the head of this
+article, we have a vivid description, drawn from life, of the names,
+habits, and peculiarities of these primitive communities, with many
+incidental examples of the relations existing between them and the
+British officers who are in touch with them on the frontier. Lord
+Roberts, in a short introduction that may be taken as a guarantee of
+the accuracy and authenticity of the volume's contents, tells us that
+it is a valuable record of sixteen years' good work by a medical
+missionary in charge of a mission station at Bannu, on the
+north-western frontier of India. And Dr. Pennell's experience,
+acquired in the prodigious enterprise of taming and converting to
+Christianity some of the most murderous ruffians and inveterate
+robbers in Asia, has provided him with a rare insight into their
+character, and furnished him with numerous anecdotes of their strange
+inconsistencies and wayward, impulsive nature. On the Afghan frontier,
+indeed, we may survey a situation that has frequently recurred in the
+history of organised governments, whenever they have found themselves
+in contact, and therefore in collision, with intractable barbarism.
+Immediately across the border line may be seen in the Afridi tribes a
+complete and living picture of man in his aboriginal condition of
+perpetual war, under no government at all, in daily peril of ending by
+a violent death a life that in the pithy words of Hobbes is 'poor,
+nasty, brutish, and short.' A few steps back into the British district
+brings us among men, often of the same breed and tribe, dwelling
+without arms in peace and security, pleading before regular law
+courts, learning in English schools, occupied in commerce and industry
+under the protection of magistrates and police. The contrast in
+morals and manners is as abrupt as the transition from the Afghan
+hills to the Indian plains. Such is the frontier along which British
+officers are charged with duties of watch and ward. Their business is
+to guard the Indian districts that march with the wild borderland, to
+prevent or punish incursions by the marauding tribes who have
+continued from time immemorial to live in practical anarchy. They obey
+no laws and acknowledge no ruler, though in emergencies they appeal
+alternately to the Afghan Amir for assistance against the British and
+to the British Government against any encroachments by the Amir.
+
+The Afghan character, writes Dr. Pennell, is a strange medley of
+contradictory qualities, in which courage blends with stealth, the
+basest treachery with the most touching fidelity, intense religious
+fanaticism with an avarice that will even induce a man to play false
+with his faith, and a lavish hospitality with an irresistible
+propensity for thieving. It will be remembered how 'Muridism,' the
+spirit of religious enthusiasm inflaming political hostility, was
+stirred up by the Mullahs of the Caucasus against the Russians, and
+embittered the resistance of the tribes. The same elements of fiery
+hatred lie close below the surface on the Afghan borderland. Dr.
+Pennell tells us that there is no section of the Afghan people which
+has a greater influence on their life than the Mullahs, who sometimes
+use their power to rouse the tribes to join in warfare against the
+English infidels; and that a prelude to one of the little frontier
+wars has often been some ardent Mullah going up and down the frontier,
+like Peter the Hermit, inciting them to break out. The notorious
+Mullah Powindah, who is still a firebrand on the border, is reported
+to possess a magical charm that renders his followers invulnerable
+before English bullets. Whether he led them in person to battle is
+not mentioned; though he could hardly adopt the excuse of Friar John,
+who, as Rabelais tells us, made a liberal distribution of mirific
+amulets to his soldiers, assuring them that those who had firm faith
+in their efficacy would come to no harm. He added, however, that to
+himself the charm would be useless, because unfortunately he could not
+believe in it. Such an explanation would be coldly received among the
+Afghans.
+
+Under the exhortations of these Mullahs their students often became
+Ghazis.
+
+     'The Ghazi is a man who has taken an oath to kill some
+     non-Mohammedan, preferably a European, as representing the ruling
+     race, but, failing this, a Hindu or a Sikh is a lawful object of
+     his fanaticism.... When the disciple has been worked up to the
+     requisite degree of religious excitement, he is usually further
+     fortified by copious draughts of intoxicating drugs.... Not a year
+     passes on the frontier but some young officer falls a victim to one
+     of these Ghazis.'
+
+It is manifest that this sporadic Muridism might become epidemic under
+serious and widespreading excitement, but the provocation that leads
+to petty frontier wars comes entirely from the tribes, who make
+predatory incursions upon the Indian villages and refuse all
+reparation. In every tribe, as Dr. Pennell tells us, the outlaws who
+live by raiding and robbery, and the Mullahs who detest the infidel
+and fear his rule, are the fomenters of crime and outrage.
+
+The vendetta, or blood-feud, our author tells us, has eaten into the
+very core of Afghan life. At present some of the best and noblest
+families in Afghanistan are on the verge of extermination through this
+wretched system. Even the women are not exempt. In a village which
+the missionary visited he noticed that the houses communicated
+laterally by little doors all down one long street; and on inquiry he
+was told that some time before a great faction fight had been carried
+on between the two rows of houses. The villagers 'were always in
+ambush to fire at each other across the street. The only way to get to
+the supply of water was to go from house to house to the bottom, and
+in order to do this without exposure the doors had been made, while by
+common consent they had agreed not to shoot while getting their
+supplies from the stream.' Another anecdote relates how a British
+officer visited a petty chief in his tower, and would have opened a
+window to look at the country round. 'He was hurriedly and
+unceremoniously pulled back by the Afghan, who told him that his
+cousin had been watching that window for months in the hope of an
+opportunity of shooting him there.' In fact the chief was actually
+shot at this window a short time after the visit. From the universal
+enmity existing between cousins in Afghanistan the proverb 'as great
+an enemy as a cousin' has become a household word. 'The causes of 90
+per cent. of these feuds are described by the Afghans as belonging to
+one of three heads--women, money, and land; and on such matters
+disputes are more likely to arise between cousins than strangers.' We
+may compare Mr. Baddeley's account of an almost identical state of
+things in Daghestan. It was split up (he says) 'into numerous khanates
+and free communities of many different races and languages, for the
+most part bitterly hostile one to another. Strife and bloodshed were
+chronic between village and village, between house and house ... and
+of many contributory causes none had operated so powerfully in
+originating and perpetuating this state of things as the elaborate
+system of blood-feud and vengeance.' And he gives one instance of a
+quarrel that arose from the theft of a hen from a villager, who
+retaliated by appropriating a cow. The retort was by taking a horse,
+upon which the murders began.
+
+     'The blood-feud was now in full swing, and was kept up for three
+     centuries, during which some scores, some say hundreds, were
+     sacrificed in the name of honour to this terrible custom; and all
+     for a hen.'
+
+But it may be more interesting to remind our readers that these feuds
+were 'in full swing' not so very long ago in our own island. A
+remarkable description of the state of the Border between England and
+Scotland in the sixteenth century and earlier has recently been
+published.[39] In a chapter headed 'The Deadly Feud' the author tells
+us that blood-feuds set family against family and clan against clan;
+and he quotes from a report submitted by Burghley to the English
+Government a passage in which the term is defined thus:
+
+     'Deadly Foed, the word of enmytie on the Borders, implacable
+     without the blood and whole family destroyed.'
+
+Feuds of the most bitter and hostile character, we are told, were an
+everyday occurrence, and were carried on with the most ferocious
+animosity on both sides. The feud was inherited along with the rest of
+the family property. It was handed down from generation to generation.
+The son and grandson maintained it with a bitterness which in some
+cases seemed year by year to grow more intense. It affected a man's
+whole social relationship, and gave rise to endless animosities and
+heart-burnings.
+
+In fact the whole description in Mr. Borland's book of the feuds
+prevalent three centuries ago on our own Border might be applied to
+those now actually raging among the Afghans, with the simple
+alteration of time, places, and names. The comparison is worth making,
+if only to show that similar conditions and circumstances produce
+everywhere the same results; and that there is yet hope for the wild
+Afghan, if hereafter it should be his destiny to fall under a strong
+government that can enforce laws, though this is the fate which he
+most dreads. No axiom is more easily refuted by historic experience
+than the commonplace saying that men cannot be made moral by statutes;
+the truth is that respect for a neighbour's purse or person cannot be
+inculcated by any other method.
+
+It was the political division along the Scottish Border that so long
+prevented the suppression of lawlessness, and when the two kingdoms
+were united it gradually ceased. On the frontier between Afghanistan
+and India the British Government keeps the peace within its own
+districts, but maintains only a fluctuating and ineffectual control
+over the tribal territory. Yet it is manifest that no permanent
+pacification can be accomplished until both sides of the line are
+brought under the same firm and civilised administration. For such a
+purpose it would be necessary, and would be practicable, to establish
+strong posts among the turbulent highlanders, to make roads, and
+probably to insist on a general disarmament, as the Russians did in
+the Caucasus. But the British Government has always been reluctant to
+undertake so arduous and so costly a task; though until some measure
+of that kind is found possible, the intestine strife and chronic
+disorder must continue; and in fact it is the natural and inevitable
+solution of the problem.
+
+     'No doubt,' Dr. Pennell observes, 'the Government desires not to
+     make any further annexation of this barren, mountainous, and
+     uninviting region, but it is not always easy to avoid doing so; and
+     it is an universal experience of history that when there are a
+     number of disorganised and ill-governed units on the borders of a
+     great power, they become inevitably, though it may be gradually and
+     piece by piece, absorbed into the latter.'
+
+In short, to manage a country without occupying it is no less
+impossible than to steer a boat without taking a seat in it. The
+process of subordinating the Afghan tribes to effective control will
+probably go forward slowly and at intervals. It may be that when one
+part of the country is taken resolutely into hand, the rest will be
+overawed and quieted; but we doubt whether any other remedy can be
+found for the feuds and forays that from time immemorial have
+distracted this borderland, which has preserved the primitive
+conditions of life and habits that have long disappeared from the
+frontiers of all other civilised nations. Yet the objections to
+pushing forward our landmarks into these mountains are great and
+manifest, while the disadvantages of the present system are equally
+patent. The attempt to protect our subjects by a line of outposts, to
+adopt the tactics of stationary defence, varied by occasional sallies
+forth from our cantonments to pursue assassins or to punish
+depredators by destroying houses and crops, is to assume a somewhat
+impotent and undignified attitude, hardly creditable in the case of a
+mighty empire worried by mere highland caterans. The Indian
+Government, therefore, finds itself placed in a dilemma: to advance or
+to stand still is equally difficult; nor is any practicable issue out
+of this situation to be foreseen.
+
+We are compelled, unwillingly, to pass over without the notice that it
+undoubtedly deserves Dr. Pennell's very impressive accounts of his
+intercourse, as medical missionary, with the strange folk whom he was
+trying to reclaim from savagery, of the risks which he faced with cool
+courage and self-command in his travels among them, and of his quaint
+theological disputations with arrogant Mullahs, whose invincible
+ignorance easily convinced a congenial audience of their argumentative
+superiority. His skill in surgery naturally invested him with a high
+reputation among people who were incessantly fighting--he had more
+success in healing their wounds than in curing their vices. His
+general 'Deductions' in regard to the present state and prospect of
+Christian missions in India are well worth attention, and with his
+survey of the existing conditions and tendencies of religious
+movements in India all who have studied the subject will generally
+agree. He lays stress on the delusion that to assault and overthrow
+the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, if such an achievement were
+possible, would be to lay open a clear field for the success of
+Christianity. 'Much more probably we should find an atheistic and
+materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and
+Worldliness had become new gods.' Such attacks upon Eastern religion
+'may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory ... but they are at the same
+time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the
+unquestioning devotion which have been the crown and glory of India
+for ages.' The wisdom and enlightened morality of these warnings are
+incontestable. But at such questions we can only glance, although from
+one point of view they may be said to have an important bearing upon
+the main subject of this article.
+
+In conclusion, we may observe that the frontiers of European dominion
+in Asia are the battleground upon which the forces of archaic and
+modern societies meet in arms for decisive conflict. In the ancient
+world the contest was only ethnical and political; the rude tribes
+were coerced into amalgamation with an expanding State, far superior
+in power and usually more humane. 'The nations of the empire[40]
+insensibly melted away into the Roman name and people.' But the
+antique polytheism had no fanatical element; the deities of the
+victorious Romans were often acknowledged and accepted by the
+conquered population. Whereas in these latter days the Russians in the
+Caucasus and the English on the Afghan border have discovered that in
+the passionate religious animosity between Islam and Christendom lies
+the mainspring of the stubborn energy and fierce hatred that so long
+held their armies in check, and that still prevents the establishment
+of even a pacific _modus vivendi_ on the most important frontier of
+India.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] (1) _The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus._ By John F. Baddeley.
+London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1908. (2) _Among the Wild Tribes of
+the Afghan Frontier._ By J. L. Pennell, M.D., F.R.C.S. London, Seeley
+and Co., 1909.--_Edinburgh Review_, July 1909.
+
+[39] _Border Raids and Reivers_, by Robert Borland, Minister of Yarrow
+(1898). This valuable work, founded entirely on the study of original
+documents, may be heartily commended to all who are interested in the
+political and social life, the customs and traditions, of the old
+Border.
+
+[40] Gibbon.
+
+
+
+
+L'EMPIRE LIBERAL[41]
+
+
+The fourteenth volume of _L'Empire Liberal_, issued in 1909, carries
+M. Emile Ollivier's very interesting reminiscences of that eventful
+period up to the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870. It
+contains many curious particulars of the incidents and transactions
+culminating in the rupture with Prussia that brought about the
+downfall of his ministry and the ruin of the Second Empire.
+Autobiographies by men who have taken a prominent part in the
+momentous scenes which they describe have often the powerful effect of
+a dramatic representation: the actors reappear on the stage; they
+plead for themselves; they give vivid impressions of the scenes; they
+repeat the very words that were spoken; they revive the intense
+emotion of the audience during the contest between those who are
+hurrying on toward some fatal catastrophe and those who are striving
+to prevent it. M. Ollivier's volume is the story of a great historic
+tragedy; the principal _dramatis personae_ are celebrities of the first
+rank; on their speech and action depend the destinies of France, and
+the spectators are the nations of Europe. If we make due allowance for
+the fact that the author's main object is to explain and defend the
+part which he himself played in these important affairs, we may credit
+him with an honest desire to set a strange, complicated, and oft-told
+story in a clear light before the present generation.
+
+M. Ollivier cites, in the first page of this volume, Machiavelli's
+observation that mankind at large judges those who give advice in
+affairs of state not by the wisdom of their counsels but by the
+results. He agrees that this method is not rational, looking to the
+haphazard course of human affairs, but he admits that the multitude
+can judge by no other standard; and he appeals to historians for an
+impartial revision of the popular verdict, founded on careful
+examination of the real facts and circumstances. Yet he fears lest in
+his own country the decline of patriotic enthusiasm, the cooling of
+military ardour, that he notices in France at the present time, may
+have rendered Frenchmen incapable of realising the hot resentment, the
+intense susceptibility to affronts, the element of heroism, which were
+dominant forty years ago in the national character. And he therefore
+has little or no expectation that the falsehood of legends which have
+been circulated regarding the events of 1870 will be proved, to his
+countrymen, even by the most irrefragable demonstration. All political
+parties in France, he says, have combined to hold their own ministry
+responsible for that calamitous war; he despairs of obtaining from
+them a hearing. He awaits with resignation the time when some
+inquisitive student of history may light upon a dusty copy of his book
+in the recesses of a library, and may set himself to explain how these
+things actually happened to readers of the future.
+
+The story of the decline and fall of the second French empire has
+often been told; yet it may be worth while to remind English readers
+of the political situation in France just forty years ago. The Emperor
+Napoleon III., importuned by reformers and reactionaries, by those who
+pressed him to step forward into Liberalism, and by those who insisted
+that he must stand still, had at last decided upon making those
+changes in the form of his government that inaugurated the Liberal
+Empire; and on January 3, 1870, the new ministry took office,
+supported by the goodwill of the moderate party in the Chamber of
+Deputies and by the general approval of the country. M. Ollivier was
+recognised as its leader and spokesman, chosen by the emperor, and
+enjoying his particular confidence; though he was not prime minister
+in the English constitutional sense, for the power of issuing direct
+orders, and of overruling the Cabinet, was still reserved to the
+sovereign; nor was he always consulted in important military or
+foreign affairs. The complex and enigmatic character of Napoleon III.
+is becoming gradually intelligible to the world at large, and public
+opinion has lately been veering round to a less unfavourable
+conclusion upon it than heretofore. He had long been reviled as a
+truculent despot, artful and dangerous, powerful and perfidious; the
+genius of Victor Hugo had set on him a brand of infamy. In reality, if
+we may trust later French writers, there was much that was good in his
+nature, and they are disposed to regard him with compassion. M. de la
+Gorce says that throughout his life Napoleon had been a humane prince.
+From the entertaining memoirs of General du Barail, whose military
+services brought him into frequent relations with the emperor, we
+should draw the impression that the emperor was affable, considerate,
+and sincerely well-intentioned. Giuseppe Pasolini, the Italian
+statesman, found him simple and easy in conversation, naturally
+right-minded and kindly,[42] though weak and irresolute. He was
+equally capable of forming bold projects or adopting cautious
+decisions; but he was apt to hesitate and turn round at the moment for
+action; and it was just here that he was so unlike his uncle, Napoleon
+I., who would have classed him among the _ideologues_ whom he
+despised. He invented the theory of nationalities to justify his
+polity of encouraging the unification of Italy, and of permitting the
+aggrandisement of Germany; in the former instance he alienated the
+Italians by refusing obstinately to allow them to occupy Rome; in the
+latter case his neutrality when Prussia attacked Austria in 1866 was
+the proximate cause of his ruin. He might have read in Machiavelli's
+_Principe_ a warning of the danger of standing aside when the
+neighbouring potentates come to blows. The result, it is there said,
+is that the winner in such a contest becomes doubly formidable, while
+the loser resents your neutral attitude, and will not help you when
+the victor turns upon you with all his strength. Machiavelli declares
+that this policy has always been _perniciosissimo_; and so it proved
+to be in the case of the French Empire. In domestic affairs also the
+Liberal Empire took up a kind of half-way position, which was assailed
+by the extreme parties on both sides; for thorough-going Imperialists
+like Rouher asserted that a Napoleon could only rule by retaining
+absolute authority; while uncompromising Liberals demanded full
+parliamentary control. Ollivier's ministry took office with the avowed
+object of gradually extending constitutional administration; but he
+found that, as Tocqueville had said in his _Ancien Regime_, the most
+dangerous moment for an absolute government is when it endeavours to
+introduce reforms.
+
+General du Barail, in the memoirs already quoted, gives M. Ollivier
+full credit for his honesty, ability, and sincere patriotism in
+undertaking his difficult task, which was begun in an evil hour, and
+failed through adverse circumstance. In May 1870, Ollivier, who was
+holding the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, transferred it to the Duc de
+Gramont, foreseeing no troubles abroad, and desiring to give his
+whole attention to politics at home. The external policy of the
+ministry was decidedly pacific; they relied on a quiet moment for
+developing the new constitutional system; they had no notion of
+changing horses in mid-stream, yet most unluckily they were caught by
+a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that
+Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the
+crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim;
+and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting
+of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of
+French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence
+in Spain was essential to the security of France; while, on the other
+hand, a complete subordination of Spanish to French interests has been
+held by other governments to be dangerous to the balance of power in
+Europe. The collision between these two principles had been the cause
+of great wars and diplomatic quarrels. Louis XIV. only succeeded in
+securing the Spanish throne for his grandson after a long war. When
+Napoleon I. made his nefarious attempt to impose his brother on the
+Spaniards as their king, his pretext was that under the Bourbon
+dynasty Spain had always been a dependency of France; and it had been
+the invariable aim of English policy to prevent a close association of
+the two kingdoms. The question had long been regarded on all sides as
+one of vital importance; and in 1869, when some information of secret
+negotiations between Bismarck and Marshal Prim had leaked out, the
+French ambassador at Berlin, Benedetti, had warned Bismarck that
+France would oppose the election of a Prussian prince to the vacant
+throne of Spain. Bismarck had treated the information as an improbable
+rumour, yet he had carefully abstained from a formal assurance that
+the king would forbid Prince Leopold to accept any such offer.[43] It
+was therefore quite certain that in 1870, when the relations between
+France and Prussia were in a very critical state, the announcement
+that Prince Leopold had been chosen for Spain would be treated as a
+most threatening move on the political chessboard. Italy was under
+deep obligation to Prussia for aid in expelling the Austrians from
+Venice; the St. Gothard railway had been openly promoted and
+subsidised by Germany for direct and secure communication with Italy
+in case of need; and now the family connection which was obviously
+contemplated would bring Spain into the circle of alliances that
+Bismarck was drawing round the French frontier. It was a strategical
+manoeuvre that the imperial government was bound to resist. Within
+France all factions were for once unanimous in demanding immediate and
+resolute protest; and the clerical party, very powerful in that
+country, were especially vehement in denouncing the project of placing
+the scion of a great Protestant dynasty on the 'throne of Charles V.'
+M. Ollivier tells us that when the news first reached him it brought
+upon him suddenly and painfully the presentiment of impending war, to
+the discomfiture of all his efforts for the preservation of peace
+until the Liberal Empire should have been consolidated in France.
+
+The plot--for it was nothing less--had been skilfully concerted
+between Berlin and Madrid; and even the parts to be played in
+anticipation of French remonstrances had been rehearsed. When
+Benedetti went to the Berlin Foreign Office for explanations, he found
+that Bismarck was absent at his country house and the king at Ems; and
+Von Thiele, the Under-Secretary, cut short his interrogation by
+replying at once that the Prussian Government knew nothing of, and had
+no concern with, the Hohenzollern candidature, adding that the Spanish
+people had a right to choose their own king. At Madrid,
+notwithstanding the French ambassador's attempts to check Prim's
+jubilant activity, Leopold's acceptance of the crown was proclaimed to
+all the foreign courts as a matter for joyful congratulation; and the
+Cortes were summoned for July 20 to elect their new monarch. To demand
+satisfaction from Spain would have been to fall into Bismarck's net;
+for the Hohenzollern prince would have been elected nevertheless, and
+if French troops had then marched into Spain the Prussian army would
+have crossed the Rhine, whereby the French would have been placed
+between two fires. It was necessary to fix the responsibility for
+these proceedings upon Prussia, and to act promptly; but the precise
+line to be adopted was the subject of anxious deliberation in the
+emperor's council--that is, in a meeting of the Cabinet presided over
+by him. Finally, Ollivier proposed, as he has told us, to speak out so
+plainly that Prussia must understand France to be in earnest, and to
+say that the Hohenzollern could not be permitted to reign at Madrid.
+Marshal Le Boeuf had assured the council that the army was in the
+highest condition of efficiency and readiness; and when M. Ollivier
+inquired whether, in the event of war, any help from other governments
+could be relied upon, Napoleon produced certain letters from the
+Austrian emperor and the King of Italy, which he interpreted as
+distinct assurances of armed support in the case of a rupture with
+Prussia. The wording of a declaration to be made before the French
+Chamber of Deputies was carefully settled--it was delivered next day
+(July 6) by the Duc de Gramont, and received with immense enthusiasm.
+Some objection was taken, then and afterwards, to its menacing tone;
+but we may agree with M. Ollivier that this outspoken warning to
+Prussia was at the moment judicious and effective; and we may admit
+that up to this point no exception could be taken to the procedure of
+the French Government.
+
+M. Ollivier dates from July 6 the first of five phases, or alternating
+changes (_peripeties_), which the diplomatic campaign, as he terms it,
+traversed in its headlong course. They are successively described and
+commented upon in the chapters of his volume; and they may be here set
+down in his own language, for the guidance of our readers through the
+complicated transactions that ensued:
+
+     'Le premier moment est la declaration ministerielle du 6 juillet;
+     le second, la renonciation du Prince Antoine (11 juillet); le
+     troisieme, la demande de garanties de la droite (12 juillet); le
+     quatrieme, le soufflet de Bismarck et la fabrication de la depeche
+     d'Ems; le cinquieme, notre reponse au soufflet de Bismarck par
+     notre declaration de guerre du 15 juillet.'
+
+These are, in fact, the five acts of a portentous drama, full of
+shifting scenes and striking situations, on the issues of which
+depended the fortunes of France and of Germany; it was played out with
+ill-omened rapidity in nine days. In regard to the train of causes and
+consequences that brought France to the tremendous disaster upon which
+the curtain fell, diverse accounts have been given to the world by the
+leading actors--by M. de Gramont, by Bismarck, Benedetti, and, the
+latest by many years, by M. Ollivier. His narrative does raise
+somewhat higher the veil which has hitherto kept in partial obscurity
+certain dark corners of the stage upon which these things went on. We
+know more now of the precise motives and considerations, the personal
+influences and impulses which diverted the Cabinet, after starting on
+the right path, into leaving it for rash and perilous adventures. On
+some points of interest he is, indeed, still reticent, and on others
+his evidence is in conflict with different narratives; but in regard
+to facts actually known to him we may accept his testimony, though in
+matters of opinion we may sometimes differ from him.
+
+M. Ollivier insists that Gramont's declaration of July 6 was
+altogether _irreprochable_; he writes that he has read it again after
+so many years with satisfaction. He admits that it contained,
+substantially, an intimation to Prussia that she must choose between
+withdrawing the Hohenzollern candidate and accepting war with France;
+but he argues that this straightforward and peremptory warning was
+justified by its effects; that Bismarck was taken aback and
+discomfited by the resolute attitude of the French ministry, supported
+enthusiastically by the Chamber of Deputies; and that Prince Antoine
+was thereby so intimidated as to compel his son Leopold to retract his
+acceptance of the Spanish crown. On the other hand, this stern
+language alarmed cautious deputies, and though it stirred Paris to a
+pitch of wild excitement it was read with uneasiness in the cooler air
+of the French provinces, where the prospect of imminent war met with
+scanty welcome.[44] The foreign governments were startled. Bismarck,
+in his _Reminiscences_, says that it was an 'official international
+threat, uttered with the hand on the sword-hilt,' From the Austrian
+chancellor, Count Beust, came earnest advice against marching hastily
+into Prussia; while the British Cabinet, in particular, doubted the
+wisdom of taking up such high ground, from which it might be difficult
+to retreat, at the opening of a grave and complicated question. And
+our ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons, whose calm judgment and friendly
+counsels M. Ollivier acknowledges unreservedly, exerted himself
+throughout this critical time to deprecate precipitate words and
+deeds.
+
+Simultaneously Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, had been
+ordered to seek an interview with the Prussian king, and to impress
+upon him the necessity of appeasing the just indignation of the French
+people by forbidding Leopold to accept the crown of Spain. The king
+replied, as is well known, that he had treated the candidature
+entirely as a family matter, quite apart from the sphere of
+international politics; that he had nevertheless communicated with
+Leopold, and could give Benedetti no positive answer until he should
+have heard from that prince. If, as has been asserted, the king had
+been cognisant of Bismarck's secret negotiations, this reply was more
+evasive than ingenuous; and we may note that he immediately directed
+his own ambassador, Werther, who was present at Ems, to return at once
+to Paris. M. Ollivier scores the king's order to the credit of
+Benedetti's diplomacy, since it amounted to an admission that the
+question in debate was much more than a mere family concern. And he
+adds that he immediately urged Gramont to allow no more equivocation
+upon this essential point, but to press Werther for a straightforward
+reply upon it. It will be seen that this pressure was carried rather
+too far at the French Foreign Office, with an important effect upon
+the course of negotiations.
+
+But at this juncture supervened the _coup de theatre_, as M. Ollivier
+styles it, which opens the second act of the drama. Olozaga, the
+Spanish ambassador at Paris, had been left in complete ignorance of
+the privy correspondence between Prim and Bismarck for procuring the
+nomination of a king from the Hohenzollern family, and this sudden
+revelation of its result by no means pleased him. He proposed to the
+Emperor Napoleon to despatch to Prince Antoine at Sigmaringen (in
+Prussian territory) an agent of his own, who should use every effort
+to convince the prince that his son must be imperatively commanded to
+withdraw his acceptance of Prim's offer. The emperor, whose sincere
+wish was for peace, consented willingly, and the mission was entirely
+successful. By long and strenuous argument the envoy had finally
+persuaded the father that his son, Leopold, would find himself in a
+precarious position on the Spanish throne, with France alienated and
+openly hostile; and the result was that Prince Antoine not only laid
+on his son a positive command to withdraw, but also telegraphed the
+decision to the principal German newspapers, to Olozaga at Paris, and
+to Madrid. According to M. Ollivier, Bismarck felt the blow keenly; it
+shattered his carefully organised plans; he found himself baffled and
+humiliated; he has himself said that his first thought was to resign
+office.[45] To the king, on the other hand, the news brought welcome
+relief; he supposed that he had now only to await Prince Antoine's
+letter confirming the public telegram, when the dispute would
+naturally drop with the disappearance of its cause. This was,
+moreover, the expectation at that moment of the French emperor, who
+observed that, if France and England were preparing to fight for the
+possession of an island in the Channel, it would be absurd to go to
+war after discovering that the island had sunk to the bottom of the
+sea.
+
+In those days, M. Ollivier explains, any telegram of political
+interest that passed over the Paris wires was communicated, by
+special arrangement, to the Ministere de l'Interieur; and accordingly
+he received a copy of Prince Antoine's message to Olozaga before it
+reached its address. The contents filled him with exultation--he could
+feel no doubt that peace had now been triumphantly secured, mainly by
+the unflinching tone of the Cabinet's declaration. He carried the
+paper with him to the Chamber, where Olozaga rushed up to him in the
+lobby, drew him into a corner, read to him with much obvious
+excitement the telegram which Ollivier had already in his pocket, and
+hurried on to the Foreign Office. Naturally the incident aroused
+general curiosity; the deputies surrounded the minister, and eagerly
+pressed him for information. M. Ollivier tells us that he hesitated
+for some time before divulging his secret; but that on the whole he
+found no good reason for withholding news that would certainly appear
+within a few hours in the evening papers, so he read out the telegram
+to all present. We believe that few men, who had not been trained by
+experience to the cautious habits of official life, would have done
+otherwise. But M. de la Gorce[46] has pointed out that the chief
+minister ought to have kept silence until the renunciation had been
+approved and confirmed by the King of Prussia, who was in hourly
+expectation of Prince Antoine's letter, and whose acquiescence,
+transmitted through Benedetti to the French Government, would have
+probably brought the whole affair to an honourable termination. It may
+be objected that this is to argue from consequences, since known,
+which could hardly be foreseen at the moment; yet one must admit that
+reticence would have been preferable, for we have to remember that M.
+Ollivier was disclosing a telegram intercepted, so to speak, on its
+passage to a foreign embassy, thereby forestalling not only the
+Spanish ambassador but also the French Foreign Office.
+
+The news ran round the Palais Legislatif, inside and outside, and
+spread through Paris with electrical rapidity.
+
+     'En meme temps debouchait du Palais Legislatif une bande agitee;
+     c'etait a qui envahirait les fiacres de la place, a qui les
+     escaladerait, a qui les prendrait d'assaut. A la Bourse, criaient
+     les hommes d'affaires; nous doublons le prix de la course, et au
+     triple galop. Parmi les journalistes, meme empressement et concert
+     de meme nature, et on voyait les haridelles de la place sortir
+     l'une apres l'autre et s'elancer rapides comme des fleches.'
+
+Apparently all this stir and hurry had already affected M. Ollivier
+with some misgivings; for when, on going into one of the
+committee-rooms, he met Gressier, formerly a minister, he assured him
+that he (Ollivier) had no intention of making the renunciation a
+stepping-stone toward further demands. 'To take up that ground,'
+replied Gressier, 'will be a proof of courage, but it will bring down
+your ministry, for the country will never be content with this degree
+of satisfaction.' M. Ollivier soon found that he was right; for a
+crowd of deputies began to protest against the faint-heartedness of a
+government that seemed willing to drop the whole affair, leaving
+Prussia to escape scot-free; and M. Ollivier had scarcely entered the
+Chamber when Clement Duvernois rose with an interpellation asking what
+guarantees the Cabinet proposed to require for the purpose of
+restraining Prussia from inventing more complications of this sort.
+
+Olozaga had taken his telegram to M. de Gramont, who by no means
+shared M. Ollivier's joy over it. He observed that the effect was
+rather to embarrass his negotiations with Prussia, since that
+government could now make the renunciation a pretext for disowning
+the responsibility which he desired to fix upon the king with regard
+to the whole business; and, moreover, he added, public opinion in
+France will consider such a conclusion unsatisfactory. He was at that
+moment engaged in colloquy with Werther, the Prussian ambassador, who
+had presented himself at the Foreign Office, where presently M.
+Ollivier joined them, Olozaga having departed. What followed is
+treated by some French writers as the most ill-conceived of all the
+false moves made by the French players in this hazardous diplomatic
+game. Gramont had been urging Werther to advise the Prussian king to
+write a letter to the emperor, to the effect that in authorising the
+acceptance of the Spanish throne by Leopold he had no idea of giving
+umbrage to France; that the king associated himself with the prince's
+renunciation, and hoped that all causes of misunderstanding between
+the two governments were thereby removed. Gramont sketched out what he
+thought the king might say, and actually made over his note to the
+Prussian ambassador, by way of _aide-memoire_; precisely as in 1867
+Benedetti had trusted Bismarck with his draft of the secret treaty
+proposed for the annexation of Belgium to France, which Bismarck
+afterwards published in the _Times_ of July 1870. M. Ollivier, who
+agreed with and supported Gramont, now maintains that his arrival
+changed the character of the conference, that it ceased to be an
+official interview between the Minister of Foreign Affairs and an
+ambassador, and thenceforward became merely one of those free
+unofficial conversations in which politicians explain their views
+without compromising their respective governments. But we are obliged
+to remark that in our judgment this plea is inadmissible, for M. de
+Gramont has explicitly stated that the interview, so far as he was
+concerned, was official,[47] and Werther could not have been expected
+to appreciate this subtle yet important distinction--of which nothing
+seems to have been said to him--while M. Ollivier should have foreseen
+that Bismarck would certainly ignore it. The result was that Werther
+did transmit to his king the suggestion of the two French ministers;
+that the king was deeply offended at having been required to send what
+he called, not unreasonably, a letter of excuses; that Bismarck used
+Werther's despatch to kindle national indignation throughout Germany;
+and that Werther himself was reprimanded and recalled.
+
+The scene now shifts to St. Cloud, where the poor emperor, who had
+supposed that Prince Antoine's telegram signified peace with honour,
+found a military party eager for war, and hotly asserting that the
+empire would be totally discredited unless satisfaction were demanded
+from Prussia for conniving at the Hohenzollern candidature. The
+interpellation of Duvernois in the Chamber was cited as a forcible
+expression of public opinion. M. Gramont now arrived at the palace
+with his report of the interview with Werther, in which the latter had
+persistently declared that the king had nothing whatever to do with
+Leopold's withdrawal. The emperor's unstable mind began to waver; he
+forgot or put aside his arrangement with M. Ollivier--that the
+ministers should meet him next morning for consultation over this new
+aspect of the affair--and he proceeded then and there to hold a
+Cabinet Council.
+
+What passed at this Council has never been exactly known. The reproach
+of a ruinous blunder lies heavy on those who took part in it. Gramont
+says no more than that the deliberations were conscientious, and that
+every one, including the emperor, earnestly desired peace.[48] M.
+Ollivier tells us, in the volume now before us, that of all the
+Cabinet ministers the Duc de Gramont alone was summoned; whether he
+learnt subsequently who were also present, and what share they took in
+promoting the decision, he leaves his readers to guess. It is clear
+that the proceeding was irregular and totally unconstitutional, and
+other French writers hint that Gramont's silence is intended to shield
+_une personne auguste_ from responsibility for a decision that was
+fatally wrong. When the Council broke up at 7 P. M. (July 12) Gramont
+immediately despatched from the Foreign Office his famous telegram to
+Benedetti at Ems, instructing him to require from the Prussian king a
+positive assurance that he would not authorise the renewal of
+Leopold's candidature--a demand, in short, for guarantees. At his
+office he met Lord Lyons, to whom he expounded his reasons for
+treating the single renunciation as inadequate, to the great surprise
+of our ambassador, who objected so strenuously to Gramont's views and
+intentions that the minister, somewhat shaken, merely said that the
+formal decision would be made public next morning. While the emperor
+and two councillors were then taking irrevocable steps toward a
+collision, and were unconsciously playing into the hands of their
+arch-enemy, the leaders of the warlike faction in the Chamber and the
+Parisian press were clamouring with fury and vitriolic sarcasm against
+a faint-hearted and contemptible ministry that shrank from seizing the
+opportunity of humbling Prussia.
+
+Again the scene changes, this time to the Foreign Office, where M.
+Ollivier, in total ignorance of that evening's Council at St. Cloud,
+sought and found the Duc de Gramont about midnight. He had come to
+ask whether any fresh news had been received from Benedetti at Ems;
+and Gramont answered by showing him the telegram just despatched by
+the Council's order to Benedetti, with a letter to himself from the
+emperor desiring that its language should be stiffened. Naturally M.
+Ollivier could hardly control his resentment at discovering that an
+extremely grave resolution had been adopted and acted upon without
+consulting or even warning him beforehand; that the emperor, in spite
+of his promises to govern constitutionally, had reverted to such an
+extreme use of autocratic power; and that Gramont had made no attempt
+to check it, had even abetted the irregularity. However, the telegram
+had gone to Ems--it was too late to remedy that mischief--but the
+Cabinet would have to answer before the Chamber for its despatch. He
+said to Gramont:
+
+     'On va vous accuser d'avoir premedite la guerre et de n'avoir vu
+     dans l'incident Hohenzollern qu'un pretexte de la provocation.
+     N'accentuez pas votre premiere depeche comme vous le prescrit
+     l'Empereur, attenuez la. Benedetti aura deja accompli sa mission
+     lorsque cette attenuation lui parviendra, mais devant la Chambre
+     vous y trouverez un argument pour etablir vos intentions
+     pacifiques.'[49]
+
+And he at once drafted a telegram instructing Benedetti to require
+from the king no more than that he should agree not to permit Leopold
+to retract the particular renunciation which his father had obtained
+from him; instead of requiring a general assurance against _any
+future_ retractation. Gramont telegraphed accordingly, but in
+continuation, not in correction, of his earlier message, so that the
+latter part of the instructions to Benedetti was inconsistent with the
+former part. But this second telegram reached Ems, as M. Ollivier had
+foreseen, too late, for Benedetti had already seen the king, and had
+been urging him persistently to satisfy the French Government by
+conceding the general assurance.
+
+M. Ollivier's description of the distress and perplexity that kept him
+without sleep during the rest of that eventful night will be read with
+a feeling of sincere commiseration. This, then, he reflected, was the
+first fruit of imperial liberalism, that the chief minister was
+slighted by his sovereign, ill-served and even betrayed by his
+colleagues, and committed, behind his back, to a most hazardous
+policy. He had been too soft-hearted to insist on making a clean sweep
+of the old official class in forming his Cabinet; he had thought to
+replace the decrepit absolutism by a young and liberal empire; and
+here was the personal power reappearing at the first crisis. The idea
+of having given the signal for war was abhorrent to him; he felt
+violently tempted to resign and retire. Yet, on reflection, to tender
+his resignation at such a moment would be, he felt, an act of culpable
+egoism, it would inevitably bring on the war; for the government would
+pass into the hands of a rash and impetuous war-party, manifestly bent
+on marching against Prussia if the king persisted in refusing, as on
+hearing of Ollivier's resignation he would assuredly refuse, the
+guarantees that had been demanded by the Council held at St. Cloud. On
+the other hand, by remaining in the ministry he might still command a
+majority in the Cabinet; nor did he despair of a majority in the
+Chamber to support him in cancelling, at some future stage of the
+negotiations, this demand for guarantees if he could recover the
+emperor's confidence. He might fail, but then he would fall
+honourably, having subordinated personal susceptibilities to
+considerations of his country's interest; so he finally determined not
+to resign office.
+
+Our sympathies are unquestionably due to a minister who, finding
+himself placed, by no act of his own, in a situation of the utmost
+perplexity, resolves to take no account of his political reputation
+and personal interests, and to choose the course that he believes to
+be necessary, in arduous circumstances, for the honour and safety of
+his country. To a British prime minister his duty would have been
+clear, he would have tendered his resignation immediately; but under
+the Liberal Empire the ultimate decision upon questions before the
+Cabinet still lay with the sovereign, and thus the responsibilities of
+his principal minister remained ambiguous and indefinite.
+Nevertheless, though it is easy to be wise after the event, our
+opinion must be that M. Ollivier would have done his country better
+service by resigning office; for though it is very probable that war
+could not have been thereby averted, yet unqualified disapproval of
+the demand for guarantees might have rallied to his side all those
+who, in the Cabinet, the Chamber, and the country, were undoubtedly
+opposed to incurring terrible risks in order to obtain pledges against
+future contingencies. Among the late Lord Acton's _Historical Essays_
+there is a remarkable paper on 'The Causes of the Franco-Prussian
+War,' in which the considerations that may justify Gramont's demand
+for guarantees are fairly stated. It is there argued that the Prussian
+king, who had first 'sanctioned' Prince Leopold's candidature, and
+afterwards its withdrawal, had left the initiative in both cases to
+Prince Leopold. He had thus kept himself quite free to sanction a
+second acceptance as he had done the first--'he held in his hands a
+convenient _casus belli_, to be used or dropped at pleasure';
+remembering that the Hohenzollern candidature had been 'a meditated
+offence, long and carefully prepared, insolently denied, which
+demanded reparation.'[50] But one might reply that the best way of
+foiling these deep and deliberate designs, manifestly contrived to
+provoke war, was to give the adversary no such plausible pretext for
+driving France into hostilities as was furnished to Bismarck by
+Gramont's demand. It is evident, however, that in July 1870 all Paris
+was in a state of irrepressible agitation, that the Imperialists in
+the Chamber were determined to push the Government into a defiant and
+warlike policy, and that they were acting in the foolhardy conviction
+that the French army could beat the Prussians, and that a victorious
+campaign would consolidate the Napoleonic dynasty.
+
+The next day, July 13, is an evil date in the history of France, when
+she was hurried into war by a swift succession and very unlucky
+conjunction of incidents. The Council met early, and decided by a
+majority not to call out the army reserves, although Marshal Le
+Boeuf energetically declared that if there were any prospect of war,
+not an hour should be lost in preparation. M. de la Gorce relates that
+four of the councillors passed grave censure on the irregular
+proceedings of the previous evening, and condemned Gramont's telegram.
+M. Ollivier says that it was resolved not to insist further if the
+guarantees were refused by the king, and for the moment to keep the
+demand for them secret, merely informing the Chamber that negotiations
+with Prussia were in progress. Ollivier took his _dejeuner_ at the
+palace, where the household staff greeted him very coldly, and the
+empress, by whom he sat, turned her back on him. In the Chamber
+Duvernois asked in a surly tone when the debate on his interpellation
+would come on, and July 15 was fixed for it. Everything now depended
+on the issue of Benedetti's interview with the king at Ems, which took
+place early on the morning of the 13th, when they met as the king was
+returning by the public promenade from taking the waters. What
+followed is well known. The king was surprised and disappointed at
+learning from the ambassador that Prince Leopold's resignation had not
+settled everything; Benedetti pressed on him Gramont's new demand for
+ulterior guarantees; the king positively refused to give them, and
+parted from him coldly though courteously, promising, however, to see
+him again after receiving the letter expected from Prince Antoine. But
+in the course of that day came Werther's report of his conversation
+with the two French ministers, which the king's private secretary
+opened and carried, in some trepidation, to his majesty. The king was
+grievously offended; he wrote to Queen Augusta that to require him to
+stand before the world as a repentant sinner was nothing less than
+impertinence, and he sent his aide-de-camp, Prince Radziwill (one of
+the highest Prussian nobles), to inform Benedetti that Leopold's
+letter of resignation had arrived, and that, as the affair was thus
+completely ended, no further audience was necessary. The ambassador
+replied that he was particularly instructed to obtain the king's
+specific approbation of Leopold's action, and was therefore obliged to
+solicit another interview. The king replied by his aide-de-camp that
+so far as he had approved Leopold's acceptance of the crown he
+approved the retractation; but the request for another interview,
+though it was twice repeated during the day, was civilly and firmly
+refused.
+
+M. Ollivier argues that Werther's report in no way affected the king's
+behaviour to Benedetti; he affirms that it made no difference at all,
+and that the king's determination to hold no further intercourse with
+him was entirely due to Benedetti's indiscreet importunity at the
+morning's meeting, which was witnessed, it may be noted, by a crowd
+of observant bystanders. We may assume that the king had at no time
+the slightest intention of acceding to the demand for guarantees; but
+it seems to us impossible to maintain that Werther's report, which was
+put into his majesty's hand at such a critical moment, and which
+undeniably gave serious offence, did not exacerbate relations which
+had already been strained, or induce the king to break off abruptly
+the personal negotiations with the French minister. And we may add
+that if Benedetti had been cognisant of this report, he might have
+understood the king's sudden change of temper, and might have spared
+himself some rebuffs. When the matter came afterwards to his
+knowledge, he declared that the effect on the king of Werther's report
+had been deplorable.
+
+Bismarck had been telegraphing from Berlin to Ems that if the king
+accorded to Benedetti any more interviews he must resign office; and
+the news of Prince Leopold's renunciation seemed to cut away the
+ground upon which he had been manoeuvring for a quarrel with France.
+But his spirits revived on receiving by telegraph from the king a
+brief summary of the Ems incidents, stating that Benedetti's
+importunate requisition for guarantees had been rejected by his
+majesty, who had subsequently resolved
+
+     'de ne plus recevoir le comte Benedetti a cause de sa pretention,
+     et de lui faire dire simplement par un aide de camp ... que sa
+     Majeste avait recu du prince Leopold confirmation de la nouvelle
+     mandee de Paris, et qu'elle n'avait plus rien a dire a
+     l'ambassadeur.'
+
+The telegram also authorised Bismarck to communicate this statement to
+the foreign courts and to the press, whereupon Bismarck gave it
+immediate publication, having made (to use his own phrase) 'some
+suppressions'; having, in fact, maliciously tampered with the text and
+falsified the tone, according to M. Ollivier and other French writers.
+His official organ, the _North German Gazette_, was directed to print
+off a supplement and to paste it up all over Berlin, and copies of
+this supplement were distributed gratis in the streets. A thrill of
+patriotic enthusiasm electrified the nation, who were unanimous in
+applauding the king in defying the French, and mocking at their
+ambassador's humiliation.
+
+     'Dans toutes les langues, dans tous les pays, courait la
+     falsification offensee lancee par Bismarck. L'effet de cette
+     publicite effroyable se produisit d'abord en Allemagne avec autant
+     d'intensite qu'a Berlin. Les journaux faisaient rage.'
+
+This is what M. Ollivier has called 'Le soufflet de Bismarck'; and
+never was the art of changing the tone and import of words without
+altering their substance more effectively employed; for it must be
+acknowledged that the communication to the press was an accurate
+rendering of the facts contained in the king's telegram, which was
+stiff but not actually discourteous; whereas Bismarck put the sting
+into it by little more than adroit condensation. We are told that when
+the king received this revised edition of his message he read it
+twice, was much moved, and said, 'This means war'; and that it rang
+throughout Europe like an alarm-bell. At the same time, and before
+Bismarck's action had been known in Paris, M. Ollivier, as he tells
+us, was struggling vigorously against the torrent of reproaches and
+imputations of cowardice which threatened to overthrow his Cabinet if
+they flinched from the demand for guarantees.
+
+Late on July 13 came a telegram from Benedetti that the king had
+consented to approve unreservedly Prince Leopold's renunciation, but
+distinctly refused any further concession. This, cried the war-party
+at St. Cloud, is totally insufficient; the emperor was irresolute, and
+merely summoned his Council for next day. Ollivier was determined, for
+his part, to accept the king's assurance as conclusively satisfactory;
+and he relates how, on the morning of the 14th, he was engaged in
+drafting, for approval by the Council, a ministerial declaration to
+that effect, when the Duc de Gramont entered his room with a copy of
+Bismarck's circular telegram, and said:
+
+     '"Mon cher, vous voyez un homme qui vient de recevoir une gifle."
+     Il me tend alors une petite feuille de papier jaune que je verrai
+     eternellement devant mes yeux.... On n'echoua jamais plus pres du
+     port. Je restai quelques instants silencieux et atterre.'
+
+At the Council, which was immediately summoned, Gramont threw his
+portfolio on the table, saying that after what had happened a Foreign
+Minister who should not vote for war would be unworthy to hold office;
+and Marshal Le Boeuf informed his colleagues that they had not a
+moment to lose, for Prussia was already arming. Nevertheless the
+Council set themselves to a deliberate investigation of the actual
+facts. Their conclusion, after six hours of discussion, was that,
+according to diplomatic rule and international custom, no exception
+could have been taken to the king's refusal, courteously worded, of
+the interview which Benedetti had, it seemed to them, rather
+pertinaciously desired; but that a reasonable refusal had been
+converted into one that was offensive by its publication in terms that
+were intentionally curt and stinging. Nevertheless Ollivier, clinging
+to any slight chance of avoiding war, persuaded the emperor and the
+Council to agree that Leopold's resignation, as approved by the
+Prussian king, should be accepted by France, and that, on the further
+question, whether members of a reigning family in one country could be
+permitted to become kings in another, an appeal for some authoritative
+ruling should be made to a general congress. But in the course of that
+day the ministers received from various quarters more evidence that
+Bismarck's inflammatory telegram had been sent officially to the
+Prussian diplomatists at all the foreign courts; and they heard that
+Paris was literally foaming with exasperation at their dilatory
+indecision, while the temper of the Chamber convinced them that the
+proposal for a congress would be rejected with fiery scorn. Berlin and
+Paris vied with each other in turbulent patriotism and warlike fury,
+and Marshal Le Boeuf, being again and for the last time questioned
+by the Council, replied positively that the French army was quite
+ready, and that no better opportunity of settling accounts with
+Prussia could be expected. The Council rescinded its former decision,
+and voted unanimously for war. The empress alone (Ollivier notes
+particularly) expressed no opinion and gave no vote.
+
+On July 15 Ollivier pronounced in the Chamber the declaration that had
+been drawn up by himself and the Duc de Gramont. It was to the effect
+that the Cabinet had throughout made every possible exertion to
+preserve peace, but that their patience was exhausted when they found
+that the King of Prussia had sent an aide-de-camp to the French
+ambassador informing him that no more interviews could be granted, and
+that the Prussian Government, by way of giving point and unequivocal
+significance to this message, had circulated it to all other foreign
+governments in Europe. Having spared no pains to avoid war, the
+ministers would now accept the challenge, and prepare for the
+consequences.
+
+M. Ollivier has given a vivid description of the scene that ensued.
+His final words were barely audible in the storm of applause that
+swept through the assembly, and the vote of urgency for the motion to
+provide the necessary war-funds was demanded with enthusiastic
+outcries, varied by angry vituperation of the few deputies who stood
+up to oppose it. But Thiers immediately arose and, in spite of many
+disorderly interruptions, made a passionate appeal to the assembly to
+reflect before precipitating the country into war. His speech, with
+the violent cries of dissent interjected by the war-party, is
+reproduced by M. Ollivier in order, as he says, that his readers may
+judge for themselves how far it merited the unstinted eulogy that has
+since been bestowed upon it; for M. Ollivier evidently considers that
+those who have credited Thiers with heroic patriotism in making this
+strenuous effort to avert the catastrophe have over-praised him. Yet
+with this view we believe that few of those who read the pages in this
+volume which contain the speech will agree. They will admire, rather,
+the courage and fervid eloquence of a veteran statesman who vainly
+strove to persuade a frantic assembly that it was fatally misled, that
+it was plunging the nation into war on a mere point of form, grasping
+at a shadow after the substantial and reasonable demand for
+satisfaction had been obtained by Leopold's renunciation; who reminded
+the deputies that the official papers authenticating the supposed
+insult had never been laid before them, and implored them not to risk
+the issues of a terrible contest upon a doubtful question of national
+susceptibility. M. Ollivier goes so far as to affirm that no one could
+be more justly accused of having brought on the war of 1870 than
+Thiers himself, because it was his vehement condemnation of the policy
+which allowed Prussia to beat down Austria in 1866, and to set up a
+formidable military power on the frontier of France, that inspired the
+whole French people with the suspicion, jealous animosities, and alarm
+which rendered a war on the Rhine between the two nations eventually
+unavoidable. But Thiers in his speech emphatically repeated his
+conviction that sooner or later France must fight Prussia to redress
+the balance of military power between the rival countries; and the
+whole point of his speech lay in one sentence: 'Je trouve l'occasion
+detestablement choisie' ('Your _casus belli_ is ill chosen and utterly
+indefensible'). It cannot be denied that in 1870 the public opinion of
+Europe was on his side: for England and Austria, whose goodwill toward
+France was unquestionable, were foremost in their efforts to deter the
+French ministers from war and in deploring their infatuation when it
+had been proclaimed. At St. Petersburg the Russian emperor told the
+French ambassador plainly that the demand for guarantees was
+unreasonable. Nor is it likely that the general judgment of the
+time--that Thiers did his best to save the empire from a disastrous
+blunder--will have been revoked by posterity, or affected by anything
+that has since been pleaded in extenuation.
+
+'If (said Thiers) the Hohenzollern candidature had not been withdrawn,
+all France would have rallied to the support of your declaration, and
+all Europe would have held you to be in the right; but it _has_ been
+withdrawn with the approbation of the Prussian king, and you had
+absolutely no pretext for making any further demand. What will Europe
+say when you shed torrents of blood on a point of form?' M. Thiers
+concluded his speech by urging the ministers to lay before the Chamber
+the actual documents which, as they asserted, rendered war inevitable.
+
+M. Ollivier, in his reply, declined to communicate certain documents
+which, he said, were confidential and could not be produced without
+infringement of diplomatic rules; and he laid stress on the
+impossibility of tolerating the affront which had been intentionally
+put upon France by Bismarck's circular telegram. And it was at the end
+of this speech that he made use of the phrase which has become
+historical as the typical expression of the levity and rashness with
+which his ministry threw their nation into a tremendous war, insomuch
+that it has become one main cause why he is so commonly charged, very
+unfairly, with the whole responsibility for the blind haste that led
+to the defeat and dismemberment of his country. 'Oui, de ce jour
+commence pour les ministres mes collegues et pour moi, une grande
+responsabilite. Nous l'acceptons le coeur leger.' The words were at
+once taken up sharply and severely; and M. Ollivier went on to explain
+that he meant a heart not weighted by remorse, since he and his
+colleagues had done everything that was consistent with humanity and
+with honour to avert a dire necessity; and since the armies of France
+would be upholding a cause that was just. He now comments bitterly on
+the malignity which has fastened this stigma on his name, merely
+because in the heat and flurry of debate, which left him not a moment
+to pick his words or arrange his sentences, he said something that he
+is sure no honest man who listened to his explanation could
+misconstrue into unfeeling frivolity. And in his criticism of the
+speech in which M. Thiers so vehemently condemned the conduct of the
+ministers he repeats emphatically that the war was not brought on by
+the demand for guarantees, but by Bismarck's false and insulting
+publication of the king's refusal to consider that demand. This
+affront, he maintains, was insufferable. Yet we learn from his
+narrative that before entering the Chamber on this eventful day M.
+Ollivier had found at the Foreign Office Benedetti, just arrived from
+Ems, who had already seen Bismarck's telegram in a newspaper, and
+could have assured the ministers that it was a perfidious
+misrepresentation, since the king had not treated him with actual
+discourtesy. Nevertheless M. Ollivier quotes and entirely adopts the
+'proud and manly' utterances of the Duc de Gramont who stood up and
+addressed the assembly towards the close of the debate.
+
+'After what you have just heard,' he said, 'one fact is enough. The
+Prussian Government has informed all the Cabinets of Europe of the
+refusal to receive our ambassador or to continue the discussion with
+him. That is an affront to the emperor and to France, and if (_par
+impossible_) a Chamber could be found in my country to bear or suffer
+it, I would not remain Minister of Foreign Affairs for five minutes.'
+
+These haughty words (we are told) electrified the Chamber, and a
+committee to examine the papers on which the ministers relied to prove
+their case was immediately appointed. These were brought by Gramont,
+who, however, said that he would not lay before the committee the
+precise words of Bismarck's insulting telegram, because his knowledge
+of it came only from a very confidential communication made to him by
+the French representatives at certain foreign courts who had been
+permitted to see the original, so that the authentic text was not in
+his possession. This excuse was accepted, somewhat imprudently, by the
+committee; and their chairman proceeded to question Gramont closely on
+one point--whether, after Leopold's retirement had become known, the
+King of Prussia had been required at one and the same time to approve
+it formally and to promise that the candidature should never be
+revived. During the debate it had been objected by those who opposed
+the war-party that after obtaining the king's approval, and not till
+then, the Foreign Secretary demanded this promise, and that on this
+new demand the king took offence and briefly declined any further
+interview with Benedetti. Gramont answered the chairman with a direct
+affirmative; he stated that the two concessions had been required
+simultaneously, and M. Ollivier undertakes to prove that this
+statement was correct. He argues, if we understand him rightly, that
+before Leopold had withdrawn his candidature, the king had been
+pressed to advise or order him to do so, and that this requisition
+included by implication the demand for a guarantee against its
+renewal. When Leopold had retired without the king's intervention, the
+royal order became unnecessary; but the implied demand still remained
+in force, and was merely repeated in subsequent telegrams.[51] On this
+we must remark that both Benedetti and the Prussian king entirely
+missed the alleged implication; that the question of guarantees was
+never raised by the telegrams interchanged between Gramont and
+Benedetti before Leopold's retirement had become public, when both the
+king and the ambassador treated it as entirely new; and that at any
+rate such an important and highly contentious demand should obviously
+have been stated with unequivocal distinctness, since any other course
+was quite certain to produce misunderstandings and recriminations. And
+it is no matter for surprise that various French writers have since
+accused the Duc de Gramont of misstating the facts upon which the
+committee reported to the Chamber that the papers laid before them
+amply sustained the ministerial request for the grant of an urgent
+war-subsidy, which was thereupon voted by an immense majority. In the
+Senate, where the money was granted with even more promptitude and
+with zealous unanimity, the proceedings were expedited by a report
+from Marshal Le Boeuf that the enemy had already crossed the French
+frontier, and M. Rouher, a thorough Imperialist, headed a deputation
+of senators to congratulate the emperor, in the name of the Senate, on
+having drawn the sword when the Prussian king rejected the demand for
+guarantees. M. Ollivier reasonably complains that this unauthorised
+demonstration was awkward and mischievous; for while the Senate was
+thus made to attribute the rupture to the king's refusal, the ministry
+was declaring war on account of the 'soufflet de Bismarck'--the insult
+embodied in the Prussian telegram. Yet M. Ollivier, looking back in
+the calm evening of life on these stormy days, might have brought
+himself by reflection to admit that between these two pretexts there
+was little to choose--that neither of them justified a government in
+staking the fortunes of the nation and the empire on the hazard of a
+great war. When Rouher had read his address, the sovereigns conversed
+with the senators, and it was remarked that while the empress was
+lively and confident of success, the emperor spoke sadly of the long
+and difficult task, requiring a most violent effort, that lay before
+them.
+
+Having brought his narrative up to the moment when the Chamber by
+voting the subsidy had practically determined upon war, M. Ollivier
+stops to comment upon and explain the strenuous opposition made to the
+vote by M. Thiers and by the small section of deputies who represented
+the Radical Left. He is convinced that this latter party were mainly
+actuated in their ardent protests by a desire to embarrass and, if
+possible, to overthrow his Government, of which they had been
+consistent adversaries. They had calculated, he explains, on the
+probability that the ministry would flinch from the rupture with
+Prussia, would adopt some pacific compromise that would be rejected
+with indignation by the Chamber, and would be contemptuously expelled
+from office. When this calculation had been foiled by the resolutely
+courageous attitude of the Cabinet, they foresaw (he believes) that a
+triumphant campaign would greatly strengthen the Government and would
+utterly discredit the Opposition, so they changed their tactics and
+fought against the ministerial proposals with accusations of criminal
+recklessness and prophecies of disaster. It is hardly possible, after
+so long an interval of time, to form any opinion upon these somewhat
+invidious suggestions. The action of those who opposed the war,
+whatever may have been their motives, was outwardly consistent enough,
+and the construction placed upon it by M. Ollivier may seem rather
+subtle and far-fetched. At the present day, however, this question
+does not particularly concern any one, though we may agree that at
+that moment no one in France contemplated the possibility of defeat in
+the field. The French army was assumed by all parties to be
+invincible, and the minority in opposition did undoubtedly believe and
+fear that the empire would be consolidated by victories. M. Thiers in
+his speech only touched generally upon the chances and perils of war,
+and even Gambetta voted with the Government upon the conviction that
+success was beyond doubt; while not only in Paris, but in all the
+great towns, the determination to fight was acclaimed because a
+triumphant campaign was supposed to be certain. It was to be
+anticipated, indeed, that a brave and high-spirited nation, very
+sensitive on the point of honour, and confident in its military
+superiority, would respond enthusiastically to the signal of war
+against a rival whose ill-will was notorious, who was accused of
+plotting the injury of their country and of deliberately insulting
+their Government.
+
+A public declaration of hostilities was sent to Berlin, though M.
+Ollivier tells us that his ministry regarded it as a superfluous
+formality which they would have preferred leaving to Prussia.
+
+     'La declaration fut libellee d'une maniere assez maladroite par les
+     commis des Affaires etrangeres, et elle ne fut pas meme lue au
+     Conseil. Elle fut communiquee uniquement par la forme et sans
+     discussion aux Assemblees, et envoyee a la Prusse le 19 juillet.'
+
+This perfunctory method of composition is characteristic of the
+prevailing official atmosphere.
+
+The document was delivered by the French charge d'affaires to
+Bismarck, and in the dialogue that followed between the two
+diplomatists, which M. Ollivier relates in full, we have an excellent
+sample of the Prussian Chancellor's sardonic and incisive manner.
+Bismarck asserted that if he had been present at the interviews with
+Benedetti he might have prevented the war, whereas the king's
+conciliatory tone at Ems had misled the French ministers into the
+blunder of using threats and making intolerable demands, until at last
+they found themselves confronted by a strong Government, backed by the
+Prussian nation in the firm resolution to defend itself. In reporting
+this conversation to the Foreign Office the charge d'affaires said
+that Bismarck appeared to be sincerely afflicted with regret for the
+rupture between the two countries, that he evidently saw, too late,
+his error in having secretly encouraged the Hohenzollern candidature,
+and that the result of all these unhappy complications had left the
+well-meaning chancellor inconsolable. Such a candid confession of
+remorse and regret moved the Frenchman's compassion to a degree that
+profoundly irritates M. Ollivier:
+
+     'Un tel exces de credulite finit par exasperer. Et la plupart des
+     diplomates de ce temps-la etaient de cette force. Bien pietre
+     serait l'histoire qui se modelerait sur leurs appreciations.'
+
+We may agree that the sympathy of the charge d'affaires with
+Bismarck's ingenuous contrition was ill-bestowed. But the tendency to
+fix upon French diplomacy a responsibility for national calamities
+that is much more justly chargeable to the account of the Imperial
+Government, is somewhat unduly prominent in certain parts of M.
+Ollivier's otherwise fair and conscientious narrative of the
+transactions that culminated in the war.
+
+When Bismarck announced to the Prussian Reichstag that war had been
+declared, he was interrupted by an outburst of long and enthusiastic
+cheering. He said, briefly, that he had no papers to lay before them,
+because the single official document received from the French
+Government was the declaration of war; and the only motive for
+hostilities he understood to be his own circular _telegramme de
+journal_ addressed to Prussian envoys abroad and to other friendly
+Powers for the purpose of explaining what had occurred. This, he
+observed, was not at all an official document. He added that a demand
+for a letter of excuses had been made through Werther to the king; and
+the real origin of the war he alleged to be the hatred and jealousy
+with which the independence and prosperity of Germany were regarded in
+France. Upon this adroit but incomplete exposition of causes and
+circumstances M. Ollivier comments with intelligible severity, laying
+stress on the fact that afterwards Bismarck threw off his disguise,
+and openly took to himself the credit of having deliberately contrived
+to bring on the war at his own time. In fact, the later German
+historians have confirmed this statement by their critical examination
+of the records and other evidence; though instead of concluding that
+his conduct was immoral they unite, according to M. Ollivier, in
+applauding his political genius. Almost the whole story of the
+connected machinations by which France was led step by step into war
+have since been disclosed, and the only part which is still unrevealed
+relates to the original devices by which Bismarck and Marshal Prim
+concerted the preliminaries to the offer of the Spanish throne to
+Leopold.[52]
+
+It is cheerfully admitted by the German historians who are cited in
+this volume that the train of incidents which produced so well-timed
+an explosion was scientifically laid by the Prussian chancellor. But
+they maintain that he was only countermining the underground
+combinations of the French, who were known to be organising a triple
+alliance with Italy and Austria for a combined assault upon Prussia;
+and that the journey of the Austrian Archduke Albert to Paris in
+March 1870 convinced Bismarck that he had no time to lose, because war
+must be provoked before these alliances were consummated. And they
+cite the example of Frederick the Great, who disconcerted the secret
+preparations of his enemies by the sudden dash upon Dresden which
+opened the Seven Years' War. This defence of his own very skilful and
+not less astute manoeuvres was endorsed by Bismarck in a speech
+before the Chamber in 1876; nor does it appear to us so untenable as
+M. Ollivier holds it to be. He argues that the fear of being attacked
+by France, if it had really influenced Bismarck's conduct in 1870,
+must have been a wild hallucination, for the chancellor must have been
+well aware that the emperor's policy at that time was decidedly
+pacific, and that his own (Ollivier's) views were still more so. He
+assures us that the project of a triple alliance was intended to be
+exclusively defensive, that it never passed beyond the 'academic'
+stage, or reached any practical form. The confidential negotiations of
+1869 with Austria and Italy had been left, he says, in the stage of
+unfinished outline, nor was it even suspected either by the French or
+by the Italian ministry that they had been carried further. On the
+other hand, it cannot be denied that in 1869 these negotiations had
+been carried quite far enough to inspire the Prussian chancellor with
+serious disquietude, if, as is very probable, he had good information
+of them. We know, from M. Ollivier's very interesting account of what
+passed at the first meeting of the Cabinet on July 6, when the
+ministers resolved to announce to the Chamber their determination to
+resent and resist the Hohenzollern candidature, that the emperor and
+M. de Gramont regarded the understanding with Italy and Austria as
+being much more than academic. It is there stated that when Ollivier
+hesitated to accept Gramont's assurance that the assistance of these
+two Powers, in the event of hostilities with Prussia, had been
+virtually secured, the Emperor Napoleon took from a drawer in his
+bureau certain letters written in 1869 by the Austrian emperor and the
+King of Italy, and, after reading them aloud, told the ministers that
+these writings undoubtedly amounted to promises of help in the
+circumstances that were then actually under discussion. The Cabinet
+accepted these proofs that the alliances might be reckoned upon as
+substantial, so that it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bismarck
+had drawn the same conclusion from the intimations that had reached
+him, and had set himself to provoke a war before the secret
+combinations against him should be ready for action. It must be borne
+in mind that from 1866 he had been deliberately preparing for it,
+being convinced, as he said later, that until France had been defeated
+in the field, his grand design of founding a German empire, with its
+capital at Berlin, could not be realised.
+
+We may therefore be permitted to suggest that the discussion with
+which M. Ollivier closes this volume is to some extent superfluous,
+for it is incontestable that Bismarck had reasons for desiring the
+war, and that France was inveigled into declaring it. In the final
+section he returns to the question whether France or Prussia were
+responsible for the rupture; and after summing up the evidence he
+pronounces judgment against Prussia. It was Prussia that invented the
+Hohenzollern candidature, against which France was bound to protest
+forcibly; and even if it be admitted, he says, that the French Cabinet
+was wrong in taking mortal offence at the insolent official version of
+the king's refusal to receive the French ambassador, there can be no
+doubt that this public affront infuriated the French nation, and drove
+it to the extremity of war. That the explosion was instantaneous he
+regards as a proof that it had not been expected nor premeditated by
+France. All these things are, indeed, neither denied nor deniable, for
+Bismarck's own arrogant revelations leave no doubt that the war had
+been desired and premeditated by that astute and far-seeing
+politician; and though upon the methods by which the Hohenzollern
+candidature was originally started Bismarck is judiciously silent, we
+may be morally certain that the instigation came from Berlin. The
+maxim _Fecit cui prodest_ affords fair ground for this inference,
+particularly when we remember the obvious improbability that the
+Spanish ministry would have gratuitously set up a candidature which
+must infallibly have brought their country into collision with its
+formidable neighbour.
+
+How the French Government fell into a net that had been spread for
+them is to most of us sufficiently clear. Whether the emperor and his
+ministers ought to have detected and avoided it, is the real question,
+and it is practically the only question that concerns M. Ollivier. In
+the final pages of his book, which touch in dignified and pathetic
+words upon the injustice of the reproaches that have been heaped upon
+him and the rancorous calumnies by which he has been pursued, his
+readers are told that, having done his best to defend the cause of his
+nation, he will terminate his work without taking up his personal
+justification, though on one point he desires not to be misunderstood.
+It has been pleaded on his behalf, he says, that he was in fact
+opposed to the declaration of war, but agreed to it under the violent
+pressure of public opinion, or else from reluctance to betray internal
+dissensions that would have broken up the ministry, or for other
+reasons. M. Ollivier insists, on the contrary, that after Bismarck's
+'soufflet' he was convinced that peace could be maintained only at
+the price of his country's abject humiliation; and that he chose the
+alternative of war as infinitely preferable, without the least regard
+to his personal reputation or interests. We may willingly agree that
+M. Ollivier acted throughout from motives of high-minded patriotism,
+and although we cannot acquit him on the charge of grave imprudence we
+may freely admit that he was entangled in a situation of extraordinary
+difficulty. To Englishmen, who are familiar with the regular and
+recognised working of constitutional government, it will be plain that
+he was the victim of a system that had placed him before the public as
+the nominal head of a Cabinet that he was supposed to have formed, and
+of a party in the Chamber that he was expected to lead. Whereas in
+fact he had no proper control over the policy of the Cabinet, and no
+solid support in the Chamber. The emperor presided at the meetings of
+the Cabinet; and it is clear that the ultimate decision in the
+supremely important departments of the army and of foreign affairs was
+still reserved to the sovereign, on whom the Foreign Secretary (as we
+should call him) could urge his views separately, and from whom he
+could take orders independently of the first minister. In this
+radically false position M. Ollivier found himself committed to
+measures on which he had not been consulted, and hurried into
+dangerous courses of action for which he had no recognised official
+responsibility, since they were sanctioned by the emperor's
+unquestionable authority. We have to remember, also, that in July
+1870, liberal institutions had been no more than six months under
+trial after eighteen years of autocratic rule, that the advocates of
+the old _regime_ were numerous and openly hostile to the reforms, and
+that all the ministers of the new _regime_ lacked experience in the
+art and practice of constitutional administration. It is among those
+conditions and circumstances that we must find some explanation of
+their imprudence, and of their inability to make a stand against the
+emperor's weakness, the clamour of hot-headed deputies, and the
+war-cries of journalists; some excuse, in short, for the heedlessness
+with which a well-meaning ministry stepped into the snare that had
+been laid for them.
+
+When, in 1871, the ex-emperor was told of M. Ollivier's earnest
+protest against the cruel injustice of holding him alone answerable
+for the national disasters, Napoleon is reported to have replied that
+this responsibility must be shared by the ministry, the Chamber, and
+himself.
+
+     'Si je n'avais pas voulu la guerre, j'aurais renvoye mes ministres;
+     si l'opposition etait venue d'eux, ils auraient donne leur
+     demission; enfin, si la Chambre avait ete contraire a l'entreprise,
+     elle eut vote contre.'[53]
+
+In a broad and general sense this conclusion may be accepted, for all
+parties concerned were heavily to blame; and manifestly the disasters
+were the outcome of a situation in which weakness and rashness were
+matched against unscrupulous statecraft and the deep-laid combinations
+of a consummate strategist.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[41] _L'Empire Liberal: Etudes, Recits, Souvenirs._ Par Emile
+Ollivier. Vol. xiv.: La Guerre. 1909.--_Edinburgh Review_, January
+1910.
+
+[42] 'Animo retto e buono' (_Memorie_, p. 407).
+
+[43] Benedetti, _Ma Mission en Prusse_.
+
+[44] _Papiers Secrets: Les Prefets._
+
+[45] _Reflections and Reminiscences of Prince Bismarck._
+
+[46] _Histoire du Second Empire_, vi. 258.
+
+[47] 'Rien n'etait plus officiel que l'entretien qui se poursuivait en
+ce moment entre le ministre des affaires etrangeres et l'ambassadeur
+de Prusse.'--Gramont, _La France et la Prusse_, p. 168.
+
+[48] _La France et la Prusse_ (1872), pp. 131-2.
+
+[49] _L'Empire Liberal_, p. 270.
+
+[50] _Historical Essays_, p. 222.
+
+[51] 'Au debut nous avions demande au Roi de conseiller ou d'ordonner
+a son parent de renoncer, ce qui entrainait implicitement une garantie
+que la candidature ne se reproduirait plus. Le Roi ayant refuse
+d'intervenir, et la candidature ayant disparu a son insu, nous avions
+reclame sous une forme explicite, notre premiere demande.'--_L'Empire
+Liberal_, p. 453.
+
+[52] Some light is thrown on these obscure intrigues by Lord Acton in
+the essay already cited. He writes that in 1869 Bismarck learned from
+Florence that Napoleon was preparing a triple alliance against him,
+and sent a Prussian officer, Bernhardi, to Madrid. 'What he did in
+Spain has been committed to oblivion. Seven volumes of his diary have
+been published; the family assures me (Acton) that the Spanish portion
+will never appear.... The Austrian First Secretary said that he
+betrayed his secret one day at dinner. Somebody spoke indiscreetly on
+the subject, and Bernhardi aimed a kick at him under the table, which
+caught the shin of the Austrian instead. He was considered to have
+mismanaged the thing, and it was whispered that he had gone too far--I
+infer that he offered a heavy bribe to secure a majority in the
+Cortes. Fifty thousand pounds of Prussian bonds were sent to Spain at
+midsummer 1870.... I know the bankers through whose hands they
+passed.'--_Historical Essays_, p. 214.
+
+[53] _L'Empire Liberal_, p. 475, footnote. Prince Napoleon told M.
+Ollivier that the emperor repeated this to him several times.
+
+
+
+
+SIR SPENCER WALPOLE[54]
+
+1839-1907
+
+
+Sir Spencer Walpole's death in 1907 left a gap in the front rank of
+contemporary English Historians. To a volume of his collected essays,
+published in the following year, his daughter, Mrs. F. Holland,
+prefixed an admirable memoir of his private life and character, with
+affectionate reminiscences of her father's 'strenuous work, his
+universal kindliness, and his simplicity of soul.' On this personal
+subject, therefore, little or nothing remains to be said. I will only
+add that during several years of intimacy with him I had every reason
+to feel honoured by his friendship, to set high value on his literary
+judgments, and to appreciate his scrupulous intellectual integrity.
+
+From that memoir I take the main incidents that belong to Sir Spencer
+Walpole's personal biography. After leaving Eton he entered the Civil
+Service at an early age, and worked for some time in the War Office,
+until he was transferred to a position of larger independence. He was
+subsequently appointed to the Governorship of the Isle of Man, where
+he remained for about twelve years; and afterwards he became Secretary
+to the Post Office until his retirement in 1899. In the discharge of
+the duties of these offices he was indefatigable; his services were
+fully approved by all with whom he came into public relations; yet
+throughout these years he found time for hard and unceasing literary
+work. In his earlier days he was a regular contributor to the
+periodical press, mainly on questions of finance; he wrote the lives
+of two Prime Ministers--his grandfather Spencer Perceval and Lord John
+Russell--while from 1876 up to the year of his death he was engaged
+upon his _History of England_. Five volumes were published, at
+intervals, on the period between 1815 and 1857; and four subsequent
+volumes, under the title of the _History of Twenty-five Years_,
+brought the whole narrative up to 1880. But the proofs of the two
+final volumes had not been revised by his hand, when he was struck
+down by a sudden and fatal malady of the brain. Other recent
+publications were a small book on the Isle of Man, entitled the _Land
+of Home Rule; Studies in Biography_; and the collection of essays to
+which I have already referred.
+
+It is upon this History of England from 1815 to 1880 that Sir Spencer
+Walpole's lasting reputation, as a man of letters, will rest. To have
+combined the writing of such a book with the duties of a very diligent
+official is no slight achievement; though one may observe that direct
+contact with administration, with political affairs, and with
+parliamentary leaders, is for the historian a distinct advantage. It
+is worth remarking that his family connections, which brought Walpole
+into the Civil Service, in no way biased his judgment on public
+questions. The grandson of a high Tory Prime Minister, the son of a
+Conservative Secretary of State, he was throughout his life an
+advanced Liberal, with an unswerving trust in popular government as
+essential to the welfare of his country and to the just and proper
+management of its affairs at home and abroad. His literary bent was
+evidently taken from hereditary association with politics, and from
+his own official training. As an historian he enters with intense
+interest into the strife of parties, the parliamentary vicissitudes,
+into the swing backward and forward of reform and reaction, into the
+exact causes and incidents that affected the rise and the fall of
+ministries. In describing the state of manners at certain periods, and
+the changes wrought in the national life by the efforts of philosophic
+writers and philanthropists, his facts and figures are always ample
+and accurate; he pays close attention to financial and economical
+movements. As a politician he distrusted the spirited policy that
+involved England in the warlike adventures and hazards of an eventful
+and stirring time. The Afghan war of 1838-43 was, he said, the most
+ruinous and unnecessary war which the English had ever waged. The
+Crimean war he evidently regarded as a useless expenditure of blood
+and money, which might well have been avoided. On Lord Beaconsfield's
+Imperialism he passes severe censure: and the interference of that
+statesman in 1877 to protect the Turkish Sultan against Russia is very
+sharply condemned. He has even some doubt whether the purchase of the
+Suez Canal Shares was a wise stroke of policy. This book, in short, is
+a corroboration of the well-known remark that the history of our
+country has been mainly written by Whigs and Liberals, with the
+exception of a few authors who, like Hume and Alison, have hardly
+preserved an historic reputation. Nevertheless, whether we agree or
+not with the prudent and pacific views towards which Walpole
+manifestly leaned, his narrative, his statements of disputable cases,
+his distribution of the arguments for and against his conclusions, are
+invariably accurate, fair, and dispassionate. His anxiety to give full
+authority for facts and opinions is shown in an almost too copious
+supply of foot-notes. Lord Acton, who found the late Bishop Creighton
+too economical of these citations, compares his practice to Mr.
+Walpole's if several hundred references to Hansard and the Annual
+Register had been struck out from the History of England.
+
+In his preface to the first volume the author explains briefly the
+method that he has adopted. History, he says, may be written in two
+ways--you may relate each event in chronological order, or you may
+deal with each subject in a separate episode--and he tells us that he
+has chosen the latter way. This method enabled him to introduce
+sketches of the state of English society at different periods, by way
+of illustrating his narrative, which are certainly attractive and
+impressive. They are composed to a large degree upon the model set by
+Macaulay, by grouping together a number of characteristic particulars
+to bring out into strong relief the morals and manners of the time.
+Walpole's picture of the Eton boy in the early nineteenth century, who
+could write admirable Greek and Latin verse but knew not a word of any
+modern language--'who regarded the Gracchi as patriots but had only an
+obscure notion that Adam Smith was a dangerous character'--is almost a
+parody of Macaulay's style. Nevertheless these sketches are on the
+whole truthful and instructive, if we allow for some exuberance of
+colouring that may have been thought necessary for artistic effect.
+
+But Walpole studied literature, as the measure of intellectual
+evolution, with the same interest that he devoted to economical and
+administrative developments. His aim was to show how all kinds of
+mental and material activity acted and reacted upon each other, how
+the feelings and aspirations of the nation were reflected in
+philosophy and in poetry, and how literary genius could stir the
+imagination of the people. He observes that while English literature
+had declined towards the close of the eighteenth century, it rose
+again rapidly with the opening of the nineteenth century. For a short
+time, indeed, the furious outbreak of the French Revolution had scared
+men of letters into recoil from the optimistic speculations of the
+preceding age--they abandoned the worship of Liberty. But the storm
+blew over; and a general revival of literary animation signalised the
+end of the long war-time, with a magnificent efflorescence of poetry.
+Walpole records, as notable signs of this intellectual expansion, the
+appearance of women in the field of literature, the immediate success
+of the two famous reviews, the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, and
+the rapid growth of journalism. The whole subject of mental progress
+has, indeed, a peculiar charm for him. He insists that 'the history of
+human thought is the most comprehensive and the most difficult subject
+which can occupy the student's attention, far more interesting and
+important than the progress of society.' He would probably have agreed
+with Coleridge that knowledge of current speculative opinions is the
+surest ground for political prophecy; and he delights in tracing back
+to distant sources the religious movements of the nineteenth century.
+He declares that the heroic measures introduced by legislation within
+our own recollections are the links of a continuous chain extending
+from a prehistoric past to an invisible future. We have here a writer
+who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical
+calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal
+pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas and the
+march of mind.
+
+There are at least two chapters in the History that exemplify the
+attention given by Walpole to ecclesiastical controversies, and to the
+significance of the antagonism between the New Learning and dogmatic
+orthodoxy. In his fourth volume the story of the Oxford Tractarians is
+related at some length, and he remarks on the singular coincidence,
+that almost simultaneously with the secession of the English High
+Churchmen the Free Church was established by disrupture from the
+Established Church in Scotland. He affirms that both these schisms, so
+different in motive and direction, had their origin in events dating
+from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The disintegrating
+forces of geology, astronomy, and scientific research generally upon
+the received tradition are examined; the beginning of modern Church
+reform is noted; and in a chapter of the final volume of the _History
+of Twenty-five Years_ it is maintained that the great question before
+the religious world in the middle of the nineteenth century was the
+possibility of resisting the inroads of science. He describes the
+vigour with which the polemical campaign was conducted on both sides;
+how the orthodox position was assailed by writers of the _Essays and
+Reviews_, by the criticism of Bishop Colenso, by Broad Churchmen and
+the champions of free thought; how it was defended by prosecutions in
+the ecclesiastical courts and in appeals to the Privy Council from
+both parties. It was certainly a remarkable epoch in the history of
+opinions, when the country was agitated by the ardent zeal of
+disputants over questions of ritual and dogma that now seem to have
+fallen into cool neglect; and Walpole gives, as usual, a careful array
+of the particular cases, with the points in debate, and the
+characteristics of the prominent leaders in each party. To estimate
+the position of the clergy as a body, and to show, as Walpole
+undertakes to do, that in the middle of the nineteenth century they
+were losing caste as a class, and that between the middle and end of
+that century they had fallen in social status, was a much more
+difficult and delicate problem. All generalisations upon the condition
+of society in times that have passed away, however recently, are of
+doubtful value, because the evidence of documents must always be
+incomplete, and even personal recollections are partial and become
+indistinct; they are all seen in a fading and uncertain light.
+Moreover the chronicler of disputations over ritual and articles, and
+of matters concerning churches and the clergy, may be said to move
+over the surface of the spiritual waters; and Walpole draws nearer to
+the deeper undercurrents when he appeals to the higher literature for
+signs of alternating tendencies of religious thought in that
+generation; though the famous stanzas from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,'
+which he quotes at the end of his chapter, represent rather the poetic
+than the philosophic conclusions of thinkers in the nineteenth
+century.
+
+But Walpole was quite aware of the difficulties that beset any writer
+who endeavours to relate the history of a very recent period,
+especially of that part to which his own lifetime belongs, and to pass
+judgments on the conduct or opinions of statesmen and writers who may
+be still living, or have only lately departed. Yet, as Lord Acton has
+said, the secrets of our own time cannot be learnt from books, but
+from men; and Walpole's social relations, his personal popularity, his
+familiarity with official business, and his literary culture, provided
+him with valuable opportunities for composing his last four volumes
+from direct impressions of his subject, for preserving the right
+atmosphere. His studies in biography show an aptitude for personal
+delineation; and in one of his earlier volumes there is a full-length
+portrait of Sir Robert Peel, executed with much skill and
+comprehension. Therein lay the artistic quality of his work; he aimed
+at the presentation of individual character and action; he laid stress
+on the influence of remarkable men on their country's fortunes; for
+true historical art is concerned with bringing prominent figures into
+formal relief, and with arranging a mass of disorderly facts under
+some scheme that produces a definite impression. Otherwise Walpole's
+style was clear, level, and straightforward; with no pretence to be
+ornamental. Perhaps the best example of his talent for well-ordered
+and compact narrative is found in two chapters of the fifth volume of
+the History, which contain an excellent summary of the rise and
+expansion of British dominion in India during the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries, with a very correct appreciation of the causes
+and circumstances to which that memorable episode in the annals of the
+British Empire is due.
+
+Walpole lived just long enough to bring his historical work, which
+occupied him for about thirty years, to the end which he had assigned
+to it. In traversing such an extensive and varied field of arduous
+labour some errors and shortcomings were inevitable, for the history
+of England in the nineteenth century is the history of the British
+Empire at its climacteric, of moral and material changes and
+developments more numerous and perhaps more important than in any
+former century. Nor did he limit his survey to the particular period
+that he had chosen; for his theory, as he has stated it, of the
+function of history, was that it shall not merely catalogue events but
+shall go back to an analysis of their causes, and of the general
+progress of the human family. He believed, with Lord Acton, that the
+recent past contained the key to the present time. It has been said
+that Walpole undertook to do for the nineteenth century what Lecky did
+for the eighteenth century: and we may agree that both historians have
+filled up, with distinguished merit and ability, large vacant spaces
+in the history of our country. Perhaps Lecky had more of the
+philosophic mind, while the distance of time that lay between that
+writer and his period enabled him to see men and things in their true
+proportion, and to judge of events by their outcome. Walpole, on the
+other hand, wrote under the disadvantages as well as the advantages of
+close proximity to the scenes which he described; and the conclusion
+of his history marks the fall of the curtain on a drama of which the
+final acts are still to be played out.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[54] _Proceedings of the British Academy_, vol. iii.
+
+
+
+
+REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY[55]
+
+
+Since I have accepted, at the request of your Warden, the honour of
+delivering an inaugural address on this occasion, it has appeared to
+me appropriate to choose, for such an audience, some literary subject.
+And I propose, with some diffidence, to offer a few observations on
+the reading of history, because in these latter days, when education
+has come in upon us like a flood, rising higher and spreading wider
+every year among our people, no part of literature is more sedulously
+studied than the field of history. On the other hand, this field is
+being very rapidly enlarged. It has been said that the output of
+histories during the nineteenth century has exceeded in bulk and
+volume the production of all previous centuries. And in all the
+countries now standing in the forefront of civilisation, the chief
+product of their serious literature is at this time historical and
+biographical--for I take authentic biography to be a kind of handmaid
+of history. It has been reported that during the ten years ending 1907
+there were published in England 5498 books under the head of history,
+and 1059 biographies. Moreover, of those who are not actually writing
+history, an important number are occupied in criticising the
+historians.
+
+Now the first observation that I submit to you is that the production
+of all history has been almost entirely the work of Europeans, among
+whom I reckon the American writers, as belonging by language and
+culture to Europe. So far as the African continent has any trustworthy
+history, it is in some European language. In Asia there have been
+annalists, chroniclers, and genealogists, mostly Mohammedan, who
+narrate the wars and exploits of great conquerors, the succession of
+kings, and the rise and fall of dynasties. And I believe that in China
+official record of public events and transactions has been kept up
+from very early ages. But if we measure these Asiatic narratives by
+the standard of literary merit and the demand for authentication of
+facts, I fear that they will be found wanting; though they may be
+relied upon to give the general course of important events, and an
+outline of the result of battles and the upsetting of thrones.
+
+When these Asiatic chroniclers wrote of the times in and near which
+they were living, they were fairly trustworthy. But whenever they
+attempted to write of times long past and of countries unknown to them
+personally, their narratives became for the most part fabulous and
+romantic, confused and improbable, with some grains of truth here and
+there. Our best information regarding the earlier ages of Asia is
+derived, I think, from Greek and Latin literature, and latterly from
+the researches of quite modern scholars and archaeologists. So that it
+may be affirmed that authentic history began in Europe, and that to
+Europe it has ever since been practically confined. At this day the
+history of all parts of the world is being written by Europeans. The
+result has been that for the last 2500 years historical material,
+collected from and relating to all parts of the world, has been
+accumulating in Europe.
+
+Such masses of records and monuments necessarily require methodical
+treatment by men of trained intelligence and of untiring industry,
+learned, and accurate. Their systematic labours, their acute and
+intelligent criticism, have created what is now usually termed the
+Science of History, which abstracts general conclusions from the mass
+of particulars. And so, I think, we may agree with Renan, who has
+declared that to the nineteenth century may be accorded the title of
+the Age of Historians, and that this has been the special distinction
+of that century's literature.
+
+Now I believe that the question, whether history is an art or a
+science, is not yet universally settled. But whatever may be the case
+in these modern days, I submit that in earlier times, and certainly
+when history began to be written, it was mainly an art. Indeed, it
+could hardly have been otherwise. In all ages and countries, from the
+time when men first attained to some stage of elementary culture, they
+have been curious about the past, they have enjoyed hearing of the
+deeds and fame of their ancestors, of far-off things and battles long
+ago. But the primitive chronicler had very slight material for his
+stories of bygone times--he had few, if any, documents--he was himself
+creating the documentary evidence for those who came after him; he
+could only compile his narratives from tradition, legends, anecdotes
+of heroic ancestors, from information picked up by travel to famous
+places, and so on. Yet from sources of this kind he composed tales of
+inestimable value as representing the ideas, habits, and social
+condition of preceding generations that were very like his own.
+Herodotus, who is our best example of the class, reconstructs,
+revives, and relates conversations that neither he nor his informants
+could have actually heard; but he does this in order to give a
+dramatic version of great events. In the opening sentence of his first
+book he says that he has written in order that the actions of men may
+not be effaced by time, nor great and wondrous deeds be deprived of
+renown. And one may notice the same style and method in the
+historical books of the Old Testament. In both these ancient histories
+the narratives represent life, action, speech, situations.
+
+It is futile, I may suggest, to subject work of this sort to critical
+analysis by attempting to sift out what is probably true from what is
+certainly false. You only break up the picture, you destroy the
+artistic effect, which is at least a true reflection of real life.
+Moreover, it is dangerous for learned men sitting in libraries to
+regard as incredible facts stated by these old writers. The legend of
+Romulus and Remus having been suckled by a wolf has been dismissed as
+a childish fable. Yet it is certain that this very thing has happened
+more than once in the forests of India within the memory of living
+men. You cannot be particular about details, you must take the story
+as a whole.
+
+From this standpoint we may agree, I think, that in illiterate times,
+and, indeed, throughout the middle ages of Europe, history-writing was
+practised as an art. The unlearned chronicler wrote in no fear of
+critics or sceptics; he drew striking scenes and portraits; he
+described warlike exploits; he related characteristic sayings and
+dialogues which completely satisfied his audience or his readers. The
+society in which he lived was not far different, in morals and
+manners, from that which he portrayed, so that he can have committed
+very few anachronisms or incongruities; and in sentiments and
+character-drawing he could not go far astray. He produced, at any
+rate, vivid impressions of reality, just as Shakespeare's historical
+plays have stamped upon the English mind the figures of Hotspur or
+Richard III., which have been thus set up in permanent type for all
+subsequent ages. At any rate portraits of this kind have not been
+modernised to suit the taste of a later age, as has been done with
+King Arthur in Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King.' And when work of this
+sort has been finely executed, the question whether the details are
+untrustworthy or even fictitious is immaterial, particularly in cases
+where the precise facts can never be recovered. We do not know exactly
+how the battle of Marathon, or, indeed, the battle of Hastings, was
+fought, but we have in the chronicles something of great value--a true
+outline of the general situation, and some stirring narratives of the
+clash and wrestling of armed men, compiled either at first hand from
+the recollections of those who were actually on the field, or else
+taken at second hand from others who made notes of what had been told
+them by those present at the battles. This, then, is what I meant when
+I said that in early times history was an art. Its method was
+picturesque.
+
+Now my next observation is that, although the science of history has
+since been invented, we have, among quite modern English writers, men
+of singular genius, who have to some extent followed the example,
+adopted the manner, of the ancient annalist. Like him, they are
+artists, their aim has been to depict famous men, to reproduce
+striking incidents and scenes dramatically. Their technical methods,
+so to speak, are entirely different from those of the old chronicler,
+who sketched with a free hand, and trusted largely to his
+inspirations, to his own experience of what was likely to have been
+said or done, or to popular tradition, which is always animated and
+distinct. The modern historian, of what I may call the school of
+impressionists, has no such experience, he knows nothing personally of
+violent scenes or fierce deeds; he composes his picture of things that
+happened long ago from a mass of papers, books, memoirs, that have
+come down to us. Yet although style and substance are quite different,
+the chief aim, the design, of the ancient and modern artist in
+history is the same. They both strive to set before their reader a
+vision of certain scenes and figures at moments of energetic
+action--not only to tell him a story, but to make him see it. Let me
+give an example. Every one here may remember the story in the Old
+Testament (2nd Book of Kings) of Jehu driving furiously into Jezreel,
+how on his way he smote Ahaziah, king of Judah, with an arrow, and how
+Jezebel, the Phoenician Queen, was hurled down out of her palace
+window to be devoured by dogs in the street. And some of you may have
+read in Froude's _History of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth_ his
+description of the murder of David Rizzio by the fierce Scotch nobles,
+how he was killed clinging to Queen Mary's knees in her chamber in
+Holyrood Palace. Now the manner, the artistic presentation of
+ferocious action, are in both cases alike; we have the words spoken
+and the deeds done; we can look on at the bloody tragedy; we have a
+dramatic version of the story. The ancient writer of the Old Testament
+probably did his work naturally, instinctively; he tells the story as
+he received it by word of mouth, briefly--laying stress only on the
+things that cut into the imagination of an eye-witness, and remain in
+the memory of those to whom they were related. He troubles us with no
+moral reflections, but goes on quietly to the next chapter of
+incidents. The modern historian has composed his picture from details
+collected by study of documents; he puts in adjectives as a painter
+lays on colour; yet the effect, the impression, is of the same
+quality: it is artistic.
+
+Now the principal English historians of the modern school, who revived
+what one may call the dramatic presentation of history, I take to be
+Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle. They all worked upon genuine material,
+upon authentic records of the period which they were writing about.
+Lord Acton mentions that Froude spoke of having consulted 100,000
+papers in manuscript, at home and abroad, for one of his histories.
+Macaulay was industrious and indefatigable. Yet Ranke, the great
+German historian, said of Macaulay that he could hardly be called a
+historian at all, judged by the strict tests of German criticism. And
+Freeman, the English historian, brought violent charges against Froude
+of deliberately twisting his facts and misquoting his authorities;
+though I believe that Freeman's bitter jealousies led him into grave
+exaggerations. Then take Carlyle. His Cromwell is a fine portrait by
+an eminent literary artist. But is it a genuine delineation of the man
+himself, of his motives, of the working of his mind in speech and
+action? Later investigation, minute scrutiny of old and new material,
+suggest doubts, different interpretations of conduct and character.
+Take, again, his description of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell's great
+victory. Carlyle explains to us the nature of the ground, the
+movements of the troops, the tactics, the points of attack, with
+admirable force and clearness--it is a marvellous specimen of literary
+execution. Yet recent and very careful examination of the locality,
+and a comparison of the evidence of eye-witnesses, have proved beyond
+doubt that Carlyle had not studied the ground, had made some important
+errors. He was, in fact, giving a dramatic representation of the
+battle, which, if it had come down to us from some mediaeval annalist,
+would have been universally accepted as genuine. In short, these three
+artists have all suffered damage under scientific treatment.
+
+Now I am not here to disparage Macaulay, Froude, or Carlyle. They were
+all, in my opinion, authors of rare genius, whose places in the
+forefront of the literature of the nineteenth century are permanently
+secure. Yet I fear that the tendency of the twentieth century is
+unfavourable to the artistic historian. It seems to me probable, much
+to my personal regret, that the scientific writing of history, based
+upon exhaustive research, accumulation and minute sifting of all
+available details, relentless verification of every statement, will
+gradually discourage and supersede the art of picturesque composition.
+In the first place the spirit of doubt and distrust is abroad, every
+statement is scrutinised and tested. The imaginative historian cannot
+lay on his colours, or fill up his canvas, by effective and lively
+touches without finding his work placed under the microscope of
+erudite analysts, some of whom, like Iago, are nothing if not
+critical, are not only exact but very exacting. In these days a writer
+who endeavours to illuminate some scene of ages past, to show us, as
+by a magic lantern, the moving figures brought out in relief against
+the surrounding darkness, is liable to be set down as an illusionist,
+possibly even as a charlatan or conjurer. Yet one feels the charm of
+the splendid vision, though it may fade into the light of common day
+when it falls under relentless scrutiny, and one is haunted by the
+doubt whether the scientific historian, with all his conscientious
+accuracy, is after all much nearer the reality than the literary
+artist. For it is seriously questionable whether the precise truth
+about bygone events and men long dead can ever actually be discovered,
+whether, by piecing together what has come down to us in documents, we
+can resuscitate from the dust-heap of records the state of society
+many centuries ago. And in regard to historical portrait painting Lord
+Acton has warned intending historians to seek no unity of
+character--to remember that allowance must always be made for human
+inconsistencies; that a man is never all of one piece. But cautious
+conclusions, nice weighing of evidence, do not satisfy the ordinary
+reader. The vivid impressions that are stamped on his mind by the
+power of style are what he mostly requires and retains; and these we
+are all reluctant to lose. We must concede to the writer, as to the
+painter, some indulgence of his imaginative faculty. Otherwise we must
+leave the battle scenes and the national portrait gallery to the poets
+and romancers of genius--to Shakespeare and Walter Scott, whose art
+had nothing to gain from accuracy, who have only to give us the types,
+the right colouring and strong outline of life and character in days
+bygone.
+
+However, I think we shall be compelled to accept the change from the
+artistic to the scientific school of historians, though we may regret
+it as unavoidable. It is the vast enlargement of the field of
+historical study, the strong critical searchlight that is turned on
+all the dark corners and outlying tracts of this field, that is
+irresistibly affecting the work of writers, enforcing the need of
+caution, of scrutinising every point, of weighing evidence in the
+finest scales, of assaying its precise value. The contemporary writer
+has to deal with the huge accumulation of material to which I have
+already referred; he must ransack archives, hunt through records piled
+up, public and private, must decipher ancient manuscript, must follow
+the labours of the wandering collector of inscriptions and the
+excavator of old tombs. He has to make extracts from correspondence,
+diaries, and notes of travel which are coming for the first time to
+the light; he must keep abreast of foreign literature and criticism.
+The mass and multiplicity of documentary evidence now at his disposal,
+most of which may not have been available to his predecessors, is
+enormous. Some twelve years ago Lord Acton wrote: 'The honest student
+has to hew his way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals
+and official publications, where it is difficult to sweep the horizon
+or to keep abreast. The result has been that the classics of
+historical literature are found inadequate, are being re-written, and
+the student has to be warned that they have been superseded by later
+discoveries.'
+
+What has been the effect of this altered situation upon the writer of
+history at the present time? On such an extensive field of operations,
+which has to be cultivated so intensely, he finds himself compelled to
+contract the scope of his operations; he can only take up very narrow
+ground. So in many instances he limits himself to a period, or even to
+a single reign, to a particular class of historical personage, or to
+some special department of human activity. He looks about for a plot
+that he can work thoroughly; he concentrates his attention upon some
+line or aspect of a subject in which he may hope that he has not been
+anticipated by others. Lord Acton has laid down that 'every student
+ought to know that mastery is acquired by acknowledged limitation'--he
+must peg out his small holding and keep within its bounds. Histories
+are now written by many and various hands--as in the case of the
+Cambridge Modern History, which already counts numerous volumes--and
+so the general area is divided and subdivided among experts, each of
+whom dips deeply into his particular allotment, and takes heavy crops
+off his ground. Yet the productiveness of the field at large seems
+still inexhaustible, for there is always some new theory to be
+established, some fresh vein of facts to be opened, some corrections
+or additions to be made. Moreover, the experts, while they toil at
+their own special work, while they attack a difficult problem from
+different sides, must nevertheless co-operate with each other. Sir
+William Ramsay, a noted archaeologist, tells us that for a new study
+of history there is needed a group of scholars working in unison; that
+the solitary historian is doomed to failure. He adds that the history
+of the Roman empire has still to be re-written. The late Lord Acton,
+when as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge he drew out his plan
+for a modern history that would satisfy the scientific demand for
+completeness and exactitude, proposed to distribute the work among
+more than a hundred writers. He observed that the entire bulk of new
+matter which the last forty years have supplied amounts to many
+thousand volumes. When history becomes the product of many hands and
+various minds the artistic element is likely to disappear.
+
+One obvious result of this state of things is that we hear no more of
+the old-fashioned histories embracing vast subjects, the work of a
+single author--of histories of the world, or a history of Europe like
+Alison's in thirty volumes. Indeed it is not long since Buckle found
+his _History of European Civilisation_ unmanageable; he died before he
+could finish it. At the present time historical subjects are divided
+and subdivided by classes, periods, or even single events. Art,
+literature, philosophy, war, diplomacy, receive separate treatment. We
+have colonial histories in numerous thick volumes; though no English
+colony has a long past. We have histories of the queens who have
+reigned in their own right, like Queen Elizabeth, and of Queens
+Consort: we have even a book on the bachelor kings of England, written
+by a lady who proves undeniably that these unlucky bachelors--there
+were only three of them--all came to a bad or sad end. As to military
+historians, Kinglake's _History of the Crimean War_ takes up, I think,
+some eight volumes. The whole course of the recent Boer War has been
+related in five substantial volumes. Neither of these wars lasted
+more than two years, yet both histories are many times larger than
+Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War in Germany. The only
+edition of Schiller's work that I have found in the library of this
+University is in four small volumes.
+
+Now, the drawback to the composition of histories on this ample and
+elaborate scale is obviously this--that the ordinary man or woman can
+hardly be expected to read them, or at most to read more than two or
+three of them. So there has sprung up a natural demand for something
+lighter and shorter; the amplification has produced a supply of
+abbreviation. The massive volumes, the heaps of material, are taken in
+hand by very capable writers with a clear eye for the main points, for
+striking incidents and personalities. The big books are sliced up into
+convenient portions, and served up in attractive form and manageable
+quantities. The work is often done with admirable skill and judgment.
+You thus obtain a bird's-eye view of the past; you have the loftier
+prominences and bold outlines of the historic landscape.
+
+In these serials, which are deservedly popular, you can read short
+biographies, for example, of English Men of Letters, of English Men of
+Action, of famous Scotsmen, Rulers of India, Heroes of the Nation. You
+have also a story of all the nations in series, and thus you can limit
+your mental survey to separate periods, events, countries, and
+figures. You are carried swiftly and adroitly over the dry interspaces
+which lie between startling incidents or between supremely interesting
+epochs.
+
+Now I have no doubt that these series, which contain much sound
+information very skilfully condensed, have been of real service in the
+propagation of historical knowledge. On the other hand, we have to
+consider that this kind of reading is disconnected in style and
+subject. The reader can make a long jump from one period to another,
+or from the statesman of one century to another who flourished in a
+very different country and age. And the handling of these diverse
+subjects is not uniform; the points of view or lines of thought are
+various, and may be contradictory. It may be expedient to warn those
+who use these excellent summaries against the habit of neglecting the
+great English classics for short biographies or compendious sketches
+of periods and personages, as if one could learn enough of Edmund
+Burke, or Milton, or Oliver Cromwell, or master the events of some
+important period, from a well-written serial in some two hundred
+pages.
+
+The demand for these historical handbooks has evidently been created
+by the spread of general education, which stimulates the laudable
+desire to learn something about subjects of which it is hardly
+respectable, in these days, to be ignorant. Such knowledge is very
+useful to those who have no leisure for more; and it is far superior
+to mere desultory reading, to the habit of picking out amusing bits
+here and there. Yet I hope it is unnecessary to impress on earnest
+students of history that they must go further; must push up as near as
+possible to the fountain heads of the rivers of knowledge; must make
+acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature--that their reading
+must be continuous and consecutive.
+
+Now those among you who are studying for University honours have no
+need for any advice from me; they are well aware that the wide
+expansion, in these days, of the field of history has raised the
+standard of examinations, and that they must be prepared for questions
+testing a candidate's critical acumen, the breadth and depth of his
+reading, much more closely than was required formerly. But there must
+also be many here present who have no examinations in front of them,
+who have no ardent inclination or even leisure for abstruse labours.
+And I presume that all of you read history for a clear understanding
+of past ages, of the acts and thoughts of the great men who illustrate
+those times. You all desire to comprehend the sequence and
+significance of events. You feel the intellectual pleasure of
+appreciating rightly the character and motive of the men and women who
+stand in the foreground of our country's annals, and also of those who
+are famous in other countries, to know how and why they rose or fell,
+whether they deserved the success that they won, or won it without
+deserving it. Moreover, for us English folk, who live at the centre of
+an empire containing races and communities in various stages of
+political development, the lessons of history have a special value.
+They teach us to judge leniently of acts and opinions that appear to
+us irrational and even iniquitous as we see them in other backward
+countries at the present day. We learn that manners and morals may not
+be unchangeable in a nation; that fallacies and prejudices are not
+ineradicable; that even cruelty, tyranny, reckless bloodshed, are not
+incurable vices. For history tells us that some of the nations now
+foremost in the ranks of civilisation have passed through the stages
+of society in which such things are possible. And thus we can study
+the circumstances and conditions of political existence which have
+retarded the upward progress of certain nations and accelerated the
+advance of others. Such inquiries belong to the philosophy of history.
+When we read, for example, the history of England in the fifteenth or
+sixteenth century, we find that our ancestors, born and bred in this
+same island, kindly men in private life and sincerely religious,
+intellectually not our inferiors, yet, when they took sides in
+politics or Church questions, did things which appear to us utterly
+cruel, against reason, justice, and humanity. To remember this helps
+us to realise the difficulty of passing fair judgment not only on the
+conduct of our forefathers, but upon the actions and character of
+other peoples and governments that are doing very similar things at
+the present time in other parts of the world. We shall find it an
+arduous task to assign motives, to weigh considerations, to acquit or
+condemn. So that, to the politician of to-day, history ought to be an
+invaluable guide and monitor for taking an impartial measure of the
+difficulties of government in troubled or perilous circumstances. Yet
+one sometimes wishes that the record of the fierce and bitter
+struggles of former days had been forgotten, for it still breeds
+rancour and resentment among the descendants of the people that fought
+for lost causes, and suffered the penalty of defeat. The remembrance
+keeps alive grievances, and the ancient tale of wrongs that have long
+been remedied survives to perpetuate national antipathies. Moreover,
+in some of the most celebrated cases known to our own annals, we are
+never sure that we have the whole case before us, for the historians
+give doubtful help, since the best authorities often take opposite
+views, as, for instance, on the question whether Mary Queen of Scots
+was her husband's murderess, or a much injured and calumniated lady.
+The admitted facts are valued differently, interpreted variously, and
+made to support contradictory conclusions. The latest historian of
+Rome, Signor Ferrero, sums up a long and elaborate dissertation on the
+acts and character of Julius Caesar by a judgment which differs
+emphatically from the views of all preceding historians. On some of
+these disputed questions we may make up our minds after studying the
+evidence; but many historical problems are in truth insoluble; the
+evidence is imperfect and untrustworthy.
+
+These, then, are some of the warnings we may take from history. We
+must not be hasty about condemning misdeeds of past generations,
+whether of the rulers or their people. The times were hard, so were
+the men; they were encompassed by dangers, while we who criticise them
+live in ease and safety. And when we hear at the present day of
+misrule and strife and bloodshed among other races--in Asia, for
+example--we may remember our own story, and we may trust that they
+also will work their way upward to peace and concord.
+
+But the truth is that, as our knowledge of the past is very imperfect,
+so also our predictions of the future are very fallible. The best
+observers can see only a very short way ahead. History shows us how
+frequently the course of affairs has taken quite unexpected turns, for
+good or for ill, forward or backward. On the whole, we may believe
+that the main direction is certainly toward the gradual betterment of
+the world at large, though the theory of progress is quite modern, for
+the ancients looked behind them for the Golden Age. Nowadays we
+trumpet the glory of our British empire; yet at intervals our
+confidence in its fortunes is shaken by some sharp panic; the decline
+and fall of England is predicted. It is, indeed, perilous to be
+overconfident, to live in a fool's paradise, for some of us have seen
+in our lifetime the sudden catastrophes that have overtaken great
+empires. But history may comfort us when we read how often the
+downfall of England has been predicted, how we have been on the brink
+of shooting down Niagara, as Carlyle declared, or threatened with
+imminent invasion, with total loss of commerce and colonies, with
+defeat abroad and bankruptcy at home. And yet our country is still
+fairly prosperous and free, and as for invasions, we may still trust
+that, as Coleridge has written:
+
+    'Ocean 'mid the uproar wild
+    Speaks safety to his island child.'
+
+But on the whole history gives political prophets little
+encouragement--we cannot foretell the future from the past.
+Nevertheless, there is some truth in the saying that history is like
+an old almanac, if we may take this to mean that, although the same
+events never happen again in the same way, yet in the great movements
+of the tide of the world's affairs a sort of periodical recurrence, an
+ebb and flow, may be noticed. For example, we know that from the
+fifteenth until near the end of the seventeenth century the Asiatic
+armies of the Turkish Sultans were invading and conquering
+South-Eastern Europe--they reached the gates of Vienna. Then followed
+a swing backward of the pendulum, and from the eighteenth to the end
+of the nineteenth century the European Powers, Russia and England,
+were each extending a great dominion over Asia. Again, up to a few
+years ago, the Turkish empire was a barbarous despotism, and we all
+believed that it must break up and be extinguished. Yet it has now
+revived in a new form, which may possibly restore its power and
+prosperity. To search for and distinguish the operating causes, the
+powers that underlie these incalculable changes, is a task for the
+student of history.
+
+There must be many of you for whom these high problems have a strong
+attraction, who enjoy rapid flights over the broad surface of history,
+wide outlooks over the past and future. Now, I admit that bold
+generalisations are hazardous, unless founded upon very solid
+knowledge; but in historical as well as in physical science they are
+needed to sum up results, to bring facts into focus. They enable us,
+so the late Lord Acton has said, to fasten on abiding issues, to
+distinguish the temporary from the transient.
+
+The late Lord Acton, who, as you may remember, was Professor of Modern
+History at Cambridge, is reckoned by general consent to have surpassed
+all his contemporaries, at least in England, by his encyclopaedic,
+accurate, and profound knowledge of history. His reading was vast, his
+learning prodigious, his industry never slackened. Yet the literary
+production of his life is contained in three volumes of essays,
+lectures, and articles; he has left us no complete book. Indeed, his
+writing is so disproportionate to his reading that one is tempted to
+liken his luminous intellect to a fire on which too much fuel had been
+heaped; the ardent mind glowed and shot up its streaks of radiance
+through the weight of erudition that overlaid it. Among Lord Acton's
+published papers is a 'Note of Advice to Persons about to Write
+History,' of which the first word is _Don't_. But he then proceeds to
+jot down some hints and maxims, brief and caustic, for the benefit of
+those who nevertheless persist in writing; and to some of these I
+commend the attention of readers, since upon readers as well as upon
+writers lies the duty of forming careful opinions, of judging
+impartially, in working out their conclusions upon the events and
+personages of past times. For Lord Acton was an indefatigable
+researcher after truth; his standard of public morality was austere,
+lofty, and uncompromising. I myself venture to think that he was too
+rigid; he admitted no excuse for breaches of the moral law on the
+pretext, however urgent, of political necessity; he refused to allow
+extenuation of violence or bloodshed even in times of great emergency.
+'The inflexible integrity of the moral code,' he said, 'is to me the
+secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history.' Now
+this is hard doctrine for most of us to follow when we set ourselves,
+as students, to condemn or acquit, to blame or to praise the prominent
+actors in the drama of our national history. On that stage, as we all
+know, the real tragedies that stand on record were sanguinary enough,
+and the parts occasionally played in them by our ancestors were of a
+sort that now appear most unnatural and indefensible to their
+descendants. Yet most of us are disposed to regard with some leniency
+even the crimes of a violent and lawless age.
+
+But however this may be, some of Lord Acton's counsels are undoubtedly
+valuable as warnings or for guidance, either as lamps to show the
+right road, or as lighthouses to keep us from going wrong. His
+inaugural lecture at Cambridge on the Study of History is full of
+precepts, maxims, warnings, injunctions, all of which may be pondered
+by students with advantage. We are enjoined, for example, to beware of
+permitting our historic judgment to be warped by influences, whether
+of Country, Class, Church, College, or Party; and it is said, by way
+of driving home the warning, that the most respectable of these
+influences is the most dangerous. But very few writers, and, I
+suspect, not many readers, can hold their mental balance quite
+steadily, can weigh testimony on either side of a question quite
+dispassionately, when our Church, or our Country, perhaps even our
+University, is concerned. Nor is it easy for students to find
+historians who are entirely unmoved by bias of these kinds, who have
+neither a theory to prove, nor a cause to support, nor a hero to be
+exalted, nor a sinner to be whitewashed. Indeed, the wicked men of
+history have always found some ingenious advocate to defend them by
+attempting to justify bad acts on the ground of excellent motives and
+intentions, of the exigencies of the situation, or other excuses and
+explanations. It is certain that some of the worst crimes on record,
+assassinations and savage persecutions, have been defended on pretexts
+of this kind, by allegations of patriotism or devotion to a faith. Not
+many weeks have passed since a dastardly murder was perpetrated in
+London, close to this spot, by a crazy wretch who declared himself a
+patriot.
+
+So we may profitably lay to mind Lord Acton's stern denunciation, not
+only of criminals in high places, but of all, high or low, who pretend
+that foul deeds may be justified by asserting pure motives. Let me
+quote again from Lord Acton. He has said: 'Of killing, from private
+motives or from public, _eadem est ratio_, there is no difference.
+Morally, the worst is the last; the fanatic assassin, the cruel
+inquisitor, are the worst of all; they are more, not less, infamous,
+because they use religion or political expediency as a cloak for their
+crimes.' He affirms elsewhere that crimes by constitutional
+authorities--by Popes and Kings--are more indefensible than those
+committed by private malefactors. And he holds that the theorist is
+more guilty than the actual assassin; that the worst use of theory is
+to make men insensible to fact, to the real complexion and true
+quality of conduct. He would probably have insisted that journalists
+and others who instigate political crimes are at least quite as bad as
+the actual criminal. Herein, at any rate, we may thoroughly agree with
+him, though the question whether the intercourse of nations and their
+Governments can be strictly regulated by the same moral standard which
+rules among individuals, does raise difficult points for the
+conscientious student of history. We have to remember that no power
+exists to enforce international laws or police, so that every
+Government has to rely upon its own strength for the defence of its
+people and the preservation of its rights.
+
+On the whole, I do not know any recent works that may be more
+profitable for advice and guidance in reading history than these three
+volumes of Lord Acton's. They contain the essence of his unceasing
+labours in collecting, comparing, and testing an immense quantity of
+historic material. They are particularly valuable for the flashes of
+insight into the deeper relations of events, for brief, sententious
+observations in which he sums up his judgments upon men and their
+doings. They are not to be taken lightly; they demand all your
+attention, for the style is compressed and packed with meaning; and
+the author seems to expect his readers to be prepared with more
+knowledge than, I think, most of us possess. His allusions take for
+granted so much learning that they occasionally puzzle the average
+man. For example, in one of his essays he makes a passing reference to
+'those who in the year 1348 shared the worst crimes that Christian
+nations have committed.' What these crimes were he does not say; and
+how many of us could answer the question off-hand? Certainly I could
+not. But the lectures and essays abound in far-ranging ideas, and show
+profound penetration into historic causes and consequences. Some of
+the essays, written in comparative youth, betray here and there a
+natural leaning towards the Church of Rome, in which he was born, and
+against Protestantism; yet his hatred of intolerance and despotism,
+spiritual or temporal, was sincere and intense. In politics he was a
+Liberal, yet he saw that Liberal institutions, representative
+government, are by no means a sure and speedy remedy for misrule in
+all times and countries, as in our day simple folk are apt to suppose.
+In writing of the condition of Europe during the earlier middle ages
+he observes: 'To bring order out of chaotic mire, to rear a new
+civilisation and blend hostile and unequal races into a nation, the
+thing wanted was not Liberty, but Force.'
+
+Here is a bold and clear-sighted deduction from the lessons of
+history, which revolutionary politicians in Asia, where no
+nationalities have yet been formed, may well take to heart.
+Parliamentary institutions, as Lord Acton has well said, presuppose
+unity of a people.
+
+Scattered through these volumes may be found, indeed, certain brief
+paragraphs which, as they contain the essence of much learning and
+deep thought, may well set us all thinking. In a remarkable essay on
+the historical relations of Church and State Lord Acton observes: 'The
+State is so closely linked with religion, that no nation that has
+changed its religion has ever survived in its old political form.'
+Here again is a striking generalisation which a student might set
+himself to verify by careful examination of the facts.
+
+And now I will make an end of my address by quoting one more remark of
+Lord Acton, in which he gives his definition of history taken as a
+whole. 'By universal history,' he says, 'I understand that which is
+distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a
+rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the
+memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to
+which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for
+their own sake, but in subordination to a higher series, according to
+the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common
+fortunes of mankind.'
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[55] Inaugural Address to the Students of King's College for Women,
+University of London, October 8, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+RACE AND RELIGION[56]
+
+
+I propose to offer for consideration some very general views upon the
+effects and interaction of the ideas of Race and Religion upon the
+political grouping of the population in various countries of Eastern
+Europe and of Asia, with the object of showing how they unite and
+divide mankind over a great portion of the earth. It will be
+understood, I hope, that it is impossible in a brief discussion to go
+far or thoroughly over such a wide field. I can only try to indicate
+some salient points that may be worth attention.
+
+If we look back upon the ancient world, as it was known to Greece and
+to Rome, and as it can be dimly surveyed through the records of
+classic antiquity, we find that before the Christian era the
+populations were divided and subdivided into races or tribes, with
+names signifying a common origin or descent; at any rate some kind of
+tribal association. The designation of their country was usually
+derived from the name of some dominant race, as Gallia from the Gauls
+or Judea from the Jews; indeed I might say, as France from the Franks
+or England from the Angles. Religious denominations of any large
+community were, I venture to suggest, unknown, at any rate in ancient
+Europe. The polytheism of these ages was too local and miscellaneous
+to weld together any considerable groups on the basis of a common
+worship or belief; for although three great religions then existed,
+Buddhism, Hinduism, and the faith of Zoroaster (still represented by
+the Parsees), these were confined to Central and Eastern Asia. And,
+moreover, these religions had not the missionary spirit; I mean that
+they made no vigorous open attempts to spread and gain proselytes,
+still less did they use force to convert great multitudes. But after
+the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world.
+The Roman empire--that greatest monument of human power, as Dean
+Church has called it--began the fusion of races into one vast
+political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on
+the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea;
+it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment
+of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political
+history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that
+changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world--the
+rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions.
+First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had
+levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the
+conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal
+spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the
+temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia. In Asia the
+victorious creed of Mohammed imposed upon immense multitudes a
+religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the
+dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was
+torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire
+was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered
+together all races of the West under the common denomination of
+Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the
+primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there
+were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes
+contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this
+strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the
+formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we
+may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when
+the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when
+the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that
+may be called national. In these countries the subdivisions according
+to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the
+sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The
+great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into
+two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has
+gradually subsided, and at the present time all minor groups of the
+population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national
+designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers,
+and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western
+Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his
+religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory
+he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or
+Italian.
+
+Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West
+into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to
+the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the
+earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of
+mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My
+present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and
+understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion
+that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have
+great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in
+France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that
+arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopedistes, as
+they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French
+Encyclopaedia, treated in theory all notions of separate races,
+religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a
+common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general
+principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from
+local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much
+practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the
+French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very
+seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded
+the kingdoms of Western Europe with the war-cry of universal
+fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and
+religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all
+peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended
+to include the people of every country to which it extended,
+superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national
+character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling
+was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in
+the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when
+Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger
+than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclopedistes were inherited
+by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two
+Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the
+chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard
+difference of race as indelible. In fact, all this school, which had
+considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and
+social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against
+rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to
+save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that
+modify human character.
+
+There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view.
+In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race
+and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for
+political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will
+remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay
+stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion,
+politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some
+Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and
+concerned. For, in the first place, there has been a notable revival
+of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread
+of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most
+prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of
+the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of
+politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing
+upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race
+and religion.
+
+The plan which I shall attempt to follow in making a brief survey of
+my subject, is to begin with a glance at the political condition of
+Central Europe, and to travel rapidly Eastward. In the West, as I have
+said, we have compact and permanently established States with national
+governments. But as soon as we pass to Central Europe we find the
+Austro-Hungarian empire distracted and threatened by internal feuds,
+arising out of the contention for ascendency of two races, Germans and
+Slavonians, and also out of the demands of the various provinces and
+dependencies for political recognition of their separate identities,
+founded on claims to represent internal sections or subdivisions of
+the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the north-west of the
+empire are parted asunder from those in the south-east by the
+Hungarians, who came in from the east, and are of a different stock,
+and who have succeeded in establishing the federated kingdom of
+Hungary. I will not trouble you with statistical or geographical
+details. For my present purpose it is enough to mention that the
+subjects of Austria, apart from Hungary, are classed in eight separate
+sections, differentiated by separate languages, and that Poles,
+Bohemians, Germans, and Italians, are all and each claiming a kind of
+home rule within the empire, and show an increasing tendency to group
+themselves by distinctions of race. In Bohemia the population is
+nearly equally divided between Germans and Slavs, who speak different
+languages, have separate schools, and contend violently for political
+preponderance. In Moravia and Silesia, where the Slav element is
+stronger, the same conflict goes on. In Galicia the contest is between
+Poles and Ruthenians, between the Roman Catholic and the Greek
+churches. In Hungary proper the Magyars have political predominance,
+but the population of German descent and language is more numerous
+than the Magyars: in Transylvania, further eastward, the Magyars are
+politically overriding the Slav races; in Croatia to the southward a
+similar struggle is going on. Throughout every province of the
+Austro-Hungarian empire we see the same intermixture of races,
+religions, and languages--the more numerous and better united sections
+are striving for political ascendency: the weaker sections contend
+against them by demanding autonomy. And, as all these various
+antipathies and jealousies are represented in the Parliament of the
+empire, the peaceful consolidation of the empire into a large national
+State is interrupted by resistance under the watchword of separate
+nationalities. Religious differences between Roman Catholicism,
+Calvinism, and the Greek Church in the Eastern provinces, accentuate
+the incoherence. Each separate group takes for its symbol, the
+standard round which people rally, a language--German, Polish,
+Tcheque, Ruthenian, and so on. They are all being energetically
+maintained and jealously preserved in speech and writing in the
+schools and the assemblies. Moreover, three different churches, at
+least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of
+religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions
+and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose
+each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They
+are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil
+society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small
+States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in
+Western Europe. In Western Europe the principle of nationalities has
+been a method not of disintegration, but of concentration. It has led
+within the last fifty years to the establishment of two States of
+first-class magnitude, Germany and Italy; and Louis Napoleon, who had
+proclaimed the idea of national unification, was ruined by his own
+policy, for the Germans destroyed his dynasty, and Italy gave him no
+help. But in Austro-Hungary, on the contrary, the movement is not
+toward centralisation--it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it
+continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an
+ancient and powerful empire.
+
+You will observe that since we entered, in our survey, the Austrian
+territories, we have found ourselves within the jurisdiction of an
+empire in the true sense of that word, which I take to mean the
+dominion of one superior sovereignty over many subordinate races,
+tribes, or petty States that obey its authority. I may be permitted to
+regard the German emperor as the military head of a constitutional
+federation, which is a different thing. Now I think it may be said
+that from Austria eastward across South-Eastern Europe and Asia, from
+Vienna to Pekin, the general form of government is not national but
+imperial. Every government is holding together a number of different
+groups, all jealous of each other, all of whom would fall apart and
+probably fight among themselves, if they were not kept under by one
+ruler over them. It may be affirmed, broadly, that the structure of
+modern Europe, as represented by the massing of the populations into
+great homogeneous nations within fixed limits, has now been completely
+left behind in the West, and that from the shores of the Adriatic Sea
+right across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the real subdivisions of the
+people, the bonds that unite and separate them into different groups,
+are denoted by Race and Religion, sometimes by one, sometimes by the
+other, occasionally by both.
+
+Our first step over the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
+proceeding south-east beyond the Danube and the Carpathian mountains,
+brings us into the various principalities and provinces that were once
+under the dominion of the Ottoman empire, though almost all of them
+are now independent of it. Nearly all of them lie in the region south
+of the Danube, which is usually known as the Balkan Peninsula. Here
+the complexities of race and religion are abundantly manifest, and
+these archaic divisions of political society surround us everywhere.
+This region has indeed been parcelled out, within our own time, into
+territories of diverse States, but this is quite a modern formation,
+and the idea of such political citizenship has been very recently
+introduced.
+
+If, now, it is asked why, in this corner of South-Eastern Europe, this
+medley of internal distinctions, which was the prevailing
+characteristic of the ancient world, has been so long preserved, the
+answer is that all this country, the Balkan Peninsula, was under the
+direct government of the Ottoman empire up to about seventy years ago,
+and that most of the provinces were only liberated from the Turkish
+yoke in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of the
+long dominion of the Turks over this country had been to perpetuate
+the state of things which existed when they first conquered it. Their
+policy, the policy of all Asiatic empires, was not to consolidate, or
+to obliterate differences produced by race and religion, but to
+maintain them in order to rule more securely. And here I may quote
+from a book recently published under the title of _Turkey in Europe_,
+which is unique of its kind, for in no other work can we find so
+complete and particular a history of the Balkan lands, or so accurate
+a description of the grouping of the people, taken from personal
+knowledge and local investigation. The author, who calls himself
+Odysseus, reminds us that the Ottoman Sultans acquired these
+territories when they were in the confusion and dismemberment which
+followed the decay and fall of the Byzantine empire; and he explains
+that the Turks, who have been always inferior in number to the
+aggregate of their Christian subjects, could hardly have kept up their
+dominion if at any time the Christians had united against them. As the
+Christians were not converted, religious unification, which in Asia
+was the basis of Mohammedan power, was here impossible, so the Turks
+divided that they might rule. 'The Turks have thoroughly learned,' he
+says, 'and daily put into practice with admirable skill, the lesson
+of _divide et impera_, and hence they have always done, and still do,
+all in their power to prevent the obliteration of racial, linguistic,
+and religious differences.' They have perpetuated and preserved, as if
+in a museum, the strange medley that was existing when these lands
+were first conquered by Turkish Sultans nearly five hundred years ago.
+Their idea of government has always been simply to take tribute and
+secure their paramount supremacy. The result has been that the
+confusion, intermixture, and rivalry of race and religion is far more
+intricate than even in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the central
+government has tried to reconcile and amalgamate. In Turkey, Odysseus
+tells us, 'not only is there a medley of races, but the races inhabit,
+not different districts, but the same district. Of three villages
+within ten miles of one another, one will be Turkish, one Greek, one
+Bulgarian--or perhaps one Albanian, one Bulgarian, and one Servian,
+each with their own language, dress, and religion, and eight races and
+languages may be found in one large town.'
+
+What has been the upshot and consequence of this Turkish system? It
+has been to make the Balkan Peninsula a battlefield, during the last
+four centuries, of two great militant creeds, Christianity and Islam,
+collecting the population into two religious camps; while inside these
+two main religious divisions there are manifold subdivisions of race.
+Men of the same creed are in different groups of race; nor are the
+race-groups always of the same creed, for one section may have become
+fanatic Mohammedans, while the rest have adhered to Christianity. The
+intermixture is the more complicated because one cannot attempt to
+distinguish a race by physical characteristics, by their personal
+appearance or features as marking descent from one stock. The
+practices of polygamy, slavery, of the purchase of women, and their
+capture in the interminable wars, have produced incessant crossing of
+breeds. It is not often understood or remembered that in former times
+a tribe or band of foreign invaders, when they had to cross the sea or
+to make long expeditions, very rarely brought women with them. So when
+they settled on the conquered lands they must have intermarried,
+forcibly or otherwise, with the subject race. If they massacred the
+men, the women were part of their booty. Neither is the test of
+language a sure one, though it is the best we have, and is becoming
+more and more the criterion of race; for a kind of struggle for
+existence goes on among the languages, they spread or contract under
+various influences, mainly political. The folk may change their
+language as they may change their creed; and, what is more remarkable,
+they may even change their race. According to the book I have just
+quoted, the Ottoman Government classes all its subject population into
+religious communities. Whatever be a man's race or language, if he
+professes Islam, he is called a Mohammedan; if he is of the orthodox
+Greek Church at Constantinople, he is Greek or Rumi, for Stambul was
+the capital of the Roman empire; or else he is Katholik, Armenian, or
+Jew, according to his creed, not according to his birthplace or his
+blood. So the official designations are religious, while the popular
+usage is various, sometimes following race, sometimes creed, and it is
+still constantly shifting, as I shall presently try to explain.
+
+And here it may be interesting to mention a peculiarity of the growth
+and constitution of the Eastern or Greek Church, in contrast with the
+Western Church of Rome. The Roman Church has always claimed
+universality--it has ignored and attempted to trample down all
+political and national divisions; it demands of all Roman Catholics,
+whoever they may be, submission to the supreme spiritual dictation of
+the Roman pontiff, and those who accept any other authority are
+outside the pale. From the beginning the Roman Catholic Church has
+made incessant war upon every kind of heresy or dissent, transforming
+the old rites and worships where they could not be exterminated. It
+proclaims independence of the State, it has no local centres or
+national branches. The Pope at Rome claims spiritual authority over
+all Roman Catholics everywhere. But the historical fact that the
+Eastern or Greek Church was always under the control of the Byzantine
+empire at Constantinople, has kept this Church much more closely
+allied to the temporal power; and the result has been that throughout
+its development it has remained closely connected with the State. So
+that wherever a fresh State has been formed, the Greek Church has
+become national, and the spiritual authority, adapting itself to
+political changes, has become a separate institution. The most signal
+example of this is to be seen in Russia, where the Greek Church, being
+cut off from Constantinople, had its own independent Patriarch up to
+the time of Peter the Great; and very lately, when Bulgaria became a
+State, it set up its own head of the Church, or Exarch. When Bosnia
+and Herzegovina were ruled by the Turkish Sultan, the chief of the
+Greek Church in that country was the Patriarch at Constantinople. Now
+that these provinces have passed under the administration of Austria,
+the ecclesiastical authority has also been transferred from the
+Patriarch to local Metropolitans. Each new State shows a tendency to
+establish what I may call spiritual Home Rule. We know that in Western
+Europe the establishment of National Churches came in by one great
+religious upheaval that is called the Reformation. In Eastern Europe
+the movement has proceeded gradually, keeping pace with the rise and
+recognition of separate governments, and the result has been the
+multiplication of internal ecclesiastical divisions.
+
+I have said that the Ottoman empire recognises only religious
+denominations in the classification of the people. Apparently this was
+the general usage in former times. A Greek meant a member of the
+orthodox Greek Church, who might or might not be an inhabitant of
+Greece, nor would he necessarily have spoken the Greek tongue. If a
+Christian changed his religion, as a matter of course he changed his
+name and his designation; he was placed in another group. But the
+pressure of political independence has been latterly bringing into
+prominence the idea of Race. Odysseus, from whose book I quote again,
+gives us the very curious fact that even race is not immutable, it
+changes like religion, with the political movement; it has become a
+question of political expediency. When a separate State has been
+organised, as in Bulgaria, or when a league for shaking off the
+Turkish yoke is being organised, as in Macedonia, the plan of the
+leaders is to induce the people to drop minor distinctions of origin
+and to unite for the purposes of political combination, under some
+larger national name, to call themselves Hellenes in Greece,
+Bulgarians in Bulgaria, and Macedonians in the Turkish province of
+Macedonia. Moreover, when a new State has been thus formed, like
+Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, on the principle of Race, the patriotic
+party begins to discover that many Greeks or Bulgarians are outside
+the territory, and they set up a claim to enlarge their boundaries in
+order to bring these people inside. So that the questions of races and
+churches are used to keep up continual intrigues, dissensions, and a
+lively agitation throughout these countries. For since religion is
+always a powerful uniting force, there is a constant effort to bring
+the people to congregate under the Established Church of their new
+State, to renounce their obedience to any spiritual head outside its
+limits. We have, therefore, the curious spectacle of a frequent
+shifting of denominations of Race and Creed for the purpose of
+political consolidation. In fact we are witnessing in the Balkan
+Peninsula a struggle among the petty States to strengthen themselves
+by capturing each other's population.
+
+I think I may have said enough to prove, briefly and superficially,
+the importance, in Central and South-Eastern Europe, of the ideas of
+Race and Religion, the necessity of understanding their strength and
+operation. So soon as we cross into Asia we find these ideas
+universally paramount. It will perhaps be remembered that Henry Maine
+pointed out long ago, in his book on Ancient Law, that during a large
+part of what we call modern history no such conception was entertained
+as that of territorial sovereignty, as indicated by such a title as
+the King of France. 'Sovereignty,' he said, 'was not associated with
+dominion over a portion or subdivision of the earth.' Now I do not
+believe that a territorial title is assumed at this moment by any of
+the great Asiatic sovereigns in Asia. Here in Europe we talk of the
+Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, or the Emperor of China; but
+these are not the styles or designations which are actually used by
+these potentates; they are each known, on their coins, and in their
+public proclamations, by a string of lofty titles, generally
+religious, like our 'Defender of the Faith,' which make no reference
+to their territories. Such were the titles of the Moghul emperors of
+India, and I may here observe that the term Emperor of India, now
+borne by the English king, is entirely of British manufacture. The
+truth is that Asiatic kingdoms have no settled territorial
+boundaries, they are always changing, just as our Indian frontiers are
+constantly moving forward; and wherever in Asia there exists a
+demarcated line of frontier, it has been fixed by the intervention of
+European governments interested in maintaining order. In Mohammedan
+lands the basis of a ruler's authority, in theory at least, is
+religious, and all through Western Asia there is the closest
+connection between the State and the dominant creed of Islam; for a
+Mohammedan sovereign's authority is ecclesiastical, so to speak, as
+well as civil; he is bound, in the words of our Litany, not only to
+'execute justice,' but to 'maintain truth'; and the theory of two
+separate jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal, is practically
+unknown, though of course in dealing with religious questions the
+ruler must be supported by the chief expounders of the law of Islam.
+To borrow a phrase from Hobbes, 'the religion of the Mohammedans is a
+part of their policy,' as it is also the fundamental bond of their
+whole society.
+
+We have seen that in South-Eastern Europe there is an intricate
+intermixture of the distinctions of race and religion, with a tendency
+of race to win the mastery. This is because the people of those
+countries were conquered by Islam, but only partially converted, and
+the Turkish Sultans, as I have already said, encouraged discord among
+their Christian subjects. But in Western Asia the faith of Islam not
+only conquered but converted much more completely; it almost
+extirpated other faiths in Asia Minor and Persia, leaving in Asia
+Minor only a few obscure sects, like the Nestorians, in a region that
+had been wholly Christian, and leaving in Persia only some scattered
+relics of the great Zoroastrian religion, still represented in two or
+three towns by those whom we call Parsees. In these lands, therefore,
+religion has generally mastered race, for the laws that regulate the
+whole personal condition and property of the people are determined by
+their religion, with a certain variety of local customs. Nevertheless,
+beneath the overspreading religious denomination there are a large
+number of tribal groups, all of whom are known by tribal names. Most
+of these tribes are fanatic Islamites, but in the midst of them is one
+group which is distinct by religion and probably by race--I mean the
+Armenians. They do not form a majority of the population in Armenia,
+they are scattered about Western Asia, and are divided into two
+Christian sects, which under the Turkish empire are regarded as two
+religious communities. Their recent terrible misfortunes afford a
+signal and melancholy warning of the danger of interfering in Oriental
+affairs without a full understanding of the complications arising out
+of these very differences and antagonisms of race and religion that I
+have been endeavouring to explain. And the whole story is a striking
+example of the tremendous power of religion in Asiatic politics. In
+1895 the European Powers interposed in the name of justice and
+humanity to press upon the Turkish Government the reforms that had
+been promised by treaty, and thus to better the condition of the
+Armenians, by securing to them a certain share in the local and
+municipal government. But the Armenians are a scattered and subject
+people, different in race and religion and language from the ruling
+Turks, and the demand for giving them some kind of independence
+alarmed the Turkish Government and inflamed the fanaticism of the
+Mohammedans. The only result of European intervention was a frightful
+massacre of the Armenians, which the European Powers witnessed without
+any serious attempt to stop. Such are the consequences of
+misunderstanding the real political situation and the forces at work.
+Probably many people in England had a very hazy notion of what the
+Armenians were, or what their name signified. We have always to
+remember that throughout Asia, and indeed over the greater part of the
+non-Christian world, the various sections of the population very
+rarely use for themselves, or indeed for the country that they dwell
+in, the name that is used for them by Europeans. As our own system has
+become territorial, as we call any natural-born inhabitant of France a
+Frenchman, and so on, we are led by a false analogy to talk of Turkey
+and the Turks, Persia and the Persians, India and the Indians, China
+and the Chinese. But these broad designations denoting modern
+nationalities are not used in Asia by the people themselves, to whom
+such a conception is foreign. I know of no terms in the languages of
+these countries that correspond to our words, Turkey, India, China, as
+geographical expressions, and I think that the names used by Europeans
+for outlying countries or peoples often come from some accident or
+chance, or mistake, or by taking the name of a part of a country for
+the name of the whole. In Asia the people still class themselves, in
+their ordinary talk, by names designating religion or race. A curious
+example of a religious designation still survives, by the way, among
+Europeans in South Africa. When the first Portuguese explorers of the
+African coast asked the Arab traders about the indigenous tribes,
+they, being Mohammedans, said that the natives were all Kafirs, which
+means Infidels. This was supposed to be the general name of a people,
+and it has been handed down to us so that we still call the South
+African natives Kaffirs. I doubt whether the tribes concerned have
+ever used or recognised among themselves this unsavoury name. I may
+note, by the way, that one of the most ancient tribal names in Asia is
+that by which the Greeks, outside the Turkish empire, are often
+known--Yunani, or Ionian--which must have been in use from the days
+when the Greek colonies settled on the coast of Asia Minor, many
+centuries before the Christian era.
+
+We are pushing our survey eastward across Asia. The kingdom known to
+Europe by the name of Persia is styled by its inhabitants _Iran_,
+though I doubt whether a Persian subject belonging to a particular
+tribe or sect would call himself _Irani_. The next independent
+kingdom, beyond Persia, is Afghanistan; and here we have an example of
+a designation originally implying race, gradually merging into one
+that is territorial and political. Afghanistan originally meant, I
+believe, the great central mass of mountains occupied by a tribe
+called Afghans; it is now becoming a name that includes the whole
+territory ruled by the Afghan Amir at Kabul. The causes that are
+producing this change in the signification of the word are, first,
+that the Amir of Kabul has subdued, more or less, all the tribes
+inhabiting the country; and secondly, that the pressure of England and
+Russia on two sides of that country has necessitated an accurate
+demarcation of frontiers all round it, in order that the Amir's
+territories, which are under our protection, may be precisely known.
+The kingdom is thus acquiring a territorial designation. But this
+kingdom of Afghanistan is really composed of a number of chiefships
+and provinces very loosely knit together under the sway of the Amir,
+which might fall asunder again if the rulership at Kabul became weak.
+And the population is all parcelled out into various races and tribes,
+usually dwelling in separate tracts under local chiefs; they are
+always known among themselves by names, denoting race or tribe;
+sometimes patriarchal, like the Children of Israel, or the clans of
+our own Highlands; sometimes local, and in one case historical, for
+the dominant tribe to which the Amir belongs has called itself Durani
+or royal.
+
+It is therefore the distinction of race or tribe, not of religion,
+that governs the whole interior population throughout this vast region
+of high mountains and valleys in the centre, with comparatively open
+country on the north and south; the whole area has been peopled by a
+conflux of tribes. Yet Afghanistan has some of the symptoms of
+national growth--I mean that if it could hold together as one kingdom
+it might grow into a nationality. In religion the Afghans are almost
+all fanatical Mohammedans, for Afghanistan is the great bulwark and
+citadel on the eastern frontier of Islam, and beyond it, in Eastern
+Asia, there are no independent Mohammedan principalities. The kingdom
+has a strictly defined territory, and a dynasty which has risen from
+the chiefship of a powerful tribe to the heritable possession of that
+territory. This dynasty, moreover, is identical in race and religion
+with a large majority of its subjects, which is another peculiar
+source of strength; for almost all the other first-class kingdoms of
+Asia are ruled by dynasties of alien race, who sometimes profess a
+religion different from that of many of their subjects. We are
+frequently reminded of the important fact that in India the English
+rulers are aliens in race and religion from the people; but we may
+also remember that after all this is only a difference of degree, a
+wider separation between the governors and the governed than elsewhere
+in Asia. The principal kingdoms of Asia are ruled by foreign families
+or dynasties that have come in by conquest. The Moghul dynasty that
+preceded our own government in India was foreign; and it was a
+Mohammedan rulership over an enormous Hindu population. The Ottoman
+Turk was a foreign invader from Central Asia, who still governs a
+variety of races and religions. In Persia the Shah's family is of a
+Turkish tribe. And the Emperor of China is a Mandchoo Tartar, of a
+race quite apart from that of the immense majority of the Chinese. Of
+course the Russians are as much aliens in Central Asia as the English
+in India; they govern from St. Petersburg as we do from London. I
+doubt, therefore, whether there is any other kingdom in Asia that has
+more of the element of national unity than Afghanistan, though
+unfortunately its political condition is precarious, because there is
+still much tribal disunion inside it.
+
+Eastward again beyond Afghanistan we enter the Indian empire, a vast
+dominion stretching south-eastward from the slopes of the outer Afghan
+hills and the Persian border to the western frontiers of the Chinese
+empire and of Siam, and controlling the whole seaboard of Southern
+Asia, from Aden to Singapore. It is the possession of this wide
+territory that has given to the English a direct and most important
+interest in the problems of race and religion. For, in the first
+place, in this empire we have to deal with three out of the four great
+faiths of the world--Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism--and we have to
+uphold for ourselves the fourth, Christianity. Secondly, we have also
+within the borders of our empire a multiplicity of races and tribes;
+and we have the peculiar Indian institution of Caste, which marks off
+all Hindu society into innumerable groups, distinguished one from
+another by the rules that forbid intermarriage and (in most cases) the
+sharing of food. Now the word Hindu requires a special explanation,
+because there is nothing exactly like it elsewhere in the world; it is
+not exclusively a religious denomination; it denotes also a country
+and a race. When we speak of a Christian, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist,
+we mean a particular religious community without distinction of race
+or country. When we talk of Persians or Chinese, we indicate country
+or parentage without any necessary distinction of creed. But when a
+man tells me he is a Hindu, I know that he means all three things
+together--religion, race and country. I can be almost sure that he is
+an inhabitant of India, quite sure that he is of Indian parentage; and
+as to religion, the word Hindu undoubtedly locates him within one of
+the manifold groups who follow the ordinances and worship the gods of
+Hinduism. Next in importance to the Hindus, as a religious community,
+come the Mohammedans, who number over sixty millions in India. The two
+faiths, Hinduism and Islam--polytheism and monotheism--are in strong
+opposition to each other; yet they are not quite clean cut apart, for
+some Hindu tribes that have been converted to Islam retain in part
+their primitive customs of worship and caste. And in Burmah, as in
+Ceylon, the population is almost wholly Buddhist.
+
+In a very able article that has recently appeared in an Indian
+magazine, the writer, a Hindu, observes: 'The Hindus offer a curious
+instance of a people without any feeling of nationality.' He finds an
+explanation in 'the intensity of religiousness, which led to
+sectarianism, and allying itself with caste, tended to preserve all
+local and tribal differences.' Other causes, historical, political,
+and geographical, might be mentioned, but I agree that the chief
+separating influence has been religious. And, however this may be, it
+may be affirmed that within our Indian empire at the present moment
+the primary superior designation of a man is according to his
+religion--he is either a Hindu, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist. But
+inside these general religious denominations are very many
+distinctions of caste, race, or tribe. The Sikhs are a sect of Hindus
+who belong exclusively to the Punjab. The Marathas and Rajputs are
+races who profess Hinduism and who always call themselves by their
+racial names: and there are many aboriginal tribes, like the Bheels
+and Gonds, who are being gradually absorbed into Hinduism. Race and
+religion are, in fact, more profoundly intermixed in India than
+perhaps in any other country of the world; and into such an intricate
+subject I cannot now enter. My present point is that in India we are
+governing an empire of the antique pattern, quite different from the
+western nationalities, a country where complexities of race and creed
+meet us at every turn in the course of our administration; an empire
+which, as Mr. Bryce has pointed out in a recent essay that is full of
+light and knowledge, has many striking resemblances with the dominion
+of Imperial Rome.[57] There is the same miscellany of tribes and races
+in diverse stages of civilisation, warlike and half-tamed on the
+frontiers, softened and reconciled by peace, prosperity, and culture
+in the older provinces of the empire, wild and barbarous in remote
+interior tracts. There is just visible in India a similar though much
+slighter tendency of the language of the ruling race to prevail among
+the educated classes, because the English language, like the Latin,
+has greater literary power, and conveys to the Indians the latest
+ideas and scientific discoveries of the foremost nations of the world.
+There is also a certain diffusion of European manners and even dress,
+resembling in some degree what took place even in such a remote
+province of the Roman empire as Britain, where, as we know from
+Tacitus, it was made a reproach against the Romanising Britons that
+they were abandoning their own costume for the Roman toga and adopting
+the manners of their conquerors. All these tendencies are slightly
+affecting distinctions of race and religion; though in India these
+distinctions are far deeper than they were under the Roman empire, and
+so far as one can judge they are ineffaceable.
+
+In regard to religious differences, so long as the people were almost
+universally polytheistic the Romans had little trouble on this score,
+since every deity and every ritual was tolerated indifferently by
+their government, provided that public order and decency were
+observed; and this is the practice of our Government in India. But we
+have one difficulty in governing India that did not trouble the Romans
+at the time when they first founded their empire by conquest. I think
+that religion had then very little influence on politics. It was the
+advent of two great militant and propagating faiths, first
+Christianity, next Islam, that first made religion a vital element in
+politics, and afterwards made a common creed the bond of union for
+great masses of mankind. It has now become in Asia a powerful
+instrument of political association. Therefore when we proclaim for
+our government in India the principle of religious neutrality we do
+indeed avoid collision with other faiths, but we are without the
+advantage that is possessed by a State which represents and is
+supported by the religious enthusiasm of a great number of its
+subjects. I take the separation of the State from religion to be a
+principle that is quite modern in Europe; and outside our Indian
+empire it is unknown in Asia. Everywhere else the ruler is the head of
+some dominant church or creed. On the other hand our neutral attitude
+enables us to arbitrate and keep the peace between the two formidable
+rivals, Islam and Hinduism, which in a large measure balance and
+restrain each other. And it is easier to govern a great empire full of
+diverse castes and creeds when you only demand from them obedience to
+the civil law, than when the Government takes one side on religious
+questions. Nevertheless, though in India we proclaim and practise
+religious neutrality, we must always remember that India is, of all
+great countries in the world, that in which religious beliefs and
+antagonisms affect the administration most profoundly, and subdivide
+the population with the greatest complexity. For the empire contains a
+wonderful variety of races and tribes, especially on its frontiers; it
+has the fierce Afghan tribes under our protectorate on the north-west,
+a cluster of utterly barbarous tribes in the north-east, and in the
+Far East beyond Burmah we have undertaken the control of a border
+tract, full of petty rival chiefships, where the language, manners and
+origins are related to the neighbouring population of China.
+
+In China we have the true type of Asiatic empire, by far the oldest in
+the world, a sovereignty that, with various changes of dynasty, has
+governed the Far East of Asia from time almost immemorial; an immense
+conglomeration of different races under the rulership of a dynasty
+that is foreign to the great majority of its subjects. Here again I
+must remark on the absence of territorial or national designations.
+The word China, as designating this empire, is not used by the people
+themselves; the official name means, I believe, the Great Pure
+Kingdom; and the emperor himself is known by various titles signifying
+august, lofty, or sacred. I suppose that almost the whole population
+belongs to the great Mongolian or Tartar family of mankind; but the
+subdivisions of different tribes, races, and languages must be
+numerous, as might be expected in such a vastly extended empire, and
+the tribesmen are all known by their tribal names. In regard to
+Religion the situation is peculiar, it is without parallel elsewhere
+in Asia; for three great systems exist in China separately and
+independently, each of them working in peace side by side with the
+others: the religion founded by Confucius, which is a great system of
+morals; Buddhism, which is a Church with a splendid ritual,
+priesthood, and monastic orders; and Taoism, which is a kind of
+naturalistic religion, the worship of stars, natural forces, spirits,
+deified heroes and local gods. It is said to be a common thing for one
+person to belong to all three religions, and the State superintends
+them all impartially. One very remarkable and peculiar fact, which I
+give on excellent authority, is that in China religious denominations
+are never used to denote sections of the people, except by the
+Mohammedans, who are not numerous and form a class apart. But any
+attempt to describe the religion of China would lead me far beyond the
+scope of this address. My present point is only to lay stress on the
+enormous political importance, in China as elsewhere in Asia, of the
+religious idea. For whereas powerful religious movements, affecting
+the destinies of kingdoms and causing great wars, have ceased in
+Western and Central Europe, in Asia all governments have constantly to
+apprehend some fresh outburst of religious enthusiasm, the appearance
+of some prophet or new spiritual teacher, who gathers a following,
+like the Mahdi in the Soudan, and attacks the ruling power. The
+Taeping rebellion, which devastated China some forty years ago, is a
+case in point; it was begun by a fanatic leader who denounced the
+established religions, and it soon became a dangerous revolt against
+the Imperial dynasty. And the outbreak against the foreigners in China
+last year is understood to have originated in religious fanaticism.
+These events go to illustrate the enormous influence on politics which
+Religion, whether you call it enthusiasm or superstition, exercises
+everywhere in Asia.
+
+But of all empires in Asia, the Russian empire is the greatest and the
+most powerful. I have only space to say here that it is of the same
+type with the others; it is a vast dominion over an infinite variety
+of races, tribes, and creeds; it is a government which has come in by
+foreign conquest; a Christian Power which has among its subjects a
+great number of Mohammedans. It differs from our Indian empire in this
+respect, that the Russian conquests were made gradually by land,
+across Central Asia, or by slow immigration and extension, as in
+Siberia, whereas the English reached India by a long sea-journey. So
+that in the Asiatic empire of Russia the separation of race between
+the rulers and their subjects is not so sharply defined as between
+England and India. Nevertheless the problems that confront Russia in
+Asia are similar in kind to those which face us in India; she has to
+reconcile to her permanent dominion a miscellany of alien peoples,
+whom it is almost impossible to fuse and consolidate into anything
+like a nationality.
+
+I have now endeavoured, very imperfectly, to show how Race and
+Religion still powerfully affect society, and trouble politics,
+throughout a great part of the world. How far they influence and
+interact upon each other is a difficult problem; but one may say that
+some religions seem to accord with the peculiar temperament and
+intellectual disposition of certain races; that, for instance, the
+active propagating spirit of Islam flourishes in Western Asia, while
+in Eastern Asia a quiet and contemplative faith, with little
+missionary impulse, no strong desire to make converts, has always
+prevailed. But in the East everywhere Race and Religion still unite
+and isolate the populations in groups--they are the great dividing and
+disturbing forces that prevent or delay the consolidation of settled
+nationalities; and so far as our experience goes, a fixed nationality
+of the Western type is the most solid and permanent form of political
+government and social aggregation. An empire is a different and looser
+mode of binding people together, yet at certain stages of civilisation
+and the world's progress it is a necessity; and an empire well
+administered is the best available instrument for promoting
+civilisation and good order among backward races. So managed it may
+last long; and its dominion may be practically permanent, for commerce
+and industry, literature and science, rapid and easy communication by
+land and sea, spread far more quickly, and connect distant countries
+far more closely, in modern times than in the ancient world. Yet there
+is always an element of unrest and insecurity underlying the position
+of imperial rulership over different and often discordant groups of
+subjects; and this has been one main cause of the immemorial weakness
+of Asiatic empires, and of the indifference of the people to a change
+of masters, because no single dynasty represented the whole people. It
+is just this weakness of the native rulers that has enabled the
+European to make his conquests in Asia; and we have carefully to
+remember that although our governments are superior in skill and
+strength, we have inherited the old difficulties. For it is my belief
+that in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, the strength of
+the racial and religious sentiments is rather increasing than
+diminishing. This is indeed the view--the fact, if I am right--that I
+especially desire to press home, because it is of the highest
+importance at the present time, when all the European nations, and
+England among the foremost, are extending their dominion over peoples
+of races and creeds different from their own. Our governments are now
+no longer confined to the continent which we inhabit; we are acquiring
+immense possessions in Asia and Africa; we can survey the whole earth
+with its confusion of tongues; its multitude of beliefs and customs,
+its infinitely miscellaneous populations. We must recognise the
+variety of the human species; we must acknowledge that we cannot
+impose a uniform type of civilisation, just as we admit that a uniform
+faith is beyond mere human efforts to impose, and that to attempt it
+would be politically disastrous. This is the conclusion upon which I
+venture to lay stress, because some such warning seems to me neither
+untimely nor unimportant.
+
+For there is still a dangerous tendency among the enterprising
+commercial nations of the West to assume that the importation into
+Asia of economical improvements, public instruction, regular
+administration, and religious neutrality will conquer antipathies,
+overcome irrational prejudices, and reconcile old-world folk to an
+alien civilisation. Undoubtedly a foreign government that rules
+wisely, justly, and very cautiously, acquires a strong hold on its
+subjects, and may stand, like the Roman empire, for centuries. But
+this can only be achieved by recognising, instead of ignoring, certain
+ineffaceable characteristics in the origins and history of the people,
+for whom the tradition and sentiment of race is often their bond of
+union and the base of their society, as their religion is the
+embodiment of their spiritual instincts and imaginations.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[56] Address delivered as President of the Social and Political
+Education League, May 5, 1902.--_Fortnightly Review_, December 1902.
+
+[57] _Studies in History and Jurisprudence_, vol. I., chap. i.
+
+
+
+
+THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS
+
+
+In considering the subject of my address,[58] I have been confronted
+by this difficulty--that in the sections which regulate the order of
+our proceedings, we have a list of papers that range over all the
+principal religions, ancient and modern, that have existed and still
+exist in the world. They are to be treated and discussed by experts
+whose scholarship, particular studies, and close research entitle them
+all to address you authoritatively. I have no such special
+qualifications; and in any case it would be most presumptuous in me to
+trespass upon their ground. All that I can venture to do, therefore,
+in the remarks which I propose to address to you to-day, is to attempt
+a brief general survey of the history of religions from a standpoint
+which may possibly not fall within the scope of these separate papers.
+
+The four great religions now prevailing in the world, which are
+historical in the sense that they have been long known to history, I
+take to be--Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Having regard
+to their origin and derivation, to their history and character, I may
+be permitted, for my present purpose only, to class the two former as
+the Religions of the West, and the two latter as the Religions of the
+East. These are the faiths which still maintain a mighty influence
+over the minds of mankind. And my object is to compare the political
+relations, the attitude, maintained toward them, from time to time, by
+the States and rulers of the people over which these religions have
+established their spiritual dominion. The religion of the Jews is not
+included, though its influence has been incalculable, because it has
+been caught up, so to speak, into Christianity and Islam, and cannot
+therefore be counted among those which have made a partition of the
+religious world. For this reason, perhaps, it has retained to this day
+its ancient denomination, derived from the tribe or country of its
+origin; whereas the others are named from a Faith or a Founder. The
+word Nazarene, denoting the birthplace of Christianity, which is said
+to be still used in that region, was, as we know, very speedily
+superseded by its wider title, as the Creed broke out of local limits
+and was proclaimed universal.
+
+There has evidently been a fore-time, though it is prehistorical,
+when, so far as we know, mankind was universally polytheistic; when
+innumerable rites and worships prevailed without restraint, springing
+up and contending with each other like the trees in a primeval forest,
+reflecting a primitive and precarious condition of human society. I
+take polytheism to have been, in this earliest stage, the wild growth
+of superstitious imagination, varied indefinitely by the pressure of
+circumstance, by accident, by popular caprice, or by the good or evil
+fortunes of the community. In this stage it can now be seen among
+barbarous tribes--as, for instance, in Central Africa. And some traces
+of it still survive, under different pretexts and disguises, in the
+lowest strata of civilised nations, where it may be said to represent
+the natural reluctance of the vagrant human fancy to be satisfied with
+higher forms and purer conceptions that are always imperfectly
+assimilated by the multitude.
+
+Among primitive societies the spheres of human and divine affairs
+were intermixed and identical; they could not be disentangled. But
+with the growth of political institutions came gradual separation, or
+at any rate the subordination of religion to the practical necessities
+of orderly government and public morals. That polytheism can exist and
+flourish in the midst of a highly intellectual and civilised society,
+we know from the history of Greece and Rome. But in ancient Greece its
+direct influence upon political affairs seems to have been slight;
+though it touched at some points upon morality. The function of the
+State, according to Greek ideas, was to legislate for all the
+departments of human life and to uphold the moral standard. The law
+prohibited sacrilege and profanity; it punished open impiety that
+might bring down divine wrath upon the people at large. The
+philosophers taught rational ethics; they regarded the popular
+superstitions with indulgent contempt; but they inculcated the duty of
+honouring the gods, and the observance of public ceremonial. Beyond
+these limits the practice of local and customary worship was, I think,
+free and unrestrained; though I need hardly add that toleration, as
+understood by the States of antiquity, was a very different thing from
+the modern principle of religious neutrality. Under the Roman
+government the connection between the State and religion was much
+closer, as the dominion of Rome expanded and its power became
+centralised. The Roman State maintained a strict control and
+superintendence over the official rituals and worships, which were
+regulated as a department of the administration, to bind the people
+together by established rites and worships, in order to cement
+political and social unity. It is true that the usages of the tribes
+and principalities that were conquered and annexed were left
+undisturbed; for the Roman policy, like that of the English in India,
+was to avoid giving offence to religion; and undoubtedly this policy,
+in both instances, materially facilitated the rapid building up of a
+wide dominion. Nevertheless, there was a tendency to draw in the
+worship toward a common centre. The deities of the conquered provinces
+were respected and conciliated; the Roman generals even appealed to
+them for protection and favour, yet they became absorbed and
+assimilated under Roman names; they were often identified with the
+gods of the Roman pantheon, and were frequently superseded by the
+victorious divinities of the new rulers--the strange deities, in fact,
+were Romanised as well as the foreign tribes and cities. After this
+manner the Roman empire combined the tolerance of great religious
+diversity with the supremacy of a centralised government. Political
+amalgamation brought about a fusion of divine attributes; and latterly
+the emperor was adored as the symbol of manifest power, ruler and
+pontiff; he was the visible image of supreme authority.
+
+This _regime_ was easily accepted by the simple unsophisticated
+paganism of Europe. The Romans, with all their statecraft, had as yet
+no experience of a high religious temperature, of enthusiastic
+devotion and divine mysteries. But as their conquest and commerce
+spread eastward, the invasion of Asia let in upon Europe a flood of
+Oriental divinities, and thus Rome came into contact with much
+stronger and deeper spiritual forces. The European polytheism might be
+utilised and administered, the Asiatic deities could not be
+domesticated and subjected to regulation; the Oriental orgies and
+strange rites broke in upon the organised State worship; the new ideas
+and practices came backed by a profound and fervid spiritualism.
+Nevertheless the Roman policy of bringing religion under
+authoritative control was more or less successful even in the Asiatic
+provinces of the empire; the privileges of the temples were
+restricted; the priesthoods were placed under the general
+superintendence of the proconsular officials; and Roman divinities
+gradually found their way into the Asiatic pantheon.
+
+But we all know that the religion of the Roman empire was falling into
+multitudinous confusion when Christianity arose--an austere exclusive
+faith, with its army of saints, ascetics, and unflinching martyrs,
+proclaiming worship to be due to one God only, and sternly refusing to
+acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. Against such a faith an
+incoherent disorderly polytheism could make no better stand than
+tribal levies against a disciplined army. The new religion struck
+directly at the sacrifices that symbolised imperial unity; the passive
+resistance of Christians was necessarily treated as rebellion, the
+State made implacable war upon them. Yet the spiritual and moral
+forces won the victory, and Christianity established itself throughout
+the empire. Universal religion, following upon universal civil
+dominion, completed the levelling of local and national distinctions.
+The Churches rapidly grew into authority superior to the State within
+their own jurisdiction; they called in the temporal government to
+enforce theological decisions and to put down heresies; they founded a
+powerful hierarchy. The earlier Roman constitution had made religion
+an instrument of administration. When one religion became universal,
+the churches enlisted the civil ruler into the service of orthodoxy;
+they converted the State into an instrument for enforcing religion.
+The pagan empire had issued edicts against Christianity and had
+suppressed Christian assemblies as tainted with disaffection; the
+Christian emperors enacted laws against the rites and worships of
+paganism, and closed temples. It was by the supreme authority of
+Constantine that, for the first time in the religious history of the
+world, uniformity of belief was defined by a creed, and sanctioned by
+the ruler's assent.
+
+Then came, in Western Europe, the time when the empire at Rome was
+rent asunder by the inrush of barbarians; but upon its ruins was
+erected the great Catholic Church of the Papacy, which preserved in
+the ecclesiastical domain the autocratic imperial tradition. The
+primacy of the Roman Church, according to Harnack, is essentially the
+transference to her of Rome's central position in the religions of the
+heathen world; the Church united the western races, disunited
+politically, under the common denomination of Christianity. Yet
+Christianity had not long established itself throughout all the lands,
+in Europe and Asia, which had once been under the Roman sovereignty,
+when the violent irruptions of Islam upset not only the temporal but
+also the spiritual dominion throughout Western Asia, and along the
+southern shores of the Mediterranean. The Eastern empire at
+Constantinople had been weakened by bitter theological dissensions and
+heresies among the Christians; the votaries of the new, simple,
+unswerving faith of Mohammed were ardent and unanimous. In Egypt and
+Syria the Mohammedans were speedily victorious; the Latin Church and
+even the Latin language were swept out of North Africa. In Persia the
+Sassanian dynasty was overthrown, and although there was no immediate
+and total conversion of the people, Mohammedanism gradually superseded
+the ancient Zoroastrian cultus as the religion of the Persian State.
+It was not long before the armies of Islam had triumphed from the
+Atlantic coast to the Jaxartes river in Central Asia; and conversion
+followed, speedily or slowly, as the direct result of conquest.
+Moreover, the Mohammedans invaded Europe. In the south-west they
+subdued almost all Spain; and in the south-east they destroyed, some
+centuries later, the Greek empire, though not the Greek Church, and
+consolidated a mighty rulership at Constantinople.
+
+With this prolonged conflict between Islam and Christianity along the
+borderlands of Europe and Asia began the era of those religious wars
+that have darkened the history of the Western nations, and have
+perpetuated the inveterate antipathy between Asiatic and European
+races, which the spread of Christianity into both continents had
+softened and might have healed. In the end Christianity has fixed
+itself permanently in Europe, while Islam is strongly established
+throughout half Asia. But the sharp collision between the two faiths,
+the clash of armies bearing the cross and the crescent, generated
+fierce fanaticism on both sides. The Crusades kindled a fiery militant
+and missionary spirit previously unknown to religions, whereby
+religious propagation became the mainspring and declared object of
+conquest and colonisation. Finally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries the great secession from the Roman Church divided the
+nations of Western Europe into hostile camps, and throughout the long
+wars of that period political jealousies and ambitions were inflamed
+by religious animosities. In Eastern Europe the Greek Church fell
+under almost complete subordination to the State.
+
+The history of Europe and Western Asia records, therefore, a close
+connection and community of interests between the States and the
+orthodox faiths; a combination which has had a very potent influence,
+during many centuries, upon the course of civil affairs, upon the
+fortunes, or misfortunes, of nations. Up to the sixteenth century, at
+least, it was universally held, by Christianity and by Islam, that
+the State was bound to enforce orthodoxy; conversion and the
+suppression or expulsion of heretics were public duties. Unity of
+creed was thought necessary for national unity--a government could not
+undertake to maintain authority, or preserve the allegiance of its
+subjects, in a realm divided and distracted by sectarian
+controversies. On these principles Christianity and Islam were
+consolidated, in union with the States or in close alliance with them;
+and the geographical boundaries of these two faiths, and of their
+internal divisions respectively, have not materially changed up to the
+present day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let me now turn to the history of religion in those countries of
+further Asia, which were never reached by Greek or Roman conquest or
+civilisation, where the ancient forms of worship and conceptions of
+divinity, which existed before Christianity and Islam, still flourish.
+And here I shall only deal with the relations of the State to religion
+in India and China and their dependencies, because these vast and
+populous empires contain the two great religions, Hinduism and
+Buddhism, of purely Asiatic origin and character, which have
+assimilated to a large extent, and in a certain degree elevated, the
+indigenous polytheism, and which still exercise a mighty influence
+over the spiritual and moral condition of many millions.
+
+We know what a tremendous power religion has been in the wars and
+politics of the West. I submit that in Eastern Asia, beyond the pale
+of Islam, the history of religion has been very different. Religious
+wars--I mean wars caused by the conflict of militant faiths contending
+for superiority--were, I believe, unknown on any great scale to the
+ancient civilisations. It seems to me that until Islam invaded India
+the great religious movements and changes in that region had seldom or
+never been the consequence of, nor had been materially affected by,
+wars, conquests, or political revolutions.
+
+Throughout Europe and Mohammedan Asia the indigenous deities and their
+temples have disappeared centuries ago; they have been swept away by
+the forces of Church and State combined to exterminate them; they have
+all yielded to the lofty overruling ideal of monotheism. But the tide
+of Mohammedanism reached its limit in India; the people, though
+conquered, were but partly converted, and eastward of India there have
+been no important Mohammedan rulerships. On this side of Asia,
+therefore, two great religions, Buddhism and Brahmanism, have held
+their ground from times far anterior to Christianity; they have
+retained the elastic comprehensive character of polytheism, purified
+and elevated by higher conceptions, developed by the persistent
+competition of diverse ideas and forms among the people, unrestrained
+by attempts of superior organised faiths to obliterate the lower and
+weaker species. In that region political despotism has prevailed
+immemorially; religious despotism, in the sense of the legal
+establishment of one faith or worship to the exclusion of all others,
+of uniformity imposed by coercion, of proselytism by persecution, is
+unknown to history: the governments have been absolute and personal;
+the religions have been popular and democratic. They have never been
+identified so closely with the ruling power as to share its fortunes,
+or to be used for the consolidation of successful conquest. Nor, on
+the other hand, has a ruler ever found it necessary, for the security
+of his throne, to conform to the religion of his subjects, and to
+abjure all others. The political maxim, that the sovereign and his
+subjects should be of one and the same religion,[59] has never
+prevailed in this part of the world. And although in India, the land
+of their common origin, Buddhism widely displaced and overlaid
+Brahmanism, while it was in its turn, after several centuries,
+overcome and ejected by a Brahmanic revival, yet I believe that
+history records no violent contests or collisions between them; nor do
+we know that the armed force of the State played any decisive part in
+these spiritual revolutions.
+
+I do not maintain that Buddhism has owed nothing to State influence.
+It represents certain doctrines of the ancient Indian theosophy,
+incarnate, as one might say, in the figure of a spiritual Master, the
+Indian prince, Sakya Gautama, who was the type and example of ascetic
+quietism; it embodies the idea of salvation, or emancipation
+attainable by man's own efforts, without aid from priests or
+divinities. Buddhism is the earliest, by many centuries, of the faiths
+that claim descent from a personal founder. It emerges into authentic
+history with the empire of Asoka, who ruled over the greater part of
+India some 250 years before Christ, and its propagation over his realm
+and the countries adjacent is undoubtedly due to the influence,
+example, and authority of that devout monarch. According to Mr.
+Vincent Smith, from whose valuable work on the Early History of India
+I take the description of Asoka's religious policy, the king,
+renouncing after one necessary war all further military conquest, made
+it the business of his life to employ his autocratic power in
+directing the preaching and teaching of the Law of Piety, which he had
+learnt from his Buddhist priesthood. All his high officers were
+commanded to instruct the people in the way of salvation; he sent
+missions to foreign countries; he issued edicts promulgating ethical
+doctrines, and the rules of a devout life; he made pilgrimages to the
+sacred places; and finally he assumed the yellow robe of a Buddhist
+monk. Asoka elevated, so Mr. Smith has said, a sect of Hinduism to the
+rank of a world-religion. Nevertheless, I think it may be affirmed
+that the emperor consistently refrained from the forcible conversion
+of his subjects, and indeed the use of compulsion would have
+apparently been a breach of his own edicts, which insist on the
+principle of toleration, and declare the propagation of the Law of
+Piety to be his sole object. Asoka made no attempt to persecute
+Brahmanism; and it seems clear that the extraordinary success of
+Buddhism in India cannot be attributed to war or to conquest. To
+imperial influence and example much must be ascribed, yet I think
+Buddhism owed much more to its spiritual potency, to its superior
+faculty of transmuting and assimilating, instead of abolishing, the
+elementary instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher
+significance, attracting and stimulating devotion by impressive rites
+and ceremonies, impressing upon the people the dogma of the soul's
+transmigration and its escape from the miseries of sentient existence
+by the operation of merits. And of all great religions it is the least
+political, for the practice of asceticism and quietism, of monastic
+seclusion from the working world, is necessarily adverse to any active
+connection with mundane affairs.
+
+I do not know that the mysterious disappearance of Buddhism from India
+can be accounted for by any great political revolution, like that
+which brought Islam into India. It seems to have vanished before the
+Mohammedans had gained any footing in the country. Meanwhile Buddhism
+is said to have penetrated into the Chinese empire by the first
+century of the Christian era. Before that time the doctrines of
+Confucius and Laotze were the dominant philosophies; rather moral than
+religious, though ancestral worship and the propitiation of spirits
+were not disallowed, and were to a certain extent enjoined. Laotze,
+the apostle of Taoism, appears to have preached a kind of
+Stoicism--the observance of the order of Nature in searching for the
+right way of salvation, the abhorrence of vicious sensuality--and the
+cultivation of humility, self-sacrifice, and simplicity of life. He
+condemned altogether the use of force in the sphere of religion or
+morality; though he admitted that it might be necessary for the
+purposes of civil government. The system of Confucius inculcated
+justice, benevolence, self-control, obedience and loyalty to the
+sovereign--all the civic virtues; it was a moral code without a
+metaphysical background; the popular worships were tolerated,
+reverence for ancestors conduced to edification; the gods were to be
+honoured, though it was well to keep aloof from them; he disliked
+religious fervour, and of things beyond experience he had nothing to
+say.
+
+Buddhism, with its contempt for temporal affairs, treating life as a
+mere burden, and the soul's liberation from existence as the end and
+object of meditative devotion, must have imported a new and disturbing
+element into the utilitarian philosophies of ancient China. For many
+centuries Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are said to have
+contended for the patronage and recognition of the Chinese emperors.
+Buddhism was alternately persecuted and protected, expelled and
+restored by imperial decree. Priesthoods and monastic orders are
+institutions of which governments are naturally jealous; the
+monasteries were destroyed or rebuilt, sacerdotal orders and celibacy
+suppressed or encouraged by imperial decrees, according to the views
+and prepossessions of successive dynasties or emperors. Nevertheless
+the general policy of Chinese rulers and ministers seems not to have
+varied essentially. Their administrative principle was that religion
+must be prevented from interfering with affairs of State, that abuses
+and superstitious extravagances are not so much offences against
+orthodoxy as matters for the police, and as such must be put down by
+the secular arm.
+
+Upon this policy successive dynasties appear to have acted
+continuously up to the present day in China, where the relations of
+the State to religions are, I think, without parallel elsewhere in the
+modern world. One may find some resemblance to the attitude of the
+Roman emperors towards rites and worships among the population, in the
+Chinese emperor's reverent observance and regulation of the rites and
+ceremonies performed by him as the religious chief and representative
+before Heaven of the great national interests. The deification of
+deceased emperors is a solemn rite ordained by proclamation. As the
+_Ius sacrum_, the body of rights and duties in the matter of religion,
+was regarded in Rome as a department of the _Ius publicum_, belonging
+to the fundamental constitution of the State, so in China the ritual
+code was incorporated into the statute books, and promulgated with
+imperial sanction. Now we know that in Rome the established ritual was
+legally prescribed, though otherwise strange deities and their
+worships were admitted indiscriminately. But the Chinese Government
+goes much further. It appears to regard all novel superstitions, and
+especially foreign worships, as the hotbed of sedition and disloyalty.
+Unlicensed deities and sects are put down by the police; magicians and
+sorcerers are arrested; and the peculiar Chinese practice of
+canonising deceased officials and paying sacrificial honours to local
+celebrities after death is strictly reserved by the Board of
+Ceremonies for imperial consideration and approval. The Censor, to
+whom any proposal of this kind must be entrusted, is admonished that
+he must satisfy himself by inquiry of its validity. An official who
+performs sacred rites in honour of a spirit or holy personage not
+recognised by the Ritual Code, was liable, under laws that may be
+still in force, to corporal punishment; and the adoration by private
+families of spirits whose worship is reserved for public ceremonial
+was a heinous offence. No such rigorous control over the
+multiplication of rites and deities has been instituted elsewhere. On
+the other hand, while in other countries the State has recognised no
+more than one established religion, the Chinese Government formally
+recognises three denominations. Buddhism has been sanctioned by
+various edicts and endowments, yet the State divinities belong to the
+Taoist pantheon, and their worship is regulated by public ordinances;
+while Confucianism represents official orthodoxy, and its precepts
+embody the latitudinarian spirit of the intellectual classes. We know
+that the Chinese people make use, so to speak, of all three religions
+indiscriminately, according to their individual whims, needs, or
+experience of results. So also a politic administration countenances
+these divisions and probably finds some interest in maintaining them.
+The morality of the people requires some religious sanction; and it is
+this element with which the State professes its chief concern. We are
+told on good authority that one of the functions of high officials is
+to deliver public lectures freely criticising and discouraging
+indolent monasticism and idolatry from the standpoint of rational
+ethics, as follies that are reluctantly tolerated. Yet the Government
+has never been able to keep down the fanatics, mystics, and heretical
+sects that are incessantly springing up in China, as elsewhere in
+Asia; though they are treated as pestilent rebels and law-breakers,
+to be exterminated by massacre and cruel punishments; and bloody
+repression of this kind has been the cause of serious insurrections.
+It is to be observed that all religious persecution is by the direct
+action of the State, _not_ instigated or insisted upon by a powerful
+orthodox priesthood. But a despotic administration which undertakes to
+control and circumscribe all forms and manifestations of superstition
+in a vast polytheistic multitude of its subjects, is inevitably driven
+to repressive measures of the utmost severity. Neither Christianity
+nor Islam attempted to regulate polytheism, their mission was to
+exterminate it, and they succeeded mainly because in those countries
+the State was acting with the support and under the uncompromising
+pressure of a dominant church or faith.
+
+Some writers have noticed a certain degree of resemblance between the
+policy of the Roman empire and that of the Chinese empire toward
+religion. We may read in Gibbon that the Roman magistrates regarded
+the various modes of worship as equally useful, that sages and heroes
+were exalted to immortality and entitled to reverence and adoration,
+and that philosophic officials, viewing with indulgence the
+superstitions of the multitude, diligently practised the ceremonies of
+their fathers. So far, indeed, his description of the attitude of the
+State toward polytheism may be applicable to China; but although the
+Roman and Chinese emperors both assumed the rank of divinity, and were
+supreme in the department of worships, the Roman administration never
+attempted to regulate and restrain polytheism at large on the Chinese
+system.
+
+The religion of the Gentiles, said Hobbes, is a part of their policy;
+and it may be said that this is still the policy of Oriental
+monarchies, who admit no separation between the secular and the
+ecclesiastic jurisdiction. They would agree with Hobbes that temporal
+and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to
+make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign. But while in
+Mohammedan Asia the State upholds orthodox uniformity, in China and
+Japan the mainspring of all such administrative action is political
+expediency. It may be suggested that in the mind of these far-Eastern
+people religion has never been conceived as something quite apart from
+human experience and the affairs of the visible world; for Buddhism,
+with its metaphysical doctrines, is a foreign importation, corrupted
+and materialised in China and Japan. And we may observe that from
+among the Mongolian races, which have produced mighty conquerors and
+founded famous dynasties from Constantinople to Pekin, no mighty
+prophet, no profound spiritual teacher, has arisen. Yet in China, as
+throughout all the countries of the Asiatic mainland, an enthusiast
+may still gather together ardent proselytes, and fresh revelations may
+create among the people unrest that may ferment and become heated up
+to the degree of fanaticism, and explode against attempts made to
+suppress it. The Taeping insurrection, which devastated cities and
+provinces in China, and nearly overthrew the Manchu dynasty, is a
+striking example of the volcanic fires that underlie the surface of
+Asiatic societies. It was quenched in torrents of blood after lasting
+some ten years. And very recently there has been a determined revolt
+of the Lamas in Eastern Tibet, where the provincial administration is,
+as we know, sacerdotal. The imperial troops are said to be crushing it
+with unrelenting severity. These are the perilous experiences of a
+philosophic Government that assumes charge and control over the
+religions of some three hundred millions of Asiatics.
+
+I can only make a hasty reference to Japan. In that country the
+relations of the State to religions appear to have followed the
+Chinese model. Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, are impartially
+recognised. The emperor presides over official worship as high priest
+of his people; the liturgical ordinances are issued by imperial
+rescripts not differing in form from other public edicts. The dominant
+article of faith is the divinity of Japan and its emperor; and Shinto,
+the worship of the gods of nature, is understood to be patronised
+chiefly with the motive of preserving the national traditions. But in
+Japan the advance of modern science and enlightened scepticism may
+have diminished the importance of the religious department. Shinto,
+says a recent writer, still embodies the religion of the people; yet
+in 1877 a decree was issued declaring it to be no more than a
+convenient system of State ceremonial.[60] And in 1889 an article of
+the constitution granted freedom of belief and worship to all Japanese
+subjects, without prejudice to peace, order, and loyalty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In India the religious situation is quite different. I think it is
+without parallel elsewhere in the world. Here we are at the
+fountain-head of metaphysical theology, of ideas that have flowed
+eastward and westward across Asia. And here, also, we find every
+species of primitive polytheism, unlimited and multitudinous; we can
+survey a confused medley of divinities, of rites and worships
+incessantly varied by popular whim and fancy, by accidents, and by the
+pressure of changing circumstances. Hinduism permits any doctrine to
+be taught, any sort of theory to be held regarding the divine
+attributes and manifestations, the forces of nature, or the
+mysterious functions of mind or body. Its tenets have never been
+circumscribed by a creed; its free play has never been checked or
+regulated by State authority.
+
+Now, at first sight, this is not unlike the popular polytheism of the
+ancient world, before the triumph of Christianity. There are passages
+in St. Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, describing the worship of the
+unconverted pagans among whom he lived, that might have been written
+yesterday by a Christian bishop in India. And we might ask why all
+this polytheism was not swept out from among such a highly
+intellectual people as the Indians, with their restless pursuit of
+divine knowledge, by some superior faith, by some central idea.
+Undoubtedly the material and moral conditions, and the course of
+events which combine to stamp a particular form of religion upon any
+great people, are complex and manifold; but into this inquiry I cannot
+go. I can only point out that the institution of caste has riveted
+down Hindu society into innumerable divisions upon a general religious
+basis, and that the sacred books separated the Hindu theologians into
+different schools, preventing uniformity of worship or of creed. And
+it is to be observed that these books are not historical; they give no
+account of the rise and spread of a faith. The Hindu theologian would
+say, in the words of an early Christian father, that the objects of
+divine knowledge are not historical, that they can only be apprehended
+intellectually, that within experience there is no reality. And the
+fact that Brahmanism has no authentic inspired narrative, that it is
+the only great religion not concentrated round the life and teachings
+of a person, may be one reason why it has remained diffuse and
+incoherent. All ways of salvation are still open to the Hindus; the
+canon of their scripture has never been authoritatively closed. New
+doctrines, new sects, fresh theological controversies, are
+incessantly modifying and superseding the old scholastic
+interpretations of the mysteries, for Hindus, like Asiatics
+everywhere, are still in that condition of mind when a fresh spiritual
+message is eagerly received. Vishnu and Siva are the realistic
+abstractions of the understanding from objects of sense, from
+observation of the destructive and reproductive operations of nature;
+they represent among educated men separate systems of worship which,
+again, are parted into different schools or theories regarding the
+proper ways and methods of attaining to spiritual emancipation. Yet
+the higher philosophy and the lower polytheism are not mutually
+antagonistic; on the contrary, they support each other; for Brahmanism
+accepts and allies itself with the popular forms of idolatry, treating
+them as outward visible signs of an inner truth, as indications of
+all-pervading pantheism. The peasant and the philosopher reverence the
+same deity, perform the same rite; they do not mean the same thing,
+but they do not quarrel on this account. Nevertheless, it is certainly
+remarkable that this inorganic medley of ideas and worships should
+have resisted for so many ages the invasion and influence of the
+coherent faiths that have won ascendancy, complete or dominant, on
+either side of India, the west and the east; it has thrown off
+Buddhism, it has withstood the triumphant advance of Islam, it has as
+yet been little affected by Christianity. Probably the political
+history of India may account in some degree for its religious
+disorganisation. I may propound the theory that no religion has
+obtained supremacy, or at any rate definite establishment, in any
+great country except with the active co-operation, by force or favour,
+of the rulers, whether by conquest, as in Western Asia, or by
+patronage and protection, as in China. The direct influence and
+recognition of the State has been an indispensable instrument of
+religious consolidation. But until the nineteenth century the whole of
+India, from the mountains to the sea, had never been united under one
+stable government; the country was for ages parcelled out into
+separate principalities, incessantly contending for territory. And
+even the Moghul empire, which was always at war upon its frontiers,
+never acquired universal dominion. The Moghul emperors, except
+Aurungzeb, were by no means bigoted Mohammedans; and their obvious
+interest was to abstain from meddling with Hinduism. Yet the irruption
+of Islam into India seems rather to have stimulated religious activity
+among the Hindus, for during the Mohammedan period various spiritual
+teachers arose, new sects were formed, and theological controversies
+divided the intellectual classes. To these movements the Mohammedan
+governments must have been for a long time indifferent; and among the
+new sects the principle of mutual toleration was universal. Towards
+the close of the Moghul empire, however, Hinduism, provoked by the
+bigotry of the Emperor Aurungzeb, became a serious element of
+political disturbance. Attempts to suppress forcibly the followers of
+Nanak Guru, and the execution of one spiritual leader of the Sikhs,
+turned the Sikhs from inoffensive quietists into fanatical warriors;
+and by the eighteenth century they were in open revolt against the
+empire. They were, I think, the most formidable embodiment of militant
+Hinduism known to Indian history. By that time, also, the Marathas in
+South-West India were declaring themselves the champions of the Hindu
+religion against the Mohammedan oppression; and to the Sikhs and
+Marathas the dislocation of the Moghul empire may be very largely
+attributed. We have here a notable example of the dynamic power upon
+politics of revolts that are generated by religious fermentation, and
+a proof of the strength that can be exerted by a pacific inorganic
+polytheism in self-defence, when ambitious rebels proclaim themselves
+defenders of a faith. The Marathas and the Sikhs founded the only
+rulerships whose armies could give the English serious trouble in the
+field during the nineteenth century.
+
+On the whole, however, when we survey the history of India, and
+compare it with that of Western Asia, we may say that although the
+Hindus are perhaps the most intensely religious people in the world,
+Hinduism has never been, like Christianity, Islam, and to some extent
+Buddhism, a religion established by the State. Nor has it suffered
+much from the State's power. It seems strange, indeed, that
+Mohammedanism, a compact proselytising faith, closely united with the
+civil rulership, should have so slightly modified, during seven
+centuries of dominion, this infinitely divided polytheism. Of course,
+Mohammedanism made many converts, and annexed a considerable number of
+the population--yet the effect was rather to stiffen than to loosen
+the bonds that held the mass of the people to their traditional
+divinities, and to the institution of castes. Moreover the antagonism
+of the two religions, the popular and the dynastic, was a perpetual
+element of weakness in a Mohammedan empire. In India polytheism could
+not be crushed, as in Western Asia, by Islam; neither could it be
+controlled and administered, as in Eastern Asia; yet the Moghul
+emperors managed to keep on good terms with it, so long as they
+adhered to a policy of toleration.
+
+To the Mohammedan empire has succeeded another foreign dominion, which
+practises not merely tolerance but complete religious neutrality.
+Looking back over the period of a hundred years, from 1757 to 1857,
+during which the British dominion was gradually extended over India,
+we find that the British empire, like the Roman, met with little or no
+opposition from religion. Hindus and Mohammedans, divided against each
+other, were equally willing to form alliances with, and to fight on
+the side of, the foreigner who kept religion entirely outside
+politics. And the British Government, when established, has so
+carefully avoided offence to caste or creed that on one great occasion
+only, the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, have the smouldering fires of
+credulous fanaticism broken out against our rule.
+
+I believe the British-Indian position of complete religious neutrality
+to be unique among Asiatic governments, and almost unknown in Europe.
+The Anglo-Indian sovereignty does not identify itself with the
+interests of a single faith, as in Mohammedan kingdoms, nor does it
+recognise a definite ecclesiastical jurisdiction in things spiritual,
+as in Catholic Europe. Still less has our Government adopted the
+Chinese system of placing the State at the head of different rituals
+for the purpose of controlling them all, and proclaiming an ethical
+code to be binding on all denominations. The British ruler, while
+avowedly Christian, ignores all religions administratively,
+interfering only to suppress barbarous or indecent practices when the
+advance of civilisation has rendered them obsolete. Public
+instruction, so far as the State is concerned, is entirely secular;
+the universal law is the only authorised guardian of morals; to
+expound moral duties officially, as things apart from religion, has
+been found possible in China, but not in India. But the Chinese
+Government can issue edicts enjoining public morality and rationalism
+because the State takes part in the authorised worship of the people,
+and the emperor assumes pontifical office. The British Government in
+India, on the other hand, disowns official connection with any
+religion. It places all its measures on the sole ground of reasonable
+expediency, of efficient administration; it seeks to promote industry
+and commerce, and material civilisation generally; it carefully avoids
+giving any religious colour whatever to its public acts; and the
+result is that our Government, notwithstanding its sincere professions
+of absolute neutrality, is sometimes suspected of regarding all
+religion with cynical indifference, possibly even with hostility.
+
+Moreover, religious neutrality, though it is right, just, and the only
+policy which the English in India could possibly adopt, has certain
+political disadvantages. The two most potent influences which still
+unite and divide the Asiatic peoples, are race and religion; a
+Government which represents both these forces, as, for instance, in
+Afghanistan, has deep roots in a country. A dynasty that can rely on
+the support of an organised religion, and stands forth as the champion
+of a dominant faith, has a powerful political power at its command.
+The Turkish empire, weak, ill-governed, repeatedly threatened with
+dismemberment, embarrassed internally by the conflict of races, has
+been preserved for the last hundred years by its incorporation with
+the faith of Islam, by the Sultan's claim to the Caliphate. To attack
+it is to assault a religious citadel; it is the bulwark on the west of
+Mohammedan Asia, as Afghanistan is the frontier fortress of Islam on
+the east. A leading Turkish politician has very recently said: 'It is
+in Islam pure and simple that lies the strength of Turkey as an
+independent State; and if the Sultan's position as religious chief
+were encroached upon by constitutional reforms, the whole Ottoman
+empire would be in danger.' We have to remember that for ages
+religious enthusiasm has been, and still is in some parts of Asia, one
+of the strongest incentives to military ardour and fidelity to a
+standard on the battlefield. Identity of creed has often proved more
+effective, in war, than territorial patriotism; it has surmounted
+racial and tribal antipathies; while religious antagonism is still in
+many countries a standing impediment to political consolidation.
+
+When, therefore, we survey the history of religions, though this
+sketch is necessarily very imperfect and inadequate, we find
+Mohammedanism still identified with the fortunes of Mohammedan rulers;
+and we know that for many centuries the relations of Christianity to
+European States have been very close. In Europe the ardent
+perseverance and intellectual superiority of great theologians, of
+ecclesiastical statesmen supported by autocratic rulers, have hardened
+and beat out into form doctrines and liturgies that it was at one time
+criminal to disregard or deny, dogmatic articles of faith that were
+enforced by law. By these processes orthodoxy emerged compact, sharply
+defined, irresistible, out of the strife and confusion of heresies;
+the early record of the churches has pages spotted with tears and
+stained with blood. But at the present time European States seem
+inclined to dissolve their alliance with the churches, and to arrange
+a kind of judicial separation between the altar and the throne, though
+in very few cases has a divorce been made absolute. No State, in
+civilised countries, now assists in the propagation of doctrine; and
+ecclesiastical influence is of very little service to a Government.
+The civil law, indeed, makes continual encroachments on the
+ecclesiastical domain, questions its authority, and usurps its
+jurisdiction. Modern erudition criticises the historical authenticity
+of the scriptures, philosophy tries to undermine the foundations of
+belief; the governments find small interest in propping up edifices
+that are shaken by internal controversies. In Mohammedan Asia, on the
+other hand, the connection between the orthodox faith and the States
+is firmly maintained, for the solidarity is so close that disruptions
+would be dangerous, and a Mohammedan rulership over a majority of
+unbelievers would still be perilously unstable.
+
+I have thus endeavoured to show that the historical relations of
+Buddhism and Hinduism to the State have been in the past, and are
+still in the present time, very different from the situation in the
+West. There has always existed, I submit, one essential distinction of
+principle. Religious propagation, forcible conversion, aided and
+abetted by the executive power of the State, and by laws against
+heresy or dissent, have been defended in the West by the doctors of
+Islam, and formerly by Christian theologians, by the axiom that all
+means are justifiable for extirpating false teachers who draw souls to
+perdition. The right and duty of the civil magistrate to maintain
+truth, in regard to which Bossuet declared all Christians to be
+unanimous, and which is still affirmed in the Litany of our Church, is
+a principle from which no Government, three centuries ago, dissented
+in theory, though in practice it needed cautious handling. I do not
+think that this principle ever found its way into Hinduism or
+Buddhism; I doubt, that is to say, whether the civil government was at
+any time called in to undertake or assist propagation of those
+religions as part of its duty. Nor do I know that the States of
+Eastern Asia, beyond the pale of Islam, claim or exercise the right of
+insisting on conformance to particular doctrines, because they are
+true. The erratic manifestations of the religious spirit throughout
+Asia, constantly breaking out in various forms and figures, in
+thaumaturgy, mystical inspiration, in orgies and secret societies,
+have always disquieted these Asiatic States, yet, so far as I can
+ascertain, the employment of force to repress them has always been
+justified on administrative or political grounds, as distinguishable
+from theological motives pure and simple. Sceptics and agnostics have
+been often marked out for persecution in the West, but I do not think
+that they have been molested in India, China, or Japan, where they
+abound, because they seldom meddle with politics.[61] It may perhaps
+be admitted, however, that a Government which undertakes to regulate
+impartially all rites and worship among its subjects is at a
+disadvantage by comparison with a Government that acts as the
+representative of a great church or an exclusive faith. It bears the
+sole undivided responsibility for measures of repression; it cannot
+allege divine command or even the obligation of punishing impiety for
+the public good.
+
+To conclude. In Asiatic States the superintendence of religious
+affairs is an integral attribute of the sovereignty, which no
+Government, except the English in India, has yet ventured to
+relinquish; and even in India this is not done without some risk, for
+religion and politics are still intermingled throughout the world;
+they act and react upon each other everywhere. They are still far from
+being disentangled in our own country, where the theory that a
+Government in its collective character must profess and even propagate
+some religion has not been very long obsolete. It was maintained
+seventy years ago by a great statesman who was already rising into
+prominence, by Mr. Gladstone. The text of Mr. Gladstone's argument, in
+his book on the relations of the State with the Church, was Hooker's
+saying, that the religious duty of kings is the weightiest part of
+their sovereignty; while Macaulay, in criticising this position,
+insisted that the main, if not the only, duty of a Government, to
+which all other objects must be subordinate, was the protection of
+persons and property. These two eminent politicians were, in fact, the
+champions of the ancient and the modern ideas of sovereignty; for the
+theory that a State is bound to propagate the religion that it
+professes was for many centuries the accepted theory of all Christian
+rulerships, though I think it now survives only in Mohammedan
+kingdoms.
+
+As the influence of religion in the sphere of politics declines, the
+State becomes naturally less concerned with the superintendence of
+religion; and the tendency of constitutional Governments seems to be
+towards abandoning it. The States that have completely dissolved
+connection with ecclesiastical institutions are the two great
+republics, the United States of America and France. We can discern at
+this moment a movement towards constitutional reforms in Mohammedan
+Asia, in Turkey, and Persia, and if they succeed it will be most
+interesting to observe the effect which liberal reforms will produce
+upon the relation of Mohammedan Governments with the dominant faith,
+and on which side the religious teachers will be arrayed. It is
+certain, at any rate, that for a long time to come religion will
+continue to be a potent factor in Asiatic politics; and I may add that
+the reconciliation of civil with religious liberty is one of the most
+arduous of the many problems to be solved by the promoters of national
+unity.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[58] Delivered as President of the Congress for the History of
+Religions, September 1908.--_Fortnightly Review_, November 1908.
+
+[59] 'Cujus regio ejus religio.'
+
+[60] _The Development of Religion in Japan_, G. W. Knox, 1907.
+
+[61] 'Atheism did never disturb States' (Bacon).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Acton, Lord:
+  On causes of Franco-German War, 346.
+  Quoted, 362 (footnote), 386, 396, 398.
+  Advice to writers of history, 384, 394.
+  Also 370, 374, 375, 387.
+
+Addison's _Blenheim_ criticised in _Esmond_, 101.
+
+Adventure, see Novels of.
+
+Adventures of Moreau de Jonnes, 16.
+  Popularity of, in short stories, 31.
+
+Afghan:
+  Blood feuds, border forays, etc., 163, 164.
+  War, 163, 318.
+  Songs, 168.
+  Frontier and frontier policy, 319, 324.
+  Character, 320.
+
+Afghanistan:
+  Barrier to Russian advance in Asia, 316.
+  British policy towards, compared with Russian policy in Caucasus, 317.
+  Is acquiring a territorial connotation, 416.
+  Eastern bulwark of Islam, 417, 449.
+
+Akhlongo, siege of, 305.
+
+Althorp, Lord, 64.
+
+Armenians, their position and misfortunes, 414.
+
+Arnold, Matthew:
+  Lord Morley's article on his letters, 50.
+  His letters reviewed, 57.
+  Quoted, 58, 59, 60, 61,177, 257.
+  Praised and criticised by Swinburne, 282, 287.
+  Also 126, 183, 207, 266, 281.
+
+Asia and foreign dynasties, 417.
+
+Asoka, 436.
+
+Austen, Jane, as novelist of manners, 21, 24.
+
+Austria-Hungary, intermixture of races and religions in, 403.
+
+
+Balfour, Arthur James, _Foundations of Belief_, 250.
+
+Balkans, policy of the Turks in the, 407.
+
+Balzac, 94.
+
+Bariatinsky, 314.
+
+Beauchamp and the Utilitarian rejection of theology, 255.
+
+Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 2.
+
+Benedetti, 332, etc.
+
+Bentham, see 'Utilitarians.'
+
+Beowulf, 168.
+
+Bismarck, see 'L'Empire Liberal,' _passim_.
+
+Blavatsky, Madame, 134.
+
+Blood feuds in Afghanistan, 321.
+  On the Scotch borders, 323.
+
+Bonaparte, 92, 187.
+
+Bossuet, 451.
+
+Braddock, General, 104.
+
+Braddon, Miss, 26.
+
+Bret Harte, 32.
+
+Bright, John: 'Force no remedy,' 260.
+
+Broad Church, 62, 257.
+
+Bronte, Charlotte, 25.
+
+Broughton, Miss, 26.
+
+Brown: definition of 'Intuition,' 238.
+
+Browning, Robert, 69, 266, 267.
+  Swinburne's homage to, 282.
+
+Buckle, 253, 261.
+
+Buddhism, 400, 423, and see 'The State in Relation to Religion.'
+
+Bulwer-Lytton, Sir E., 99, 116.
+
+_Burial of Sir John Moore_, 173.
+
+Burke's letters, 37.
+
+Burney, Miss, 21.
+
+Butler's _Analogy_, 236.
+
+=Byron, Works of Lord=, 177-209.
+  Additions to his published letters, 178.
+  Their bearing on his reputation, 179.
+  Causes affecting his popularity, 183.
+  Comparison with Chateaubriand, 186, 194.
+  His success in oriental romance, 187;
+    and in heroic verse, 190.
+  Defects, tendency to declamation, etc., 191.
+  Carelessness, contrast between his theory and practice, 193.
+  Comparison with Scott, _The Giaour_, 195.
+  Metre of his romantic poems, 197.
+  His dramas, failure in blank verse, 198.
+  His lyrical power, examples, 200.
+  _Beppo_ and _Don Juan_, 203.
+  Founder of modern realism in poetry, 204.
+  _Vision of Judgment_, 206.
+  Conclusions: value of his influence, 207.
+
+Byron, Lord, as realist, 6.
+  Also 13 and 97, and see under 'Letter-writing.'
+
+
+Campbell, Thomas:
+  Carlyle's description, 64.
+  As heroic poet, 173.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, see 'Letter-writing.'
+  Denounces Utilitarianism, 256.
+  Swinburne's tribute, 283.
+  His descriptive method, 383.
+  See also 9, 58, 116, 215.
+
+Castlereagh, Lord, 180, 183.
+
+Caucasus, see 'Frontiers,' 291, etc.
+
+Cavagnari, in Afghan ballads, 163.
+
+Cervantes, 108.
+
+Chanson de Roland, 161.
+
+Charles Edward, Prince, authentic incident in _Esmond_, 104.
+
+Chateaubriand, 97, 115, 185-187, 194.
+
+Chaucer, 1.
+
+_Chevy Chase_, 170.
+
+Chillianwalla in fiction, 128.
+
+China, religious systems, 423.
+  Religious polity, 438.
+
+Christian missions in India, 326.
+
+Christianity and Islam, as militant religions, 400, 408, 421.
+  Compared with Buddhism, etc., 427.
+  Form alliances with the State, 434, 441.
+
+Church and State:
+  Lord Acton on, 398.
+  Separation a modern idea, 421.
+  Importance to the Church of recognition, 445.
+  Diminishing closeness of the connection, 450.
+  Gladstone and Macaulay on, 452.
+
+Clough, 266.
+
+Coleridge, S. T., see 'Letter-writing.'
+  Connection of speculative ideas and political movements,
+    211, 229, 237, 372.
+  Quoted, 33, 181, 393.
+  Also mentioned, 37, 185, 265, 287.
+
+Colvin, Sidney, quoted, 40, 71.
+
+Comte and J. S. Mill, 255.
+
+Cooper, Fenimore, 32.
+
+Cowper, as letter-writer, 37, 66.
+  Quoted, 62.
+
+Crabbe, 193.
+  Quoted, 69.
+
+Crimean War, 311, 313.
+
+_Cujus regio ejus religio_, 436.
+
+
+Dante, 39.
+
+Dargo, in the Caucasus, attack on, 307-308.
+
+Darmesteter, Afghan ballads, 163, 168.
+
+Davidson on rhyme in poetry, 279, 280.
+
+Defoe, 3, 99.
+
+De la Gorce:
+  On Napoleon III., 330.
+  On the French ministry, 339, 347.
+
+De Musset, Alfred, 111.
+
+De Stael, Madame, 180.
+
+De Tocqueville, 331, 402.
+
+De Voguee, 252.
+
+Dickens, Charles, 23, 30, 68, 98.
+
+Direct narration in fiction, 18.
+
+Disraeli, Benjamin, as novelist, 18.
+
+Drama, rival of the novel, 2.
+
+Du Barail, General:
+  On Napoleon III., 330.
+  On Ollivier, 331.
+
+Due de Gramont, 331, etc.
+
+Duvernois' interpellation in French Chamber, 342, 347.
+
+
+Edgeworth, Miss, 21.
+
+Eliot, George:
+  _Romola_, 23.
+  _Adam Bede_, 25.
+
+Empire, defined, 406.
+
+Ems, Benedetti and King of Prussia at, 343-350, 356.
+
+Encyclopedistes, ancestors of the Utilitarians, 252, 402.
+
+European dominion in Asia, importance of, 403.
+
+
+Farrar, Archdeacon, quoted, 12.
+
+Ferozeshah, 130.
+
+Ferrero on Julius Caesar, 391.
+
+Fiction and fact in the novel and in history, 10, 385.
+
+Fiction, doubt as to its value as evidence of manners, 111.
+  See also 91 and 110.
+
+Fielding, Henry, 3, 26, 95, 111.
+  _Tom Jones_, 19.
+  Influence on Thackeray, 99.
+
+Fitzgerald, Edward, see 'Letter-writing,' 66-70.
+
+Franco-German War, see 'L'Empire Liberal.'
+
+French Revolution, 212, 218.
+
+=Frontiers, Ancient and Modern=, 291-327.
+  Demarcation of frontiers a modern development, 291.
+  Interest of the subject to England, 293.
+  Mr. Baddeley's work on the Caucasus, 294.
+  Description of the Caucasus, 295.
+  The Russian advance, 296.
+  Yermoloff and his policy, 298.
+  Its failure for the time, and his recall, 301.
+  Rise of Muridism, 302.
+  Shamil succeeds Kazi Mullah, 303.
+  Capture of Akhlongo, 306.
+  Repulse of Vorontzoff at Dargo; 307.
+   and at Ghergebil, 310.
+  Shamil ransoms his son, 312.
+  Surrenders at Gooneeb (1857), 313.
+  Effect on Asiatic politics, 315.
+  Russian policy compared with British in Afghanistan, 316.
+  Dr. Pennell on the Afghans, 319.
+  Ghazis, blood feuds, 321.
+  Dr. Pennell on missions, 326.
+
+Frontiers, not strictly demarcated in the East, 413.
+
+Froude, J. A., quoted, 74.
+  His methods as a historian, 382.
+
+
+Gambetta votes for war with Prussia, 359.
+
+Garibaldi, 273.
+
+Gaskell, Mrs., 26.
+
+_Gesta Romanorum_, 2.
+
+_Gil Blas_, 19, 204.
+
+Gladstone, W. E., 229.
+
+Godwin, William:
+  As recipient of good letters, 46.
+  His tragedy, _Antonio_, 46.
+  Carlyle's description, 64.
+  A peaceful anarchist, 234.
+
+Goethe, 78, 182.
+
+Gordon, Lindsay, 32.
+
+_Grand Cyrus_, 96.
+
+Gray, Thomas, 37, 50.
+
+Greek Church, 433.
+  Comparison with Rome, 409.
+
+
+Hemans, Mrs., 265.
+
+Herodotus, 160, 379.
+
+=Heroic Poetry=, 155-176.
+  Definition, 155.
+  Professor Ker's _Epic and Romance_, 156.
+  Early bards and chroniclers, 157.
+  Their work based on fact, 158, 164.
+  The hero and the heroic poet, 159.
+  Icelandic Sagas, and Afghan songs, 163.
+  Homer, 165.
+  Position of women in Homeric poetry, 166.
+  The heroic style in the Old Testament, 167.
+  Romantic poetry of England, _Morte d Arthur_ and ballads, 169.
+  Sir Walter Scott, 171.
+  Limitations of heroic poetry, 172.
+  Its decline, unfavourable influences of both the romantic and the
+    realistic spirit, 174.
+
+Hindu, meaning of, 419.
+
+Hinduism, not a missionary religion, 400.
+  Never established by the State, 447.
+
+Historical romance brought to perfection in nineteenth century, 96.
+
+=History, Remarks on the Reading of=, 377-398.
+  Almost all real history written in some European language, 377.
+  History, formerly an art, becoming a science, 379.
+  Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle as historical artists, 382.
+  The scientific method, possible drawbacks, 384.
+  Limitation and subdivision necessary, 386.
+  Short abstracts, their use and abuse, 388.
+  Motives for studying history, 390.
+  Our knowledge imperfect, and our predictions fallible, 392.
+  Lord Acton's advice and principles, 394.
+
+Hobbes, Thomas, 243, 273.
+  Followed by Bentham, 221.
+  Quoted, 319, 413, 441.
+
+Hogarth, William, 99.
+
+Hookham Frere, 204.
+
+Hugo, Victor, 187, 300.
+  Swinburne's admiration, 265, 282, 287.
+
+Hume, 215, 216.
+  Influence on Bentham, 222;
+    on Mill, 244, 254.
+  Quoted, 224.
+
+Humphry Ward, Mrs., example of her descriptive method, 27.
+
+Hutcheson, 217.
+
+
+Iliad, 174.
+
+Impressionist school in fiction, 33.
+
+Inchbald, Mrs., quoted, 46.
+
+India, Mill's history of, 225.
+
+Importance of frontier questions, 293.
+
+Indian Empire:
+  Resemblance to Roman, 420.
+  Comparison with Russian, 424.
+  See also 'Race and Religion,' and 'The State in Relation to Religion.'
+
+Irish characters, Thackeray's partiality for, 109.
+
+Islam:
+  Its militant policy, 400, 413.
+  Spread of, 432.
+  In India, 446.
+  Importance to Turkey of Sultan's position in, 449.
+
+
+James, G. P. R., 32.
+
+Jeffrey, Thomas, 186, 199.
+
+Jehu's story, 382.
+
+_John Inglesant_, 18, 106.
+
+Johnson, Samuel, 120.
+
+Jones, Paul, 113.
+
+Jowett, Benjamin, quoted, 55, 57.
+
+
+Kaffir, origin of the name, 415.
+
+Keats, John, 185, 199.
+  See also 'Letter-writing.'
+
+Kemble, Fanny, FitzGerald's letters to, 68.
+
+Ker's _Epic and Romance_, 156, 164, 168.
+
+_Kidnapped_, direct narration in, 18.
+
+Kingsley, Charles, 8.
+  Quoted, 278.
+
+Kipling, Rudyard, 32, 149, 174.
+
+Klugenau, Russian General, 305.
+
+
+Lamartine, 187.
+
+Lamb, Charles, 47.
+  Quoted, 48, 56.
+
+Lansdowne, Lord, 228.
+
+Laotze, 438.
+
+Le Boeuf, Marshal, 334, 347, 351, 358.
+
+Lecky, W. E. H., on American Loyalists, 105.
+  Comparison with Walpole, 376.
+
+=L'Empire Liberal=, 328-367.
+  Constitutional reforms and character of Napoleon III., 330.
+  Ollivier's difficult position as chief minister, 331.
+  Crown of Spain accepted by Leopold, 332.
+  Effect in France, warning to Prussia, 333-336.
+  Benedetti's interview at Ems, 337.
+  Leopold's compulsory renunciation, 338.
+  Incautious action of Ollivier, 339;
+    and of Gramont, 341.
+  Assurances demanded from Prussia, 344.
+  Ollivier meditates resignation, 345.
+  Benedetti at Ems, 348.
+  'Le Soufflet de Bismarck,' 350.
+  Declaration of war, 352.
+  Thiers' opposition, Ollivier's defence, 353, 354.
+  French enthusiasm, 358.
+  Reception of declaration by Bismarck; 360;
+  and by the Reichstag, 361.
+  Bismarck's real responsibility, 362.
+  Ollivier's acts and motives examined, 365.
+
+=Letter-writing (English) in the Nineteenth Century=, 34-75.
+  Conditions of fine letter-writing, 34.
+  Affinities with the diary and the essay, 36.
+  Poets as good letter-writers, 37.
+  Value of letters for biographical and other purposes, 38.
+  Earlier writers--Keats, Scott, Southey, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+    Shelley, Lamb, 39-47.
+  Lord Morley's canon, 50.
+  Later writers and their difficulties, 52.
+  Dean Stanley's letters, 53.
+  Matthew Arnold's, 57.
+  Thomas Carlyle's, 63.
+  Edward Fitzgerald's, 66.
+  R. L. Stevenson's, 70.
+
+Lever, Charles, 8, 92.
+
+Liverpool, Lord, 66, 229, 230.
+
+Lucretius, 271.
+
+
+Macaulay, T. B., 61, 206.
+  On Byron, 184, 191.
+  His rejoinder to James Mill, 227.
+  Influence on Walpole, 371.
+  Ranke's criticism, 383.
+
+Machiavelli:
+  On judging by results, 329.
+  On standing neutral in war, 331.
+
+Mackintosh, as typical Whig, 228.
+
+Maine, Sir H., on 'Sovereignty,' 412.
+
+Malthus, T., 234, 236.
+
+Manning, Cardinal, 53, 74.
+
+Marbot, success of his Memoirs, 13, 16.
+
+_Marcella_, quoted, 27.
+
+Marlborough, Thackeray's description of, 103.
+
+Marryat, Captain, 8.
+
+_Master of Ballantrae_, direct narration in, 18.
+
+Maurice, 256.
+
+Mayor's _English Metres_, 286.
+
+Mazzini, 273.
+  Quoted, 184.
+
+Memoirs and fiction, 13.
+
+_Memorials of Coleorton_, 42.
+
+Meredith, George, 264.
+
+Mill, see 'Utilitarians.'
+
+Milton, 200, 287.
+  Quoted, 183.
+
+Mongolians have not produced spiritual teachers, 442.
+
+Moore, Thomas, 42, 179, 193.
+  His sham Orientalism, 6, 123, 188.
+  His dealings with Byron's letters, 177.
+
+_Morte d'Arthur_, 169.
+
+Mullahs, 320.
+
+Muridism, see 'Frontiers,' 320.
+
+Murray, John, 178.
+  Quoted, 188.
+
+Murray, Professor, and solar myths, 161.
+
+Myths, historical value of, 11.
+
+
+Napoleon:
+  His story adapted to myth-making, 14.
+  Transformer of democracy into Imperialism, 252, 402.
+
+_Napoleon Intime_, 15.
+
+Napoleon III; and see 'L'Empire Liberal.'
+
+Nationalities, formation of, in Europe, 401.
+
+Naturalism or realism defined, 25.
+
+Newman, Cardinal, 257, 258.
+  Swinburne's tribute to, 283.
+
+=Novels of Adventure and Manners=, 1-33.
+  Mr. Raleigh on origins of fiction, 1.
+  Metrical tales, heroic romance, the eighteenth-century school of
+    novelists, 2, 3.
+  Novel of adventure derived from the fabulous romance, 4.
+  Scott's influence, 5.
+  Later tendencies, 6.
+  Approximation of the historian and novelist, 10.
+  The novelist rivalled by the writer of Memoirs, 13.
+  Adventures of de Jonnes reviewed, 16.
+  Causes limiting the sphere of the Novel of Adventure, 18.
+  Novel of Manners, its pedigree: Fielding, 19.
+  Influence of women writers: Miss Austen, etc., 21.
+  Growth of Realism, 25.
+  Description of nature, its uses, 26.
+  Danger of excessive Realism, 29.
+  Short stories: the Impressionist School, 32.
+
+=Novelist, The Anglo-Indian=, 121-154.
+  Causes affecting output of good fiction in India, 121.
+  _Tara_, a successful historical novel, 123.
+  _Pandurang Hari_, valuable as picture of pre-English times, 125.
+  _Oakfield_, good battle pictures, absence of native characters
+     noted, 126.
+  _The Wetherbys_, 131.
+  _A True Reformer_, and _The Dilemma_, 132.
+  _Mr. Isaacs_, 134.
+  _Helen Treveryan_, assigned a high place as a historical novel, 136.
+  _On the Face of the Waters_, Indian characters freely introduced,
+     minute adherence to fact, 139.
+  _Bijli the Dancer_, a purely native story, 143.
+  _Chronicles of Dustypore_, a picture of Anglo-Indian life, 145.
+  _The Bond of Blood_, a dramatic presentation of incidents of Indian
+     life, 146.
+  _The Naulakha_, 149.
+  _Transgression_, 151.
+  Conclusions: uniformity of Anglo-Indian society, 152.
+  Conditions favour the novel of action, 153.
+  Absence of the psychological vein, 154.
+
+
+O'Connell, Daniel, described by Carlyle, 64.
+
+_Odyssey_ quoted, 167.
+
+Old Testament and heroic narration, 167.
+
+Oliphant, Mrs., 26.
+
+Ollivier, see 'L'Empire Liberal.'
+
+Olozaga, 337.
+
+Ottoman Empire, its complexities of Race and Religion, 406.
+
+Ouida, 25.
+
+
+Paley, 222.
+
+Parr, Dr., 199.
+
+Patmore, Coventry, 268.
+
+Pearson, Hugh, 55, 57.
+
+Peel, Sir Robert, quoted, 232.
+
+Peninsular War and heroic poetry, 173.
+
+Peter the Great's Caspian expedition, 296.
+
+Phingari, 196.
+
+Polytheism, formerly universal, 428;
+  gives way to Christianity, 431.
+
+Pope, 37.
+  Byron's praise, 193.
+
+Porter, Jane, and historical romance, 23.
+
+
+Rabelais, 321.
+
+=Race and Religion=, 399-426.
+  Ancient groupings of peoples, 399.
+  Effect of (1) the Roman Empire, (2) Christianity and Islam, 400.
+  Consolidation of States in the West, 401.
+  Importance of 'Race' overlooked by Utilitarians, 402.
+  Gravity of the question in Austria, 403.
+  Its complexity in Turkey, 406.
+  Maintenance of racial and religious differences by Asiatic Empires, 407.
+  Close alliance of Greek Church with the State, 410.
+  Classification of the people by religion in Ottoman Empire, 411.
+  Importance of 'Race and Religion' in Asia, 412.
+  Religious distinctions predominant in Western Asia, 413.
+  Causes of the Armenian massacres, 414.
+  Racial distinctions predominant in Afghanistan, 417.
+  India, connotation of 'Hindu,' 418.
+  Complexities of race and creed, 420.
+  Policy of religious neutrality, 421.
+  Peculiarity of religious situation in China, 422.
+  Russian Empire, conclusions, 424.
+
+Race distinctions, increasing influence of, 252.
+
+Radcliffe, Mrs., the novelist, 5.
+
+Raleigh, Sir Walter, on _The English Novel_, 1.
+
+Ramsay, Sir William, on writing of history, 386.
+
+Rawlinson on the effect of troubles in the Caucasus on Russian policy, 315.
+
+Realism defined, 25.
+  Its dangers, 28, 30, 31, (cf. 12, 140).
+
+Reform Bill, 232.
+
+=Religions, The State in its Relation to Eastern and Western=, 427-453.
+  Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism; Western, Christianity and
+    Islam, 427.
+  Growth of State domination under Roman Empire, 429.
+  Domination of the Church when Christianity established, 431.
+  Conflict with Islam, its effects, 432.
+  Close alliance of both faiths with the State, 434.
+  Absence of religious wars and of persecution in ancient India, 434.
+  The situation in China, 437;
+    and in Japan, 443.
+  India, political independence of Hinduism, 443.
+  Toleration by Mohammedan rulers, 446.
+  Hinduism never an established religion, 447.
+  British policy of neutrality, 447.
+  Some political disadvantages, 449.
+  Conclusions: difference in relations of Eastern and Western religions
+    to the State, 451.
+
+Renan, 379.
+
+Ricardo, 234.
+
+Richardson, the novelist, 3.
+
+Ritchie, Lady Richmond, 76.
+  Quoted, 79.
+
+_Robert Elsmere_, its popularity, 30.
+
+Roberts, Lord, 136, 142, 163, 319.
+
+Rodney, Admiral, 115.
+
+Roman Catholic Church, its polity compared with the Greek, 410.
+  Inheritor of Imperial tradition, 432.
+
+Roman Empire, its frontier policy, 292; also 400, 420, 430, 441.
+
+_Roman Naturaliste_, by Brunetiere, 25.
+
+Rousseau, J. J., 212.
+
+
+Sagas, 163, 168.
+
+Sainte-Beuve, 194.
+
+Say, Leon, 16.
+
+Scotch common sense philosophy, 215.
+
+Scotsman, the, in fiction, 109.
+
+Scott, Michael, 8.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter:
+  Head of modern romantic school of fiction, 5.
+  Abandoned poetry for prose, 6.
+  Transferred dialogue from the drama to the novel, 108.
+  His historical insight, 115.
+  His descriptions of fighting, 103, 172, 190, 385.
+  Quoted, 200.
+
+Shakespeare, 39, 108, 198, 287, 380, 385.
+  Quoted, 171, 275.
+
+Shamil, see 'Frontiers,' 303, etc.
+
+Shelley, 179, 185, 287.
+  His letters, 44.
+  Quoted, 207, 290.
+  Comparison with Swinburne, 264.
+  Swinburne's admiration, 288.
+
+Shintoism, 443.
+
+Shorthouse, J. H., 9.
+
+Smollett, 111.
+
+South African War, 176.
+
+Southey, Robert, 41, 43, 62, 73, 206.
+  Carlyle's description, 64.
+  Type of Conservatism, 229.
+
+Sovereignty, Territorial, a modern idea, 412.
+
+Spenserian stanza, Byron's admiration for, 197.
+
+Stanley, Dean, see 'Letter-writing.'
+
+Stendhal, 87, 141.
+
+Sterne, Laurence, 89.
+
+Stevenson, R. L., see 'Letter-writing,' also 9, 116.
+
+Surtees and the Sporting Novel, 26.
+
+Swift, 89, 99.
+  Thackeray's description, 103.
+
+Swinburne, A. C., 69.
+  On Byron, 183, 191, 207.
+
+=Swinburne, Characteristics of his Poetry=, 263-290.
+  Swinburne's predecessors and contemporaries, 263.
+  Earlier poems, _Atalanta in Calydon_, _Chastelard_, 267.
+  _Poems and Ballads_, published and withdrawn, 268;
+    reissued with reply to critics, 272.
+  _Songs and Ballads_, war upon theology, 273.
+  _Songs of the Four Seasons_, 275.
+  _A Midsummer Holiday_, 276.
+  Love of the sea and of his country, 277.
+  His power of musical phrasing, 279.
+  His attitude to eminent contemporaries, 282.
+  His dramas, 285.
+  Concluding remarks: his high aspirations and his defects, 288.
+
+
+Taeping rebellion, 423.
+
+Taoism, 423, 438, 440.
+
+Tchetchnia, in the Caucasus, 295, etc.
+
+Tennyson, 38, 69, 174, 184, 194, 199, 266, 268, 286, 289, 374.
+  Quoted, 205, 209, 287, 288.
+  Absence of rhyme in 'Tears, idle tears,' 281.
+  Swinburne's tribute, 282.
+
+Thackeray, W. M., 23, 26, 141.
+
+=Thackeray, William Makepeace=, 76-120.
+  Lady Ritchie's biographical contributions, 76.
+  Brief sketch of his life, 78.
+  Early works, _Yellowplush Papers_, etc., 79.
+  His rare qualities first shown in _Barry Lyndon_, 83.
+  His defence of taking a rogue for hero, 86.
+  _Vanity Fair_, his irony and pathos, 89.
+  His merciless war on snobbery, 90.
+  His pictures from military life, 91.
+  _Pendennis_, a novel of manners, 93.
+  Tendency to moralise, 95, 106, 110.
+  _Esmond_, 96.
+  Thackeray as historical novelist contrasted with Scott, 97, 103.
+  _The Virginians_, 104.
+  _The Newcomes_, a return to the novel of society, 109.
+  Tendency to caricature, 111.
+  _Denis Duval_, 112.
+  Classification of his works as historical novels and novels of
+    manners, 115.
+  His character, religion and influence, 117.
+
+Thiers, opposed to war of 1870, 353, etc.
+
+Thorburn's _Bannu_, 163.
+
+Tolstoi, 8, 101, 154.
+
+Tractarians, 257.
+  Walpole's account of, 372.
+
+Trollope, Anthony, 24.
+
+Turgot, 214.
+
+
+=Utilitarians, The English=, 210-262.
+  Objects of Mr. Stephen's history, 210.
+  A system with a practical aim, 211.
+  Its influence on government, 213.
+  Philosophy of Reid and Stewart, 215.
+  Bentham's doctrines, 216.
+  Brief account of his life, 218.
+  Mr. Stephen's criticisms, 221.
+  Bentham's neglect of history, 223.
+  James Mill, 225.
+  Attitude to the Church, 226.
+  His 'Essay on Government,' Macaulay's attack, 227.
+  Position of Southey and Coleridge, 229.
+  English and Greek theories of the State, 231.
+  Criticism of Malthus and Ricardo, 234;
+    and of James Mill, 238.
+  John Stuart Mill, his life and training, 241.
+  His doctrines and policy, 243.
+  His _Political Economy_, 246.
+  His later writings criticised, 248.
+  _The Subjection of Women_, 251.
+  Mill's theology, 253.
+  Opposition to Utilitarianism, 256.
+  Mr. Stephen's position, 259.
+
+
+Voltaire, 206, 274.
+
+Vorontzoff, Russian General, 307, 310.
+
+
+Walpole, Horace, 3, 37, 50.
+
+=Walpole, Sir Spencer=, 368-376.
+  His literary bent as an historian, 369.
+  His method described by himself, 371.
+  His treatment of ecclesiastical controversies, 372.
+  Comparison with Lecky, 375.
+
+Waterloo in Scott and Byron's verse, 172, 190.
+
+'Waverley' Novel, 28, 97. See 'Scott.'
+
+Wellington, Duke of, 92, 165.
+
+Werther, Prussian minister at Paris, 348.
+
+Whately, _Historic Doubts_, 14.
+
+Wolfe, General, 104.
+
+Wordsworth, William:
+  His letters, 37, 43.
+  Described by Carlyle, 64.
+  Criticised by Byron, 188.
+  Also 49, 177, 181, 199, 277.
+
+
+Yermoloff, General, 298.
+
+
+Zola, 15, 33.
+
+Zoroaster, 400, 413.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the
+Edinburgh University Press
+
+
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #25937 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25937)