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Title: British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII - January and April, 1871
Author: Various
Language: English
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The January Journal has no Article VIII.
THE
BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW.
JANUARY AND APRIL, 1871.
VOLUME LIII.
AMERICAN EDITION.
NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY THE LEONARD SCOTT PUBLISHING COMPANY
340 FULTON STREET, BETWEEN BROADWAY AND NASSAU STREET.
1871.
S. W. GREEN.
PRINTER, STEREOTYPER, AND BINDER
16 and 18 Jacob St., N.Y.
INDEX TO VOL. LIII.
Abbott, Rev. Edwin A., Bible Lessons, Part II., 154.
Abbs, Rev. John, Twenty-two Years' Missionary Experience in
Travancore, 297.
Ainger, Rev. Alfred, Sermons preached in the Temple Church,
316.
Alcott, L. M., Little Women, 157.
Alford, Henry, D.D., Truth and Trust: Lessons of the War,
318.
American Press, The,;
Influence of the Press on Civilization, 1, 2;
Raymond's Life, 3;
The Newspaper in America, ib.;
Reviews, 5;
Want of a Comic Periodical, ib.;
Roman Catholic Organs, 6;
Religious Journalism, 7;
The Princeton Review, 8;
Superiority of the Independents and Presbyterians in
Theological Authorship, 9;
General Criticism of the American Press, ib.;
Inferiority to that of England, 10;
Corruption of the English Language, ib.;
Scurrility and Personality, 10, 11;
Absence of Anonymous Editorship, 11, 12;
Low scale of Morality, though improved of late, 12;
Great Power of the Press, and the responsibility which
each power involves, 13.
Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vols. XVII. and XVIII., 151.
Attwell, Henry, A Book of Golden Thoughts, 140.
Barham, Life and Letters of Rev. R. H., by his Son, 209.
Baring-Gould, S., The Origin and Development of Religious
Belief--Part II., 142.
Barlowe, Master John, The Bruce, 140.
Barnes in Defence of the Berde, 140.
---- Albert, The Evidences of Christianity in the Nineteenth
Century, 147.
Barni, Jules, Napoléon 1er, et son Historien, M. Thiers,
218.
Barrett, G. S., The Revision of the New Testament, a Lecture,
320.
Beauvoir, The Marquis de, a Voyage round the World, 123.
Beecher, Henry Ward, The Plymouth Pulpit, 320.
Belcher, Lady, The Mutineers of the 'Bounty' and their
descendants, 115.
Bennet, Rev. James, The Wisdom of the King, 320.
Bentley Ballads, The, 209.
Berkeley's Works, Professor Fraser's Edition of, 256;
England's Neglect of her Philosophers, ib.;
Berkeley's Historical Position not sufficiently recognised,
257;
Mr. Fraser's Picture of him at College, 258;
Two earliest books, 259;
Berkeley at Court, ib.;
Interest in Social Morality, 259, 260;
Rapid Church Preferment, 260;
He starts for the Bermudas to found a College, ib.;
Stops at Rhode Island, and remains there some years, ib.;
Writes his 'Alciphron,' 261;
Dr. Johnson, ib.;
Close of Berkeley's active life, 262;
Founds a Scholarship at Yale College, 263;
His life as Bishop of Cloyne, ib.;
Belief in Tar-water, ib.;
Removal to Oxford, 264; Death, ib.;
Berkeley's Philosophy, ib.;
Views of two classes of his Critics, 265;
Too much founded on his Early Writings, ib.;
The true Key to his Philosophy, 266;
Its relations to Locke and the English Mystics, 266, 267;
Three Stages of Development, 268;
'New Theory of Vision,' ib.;
'Principles of Human Knowledge,' 269;
The Abstract Idea of Matter, 270;
Something more than mere Sensations, ib.;
Associations, 271;
Deficient Perception of Ethical Relations, 272;
The 'Siris,' ib.
Bingham, Hon. Cap., Journal of the Siege of Paris, 291.
Bible, The Holy, arranged in Paragraphs and Sections, 154.
Blackburn, Henry, Art in the Mountains, 129.
Blackmore, R. D., Lorna Doone, 139.
Blunt, Rev. J. H., A Dictionary of Doctrinal and
Historical Theology, 146.
Bonapartism, The Downfall of, 218;
Analogy between the Imperialism of 1804 and that of 1852, 219;
The latter hopelessly collapsed, 220;
The Strange Revolution in Literature, 221;
The Mutual Hatred of French and Prussians in the Emperor's
Favour, 222;
His Relations, real and supposed, to Religion, 222, 223;
The Second Empire rendered possible by the strength of the
Napoleonic Idea, 224;
Causes of the Empire's Decay, ib.;
Reaction against the Despotism of the Capital, 226;
Rottenness of Paris Life, ib.;
Ignorance of itself and of other Nations, 227;
M. Leclercq's Views, 228;
'Papiers Secrets,' 229;
Management of Money, 229, 230;
'Cabinet Noir,' 230;
The Emperor warned by Persigny, ib.;
Lanfrey's account of Napoleon I., 231;
The Erckmann-Châtrian Novels, 232;
General political knowledge assumed in them, and with
reason, 233;
Impossibility of Predicting the Future of France, 234.
Bonar, Horatius, D.D., Life and Truth, 317.
Boorde, Andrewe, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of
Knowledge, 140.
Braund, J. H., History and Revelation, 152.
Bray, Mrs., The Revolt of the Protestants of the Cevennes,
116.
Brevia, Short Essays and Aphorisms, by the author of
'Friends in Council,' 310.
Broadus, J, A., D.D., A Treatise on the Preparation and
Delivery of Sermons, 148.
Brougham, Life and Times of Lord, 297.
Brown, J. B., First Principles of Ecclesiastical Truth, 314.
---- ---- Misread Passages of Scripture--Second Series, 319.
Brunel, Isambard, The Life of I. K. Brunel, 294.
Buchanan, Robert, Napoleon Fallen, 303.
Bulwer, E. (Lord Lytton), King Arthur, 304.
Bungener, F., St. Paul: his Life, Lectures, and Epistles,
152.
Bunting, Memorials of the Rev. W. M., 120.
Burn, R., Rome and the Campagna, 127.
Burton's History of Scotland, Vols. V., VI. and VII., 161;
Important place held by Scotland in English History, ib.;
Character of Mr. Burton's Books, 162;
Period treated of in the Present Work, ib.;
Mary Stuart, ib.;
Elizabeth's Policy, 163;
Murray, 164;
James 1st, 165;
The Reformation in Scotland, 166;
James as King of the three Kingdoms, 168;
Effects of the Union in Scotland, 169;
Restoration of Prelacy, ib.;
Policy of Charles I., 170;
The Covenant, 171;
Outbreak of Civil War, 172;
Westminster Assembly, 174;
Execution of Charles, 175;
The Scotch overcome by Cromwell, ib.;
The General Assembly Dissolved, ib.;
Masterly Policy of Cromwell, ib.;
Subsequent History, 176;
Estimate of the Book, ib.
Capper, John, The Duke of Edinburgh in Ceylon, 298.
Chamberlayne, T., The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis;
and other Poems, 133.
Clarke, C. C., The Riches of Chaucer, &c., 141.
---- ---- Tales from Chaucer in Prose, 141.
Coinage, Report from the Royal Commission on International,
14;
Nature of the Question, 14, 15;
Mr. Jevons's Investigations, 15, 16;
Convention entered into by Four Countries, 16;
Importance of England's joining in it, 17;
Plan proposed to facilitate this, 17, 18;
Comparison of the Amount of Gold Coinage in different
Countries, 19;
Charges at the Different Mints, 20;
Precedent for Change in English Coinage, 21;
Small proportion of the Gold brought into the Country
Coined, ib.;
Summing-up, 22.
Colborne, P., The Measure of Faith; and other Sermons, 319.
Collins, Mortimer, Marquis and Merchant, 309.
Conder, G. W., Tender Herbs, 317.
Cordery, J. G., The Iliad of Homer, Translated, 304.
Cotton, Memoir of Bishop, 295.
Courthope, W. J., The Paradise of Birds, 133.
Cowper, Poetical Works of, Edited by W. Benham, 134.
Creasy, Sir E. S., History of England, Vol. II., 113.
Crowfoot, J. R., Fragmenta Evangelica, 93.
Cubitt, James, Church Design for Congregations, 129.
Cunningham, General, The Ancient Geography of India, 302.
Dale, R. W., The Jewish Temple and the Christian Church,
318.
Darwin, C., The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation
to Sex, 299.
Deane, Life of General, 118.
Diary of a Novelist, 136.
---- of the French Campaign of 1870, 273.
---- of the Besieged Resident in Paris. 291.
Dixon, W. H., Her Majesty's Tower, Vols. III. and IV., 292.
Duncan, P. M., The Transformation of Insects, 126.
Duplessis, G., The Wonders of Engraving, 128.
Early English Texts, 176; Importance of Studying the Early
English Language and Literature,176, 177;
Efforts made to Facilitate and Promote such Study, 177;
Early English Text Society and its Publications, 178;
Theological Works, 179;
Romances, 180;
Fourteenth Century Texts, ib.;
The 'Vision of Piers Plowman,' ib.;
Mr. Toulmin Smith's edition of 'English Gilds,' 182;
'Early English Alliterative Poems,' ib,;
Arthurian Romances, 182-185;
The 'Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry,' 186;
'The Wright's Chaste Wife,' ib.;
Furnivall's 'Babees Book,' 187;
'Book of Quinte Essence,' ib.;
Religions Books, ib.;
Condition of the Society, ib.;
Its Important Objects, 189.
Eiloart, Mrs., From Thistles--Grapes? 137.
Episcopal Church, Parties in the, 189;
Diversities in Opinion and Practice existing in the
Church, 189, 190;
Dr. Hook's Representation of High Church Views, 190, 191;
Those of the Evangelicals, 191;
Broad Churchmen the only Men who maintain Clerical Liberty,
192;
What Stanley says, ib.;
General Spread of a Measure of High Church Feeling, 193;
Some little Influence Acquired by Convocation, ib.;
Alleged Catholic Revival, 194;
Boldness of the Ritualists, 195;
Youthful Energy of the Party, ib.;
Their Practical Wisdom, 196;
The 'Twelve Days' Mission,' 197;
The Power of Individuals Utilized, 198;
The Advance of the Party Favoured by Circumstances, ib.;
Also, by Controversies, 199;
By the Fear of a Separation between Church and State, 200;
Almost entire Extinction of the 'High and Dry' School,
201;
The Anglican Clergyman of To-day, ib.;
Contempt for Law, 203;
Decline of the Evangelical Party, 204;
Causes of that Decline, 206;
Approaching Crisis in the Establishment, 209.
Episodes in an Obscure Life, 306.
Erckmann-Châtrian, Romans Nationaux, 218.
Established Church in Wales, The, 72;
Principles involved in the Disestablishment of the Irish
Church, ib.;
Mr. Gladstone's Attempt to escape from applying these
Principles to Wales, 73;
Influence of England on the Religious History of Wales,
74;
The Church Establishment since the Reformation, 75;
Its Failure, 77;
The Appointments of Englishmen to Welsh Bishoprics, 79;
Testimony of two Welsh Clergymen on the subject, 79, 80;
Fathers of Welsh Methodism, 80;
Effect of the New Movement on the Church, 81;
Primary Cause of all the Evils, 84;
Comparison of the Established Church with Nonconformists
during this Century, ib.;
Church Accommodation, 85;
Number of Attendants, 87;
Schools, 89;
Preponderance of Nonconformists in Welsh Literature, 92;
The Eisteddfod, ib.;
Exceptional Scarcity of Crime in Wales, 93.
Fair France, 125.
Foreign Protestant Pulpit, 318.
France, Alsace and Lorraine, 273.
Francillon, R. E., Earl's Dene, 306.
Fraser, A. C., The Works of Bishop Berkeley, 256.
Fraser-Tytler, C. C., Jasmine Leigh, 309.
French, The late F. W., Things Above, 320.
Froude, J. A., History of England, Vols. VIII.-XII., 126.
Future of Europe, The, 273;
The Progress of the Race Interrupted, 274;
The Fault not all on One Side, ib.;
Prussia's openly avowed Desire of Domination, 275;
Excuses made for her Conduct; ib.;
Bismark's Ground that of Political Expediency, 276;
His False Reasoning, ib.;
Prussia will not stop short in her aggressive Career, 277;
Her want of Money, ib.;
National Character, 278;
Prussia's Absorption of all Germany into Herself, 279;
The King made Emperor, 280;
Despotic Constitution of the Empire, ib.;
Austria must also be Absorbed, 281;
Holland in Danger, 282;
Relations between Prussia and Russia, ib.;
What Prussia may do in Turkey, 283;
Change of Proportion in the Powers of Europe, 284;
Decrepitude of Austria, ib.;
Ruined State of France, 285;
Effects of her Prostration upon Europe, 286;
Isolation of England, 287;
Difficulties to be encountered by her, ib.;
Duties of her Government, 287, 288.
Gilbert, W., Martha, 307.
Gledstone, J. P., The Life and Travels of George Whitefield,
297.
Gogerly, Rev. G., The Pioneers, 297.
Greg, W. R., The Great Duel, 292.
Hamilton, The late James, D.D., Moses, the Man of God, 153.
Hampden, Some Memorials of Bishop, 296.
Hare, A. J. C., Walks in Rome, 302.
Harold Erle, 307.
Heraud, J. A., The In-Gathering, 134.
Hinton, J., Thoughts on Health and some of its Conditions,
301.
Hood, E. Paxton, the World of Moral and Religious Anecdote,
140.
Hoole, C. H., The Shepherd of Hermas, Translated, 151.
Hoppin, Professor, the Office and Work of the Christian
Ministry, 316.
Hutton, R. H., Essays, Theological and Literary, 311.
Ingoldsby, 209;
Value of this kind of Writing, 209, 210;
Barham's Clerical Life little touched on, 210;
Character of his Humour, and his Superiority to others in
this Respect, 212;
His attacks on Superstition, 213;
The 'Ingoldsby Legends' adapted to Young Readers, 214;
Deficiency of Poetry in Them, ib.;
Hook, 215;
Anecdotes, 216.
Interests of Europe in the Conditions of Peace, The, 273.
Jacox, F., Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts, 150.
Jeafferson, J. C., Annals of Oxford, 294.
Juvenile Literature, 154, 309.
Kaye, J. W., The Essays of an Optimist, 140.
Kay Spen, The Green-Eyed Monster, 309.
Keshub Chunder Sen, The Brahmo Somaj, 148.
Landels, Rev. W., D.D., Beacons and Patterns, 318.
Lanfrey, P., Histoire de Napoléon 1er, 218.
Leathes, Rev. S., The Witness of St. John to Christ, The
Boyle Lecture for 1870, 149.
Leclercq, Emile, La Guerre de 1870, 218.
Letters on the War, 291.
Lewis, Rev. W. H., D.D., Sermons for the Christian Year,
319.
Louis's own Account of the Fight, 409.
Low, Lieut. C. R., The Land of the Sun, 125.
M'Combie, The late W., Sermons and Lectures, 320.
MacDonald, G., The Miracles of our Lord, 152.
Macduff, J. R., D.D., Memories of Patmos, 153.
Mackennal, A., Christ's Healing Touch, and other Sermons,
319.
MacLeod, A., D.D., Christus Consolator, 148.
Macmillan, Rev., H., The True Vine, 318.
Malmesbury Papers, The, 23;
Importance of the Period Comprised, ib.;
The Father of the First Earl, 25;
Friendship with Handel, ib.;
Almack's Rooms Designed, 26;
Fashionable Amusements, ib.;
Court Dress, 28;
The Pantheon, 30;
England a Hundred Years Ago, 31;
Old London, 32;
Paris, ib.;
The First Earl, 34;
His Diplomatic Embassies, ib.;
The Editor of the Books, 35.
Malmesbury, Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris,
first Earl of, 23.
---- ---- Letters of the first Earl of, his Family and
Friends, 23.
March, Rev. D., D.D., Night unto Night, 154.
Mariette, 138.
Martin, Samuel, Rain upon the Mown Grass, and other Sermons,
150.
Mateer, Rev. S., The Land of Charity, 297.
Matson, W. T., Poems, 134.
Maverick, A., Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for
Thirty Years, 1.
Meade, Lieut. the Hon. H., A Ride through the Disturbed
Districts of New Zealand, 299.
Melville, Henry, Sermons, 318.
Michelet, Jules, La France devant l'Europe, 273.
Mourin, E., Les Comtes de Paris, 54.
Muller, F. Max, Chips from a German Workshop, Vol. III.,
139.
Murray, Rev. J., The Prophet's Mantle, 318.
My Little Lady, 307.
Newman, Professor F. W., Europe of the near Future, 273.
O'Flanagan, J. R., The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and
Keepers of the Great Seal of Ireland, 288.
Oliphant, Mrs. John, 136.
Oosterzee, Rev. J. J. Van, D.D., The Theology of the New
Testament, 145.
Palestine, Explorations in, 36;
Purposes and Plans of the Exploration Society, ib.;
Early Operations, 36, 37;
The site of Capernaum Decided, 37;
Ai and Cana, ib.;
Synagogues Examined, 38;
Tombs, ib.;
Temples, 39;
Topography of Jerusalem, 40;
The old Walls, 44;
Site of the Temple, 45;
Jewish Archæology, 49;
A Museum for the Antiquities Discovered, ib.;
Inscriptions, 50;
The Moabite Stone, 51;
Light thrown by it on Early Writing, 51, 52;
Natural History and Geology, 53;
Importance of continuing and Encouraging the Society's
Work, 53, 54.
Paley, F. A., Religious Tests and National Universities,
235.
Parker, Joseph, D.D., Ad Clerum, 148.
---- ---- The City Temple Sermons, 316.
Parr, Louisa, Dorothy Fox, 308.
Pope, The Works of Alexander, 303.
Porter, Noah, D.D., The American Colleges and the American
Public, 302.
Present Day Papers on Prominent Questions in Theology, 144.
Prussian Aggrandisement and English Policy, 273.
Pulpit Analyst, The, 154.
Rae, W. F., Westward by Rail, the New Route to the East,
123.
Rees, T., D.D., History of Nonconformity in Wales, 72.
---- Rev. W., The Church of England in Wales, 72.
Religious Tests and National Universities, 235;
Why Disabilities have so long been Retained at the
Universities, ib.;
Desires on different sides for their removal, 237;
Objections brought against it, ib.;
Ineffectiveness of Tests, 239;
Needless in connection with Sinecures, ib.;
Principles recently adopted regarding Education, 240;
Importance of the connection between the Universities
and Elementary Education, 240, 241;
Clerical Fellowships and the effects they Produce, 241;
Evidence given before the House of Lords, 242, 243.
Richardson, F., The Iliad of the East, 136.
Robinson, Wade, Loveland., and other Poems, chiefly
concerning Love, 133.
Rothschild, C. and A. de, The History and Literature of
the Israelites, 143.
Rowlands, Rev. D., Sermons on Historical Subjects, 317.
Ruskin, John, Fors Clavigera, 310.
Schmid, C. F., D.D., Biblical Theology of the New Testament,
145.
Schmidt, A., Elsass und Lothringen, Nachweise wie diese
provenzen dem deutschen Reiche verloren gingen, 273.
Scrutator, Who is responsible for the War?, 273.
Seeley, Professor, Lectures and Essays, 114.
Sermons, 316.
Sewell, E. M. and S. M., Yonge, European History, 116.
Shairp, J. C., Culture and Religion in some of their
Relations, 149.
Shalders, E. W., Sermons for the Times, 320.
Shand, A. J., On the Trail of the War, 116.
---- A. I., Against Time, 135.
Sieges of Paris, The Early, 54;
Comparison of Paris with other Capitals, 55;
Its History, 56;
Sudden rise in importance, 57;
Attacks by the Northmen, 58;
Rivalry with Laon, 59;
Great Siege of Paris by the Northmen, 60;
Abbo's account of it, 61;
The Siege Raised, 65;
Further Ravages, 66;
Second German Invasion, 67;
Its Results, 69;
Analogies with the War in our Time, 71;
Future Fate of Paris, 72.
Six Months Hence, 137.
Stanford, Charles, Symbols of Christ, 317.
Stapleton, A. G., The French Case truly Stated, 273.
Strauss, D. F., Krieg und Friede, 273.
Stubbs, W., Select Charters and other Illustrations of
English Constitutional History, 291.
Swainson, C. A., D.D., The Athanasian Creed, and its usage
in the English Church--A Letter to Dean Hook, 143.
Tappan, The Life of Arthur, 120.
Taylor, Rev. W. M., The Lost Found and the Wanderer Welcomed,
317.
Tennyson, A., and Arthur Sullivan, The Window; or, the Loves
of the Wrens, 130.
Thistleton, Rev. A. C., The Story of Job, 319.
Tholuck, A., D.D., Hours of Christian Devotion, 153.
Thompson, J. P., The Theology of Christ from His own Words,
145.
Tourguéneff, Ivan, S., On the Eve, 308.
Tregelles, S. P., The Greek New Testament, 93;
Value of the Work, ib.;
The Author's previous Writings, 94;
The MSS. he has followed, 95;
His Text Compared with Alford's, 97;
His Labours interrupted by Illness, 98.
Trench, W. Stewart, Ierne, 305.
Trollope, J. Adolphus. A Syren, 135.
----, Anthony, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, 138.
Two Months in Palestine, 125.
Tyerman, Rev. L., Life and Times of Wesley, 119.
Vaughan, C. J., D.D., Christ satisfying the Instincts of
Humanity, 316;
Half-Hours in the Temple Church, 317;
Counsels to Young Students, ib.
Vera, 305.
Victor Hugo, Napoléon le petit, 218.
Victory of the Vanquished. The, 139.
Vince, Charles, Lights and Shadows in the Life of King David,
319.
Wadsworth, Charles, Sermons, 318.
War Correspondence of the Daily News, 291.
War of 1870, The, 98;
Possible Results of the War, 98, 99;
Its Causes, 99;
Sketch of its History, 100;
French Scheme and Movements, ib.;
Speedy Organization of the Germans, 101;
First Battle, 102;
Woerth and Forbach, 103, 104;
Gravelotte, 105;
Insane scheme made for MacMahon, 107;
Sedan, 109;
Surrender of Metz, 110;
Revival of the French Spirit under Trochu and Gambetta,
ib.;
Wonderful Defence of Paris, 111;
Blame attaching to Prussia, 112;
Lessons of the War, ib.
War of 1870-1, 243;
The Last Half of the Great Drama, 244;
Proceedings after the Disaster of Sedan, ib.;
Investment of Paris, 245;
Trochu's Scheme of Defence, 245, 246;
Gambetta's Balloon Journey and Efforts in Collecting
Troops, 246;
Doings of the Germans, 246, 247;
Effects of the Fall of Metz, 247;
The promising movements of D'Aurelles de Paladines, ib.;
His Failure and its Causes, 248;
Change in the German Plans, 249;
Their Superiority in Generalship, 250;
Was Trochu Incompetent? 251;
Chanzy's Brilliant Actions, ib.;
Reinforcements obtained on Both Sides, 252;
Bourbaki's rash Scheme, 252, 253;
Chanzy's Defeat, 253;
Bourbaki's attempt at Suicide, 254;
Progress of the Siege, 255;
Famine, ib.;
The War Ended by the Fall of Paris, ib.;
The Future of France; ib.
Wardlaw, Gilbert, The Leading Christian Evidences, 147.
Watson, Albert, Cicero, 118.
Wedgewood, Julia, John Wesley and the Evangelical Reaction
of the Eighteenth Century, 119.
Wesley, The Poetical Works of John and Charles, 135.
White, John, Sketches from America, 126.
Wickham, The Correspondence of the Right Hon. W., 117.
Williamson, Rev. A, Journeys in North China, Manchuria,
and Eastern Mongolia, 121.
Wylie, Rev. J. A., Daybreak in Spain, 125.
THE
BRITISH QUARTERLY
JANUARY 1871
ART. I.--_Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for Thirty Years._
Progress of American Journalism, from 1840 to 1870. By AUGUSTUS
MAVERICK. Hartford, Connecticut: A. S. Hale. 1870.
There is no country in the world which so finely illustrates the
diffusive spirit of modern civilization as America; for, though in other
lands human nature seems to rise to a greater height in individual
instances, and to stand out in more picturesque relief, it is the nation
which has excelled them all in equalizing the rights, the enjoyments,
and the intelligence of man. Many circumstances have contributed to this
happy result. America has been clogged by none of the mischievous
remains of feudal institutions, and but little affected by those
violations of political economy, older than the age of reason, which
have checked the free and natural development of European communities.
Its provisions for popular education were from the first singularly
wise, liberal, and ample; there was no legislation to restrict all civil
and social advantages to the members of a single religious sect; and no
taxes on knowledge or artificial monopolies of any kind, to prevent the
people from having access to that full variety of opinions, inquiries,
and statements of fact, which is necessary to intellectual advancement.
Above all, it was born old, with all the elements of European
civilization to start with, and equipped with a complete literature, in
which it would seem almost impossible to find place for any great
genius, and with the best English works placed within every man's reach,
at less than a tenth of their original cost. Taking these things in
connection with the boundless material resources of the country, it is
not by any means difficult to explain the magical rapidity of its
advances in wealth and population, the signal prosperity it has already
enjoyed, and the extraordinary power and greatness to which it is
evidently destined.
The development of the press, like the improvement of the means of
civilization, is a certain sign of the relative advancement of a nation.
We use the term civilization here to signify not so much the development
of some elevated and delicate parts of human nature, such as art,
philosophy, or politeness, as that of political liberty and social
progress; and in this sense the progress of the press becomes
historically the most constant and faithful indication of the general
progress of a nation. The truth of this proposition becomes evident,
from the close connection that exists between the press and the public,
from the action and reaction, the efflux and reflux, from the true
corporate unity which brings into the press the life-blood of the
country. We depend upon the newspaper for distributing knowledge, as
well as creating it; it is an instrument by which the opinions and
feelings of the people may be guided and developed, as well as
communicated and ascertained. It is in fact an essential element in the
peculiar spirit and tendency which characterizes our modern
civilization. Still we are far from holding that it is a perfect
instrument, or free from very serious drawbacks. Eminent men like
Lamartine speak of it in terms of extravagant eulogy, predicting that
before the century shall have run out journalism will be the whole
press, the whole human thought, and that the only book possible from day
to day will be the newspaper; a great English novelist speaks of it as a
link in the great chain of miracles which prove our national greatness;
and Bulwer Lytton calls it the chronicle of civilization, the great
mental camera which throws a picture of the whole world upon a single
sheet of paper. These somewhat rhetorical representations are very
common, but they are far from exact or truthful. We suspect that the
newspaper tends in all countries to ignore, more or less, all knowledge
that will not render its teaching popular; that its chief figures are
often the wicked, the worthless, and the shallow; and that its pictures,
though generally faithful, are often false, distorted, and narrow. De
Tocqueville liked the liberty of the press, rather from the evils it
prevented, than from the advantages it created; and Montalembert
represents Liberty as saying to the Press, like the unhappy swain--'_Nec
cum te nec sine te vivere possum_.' John Stuart Mill has two objects of
hatred; Puritanism, with its positive creed and aggressive zeal, and the
ascendancy of the middle classes, through the newspaper press, with all
their mediocrity and bigotry. He has always protested, in the interests
of his great idol, individuality, against 'the _régime_ of public
opinion,' against the various 'usurpations upon the liberty of private
life,' against the moral intolerance of society, carried on through, the
newspapers. Amidst these various estimates of the press we are disposed
to take a middle course. It may sometimes be wielded by unworthy hands,
for unworthy purposes; its liberty may run into licence, and the rules
of good taste and propriety be violated; its policy on public questions
may be unscrupulous and unprincipled; but we remember that modern
progress would have been impossible without it; that the people are not
its slaves, but its patrons and critics; and we would lay no other
restraint upon it than the invisible fetters imposed by the intelligence
and good feeling of its readers. Whether, then, we consider the amount
and quality of intellectual force put forth in it, the character of mind
acted on by it, and the wide area over which it operates, especially in
England and America, where it has the greatest expansion, we cannot but
regard it as a subject for sincere congratulation that its influence has
been exercised so uniformly on the side of public safety and public
morals, that there has been a gradual improvement of late years in the
moral tone of newspaper management, and that it has succeeded in
creating and fostering a healthy and independent public opinion on all
the questions of the age.
The great development of the American press has taken place during the
last thirty years, keeping pace exactly with the advancing prosperity of
the country. A large number of new and powerful processes, as well as
influences of a more general kind, were converging towards this result.
The education of the people, the progress of legislation, the
discoveries of science, the inventions of art, conspired to make
literature, especially in the newspaper form, a prime necessity of
American life, and to place it within every man's reach on easy terms;
while every improvement made in the art of communication and travel
still farther contributed to its growth, and increased its utility. So
it has come to pass that America is the 'classic soil of newspapers;'
everybody is reading; every class is writing; literature is permeating
everywhere; publicity is sought for every interest and every order; no
political party, no religious sect, no theological school, no literary
or benevolent association, is without its particular organ; there is a
universality of print; the soldiers fighting in Mexico or in the
Southern states are printing the journal of their exploits on the
battle-field; the press is seizing on the whole public life and upon so
much of private life as through social irregularity, or individual force
of character, or national taste, necessarily emerges into publicity;
fostering on the one hand the worship of the almighty dollar, but
establishing a strong and wholesome counterpoise, by stimulating that
zeal for public education, that enthusiastic spirit of philanthropy, and
that truly munificent liberality by which the American people have been
always distinguished. As we have already intimated, the modern
development of the press is just thirty years old. There was no
telegraph before 1843; no fast ocean-steamer to carry news from the old
world for some years later; and no Associated Press to organize the
supply of intelligence. The first American newspaper was printed at
Boston, in 1690, fifty years after the appearance of the first English
newspaper; in 1775 there were only 34 newspapers; in 1800, 200; in 1830,
1,000; and the latest statistics give no less than 5,244 as the total
number of journals published in the United States, of which 542 are
daily, 4,425 are weekly, and 127 are monthly.
Our common idea of the American newspaper is that of a print published
by a literary Barnum, whose type, paper, talents, morality, and taste
are all equally wretched and inferior; who is certain to give us
flippancy for wit, personality for principle, bombast for eloquence,
malignity without satire, and news without truth or reliability; whose
paper is prolific of all kinds of sensational headings; and who is
obliged, in the service of his advertising customers, to become
enthusiastic on the subject of hams, exuberant in the praises of
hardware, and highly imaginative in the matter of dry-goods. Perhaps
this representation might apply, with some degree of correctness, to a
portion of the newspaper press, especially that published in the country
towns and villages; but we shall immediately see that American literary
enterprise, especially in the great cities, is not to be judged by such
unworthy examples. The work of Mr. Maverick, which appears at the head
of this article, supplies a large amount of information concerning
American journalism, connecting its more recent development with the
name of Henry J. Raymond, a well-known Republican politician, who
founded the _New York Times_, one of the most respectable and powerful
newspapers in the States. We cannot say much for the book, on literary
grounds: it exhibits nearly all the worst qualities of Transatlantic
journalism itself--flimsiness, personality, and haste; but its
information is very interesting and acceptable to European readers. The
facts of Raymond's life may be supplied in a few sentences. He was born
in 1820, at Lima, in the state of New York; he graduated at the
University of Vermont; he went to New York city in 1840, and was
introduced to newspaper life by Horace Greeley; he passed ten laborious
years on the _Tribune_, and the _Courier_ and _Inquirer_; and in the
year 1851 he may be justly said to have opened a new era in American
journalism, by establishing the _Times_, a daily paper, which carried
temperance and dignity into political discussion, banishing all
personalities, and maintaining a high critical and moral tone, which was
all but unknown before that period. Like most American journalists, he
engaged actively in politics, becoming in 1849 a member of the New York
Legislature, and afterwards speaker of the House of Representatives, and
Lieutenant-Governor of the State; and in 1864, member of Congress. He
was a sincere and upright politician, who always staunchly opposed the
slave party in the United States, but lost popularity and credit, by his
exceedingly foolish and unfortunate championship of President Johnson,
through all his remarkable freaks of obstinacy and eccentricity. On
returning home from his office, on the night of the 18th June, 1869, he
dropped down in the hall of his house, in a fit of apoplexy, and died
five hours afterwards, without recovering consciousness. He was in his
fiftieth year. Henry Ward Beecher said, in the funeral oration at his
grave, that Raymond 'was a man without hate, and, he might almost say,
without animosity; his whole career had been free from bitterness;' and
Horace Greeley bore this high testimony to his professional ability;--'I
doubt whether this country has known a journalist superior to Henry J.
Raymond. He was unquestionably a very clever and versatile, but not
powerful writer; and excelled especially in newspaper management.' We
shall have occasion to refer again to his services as a journalist.
In proposing to give some account of the American press, both secular
and religious, we have to remark that the first great stimulus given to
newspaper enterprise in America was by James Gordon Bennett, the
well-known editor of the _New York Herald_, which was established in the
year 1834. This able journalist was born in 1800, at Newmill, Keith,
Banffshire, of Roman Catholic parents. He was originally designed for
the priesthood, and had passed through a portion of his preliminary
training in the Roman Catholic College of Blairs, near Aberdeen, but
ultimately abandoned the prospects of a clerical life, and emigrated to
America, in his nineteenth year--as he said himself--'to see the country
where Franklin was born.' There he formed an early connection with the
press, but it was not, as we have said, till 1834 that he founded the
_Herald_. We are all more or less familiar with the moral and
intellectual characteristics of this newspaper--unsparing personality,
intolerable egotism, and sleepless hatred of England; but we are not so
foolish as to imagine that the _Herald_ became popular and successful
because Americans are fond of personal abuse, or private scandal, or of
the ceaseless denunciation of this country. These offences against good
taste and right feeling existed long before the publication of the
_Herald_. The secret of its remarkable success lay in the vigour and
tact with which Bennett laboured day and night to furnish ample and
early intelligence of events in all parts of the world, without regard
to cost and labour. Mr. Maverick tells us that 'all the old and
heavy-weighted journals, which lazily got themselves before the New York
public, day by day, thirty years ago, were undeniably sleepy,' and that
'the ruthless Bennett shocked the staid propriety of his time by
introducing the rivalries and the spirit of enterprise which have ever
since been distinguishing characteristics of New York newspaper life.'
The _Herald_ was successful, then, because Bennett made it his business
to present his readers with fresh, ample, and correct news. No editorial
eloquence, no skilful flattery of national prejudice or party feeling,
could have atoned for any shortcoming in this respect. The other
newspaper managers were soon compelled to imitate his energy and skill
in the supply of news, and Mr. Maverick has informed us how effectively
his example was sometimes followed, by his rivals. On one occasion,
before the days of the telegraph, the leading New York journals
despatched reporters to Boston, to obtain an early account of a speech
by Daniel Webster, who was then in the plenitude of his fame. Two
reporters represented each journal; but Raymond alone represented the
_Tribune_. On their return home by the steamer the other reporters
passed the night in convivial pleasantries; but Raymond was busily
engaged all the time, in a retired part of the vessel, writing off his
report for a batch of printers who were on board with their 'cases' of
type; so that the entire report, making several columns of the
_Tribune_, was prepared for being printed on the arrival of the steamer
at New York, at five o'clock in the morning. The feat was a remarkable
instance of newspaper enterprise. The Hudson River steamboats afterwards
regularly carried corps of printers with types, from Albany to New York,
to prepare the speeches of legislators for next morning's journals.
Carrier-pigeons were employed to convey the latest European news from
Halifax or Boston to Wall-street; and pilot-boats made long voyages, in
stormy weather, to meet Atlantic steamers in search of early news. In
election times pony-expresses were appointed by rival journals to carry
early intelligence of results; as, in railway times, 'locomotive engines
were raced on rival lines of railroad in the interest of papers which
had paid high prices for the right of way.' Sometimes a little of that
'smartness,' which is so popular in America, was displayed in these
newspaper rivalries, as when, on one occasion, the _Tribune_ reporter
ran off to New York on a special engine, hired expressly for the
_Herald_, and thus succeeded in publishing an early and exclusive
edition of some important news.
The success of the _Herald_ led Horace Greeley to found the _Tribune_,
in 1841. We can see at once that, like Bennett and Raymond, he was
greatly endowed with that species of sagacity which divines at a glance
the capabilities of a new project or speculation. Greeley was the son of
a New England farmer, and came to New York a poor penniless boy. His
earlier essays in newspaper management were total failures; but the
_Tribune_ was remarkably successful from its very commencement. It
eschewed the coarse and violent style of the _Herald_, and pursued a far
more generous and enlightened policy on public questions, while it
almost rivalled the business-like energy of its earlier contemporary;
but it ultimately injured itself by its championship of socialism, and
a host of other secular heresies. For, though Greeley was of a
remarkably practical turn of mind, at least in the management of his own
business, he was a great theorist, committed to every _recherché_
novelty in faith and life, a moral philosopher, after a fashion of his
own, sincere and liberal in his ideas, with deep sympathies for the
working classes, advocating their rights, and seeking their elevation,
while he did not fear to expose their follies and their faults. The
_Tribune_ became, under his management, the organ of socialism and
spirit-rapping, woman's rights, vegetarianism, temperance, and peace
principles. It seemed, in fact, the premature harbinger of the 'good
time coming,' adept in all the cant of reform, and familiar with the
whole philosophy of progress, a very clear vein of sense being
perceptible to critical minds, in the elegant sophistry with which it
vindicated its own course, and tried to overwhelm all objectors. It
attempted, in fact, to turn to account the remarkable tremour of the
public mind, which arose from what was seen or said between 1845 and
1855 of mesmerism, electro-biology, spirit-rapping, Swedenborgianism,
and psychology; but we are glad to know that the _Tribune_ has greatly
improved in its general views, and comes more into accord with common
ideas on these curious subjects.
It was the disgust and disappointment of the public with the socialistic
heresies of the _Tribune_, as well as with the shameless and indecent
personalities of the _Herald_, that led to the establishment of the
_Times_, in the year 1851. It took rank at once as a dignified and able
journal. Its influence was exercised from the first on the side of
morality, industry, education, and religion; and to use the words of an
eminent English journalist, now at the American press, 'it encouraged
truthfulness, carried decency, temperance, and courtesy into discussion,
and helped to abate the greatest nuisance of the age, the coarseness,
violence, and calumny, which does so much to drive sensible and
high-minded and competent men out of public life, or keep them from
entering it.' No one, certainly, has ever done more than Henry J.
Raymond for the elevation of the American newspaper. We cannot justly
overlook the substantial services done in the same department by the
_New York Evening Post_, under the management of its veteran editor,
William Cullen Bryant, the poet; by the _New York World_, a new paper
distinguished by the talent, incisiveness, and dignity of its articles;
and by the _Nation_, managed by Mr. Godkin, an Irishman, once connected
with the London press, and which stands upon the intellectual level of
the best European periodicals.
We are indebted to Mr. Maverick for a tolerably full account of the
present position of New York journalism. There are 150 newspapers
published in that city, of which 24 are daily papers, two of them
published in the French language, and three in the German. The remainder
are weekly journals, of which eighteen are in German, one in Italian,
and two in Spanish. There are no less than 258 German newspapers in all
America, the largest number being published in Pennsylvania. There are
eighteen religious newspapers published in New York. We have the
following information in reference to the literary and mechanical
arrangements of the daily press:
'Each of the great daily papers of New York to-day employs
more than a hundred men, in different departments, and
expends half a million of dollars annually, with less
concern to the proprietors than an outlay of one-quarter of
that sum would have occasioned in 1840. The editorial corps
of the papers issued in New York on the first day of the
present year numbered at least half a score of persons; the
reporters were in equal force; sixty printers and eight or
ten pressmen were employed to put in type and to print the
contents of each issue of the paper; twenty carriers
conveyed the printed sheets to its readers, and a dozen
mailing clerks and bookkeepers managed the business details
of each establishment. Editorial salaries now range from
twenty-five to sixty dollars a week; reporters receive from
twenty to thirty dollars a week; and the gross receipts of
a great daily paper for a year often reach the sum of one
million of dollars, of which an average of one third is
clear profit. These statistics are applicable to four or
five of the daily morning journals of New York.'
There is much literary ability displayed in the daily and weekly
journals of Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and other leading cities.
The _Boston Post_ is a leading paper in that city. It is answerable for
all the paradoxical absurdities of the famous Mrs. Partington. The
_Washington National Era_, like the _National Intelligencer_, of the
same capital, has a high position, as a literary and political journal.
It was through its columns that Mrs. Stowe first gave to the world her
'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' just as Judge Haliburton first published 'Sam
Slick, the Clockmaker,' in the pages of a Nova Scotian weekly newspaper.
It is a remarkable fact that the Americans have never produced a
Quarterly worthy of the name, except the 'North American Review,' which
is certainly below the intellectual level of the four or five English
reviews which are reprinted in New York every quarter within a
fortnight of their publication in England. It was said, in explanation
of the fact that the French had never succeeded in maintaining a review
on the plan of the English Quarterlies, that their opinions and parties
change so often, and the nation was so volatile, that they could not
wait a quarter of a year upon anybody. But this explanation will not
apply to the Americans. The 'North American Review' has always had on
its list of contributors the very best names in native literature, such
as Longfellow, Everett, J. R. Lowell, Motley, Jared Sparks, Caleb
Cushing, George Bancroft, and others. Yet its success has been very
partial. Its literary position ought to have been far more decided. The
'Atlantic Monthly' holds a deservedly high place in American letters,
with such authors as Emerson, Holmes, and Mrs. Stowe among its principal
contributors; but its influence has always been thrown into the scale
against Evangelical Christianity. 'Harper's Magazine,' published in New
York, is an illustrated monthly for the fashionable world, with a
circulation of 150,000 copies. 'Bonner's Ledger' has pushed its way into
the front rank of weekly magazines, by its romances, its essays, and its
poetry, from such writers as Parton, Beecher, Everett, Saxe, Bryant, and
many others. The sporting world has its _Wilkes' Spirit of the Times_;
the advocates of woman's rights have the _Revolution_, in the hands of
Susan B. Anthony and E. C. Stanton; the grocers have a _Grocers'
Journal_; the merchants a _Dry Goods Reporter_; the billiard-players, a
_Billiard-cue_; and the dealers in tobacco, a _Tobacco Leaf_. The
advocates of Spiritualism and Socialism have a large number of journals
in their service. But, strange to relate, the Americans have not a
single comic periodical like our 'Punch.' Mr. Maverick says that, in the
course of a dozen years, many attempts have been made to establish such
a print, but without success. 'Vanity Fair' was the best of the class,
but its wit and its pictorial illustrations were equally poor and
trivial. All the comic papers that flourished for a few years were only
remarkable for the immense amount of bad wit they contained, for a
wilderness of worthlessness, for an endless process of tickling and
laughter; with only an occasional gleam of genuine humour and
imagination. If the Americans have failed in producing such a
periodical, it is not from the want of literary men possessed of the
_vis comica_, for Oliver Wendell Holmes, James R. Lowell, Shelton,
Butler, and Saxe are first-rate humourists. The English comic papers can
command all the abounding talent of men like Douglas Jerrold, Albert
Smith, W. M. Thackeray, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Thomas Hood, F.
Burnand, and a host of other satirists. The Americans, however, have
never had a Tenniel, a Doyle, a Leech, a Du Maurier, or a Keene, to
throw off, week after week, the most amusing and instructive of
pictorial satires. All they have hitherto done in this department is to
copy with tolerable taste and skill the best cartoons and wood-cuts of
'Punch' and our illustrated magazines. Perhaps America has yet to find
its Bradbury and Evans. It is evidently most in want of a publisher.
After all, there is hardly anything the Americans need more than a good
comic paper, to moderate the intensity of their politics, to laugh down
the extravagant follies of American society, to measure the strength of
their public men, to register their blunders, and expose their
hollowness, to watch over the caprices of fashion, to criticize the
press itself, with its coarseness and scurrility, its disgraceful
advertisements, and its downright fabrications; taking good care to keep
free from those sins which so easily beset satirists, rancour,
obscenity, and attacks on private character. They need a satirical
journal, just to apply to all things the good old test of common sense;
and when uncommon wit is allied with common sense in branding any custom
or habit as evil, it must be very deeply rooted if it cannot be
overturned or modified. Besides, the Americans, as a hard-working race,
need a refreshing humour to relieve the strain upon their mental and
physical energies. Emerson remarked of Abraham Lincoln, that humour
refreshed him like sleep or wine; and a nation so eager in all kinds of
work deserves the innocent relaxation that comes from literature in its
most sparkling and pleasing form.
The volume of Mr. Maverick makes almost no allusion to an important
department of the American press, which demands some notice at our
hands, viz., that which ministers to the intellectual and moral wants of
the Irish Roman Catholic immigrants. There is no city of any magnitude
which does not possess its Catholic organ. New York city is the proper
centre of the Catholic press, but Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati,
Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Boston, Charleston, and St.
Louis have each their weekly paper for the Irish population.
Intellectually, these papers are very inferior, and so illiberal that
almost every question is viewed from the single standpoint of creed,
race, or country. The liberal policy of a free and progressive state has
hardly produced the slightest effect upon them. It is a very remarkable
fact that in America, as in other countries, journalism is not wielded
in the service of Romanism with any freshness and power, except by
converts from Protestantism. We find _Brownson's Review_, the _Freeman's
Journal_, the _Shepherd of the Valley_ (now discontinued), and the
_Catholic Herald_, in the hands of perverts, just as in Europe the
_Tablet_ was founded by a convert from Quakerism, the _Dublin Review_ is
in the hands of an Oxford pervert, and the _Historisch-politische
Blätter_ of Munich was founded by Professor Phillips, and maintained in
great scientific efficiency by Yarke, both converts from Lutheranism.
The Irish press in America is very ultramontane. It seems drunk with the
very spirit of religious servility, mad with the hatred of liberty, and
adopts the strictest Roman Catholic doctrines, following them out to
their extremest consequences, with a rudeness and arrogance of style,
approaching to vulgarity. Orestes Brownson says that the Pope is nowhere
so truly Pope, and finds nowhere, so far as Catholics are concerned, so
little resistance in the full exercise of his authority as in the United
States. No European editor, except Veuillot, ever wrote in the style of
Brownson himself, who is intellectually without a peer among Romish
editors; for he takes the strongest and most unpopular ground as the
very foundation of his ecclesiastical and political theories. Veuillot
shocked the good sense and liberal feeling of Europe, by defending the
Inquisition and the St. Bartholomew massacre; but Brownson despises all
prudential considerations, in claiming for his church the right to put
heretics to death, for he holds that this is punishment, and not
persecution. The _Shepherd of the Valley_ held that the question of
punishing heretics was one of mere expediency, and declared that in the
event of his church gaining the ascendancy in America, there would be an
end of religious toleration. The _Pittsburgh Catholic_ censured these
outspoken utterances; but the _Boston Pilot_ rebuked its Pittsburgh
contemporary for its censures, declaring that the _Shepherd of the
Valley_ said nothing that was not true; yet saying itself, with marked
inconsistency, 'No Catholic wishes to abridge the religious rights of
Protestants.' It is in perfect consistency with such ultramontane ideas
that these Irish newspapers uniformly take the side of royal despots in
great national struggles, and deny all sympathy to revolutionary leaders
except those of Ireland. Though they usually cry out lustily when any
step in American legislation or any popular combination manifests even
an appearance of hostility to Catholic interests, they actually had the
audacity, in 1859, to defend those royal miscreants of Italy, who rioted
in the misery of their subjects, and of whom it was truly said, 'They
kept one-half of their people in prison and the other half in fear of
it.' They sympathised with the Poles in their last insurrection, because
their oppressor was a schismatic; they had no sympathy with Hungarians,
or Italians, or Spaniards, because their oppressors were Catholics. The
_Boston Pilot_--the most popular journal of the Irish--forgot its _rôle_
so far in 1848, as to take a liberal view of the European revolutions.
The result was that the _Univers_, in giving an account of Catholic
journalism in America, excluded the _Pilot_ from its list of the
orthodox; the clergy, moreover, condemned it; and it was obliged to
express its penitence for such an error of judgment. The _Pilot_, after
all, is more reasonable and less fanatical than most of the Catholic
papers, and is specially copious in its reports of Catholic news. All
these Irish newspapers are, without exception, bitterly anti-English in
their tone and spirit. One might suppose that having escaped from misery
and poverty, and launched upon a new career of prosperity and
contentment, the Irish could afford to forget England; but, like their
teachers at the press, they are strong in historical grudges, and their
hatred to this country is as much theological as political. The
Irish-American journalist delights in copying into his paper the abuse
of England, collected from all quarters of the world, and in times of
war or rebellion depreciates our triumphs and magnifies our misfortunes.
The Catholic clergy have found it hard to control the opinions of a
portion of their Irish countrymen, who, though sufficiently submissive
in spiritual concerns, have shown a disposition to assert an
independence of clerical control in matters affecting the interests of
Ireland. Sometimes, indeed, the clergy have been led to humour this
national feeling, as when they were in the habit of attending the 'Tom
Moore Club,' at Boston, though it had been more than suspected that the
favourite poet had died out of the pale of the church. At length the
_Shepherd of the Valley_ pointedly condemned their appearance at the
annual banquet, on the ground that the poet was ashamed of his country's
religion during life, and that English preachers performed the obsequies
at his grave. The appearance of Thomas Francis Meagher in America, after
his escape from penal servitude in Australia, greatly perplexed the
bishops and clergy; but the _mot d'ordre_ went forth, and all the
Catholic newspapers in America, with a single exception, assailed him
with the greatest bitterness, for his enlightened opinions upon
religious liberty, and upon the relation between Church and State.
Thousands of the Irish, notwithstanding, rallied round Meagher; and the
_Irish-American_ was established, for the vindication and enforcement of
his principles. There are a few other organs of Irish nationality,
including the _Irish People_, of John Mitchell, published in America,
but, with the exception of the _People_, they are all contemptible, in
every point of view. You find in their pages column after column of
windy jargon and tawdry rhetoric, which would consign an English editor
to a madhouse. This gaudy and ornate style, with a profusion of florid
imagery and Oriental hyperbole quite overpowering, seems to characterise
every Nationalist journal. It is these papers that have inflated the
Fenian bubble. We pity the deplorable ignorance of the Irish masses,
their misguided enthusiasm, and their preposterous pertinacity in the
pursuit of visionary ends; but we have no language too severe to apply
to their intellectual leaders who pursue their ignoble calling from a
mercenary calculation of the profits to be derived from bottomless
credulity. We fear that the Irish press generally has succeeded in
imparting an education to the _emigrés_ that can serve only to nurture
hatreds, which, like curses, too often come home to roost, and that some
considerable time may be expected to elapse before all the appliances of
American civilization and Christianity shall succeed, as they most
certainly will, in the assimilation of such intractable materials.
Our notice of the American press would be incomplete without some
account of that ample supply of religious literature which is furnished
by thousands of weekly, monthly, and quarterly periodicals. The
religious newspaper is almost peculiar to America, and is far superior
to any similar publication in England. The English paper is more
ecclesiastical and less religious; the American, while equally strenuous
and careful in the advocacy of denominational claims, supplies much of
what we usually obtain here from the _Sunday Magazine_ and the _Family
Treasury_. The literary superiority of the religious press over the
secular in America arises mainly from the fact that its conductors and
contributors are mostly clergymen who have been graduates of colleges,
and are possessed of a considerable amount of classical culture and
training. Every denomination has a large number of weekly organs. The
two leading newspapers of the class are the _New York Independent_ and
the _New York Observer_, the former an organ of the Congregationalists,
and the latter of the Presbyterians. The _Independent_ was originally
conducted by the Rev. Dr. Bacon, the Rev. Dr. Thompson, and the Rev.
Richard Storrs, jun.; it afterwards passed into the hands of the Rev.
Henry Ward Beecher, who wielded it with great power and efficiency in
the anti-slavery cause; and it is now managed by Theodore Tilton in
company with several others. It contains a great variety of religious,
political, and general news, devotional and literary pieces of great
merit, together with foreign and domestic correspondence, written with
an excellent spirit. Mr. Beecher has established, and conducts, the
_Christian Union_, another religious paper, which is rapidly rising to
popularity and power. _The Advance_, a religious paper published in
Chicago, and conducted by Dr. Patten, is one of the best of the
religious papers of America. The _Observer_ is one of the oldest and
best established papers, once exceedingly Conservative in its views of
slavery, but always distinguished by sound judgment, good taste, and
fair culture. The Methodists are well represented by the _Christian
Advocate and Journal_, and the Baptists by the _Examiner and Chronicle_.
The monthly organ of the American Tract Society has a circulation of
about 200,000, which it owes to its catholic character and its
extraordinary cheapness. The quarterly literature of the American
churches is of a very high character. The _Bibliotheca Sacra_ is the
great organ of New England theology, and the _Biblical Repertory and
Princeton Review_ is the leading representative of the Calvinism of the
Westminster standards. These are the two most powerful reviews. The
_Bibliotheca Sacra_ is published at Andover, the scene of the learned
labours of Moses Stuart, the biblical expositor, and was established
twenty-seven years ago. It differs from the _Princeton Review_ and all
British reviews in publishing the names of its contributors, and it has
succeeded in gathering to its pages a vast amount of the most versatile
talent from nearly all the Congregational Colleges of America. Its most
original contributor in the domain of metaphysical theology is Professor
Austin Phelps, of Andover, whose articles on 'The Instrumentality of the
Truth in Regeneration,' and 'Human Responsibility as related to Divine
Agency in Conversion,' published within the last two or three years,
prove that much of the genius and spirit of Jonathan Edwards still
exists in New England theology. Another eminent contributor, Professor
Park, of Andover, who is also its principal editor, has been frequently
in collision with Dr. Hodge, of the _Princeton Review_, on points of
Calvinistic divinity. Professor Bascom has been recently publishing in
its pages a series of articles on 'The Natural Theology of Social
Science'--a subject hitherto left too much in the hands of
secularists--and has succeeded in lifting it with advantage into the
higher sphere of theology. The articles of this review are generally
marked by a high style of ability and a scientific thoroughness: and
are, many of them, worthy of being reproduced, as they have been, from
time to time, in the _British and Foreign Evangelical Review_. The
spirit of its management is exceedingly liberal. We observe, for
example, that it recently published an article on 'Christian Baptism,'
from the professor of a Baptist College, in conformity with a plan
adopted by the conductors of securing from representative men of
different sects and schools of thought, articles unfolding distinctive,
theological opinions, and exhibiting with something like scientific
precision the exact peculiarities of meaning attached to the terminology
of the respective schools. The _Princeton Review_ is the oldest
quarterly in the United States. It was established in 1825 by Dr.
Charles Hodge, the well-known commentator on the Epistle to the Romans,
who was then, and still is, a Professor in the Princeton Theological
Seminary; but it was not till 1829 that it ceased to be a mere repertory
of selections from foreign works in the department of biblical
literature. It is, beyond all question, the greatest purely theological
review that has ever been published in the English tongue, and has waged
war in defence of the Westminster standards for a period of forty years,
with a polemic vigour and unity of design without any parallel in the
history of religious journalism. If we were called to name any living
writer who, to Calvin's exegetical tact, unites a large measure of
Calvin's grasp of mind and transparent clearness in the department of
systematic theology, we should point to this Princeton Professor. He
possesses, to use the words of an English critic, the power of seizing
and retaining with a rare vigour and tenacity, the great doctrinal
turning-points in a controversy, while he is able to expose with
triumphant dexterity the various subterfuges under which it has been
sought to elude them. His articles furnish a remarkably full and exact
repository of historic and polemic theology; especially those on
'Theories of the Church,' 'The Idea of the Church,' 'The Visibility of
the Church,' 'The Perpetuity of the Church,' all of which have been
reproduced in English reviews. The great characteristic of his mind is
the polemic element; accordingly we find him in collision with Moses
Stuart, of Andover, in 1833, and with Albert Barnes in 1835, on the
doctrine of Imputation; with Professor Park, in 1851, on 'The Theology
of the Intellect and the Theology of the Feelings;' with Dr. Niven, of
the _Mercersburg Review_, in 1848, on the subject of the 'Mystical
Presence,' the title of an article which attempted to apply the modern
German philosophy to the explanation and subversion of Christian
doctrines; with Professor Schaff, in 1854, on the doctrine of historical
development; and with Horace Bushnell, in 1866, on vicarious sacrifice.
In fact, a theological duel has been going on between Andover and
Princeton for nearly forty years, the leading controversialists of
Andover being Stuart, Park, Edward Beecher, Baird, and Fisher, and those
of Princeton, Hodge, the Alexanders, and Atwater.[1] Hodge has
contributed one hundred and thirty-five articles to the _Review_ since
its commencement; Dr. Archibald Alexander--a venerable divine, who
resembled John Brown, of Haddington, in many respects--contributed
seventy-seven; his son, Dr. James Waddel Alexander, twice a Princeton
Professor, and afterwards pastor of the wealthiest congregation in New
York, contributed one hundred and one articles; another son, Dr. Joseph
Addison Alexander, the well-known commentator on Isaiah, contributed
ninety-two, mostly on classical and Oriental subjects; and Dr. Atwater,
another Princeton professor of great learning and versatility,
contributed sixty-four on theological and metaphysical subjects. The
articles in the _Princeton_ on science, philosophy, literature, and
history, have generally displayed large culture and research. The review
of Cousin's Philosophy, in 1839, by Professor Dod, was one of the most
remarkable papers that appeared on the subject in America, and was
afterwards reprinted separately on both sides of the Atlantic. Another
theological quarterly of America, is the _New Englander_, published at
Newhaven, Connecticut, and representative principally of Yale
scholarship. Nearly all the leading names in New England theology, such
as Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, Dwight, Griffin, Tyler, and Taylor, among
the dead, and Bushnell, Beecher, and Bacon, among the living, are
associated with the venerable University of Yale. Tryon Edwards (the
great-grandson of Jonathan Edwards) is one of the contributors to the
_New Englander_. The professors and graduates of the college are its
principal contributors. Among them are to be found the distinguished
names of Dr. Noah Porter and President Woolsey. The former has recently
contributed to the _New Englander_, a series of valuable articles, just
reprinted in a small volume, on 'The American Colleges and the American
Public;' an able discussion of the fundamental principles of University
education. The _Mercersburg Review_ is the quarterly organ of the German
Reformed Church, and has been conducted, from its commencement, by Dr.
Niven and Professor Schaff, the well-known historian. The Baptists have
their _Christian Review_, the Methodists their _Methodist Quarterly
Review_, the Lutherans their _Evangelical Review_, the Episcopalians
their _Protestant Episcopal Quarterly Review_, and the Unitarians their
_Christian Examiner_, which reflects from time to time the vicissitudes
of Unitarian opinion. There is one fact suggested by this review of the
American religious press, viz., that Episcopacy holds a very inferior
place beside Independency and Presbyterianism in theological authorship.
We all know how greatly things are changed, even in England, since Dr.
Arnold deplored, and all but despised, the culture of Dissenters, for we
have Dean Alford, but the other day, confessing in the _Contemporary
Review_, 'Already the Nonconformists have passed us by in Biblical
scholarship, and ministerial training.' But in the United States, the
palm of theological scholarship has always rested in the hands of
Congregational and Presbyterian divines. The best theological
seminaries, the ablest theological reviews, and the most original as
well as extensive authorship in the various branches of theology, belong
to the two denominations referred to.
We shall now proceed, as briefly as possible, to make some observations
of a critical nature upon the intellectual and moral character of the
American press generally. It is not, certainly, in any spirit of
national superiority that we point to the undoubted fact that,
notwithstanding the great expansion of newspaper literature in the
States, the wide diffusion of popular education, and the circulation of
English books of the best kind at a mere nominal cost, the Americans
have as yet produced nothing representatively like our London _Times_,
or _Punch_, or the _Athenæum_, or the _Illustrated London News_, or the
_Saturday Review_, or the _Art Journal_, or the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_. They have not even produced a single great newspaper writer
like Captain Stirling, of the _Times_, Albany Fonblanque, sen., of the
_Examiner_, or Hugh Miller, of the _Edinburgh Witness_, for Bennett,
Greeley, and Raymond, though capital editors, are all greatly inferior
to these men in that art of scholarly, dignified, and tasteful
leader-writing, which gives such a power and charm to London journalism.
Newspaper writing is, perhaps, the most difficult of all writing; there
is none at least in which excellence is so rarely attained. The capacity
of bringing widely-scattered information into a focus, of drawing just
conclusions from well-selected facts, of amplifying, compressing,
illustrating a succession of topics, all on the spur of the moment,
without a moment's stay to examine or revise, argues great intellectual
cultivation. The articles may not be of a lofty order, or demand for
their execution the very highest kind of talent, but the power of
accomplishing it with success is very uncommon, and of all the varieties
of ways in which incompetency is manifested, an irrepressible tendency
to fine writing is associated with the greater number of them. De
Tocqueville says that democratic journalism has a strong tendency to be
virulent in spirit and bombastic in style. It certainly runs the risk of
lawlessness, inaccuracy, and irreverence, with much of vehemence, and
with little taste, imagination, or profundity. One serious charge we
have to bring against the American newspapers is, that they have sorely
vulgarized and vitiated the English language. We are aware that many of
them imagine the language of their country to be the standard as to
idiom, pronunciation, and spelling, and any English variation from their
golden rule as erroneous and heterodox; but such critics are entitled to
no consideration whatever. If men of education at the American press
refuse to study the style of the great authors who fixed and purified
the language of our common forefathers, so that we may have one and not
two languages spoken on opposite sides of the Atlantic, let them at
least imitate such writers of their own as Washington Irving, Horace
Bushnell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose pure and
native English is wholly free from all the corruptions and affectations
of phrase which overrun American newspapers, simply because it is
beautifully modelled upon the most elegant and polished writers of
English literature. In fact, the Americans have always been greatly in
need of a critical organ, like the old _Edinburgh Review_, to purify the
literary atmosphere from the clouds and mists of false taste which
deface it, to stand censor on books and newspapers, a recognized
authority in the literary republic, for whose quarterly judgments
readers might look with interest, and authors with trembling. The
_North American Review_, though written with great spirit, learning, and
ability, and abounding in profound and original discussions on the most
interesting subjects, has never filled the place of the _Edinburgh_,
and, indeed, its own style is not free from the common sin of
affectation. It is pleasant to think of William Cullen Bryant, the poet,
hanging up in the office of his newspaper--the _New York Evening
Post_--a catalogue of words that no editor or reporter is ever to be
allowed to use.[2] Let us hope that the literary men of America, of all
classes, will seriously aim at the formation of a purer, chaster, and
juster style of writing, for what they have hitherto produced has been
defective in taste rather than in talent.
Another great sin of American journalism is its intolerable personality,
violence, and exaggeration. This was the disgrace of our own English
press at no distant period. Cobbett was a great sinner in this respect,
He had much to do with raising the intellectual, and lowering the moral,
reputation of the modern newspaper. The wide diffusion of enlightened
views on politics and religion is attested, however, in a remarkable
manner among ourselves, by the moderation of tone which we now see in
journals which, about twenty years ago, were remarkable for their
scurrility and violence. It is no longer a recommendation to an English
newspaper to be known as an assailant of the Royal Family, the
aristocracy, the bench of bishops, or parsons. Several publications
that, a few years since, professed atheism and secularism, have become
extinct, and the _quondam_ organs of Chartism and fierce democracy have
been obliged to become respectable. But many of the American newspapers
are much worse than the English were a quarter of a century ago. With
us, faction has become less mischievous and shameless; unfounded
accusations less common and less malignant; invectives more measured and
decorous; not merely because the evil passions which required to be fed
with the abuse of individuals have calmed down, but because the British
press is now guided by the principle of attacking public opinion, not
private characters, measures, not men; and its quarrels are usually
governed by the laws of honour and chivalry, which proscribe all base
advantages. Put an American newspaper cannot assail another newspaper
without mentioning the editor's name, and calling him coward or rascal.
If you cannot answer your opponent's objections, you caricature his
appearance, or dress, or diet, or accent, as Bennett is in the habit of
treating Greeley; and if you are foiled by his wit, you recover your
advantage by stabbing his character. No allusions become too indecorous
for your taste; no sarcasms too bitter for your savage spite; and no
character pure enough to be sacred from your charges and insinuations.
The American editor pursues his antagonist as if he were a criminal. The
_New York World_ lately devoted four columns of its space to illustrate
by quotations the amenities of American journalism. The majority of the
papers seem to subsist on the great staple of falsehood and personality,
and enjoy all the advantages which spring from an utter contempt for the
restraints of decency and candour; and we are strongly of opinion that
this work of cruel intimidation is pursued with unrelenting eagerness,
not from the influence of angry passions or furious prejudices, but in
the cold-blooded calculation of the profits which idle curiosity or the
vulgar appetite for slander may enable its authors to derive from it. We
are not prepared to endorse all the strong statements made by infuriated
rivals concerning the proprietor of the _New York Herald_; but he leaves
us, in no doubt, himself, as to the light in which he regarded his own
frequent chastisements. Immediately after James Watson Webb had severely
whipped him in the streets of New York, the whole affair was recounted,
in the _Herald_ with a sensational circumstantiality that had an evident
eye to business, though we cannot overlook the remarkable good humour
with which Bennett treated the whole affair:--
'The fellow,' he says, 'no doubt wanted to let out the
never-failing supply of good humour and wit which have
created such a reputation for the _Herald_, and appropriate
the contents to supply the emptiness of his own skull. He
didn't succeed, however, in rifling me of my ideas. My
ideas in a few days will flow as freshly as ever, and he
will find it to his cost.'
Imagine the London _Times_ degraded to the condition of its responsible
editor rejoicing in his own personal chastisement! American journalists
fight like their French brethren. They never dream of explanations.
Bullets and bowie-knives are the natural sequel of such recriminations
as disgrace their newspapers. This extreme violence is part of the loose
political morality so common there. Americans seem to be taught almost
from their infancy to hate one-half of the nation, and so contract all
the virulence and passion of party before they have come to the age of
reason; but before their newspapers can be said to enter upon the course
of real usefulness which is open to them, they must have come to believe
that political differences may exist without their opponents being
either rogues or fools. Jefferson said in his day that the scurrility of
the press drove away the best men from public life, and would certainly
have driven away Washington had he lived to suffer from its growing
excesses. James Fenimore Cooper, the celebrated novelist, had a horror
of newspapers, and instituted actions at law against a host of them for
literary libels. He once remarked, 'The press of this country tyrannizes
over public men of letters, the arts, the stage, and even private life.
Under the semblance of maintaining liberty, it is gradually establishing
a despotism as ruthless and grasping and one that is quite as vulgar as
that of any Christian state known.' This view of the case is certainly
serious and suggestive. Party violence may be carried to a length that
defeats itself, for it may harden public men against all newspaper
criticism whatever, to the great injury of public affairs, and thus
lower the estimation and disturb the course of public opinion. Nowhere
are fools more dogmatic than in politics, and nowhere are wise men more
doubtful and silent; but American party writers have no respect for the
Horatian maxim, 'in medio tutissimus'--the secret of that moderation of
opinion which has distinguished the most genial and sagacious men in our
political world. They must really learn to cultivate a love of truth and
justice; they should seek to attain the power of holding the scales
steadily, while the advantages or disadvantages of every question are
fairly weighed; they should stamp upon their professional life the
impress of personal rectitude and honour, and not wait--to copy the tone
of the old apologies--till a higher standard of public morals, and a
more intelligent cultivation of political and literary inquiries, shall
have raised for them a new class of readers. It is the prerogative of
genius to create the light by which it is to be understood and
appreciated; but the working talents of a country, which are identified
with its immediate interests, ought at least to rise a little above the
surrounding level.
We are led, from this point, to notice another defect in American
journalism,--the absence of the anonymous usage, which is, indeed,
mainly answerable for the scurrility and violence already referred to.
The British editor is usually unknown to the public; the French
journalist subscribes his name at the foot of his articles; but the
American editor publishes his name and address boldly at the top of his
newspaper. The effect of this custom is to identify the authority of the
journal with the personal influence of the editor; it tends to a habit
of deciding questions on personal grounds, and to a far too marked
superfluity of the _tu quoque_ argument. The object of the American
journalist is not so much the instruction of the public as the political
advancement of himself, for journalism usually forms the first stage in
the course of an ambitious politician, or a rising statesman; and the
American usage is certainly very well adapted to this end. Our anonymous
habit limits the discussions of the press and abolishes egotism, while
it certainly tends to debar personalities. It has been remarked, as a
suggestive fact, that personality is the common vice of the only free
press in the world, which ignores the anonymous principle; and that in
England, under a contrary usage, personality is little known, always
reprobated, and, indeed, in cases of flagrant personal attacks, the
authorship is usually but thinly disguised. It is absurd to defend the
American habits as manly and ours as cowardly; for their habit tends to
make writers far from circumspect or considerate of the feelings of
others. But, in fact, the publicity in which American journalists
delight is only akin to the publicity of American life generally. The
British public would not tolerate the intrusion of the press into
private or family concerns; yet one New York paper published, in the
panic, of 1857, the name of every gentleman who bought a silk dress for
his wife, or gave a dinner-party to his friends. Other newspapers
criticize the dress and appearance of ladies at balls and cricket
parties, the personality of their praise being almost as offensive as at
other times the coarseness of their vituperation.
We confess that we do not entertain a very high opinion of the morality
of the American press, though we admit there has been a sensible
improvement within the last thirty years. Emerson made the remark, in
his 'English Traits,' that the London _Times_ was an 'immoral
institution,' on the ground we presume, of its frequent changes of
opinion. We are far from defending the leading journal in its policy of
tergiversation--for there can be no doubt it ever fights on the stronger
side, upholds no falling cause, and advocates no great principle--but it
was never yet bought with bribes or cowed by intimidation. It has
sometimes shown that it is conducted on principles superior to mere
money considerations, for, during the Railway mania of 1845, when its
advertising sheet was overrun with projected lines of railway, realizing
to the proprietors the enormous sum of from £2,839 to £6,687 per week,
the Thunderer turned its fire on these projects, and lost nearly £3,000
in a single week. We do not charge the American press with any flagrant
changes of policy or principle, for we believe it is, in these respects,
sufficiently consistent. But we deplore the absence of high moral
purpose, as well as independence in its discussions of public questions.
The American people demand a large amount of flattery; they have come
almost to loathe the wholesome truth; they must be pampered with
constant adulations, so that no one will venture to tell them their
faults, and, neither at home nor abroad, dare moralists venture a
whisper to their prejudice. This is a serious drawback. America wants
more writers of the class who are said to prefer their country's good to
its favour, and more anxious to reform its vices than cherish the pride
of its virtues. Besides, we strongly suspect that the American
journalist is very careless about the truth. We mean the truth of fact,
which is part of the historic disposition of the age, as opposed to all
that is sensational. He resembles the French rather than the English
journalist in the tendency to regard good news as more important than
correct news. The English journals make it their business to present
their readers with news and not advice, with facts and not opinions, so
that they can form opinions for themselves, and the power of our press
is thus enormously increased, but only on conditions that effectually
prevent the arbitrary exercise of it. The American writers for the press
have followed our example in some degree, but their disposition to
provide startling and sensational intelligence is too often manifested
at the expense of truth. Mr. Maverick gives an account of a number of
disreputable hoaxes played by the newspapers upon the public of America,
which were justified, we presume, to the consciences of the authors by
the observation of Lord Bacon--'A mixture of lies doth ever add
pleasure; doth any man doubt that if there were taken from men's minds
vain opinions, nattering hopes, false valuations, and the like, it would
leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things?' The 'Moon
Hoax,' which was published in the New York _Sun_ in 1835, was one of the
most skilful and successful of these literary frauds. Successive numbers
of that paper contained a pretended extract from the pages of a
supplement to the _Edinburgh Journal of Science_, under the title of
'Great Astronomical Discoveries latterly made by Sir John Herschel,
LL.D., F.R.S., at the Cape of Good Hope.' The paper had a remarkable air
of scientific research, such as might deceive all but the most learned
and wary. The Herschel telescope was represented as affording a distinct
view of lunar roads, rocks, seas, cascades, forests, houses, people, and
monsters of various shapes. The 'Roorback Hoax' was a shameless attempt
to injure the character of J. K. Polk, when he was a candidate for the
Presidency, by representing him as possessing forty-three slaves who had
his initials branded into their flesh. The deception was wrought by
simply adding to a sentence in Featherstonehaugh's Travels in America
four lines of the hoaxer's own, recording the disgraceful lie referred
to. We confess that we cannot recognise the morality of a transaction
which Mr. Maverick records in the history of the _New York Times_,
without apparently the slightest suspicion of its dishonesty. When the
_New York Herald_ got hold of the single survivor of the ill-fated
Atlantic steamer, _Arctic_, which was lost in September, 1854, an
assistant on the _Times_ succeeded, by means of an adroit pressman, in
purloining an early copy from the _Herald_ press-rooms, and actually
published the _Herald's_ report an hour earlier than that journal. We
cannot understand what Mr. Maverick means by representing the _Herald_
as 'playing a trick to keep the news from the other papers,' unless the
_Herald_ was actually bound to supply its contemporaries gratuitously
with the exclusive news it had obtained from the survivor at its own
sole expense. The transaction seems to us merely a clever specimen of
American 'smartness.'
But we must draw these observations to a close. We cannot but admit that
the press of America, with all its defects, is an engine of great power.
It is on this ground we desire for it a close approximation to those
intellectual and moral qualities which have given British journalism
such an influence over the affairs of the whole world. In fact, two such
nations as America and Britain, working in the same language, should be
always learning from each other; for the eager energy of the one should
push forward the occasionally lagging progress of the other, and our
matured caution restrain their hasty inexperience. America is great in
all that leads to immediate and available results. She has given us
several of the greatest mechanical inventions of the age; she has far
excelled us in the theory and practice of religious liberty, as well as
in the more liberal recognition of denominational brotherhood among the
religious sects; while she has furnished a noble example of public
spirit in the support of religion, missions, and education. Let us hope
that in time she will equal, if not surpass us in a periodical
literature, which, if even still more intensely political than ours,
will display a breadth and strength of thought, together with a wisdom
and dignity, which will add immensely to its power. There is one aspect
of Transatlantic literature which already contrasts favourably with our
own, and that is its generally cordial recognition of Evangelical
Christianity. With the exception of the German and French newspapers,
which chafe under the restraints of a Christian country, and scoff at
Judaic sabbaths, Pharisaic church-going, and tyrannical priestcraft,
there are no newspapers of any position in the States that are avowedly
anti-Christian; and there is less disposition than formerly, on the part
of the American press generally, to exclude all reference to distinctive
Christianity. It was considered a remarkable circumstance at the time of
the American revival that several newspapers, notorious for a thinly
disguised infidelity, and for a most undisguised enmity to Evangelical
religion, should not only publish the most ample reports of the
movement, but commend it in a way that has had no parallel in English
journalism, even before the tide of public opinion had turned decisively
in its favour. It is the common custom still for American newspapers to
print the sermons of popular preachers, and to publish a large amount of
religious intelligence. The press is also intensely Protestant, and has
contributed to the growth of that enormous assimilating power by which
American Protestantism has absorbed generation after generation of the
Roman Catholic emigrants. The statistics of the Propaganda declare that
one half of the whole number has been lost to the Church of Rome; and
the explanation is, that they can no more escape from the influence of
American ideas than from the effects of the atmosphere and climate.
It becomes, therefore, a matter of the greatest consequence that the
literary guides of a nation with such a destiny as America, should
understand the responsibilities under which their power is exercised.
They should take care, above all things, to use their influence not to
materialize the mind of society, by obtruding material concerns too much
upon the attention, to the neglect of those moral and spiritual
interests which constitute the very foundations of its greatness. This
is a real danger, for, as De Tocqueville remarks, the tendency of modern
democracy is to concentrate the passions of men upon the acquisition of
comforts and wealth. They cannot be ignorant that the most clearly
marked line of social progress over the whole world is coincident with
the line of the Christian faith; that wherever true religion has had
free access to the centres of human action, a palpable advance has been
made in knowledge, liberty, and refinement; while poverty, injustice,
and licentiousness, which are the ulcers of a depraved society, have in
that degree been checked and healed. They must understand that honesty
is the grand necessity of the world at this time, in its politics as
well as its theology, in its commerce as well as its science. Let these
things be understood by the leaders of American thought, and we cannot
but anticipate a proud future for their country. It is a subject of just
congratulation to England that her children have stamped their character
on a vast continent, and, that instead of discontented colonies
subjected to her caprice, she can now point to a great people, with all
the best life of the ancient nations throbbing in their veins,
flourishing exactly in proportion to their freedom, and trained, through
all their bloody disasters which almost threatened to ruin their work,
to build a stronger rampart, and to reclaim a broader shore for
posterity. The interests of humanity demand that a nation so strong in
all the material elements of civilization, and manifesting such an
impetuous disregard of limit and degree in all its enterprises, should
be equally strong in its intelligence and its Christianity.
ART. II.--_Report from the Royal Commission on International Coinage.
1868._
Although during the deplorable struggle between Germany and France
public attention has been of necessity mainly directed to the conflict,
yet it is impossible, for many reasons, to do otherwise than regret this
concentration of interest. The last session of our Parliament was
fertile to an unusual degree in measures of public utility and
importance; but it is not too much to say that the difficulties incurred
by several of these measures in their passage through both Houses would
have been greatly enhanced had the engrossing events which have recently
agitated all Europe occurred at the time. The only satisfaction which
can be obtained in contemplating, even from a distance, the misery
inflicted on such countless thousands, arises from the hope that when
the last echoes of the strife have faded away, a peace, firm and
durable--durable because based on sound principles--may link together
those nations who are now suffering from the effects of the struggle.
Till this is the case, the evils arising from the war will not be
confined to those actually engaged in it. Meanwhile, it is really no
slight misfortune that many subjects, not unimportant to the country,
should fail to obtain the attention which they would otherwise have
received, in consequence of the superior interest of the central
European crisis.
Professor Jevons' remarks at the late meeting of the British Association
at Liverpool, on the manner in which points of importance were thus
swamped, will not readily be forgotten by those who heard them. Among
other subjects, the Professor instanced that of an international
coinage, which, after having received considerable and careful
attention, had receded for a time from that prominence which it
deserved.
In this country, the question has been considered from two points of
view--the one taken by those who are desirous to adopt a universal
system of coinage, as well as a universal system of weights and
measures; the other, by those who are aware of the present and
increasing deterioration of the gold coinage of the country, arising
from the number of coins deficient in full weight which are now in
circulation.
Neither of these points have escaped the notice of the active mind of
the present Chancellor of the Exchequer (Right Hon. R. Lowe). He has
become aware that many of the gold coins now in circulation are below
the legal tender weight; that the opportunity of a considerable
re-coinage might be made use of to assimilate the weight of gold in the
sovereign to that contained in twenty-five francs, and that in doing
this the expense incurred in the coinage of gold might, by means of a
seigniorage, be spared to the country.
To explain these points, it will be well, in the first place, to refer
to a report of the then Master of the Mint, and Colonel Smith, late
Master of the Calcutta Mint, in reply to the question put by the
Chancellor of the Exchequer--
'What would it cost, first to manufacture a sovereign, and
afterwards to keep it in good condition for all time? The
coin is always losing weight by wear, while it passes from
hand to hand, and ends by becoming light (after
three-quarters of a grain of gold have been lost), and is
no longer current. The individual piece has thus a limited
existence, and must be withdrawn and replaced by a new
sovereign of full weight; that, again, by another in due
time; and so on. Now, for what present payment could this
succession be maintained? What is the contract price to
cover the first construction, and all future
restoration?'[3]
To put it in another shape. The person who thinks it worth his while to
convert his gold bullion into coin, according to this plan, is to pay
for the expense of manufacture, and is also called upon to contribute to
a reserve fund, by means of which the natural deterioration of the coin
he has caused to be put into circulation is to be provided for.
The coinage of gold in this country is--and it is well to explain this
point at the outset--entirely gratuitous as far as the Government is
concerned. That is to say, any person possessing gold bullion of the
required purity of standard, may, if he chooses, take that bullion to
the Mint. And, in due time, the officers of the Mint will return
him--weight for weight--an equal quantity of gold coin. _In due time_,
however, means in practice, a considerable delay; and delay in money
matters means loss of interest. Hence, it arises, that in the natural
course of events, no private person takes gold bullion to be coined,
himself. But he carries it to the Bank of England. Now, that great
corporation, among other duties to the State, has this particular
charge. It is bound to buy all gold bullion of standard fineness offered
to it, at the rate of £3 17s. 9d. per oz. These payments are made in
bank notes; and as bank notes are immediately exchangeable for
sovereigns, the result is, that any one possessing gold bullion of the
Mint standard, can at once and immediately turn that bullion into gold
coins for the slight cost of 1½d. per oz., or something less than ½d.
for every sovereign. This is really buying a sovereign at cost price,
for the mere manufacture of a sovereign costs fully a ½d., as will be
mentioned further on. What is more, the payment, small as it is, does
not accrue to the Government, but is retained by the Bank of England,
and is considered as being only sufficient to compensate that
institution for the trouble and expense of the operation, including the
loss of time, and consequent loss of interest incurred. No provision is
made to include the loss by wear, which, though imperceptible at the
moment, accumulates in process of time to a large amount. Investigation
shows that 100 sovereigns lose 8d. a year by fair usage. If the amount
of British gold coin in circulation amounts, as it is supposed to do, to
eighty millions, sixty-eight being whole sovereigns, and twelve millions
in halves, the annual loss would amount to £35,000 from deterioration
due to wear alone. The charge for manufacturing sovereigns is not high
when all that has to be done is taken into consideration. Great
precautions have to be taken in the process to secure the needful
quality. Each bar has to be brought to the required standard. Careful
assays are made, and great exactness in the weight of each coin is, of
course, essential. All these points cannot be attended to without
considerable expense. Again, the great amount of valuable property in
the shape of coin and bullion necessitates vigilant watching. The total
charge is estimated at ½d. each sovereign. Half sovereigns are, in
proportion to value, more expensive to strike than sovereigns. They also
wear more rapidly. This arises from greater rapidity of circulation, and
also from the fact that, weight for weight, each half sovereign presents
a greater surface for abrasion than a sovereign. After making careful
calculations, the Master of the Mint and Colonel Smith arrived at the
conclusion that a charge of £1 13s. 6d. for every £100 coined would be
sufficient to cover all expenses. That is to say, that if an arrangement
were made with a contractor to undertake to manage the Mint, and to keep
the gold coinage in good repair, he would require, to hold him harmless
from loss, to be paid about £1 13s. 6d. for every £100 in the average
proportion of sovereigns and half sovereigns put into circulation. And
this sum is at the present time lost to the community.
It is characteristic of the manner in which public questions are handled
in this country, that throughout the report, to which is attached the
name of an official in such high place as that of the late Master of the
Mint, continual reference is made to the investigations, not of a public
officer, but of Mr. Jevons, Professor of Political Economy in Owen's
College, Manchester. Mr. Jevons, being desirous of ascertaining the
condition of the gold currency, made inquiries of bankers and other
suitable persons in all parts of the United Kingdom, requesting them
'to take one or two hundred pounds in sovereigns, and half
the amount in half-sovereigns, from gold received in the
ordinary course of business, and to cause the number of
coins of each date to be counted and stated. The aid thus
requested was furnished with a readiness which I had no
right to expect, and which I cannot sufficiently
acknowledge. Not a few gentlemen, on becoming acquainted
with my purpose, procured very extensive returns, and the
final result was, that this kind of census of the gold
coinage was extended over one-sixth of a million of coins,
thus composed:
Number of sovereigns enumerated 90,474
Number of half-sovereigns enumerated 75,036
------
Total number 165,510
'At least one gold coin in every hundred now existing in
this country was, on the average, enumerated; and, as there
were 321 separate returns received from 213 distinct towns
or localities, including almost every place of commercial
importance, it may be allowed, I think, that sufficient
data were acquired for determining the average character of
the circulation.'--_Journal of the Statistical Society_,
vol. xxxi., p. 439.
Mr. Jevons' inquiry was, as he describes it, made in a private manner,
but it was, beyond question, conducted most efficiently and thoroughly.
And there is no reason to doubt that he has rather under-estimated than
over-estimated the case when he states, that about 45 per cent. of the
sovereigns and 62 per cent. of the half-sovereigns now in circulation in
the country are lighter than the legal standard. If this statement
appears excessive to any one, he can easily verify it for himself. He
has only to go to his banker, in whatever part of the United Kingdom he
may reside, and ask him to provide out of the gold in his till--out of
the ordinary circulation of the locality--100 sovereigns of _full_
weight. Then, if he inquires how many sovereigns have been picked over
to obtain this number, he will--within those reasonable limits of
variation which every similar calculation is liable to--find that Mr.
Jevons' statement gives a correct idea of the ordinary circulation.
But Mr. Lowe, as will have been observed, did not confine himself to the
actual deterioration of the existing British gold circulation. His
thoughts took a wider range--'a coin which would have the advantage of
an international circulation' occurred to him as a possible thing--and,
further, that the British sovereign, reduced to an exact equation with
twenty-five francs of gold coin of France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland,
&c., might be such a coin. The question of the desirability of an
international coinage has frequently been discussed. From some of the
remarks which have been made on Mr. Lowe's speech, it might have been
imagined to be only a recent idea. But this is far from being the case.
Much attention was drawn to the point in 1851. The difficulty then
experienced in comparing the value of the articles produced in different
countries and shown at the Great Exhibition, naturally suggested the
idea of a coinage common to all nations. The International Statistical
Congress then took the matter up at their meetings at Brussels, in 1853,
and at Paris, in 1855, and at London, in 1860. This last-named meeting
was held under the presidency of the late Prince Consort, and his
address on its opening was the last public speech delivered by him. In
it are to be found these words, which show that the importance of the
question of international coinage had not escaped the notice of the
Prince:--'The different weights, measures, and currencies, in which
different statistics are expressed, cause further difficulties and
impediments. Suggestions with regard to the removal of these have been
made at former meetings, and will, no doubt, be renewed.' Before this
meeting separated, an international commission was formed to report on
the question. Further consideration was given to it at Berlin, in 1863.
In December, 1865, the idea was put into practice. A formal convention
was entered into by France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland; and those
four countries established an international currency among themselves.
The French Government followed up the subject by giving official notice
of this convention, inviting this country, with many others, to send
commissioners to attend a conference 'for the purpose of deliberating
upon the best means of securing a common basis for the adoption of a
general international coinage.'
'The Conference was attended by thirty-three delegates,
representing twenty different countries, viz.:--Austria,
Baden, Bavaria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain,
Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Russia,
Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, United
States, Wurtemburg.'
'The delegates were not authorized in any way to bind their
respective countries, but they voted according to their own
opinions.'
* * * * *
'Great value seems to be attached to the cooperation of
England in any measure of this description. England has
been forward in urging the policy of free trade upon
Continental nations; and while her joining in any movement
originated abroad for promoting and facilitating commercial
intercourse would be most favourably received, and would
increase her influence among them, her declining altogether
to enter upon it might appear to be inconsistent with her
general conduct upon such questions.'
'The recommendations of the Conference may be shortly
stated to be:
'I. The adoption of a single gold standard.
'II. The adoption of 9/10 as the proportion of fine gold in
the coins.
'III. That all gold coins hereafter struck in any of the
countries which are parties to the Convention, should be
either of the value of five francs or multiples of that
sum.
'IV. That a gold coin of the value of twenty-five francs
should be struck by such countries as prefer it, and be
admitted as an international coin.
'In other countries steps have been taken with a view to
promote a general international coinage.
* * * * *
'A Bill has been introduced into the Congress of the United
States for altering the value of the American coinage, so
as to assimilate it to that of the Convention of 1865; and
we have received the report of the Finance Committee of the
Senate of the United States, recommending the adoption of
the measure, with certain amendments; together with a
report also presented to the Senate, adverse to the passing
of the Bill.
'A Bill has been introduced into the Canadian Parliament
for the regulation of the currency of that country, in
which provision is made for the adoption by Canada of the
system of the Convention, in the event of the measure above
referred to becoming law in the United States.
'Another Bill has been introduced into the Congress of the
United States, in order to assimilate the coinage to that
of this country, making the half eagle equal to our
sovereign.
'The Federal Parliament of the North German Confederation
has passed a resolution declaring necessary the adoption of
a decimal monetary system.
'Finally, we have received a communication from the Foreign
Office, by which it appears that the Government of Sweden
have proposed to strike a gold coin equivalent to ten
francs, and further to coin pieces of twenty-five francs as
soon as such a coin shall be struck in France.'--_Report
from the Royal Commission on International Coinage_, 1868.
The Spanish Government has recently given notice of being willing to
join the Convention (Nov., 1869), and the pattern pieces of the
twenty-five franc coin have already been struck at the Paris mint.
This brief _résumé_ of what has actually been done by several other
nations, suffices of itself to show that the question deserves, as Mr.
Lowe has stated in Parliament, very careful consideration.
Four nations, with more than sixty-six millions of inhabitants, already
possess an international coinage. That is to say, any merchant in the
furthest point to which the Convention extends knows at once, if he
takes up a paper with the prices current at Paris, Marseilles, Bordeaux,
or any of the great centres of commerce, what those prices mean, and how
nearly they correspond with his own. Other nations besides France,
Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, are prepared to join in this uniform
coinage. It is not unlikely that the sixty-six millions may be more than
doubled shortly. Will it not be a great disadvantage to the thirty or
thirty-two millions inhabiting these islands to be outside this great
confederation?
The values of the gold in the pound sterling and in twenty-five francs
approximate very closely. To enable this country to join the
confederation, it would be needful for the values to be equalized. This
must be done in one of two ways.
Either the amount of gold contained in the proposed coin of twenty-five
francs must be increased by twenty centimes to make it the equivalent of
the English full-weight sovereign. Or, the weight of gold in the English
sovereign must be diminished to make it equal to that contained in the
25-franc piece. The Royal Commissioners on International Coinage appear
to have entertained an aspiration--it can hardly be termed a hope--that
the former plan would be adopted; but it can scarcely be looked for. The
inconvenience to the nations who have already joined the Convention
would be so great as to preclude the idea. The other alternative alone
practically has to be considered. It amounts to this: that 2d. in value
should be taken out of every sovereign. But to do this without due
compensation would be to alter every existing contract. A seigniorage to
be charged on all bullion taken to the mint to be coined, is proposed as
a method of bridging over this difficulty. To effect this such a charge
or seigniorage would have to be proportionate to the amount of bullion
subtracted from each sovereign.
It is desirable to trace out what effect such a charge would have. It
would be--
'tantamount to an enhancement of the purchasing value of
the coinage in the country of its currency. It immediately
augments the value of the coinage as expressed in its
exchange value for bullion, unless the weight of pure metal
in the coinage be simultaneously reduced to the same extent
as the amount of the seigniorage. The following may serve
as a test example, and avoid the necessity for the use of
fractions:--"What would be the effect of a seigniorage of 1
per cent, in a country where it is imposed for the first
time?" It would be this: that whilst the pieces of current
coin before the imposition of the seigniorage were exactly
worth their weight in uncoined bullion of the same
intrinsic fineness, they would, after its imposition, be
worth 1 per cent, more than their weight in bullion of the
like standard.'--_Mr. Hendriks' Evidence, Royal Commission
on International Coinage_, p. 142.
The sovereign, thus diminished in weight, would still possess exactly
the same purchasing power--within the limits of the country--as it
previously had. Beyond those limits, as shown by the practice of the
French mint authorities, it would still retain its value. It would not
be, as the present sovereign now is, undervalued in consequence of the
mint charges of other nations.
An objection may be, and has already been, made to the alteration--that
such a change would be unfair to all those creditors who had made
contracts in the old coin, and would be repaid in the new. This
objection is sufficiently disposed of by the fact that, as mentioned
before, the purchasing power of the new coin will be equal to that of
the old.
If any doubt existed, a further security might be given under all
circumstances, by adopting the plan recommended by Colonel Smith, the
late Master of the Calcutta Mint. His proposal is, 'that the new
sovereign shall be changeable for gold bullion at the present price.'
This would cause the value of the new coin to remain equal with that of
the present coin, exactly as the value of the existing silver coinage is
maintained. The present shilling, even when of full weight, is by no
means worth its weight in the metal of which it is made. The pound troy
of standard silver is, and has been in England, since 1817, coined into
sixty-six shillings. The value of the shilling, thus debased, is
maintained at the proper level by the coin being limited, as a legal
tender, to 42s. by tale. The result is obvious. Silver of the value of
something like 18s. does service for 20s. What is more, this has been
the case for years, and no one has ever been injured by it. And the same
effect would surely follow if Colonel Smith's plan were carried out. If
the holder of 100 sovereigns were to desire to convert them into gold,
he would take them to the Bank of England, who would give, as now, a
certain quantity of bar gold of standard fineness, at £3 17s. 10½d. per
oz. The sovereign would, to a certain extent, become a 'token' coin;
that is to say, each sovereign would, as the shilling is now, be worth
something less than the stamped value. But it would, within the limits
of the convention, that is, within the limits of the civilized world, be
current exactly to the extent of its nominal value; and any one desiring
to employ it beyond the limits of the Convention would be placed in
exactly the position in which he is now, by simply taking his gold coins
to the Bank of England and exchanging them for bar gold. A further
advantage would arise from this diminution in weight of the sovereign.
As the sovereign is worth a fraction over ten rupees in India, it
follows that the internationalization of the English sovereign, and the
reducing it by about twopence, to make it equal with twenty-five francs
or five dollars, would immediately rectify the present difference
between the British sovereign and the 10-rupee piece; and the rupee, the
British florin, and the Australian florin would, in the international
scheme of coinage, ultimately become absolutely identical, so far at
least as gold coinage is concerned.[4]
Any alteration of coin in so backward a country as India would have to
be introduced with great caution; but the advantage of assimilating the
currency to that of this country cannot be doubted. There are great
disadvantages in allowing coins, nearly identical in value, to circulate
together; and if the 'sovereign' remains at the present value, what Mr.
Jevons anticipates may not be unlikely to happen.
'It is only necessary for the Continental nations and the
United States to issue, as is already proposed, a piece of
twenty-five francs in order to supplant the sovereign; for,
as the new coin would have the value of a well-worn
sovereign, it would soon be accepted equally with the
sovereign in all foreign countries and our colonies, if not
at home. At the same time, the difference of value being
about 2d. in the pound, would ensure the melting of all new
sovereigns in preference. Thus, however many sovereigns are
coined, we should never succeed in dislodging the 25-franc
piece from circulation. More even than at present our
British Mints would perform the labours of the Danaïdes,
ever pouring forth new and beautiful coin, at once to
disappear into the bullion dealer's crucible. The sovereign
would be an evanescent coin, constantly liable to be
recoined with the permanent impress of a foreign mint.
Common sense, as well as invariable experience, tells us
that we must be worsted in this contest of the heavier and
the lighter coin.'--_Professor Jevons' Paper in the Journal
of the Statistical Society_, vol. xxxi., p. 429.
The extent of the populations employing the 20-franc piece as their
principal gold coin, has already been mentioned. Some persons may say,
'It is true these nations more than double in number the persons whose
basis of accounts is the pound sterling; but still there may be more
"sovereigns" in existence than 20-franc pieces.' Now, it is by no means
as easy to enumerate the coins in a country as to make a census of the
inhabitants. You may count the dwellers in the poorest hovel. But you
cannot count the coins hidden under the hearth, or in the end of the
stocking. It is, however, by no means clear that the amount of British
gold coin in existence is as much as that circulated by several other
nations. Sovereigns, so far from preponderating, appear to be in an
absolute minority. At the Paris Conference of 1867, the amounts of the
gold coinage of Great Britain, France, and the United States were stated
as follows:--
France, from 1793 to 1866, of the value of £262,444,160
Great Britain, 1816 to 1866 187,068,290
United States, 1792 to 1866 169,107,318[5]
It is, of course, impossible to state with certainty what proportion of
coins struck at any mint at any time remain in existence afterwards.
Some coins are called in, some are lost, others find their way to the
melting-pot: it is impossible to say how many continue to circulate. One
thing, however, is certain, that whatever casualties of this nature any
coins are exposed to, British coins feel to the fullest extent. The
rapidity of circulation in Great Britain tends to great deterioration
from wear and tear. The absence of seigniorage causes our coinage to be
relatively undervalued in proportion to other gold coins.[6] Even
supposing British coins to remain current as long as those of other
nations, they are certainly less numerous. They are probably far less
frequently hoarded. The coinage returns from 1851 to 1866 inclusive show
the relative proportions even more clearly than the earlier statements.
Our Mint was less fertile during that time, than either the Mints of
France or the United States.
YEARS 1851 TO 1866.
Great Britain struck in gold coins £91,000,000
The United States 131,600,000
France 197,400,000
-----------
420,000,000
The amount of gold coin in a country is very far from being an
indication, either of its wealth or of its business transactions; but
these figures suffice to show that the sovereign does not hold the
pre-eminence frequently ascribed to it. Even if the proceeds of the
Sydney Mint are added in, the sovereign will still be found in the
minority. The Sydney Mint was established in 1855. The coinage has been
as follows:--
Average
Years. Coinage. per annum.
7 years 1855 to 1861 £ 8,438,162 £1,205,451
5 " 1862 to 1866 11,889,838 2,377,967
-----------
£20,328,000
And it must not be assumed that all these Australian sovereigns are in
circulation now. An imperfection in the process of refining incident on
carrying on that operation in a new country, left a certain portion of
silver at all events in the earlier mintages, and this circumstance is
believed to have made these coins favourites with the 'melters.' Sir A.
Donaldson, formerly Colonial Secretary, and Colonial Treasurer to the
Government of New South Wales, gave evidence before the Select Committee
of the House of Commons on the Sydney Branch Mint, appointed in 1862;
and, after stating that he believed that a considerable number of the
Australian sovereigns have reached England, added, 'as a matter of fact,
I think they all find their way to the refiner.' Mr. W. Miller, of the
Bank of England, when examined before the same Committee, 'understood
that upwards of 2,000,000 were sent to this country some time ago, and
that they have been melted.' This was before the proclamation making
these coins legal tender in this country. They have probably been less
frequently melted since that proclamation. But it cannot be assumed that
the whole twenty millions are still in circulation. Even including all
of them, the sovereign would not be the preponderating coin as far as
number is concerned.
Mr. Hendriks, a very eminent statistician, who has paid much attention
to questions connected with the coinage (_vide Journal of the Society of
Arts_, February 14, 1868), has given to the public the grounds upon
which he bases his opinion that, although the sovereign and the dollar
may be more widely diffused than the Napoleon, there are now current in
the world twice as many Napoleons as sovereigns, four times as many as
half-eagle or five-dollar pieces, and about one-third more than
sovereigns and half-eagle pieces together. This writer has also made the
following calculations, showing the relative importance of the United
States, England, and France, as the chief manufacturing countries of
coinage since 1792. The object of the division of the results into
separate periods is to show the altered condition since the gold
discoveries in California and Australia.
PERCENTAGE OF THE COINAGE OF THE THREE
NATIONS TO THEIR TOTAL COINAGE.
Years Years Years
1792 to 1851. 1861 to 1866. 1792 to 1866
United States 18⅓ 31½ 27⅓
England 48⅔ 21½ 30⅓
France 33 47 42⅓
------ ------ ------
100 100 100
In further commenting, in the pages of the _Economist_, on these
statistics, Mr. Hendriks observes:--
'It thus appears that whilst England coined 48⅔ per
cent., or nearly one-half, of the grand total from 1792 to
1851, her proportion has fallen from the first place to the
last, in the subsequent period 1851 to 1866, her fresh
coinage having therein sunk to 21½ per cent., or a
little more than one-fifth of the total. The proportion for
France was 33 per cent. in the first period, and 47 per
cent. in the second. From the second place she thus moved
to the first. But the advance of the United States was
equally marked, and from the smallest proportion, 18⅓
per cent, in the period 1792 to 1851, there was an increase
to 31½ per cent., or to the second place, in the period
1851 to 1866.
'The report from the Secretary of the American Treasury for
1868 gives more recent statistics, namely, for the years
ended 30th June, 1867 and 1868. These show a gold coinage
of about forty million dollars in 1867, and of about
twenty-four million dollars in 1868. But in England, in
1867, the gold coined was actually less than half a million
sterling, or under two and a half million dollars' worth in
American coin. And in 1868 the English Mint turned out only
£1,653,384 sterling, or about eight million dollars' worth
in American coin. The gold coinage of France has also
declined below the rate of fresh production in America.
Thus America is rapidly attaining the first place as a gold
coining country. And it will be a question for future time
to solve, whether the English and Australian Mints, in
their united working, will exceed the manufacture by the
United States' Mints at Philadelphia, San Francisco, and
Denver.'
As some persons may say, 'Other nations need a larger gold coinage than
we do, because their paper money and banking systems are not like ours;
but their coinage is no proof of the extent of their business
transactions,' it is best to mention that the united export and import
trade of the European countries alone, who have already joined the
Monetary Convention, or have signed preliminary treaties of adherence
thereto, amounts to no less than five hundred million pounds sterling
per annum at the present time, or to nearly one-fourth more than the
aggregate exports and imports of the United Kingdom. It will now be
desirable to mention the charges made for coining, or seigniorage, at
the principal mints. In England no charge is made; but the 1½d paid
to the Bank on each ounce of standard gold bullion, amounts to about
0·1605 (say 3s. 2½d.) per cent. In France it is different. When gold
is carried to the mint there, coin is returned for it, with a certain
deduction. This deduction is about ¼ per cent. Beyond this there is
some delay, practically, before the coin is returned. On an average the
loss of interest on the money, caused by this delay, amounts to about
¾ per cent. Altogether, the charge is about 1 per cent., or more than
six times the charge now made in England. In Prussia the charge is ½
per cent., and the delay is about the same as in Paris. In America and
India it is about the same.[7]
It appears from these statements that there is nearly a universal
consensus of practice in charging a seigniorage. There is also a nearly
universal consensus of opinion on the part of the leading authorities in
political economy (such as Adam Smith and J. S. Mill) that such a
seigniorage, when moderate, really enhances the value of the coin to the
extent of the charge. If, therefore, this opinion is correct, it follows
that the gold coinage of England, where no charge is made, will be
depreciated--that is, will not obtain its real value in those countries
where a charge is made. It is not difficult to show that this is the
case in France; and if in one country where a seigniorage is charged, it
follows, of course, in all of them.
A British sovereign of full weight contains about equal intrinsic
quantities of pure gold with twenty-five francs twenty centimes.
'But it does not follow that even a full-weight sovereign
is more valuable, either in a mathematical or in a
commercial sense, than twenty-five francs of gold coin,
when it is conveyed to a country within the operation of
the Monetary Convention of December, 1865. There the
sovereign ceases to be coin, and is nothing more than
bullion; and, as bullion, is subject to a seigniorage or
mint-charge, when converted into coin. And as, in the
countries in question, twenty-five francs twenty centimes
of bullion are, on the average, equal to only twenty-five
francs of coin, the sovereign is practically "valuable"
only as twenty-five francs.'--_Royal Commission on
International Coinage. Evidence of Mr. Hendriks_, p. 145.
The reason for this must be that the British coinage is gratuitous. A
sovereign may be regarded from two points of view--as a certain weight
of gold of a known fineness, manufactured into a uniform shape by the
officials of the mint, and as the current coin of the realm. At present
no charge is made for the process of manufacture. The question to be
decided is this, Is the coin, _plus_ the process of manufacture, worth
more than the same weight of gold before that process is performed? It
appears that it is even worth less in France.
'The French Mint publishes a tariff giving a schedule of
the coinage of each country, the legal weight and fineness
in the country of its mintage, and a comparative estimate
of fineness, according to the French Mint tariff of
purchase, stating the value of each coin per kilogramme and
per single piece.'
If the intrinsic value of the pure gold contained in the sovereign is
considered, it is equal to 25·2079 at par; but the Mint tariff giving
the price of purchase makes it only 25·12 at par, a deduction of about
nine centimes on each sovereign. In estimating it thus,
'The French Mint Commission and M. Durand, its
Commissioner-General, practically admit that current gold
coin in France is equal in exchange to its full legal
weight of bullion, _plus_ seigniorage. In order to test
this with mathematical exactness, we must observe that a
kilogramme, _i.e._, 1,000 grammes of absolutely pure gold
without deduction for seigniorage or mint charges, is worth
3444·4444 francs; or, _with_ deduction at the rate of 6
francs 70 centimes, on 3,100 francs, 9/10 fine, the 1,000
grammes of absolutely pure gold, 10/10 fine, are worth
3,437 francs. Then, at ·916 fine, _i.e._, at the French
Mint tariff of English gold coin treated as bullion, the
proportionate value of the kilogramme of sovereigns,
allowing for seigniorage or mint charge, comes out as given
in the tariff, 3148·29 francs. And thus, doubtless, the
French Mint arrives at its present equation of 25·12 francs
= 1 sovereign. For the proportion is, 1,000 _grammes_ :
3148·29 francs :: 7·98085 grammes : x = 25·12602
francs.'--_Royal Commission on International Coinage. Mr.
Hendriks' Evidence_, p. 146.
It appears by this that the pound sterling is practically undervalued
2d. in France; one penny about in the intrinsic worth of the gold; and
another, the cost of coining the metal, including the loss for delay in
so doing.
Any alteration in the standard of the coinage is, beyond doubt, a
measure which should not be carelessly undertaken. Those opposed to such
a measure have stated that the standard had remained unchanged in this
country for more than a century and a half. Great weight has also been
attributed by some persons to the resolution of the House of Commons of
20th October, 1696, and passed again in the same words on the 12th June,
1822, 'That this House will not alter the standard of the gold and
silver coins of this kingdom, in fineness, weight, or denomination.' A
solemn declaration beyond doubt; but notwithstanding this, several
changes have at various times been made in the currency of the realm.
In 1696, the year of the 'Resolution' silver was the sole legal tender.
In 1717, silver ceased to be the sole standard, and the double, or
alternative standard of gold or silver, was adopted. This change was
made under the advice of Sir Isaac Newton.
In 1774, silver was restricted, as a legal tender, to sums under £25 by
tale, and above £25 by weight, but gold remained a legal tender without
restriction.
In 1783, both gold and silver, without any restriction, became legal
tender.
In 1797, bank notes were made legal tender. The effect of this change is
well known.
In 1798, silver was made legal tender as in 1774.
In 1817, gold alone was made legal tender, silver being debased and
restricted as mentioned before.
In the face of these alterations it is impossible to appeal to history
for a proof that it is not lawful to make any desirable change.
But some objectors say, If the British Mint no longer coins gratis, gold
bullion will no longer make its way to this country as freely as it now
does. At the present time England is the great bullion exchange of the
world, because it is the country where the mint charges are lowest.
Deprive this country of this advantage, and the stream of bullion will
be directed elsewhere. If this argument is of any validity, of course
all, or at least the greater part, of the bullion which has already
reached this country, must have found its way to the Mint. But what is
the real fact? That not so much as the ninth part of the gold bullion
imported into this country within the last four years, has been coined
into British money.
The following figures are taken from the Statistical Abstract for
1869:--
COMPUTED REAL VALUE OF THE REGISTERED IMPORTS
OF GOLD AND SILVER BULLION, AND SPECIE, INTO
THE UNITED KINGDOM.
Gold. Silver. Total.
1865 £14,485,570 £6,976,641 £21,462,211
1866 23,509,641 10,777,498 34,287,139
1867 15,800,159 8,020,888 23,821,047
1868 17,136,177 7,716,418 24,852,595
_____________
£104,422,992
AMOUNT OF GOLD AND SILVER MONEYS COINED AT THE
ROYAL MINT.
Gold. Silver. Total.
1865 £2,367,614 £501,732 £2,869,346
1866 5,076,676 493,416 5,570,092
1867 496,397 193,842 690,239
1868 1,653,384 301,356 1,954,740
___________
£11,084,417
Looking at these figures, it will scarcely be argued that the fact of
gratuitous coinage at the Royal Mint is of any power in attracting gold
bullion to this country.
The charges made on coining in other countries amount to large sums in
the aggregate. It is desirable to show what these sums are.
It has been calculated that, upon each million pounds sterling worth of
gold coin delivered, the charge (including adjustment for loss of
interest in the fixed delays for delivery) amounts in all
England to £ 1,605
France 10,490
United States 15,000
Australia 13,330
India 13,330[8]
It is of itself a sufficient answer to those who think that the
imposition of a seigniorage might prevent bullion from being brought to
this country for coinage, to note what has taken place where such a
charge is made. Both France and the United States have coined
considerably more gold during the sixteen years mentioned above than
this country. Yet the charge in the United States is nearly ten times
that in Great Britain. The coinage at the Mint of Sydney has nearly
doubled, yet the charge in Sydney is nearly as high as in the United
States. The returns for the years 1867-1868 have not, as far as we are
aware, yet reached this country. But considering the great and
progressive increase in the Sydney coinages, it is highly probable that
the coins struck in Australia during those years have greatly exceeded
those minted in London.
To sum up:
It is at present open to this country to join the International Monetary
Convention already in force between several of the principal European
States.
It is probable that this Convention will shortly include the most
important powers of the civilized world.
The population of the countries which have already given in their
adherence to this Convention, greatly exceed in number the inhabitants
of the British Islands. Their trade is more important in value than our
own.
The disadvantages of being outside such a Convention are very great.
In joining it, a seigniorage would have to be charged on all British
gold coinages.
A similar seigniorage is always charged on the coinages at the Sydney
Mint; and the coinage at the Sydney Mint is now large and increasing--in
the last two years probably more than that of the English Mint.
This seigniorage is no disadvantage to anyone. On the contrary, it
possesses several advantages. At present, the last holder of a light
sovereign is exposed to loss. This is unfair, as probably the last
holder has done nothing to cause the coin to be light.
Were a seigniorage imposed, the first holder, the man who thinks he can
gain something by causing the coin to be minted, would have--as is
fair--to provide against the depreciation. Further, the first holder
would have to pay for the work he has done; _i.e._, the manufacture of
the coin--a charge now defrayed by the country.
It is clear that the absence of a seigniorage is not the cause which
attracts gold to England, as barely the ninth part of the bullion
imported finds its way to the Mint.
It is also clear that alterations, one at least of far more importance
than the imposition of a seigniorage, have at former times been made in
the status of the currency of the country.
To conclude, in the words of an early pioneer of British commerce, 'The
exchanges practised in England, and principally in London, are confined
within a narrow scantling, being but as a rivolet issuing out of the
great streame of those exchanges that are used beyond the seas.'
Thus wrote 'that eminently deserving author,' Mr. Lewes Roberts, the
'delineator' of the Merchant's Mappe of Commerce in 1638. The 'true
dimensions of our English traffique' even then excited his limited
admiration and wonder. He could only imagine either that this commerce
was 'at its full perfection, or that it aymes higher than can hitherto,
by my weake sight, be either seen or discerned.' To us, 'the full
streame' of that trade seems but 'a petty rivolet,' and we only wonder
how, with the complicated and varying systems of money then in practice,
with measures of length and quantity differing in almost every place of
importance in Europe, any commerce could be kept up between differing
nations. It is no longer needful to note now, as it was then, that
different weights and measures were to be found in the principal cities
even of the same country. It is no longer needful to bear in mind, as it
was then, that there was a difference of exchange between places close
to each other, and within the same territories. Commerce now would not
bear such fetters. The vigour of the early days of trade surmounted
those obstacles as the rush of a mountain stream drives it unhindered
over rocks that vainly bar its course. In these times affairs approach
what has been termed the stationary state. As the stream expands, the
current becomes more gentle. As facilities for trade become greater, a
smaller obstacle suffices to turn that trade from its course. It is now
far more easy to give a vessel the option of discharging her cargo in
one port or another, in one country or another, than it was then.
Increased opportunities of intercourse render any change of the line of
traffic far less difficult now than at any previous time. A smaller
difference in profit renders such alterations of destination more
desirable and more necessary. The course of commerce has just been
compared to that of a stream--as dashing rapidly down the mountain glen,
or slowly moving through the rich and level plain. Is it permissible to
carry on the simile still further?--to watch how, as in Holland, a
trifling artificially-produced change of level is sufficient to divert
the scarcely perceptible flow of the almost stagnant flood--to add the
waters of the Rhine to the Yssel, or of the Waal to the Lech? So as a
general extension of wealth brings all countries more closely to one
uniform condition, is it not needful to remove those obstacles which may
cause similar diversions of our trade? Is it not needful to take a step
onward, and to supply our own people with those advantages which are now
possessed by many--will soon be possessed by almost all civilized
nations? Among such advantages, to provide a coinage which, while
entailing no expense on the country, either at its creation or for its
maintenance, may be truly international in character, and aid the
streams of our commerce to maintain their course around the globe.
ART. III.--(1.) _Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, first Earl
of Malmesbury._ Edited by his Grandson, the Third Earl. 4 vols. Second
edition. London: 1845.
(2.) _Letters of the first Earl of Malmesbury, his Family, and Friends,
from 1745 to 1820_. Edited, with Notes, &c., by his Grandson, the Right
Hon. the EARL OF MALMESBURY, G.C.B. 2 vols. London: 1870.
From 1745 to 1820--this was the lifetime of James Harris, afterwards first
Earl of Malmesbury; and such is the period over which the subject-matter
of these two works extends. A more memorable period is not to be found
in the annals of this country, or even in the long and more momentous
history of Europe. It bridges the chasm which separates the old world of
Europe from the new. It shows us that elder world in its last stage; it
also shows us the beginning of that new and better order of things
amongst which we now live. In the earlier period of those seventy-five
years, we see the thrones of Louis the Fifteenth, of Frederick the
Great, and Catherine of Russia, standing high above the heads of a
crushed and miserable people, who counted for nothing either in their
policy or in their pleasures. The simple facts of that old _régime_ of
royal absolutism now read like a monstrous dream. Vice and despotism in
the palace, license and intrigue at the Court, penury in the cottage,
and degradation everywhere, such is hardly an exaggeration of the
general condition of the Continent at that time, and simple truth as
regards France, who then, as since, boasted her leadership of
civilization. As is always the case in analogous periods, the people
themselves had sunk into a moral torpor. There were no national
movements or aspirations. Religion, freedom, and the thirst for military
conquest, are the three great motive powers of humanity. But all of
these were then dead or in abeyance. Humanity had settled on its lees.
Even mental philosophy, which so often flourishes in such dead times of
a nation's history, threw its teachings into the scale in favour of an
ignoble life; and while a pitiless Scepticism robbed men of heaven and
all their religious beliefs, Materialism bade them "eat, drink, and be
merry, for to-morrow ye die" _for ever_, like the trees of the wood and
the beasts of the fields. While Philosophy robbed man of his moral
freedom and a future life, Royalty denied him his personal and political
liberty and plundered his pockets. In truth, the whole upper crust of
society had become heartless, debased, and corrupt, while beneath was a
seething mass of suffering, ignorance, and savagery. And so the upper
crust, with king, priests, and nobles--crowns, croziers, and
coronets--gave way and fell into an abyss of devouring fire, like that
which burst up of yore beneath Sodom and Gomorrah, devastating the
corrupt Cities of the Plain. The old world of Europe was cast into the
furnace, and all things became new--Providence overruling the wrath of
man to its own wise and merciful ends.
All history is an ennobling study, alike in its events and its examples;
but life is short, and it is the French Revolution that commences the
period of history of deepest importance to the present age. Beyond that
chasm, so rudely severing the old world of Europe from the new, lies the
realm of the historian; on this side begins a drama of opinions and
events constituting by far the most useful field of study in secular and
political knowledge. Changed since then, and still changing, as are the
territorial arrangements of Europe, the conquests of Napoleon
contributed greatly to the rise of the principle of Nationality which is
now the great power at work in the alteration of boundaries and the
shaping of kingdoms. It is true, Napoleon meant to conquer only for
himself and for France. He sought to found a vast empire, with vassal
kingdoms under the rule of his brothers and relatives. But in
establishing this empire, he swept away a great deal of the obstructive
rubbish of the former time. By expelling the Germans from Italy, and
also by creating a titular King of Rome, he paved the way for the
subsequent aspirations and movement of the Italians in favour of
nationality and independence, which have at length borne their full
fruits in the establishment of a free and united Italy. In like manner,
by sweeping away a whole host of petty princedoms in Germany, he
simplified the subsequent course of events towards a unification of
Germany; while the iron despotism which he exercised in that country
first compelled all Germans to feel the tie of brotherhood, in the
glorious uprising of the Fatherland in 1813 against the foreign foe.
Poland, too, during the ascendancy of Napoleon, temporarily (but only
for the great conqueror's own purposes) regained in part its old
existence, thereby keeping alive the hope for renewed independence; a
hope which, improbable as our expectations may seem, we think will yet
be realized amid the great trouble, and changes impending over the
Continent. But still more memorable, and worthy of thoughtful study, are
the times of the French Revolution, from the influence which they have
produced upon the current of political, social, and religious thought,
in subsequent times. A whole flood of new ideas, principles, and
opinions was then poured upon the world. Some of these were wise and
good, others were detestable, but nearly all of them were given to the
world in so crude a form and in so savage or ruthless a spirit, as to
make them as a whole so repulsive that even yet some of their
excellencies are but little known or acknowledged. Every one recognises,
however, the vast influence which that grand and terrible Revolution has
exercised upon the whole current of subsequent thought; and if Europe
has yet to undergo one more great upheaving of democratic revolution (as
we believe it has), we may rely upon it that some of the more extreme
and, at present, all but forgotten dogmas of the first revolution will
again appear on the scene; including, we regret to say, that terrible
development of infidelity and materialism, against which even
Robespierre himself, with his firm belief in the Supreme Being and a
future life, was unable successfully to contend. That storm of blasphemy
and utter scepticism, in its worst features at least, soon blew
over--and let us trust that such will be the case again; but any one
who has watched the turn of thought on the Continent, and in Germany
even more than in France, must expect any new outburst of democratic
revolution to be accompanied by a manifesto of infidelity and an attempt
to banish religion from the fabric and principles of society, in a
manner only too similar to that which formed the worst feature of the
first French Revolution.
The first Earl of Malmesbury was in public life, for the greater part of
the time holding the highest diplomatic appointments abroad, during the
whole course of these momentous events. From a vantage-ground enjoyed by
few men either of this or any other country, he beheld the Courts and
peoples of Europe both before the deluge and after it; and although he
withdrew from public office before the termination of the great war with
France, he continued to the end to be confidentially consulted by the
Ministers of the time. The first of the two works whose titles are
prefixed is by far the most valuable and important. All the leading men
of the day--monarchs, statesmen, and generals--figure constantly in the
diaries and correspondence. The work has been quoted with advantage to
history by some of our ablest writers, and not least so by Lord
Stanhope, in his 'Life of Pitt.' It constitutes a mine of historical and
political facts; and though published too late to be made use of by our
chief historians of the French war and of the immediately preceding
times of the Empress Catherine and Frederick the Great, its value is
fully recognised by the writers of the personal and political memoirs
which have recently issued from the press. The second of the works on
our list is of a lighter character, in which the incidents of
fashionable life mingle largely with matters of State and Parliamentary
politics. The one work shows us the grand movements of the time, the
other gives us the bye-play. The latter, to which we chiefly confine our
remarks, is a selection from private letters received by three
generations of the Harris family. They are confidential exchanges of
intelligence and ideas, in which the hopes and fears, the expectations,
disappointments, and impressions of our ancestors are given in the very
words in which they were described. The noble editor of these letters
calls them 'waifs of the past,' but they possess a twofold interest,
firstly, as illustrating the opinions and social habits of that past
time; and secondly, they are reliable indications of what public feeling
was at their date with regard to politics, society, and the general
condition of our own and foreign countries:--
'And how eventful those years were,' says the editor:
'They saw the Highland rebellion; the American war; the
despotic Courts of the Bourbons, of Catherine, and of
Frederick; the great French revolution, and its subsequent
phases of a bloody republic, an aggressive empire, an
ephemeral restoration, and again of a short empire and a
second restoration. They witnessed the struggles of our
English people for greater freedom, even from the
privileges claimed by their own House of Commons; and
lastly, a far fiercer contest to save their own country
from the subjugation under which for a time Napoleon held
every nation in Europe except theirs.'
The chief recipient of the earlier letters in this collection was Mr.
James Harris, the father of the first Earl of Malmesbury. The Harris
family had lived quietly on an estate in Wiltshire from the middle of
the 16th century; and Mr. James Harris first broke through the
hereditary sameness of existence by becoming one of the most
distinguished scholars of his day. Besides 'Philosophical Treatises,' he
published a work on grammar, called 'Hermes,' which the accomplished
Bishop Lowth styled 'the most beautiful example of analysis produced
since the days of Aristotle,' and which obtained so high a reputation
that it was afterwards translated and published by command of the French
Directory in 1796. He was member of Parliament for Christchurch, which
seat he held till his death, in 1780; was made a Lord of the Treasury in
1763, and in 1744 he became Secretary and Comptroller of the Queen's
Household. When he first took his seat in the House of Commons, John
Townshend asked who he was, and on being told that he had written on
grammar and harmony, replied 'Why does he come here, where he will hear
neither?' His literary talent and high personal character procured for
Mr. Harris a wide circle of friends and acquaintances among the leading
men of the times; and owing to the influence he thus acquired he was
enabled to launch his son, afterwards the first Lord, early into public
life. The present Earl (who edits these letters), speaking of the
'_fêtes_ and social intercourse in the venerable city of Sarum,' where
his great-grandfather resided, observes regretfully 'how much less of
cliques and class categories then existed among the nobility and their
neighbours than in the present day.'
Mr. Harris was passionately fond of music and art, and wrote treatises
upon them, which indicate a more lively and sympathetic nature than
would he inferred from the dry philosophy of his other works. His wife
moved much in society, and appears to have possessed a similar taste for
the fine arts. The best artists of the day were visitors at their house
in Salisbury. The family went frequently to the theatre, and in the
letters we find critical observations on most of the new dramas of the
time. There are two letters from David Garrick, asking permission to
bring out at Drury Lane a musical pastoral, called 'Damo and Amyrillis,'
which, the editor says, 'was in Mr. Harris's hands,' but which, there
seems to us reason to believe, was actually composed by him. As might be
expected of a musical family, they attended the concerts and the opera,
and by-and-by we read of 'the great house in the Haymarket,' and Italian
singers come to the front. Then, as now, the Opera was a perilous
venture, and both the managers and singers occasionally came to grief.
Of one of the favourite singers of the day we read as follows:--
'All Manzolini's clothes and finery are seized, and carried
to the Custom House, so he has sent a petition to the Lords
of the Treasury to have them redeemed. This event diverts
Lord North, as he says not one of the Treasury know a note
of music, nor care one farthing what becomes of Manzolini,
_except Mr. Harris_. He says your father has told so moving
a story to Mr. Grenville about it, that he thinks it may
affect him.'
A close friendship existed between Mr. Harris and Handel, who left him,
by will, his portrait, and all his operas in manuscript. The very first
letter in this collection has a touching allusion to the great musician,
whose intellect had been affected by his labours, and who had become
very eccentric. The Countess of Salisbury, a relative of Mr. Harris,
writes to him thus (in 1745):--
'My constancy to poor Handel got the better of my indolence
and my propensity to stay at home, and I went last Friday
to see the 'Alexander's Feast;' but it was such a
melancholy pleasure as drew tears of sorrow, great though
unhappy Handel, dejected, wan, and dark, sitting by, not
playing on the harpsichord, and to think how his light has
been spent by being _overplied in music's cause_. I was
sorry, too, to find the audience so insipid and tasteless
(I may add unkind) as not to give the poor man the comfort
of applause; but affectation and conceit cannot discern or
attend to merit.'
In the next letter, the Rev. W. Harris writes to Mrs. Harris thus:--
'I met Mr. Handel a few days since in the street, and
stopped and put him in mind who I was; upon which, I am
sure it would have diverted you to have seen his antic
motions. He seemed highly pleased, and was full of inquiry
after you. I told him I was very confident that you
expected a visit from him this summer (at Salisbury). He
talked much of his precarious state of health, yet he looks
well enough.'
Handel recovered from the mental affection; and five years later (1750)
we find the Earl of Shaftesbury writing of him as follows:--
'I have seen Handel several times since I came hither (to
London), and I think I never saw him so cool and well. He
is quite easy in his behaviour, and has been pleasing
himself in the purchase of several fine pictures,
particularly a large Rembrandt, which is indeed excellent.
We have scarce talked at all about musical subjects, though
enough to find that his performances will go off
incomparably.'
Music appears to have held a more prominent place in public amusements a
century ago than is generally imagined; and when Giardini undertook the
management of the Opera 'at the great house in the Haymarket' in 1764,
Mrs. Harris opines that he will meet with no small difficulty, because
the 'greatest part of the orchestra, and almost all the dancers, are
engaged at the _play-houses_.' Giardini--a Piedmontese violinist and
composer, who, after residing thirty years in England, went to Russia,
where he died in 1793--came to grief in this operatic venture, and
afterwards started an Opera in 'Mrs. Cornely's' rooms. Indeed, the
Haymarket house, great as its celebrity became in the present century,
was by no means a famous place in those times. In the same year (1764)
we read in one of the letters, 'Almack is going to build some most
magnificent rooms behind his house--one much larger than that at
Carlisle House,' _i.e._, Mrs. Cornely's. This latter was the favourite
place of resort at that time, and for many years afterwards. It was a
place where subscription-concerts were held (one series mentioned in
1764, consisted of twenty-one concerts, of Bach's music, Cocchi's, and
Abel's, for five guineas), where the Opera for some time had its seat;
and also where masquerade parties and other fashionable entertainments
were held. In 1770, we read of 'fifteen or sixteen young men of fashion
and fortune giving a masquerade at Cornely's, to 800 people;' and in the
following year we have a full account of a masquerade given at the same
place by 'the gentlemen of the Tuesday Nights' Club.' Mrs. Harris,
writing to her son (the future Earl) at Madrid, says: 'Mr. Charles Fox
has offered to supply us with tickets. Your sisters and I mean to go;
'tis the only masquerade I wish them to go to. I shall try my utmost to
persuade Mr. Harris (her husband) to accompany us. One difficulty is in
the way; that is, no gentlemen are admitted in dominos.' Mr. Harris
could not be persuaded to join the fashionable assembly, but Mr.
Fox--who had just commenced his official career, as a Lord of the
Admiralty--was, at that time, more at home in such parties than in
Parliament. Mrs. Harris was greatly delighted with it. The following is
part of her account of it:--
'Gertrude (Miss Harris) was dressed as the Pythian, that
is, priestess to the temple of Apollo, a dress which she
wore in one of the private plays. Louisa was an Indian
Princess; Mr. Cambridge borrowed a dress for her which was
pretty and fine--the habit, muslin with green and gold
sprigs, with a turban and veil. I never saw anybody enter
so strongly into the spirit of a masquerade as she did. She
talked to numbers all in French, and had disguised her
voice so well that even some of her friends did not
discover her. Towards the end, she said she was frightened
by the Devil speaking to her sister. Mine was a white
domino, with a Mary Queen of Scots cap and ruff.
'Lord Edgecombe was a shepherdess, with a little lamb under
his arm, and a most excellent figure he was. Mr. Banbury
was a most excellent _friseur_; Lord Berkeley, a charlatan.
Mrs. Crewe[9] looked beautiful as a nun with a yellow veil.
Several gentlemen in women's clothes, not as old women....
'On the whole we are greatly entertained, for it was the
first masked ball I ever saw. We supped soon after one; and
then everybody unmasked, and a number of acquaintances we
found, though we had found out many before. We got home
soon after five; and, old as I may be, I never left a
public place with more regret.'
Mrs. Cornely's rooms soon became the object of a jealous, and let us
hope unfounded, attack. Giardini had opened an Opera there, which was
'greatly injuring that of Mr. Hobart's in the Haymarket;' and the latter
gentleman 'informed against them' as an unlicensed house. There was a
strong party on either side, 'harmoniacs' and 'anti-harmoniacs,' and the
latter party brought forward scandalous charges. Only a week after the
above-mentioned masquerade, Mrs. Harris writes thus:--
'The Harmoniac is over, and, what is worse, they threaten
hard to indict Mrs. Cornely's as a house of ill-fame, and
say that forty beds are made and unmade every day, which is
hard, for a friend of ours says it is never more than
_twenty_. But, joking apart, if they choose to demolish
Mrs. Cornely, all elegance and spectacle will end in this
town; for she never yet had her equal in these things, and
I believe got but little, as all she undertakes is clever
to a degree.'
There is a wonderful want of logical sequence in these few lines; and as
to whether the scandalous charge was true or false, Mrs. Harris apparently
was as little in a position to judge as we are now. Mrs. Cornely was
originally Mademoiselle Pompeiati, a singer. She hired Carlisle House,
in Soho-square, and established balls and assemblies by subscription.
This place of fashionable resort, however, as well as its mistress,
quickly thereafter declined in reputation. In 1774, we find Mrs. Harris
writing:--'I went to Carlysle House, which Bach has taken for his
concerts; the furniture, like Mrs. Cornely, is much on the decline; but,
in my opinion, the place is better for the concert than Almack's.' Bach
soon left these rooms, and opened a place of his own, splendidly fitted
up. But even he was not allowed to carry on his performances without
opposition, although of a different kind from that which proved fatal to
Mrs. Cornely. 'Lord Hillsborough, Sir James Porter, and some others
(writes Mrs. Harris) have entered into a subscription to prosecute Bach
for a nuisance, and I was told the jury had found a bill against him.
One would scarce imagine his house could molest either of these men, for
Bach's is at the corner of Hanover-street.'
Amateur theatrical performances were in those days in great vogue among
the upper classes, and usually took place in the country residences of
the nobility and gentry in the winter months--during the Parliamentary
recess, when even members of the Ministry (notably Mr. Fox) took part in
them. Winterslow House was the famous place for these amateur
performances. The ordinary audience consisted of the servants of the
house and the neighbouring townspeople, as well as a select circle of
visitors, which on one occasion included the Duke and Duchess of
Queensberry, the Duchess of Bedford, Lord and Lady Pembroke, Lady
Charles and Lord Robert Spencer, Lord Dunkellin, Lady Louisa
Fitzpatrick, &c. At the close of one of those performances at Winterslow
House (in January, 1774), in which Mr. Fox and another member of his
family acted, a lamentable accident occurred, which destroyed the
greater part of the mansion. Mrs. Harris writes of it next day as
follows:--
'We got home in whole bones [an allusion apparently to the
bad roads] soon after one, and in high spirits; but our joy
is now turned to sorrow, for this morning, at five, a fire
broke out in the new building at Winterslow House, and
entirely consumed that and also the old house, except the
kitchen and laundry. Though the house was full of company,
fortunately no life was lost. The fire was discovered by
some Salisbury chairmen, who, for want of a bed, were
deposited on a carpet under the great stairs; they alarmed
the house, and probably, thereby, saved some lives. Lady
Pembroke, Lady Mary Fox and her children, were carried to
King's House; Miss Herbert, Mrs. Hodges, and the other
ladies stayed in the laundry; all the gentlemen stood by.
As they had no engines, and little or no water but violent
rain, they in a manner gave up all hopes of the house; but
their object was to save the furniture, in which they have
succeeded, though 'tis greatly damaged by dirt and rain.
'Tis thought, but not certain, that the fire was owing to
some timber near a chimney in the new building. I think of
the contrast: we left that house this morning between
twelve and one, all mirth and jollity, and by seven it was
consumed; it really hurts me when I think how many
agreeable days I have spent in those rooms.
'Some say that, during the flames, Stephen and Charles Fox
and Fitzpatrick got to a proper distance, and laid bets as
to which beam would fall in first. The friends of the
house, who resort to Almack's and White's, say they are
sorry they were not at Winterslow that night, as "they
might have had an opportunity of seeing the family in a
_new light_. I could mention profane things uttered at the
very time, but they are too bad."
Amateur dramatic and operatic performances were a frequent amusement at
Mr. Harris's house in Salisbury. Miss Gertrude, the elder daughter, was
an adept in such performances, and, moreover, retained this taste
throughout the whole of her long life. This lady afterwards became the
wife of Mr. Robinson, younger son of Lord Grantham. She lived, in the
London world, to the age of eighty-five, preserving to the last her
faculties and cheerful character. She used to give private theatricals
at her house, in which Lord de Grey, Mr. F. Robinson, Hugh Elliott, and
Canning were the chief actors--Canning writing the prologues and
epilogues, which are still extant. In the letters we find frequent
allusions to the performances in Mr. Harris's family residence; but we
shall content ourselves with mentioning one of them, which aroused the
satirical ire of some provincial Juvenal, whose poetic outburst serves
to show the great, indeed too great, change between the notions on such
subjects then and now. Mrs. Harris, in a letter to her son, thus alludes
to a rehearsal of the piece, which a few days afterwards was performed,
as usual, to an audience of the townsfolk and the visitors at the
house:--
'I have but little to send from hence; we are so totally
taken up with our own theatrical business that nothing else
is thought of. The ladies acted last night in their dresses
to all their servants, and a most crowded house they had.
Although I was not admitted to the performance, I saw all
the ladies. Their dresses are fine and elegant. Miss
Townshend makes an excellent Spanish ambassador, a fine
figure and richly dressed; she had a prodigious long sword,
and not being accustomed to wear one, she contrived, as she
walked, to run it up through a scene, and damaged it
greatly. Louisa has taken a sword you left her [here?], and
manages it right well. She is very fine in a purple Spanish
dress, all the buttons Irish diamonds, a handsome button
and loop to her hat, and your King of Spain's picture
hanging from her neck. The Queen, Miss Hussey, was dressed
in blue and silver, with a number of diamonds; Miss
Wyndham, who is Elvira, in white, trimmed with pearls;
Gertrude, the Princess, in a black Spanish dress, trimmed
with red and silver, and a great quantity of diamonds; it
becomes her much.
'Lord Pembroke [the tenth Earl] sent a note to your father,
which was as follows:--"I can snuff candles, I can scrape
on the violoncello; if either of these sciences will
entitle me to a place in your theatre, I will perform
gratis. P.S. My wife says she can thrum the harpsichord or
viol-de-gamba."
'We have sent them and the Amesbury House tickets for
Saturday. Everybody is making interest to get in. The
ladies mean to perform five times, so I hope everybody will
see it.'
The satirical verses which this lady performance called forth appeared
in the _Bath Journal_ (Nov. 17, 1774), entitled 'On the Ladies at the
Close of Salisbury, now acting _Elvira_;' and Mrs. Harris opines that
'they were sent from some _vinegar_ merchant in Salisbury who could not
get admitted to the performance. The verses are as follows:--
'In good Queen Elizabeth's reign,
In a decent and virtuous age,
That they ne'er might give modesty pain,
No female appeared on the stage.
But lo, what a change time affords!
The ladies, 'mong many strange things,
Call for helmets, for breeches and swords,
And act Senators, Hervos, and Kings.'
If the anonymous 'vinegar merchant' could have been transported into the
present time, how much more would he have been shocked by the 'change
which time affords!' Could he now take a trip to London (so serious a
matter a century ago, but made so quickly and cheaply now by means of a
return ticket by rail), what would he think of the state of matters in
our theatres? It was only in private theatricals that ladies donned the
male costume a century ago, and they were always draped with the
strictest propriety. But what do we see in London theatres now? Not only
in the so-called 'burlesques' does the main 'fun,' such as it is,
consist in the transposition of the sexes--men taking female
characters, and women the part of males--but the costumes of the female
performers, rich and picturesque as they usually are, are devised
expressly to make a prodigal display of the person, a minimum of clothes
apparently being the acme of perfection kept in view by the theatrical
costumiers, and by the ladies themselves. The female figure is now so
prodigally displayed that a handsome girl, especially if she has
well-turned legs, is sought after on that account alone. 'My _shape_ is
my fortune, sir, she said!' would now be the burden of the song of these
demi-nude demoiselles of the stage. To such a pitch has this new method
of attracting audiences been carried, that this class of performances,
or rather exhibitions, are now known in theatrical parlance as
'leg-pieces.' It is impossible not to see what a demoralising influence
such performances must have upon the rising generation, indeed upon the
whole audience. It is a lamentable sign of the times: it is a symptom of
degeneration, of corruption, of a fatal laxity of manners. The relation
between the sexes is becoming seriously deteriorated; and woman, instead
of being peculiarly an object of respectful regard or chivalrous
admiration, tends to become simply an object of pleasure, seeking to
please at any cost. Most rightly did the Lord Chamberlain recently issue
his fiat against the short skirts of the ballet-dancers: but the fiat
has been vain, as all such injunctions in this 'free' country must be
when public opinion refuses to support it, or at last allows itself to
be overpowered by the crowd of playgoers who delight in such spectacles.
A gangrene of selfish and demoralising pleasure is now eating into the
heart of this country; and we fear the social malady will not be checked
save by the advent of some terrible national calamity--let us hope not
so terrible as that by which our neighbour France is now being purged as
by fire.
Before quitting the lighter and gossipy items to be found in these
letters, let us say a word or two about the rich Court costumes of the
period. We need not speak of the dresses of the ladies; for although the
fashion of those dresses has changed, indeed is ceaselessly changing, in
richness and costliness female attire at the present time is quite on a
par with what it was when George the Second was king. But a notable
change has taken place in the full dress of the men. Probably only a
minority of our readers can remember the time when colour disappeared
from the evening costume of gentlemen: it is nearly forty years since
coloured coats, with white or coloured silk or velvet waistcoats
vanished from the private dinner-party and ball-room--though the taste
for colour is now reviving. Warren, in _Ten Thousand a Year_, dresses
his hero Gammon for the evening in blue coat with metal buttons, white
waistcoat, and black trousers--and such was a quiet evening dress of
that time. In the long interval since then, there has been a monotonous
reign of simple black cloth. The change in the Court or gala dress has
been still more striking. Apropos of this change, a philosophic writer
has remarked, that whenever any class abandons its distinctive costume,
it is a sign of decadence and coming extinction. There is some truth in
the remark, but it is partial truth only. It ignores the fact that the
peculiar source of distinction for each class, and especially with the
nobility, who are or ought to be the leaders of the nation, varies from
age to age with the spirit of the times. It might as well be said that
our nobility verged on extinction three centuries ago, when they ceased
to wear mail and to lead their retainers to the field. No doubt the
French Revolution, with its levelling doctrines, and the principle of
social equality (not new in this country), tended to abolish the
'bravery' of dress previously distinctive of the nobility; but the
change was far more due to the gravity of the times, the sober spirit
natural during a most critical period of the country, and of the economy
rendered necessary throughout the community at large by the heavy costs
of the great war with France. Indeed, the fact that a corresponding
change took place in the gala dress of the middle classes serves to show
that there was nothing exceptional or peculiar in the diminished finery
of the aristocratic costume. All classes alike felt the sobering
influence of the time, and then, as in all such cases, a corresponding
change took place in costume.
Firstly, then, as to the gala costume of the Prince of Wales, afterwards
George III., who certainly cannot be suspected of too great a devotion
to fashion or the frivolities of dress. In a Drawing-room in St. James's
in 1745, the Prince of Wales wore a light-blue velvet coat, laced with
silver, and the sleeves of it brocade--as was also his waistcoat. On
another occasion he 'had on a crimson damask laced with silver, very
rich and handsome.' Again, the Countess of Shaftesbury, writing to her
cousin, Mr. Harris, in December, 1754, 'enlivening her epistle with a
detail of the birthday finery' at Court, says: 'The Prince of Wales
looked as blooming as his clothes; they were a blossom-coloured velvet,
with gold and lace down before; the waistcoat and cuffs a rich
white-and-gold stuff. Prince Edward's was a yellow and silver velvet,
with a silver lace before, turned up with white and silver cuffs, and
the waistcoat the same.' She adds: 'My lord's clothes and mine were both
admired. His was a very rich scarlet and gold velvet coat--waistcoat and
breeches the same; and mine a gold stuff with purple spots on the
ground, and coloured sprigs of flowers that looked like embroidery.' On
a similar occasion, 'Lord Kildare was unexceptionably the finest of any
gentleman there: his coat was a light-blue silk, embroidered all over
with gold and silver in a very curious manner, turned up with white
satin, embroidered as the other; the waistcoat the same as his sleeves.'
His Majesty (George II.), however, by no means set the fashion in gala
dress. Even at Drawing-rooms, we read, 'he dressed in his usual way,
without aiming at finery of any sort;' his usual costume being a
deep-blue cloth coat, trimmed with silver lace, and waistcoat the same.
At another Birthday Drawing-room, 'the King was dressed in black velvet;
the sleeves of his coat and his waistcoat were red, embroidered with
gold.' The last time his Majesty's costume at Drawing-rooms is mentioned
is in 1754, six years before his death, when we find the following
curious statement, that 'his Majesty had told Mr. Shutz [the fashionable
German tailor of the day] he would have him bespeak him a very handsome
suit, but not to make a boy or a fop of him;' and as the result of this
consultation with his tailor, his Majesty appeared in brown, very richly
laced with silver, and turned up with a blue cuff laced, and a blue and
silver waistcoat.' We read of 'very mortifying disasters' happening at
some of these Birthday Drawing-rooms. On one such occasion, the Countess
of Salisbury writes:--
'Miss Young, in making her curtsey to his Majesty,
entangled the heel of her shoe [there were high heels in
those days] in her train, so that she fell quite backwards,
with her legs up. The laugh was so general that nobody
thought of helping the poor young creature, until his
Majesty, though as well diverted as the rest, said he would
go himself; but, as you may imagine, was prevented. Lady
Young was not in less confusion than her daughter.
'The second hustle was about Miss Corke, whose hoop, in
climbing over the Foreigner's box, caught in such a manner
that all her petticoats flew up, to the undermost flannel.
Lady Arvon, in endeavouring to help her, was caught in the
hoop, which pulled off her fine diamond sprig and
head-dress.'
As might be expected, there were flirtations, runaway matches, and
_mésalliances_ in those days, as they are still. One of the beauties
immortalized by the pencil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and whose portrait
is preserved at Holland House, gave rise to much gossip by marrying a
'player:'--
'The Court and assembly's talk yesterday was all of the
match of Lady Susan Strangeways and O'Brien, the player. It
is said she went out on Saturday with a servant, whom,
under pretext of having forgotten something, she sent back,
and said she would wait in the street till her return.
O'Brien was waiting in a hackney coach, which she got into;
and they went to Covent Garden Church, and were married.
'Tis a most surprising event, as Lady Susan was everything
that was good and amiable; and how she ever got acquainted
with this man is not to be accounted for. They say she sent
him £200 a little time since. She is of age.'
Gretna Green, on the Scottish borders, although it has now relapsed into
the obscurity natural to such a poor little hamlet (although it still
gives name to a railway station), was a famous place in those days in
connection with runaway matches; indeed, it was so even within the
memory of the present generation. A century ago, we often read of lovers
having 'gone to Scotland.' Among others--
'Lady Jane Tollemache, daughter to Lord Dysart, is gone to
Scotland with a Captain Halliday of the Light Horse: his
father is a man of fortune. The captain was just going to
to be married to Miss Byron; the coach and clothes were
bought; but he saw Lady Jane twice at the Richmond
assembly, was captivated, wrote a letter to Miss Byron, to
inform her he had changed his mind, and had set out for
Scotland.' [The gay captain would have had to pay heavy
damages for so cavalier a proceeding now-a-days.]
Whatever amount of what is commonly called 'scandal,' and which merits a
worse name, there may have been in our aristocratic circles in the
latter half of last century, there is but little trace of it to be found
in these letters. But in one of Mrs. Harris's letters to her son, giving
him the talk and gossip of the town, there is a mysterious-looking
allusion to some such matrimonial scandal, which reads as
follows:--'Lady S---- B---- is in lodgings at Knightsbridge. She says
her husband [whom doubtless she had deserted] is a most angelic man; but
her attachment for the other is so great, she must live with him.'
What was the 'Pantheon' in those days? Whatever else it was, it appears
to have been a sort of assembly-rooms for balls and dances; and, though
frequented by persons of rank and of the highest respectability, its
doors were not impregnable against the entrance of 'soiled doves' and
doubtful reputations--whose presence, however, was against the rules of
the place, for, as the following embarrassing incident to one of Mrs.
Harris's daughters shows, they were liable to be turned out. Mrs. Harris
thus writes of it to her son:--
'Wednesday your two sisters, Molly Cambridge, and I, went
to the Pantheon. It is undoubtedly the finest and most
complete thing ever seen in England. Such mixture of
company never assembled before under the same roof. Lord
Mansfield, Mrs. Baddeley, Lord Chief Baron Parker, Mrs.
Abbingdon, Sir James Porter, Madlle. Heinell, Lords Hyde
and Camden, with many other serious men, and most of the
gay ladies in town, and ladies of the best rank and
character--and, by appearance, some very low people. Louisa
is thought very like Mrs. Baddeley [one of the gay ladies];
and Gertrude and I had our doubts whether our characters
might not suffer by walking with her [_i.e._, Louisa]; but
had they offered to turn her out, we depended upon Mr.
Hanger's protection. [George Hanger, of the Guards, was one
of the great beaux of his day.] None of the fashion dance
country-dances or minuets in the great room, though there
were a number of minuets and a large set of dancers. I saw
Miss Wilks dance a minuet; some young ladies danced
cotillons in the cotillon gallery.... The spectacle at
first strikes one greatly, but then it becomes stupid.'
The domain of personal incident crops up richly and interestingly
throughout these volumes, and comes freshly and truthfully upon us in
the correspondence of the hour. Whether we read of Lady ----, who ran
away with her footman John, and sent back her fine clothes, 'because she
would no longer have any need for them;' or of the deep gambling and
other queer affairs of Charles Fox in his dissipated youth; or of the
sayings and doings of the notorious Wilkes, who so shocked society, or
of his duel, in which he bore himself so honourably, the epistolary
narrative is full of _naïveté_ and interest. The second marriage of Lord
Coventry (whose first wife was the elder of the beautiful Miss Gunnings)
must have been what is now called 'good fun.' The marriage party was all
assembled in stately magnificence; but his Grace of Canterbury was from
home, and the licence did not arrive! But the party was equal to the
emergency--'so it was agreed that they should eat the dinner, rather
than it should be spoiled. So to dinner they went [at the early hour
then in fashion], and sat all the afternoon, dressed in their white and
silver, expecting every moment the express from Lambeth, but nothing
came. The same reason held good for eating a supper as for eating the
dinner; and in short they supped and sat till after two, and then, by
mutual consent, dismissed the parson, and all retired.' Two hours
afterwards (4 a.m.) the express with the licence arrived, and the
ceremony went off with due _éclat_ in the forenoon. We may remark that
it is comforting to find in these letters of the day a guarantee for the
genuineness of many of the excellent bonmots and repartees which have
taken their place in our anecdotical literature in connection with the
more or less famous men of that period, and which sparkle pleasantly
across the pages of these volumes.
But quitting the domain of purely personal incident, let us glance at
some passages in the letters which throw curious light upon the England
of our forefathers in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Here is
a picture of Cambridgeshire which looks strange now, and which indeed
startled the writer thereof, Mrs. Harris, when she and her husband went
on a visit to their friend the Dean of Sarum's parsonage in that
locality. She says that the country is the most disagreeable she ever
saw; and talking of the Fens, says that the herds of cattle which feed
on them in the summer months are up to their bellies in water even in
the dry season:--
'The natives dry the cowdung for firing in the winter; so
'tis kept in heaps about the fields, as is also the dung of
their yards; so when you walk, the stink is inconceivable.
Mr. Harris took a ride to survey these fens, and he says
nothing can be so detestable. He talked with the natives,
who told him that during the winter the water was
constantly above the ancles in their houses.'
'The Dean's parsonage is surrounded with fens, and you are
teased beyond expression by the gnats. When we got here,
the Dean's butler came to your father with a pair of
leather stockings [the dress of that day was breeches and
silk stockings] to draw on so as to protect his legs, which
in hot weather [it was the month of June] is dreadful.
Besides this, the beds have a machine covered with a silk
net, which lets down after you are in bed, and covers you
all over. Without this, there could be no sleeping; for,
notwithstanding these precautions, we were most miserably
stung.'
Were anyone to light upon this passage in an isolated form nowadays, he
would conclude without hesitation that it was an extract from some
Indian diary--the use of the word 'natives' completing the resemblance.
Here we have the Indian plague of mosquitoes existing in full severity
in England, and also the use of mosquito-nets around the beds at night,
exactly as in India. Nay, there is still another point of
resemblance--namely, in the use which the Cambridgeshire 'natives' made
of the cow-dung: drying and using it as fuel, as is the common practice
of the natives of our Eastern Empire.
In the letters which relate to the events of the Rebellion of 1745, and
the march of the rebels into the heart of England, we have ample proof
alike of the general ignorance of places now well known to every one,
and of a want of the means of information in regard even to the great
events taking place in other parts of the kingdom, which read strangely
in these times when every morning we can know from the newspapers the
very way the wind is blowing in every quarter of our island. The
Highland army marches to and fro in its daring enterprise, although
several separate armies (Wade's, Ligonier's, the Duke of Cumberland's,
&c.) are on foot to meet or catch them: indeed, as we read in these
letters, 'more troops are in England than ever was known before,' yet
notwithstanding, the hardy light-moving Highlanders get through them all
into the heart of England, and quite as easily back again. We cannot
help thinking that the English generals had not much stomach for their
work. They were astonished and something more by the sudden and total
rout of Sir John Cope's army, and by the daring and marvellous rapidity
of the rebels' march; and it must be allowed that even in their retreat,
the Highlanders gave a good account of any force that tried to bar their
passage. As the noble editor incidentally observes, General Wade (who
was posted in the north of England to stop the southward march of the
rebels) only became famous after the rebellion was over; and his
marching and counter-marching to catch the rebels was of a very helpless
character indeed.
Smuggling, as well as rebellion, profited greatly by the roadless
character of England in those days. Mr. and Mrs. Harris, on returning
home one night from Heron Court, then the property of their friend Mr.
Hooper, had great difficulty in getting over Ringwood Heath, an
adjoining waste land, about five miles in length--'the vile heath,' as
Mrs. Harris calls it--even with 'the assistance of two servants riding
before.' Heron Court now belongs to the Malmesbury family; and the
editor, in a foot-note, states that until the beginning of the present
century there were no roads but smugglers' tracks across those heaths.
They were a favourite place for contraband transit from the south coast;
and he mentions that all classes aided in carrying on this traffic. 'The
farmers lent their teams and labourers, and the gentry openly connived
at the practice, and dealt with the smugglers. The cargoes, chiefly of
brandy, were easily concealed in the furze bushes, that extended from
Ringwood to Poole, and in the New Forest for thirty miles.' We suspect
that the impossibility of carrying on such operations nowadays has had
much more to do with their cessation than the improvement in the
morality of the age. Look at the customary frauds in making returns to
the income-tax, and then say whether the middle-classes are a whit more
honest in fiscal matters now than they used to be when smuggling was
rife.
How vastly London has changed and grown since the last century need not
be said, and the contrast between then and now, meets one almost in
every page of these lively letters. There was no Rotten-row, or the
fashionable rides in the Park, which make so gay a sight now in the
summer afternoons; and the whole district north of the Park knew nothing
of the noble streets and terraces which now occupy the space. Mrs.
Harris speaks with delight, almost rapture, of the sweet rural beauty of
a 'ride to Paddington of a July morning.' But with all our knowledge of
the change which has come over the British metropolis since that time,
it is startling to find that some nameless Dick Turpin or Claude Duval
could ply his trade with impunity even within the courtly precincts of
St. James's. In February, 1773, Mrs. Harris writes that 'a most
audacious fellow robbed Sir Francis Holburne and his sisters in their
coach, in St. James's Square, coming from the Opera. He was on
horseback, and held a pistol close to the breast of one of the Miss
Holburnes for a considerable time. She had left her purse at home--which
he would not believe. He has since robbed a coach in Park Lane.' In
these letters, too, there is the earliest mention which we have met with
of the tiny member of the finny tribe which now confers a greater
popular renown upon Greenwich than even its world-famous Observatory or
its magnificent Hospital, and which for a generation has caused that
place to be the honoured scene of the annual Ministerial banquet at
which our rulers meet together to congratulate one another upon the
approaching close of the Parliamentary session,--the famous 'whitebait
dinner,' which within the last two years has fallen into abeyance,
perhaps never to be revived. Mr. Harris, the founder of the family and
father of the first Earl Malmesbury, was then (1763) a Lord of the
Admiralty; and Mrs. Harris describes a 'most agreeable expedition on the
Thames,' which she had with a party in the 'Admiralty barge.' After
seeing Woolwich and all its military wonders, the lady says:--
'We got back to Greenwich to dine. We had the smallest fish
I ever saw, called whitebait: they are only to be eat at
Greenwich, and are held in high estimation by the
epicures; they are not so large as the smallest of minnows,
but are really very good eating. We dined in a charming
place in the open air, which commanded a fine view of the
Thames; but were obliged to leave it at six o'clock, as the
tide was so cruel as not to stay for us--and they never
venture to shoot the bridge [old London bridge] with the
Admiralty barge at low water. We had a beastly walk through
the Borough after we landed.'
Let us now quit old England for a moment to take a passing glance at the
Continent. As we have already said, the 'Diaries and Correspondence' of
the first Earl of Malmesbury are a rich mine of political information
and personal anecdote concerning the leading Courts of Europe; but we
must here confine our few gleanings of this kind from the newly
published 'Letters,' and content ourselves with some sketches of the
state of matters in France, in the period of decay and rottenness which
preceded the outburst of the terrible but life-reviving Revolution.
Young Mr. Harris (afterwards the first Earl), then only in his
twenty-second year, is passing through Paris in November, 1768, on his
way to assume a diplomatic post at Madrid, and thus he writes of the
French capital:--
'I see no new improvements since I was last here; and,
except a few new fashions for caps and muffs, I believe
nothing has changed materially. On such subjects alone do
this lively people exercise their inventive faculties,
since the decease of Louis le Grand. They have now no
capital painters, few good sculptors, and still fewer good
authors; for the modern set of French writers are either
totally devoid of talents, or else employ them in such a
manner, and on such subjects, as to render their works of
very little use to the community. To pass for an _esprit
fort_ is all their ambition; and when a man has written
down all religions, without distinction, they cry, "_Pardi!
c'est un grand homme: il pense hardiment!_"'
Turning from fashion and infidelity, the young diplomatist in another
letter describes the political aspect of affairs; remarking, _inter
alia_, that the Government 'are now expending the revenues of the year
1771 [three years in advance!] at the same time that the people are
labouring under the greatest necessity; garden stuff and bread, the
chief nourishment of the lower class in this country, being raised in
price one-third since last winter, and the greatest appearance also that
there will not be a sufficient quantity of either to supply the winter.'
But Court life and pageantry went on _quand même_. Seven years later,
a Dr. Jean takes up the correspondence from Paris. Speaking of the
Anglomania then prevalent, and which mingled with the Court gaieties, he
writes that the 'young Queen' (Marie Antoinette) has made herself
unpopular by 'a little misunderstanding in etiquette' between her and
the princes of the blood, and also by her great predilection for
everything that is English. And he describes a horse race, 'which is now
become a very frequent and frequented amusement.' Most of the cavaliers
in the concourse were 'badly imitating the English mode of riding;' also
'ladies of fashion, clad in boots and leather breeches, _astride_ on
their horses!' The Queen, with all her court, were upon the stand at the
starting post; and the race was 'managed by English grooms (_jackés_ as
they call them) and English horses.' The same correspondent also gives a
description of a _bal paré_ in 'the most decorated room perhaps in the
world,' the Opera House at Versailles. He says that Lord Clive, who was
present, 'declared that Asiatic display of riches appeared but as tinsel
to the brilliancy of the French court on that occasion.' 'The room,'
says Dr. Jean 'was filled by between three and four thousand people,
dressed in the richest, and at the same time the most fancied, taste
imaginable. The show which French ladies always make above those of
other nations added much to the spectacle. The ornaments of their
head-dress, and their robes, so disposed and varied, composed a most
beautiful _tout ensemble_. In regard to their persons, to be sure, they
seemed to be almost all of the same family, from the similarity of their
_complexions_, and the unity of their dress. It appeared to me an
assembly of houris.' He describes the Queen as 'very majestic, and at a
distance very handsome,' also with a remarkably fine hand and arm; and
he adds that she gives life to almost all public amusements, and 'is
very familiar with those who are in favour,'--an amiable though perhaps
not dignified _trait_ which brought her sad woe in the end, in
consequence of the calumnies set on foot against her by her base and
contemptible relative, the Duke of Orleans, _Philippe Egalité_.
A romantic incident connected with the French Revolution happened to
Lord Malmesbury in 1793, when the French nobility and clergy were flying
from the sanguinary proscriptions of the Reign of Terror. He was walking
one day on the pier at Brighton (not then the scene of gaiety and
fashion which it is now), when a French fishing-boat approached the
pier, and one of the crew jumped out with a baby in his arms, and
addressed him. The poor fisherman said that a lady, known and beloved
by himself and his comrades, had thrown the baby into their boat,
entreating them to save its life by carrying it to England, whither, she
said, if she were spared, she would follow it. They had accordingly
stood over for Brighton, to entrust the infant, as the lady desired, to
the first Englishman they met. Lord Malmesbury at once took charge of
the helpless little exile, and had it conveyed to Lady Malmesbury at his
house. In a few weeks, the mother, after many hair-breadth escapes,
found her way to England, and knowing where the child had been landed,
soon discovered its place of refuge. The baby became a handsome and
fascinating woman, and, as Madame Alfred de Noailles, was for many years
a leader of fashion in the first circles of Paris. When Lady Malmesbury
was at Paris in 1816, we find her writing of Madame Alfred as 'our
daughter;' and his quondam _protégé_, in all her letters to Lord
Malmesbury, used to sign herself 'Leontine Harris.'
Although tempted to linger longer over these interesting letters, our
narrowing limits warn us that we must leave untrod a large portion of
the field which they present, alike for gossiping and for sage
historical reflection. But ere we close, we must say a few words as to
the leading members of the family whose correspondence has now been
given to the world. Of Mr. James Harris, who, though not himself
ennobled, may justly be regarded as the founder of the Malmesbury
family, we have already spoken. He was a literary man of fine tastes, a
member of Parliament, and a subordinate member of several
Administrations. He does not appear to have had the brilliant abilities
of his son, the first Earl; but he had a pleasant and healthy
temperament, a perfect rectitude of nature, and a sound sagacity, which
qualities have since been hereditary in the family. There are only a few
letters of his in this collection, but in almost every one of these,
brief though they are, there is some remark or other which shows his
shrewd and healthy common sense, whether in great matters or little
ones. When a motion was made in the House (1770), to restrain revenue
officers from voting at elections (a disfranchisement only recently
removed), Mr. Harris writes that it was 'a rather tedious debate, full
of that patriotic commonplace which nobody believes that talks it, nor
anyone else but a few dupes in the provinces.' When we were on the eve
of war with Spain, in 1770, about the Falkland Islands, he writes:--'It
moves me to indignation that two respectable nations, naturally made for
friends, should take to cutting one another's throats for a paltry
island, not better than Bagshot Heath, and which if it were merged in
the ocean, would be no loss to either. Let it be with nations as with
individuals: if ye _can_ help it, don't quarrel at all--'tis more
conformant to your social nature; but if ye _must_ quarrel, for heaven's
sake let it not be for trifles, for objects of the lowest contempt.' But
when this Spanish difficulty was happily got over, to the general
satisfaction of the country, which, he says, 'does not wish a war,
whatever wicked patriots may endeavour;' he adds, 'None make such
audacious use of the word _people_ as these do--a word which often means
no more than themselves, and their ignorant or interested followers.'
His son, the first Earl of Malmesbury, was perhaps the ablest
diplomatist whom England has produced; certainly he was second to none
in the long roll of distinguished men who have served the State as
ambassadors and ministers in foreign countries. There is an anecdote of
his boyhood, narrated by his relative Lord Shaftesbury, which perhaps
may be taken as an indication of the courage and self-reliance which the
youth was afterwards to display in a very different form. As his mother
was walking one day with some friends before her house in the Close at
Salisbury, she descried some one climbing up the spire of the cathedral;
and having obtained a glass the better to observe so perilous a feat,
she immediately dropped it, exclaiming, 'Good heavens! it is James!' The
astonished lady had discovered her only son upon the apex of the tallest
steeple in Great Britain. Of his life at Oxford, he himself (taking a
retrospect in 1800) gives a poor account, either as regards learning or
amusements. He says that the set of men with whom he lived were very
pleasant, but very idle fellows. 'Our life was an imitation of high life
in London: luckily, drinking was not the fashion; but what we did drink
was claret, and we had our regular round of evening card parties, to the
great annoyance of our finances. It has often been a matter of surprise
to me how so many of us [Charles Fox, Lord Auckland, Bishop North, and
others] made our way so well in the world, and so creditably.' From
Oxford he went to the University of Leyden; and as he became a favourite
with our Minister at the Hague, young Harris had ample opportunities of
mingling in the court life, and also of studying carefully the political
affairs of Holland--a knowledge which he was afterwards destined to turn
to most valuable account. In the following year (1767) he made a journey
to Prussia, Poland, and Paris; and in 1768, although only in his
twenty-second year, he was appointed secretary of embassy at the Court
of Madrid. In this post, an opportunity arising, the youth greatly
distinguished himself; for, having been temporarily left chargé
d'affaires, he undertook upon his own responsibility the critical affair
of the Falkland Islands, which he conducted so admirably as to win the
praise of both political parties at home; and the issue, so honourable
to England, at once established his diplomatic reputation, and obtained
for him in the following year the post of Minister at Berlin, where
Frederick the Great, although past his prime, reigned in the full vigour
of his tyrannical and eccentric genius. Next, after a few months in
England in 1776, when he married, he was sent to St. Petersburg as our
minister at the Court of the Empress Catherine, whose shameless passion
for 'favourites' affected even her policy, and where he had a hard
battle to fight, owing to the Empress's ill-will to England, although
his _esprit_ and remarkable conversational talents made him personally
much more liked by the Empress than any of his diplomatic rivals. It
appears to have been a costly office, and diplomatic salaries at that
time were so inadequate that on leaving Russia he had diminished his
private fortune to the extent of £20,000.
The severe climate of Russia broke down his health, and he returned to
England in 1782, having previously received from the King the Order of
the Bath, in acknowledgement of his services at the Russian Court. But
two years afterwards he was despatched to the Hague, at that moment the
scene of the most active political operations and manoeuvres; the
Stadtholder being then threatened with deposition, and Holland with
subjection to France. In this emergency, Sir James Harris matured a bold
plan of an Anglo-Prussian alliance and an intervention on behalf of
Holland; a project which Mirabeau, the French agent at Berlin, when he
got wind of it, scouted as absurd, _et seulement la conception
personelle de cet audacieux et rusé Harris_, but which completely
succeeded--freeing Holland from her peril, and winning high fame for its
bold projector, who was created Baron Malmesbury, and received honours
from the King of Prussia and the Stadtholder. Lord Malmesbury now
enjoyed the almost unbounded confidence of his Government in all matters
relating to foreign politics, and was entrusted with all the most
important missions. In 1793, he was sent to Berlin, and in 1796 and
again in the following year he was sent to France to endeavour to
negotiate a peace with the French Directory. We cannot do more than
simply mention those important missions; but we cannot refrain from
noticing a mission of a very different kind which befel him in 1794,
when he received orders 'to ask of the Duke of Brunswick his daughter in
marriage for the Prince of Wales.' Lord Malmesbury had little hope of
this union turning out well, but he had no discretionary power in the
matter, so he married her Royal Highness by proxy, and brought her over
to England. The Prince of Wales never forgave Lord Malmesbury for his
share in this affair, which was certainly hard upon his Lordship,
especially as he had no end of difficulties with the German princess, as
well as with some of the ladies of the Court, who had reasons of their
own for hating Prince George's _fiancée_. Here is his Lordship's account
of the first interview between the Princess and her royal betrothed:--
'I, according to the established etiquette, introduced (no
one else being in the room) the Princess Caroline to him.
She very properly, in consequence of my saying to her it
was the right mode of proceeding, attempted to kneel to
him. He raised her (gracefully enough), and embraced her,
said barely one word, turned round, retired to a distant
part of the apartment, and calling me to him said, "Harris,
I am not well, pray get me a glass of brandy." I said,
"Sir, had you not better have a glass of water?" upon which
he, much out of humour, said with an oath, "No!" and away
he went. The Princess, left during the short moment alone,
was in a state of astonishment, and on my joining her said,
"_Mon Dieu! est-ce que le Prince est toujours comme cela?
Je le trouve très gros, et nullement aussi beau que son
portrait._" I said His Royal Highness was naturally a good
deal affected and flurried at this first interview, but she
certainly would find him different at dinner.
'At dinner I was far from satisfied with the Princess's
behaviour; it was flippant, rattling, affected raillery and
wit, and throwing out coarse vulgar hints about Lady ----,
who was present, and, though mute, _le diable n'en perdait
rien_. The Prince was evidently disgusted. And this
unfortunate dinner fixed his dislike, which, when, left to
herself, the Princess had not the talent to remove, but, by
still observing the same giddy manners and attempts at
cleverness and coarse sarcasm, increased it till it became
positive hatred.'
Soon after the Earl's last diplomatic mission to France, in 1797, he was
seriously attacked by deafness, in consequence of which infirmity he
thought it right to decline all further State employment either in the
Cabinet or abroad; but during the lives of Mr. Pitt and the Duke of
Portland, he remained in the most intimate political confidence of those
Ministers and their principal colleagues. Indeed, during the greater
part of the war with Napoleon, every scrap of important news received at
the Foreign Office appears to have been forwarded to him; and in 1814
he was consulted by Lord Liverpool's Government on the readjustment of
Europe, and the arrangements relating to Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg,
and Prussia, were principally suggested and settled by him. During the
closing years of his life (he died in 1820, at the age of seventy-five),
he passed most of his time in London and at Parkplace, his seat near
Henley, receiving at his house constantly, and with the same pleasure,
the rising generation of statesmen and literary men, as he had shown
formerly in associating with his own distinguished contemporaries. He
early appreciated the high talents of Mr. Canning, Lord Grenville, and
Lord Palmerston, and used his influence with the statesmen of the time
to draw special attention to those illustrious men who have now become
memorable in English history. He was the guardian of Lord Palmerston,
and by his influence obtained for him his first official appointment.
Two portraits of the Earl are given in these volumes: one taken in the
early part of his career when he was simple Mr. Harris, the other when
he was full of years and honours, at the age of seventy. Both are
handsome faces, but though the first has the advantage of youth, with a
look of _esprit_ and lively courage, the second is really the finer and
nobler head--a phenomenon only observable in rare cases, where high
intellect is united with goodness of heart and a well-balanced
temperament. His grandson, who edits these works, and who--in consonance
with the principles of life so wisely and admirably laid down by the
first Earl, with special reference to the nobility, but whose beautiful
precepts are applicable to all spheres of life--has devoted himself from
youth to the public service, and has twice been the Foreign Minister of
England, appends some true remarks as to the difference in the work and
responsibilities of diplomatists which has been created by the progress
of civilization and the great change in the political condition of the
nations of Europe. But the result of those changes has been to lessen
the responsibility and lighten the labour of our Ministers abroad, and
the contrast serves only to heighten the well-won reputation of the
diplomatist whose 'Letters and Correspondence' have supplied materials
for this article. The cynical but pre-eminently sagacious Talleyrand,
speaking simply of Lord Malmesbury's intellectual powers and knowledge
of human nature, apart from those high personal qualities by which he
was distinguished, said, _Je crois que Lord Malmesbury était le plus
habile Ministre que vous aviez de son temps. C'était inutile de le
devancer, il fallait le suivre de près. Si on lui laissait le dernier
mot, il avait toujours raison._ And as is shown alike by his official
career, and by his private correspondence, we may well apply to the
first Lord Malmesbury the epithet by which M. Thiers has so truly
characterized Mr. Pitt--'ce pur Anglais.'
ART. IV.--_The Explorations in Palestine. Publications of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, viz._--
(1.) _Report of Preliminary Meeting, 1865._
(2.) _Captain Wilson's Expedition, 1866._
(3.) _Meeting at Cambridge, 1867._
(4.) _Annual Meeting, with Lieutenant Warren's Report, 1868._
(5.) _Statement of Progress, January 1st, 1869._
(6.) _Lieutenant Warren's Letters and Reports, with Lithographed Plans._
(7.) _Lieutenant Warren's Notes on the Valley of the Jordan, and
Excavations at Ain es Sultan (Jericho.)_
(8.) _Dean Stanley's Sermon on the Exploration of Palestine._
(9--15.) _Quarterly Statements_ I. _to_ VII., _April, 1869, to October,
1870._
(16.) _The Recovery of Jerusalem._ Edited by the Honorary Officers of
the Palestine Exploration Fund. With Fifty Illustrations. Richard
Bentley.
The Palestine Exploration Society was established in 1865, for the
accurate and systematic investigation of the archeology, topography,
geology, physical geography, and manners and customs of the Holy Land,
for Biblical illustration. The universality of interest belonging to
Palestine, and the inefficiency of individual efforts at exploration,
made the step advisable; while the success of the Ordnance Survey of
Jerusalem in 1864 at once suggested the scheme and gave encouragement to
its promoters. In the original prospectus of the Society it was proposed
to excavate at Jerusalem for the purpose of ascertaining the extent of
the Temple enclosure, the position of the tombs of the kings, the site
of the Tower of Antonia, &c; to examine other important sites, such as
Gerizim, Samaria, Jiljilieh (probably Gilgal) and the mounds at Jericho;
to collect materials for a work on manners and customs comparable to Mr.
Lane's 'Modern Egyptians;' to effect an accurate survey of the Holy
Land; to determine levels and sites and the course of ancient roads; to
investigate the geology of the country, especially in the Valley of
Jordan and basin of the Dead Sea; and lastly, to apply the same energy
and ability to the study of the botany, zoology, and meteorology of
Palestine, which naturalists have given to those of the forests of South
America and the rivers of Africa. The time is come when we may ask how
much of this programme has been carried out, and what amount of light,
if any, is being thrown on the Scriptural history. Three years ago, we
touched upon the subject;[10] but the Society was then in its infancy,
its work only just begun, and the publication of results confined to
one or two small pamphlets. We now have at least enough reports to make
a thick octavo volume, and these so packed with technical details that
they will have to be spread out into three volumes more before their
information can be grasped by the ordinary reader. We have, moreover,
now before us the book called the 'Recovery of Jerusalem,' which is
partly such an expansion and partly a comment on the work, with a trifle
of new material.
The active work of the Society commenced in December, 1865, when Captain
Wilson, E.E., and Lieutenant Anderson, E.E., with Corporal Phillips, as
photographer, landed at Beyrout, to probe the country from north to
south. Captain Wilson was the intelligent officer who had surveyed
Jerusalem the previous year, and given us a map of that city, as
accurate and reliable in every particular as any map to be had to-day of
the city of London. This first expedition, in the course of six months,
traversed Palestine from Damascus to Hebron, constructing a series of
maps of the entire backbone of the country, excavating at Tel Salhiyeh
(near Damascus), at Kedes (Kadesh Naphtali), and Mount Gerizim;
examining remains of ancient synagogues, copying old inscriptions,
collecting materials for about fifty plans, with detailed drawings of
churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and tombs, and tracing the
ancient system of irrigation of the Plain of Gennesareth. The report of
this tentative expedition was in favour of Jerusalem as the headquarters
of any future exploring party, since that city promised to prove the
greatest mine of discoveries, and to yield the quickest results.
Accordingly, in November, 1866, we find Lieutenant Warren, R.E., at work
in Palestine, at first with only Sergeant Birtles for his assistant, but
afterwards with several corporals as well, and with permission to engage
a number of native labourers, according to the amount of excavation
going on. Lieutenant Warren spent two months in survey-work east and
west of Jordan, and then concentrated his energies on Jerusalem, where
he laboured at shafts and galleries almost incessantly, till he was
invalided home, in May of the year 1870.
Although the operations at Jerusalem, besides being the more extensive,
are also the more interesting in character, it may be well to look,
first, at the results of Captain Wilson's expedition, and in connection
with that officer's work, to consider the later labours of Warren, where
they are of the same kind. First, with regard to the survey-work: it is
marvellous that we have never yet had a decently correct map of the land
in which all Christians are so much interested. The Admiralty have given
us correct charts of the coast-line, but in the interior of the country
hundreds of sites remain to be verified, and hundreds to be discovered;
while the east of Jordan is almost a _terra incognita_, and the maps of
it scarcely more than creations of the fancy. It is as though in England
we were acquainted with but the line of the Great Northern Railway and
the towns within a little distance of it on either side, and in Wales
knew only the position of three or four of the principal towns. The
Wilson exploring party fixed for the first time the exact latitude and
longitude of nearly seventy places between Damascus and Jerusalem,
determined many sites, ascertained heights, and recorded the features of
the ground along which they passed. Lieutenant Warren has obtained the
latitude and longitude of many scores of places, fixed the height of
some hundreds, and surveyed so much ground that the committee are able
to announce the map of Palestine, on the scale of one inch to the mile,
as 'now approaching completion.' Much of this work was done in the
dangerous country east of Jordan, where life is not safe without an
escort, and the sheikh who bargains to protect you is ready to sell you
to the next chieftain who thinks your friends can pay a ransom.
Connected with the surveying is the settlement of topographical
questions. We have seen an old book which professed to give the latitude
and longitude of every place visited by the Scriptural kings, prophets
and apostles, with their relative positions and distances from one
another in miles. Such information, if reliable, would be of great
value, for there is so close a connection between history and geography
that in some cases the first cannot be understood without a knowledge of
the second; and in most cases the geographical or topographical
knowledge will at least assist us to realise the history.
In this department our knowledge is still scanty, though good service
has been rendered by the explorers. The site of Capernaum, which has
been fixed in three different places by Egmont, Robinson, and De Saulcy,
and which Dean Stanley regarded as utterly lost, has been fixed by
Wilson with very small chance of error, where Soewulf placed it in the
beginning of the twelfth century, viz., at Tel Hum,[11] on the
north-western corner of the lake. The determining circumstance was the
discovery of the irrigation of the plain of Gennesareth, as described by
Josephus,[12] and its connection with the Tabighah Fountain, whereas
attention had previously been fixed on the Round Fountain. It is
confirmatory of Wilson's view, that while at the Round Fountain there
are no ruins, except some small foundations which may have been
anything, Tel Hum possesses extensive ruins, including those of a
synagogue. Two miles north of Tel Hum--at Kerazeh, a spot indicated by
the Rev. G. Williams, in 1842, and indeed by Pococke, as early as
1740--Lieutenant Anderson identified Chorazin, by the presence of
extensive remains, including those of a synagogue. Of no less interest
is the discovery of the scene of the destruction of the herd of swine.
Lord Lindsay, Mr. Elliott, and others had been on the eastern shores of
the lake, but their accounts were mutually contradictory; and Dean
Stanley, after rewriting his note on the place again and again, had been
obliged to scratch it out altogether. It now appears that there is only
one place--namely, Khersa, about half way between Wady Fîk and Wady
Semakh--which fulfils all the conditions required by the Biblical
narrative. The hills which everywhere else on the eastern side receded
from a half to three-quarters of a mile from the water's edge, here
approach within forty feet of it; not, indeed, terminating abruptly, but
presenting a steep, even slope. The 'Dictionary of the Bible' places the
scene at Gadara, now Um Keis, a place from which the swine would have
had a hard gallop of two hours before reaching the lake.
We have also in these publications an admirable paper by Captain Wilson,
'On the site of Ai and the position of the Altar which Abram built
between Bethel and Ai;' and another by the Rev. Dr. Zeller, Protestant
clergyman at Nazareth, on 'Kefr Kenna.' As the old Hebrew names of
places commonly cling to the spot under some Arabic disguise--the hill
of Dan, for instance, being now Tel el-Kadi (both Kadi in Arabic, and
Dan in Hebrew, being equivalent to 'judge' in English)--it is doing
good service to collect Arabic names. Great care, however, is needed in
this work, for the same _wady_ may have different names in different
parts; two or three hills, a fountain, and several ruins may all have
one name--that of the district; and the traveller may misunderstand the
Arabic answers to his questions. Mr. Layard tells a story of a
traveller, who published, for the benefit of those who might follow in
his footsteps, a little vocabulary, but whose own ignorance of the
language is shown by the fact that several places on his map are marked
with the word _Mabarafsh_. The fact was, that when the traveller asked
his guide the name of a place the man answered _Mabarafsh_--'I don't
know,' and down went this name on the map. In the same traveller's
vocabulary 'nose' is put down as _snuff_; for when he wanted the word
for nose he had probably raised his hand, and the Arab supposed he
wanted 'snuff.' Under these circumstances, it must have been very
satisfactory to Lieutenant Warren, after making a list of 150 places
visited or seen on the east of Jordan, to find that wherever Robinson
had been before him there was substantial agreement in the spelling.
Lieutenant Warren and Dr. Chaplin, of Jerusalem, also obtained many
names in the course of a tour from Jisr Damieh to Jisr Mejamia and back;
and the former has given us a list of thirty-four Tels in the Jordan
valley. More work of the same kind will have to be done, as there is
much confusion in the spelling of names; besides which there exist many
unnamed cities and ruins on both sides of the Jordan. South of Ammân
(the ancient Rabbath-Amman, and afterwards Philadelphia, 2 Sam. xi. and
xii.), Lieutenant Warren came upon a piece of elevated country, about
four miles square, literally covered with ruins of temples and houses.
The synagogue at Capernaum was only one out of nine synagogues examined
in the district north of the Sea of Galilee, and the investigation was
so thorough that the plan of the building was made out, and careful
drawings made and measurements taken. The result has been to dissipate
the idea that the synagogues were barn-like structures, and to prove
that they had considerable architectural pretensions.
'They all lie north and south, have three gateways in the
southern end, the interior divided into five aisles, by
four rows of columns, and the two northern corners formed
by double engaged columns. The style of decoration does not
always appear to have been the same. At Tel Hum (the
strongest claimant for the site of Capernaum) and Kerazeh
(Chorazin), Corinthian capitals were found; at Irbid, a
mixture of Corinthian and Ionic; whilst Kefr Birim, Meiron,
Um el-Amud have capitals of a peculiar character. The faces
of the lintels over the gateway are usually ornamented with
some device; at Nebartein there is an inscription and
representation of the seven-branched candlestick; at Kefr
Birim the ornament appears to have been intended for the
Paschal lamb; and at Tel Hum there are the pot of manna and
lamb. A scroll of vine leaves, with bunches of grapes, is
one of the most frequent ornaments. The investigator cannot
fail to be struck by their resemblance in plan--accidental
or otherwise--to the palaces of Persepolis and to the House
of the Forest of Lebanon, built by Solomon.'
For particular description and measurements our architectural readers
must be referred to Captain Wilson's paper in Quarterly Statement No.
II. These synagogues date either from the Christian era or the centuries
immediately following. Mr. R. Phené Spiers, M.R.I.B.A., says, from the
third to the sixth centuries, inclusive. The Rev. George Williams, of
Cambridge, assigns them to a period prior to the destruction of
Jerusalem, both because the depopulation of the country after that event
made it almost impossible that they should have been built subsequently,
and because the style of ornament so much resembled that of the tombs of
the kings (so-called) at Jerusalem. In that case they may have been
trodden by the feet of Christ; and the ruins of Capernaum may be remains
of the very building concerning which the Jewish elders said, the
centurion is worthy--'for he loveth our nation, and hath built us the
synagogue.' Yet Dr. Robinson, whose ears and eyes seemed to be open to
hear and see all that was really to be heard and seen in connection with
sacred topography, did not mention these various ruins till his second
journey in 1852, giving then only a brief account of them, while
previous to that year there had been no account of them at all.
Another admirable paper of Wilson's, also illustrated with plans, is 'On
the Remains of Tombs in Palestine.' Rock-hewn tombs appear to be the
earliest in date, and are the tombs most commonly met with, the softer
strata of limestone, especially the white chalk in some districts, being
well adapted for excavation. Sometimes a natural cavern is made use of,
sometimes a square or oblong chamber is cut in the rock, while in a
third class one entrance leads into a number of sepulchral chambers; and
in all these cases _loculi_ or resting-places for the bodies are either
sunk in the surface of the rock much after the manner of a modern grave,
or driven into the rock-face like a small tunnel or pigeon-hole. In the
so-called tomb of Joshua at Tibneh, after passing through a chamber with
fourteen _loculi_, a smaller one is reached which has only one _loculus_
at its extreme end, an arrangement not noticed elsewhere; the face and
sides of the porch are nearly covered with niches for lamps, and round
the door are traces of plaster. The tombs of the kings at Jerusalem come
into this class, and are described, as well as the tombs of the
prophets, the tombs of the Judges, and a large tomb discovered by Lieut.
Warren in the Kedron valley. Masonry tombs, which constitute the second
class, are few in number, and confined to the northern portion of the
country. It is possible that at Tel Hum, where the (basaltic) rock is so
hard as to make excavation difficult, this form of tomb was commonly
used. If the tombs in which the demoniac lived were of this description,
their disappearance is not at all surprising. Besides these two classes
of tombs, and their subdivisions, sarcophagi are sometimes found, those
at Kedes (Kadesh Naphtali, the city of refuge in the midst of Canaanite
strongholds) being the most elaborately ornamented. The material is hard
white limestone, almost marble, and the workmanship is excellent: the
usual design on the sides is a garland held up in two or more loops by
nude figures, with some device over each end and a bunch of grapes
hanging from the bottom. Two sarcophagi have been shipped to England by
Lieut. Warren, and were exhibited, with other articles, at the Dudley
Gallery in the summer of last year.
A paper in these Quarterly Statements, which has greatly pleased the
architects is that on the ruined temples of Coele-Syria. In the summer
of 1869, _Captain_ Warren (we are glad to notice his promotion) was
obliged to take his party to the Lebanon in consequence of their having
suffered severely from fever in Jerusalem. While there they occupied
themselves in investigating the ruined temples of Coele-Syria and
Mount Hermon, and the exhaustive manner in which the work was done,
places us in possession of so much information that we may be said to
have previously known nothing at all on the subject. The extremely
careful tracings (fifteen in number) sent home by Captain Warren are to
be seen at the office of the Fund; but two of them, selected by the
advice of Mr. Fergusson, are given to subscribers with Captain Warren's
complete and detailed account of the temples in Quarterly Statement No.
V. The temples of Coele-Syria date from Roman times, and the
inscriptions found on them are mostly Greek. The small temples about
Mount Hermon appear to be somewhat more ancient, their architecture
being of the Ionic order. On the summit of Hermon stands the ruins of a
sacellum, _i.e._, a rectangular building without a roof, which has
nothing in its construction in common with the temples on the west
below, and which probably had to do with a different and more ancient
form of worship. Captain Warren's investigations led him into a
discussion of the question of the orientation of heathen temples. It had
been surmised by Dr. Robinson and several other writers that the temples
about Hermon were turned towards it as to a kibleh, so that the
worshippers might face it when they prayed; but now that the directions
and angles are taken, it is found that they all have their entrances
more or less towards the _east_, and in no case does the entrance or any
side of the building face direct upon the summit of Hermon. The Jewish
tabernacle and afterwards the temple at Jerusalem faced the
east--according to Josephus--in order that when the sun arose it might
send its first rays upon it; according to some of the Jews of the
present day, in order that the priest might watch for the first dawn of
day in offering up the morning sacrifice.
The principle which accounts for the eastward aspect of the temple at
Jerusalem, accounts also for the southward aspect of the synagogues of
Galilee: as that was open to the east, so they were open to the temple.
It would be a crucial test of this theory to examine the remains of a
synagogue said to exist near Beersheba, the only ruin of the kind which
is not due north from Jerusalem.
The mention of temples reminds us that on Mount Gerizim numerous
excavations were made under the direction of Lieut. Anderson. Within the
ruins known as the 'Castle,' the foundations of an octagonal church were
laid bare, probably the church known to have been built there by
Justinian. On the eastern side of the church is an apse, on the northern
side the main entrance, and on each of the others, doors leading to
small side chapels. In the interior are the piers of a smaller octagon,
apparently intended to carry a dome. The church and castle were found to
be built on a rough platform of large stones laid together without
mortar, and of this--which may possibly be the platform on which the
Samaritan Temple stood--the 'twelve stones,' fabled to have been brought
up by the tribes from the bed of the Jordan, form a portion. No trace
of large foundations could be found on the southern portion of the small
plateau on which the castle stands. Close to the Holy Rock of the
Samaritans a number of human remains were dug up, but no clue could be
obtained to their age or nationality. The study of the synagogue remains
of Galilee, as well as the temples, mosques, churches, tombs,
inscriptions, aqueducts, castles, theatres, ruined cities and general
aspect of the country, is much facilitated by the series of 350
photographs taken by the two expeditions, which are most of them
beautifully executed and very many of them taken for the first time.
We must now follow Captain Warren to Jerusalem, where the longer course
of the operations supplies us with larger results for criticism; and the
_reason_ for the more extended labours is a reason for our devoting more
space to their consideration; it being simply the paramount interest of
Jerusalem and the richness of the field Scripturally, historically, and
archæologically. The ground on which the city of Jerusalem stands is
included in a fork between two ravines, whose point of union is to the
south-east of the city, near the Well of Joab, and which, if we trace
them backward, may be said to clasp the city, the one on the south and
west, the other on the east. The eastern ravine is known as the Valley
of Jehoshaphat or of the Kedron, the westernmost as the Valley of
Hinnom. On the north side they run up to the level of the northern part
of the city; so that Jerusalem is not an isolated hill, but the southern
tongue of a great plateau which stretches away northward. This
table-land is one of the highest in the country, and Jerusalem is about
2,500 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, while the Dead Sea,
only twelve miles to the east, is 1,300 feet below the same. Of the
cities of Palestine, Jerusalem alone is thus entrenched with deep
ravines--a mountain fastness, with natural defences on every side except
the north; and to this circumstance she owed in a great measure her
early strength and subsequent greatness. After Joshua's conquest, the
aboriginal inhabitants of Palestine, who elsewhere lingered only in the
plains, were, able here to maintain a position in the hills;[13] and
Joshua, Barak, Gideon, and Saul passed away without seeing the Jebusites
conquered. When David became king of all Israel, it was necessary to fix
his capital farther north than Hebron, and no city appeared so suitable
as Jebus, both on account of its strength and its central position, and
perhaps also from the circumstance that it was partly in the tribe of
Judah, to which David belonged, and partly in Benjamin, the tribe of
Saul. So strong was the citadel that the blind and the lame were thought
sufficient to defend the walls; but the steep ascent was climbed by
Joab, and David 'took the stronghold of Zion.' Before David's time the
men of Judah and the men of Benjamin had gained some partial successes
at Jerusalem, and perhaps before the Israelitish invasion the city had
experienced varied fortunes in the wars of the aboriginal tribes among
themselves. But in the 3,000 years since David's time, how eventful has
been its history! From David to Nebuchadnezzar, from Nebuchadnezzar to
Pompey and Titus, from Titus to the Crusaders, from Saladin to Sultan
Suliman, who built the present walls in 1542, the sieges have been no
fewer than twenty; while the city has been four or five times sacked or
utterly destroyed.
It is very much in consequence of the repeated destruction of its walls
and buildings that its topography has become so much obscured. This
could hardly have been the case with any other city of which we had such
full descriptions, nor with Jerusalem if ravines had not run _through_
the city as well as round it; the _débris_ has found its way into these
intramural valleys, from which its removal was difficult and perhaps
inadvisable. The description which Josephus gives of the city is as
follows:--
'The city was built upon two hills, which are opposite to
one another and have a valley to divide them asunder; at
which valley the corresponding rows of houses on both hills
end. Of these hills that which contains the upper city is
much higher, and in length more direct. Accordingly it was
called the citadel by king David (he was the father of that
Solomon who built this temple at the first); but it is by
us called the Upper Market Place. But the other hill, which
was called Akra, and sustains the lower city, is of the
shape of a crescent moon. Over against this was a third
hill, but naturally lower than Akra, and parted formerly
from the other by a broad valley. However, in those times
when the Asamoneans reigned, they filled up that valley
with earth and had a mind to join the city to the temple.
They then took off part of the height of Akra and reduced
it to be of less elevation than it was before, that the
temple might be superior to it. Now, the valley of the
cheesemakers, as it was called, being that which we told
you before distinguished the hill of the upper city from
that of the lower, extended as far as Siloam; for that is
the name of a fountain which hath sweet water in it, and
that in great plenty also. But on the outsides these hills
are surrounded by deep valleys, and by reason of the
precipices to them belonging on both sides, they are
everywhere unpassable.[14]
'In section 2 of the same chapter, he says, "It was Agrippa
who encompassed the parts added to the old city with this
[third] wall, which had been all naked before; for as the
city grew more populous it gradually crept beyond its old
limits, and those parts of it that stood northward of the
temple and joined that hill to the city, made it
considerably larger, and occasioned that hill, which is in
number the fourth, and is called Bezetha, to be inhabited
also."'
It would be easy from these descriptions to trace an ideal map of
Jerusalem with its ancient hills and valleys; but such a map would not
correspond by a long way with Jerusalem as it is now. The city, as
enclosed by its walls to-day, approximates to the form of a
parallelogram whose eastern and western sides run north and south, but
whose western side as a whole stands more southerly than its eastern
side as a whole. From outside the Damascus Gate, near the middle of the
north wall, a very marked valley traverses the city, deepening as it
runs southward, and terminating by a junction with the Kedron valley
outside the south wall, near the Pool of Siloam. The half of the city to
the west of this valley is the higher of the two, and is itself highest
at its north-western part; the half of the city to the east consists of
the Haram esh-Sherêf--a raised platform about 1,500 feet from north to
south and 900 feet from east to west, and of about an equal space of
streets and houses. The Haram is the southern portion and is separately
enclosed with walls, though its entire east wall and two-thirds of the
south are coincident, so far, with the walls of the city. The one valley
from Damascus Gate gives us two hills within the city; but according to
Josephus there were four, and even if we suppose that Bezetha, the 'new
town,' last added to the city, was afterwards excluded from it by a
narrowing of the compass of the walls, we must still find a second
valley to give us a third hill. In the part of the city to the north of
the Haram area a valley runs down from Herod's Gate in the north wall
towards St. Stephen's Gate in the east wall; but the narrow ridge on the
north-east side of this valley is connected with the high ground outside
the city, and can hardly be of itself the third hill we are in search
of. There must have been a valley then which has become obliterated--in
fact, Josephus tells us that the Maccabees did fill up a valley, to
connect the city with the temple, in the second century B.C. But
inasmuch as the valley is not now apparent, it has to be supplied from
conjecture, and in consequence we have had a mass of topographical
controversy unequalled for its extent, its confusion, and its
bitterness. The valley from the Damascus Gate is usually identified with
Josephus's Tyropoeon valley or valley of the cheesemakers; but some
writers bring a valley across from the Jaffa Gate, which is near the
middle of the west wall, into this north-and-south valley, and call it
the Tyropoeon from Jaffa Gate to Siloam. The valley from Damascus
Gate, again, is often made to send off a branch to the east across the
Haram platform, cutting it sometimes near its northern wall and
sometimes farther south than the dome of the rock or Mosque of Omar,
which stands on a smaller platform near the centre of the larger. It is
disputed, also, which is the valley of Hinnom, which the valley of
Kedron, whether Hinnom was not on the east of the city, and whether
Gihon did not come down through the middle of the city.
The fate of the valleys determines the fate of the hills, and we are
perplexed to know which was Mount Zion, which Moriah, and which Akra,
nothing seeming to be certain except that the modern Zion (the western
hill) is not the ancient Zion, that the Temple (and therefore Moriah)
was somewhere within the Haram enclosure, and that the hill to the east
of the present Kedron valley is the Mount of Olives. The position of the
hills and valleys determines the course of the streams; for the brook
Kedron presumably followed the valley of that name, the Pools of Gihon
were in the valley of Gihon (if there was a valley of Gihon); and when
Hezekiah 'brought the upper watercourse of Gihon straight down to the
west side of the city of David,' the direction of the new channel
depends on the position assigned to 'the city of David, which is
Zion.'[15] On the position and contour of the hills, again, depends the
direction of the ancient walls; for these would in general follow the
brow of the hill, except on the north side, where the ground made no
descent, while Zion appears to have been separately enclosed, so as to
need a siege by itself. Until we know the direction of the walls, we
know not where to look for the gates and towers, nor for the sepulchres
of the kings, which were most of them within the city of David;[16] nor
for the Holy Sepulchre, which was _outside_ the gates. A grand point
also is the exact site of the temple, which carries with it that of
Antonia, which Josephus says was at the junction of the north and west
cloisters, and may also help us to find Solomon's palace, and to
determine the position of the king's gardens. It must be evident that,
while these points remain unsettled, the history of Jerusalem, from
David's age to that of Titus, must lack for us the definiteness and
vividness which are so essential to its complete understanding. Of
theories we have had enough--they are guesses not without a certain
value, but guesses almost in the dark--facts are wanted, to test and
correct the theories; and these facts the Palestine Exploration
Committee promised to supply.
Captain Warren saw that two courses were open to him, in his endeavours
to recover a first thread of the old topography--(1) to obtain the
contours of the ground as they existed in olden times; (2) to dig about
the supposed site of some remarkable building, in hopes of finding its
remains. Both these methods were adopted; and although excavation is not
allowed in the sacred places, and the work has been crippled elsewhere
for want of funds, enough has been ascertained to settle several
disputed points, and to alter the conditions of controversy for time to
come. First, as regards the hills and valleys, the Tyropoeon valley,
which it was conjectured might contain thirty or forty feet of _débris_,
is found, by excavation, to be filled up in some places to nearly one
hundred feet; and instead of presenting an even slope, its western side
is nearly level, the final descent being very steep, and the lowest
course of the valley being _inside_ the Haram, about sixty feet east of
the south-west angle. The Kedron valley is found to contain sixty or
eighty feet of loose stone chippings and other _débris_, forming a
sloping bank, with an inclination of about thirty degrees, and having
its base resting against the western slope of Olivet. One effect of this
accumulation has been to alter the bed of the stream, so far as there is
now any stream at all, pushing it forty feet to the east, and raising it
thirty-eight feet from its old level. At what must have been the ancient
bed of the brook the remains of a masonry wall were touched; between
that line and the east of the Haram several other walls were
encountered, and at last progress up the hill was stopped--at a point
fifty feet east of the Haram--by a massive masonry wall, into which
Warren drove a hole five feet, and then had to give up the business. A
contribution from M. Clermont Ganneau, of the French Consulate at
Jerusalem, affords Mr. Warren an argument in favour of the identity of
Kedron and Hinnom. There have always been several reasons for
considering the Virgin's Fount, in the Kedron, to be the same with En
Rogel, where Adonijah was saluted as king, though many place it at the
Well of Joab, lower down. Near to En Rogel was the stone of Zoheleth (1
Kings i. 9), and near to the Virgin's Fount M. Ganneau discovers a rock
called Ez Zehwele; so that the statements of Joshua xv. and xviii.,
which make the border between Judah and Benjamin to pass Zoheleth to En
Rogel, and thence up the valley of Hinnom, seem to identify Hinnom with
what is now called Kedron. As the Kedron has three names to-day in
different parts of its course, there would thus far be no objection to a
fourth, but the statements in Joshua seem to us to point to some valley
more westward than that now called Kedron. The principal reason for
tracing the Tyropoeon from the Jaffa Gate arises from Josephus's
description of the valley as an open space or depression within the
city, 'at which the corresponding rows of houses on both hills end.'
This was held to be more applicable to a valley running from the Jaffa
Gate than to that from the Damascus Gate when the slope is so gradual
that the rows of houses now run across it without interruption, besides
which it probably had formerly a wall on either side of it. Mr.
Lewin[17] speaks positively as to the Tyropoeon commencing at the
Jaffa Gate, and says it can be traced thence to the Haram by the _rise_
of ground which is still very perceptible on the right hand, as you walk
down the street from the gate to the Haram. He makes this valley the
boundary of the high town on the north, and puts his first wall on the
southern brow of it. It is difficult to see on this hypothesis how the
hill of the high town could be 'in length more direct' than the eastern
hill, as Josephus says it was; or how the corresponding rows of houses
could meet any more readily than near Damascus Gate. However, Mr.
Warren, after excavation, tells us that 'a very decided valley runs down
from the Jaffa Gate to the Tyropoeon, near Wilson's arch;' and he
found under the causeway leading westward from Wilson's arch, vaults and
chambers, and a secret passage, at a depth which serves to confirm his
view. There is no disputing facts, though it seems to us still
questionable whether this valley is any part of the Tyropoeon of
Josephus. The valley running south-east from Herod's Gate, in the
north-east part of the north wall, proves to be longer and deeper than
any theorist had imagined, running into the Kedron at a point between
the north-east angle of the Haram and the Golden Gate, and being filled
in with more than 100 feet of _débris_. The Pool of Bethesda, which is
360 feet in length, is imbedded in this valley, and stretches across it,
having its ends formed by the rocky sides of the valley, and its sides
built up of masonry; and since it is found lined with concrete, it must
have been a reservoir, and not the fosse of Antonia, which Robinson
supposed it to be.[18]
The valley which Simon Maccabeus filled up[19] is made by Mr. Lewin to
coincide with the northern half of what is usually called the
Tyropoeon--the part from Damascus Gate, down to near Wilson's arch.
Other writers identify it with a supposed branch of the Tyropoeon,
curving to the east across the Haram. Josephus tells us that when Pompey
beseiged Jerusalem he took up his position on the _north_ of the temple,
in the only part where an assault was practicable; and that even there
the temple was defended by high towers, and a trench, _and by a deep
ravine_. The position which various writers give to this ravine depends
upon their idea as to the site of the temple. Mr. Fergusson[20] thinks
that the valley of the Asamoneans was a 'tranverse cut, separating the
hill Bezetha from the Akra or citadel, on the temple hill.' Mr.
Thrupp[21] allows a valley on the north side of the temple, and reminds
us that traces of a valley debouching into the valley of Kedron, near
the middle of the eastern wall of the Haram, and which seemed to have
been artificially filled up, were detected by the late Dr. Shultz.
Shultz identifies these traces as those of the valley filled up by the
Asamoneans; but Thrupp holds him to be mistaken in doing so. Mr.
Sandie[22] puts forth the recognition of such a valley as the special
characteristic of his view of ancient Jerusalem; but he places it south
of the dome of the rock. He moreover identifies it with 'the ravine
called Kedron' (τὴν Κεδρῶνα καλουμένην φάραγγα), which Josephus tells us
was overlooked by the north-east wall of the temple,[23] and by which he
does not mean the valley of Kedron, since he always calls the latter
'Kedron' simply. Mr. Lewin, again, makes this ravine to be 'the slip of
ground between the temple and the city wall, reaching from Bethesda on
the north to Ophla on the south,' _i.e._, the eastern side of the
present Haram platform, which is, or was, the west bank of the present
Kedron valley. It is difficult to see how this could have been a ravine
at all; but Mr. Lewin translates '_so-called_ Kedron ravine,' and seems
to think the expression implies that Josephus did not consider the term
'ravine' quite legitimate. Even if this were so, the illegitimacy of the
designation might result from the circumstance that what was once a
ravine had since been filled up by the Maccabeans and by Pompey.[24] But
we must come to facts.
First of all, Captain Warren tells us that there was no ravine south
of the dome of the rock, for 'the crest of the rocky spur runs from the
north-west angle of the Dome-of-Rock platform in a south-east direction
to the triple gate in the south wall; and at these two points, and in
the line between them, the rock is at the surface.' Secondly, in
December, 1868, when the displacement of a stone by the rains enabled
Captain Warren to descend beneath the surface of the Haram, he found a
souterrain running east and west, in the line of the northern edge of
the Mosque platform, the southern side of it being scarped rock, on
which the wall supporting the northern edge of the Mosque platform is
built, but the rock itself appearing to 'shelve down rapidly to the
north.' In the following month Captain Warren ventured to suggest on
plan (lithographed plan 32) the possible course of a valley coming from
the Gate of the Inspector in the Tyropoeon, and running past the
north-western corner of the Dome-of-Rock, out eastward through the
Birket Israil (Pool of Bethesda). The souterrain may, as Captain Warren
observes, be claimed by one party as the ditch on the northern wall of
the temple, and by another as the northern ditch of Antonia; and the
valley--which owes its depth in one part of its course to what is
doubtingly called a 'natural or artificial ditch'--will of course be
claimed as that of the Asamoneans.
It is thus, in our opinion, rendered probable that the ground to the
west of that valley which runs from Damascus Gate constituted the old
town, the φρούριον of David's time, the upper market-place of
the days of Josephus; that the dome of the rock and the space to the
south of it represent the old Temple-hill; that to the north of this was
the valley of the Asamoneans; that between the latter and the valley
from Herod's Gate was the city of David, or Zion,[25] and that
north-east of the last-named valley was Bezetha. The name Zion got
transferred to the Temple-hill, or was made to include it, before or
during the times of the Maccabees, probably after the filling-up of the
intervening valley, and in the early centuries of the Christian era was
transferred to the western hill, which, after the Akra was cut down, was
the highest hill of the city.[26] Certainly there is still room for some
controversy on these points, and Captain Warren contributes something to
the discussion, in a long paper on the 'Comparative Holiness of Mounts
Zion and Moriah,' in which he argues that Zion was considered holy when
the ark was there, in David's time; that after the ark (and the
holiness) were transferred to Moriah, the name Zion got transferred
also, and that Josephus refrains from using the term Zion because he is
aware of this confusion.
If the Tyropoeon valley extended from Damascus Gate southward, and the
city of David was on the eastern side of it, north of the temple, then
the water which Hezekiah diverted from its course, and brought down to
the west side of the city of David (2 Chron. xxxii. 30), and yet _into_
the city of Jerusalem (2 Kings xx. 20) was probably brought in at
Damascus Gate, and ran towards the Kedron, either on the west side of
the temple, or by the Maccabean valley, on the northern side. In the
southern half of the Tyropoeon valley, outside the west wall of the
Haram, Captain Warren has found, at a depth of seventy or eighty feet, a
rock-cut aqueduct, twelve feet deep and six feet wide, with round
rock-cut pools at intervals, and shafts which indicate that pure water
was drawn from it. As Hezekiah brought the stream down from 'the upper
watercourse of Gihon,' this discovery has a direct bearing on the
question of the position of 'the upper pool,' and of 'Gihon, in the
valley,'where Solomon was anointed king; but as the upper part of the
Tyropoeon has not been excavated, it remains uncertain whether the
water came in by Damascus Gate or Jaffa Gate, and consequently what
position of Zion is favoured by the finding of this aqueduct.
The search for the old walls of the city has only been partially carried
out. Here, again, we have Josephus's explicit description, and the usual
differences among the commentators.
'The city of Jerusalem was fortified with three walls, on such parts as
were not encompassed with unpassable valleys; for in such places it had
but one wall.... The old wall began on the north at the tower called
Hippicus, and extended as far as the Xistus, a place so called, and
then, joining to the Council-house, ended at the west cloister of the
temple. But if we go the other way westward, it began at the same place,
and extended through a place called Bethso to the Gate of the Essenes;
and after that it went southward, having its bending above the fountain
Siloam, where it also bends again towards the east at Solomon's pool,
and reaches as far as a certain place which they called Ophlas, were it
was joined to the eastern cloister of the temple. The second wall took
its beginning from that gate which they call Gennath, which belonged to
the first wall; it only encompassed the northern quarter of the city,
and reached as far as the tower Antonia. The beginning of the third wall
was at the tower Hippicus, whence it readied as far as the north quarter
of the city, and the tower Psephinus, and then was so far extended till
it came over against the monuments of Helena (which Helena was Queen of
Adiabene, the daughter of Izates); it then extended farther to a great
length, and passed by the sepulchral caverns of the kings, and bent
again at the tower of the corner, at the monument which is called the
monument of the Fuller, and joined to the old wall at the ravine called
Kedron.'[27]
As many writers make the northern part of the first wall to have run
from the Jaffa Gate eastward, Captain Warren spent some time in
excavating in the Muristan, a large open space in the city, the old
burial-place of the Knights Hospitallers; but he found 'nothing but
confusion in the shape of old walls running at one another in all
directions.' At Wilson's arch, however, near the Haram wall, and nearly
due east from the Jaffa Gate, he discovered an old city gateway at a
great depth. If we could find traces of the tower Hippicus we should
come upon the first and third walls together, and similarly the gate
Gennath would put us on the line of the first and second walls. The
theories of some writers compel them to put Hippicus at the Jaffa Gate,
where they think they see its representative in the present Castle of
David. But we agree with Mr. Fergusson, that the remains called _Kasr
Jalud_ at the north-west corner of the city suit better with Josephus's
description. To this point Captain Warren has not yet been able to give
much attention; but the so-called Gennath Gate was examined both by
Wilson and by Warren, and pronounced by the former to be of
comparatively modern construction, by the latter to be ancient,
'especially as its style is Roman.' The gate rests in made earth.
The Damascus Gate is built of two very different styles of masonry, one
of them apparently very old; and it suits the views of several writers,
who differ as to the course of the first wall, that this gate and the
portion of wall immediately east of it should be part of the second wall
of the city.[28] At the Damascus Gate excavation brought to light 'a
very ancient wall ten feet six inches in thickness, built with bevelled
stones similar to those of the Jews' Wailing Place;' but the wall would
seem to be built out of old materials, since stones of more recent date
were found among them; and at the foot of the wall lay a stone with a
Templar's cross on it.
The third wall has probably almost or quite disappeared, for when
Hadrian was re-erecting the walls in A.D., 136, he would not think it
necessary to go out so far; the population had diminished, and to
construct armour without, so disproportionate to the shrunken body
within, would have been simply ridiculous. If any part of the third wall
remained, we might suppose it to be at the northern part of the present
east wall; but here excavation shows that there has been 'no destruction
of extensive buildings so far north as St. Stephen's Gate,' that the
wall itself is 'of no very ancient date,' and that 'of the city wall to
the east, the north-east angle of the Haram area is the first sign from
the northern end of anything ancient in appearance.'
Perhaps there is here a little room for error; for where the rock is
high, the absence of much _débris_ may not imply that there has been no
great destruction of buildings; but simply that the rubbish has found
its way to the valleys or was not suffered to accumulate.
South of the Haram wall, the hill, which is now chiefly occupied by
small vegetable gardens, in terraces of six to ten feet high, must have
been at one time covered with houses, for every shaft sunk brought to
light remains of buildings, drains, scarped and cut rock, and
antiquities of various dates. A cavern cut out of the rock, appears to
have been at first a dyer's shop and afterwards a stable, while early
Christian glass and pottery was found in a drain above it. Tradition
relates that St. James was cast over the outer wall of the temple
enclosure, and that 'a fuller took the club with which he pressed the
clothes, and brought it down on the head of the just one.' This hill is
frequently identified with Ophel, where Jotham and Manasseh built (2
Chron. xxvii. 3; xxxiii. 14; Neh, iii. 26, 27; xi. 21), though whether
Ophel referred to the whole of the swelling hill or to a tumour-like
tower in some part of it was not certain.[29] In this district Warren
has discovered a massive wall, from twelve to fourteen feet thick, which
abuts on the Haram wall (but does not bond into it) at a point twelve
feet six inches west of the south-east angle of the Haram, which runs
first of all sixty feet due south, and then takes a bend to the
south-west, in which direction it runs for 700 feet, and then ends
abruptly. The wall is still from forty to sixty feet in height, and the
rock is scarped for thirty feet below it, while solid towers of masonry
are found at intervals along its course. This discovery will have to be
taken into consideration by those who bring the south wall of the city
up from Siloam, and make it join the third wall at a point 600 feet from
the south-west angle of the present Haram, and therefore more than 300
feet from the point where this wall abuts. The curious rock-cut
connection which Warren found between the Virgin's Fount and a shaft
opening from Ophel, would seem to be a device for supplying the
inhabitants of this district with water, in a secret way; reminding us
of the work of Hezekiah, and possibly being of the same date.
A question of paramount interest is the site of the successive temples
of Solomon, Zerubabel and Herod. It is universally allowed that the
temple stood on that hill which we call Moriah, and within the present
sacred area; but while Josephus describes it as a square of 600 feet (1
stadium), in the side, the dimensions of the Haram are, according to
Catherwood, 1,520 feet on the east side, 1,617 feet on the west, 1,020
on the north, and 932 on the south. The way being thus open for
conjecture, we have had the usual differences of opinion, and the temple
has been variously placed at the south-west angle, the centre of the
area, the southern half of the area, the northern half, or has even been
made coincident with the entire Haram. A few shafts and galleries would
probably settle this question, and in showing us the foundations of the
temple, give us the key to most of the old topography; but unfortunately
the reservation made by the Turkish Government has compelled Captain
Warren to labour only outside the enclosure. Still, as there was reason
to think that one or more of the Haram walls or angles might coincide in
position with those of the temple, there was room for discovery by
exterior examination. The theory of Catherwood and of De Vogüé, that the
whole of the area belonged to the temple, may be dismissed as being
inconsistent with the measurements of Josephus. The discovery of the
transverse valley and of the prolongation of the valley from Herod's
Gate appear to be fatal to Williams's view, that the temple stood in the
northern half of the Haram and stretched all across it.
A favourite theory is that of Fergusson, Lewin, and others, that the
temple occupied the south-west angle of the area, its south and west
walls coinciding with those of the Haram for a distance of 600 feet from
the corner. The chief positive evidence for this view consists in the
fact that the south-west angle is the only right angle of the present
walls, that some of the stones existing in that part of the wall to-day
are so immense as to justify Josephus's description of stones 'immovable
for all time' and that the spring stones of an arch discovered by
Robinson in the western wall, commencing about forty feet from the
south-west angle, would be in the centre of the great Stoa Basilica of
the temple. This cloister, according to the Jewish historian, was on the
south wall, overhanging the valley, and communicated by steps with the
upper city.[30] The arch of Robinson was often assumed to be the first
of a series, and 'Robinson's bridge or viaduct' was attributed by Lewin
to Solomon, and identified as that which was broken away by the
followers of Aristobulus, in Pompey's time.[31] Signor Pierotti had
scratched up a few feet of earth, and not finding any trace of a pier,
declared that there could not have been a bridge. The excavations of
Capt. Warren have shown that the south-west angle of the Haram is buried
for about ninety feet, while in the Tyropoeon valley the rock from the
western side rather rises than falls until it is within 200 feet of the
sanctuary wall, and then shelves down very rapidly. The actual pier of
an arch has been discovered, with three courses of stones _in situ_,
twelve feet two inches in thickness, commencing at forty-one feet six
inches from the wall, within a few inches of the span assigned by
Robinson. The length of the spring-stones is given by Wilson as fifty
feet, and the pier is found to measure fifty-one feet six inches, and
has its northern end eighty-nine feet from the south-west angle, nearly
corresponding to the spring stones. The stones of the pier are precisely
similar to those of the south-west angle, and presumably of the same
age; but the inference that they are therefore of the age of Solomon is
checked by the next discovery. Stretching between the pier and the
sanctuary wall is a pavement, on which some of the fallen voussoirs of
the arch are resting, but underneath the pavement are twenty-three feet
of _débris_, covering two older voussoirs, which have crushed into the
arched roof of an aqueduct which may be older still--the aqueduct
previously spoken of in connexion with Hezekiah. These historical
_strata_ seem to yield evidence as follows:--
1. The winding rock-cut aqueduct was constructed.
2. The west Haram wall was afterwards built, the aqueduct arched over,
and a bridge thrown across from the Haram area to the western side of
the valley.
3. The arch of the bridge fell (two voussoirs still remain), smashing in
part of the arch of the aqueduct.
4. _Débris_ began to fill up the valley, a pavement was constructed upon
it, which still remains, about twenty feet above the top of the
aqueduct; and shafts were constructed at intervals from the pavement
down to the aqueduct, in order to obtain water readily. Another arch was
built.
5. The arch fell, and now rests upon the pavement.
6. _Débris_ began to fill up the valley over the fallen arch, the pier
of which standing out was removed, all except the three lowest courses.
7. Houses were built on a level twenty feet above the pavement.
8. These houses fell into ruin and the _débris_ accumulated to its
present level, viz., forty-five feet above the pavement.
No remains of any second arch of the supposed viaduct have been found;
but three arches with a staircase to west would have sufficed to bridge
the gulf, and there does exist a colonnade in ruins in continuation of
the line of Robinson's arch. It is part of the view which places the
temple at the south-west angle, that the three other gates and roadways
mentioned by Josephus as connecting its west side with the city and
suburbs[32] should be traceable between Robinson's arch and a point 600
feet from the south-west angle. The first of these gates--apparently the
most northern--'led to the king's palace, and went to a passage over the
intermediate valley.' It is remarkable that at a distance of 600 feet
from the south-west angle we have a causeway which crosses the valley,
while from this point the western wall no longer follows the same
direction, but inclines slightly to the westward. This causeway
commences with an arch nearly as large as Robinson's, discovered by Dr.
Barclay, of the United States, measured by Captain Wilson, and known as
Wilson's arch. This arch is now found to be in a perfect condition and
elevated 120 feet above the lowest part of the valley, while the
causeway to west is a succession of vaults on vaults, and is about
eighty feet above the rock. The passage--the way to the king's
palace--has also apparently come to light in the form of a secret
tunnel, which has been traced westward for 250 feet, at which point it
is under the house of Joseph Effendi, and is used as a cistern.
Of the two intermediate gates, the southern should be by calculation 264
feet from the south-west angle of the Haram area; and at 270 feet there
is in the Haram wall an enormous lintel, which was first brought
prominently into notice in this century by Dr. Barclay, in his 'City of
the Great King.' The bottom of the lintel is five feet five inches above
the surface of the ground, and Warren has ascertained that the sill is
about thirty feet below the lintel, while the road up to it seems to
have been by a causeway raised forty-six feet above the rock. We have,
then, in the western portion of the Haram wall two bridges and one gate;
but the most persevering search has not been rewarded by the discovery
of any second gate between the two bridges. Moreover, the spring of
Wilson's arch is seven feet above that of Robinson, its pier is for the
first nineteen feet built up of rough blocks (that of Robinson's of
smooth stones), and the voussoirs are of a style said to be of the later
days of the Roman empire; though, like the more southern arch, it
appears to have had a predecessor on the same spot.
Of the new evidence furnished by the explorations, the balance seems,
after all, to tell against the south-west angle as the site of the
temple. It has already been stated that the original bed of the
Tyropoeon valley comes out through the south wall of the Haram, about
sixty feet from the south-west angle; and it is only stating the fact in
other words to say that for sixty feet the south wall is carried up the
slope of the modern Mount Zion. In the other direction, if we measure
off 600 feet from the south-west angle, to find the south-east corner of
the temple, the wall at that point rests on the highest part of Mount
Moriah, which is not cut by the south front at all. An examination of
the lithographed plan, No. 14, makes such a position seem an unlikely
one for the original wall; for it would be more like building in the
valley than on the hill, would take more material, and be destitute of
symmetry. Next, the rock-cut aqueduct running down the Tyropoeon has
one of its pools half cut through by the west wall; and the north part
of the aqueduct, roofed with flat slabs, appears to be older than the
south, which is vaulted; everything favouring the conclusion that the
aqueduct originally followed the course of the valley, and that when the
wall was built the part of the aqueduct lying outside of it was left
intact, and new lines of arched passage built to connect the older
portions. Unless, therefore, the aqueduct is of pre-Solomonian age, the
west wall was no part of Solomon's Temple at least, though it may have
been included in Herod's.
Add to all this, that the stones at the south-west angle resemble those
at the north-east, and that a temple in the south-west angle would not
face due east, and the evidence in favour of this position is by no
means conclusive.
The courses of stone in the south wall usually run from three feet six
inches to three feet nine inches in height; but between the Double Gate
and the Triple Gate there is a course described by Captain Wilson, from
five feet ten inches to six feet one inch high. Captain Warren found
that this course, with some breaks, is continued to the south-east
angle, and thence runs north along the east wall for twenty-four feet.
The length of this course in the south wall is 600 feet; and the
coincidence of this number with the measurement of the temple cloisters,
is enough to suggest that we may here have a clue, especially since,
through the rising ground under the Triple Gate, this is the first
course of stones which could be carried uninterruptedly through from
east to west. Captain Warren, following this clue, not only found, after
numerous examinations underground, that a perpendicular dropped from the
most westerly stone of this course would pretty well divide the wall
into two parts of different character, but that the rough stones to the
west of this line resemble those at the north-east angle, thus far
favouring the conclusion that these were the parts added by Herod.[33]
The Triple Gate is in the middle of this six feet course of stones, thus
agreeing with the description of Josephus, that the south front of the
temple had 'gates in its middle,' an expression which some have tried to
reconcile with the existence of the Huldah and Triple Gates, at about
equal distances from the angles and from one another, or have construed
as applying to the Huldah Gate alone, which is, however, 365 feet from
the south-west angle.
Under the Triple Gate the rock, as already stated, is highest, and
notwithstanding that the slope is greater to the east than to the west,
there would thus be an appearance of symmetry in the wall which it could
not have if standing entirely west of the Triple Gate. It is worth
notice also that at the Huldah Gate, where, on this view, the temple
would terminate to west, the wall of the city, coming up from the south,
now abuts, indicating that the south-west angle of the Haram is less
ancient than the original city wall at this part, and the city wall less
ancient than the south Haram wall east of Huldah Gate.
Again, the wall of Ophel, which commences at the south-east angle, and
thus favours the view we are considering, runs sixty feet south, then
700 feet south-west, and terminates abruptly at a point nearly due south
of Huldah Gate (see lithographic plan, No. 30), to which, it would seem
possible, its return course may have run. Even Fergusson's argument for
the south-west angle--that the south wall of the platform which now
surrounds the Mosque of Omar runs parallel to the south wall of the
Haram, at a distance of exactly 600 feet, and for a length of 600
feet--is nearly as much in favour of the south-east angle; and Lewin's
argument that Josephus's πύλας κατὰ μέσον must refer to a
double doorway, and therefore to the present Huldah Gate, is balanced by
Warren's discovery that originally the so-called Triple Gate was a
double tunnel.
It is often urged that the sub-structures known as Solomon's stables, in
the south-east corner of the Haram, are of too slight a construction to
bear the cloisters of the temple, and too modern, as well as too
slight;[34] but the floor of these vaults is on a level with the six
feet course of stones previously mentioned--above which level few stones
remain _in situ_--and any previous sub-structures would not have
survived the destruction of the east and south retaining walls. Between
the Triple Gate and the south-east angle is the postern known as the
Single Gate, with its sill on a level with the sill of the Triple Gate,
but itself of modern construction. Below this gate, and below the vaults
within the Haram, at this corner, Warren discovered a passage for
carrying into the Kedron some liquid, and yet wholly distinct from the
water channels under the Triple Gate. Underground Jerusalem so abounds
in aqueducts and passages that it would not be of much force to urge
that this channel conveyed the blood from the altar: yet the suggestion
may be set against any similar one in favour of another site.
Finally, on this point, at the south-east angle, which some had thought
to be modern, the foundations are about eighty feet beneath the surface,
the stones are _in situ_, and some of them have Phoenician masons'
marks painted and chiselled on them. That the stones are _in situ_ is
proved by the circumstance that a small depth of _débris_, which had
been shovelled away to make room for the lowest tier, still remains
close by, and has its layers _sloping inwards_. That the wall is ancient
is thought to be evidenced by the Phoenician characters, which seem
certainly to point to pre-Roman times, and possibly to the time when
Solomon engaged the workmen of Hiram, King of Tyre, to build the temple.
Still, neither is the evidence conclusive here. While the stones at the
north-east angle differ from those at the south-east, and there are
several breaks and irregularities in the masonry of the east wall,
Phoenician marks--though too much blurred to be deciphered--are found
at the north-east angle also; the south-east angle is not a right angle,
but measures 92 deg. 5 min. at the surface, and 92 deg. 25 min. at the
foundation; at 105 feet from the corner there is a break in the
character of the masonry; only the first 120 feet of wall are in the
same straight line, and then there is a bend to the north-east.
The platform, called the Haram area, is nearly on one level all over,
and near its centre is a second platform, about eighteen feet higher,
on which stands the Mosque of Omar, covering the Sakhra, or sacred rock
of the Mahometans, which measures sixty feet by fifty or fifty-five, and
is said by them to be a morsel of Paradise. Thrupp and Falconer suppose
it to be the rock or part of the rock on which stood the tower of
Antonia; Fergusson maintains it to be the Holy Sepulchre, over which
Constantine built a church, and Professor Willis identifies it with the
threshing-floor of Araunah, and therefore with the site of the temple.
As this rock is the highest point of Mount Moriah, and contains a cave
with an opening to a deeper recess which has not been explored, it was
sure thus to suggest itself as the place of the altar whence, according
to the Talmud, the blood and offal of the sacrifices were drained off to
the Kedron. As excavations have not been permitted within the sacred
area, it has not been possible to put this theory to any test; nor can
Warren's accidental discovery of souterrains along the northern edge of
the platform, and of a natural or artificial ditch crossing beyond its
north-west corner, be considered as settling the point either way. It
may be worth a thought that the summit of Moriah may have been a 'high
place' for heathen worship before it occurred to David to build a temple
for God; that on that very account it would perhaps be _avoided_ by the
builders of the temple; and that if Araunah worshipped on any high place
at all, his threshing-floor would not be on the same spot.
Captain Warren is never forward to theorise, but as a provisional
hypothesis during his earlier excavations he favoured the south-east
angle as the probable site of the temple; and now, after three or four
years of investigation, while he has come to no conclusion, he inclines
to a position nearly coincident with the Dome-of-Rock platform. As
Josephus states the stones in Solomon's Cloister--the eastern side of
the temple--to have been twenty cubits long and six cubits high, and
Warren has not found any stones of these dimensions at any point where
he has explored, he naturally thinks the cloister may be in the part he
has not explored, viz., a space of 600 feet between the Golden Gate and
the south-east angle, where a wide Mahometan cemetery makes operations
very difficult.
'Place the temple here, nearly coinciding with the
Dome-of-the Rock Platform, and it appears to suit exactly.
It has the valley to the north; it has the raised platform
of the dome of the rock, which is just about the height of
the inner court above the outer; it has the unexplored 600
feet of wall south of the Golden Gate, and overlooking the
Kedron. But it will be asked, "What about the south-east
angle, with its sub-structures and its walls, with
Phoenician characters inscribed thereon?" I think it was
Solomon's palace.'
One of the objects of the Palestine Exploration Fund is to improve our
knowledge of Jewish archæology, about which we have known next to
nothing. The discoveries in Assyria show us what may be expected; 'for
not only have we been able (says Mr. Layard) through the discoveries of
Sir Henry Rawlinson, Dr. Hincks, and others (Mr. Layard might have added
his own name), to read their written history, and trace their connection
with other nations and races, but by the aid of the sculptures we can
almost learn the details of the private and domestic life of the
Assyrian people--their dress, their arms, and their religious
ceremonies.' If similar discoveries could be made in Palestine, the
greatest light would be thrown upon the political and domestic history
of the Jews, and most important illustrations of the Holy Scriptures
would be obtained. Such discoveries are indeed considered unlikely,
since the Jewish law forbade the representation of the human form in
sculpture or painting; but the Jews did not always scrupulously observe
their law; besides which, the objection does not relate to the discovery
of pottery, glass, coins, metal work, remains of architecture, &c. It
must be confessed, indeed, that the legendary golden throne of King
Solomon, with its eagles, and lions, and doves, has not been found, and
the sceptres of the kings of Judah and Israel have not even been
searched for by the explorers; moreover, most of their labour has been
expended in uncovering massive structures, which cannot be brought home;
yet still, when Mr. Macgregor returned from Jerusalem, he brought with
him nine cases of objects incidentally lighted upon by the excavators,
and in the summer of 1869 the Society was able to open a Museum of
Palestinean Antiquities. The collection included lamps, pottery, glass,
coins, weapons, tesselated pavement, sculpture, sarcophagi, geological
specimens, and a collection of stone weights; besides photographs, and
tracings, maps, and models. Three glass lamps, of curious construction,
with several brigs of red pottery, and a cooking dish, glazed inside,
were found in the rock-cut chambers and passages leading from the
Virgin's Fountain up through the hill of Ophel. The whole of the ground
of Ophel, between the south Haram wall and the Pool of Siloam, has been
built over, and lamps of a particular type have been found there--two of
them with Greek inscriptions--and in no case has any known Arabic
pottery been found. On the other hand, at the Birket Israil--so-called
Pool of Bethesda, where Warren dug through thirty-five feet of rubbish,
and brought up a piece of the concrete bottom--the pottery is totally
different. It is in many cases highly glazed, and has patterns on it,
and when it is unglazed it has bands of red or brown, or other marks,
very similar in appearance to the specimens of pottery found at Athens
and Melos; and yet among this there came to light two pieces of glazed
jars with raised Arabic or Cufic inscriptions, one of them being the
usual invocation to Allah.
Some of the pottery found is older than the south-east portion of the
Haram wall, for on the rock there rests an accumulation of eight or ten
feet of a clay mould, which, from its slope, appears to have been cut
through for the purpose of laying the stones on a solid foundation, and
this clay abounds in pottery, broken into fragments. The rock at the
south-east angle is very soft for the first two or three feet of depth,
and at three feet to the east of the angle a hole was found scooped out
of it, one foot in diameter and one foot in depth, in which was a little
earthenware jar, standing upright, as though it had been purposely
placed there. Warren suggested at the time (February, 1869) that the
purpose may have been religious or superstitious, and that in such cases
inscriptions might be found upon the pottery, if the jars were properly
cleaned. The suggestion has borne fruit in his own experience. Among the
fragments of pottery which for a depth of about two inches covers the
rich loam overlying the rock at the south-east angle some handles of
jars were observed to have a stamp on them, and on this account some
specimens were collected. After his return to England, in 1870, Captain
Warren, getting these out, and dusting the mud off them, observed
Phoenician letters, some of which have since been read by Dr. Birch,
of the British Museum, as _lemelek Zepha_ (to the king Zepha), and which
exactly resemble those of the Moabite stone, of which all the world has
heard. The significance of this discovery will be better understood
after we have considered that of the Moabite stone itself.
The paleographical results achieved by the Palestine Exploration Fund,
when viewed by the side of the many and varied works in other
departments, may seem to be small; but Mr. Deutsch, when speaking at
Oxford,[35] was not wrong in desiring his hearers to count the latter,
but to weigh the former. In a minaret near Nablus, immured upside down,
is an inscribed slab that once belonged to a synagogue, which, though it
does not seem to have been seen by Robinson, was copied by Shultz in
1844, and published by Rödiger; and again copied by Wildenbruck, and
published by Blau. Finally, in 1860, it was copied and explained by
Rosen, whose work left that of his predecessors far behind. Yet even he
does not give all the characters, nor are they so accurately reproduced
as would seem to be absolutely necessary in the case of the oldest known
Samaritan monument; nor has he been able more than to conjecture as to
the reading of the very beginning of the tablet. A photograph, taken
under Captain Wilson, has rendered everything clear, and it turns out
that, owing to the difficulty of the position in which the decipherer is
necessarily placed, it was utterly impossible to perceive certain marks
on the stone itself which are quite clear in the photograph. The tablet
itself exhibits ten lines, the first eight of which contain the Ten
Commandments, according to the Samaritan recension, in an abbreviated
form. The ninth forms a portion of the celebrated Samaritan
interpolation after the Ten Commandments (from Deut. xxvii. 2--7; and
ix. 30)--'And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan ...
on Mount Gerizim ... _and thou shalt build there an altar unto the Lord
thy God_.' The last line contains the formula from Exodus, of frequent
use in Samaritan worship, viz., 'Arise, O Lord; return, O Lord!'[36]
Another photograph gives the famous inscription on the lintel of a
ruined synagogue at Kefr Birim, in Galilee, with greater clearness than
is represented in M. Renan's lithograph, taken from a cast, and is even
clearer than the original itself, certain blurred characters of which it
was next to impossible to distinguish on the glaring white surface. The
gist of the inscription is a prayer for 'peace upon this place and all
the places of Israel,' and an indication of the builder's name. In
addition to these, some dozens of inscriptions have been copied--in the
north of Palestine by Wilson; at Jerash and in the Lebanon by Warren;
and in the Haram area and elsewhere by Mr. E. H. Palmer. Ancient
characters have been ferreted out, and copied from the walls of Sidon;
and a seal, bearing the inscription, 'Haggai, son of Shebaniah,' and
dating as far back as the Maccabean period, has been found under the
buried pavement near the south-west corner of the Haram. The red-paint
characters at the south-east angle of the Haram were examined by Mr.
Deutsch on the spot, and pronounced to be partly letters, partly
numerals, and partly special masons' or quarry signs. Some of them were
recognisable at once as well-known Phoenician characters; others,
hitherto unknown in Phoenician epigraphy, Mr. Deutsch had the rare
satisfaction of being able to identify on absolutely undoubted antique
Phoenician structures in Syria, such as the primitive sub-structures
of the harbour at Sidon. Similar marks at the north-east angle afford
evidence that the stones of the Haram wall were shaped at the quarry,
inasmuch as the paint in one instance has run, and the trickling is
upwards with reference to the present position of the stone. Evidence to
the same effect is furnished by the marginal drafts, which, present no
appearance of pattern or design when the wall is regarded as a whole,
but only when each stone is taken by itself.
The paleographic discovery of paramount interest is that of the Moabite
stone, with a memorial inscription in what is known to scholars as the
'Phoenician' character, and belonging, there is little doubt, to the
first half of the ninth century B.C. In August, 1868, the Rev. F. A.
Klein, a Prussian clergyman, in the service of the Church Missionary
Society at Jerusalem, in the course of a journey from es-Salt to Kerak,
had the good fortune to be shown this monument at Dhibân near Arnon, the
old border of Moab. The stone was lying among the ruins, perfectly free
and exposed to view, the inscription uppermost, and was in excellent
preservation. Mr. Klein ascertained it to be one metre thirteen
centimetres in height, seventy centimetres in breadth and thirty-five in
thickness, rounded at the upper and lower corners,[37] and containing
thirty-four lines of writing. Circumstances prevented his copying more
than 'a few words from several lines at random;' and when afterwards M.
Clermont-Ganneau, of the French Consulate at Jerusalem, Captain Warren,
of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and others, interested themselves to
obtain 'squeezes,' the Arabs resented the action of foreigners,
quarrelled among themselves, and lighting a fire about the stone poured
water on it and broke it to pieces. An Arab employed by M. Ganneau, who
when the quarrel arose was engaged in taking a squeeze, tore off the wet
impression in rags, and springing on his horse managed to escape,
though not without a spear wound in his leg. Through the energy of
Captain Warren and M. Ganneau better squeezes were afterwards obtained
of the larger fragments, and at a later date the fragments themselves
came to hand, so that of 1,000 letters which it is estimated the stone
contained, 669 have been recovered.
While the materials remain imperfect, it is impossible to obtain a
complete translation of the inscription, though various attempts have
been made. M. Ganneau's second translation of June, 1870, differs widely
from that which he put forth five months previously; but then his only
copy of certain parts of the stone was certain torn rags (_lambeaux
frifés et chiffonnés_), and his method of procedure with the fragments
of the stone is thus described:--'La plus grande partie de ces morceaux,
même les plus minimes, peut être mise en place facilement, en tenant
compte de la correspondance horizontale et verticale des séries de
caractères: il suffit de procéder comme pour déterminer la position
géographique d'un point par l'intersection des lignes de longitude et de
latitude.'[38] Translations have also been attempted by Professor
Schlottman, of Halle, Professor Nöldeke, and in this country by Dr.
Neubauer; while Mr. Deutsch has consistently asked scholars and the
public to exercise patience and wait till the full materials for a
translation should come to hand. The general drift of the inscription,
however, is clear enough. It appears to be a contemporaneous record from
the Moabite point of view of 2 Kings i. 1, set up by King Mesha,
commencing with a brief record of himself and his father, commemorating
warlike successes over the Israelites, explaining how he rebuilt and
improved a number of well-known Moabite cities, and finishing apparently
with some further reference to war. The names of Israel, Omri, Chemosh,
occur up and down, and the monarch seems to have conceived himself under
the special guidance of his god, who was thought to signify his will
that this or that city should be attacked, and who was obeyed
implicitly. Historically, therefore, the monument is interesting, since
it is an unexpected record of a nation now passed away, and adds a
trifle to our knowledge.
Paleographically, the stone is of far greater value, and happily of
nearly as much value in its mutilated condition, as it would have been
if perfect. It is the very oldest Semitic lapidary record of importance
yet discovered, the most ancient specimen of the alphabetic writing
still in common use amongst us--a century and a half earlier than any
other inscription in the same Phoenician character, and three
centuries earlier than any other such inscription of any length. Its
significance in this respect is, however, only in process of being
studied, and uniformity of opinion has not yet been arrived at. The
names of the Hebrew letters are all significant of certain
objects--_aleph_, _bêth_, _gimel_, _daleth_, for instance = ox, house,
camel, door, &c.; and it has been maintained by Semitic scholars that
the letters themselves were originally slight and abridged
representations of the visible objects, the resemblance being more
clearly seen in the older Phoenician than in the later Phoenician,
the Assyrian or square character, and archaic Greek.[39] Mr. Deutsch,
who was so careful in the matter of translation, was bold to express
himself here, and to assert from the evidence of the Moabite stone that
'the more primitive the characters the _simpler_ they become; not, as
often supposed, the more complicated, as more in accordance with some
pictorial prototype.'[40] This view is controverted by Professor
Rawlinson, in the _Contemporary Review_ for August, 1870, and, as it
appears to us, successfully; for while the later characters in some
instances present a greater complication to the eye, they are far
simpler to the mind as soon as you imagine yourself engaged in writing
them and exerting the volition separately for each stroke. 'In _samech_
for instance, apparently the most complicated of the later letters, a
gradual diminution in the number of strokes may be traced from first to
last. Originally the letter was written like an early Greek _xi_--thus,
[hand printed character], with four distinct strokes; then the four were
reduced to two by changing the three horizontal bars into a zigzag,
which could be written without taking the hand from the paper, and
adding a vertical bar beneath it; finally, the vertical bar was attached
to one end of the zigzag, and thus made a continuation of it, so that a
single continuous stroke sufficed for the whole letter.... In like
manner, the original _zain_ required three distinct strokes, two
horizontal and one oblique ([hand printed character]), which were
subsequently represented by the form still in use (Z), a form producible
by a single effort, without any removal of the pen from the paper.'
And so with regard to the pictorial origin of the letters. The early
_bêth_ differs from the later solely in having a pointed head instead of
a rounded one. But the object which _bêth_ was intended to represent was
a tent, the earliest 'house' of pastoral man; and this had in primitive
times the simple triangular form, Δ. Thus the early _bêth_ more
resembled the object than the later one. The early _daleth_ is a simple
triangle; the later has the right side of the triangle elongated, and
the other two generally rounded into one. But _daleth_, 'door,'
represented the opening of a tent, the form of which was like that of
the tent, triangular. For other instances we must refer our readers to
Professor Rawlinson's paper and the plate which accompanies it, merely
remarking in the way of adverse criticism that the square letters of the
Old Testament present a difficulty, since, while they are confessedly of
later origin, such letters as _bêth_, _gimel_, _zain_, _ain_, _kaph_,
_shin_, are less simple in the sense explained, than the older. The
Moabite stone also throws light on the question of the time at which
writing was introduced into Greece, the Greek alphabet of the earliest
inscriptions (circ. B.C. 650-500) resembling that of the Moabite stone
more closely than it does any later alphabet; so that Mr. Grote's
opinion that letters were unknown to the Greeks of Homer's time, and
Hesiod's, is in danger of being proved incorrect.
It is remarkable that a stone measuring three feet six inches in length
and with thirty-four lines of writing on it should have escaped notice
until the year 1868; but since Irby and Mangles visited Moab in 1809,
scarcely any European traveller has passed near the spot where this
monument was found; so that it has been said that the chief value of
this discovery is in the prospect it affords of future successful
exploration. It should be remembered that the Arabs are now aware of the
price Europeans are willing to pay for such relics, and would no doubt
bring others forward if they knew of any existing. Mr. E. H. Palmer, who
was in the country in the spring of 1870, is probably right in his
conclusion that above ground at least there does not exist another
Moabite stone. But there are more fishes in the sea than have ever yet
been caught; and if a few intelligent men accustomed to dealing with
lawless Arabs could be sent out to Moab to conduct excavations, they
might, if liberally supplied with money and other resources, obtain
antiquities of great value, inscriptions possibly included. Dean Stanley
points us also to 1 Sam. xv. 12, describing Saul's victory over the
Amalekites, where it is said, 'Saul came to Carmel, and behold he set
him up a place' (מַצִיג which is from the root נָצַג, _to
set_, _to put_; in the Hiphil to make to stand, and which might be
translated _pillar_ or _trophy_)--the Dean points to this to show the
possibility of even Jewish inscriptions coming to light.
To return to the characters at the south-east angle of the Haram--on the
wall and on the handles of the jars or vases. The letters on the pottery
are like those of the Moabite stone; whence the age of the jars is
inferred to be about the same, and their origin Phoenician: the
position of the pottery shows it to be of nearly the same age as the
wall, and hence the antiquity of the wall is deduced; the wall itself
shows Phoenician marks, and so the builders are believed to have been
Phoenicians. This seems to us a little too hasty. The Moabite stone
gives us the _Moabite_ alphabet of King Mesha's time, which proves to be
identical with that of old Phoenicia. Judea was geographically as near
to Phoenicia as Moab was, and probably used the same alphabet, a
supposition confirmed by the discovery of vase handles at Jerusalem with
letters like those of the Moabite stone. It seems gratuitous to conclude
that these vases were among the contents of a museum or were ever the
property of Phoenicians, when the evidence goes to show that the
language inscribed on them was common to all the races of Western Asia.
Only for want of a better name has it been called 'Phoenician;' and
Mr. Deutsch had already suggested the term 'Cadmean,' while Sir Henry
Rawlinson had ventured the prediction that, should any early monument be
found at Jerusalem, its inscription would be in this character. The
Phoenician character was probably the only cursive character used by
the Semitic nations, and the Hebrew character, Sir Henry believes, did
not exist till after the return from the captivity. The vase handles
therefore show us the kind of letters used by the Hebrew prophets, and
the Cadmean masons' marks neither prove nor disprove the Phoenician
origin of the Haram wall; but the identity of the vase-handle letters
with those of the Moabite stone rather than with the alphabet of
Assyrian tablets and gems, or of the inscription on the tomb of
Eshmunazer (circ. B.C. 600) indicates the great antiquity both of the
pottery and the south-east Haram wall. On this point we may add that we
have compared (from the photographs) the letters of the vase-handles
with those of the Moabite stone, and find the identity very apparent in
the case of the _tau_, _shin_, _kaph_ and _mem_.
The work promised by the Fund in the departments of natural history and
geology still waits for want of means; though notes have been made on
the occurrence of basalt, trap, hot springs, &c., and among the things
sent home have been an occasional animal, a small collection of
_Coleoptera_, a book of dried flowers from Moab, and some specimens of
rock. In its zoology and botany, as well as in its human history and
arts, Palestine has felt the influence of Africa, Asia and Europe; the
heights of Lebanon and Hermon, the depths of Gennesareth and the Dead
Sea, assist to make its natural history cosmopolitan. It is curious that
the _Clarias_, a strange-looking fish of the Siluroid family, found by
Tristram in the Lake of Galilee, and in one of the fountains near its
shores, should be identical in species with a fish found in the Nile;
thus far confirming Josephus, who says that the fountain of Capharnaum in
Gennesareth produced a Nile fish, and on that account was thought to be
a vein of the river of Egypt.[41] But the words of Linnæus are almost
true to-day: 'We know more of the botany and zoology of farther India
than we do of those of Palestine.' Of the geology we are in equal
ignorance, although the depression of the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea
invites attention as being the most remarkable on the face of the globe,
and constituting, in the opinion of Sir R. Murchison, the key to the
entire geology of the district. Mr. Prestwich, Mr. Tristram, and a few
other gentlemen, if sent out and supported for some years, would
probably astonish us by the results of their investigations. In
meteorology the Society has made a commencement, by sending out
instruments and publishing tabular statements of barometrical readings,
temperature, rainfall, &c., observed at Beyrout, Nazareth, Gaza, Jaffa,
and in the Lebanon. With all this work on hand, they have also begun the
exploration of the Tih--the Wilderness of the Wanderings--sending out
Mr. E. H. Palmer, a most accomplished Arabic scholar, formerly of the
Sinai Ordnance Survey, who appears to have made some discoveries, but
whose full statement is not yet before us.
We had intended to detail the difficulties under which the explorers
have done their work, but the list is too long: counting every shade,
from the laziness of the native workmen, to the whizzing of native
bullets; from the thermometer at 110 degrees to attacks of fever and
dysentery; from slips in scaling mountains, danger from falling stones,
risk of choking in narrow aqueducts and sewers--we had noted not less
than fifty instances.
We are bound to say that the Society has made a good beginning; that it
has done fully as much as could be expected under all the
circumstances, and with its inadequate funds; and that if it be not well
supported for another five years it will be to the lasting disgrace of
England. In its scientific and its religions aims, in its practical and
its unsectarian character, it suits the present age; supplying facts for
theorists, illustrating points of Scripture history, and confirming the
general truth of the Bible.
Besides the completion of the work at Jerusalem, much remains to be
done, not only in natural history and geology, but in the observation of
manners and customs, exploration at other cities, such as Jezreel,
Samaria, Hebron, Bethshan, Nazareth, and excavation of the mounds
scattered over the face of the country. There will probably never be a
better opportunity than the present: for the visit of the Prince of
Wales to the Holy Land removed some prejudices, the Turkish Government
is favourable to the enterprise, and the work is actually begun. We
conclude this review of the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund by
heartily endorsing the appeal of Mr. Deutsch at the annual meeting in
1869. 'We, as humble votaries of science, would, in the name of science,
urge you to continue that in which both religion and science may join.
And let me remind you of one thing. There are ruins enough in the City
of Sorrows. _Do not add fresh ruins._ Do not leave there broken shafts,
abandoned galleries; and let it not be told in Gath that this England,
the richest, proudest, and most Bible-loving country in the world,
undertook one of the greatest undertakings, and abandoned it--for want
of money.'
ART. V.--_The Early Sieges of Paris. Les Comtes de Paris; Histoire de
l'Avènement de la Troisième Race._ Par ERNEST MOURIN. Paris: Didier et
Cie.
_Robert der Tapfere, Markgraf von Anjou, der Stammvater des
Kapetingischen Hauses._ Von Dr. Phil. KARL VON KALCKSTEIN. Berlin:
Löwenstein.
The events of the last few months have, in a special way, drawn the
thoughts of men towards two cities which stand out among European
capitals as witnesses of the way in which the history of remote times
still has its direct bearing on things which are passing before our own
eyes. Rome and Paris now stand out, as they have stood out in so many
earlier ages, as the historic centres of a period which, there can be
no doubt, will live to all time as one of the marked periods of the
world's history. And it is not the least wonderful phænomenon of this
autumn of wonders that, while our eyes have been drawn at once to Rome
and to Paris, they have been drawn far more steadily and with far keener
interest towards Paris than they have been drawn towards Rome. We can
hardly doubt, whether we look back to the past or onwards to the future,
that the fall of the Pope's temporal power is really a greater event
than any possible result of the war between Germany and France. Yet such
is the greater immediate interest of the present struggle, such perhaps
is the instinctive attraction of mankind towards the more noisy and
brilliant triumphs of the siege and the battle-field, that the really
greater event, simply because of the ease with which it has happened,
has passed almost unnoticed in the presence of the lesser. The world has
seen the Papacy in several shapes; but the shape of a Pontiff,
spiritually infallible, but politically a subject, and the subject not
of an universal Emperor but of a mere local King, is something which the
world has not seen before. What may come of it, no man can say; but we
may be pretty sure that greater things will come of it in one way or
another, than can come out of any settlement, in whatever direction, of
conflicting French and German interests. Still, at this moment, the
present fate of Paris unavoidably draws to itself more of our thoughts
than the future fate of Rome. But it is well to keep the two cities
together before our eyes, and all the more so because the past history
and the present position of those two cities have points in common which
no other city in Europe shares with them in their fulness, which only
one other city in Europe can claim to share with them in any degree.
The history of Rome, as all the world knows, is the history of a city
which grew into an Empire. It grew in truth into a twofold, perhaps a
more than twofold Empire. Out of the village on the Palatine sprang the
Rome of the Cæsars and the Rome of the Pontiffs. From Rome came the
language, the theology, the code of law, which have had such an undying
effect on the whole European world. Amidst all changes, the city itself
has been always clothed with a kind of mysterious and superstitious
charm, and its possession has carried with it an influence which common
military and political considerations cannot always explain. And from
the Old Rome on the Tiber many of these attributes passed--some were
even heightened in passing--to the new Rome on the Bosporos. From the
days of Constantine till now, no man has ever doubted that, in the very
nature of things, Constantinople, in whatever hands, must be the seat of
empire. To Western eyes this seems mainly the result of her unrivalled
geographical situation; over large regions of the East the New Rome
wields the same magic influence which in the West has been wielded by
the Old. _The_ City,[42] the City of the Cæsars, is in Christian eyes
the one great object to be won; in Mahometan eyes it is the one great
object to be kept. By the Bosporos, as by the Tiber, it is the city
which has grown into the Empire, which has founded it, and which has
sustained it.
Now of the other capitals of Europe--the capitals of the more modern
states--one alone can claim to have been, in this way, the creator of
the state of which it is now the head. Berlin, Madrid, Stockholm,
Copenhagen, Saint Petersburg, are simply places chosen in later times,
for reasons of caprice or convenience, as administrative centres of
states which already existed. Vienna has grown from the capital of a
Duchy into the capital of something which calls itself an Empire; but
Vienna, as a city, has had nothing to do with the growth of that
so-called Empire. London may fairly claim a higher place than any of the
cities of which we have spoken. It was only by degrees, and after some
fluctuations, that London, rather than Winchester, came to be
permanently acknowledged as the capital of England. London won its rank,
partly by virtue of an unrivalled military and commercial position,
partly as the reward of the unflinching patriotism of its citizens in
the Danish wars. But London in no way formed England, or guided her
destinies. The history of London is simply that the city was found to be
the most fitting and worthy head of an already existing kingdom. But
Paris has been what London has been, and something more. Paris, like
London, earned her pre-eminence in Gaul by a gallant and successful
resistance to the Scandinavian enemy. It was the great siege of Paris in
the ninth century which made Paris the chief among the cities of Gaul,
and its Count the chief among the princes of Gaul. Its position first
marked it out for the rank of a local capital, and, through the way in
which it used its position, it grew into the capital of a kingdom. But
it did not, like London, simply grow into the capital of a kingdom
already existing. The city created first the county, and then the
kingdom, of which it was successively the head. Modern France, as
distinguished both from Roman Gaul and from the Western Kingdom of the
Karlings, grew out of this County of Paris; and of the County of Paris
the city was not merely the centre, but the life and soul. The position
of Paris in the earliest times is best marked, as in the case of all
Gaulish cities, by its place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. It was a
city, not of the first, but of the second rank; the seat of a Bishop,
but not the seat of a Metropolitan.[43] Lutetia Parisiorum held the
usual rank of one of those head towns of Gaulish tribes which grew into
Roman cities. But it never became the centre of one of the great
ecclesiastical and civil divisions; it never reached the rank of Lyons,
Narbonne, Vienne, or Trier. Twice before the ninth century, the
discerning eye, first of a Roman and then of a Frankish master, seemed
to mark out the city of the Seine for greater things. It was the beloved
home of Julian; it was the city which Hlodwig at once fixed upon for the
seat of his new dominion. But the greatness of Paris, as the earliest
settled seat of the Frankish power, was not doomed to be lasting. Under
the descendants of Hlodwig Paris remained a seat of royalty; but, among
the fluctuations of the Merovingian kingdoms, it was only one seat of
royalty among several. It was the peer of Soissons, Orleans, and
Metz--all of them places which thus, in the new state of things, assumed
a higher importance than had belonged to them in Roman times. But, as
the Austrasian House of the Karlings grew, first as Mayors, and then as
Kings, to the lordship of the whole Frankish realm, the importance of
the cities of Western Gaul necessarily lessened. Paris reached its
utmost point of insignificance in the days of Charles the Great, whom
French legends have pictured as a French King, reigning in Paris as his
royal city. Whatever importance it had, it seems to have derived from
its neighbourhood to the revered sanctuary of St. Denis. By a strange
accident, the first King of the new house--the house with which Paris
was to wage a war of races and languages--died either in the city
itself, or in the precinct of the great monastery beyond its walls.
Pippin, returning from a successful campaign in Aquitaine, fell sick at
Saintes; from thence he was carried to Tours to implore the help of
Saint Martin, and thence to Paris to implore the help of Saint Denis. He
died at Paris, and was buried in the great minster which became the
burial-place of the next and rival line of kings.[44] But Paris was
neither the crowning-place nor the dwelling-place of his son, nor was it
the object of any special attention during his long reign. Of the two
sons of Pippin, between whom his kingdom was immediately divided, Paris
fell to the lot of Karlmann. But he chose Soissons for his
crowning-place--the place where his father had been crowned before
him.[45] Charles, crowned at Noyon, made Aachen his capital, and, in the
course of his whole reign, he visited Paris only on a single progress,
when it is incidentally mentioned among a long string of other
cities.[46]
But this time of utter neglect was, in the history of Paris, only the
darkness before the coming of the dawn. In the course of the next reign
Paris begins to play an important part, and from that time the
importance of the city steadily grew till it became what we have seen it
in our own day. The occasional visits of Lewis the Pious to the city are
dwelled on by his poetical biographer with evident delight, and with
even more than usual pomp of words.[47]. And the city was now about to
appear in its most characteristic; light. In the words of Sir Francis
Palgrave, who has sketched the early history of Paris with great power
and insight,[48] 'the City of Revolutions begins her real history by the
first French Revolution.'[49] In this particular case we do not even
grudge the premature use of the word 'French,' for the movement of which
he speaks was plainly a movement of the Romanized lands of the West
against their Teutonic master. Most likely no such feeling was
consciously present to the mind of any man; but nations and parties seek
to shape themselves unconsciously, and cities and regions learn to play
their appropriate parts, before they can give any intelligible account
of what they are doing. The Emperor was leading an expedition against
the revolted Bretons; suddenly all the disaffected spirits of the
Empire, his own sons among the foremost, gathered themselves together at
Paris.[50] They then seized Lewis himself at Compiègne, and their hated
step-mother Judith on the rock of Laon. But one part of his dominions
was still faithful to the imprisoned Cæsar; the German lands had no
share in the rebellion, and eagerly sought for the restoration of their
sovereign. In marking out the geographical divisions of feeling, the
writer of the ninth century, like those of the nineteenth, is driven, as
it were, to forestal the language of a somewhat later time. The Emperor
had no confidence in the French, but he put his trust in the German.[51]
Such was the part--a characteristic part--played by Paris in the
Revolution of 830. Four years later Paris appears playing an opposite,
yet a no less characteristic part. The Emperor Lewis, already restored
and again deposed, is held as a prisoner by his eldest son Lothar, and
is led in bonds to Paris.[52] Again the men of the East, the faithful
Germans, are in arms for their sovereign under Lewis, at that moment his
only loyal son. But by this time the city has changed sides. Lothar, for
fear of the German host, flees to the South, leaving his father at
liberty; the late captive is led by his rejoicing people to the minster
of Saint Denis, and there is girt once more with the arms of the warrior
and with the Imperial robes of the Cæsar.[53] Once then in the course of
its long history, did Paris behold the inauguration of a lawful Emperor.
But it was the re-inauguration of an Emperor whom one Parisian
revolution had overthrown, and whom another Parisian revolution had set
up again; and in the moment alike of his fall and of his restoration the
force of loyal Germany forms at one time a threatening, at another an
approving, background.
We thus see Paris, well-nigh unheard of during the reign of Charles the
Great, suddenly rise into importance under his son. Under Charles the
Bald its importance becomes greater still, and it begins to assume the
peculiar function which raised it to the head place in Gaul. The special
wretchedness of the time was fast showing the great military importance
of the site. Under the rule of the Austrasian Mayors and Kings there had
been endless wars, but they had been wars waged far away from Paris.
Above all, no hostile fleet had for ages sailed up the Seine. Lutetia
on her island must, under the Frankish power, have enjoyed for some
generations a repose almost as unbroken as she had enjoyed in the days
of the _Roman Peace_. Now all was changed. The Empire was torn in pieces
by endless civil wars, wars of brother against brother, and the fleets
of the Northmen, barely heard of in the days of Charles the Great, were
making their way up the months of all its rivers. Men now began to learn
that the island city, encompassed by the broad Seine, with its bridges
and its minsters, and the Roman palace on the left bank, was at once
among the most precious possessions and among the surest bulwarks of the
realm. It is not without significance that the one time when the Great
Charles himself visited Paris, it was in the course of a progress in
which he had been surveying the shores of the Northern Ocean.[54] He
came to Paris as a mourner and as a pilgrim, yet we may believe that
neither his grief nor his devotion hindered him from marking the
importance of the post. His eye surely marked the site as one fated to
be the main defence, if not of his whole Empire, at least of its western
portion, against the pirate-barks by which the Ocean was beginning to be
covered. And probably it was not mere accident that it was in the course
of an expedition against Brittany that Paris became the centre of the
conspiracy of 830. In a Breton war, a land war, Paris would not be of
the same pre-eminent importance as it was in the invasion of the
Northmen. Still the island stronghold would be of no small moment in
case of a Breton inroad, and in the days of Lewis the Pious a Breton
inroad was again a thing to be dreaded. Among the troubles of the next
reign the pre-eminent importance of Paris begins to stand out more and
more strongly. By the last partition under Lewis the Pious, his youngest
son, Charles the Bald, became King of a kingdom formed by the accidental
union of Neustria and Aquitaine. The kingdom so formed answered to
nothing which had been thought of in earlier divisions, but it answered
in a kind of rough way to modern France. Far smaller as a whole, it took
in districts at both ends, in Flanders and in Catalonia, which have long
ceased to be looked upon as French. But it nowhere came near to the
coveted frontier of the Rhine and the Alps. Of this kingdom it seemed at
first that Paris was at once to become the capital; no other city filled
so prominent a place in the early history of the reign of Charles the
Bald. In the very beginning of his reign we find Charles making use of
the position of the city and its bridge: to bar the progress of his
brother, the Emperor Lothar. We find him dwelling for a long time in the
city, and giving the citizens the delight of a spectacle by appearing
among them in royal pomp at the Easter festival.[55] Four years later,
the city began to appear in its other character as the great mark for
Scandinavian attack. The northern pirates were now swarming on every
sea, and the coasts of Britain, Gaul, and Germany were all alike
desolated by their harryings. But they instinctively felt that, while no
shore lay more temptingly for their objects than the shores of Northern
Gaul, there was no point either of the insular or of the continental
realm where their approach was better guarded against. The island city,
with its two bridges and its strongly fortified Roman suburb on the
mainland, blocked their path as perhaps no other stronghold in Gaul or
Britain could block it.[56] In the very year of the fight of Fontenay,
as if they had scented the mutual slaughter from afar, the Northmen had
sailed up the stream and had harried Rouen and the surrounding lands
with the sternest horrors of fire and sword.[57] Four years later they
pressed on yet further into the heart of the defenceless realm; Paris
was attacked; in strange contrast with the valour of its citizens forty
years later, no one had the heart to resist; the city was stormed and
sacked; and King Charles, finding his forces unequal to defend or to
avenge, was driven to forestal the wretched policy of Æthelred, and to
buy a momentary respite from the invaders.[58] Other attacks, other
harryings followed. One more terrible than all, in the year 857, was
specially remembered on account of the frightful havoc wrought among the
churches of the city. The church of Saint Genoveva, on the left bank of
the river--better known to modern ears as the Pantheon--was burned,
Saint Stephen's, afterwards known as Nôtre Dame, Saint Germans, and
Saint Denis, bought their deliverance only by large ransoms.[59] In the
minds of the preachers of the time the woes of Paris suggested the woes
of Jerusalem and a wail of sorrow went up from the Jeremiah of the age
for the havoc of the city and its holy places.[60]
When we remember the importance to which Paris was plainly beginning to
rise under Lewis the Pious, we may perhaps be led to think that it was
the constant attacks to which the city was exposed which hindered it
from becoming the permanent dwelling-place of royalty under Charles the
Bald. That the city held a place in his affections throughout his life
is shown by his choosing Saint Denis as the place of his burial. But it
never became the royal city of the Kings of his house. We need hardly
look on it as a mark of personal cowardice in Charles that he preferred
to fix the ordinary seat of his government in some other place than the
most exposed fortress of his kingdom. Compiègne now often appears as a
royal dwelling-place; but the home and centre of Carolingian royalty in
the Western Kingdom gradually fixed itself on a spot the most opposite
to Paris in position and feeling which the Western Kingdom could afford.
Paris and Laon were in every sense rivals; their rivalry is stamped upon
their very outward appearance. Each is a representative city. Paris,
like Châlons and Bristol, is essentially an island city; the river was
its defence against ordinary enemies, however easily that defence might
be changed into a highway for its attack in the hands of the amphibious
Northmen. But Laon is the very pride of that class of towns which out of
Gaulish hill-forts grew into Roman and mediæval cities. None stands more
proudly on its height; none has kept its ancient character so little
changed to our own day. The town still keeps itself within the walls
which fence in the hill-top, and whatever there is of suburb has grown
up at the foot, apart from the ancient city. Paris again was the home of
the new-born nationality of the Romance speech,[61] the home of the new
French nation. Laon stood near the actual German border, in a land where
German was still spoken; it was fitted in every way to be, as it proved,
the last home of a German dynasty in the West. There can be little doubt
that, by thus moving eastward, by placing themselves in this outlying
Teutonic corner of their realm, the Carolingian Kings of the West threw
away the opportunity of putting themselves at the head of the new
national movement, and of reigning as national Kings, if not of the
whole Romance-speaking population of Gaul, at least of its strictly
French portion north of the Loire.
Of such a mission we may be sure Charles the Bald and his successors
never dreamed. The chances are that those to whom that mission really
fell dreamed of it just as little. We must never forget that the
national movements of those days were for the most part instinctive and
unconscious; but they were all the more powerful and lasting for being
instinctive and unconscious. An act of Charles the Bald, one of the
ordinary grants by a King to one of his vassals, created the French
nation. The post from which the King himself shrank was entrusted to a
valiant subject, and Robert the Strong, the mightiest champion of the
land against the heathen invader, received the government of the whole
border land threatened by the Breton and the Northman.[62] We may be
sure that the thoughts of the King himself did not reach at the most
beyond satisfaction at having provided the most important post in his
realm with a worthy defender. To shield himself from the enemy by such a
barrier as was furnished by Robert's country, it was worth while to
sacrifice the direct possession even of the fair lands between the Loire
and the Seine. His dominion was a _mark_;[63] his truest title a
_marquis_. But the Mark of France, like the Mark of Brandenburg and the
Mark of Austria, was destined to great things. Robert no doubt, like the
other governors and military chiefs, who were fast growing from
magistrates into Princes, rejoiced in the prospect of becoming the
source of a dynasty, a dynasty which could not fail to take a high place
among the princes of Gaul. But he hardly dreamed of founding a line of
Kings, and a line of Kings the most lasting that the world ever saw.
Still less did he dream of founding a nation. But he did both. The
Counts who held the first place of danger and honour soon eclipsed in
men's eyes the Kings who had retired to the safer obscurity of their
eastern frontier. The city of the river became a national centre in a
way in which the city of the rock could never be. The people of the
struggling Romance speech of northern Gaul found a centre and a head in
the rising city and its gallant princes. That Robert was himself of
German descent, the son of a stranger from some of the Teutonic
provinces of the Empire,[64] mattered not a whit. From the beginning of
their historic life the Parisian Dukes and Kings have been the leaders
and representatives of the new French nationality. No royal dynasty has
ever been so thoroughly identified with the nation over which it ruled,
because no royal dynasty could be so truly said to have created the
nation. Paris, France, and the Dukes and Kings of the French are three
ideas which can never be kept asunder. A true instinct soon gave the
ruler of the new state a higher and a more significant title. The Count
of Paris was merged in the Duke of the French, and the Duke of the
French was soon to be merged in the King. The name of _Francia_, a name
whose shiftings and whose changes of meaning have perplexed both history
and politics--a name which Eastern and Western writers seem to have made
it a kind of point of honour to use in different meanings[65]--now
gradually settles down, as far as the Western Kingdom is concerned, into
the name of a territory, answering roughly to the Celtic Gaul of the
elder geography.[66] It has still to be distinguished by epithets like
_Occidentalis_ and _Latina_, from the Eastern _Francia_ of Teutonic
speech, but, in the language of Gaul, _Francia_ and _Franci_ for the
future mean the dominion and the subjects of the lord of Paris. We need
not say that the lands beyond the Rhone, the Saône, and the Maes, which
formed no part of the Western Kingdom, are not included under the name
of _Francia_. But neither are the lands held, like the French Duchy, in
fief of the common sovereign, Brittany, Flanders, Aquitaine, and the
ducal Burgundy. To these must be added Normandy, the land wrested from
the French Duchy to form the inheritance of the converted Northman.
France is still but one among the principalities of Gaul; but, like
Wessex in England, like Castile in Spain, like Prussia in Germany and
Piedmont in Italy, it was the one destined, by one means or another, to
swallow up the rest. From the grant of 861, from the foundation of the
Parisian Duchy, we may date the birth of the French state and nation.
From that day onwards France is whatever can, by fair means or foul, be
brought into obedience to Paris and her ruler.
Count Robert the Strong, the Maccabæus of the West-Frankish realm, the
patriarch of the old Capets, of the Valois, and of the Bourbons, died as
he had lived, fighting for Gaul and Christendom against the heathen
Dane.[67] But his dominion and his mission passed to a son worthy of
him--to Odo, or Eudes,[68] the second Count of his house, presently to
be the first of the Kings of Paris. In his day came the great struggle,
the mighty and fiery trial, which was to make the name of Paris and her
lord famous throughout the world. On the great siege of Paris by the
Northmen, the turning-point in the history of the city, of the Duchy,
and in truth of all Western Europe, we may fairly dwell at somewhat
greater detail than we have done on the smaller events which paved the
way for it. We must bear in mind the wretched state of all the countries
which made up the Carolingian Empire. The Northmen were sailing up every
river, and were spreading their ravages to every accessible point. Every
year in the various contemporary annals is marked by the harrying of
some fresh district, by the sack of some city, by the desecration of
some revered monastery.[69] Resistance, when there was any, was almost
wholly local; the invaders were so far from encountering the whole
force of the Empire that they never encountered the whole force of any
one of its component kingdoms. The day of Saul-court, renowned in that
effort of old Teutonic minstrelsy which may rank alongside of our own
songs of Brunanburh and Maldon,[70] the day when the young king Lewis
led the West-Frankish host to victory over the heathen,[71] stands out
well-nigh alone in the records of that unhappy time. While neither realm
was spared, while one set of invaders ravaged the banks of the Seine and
the Loire, while another more daring band sacked Aachen, Köln, and
Trier,[72] the rival Kings of the Franks were mainly intent on extending
their borders at the expense of one another. Charles the Bald was far
more eager to extend his nominal frontier to the Rhine,[73] or to come
back from Italy adorned with the Imperial titles,[74] than he was to
take any active step to drive out the common enemy of all the kindred
realms. At last the whole Empire, save the Burgundian Kingdom of Boso,
was once more joined together under Charles the Fat. Paris was again
under the nominal sovereignty of an Emperor whose authority, equally
nominal everywhere, extended also over Rome and Aachen. Precarious and
tottering as such an Empire was, the even nominal union of so many
crowns on a single head, however unfit that head was to bear their
weight, does seem to have given for the moment something like a feeling
of greater unity and thereby of greater strength. Paris, defended by its
own Count and its own Bishop, was defended by them in the name of His
Emperor, Lord of the World.[75] The sovereigns alike of East and West
were appealed to for help, and at least a show of help was sent in the
name of both parts of the Frankish realm.[76] The defence of Paris was
essentially a local defence, waged by its own citizens under the command
of their local chiefs. Still the great check which the invaders then
received came nearer to a national act on the part of the whole Frankish
Empire than anything which had happened since the death of Charles the
Great.
Our materials for the great siege are fairly abundant. Several of the
contemporary chronicles, in describing this gallant struggle, throw off
somewhat of their usual meagreness, and give an account conceived with
an unusual degree of spirit and carried out with an unusual amount of
detail.[77] And we have a yet more minute account, which, even as it is,
is of considerable value, and which, had it been a few degrees less
wearisome and unintelligible, would have been of the highest interest.
Abbo, a distinguished churchman of those times, a monk of the house of
Saint German, and not only a contemporary, but a spectator and sharer in
the defence,[78] conceived the happy idea of writing a minute narrative
of the exciting scenes which he had witnessed. But he unhappily threw
his tale into the shape of hexameters which have few rivals for
affectation and obscurity. The political biographer of Lewis the Pious
at all events writes Latin; Abbo writes in a Babylonish dialect of his
own composing, stuffed full of Greek and other out-of-the-way words, and
to parts of which he himself found it needful to attach a glossary.
Still with all this needless darkness, he gives us many details, and he
especially preserves many individual names which we should not find out
from the annalists. A fervent votary of Saint German, a loyal citizen of
Paris, a no less loyal subject of the valiant Count who, when he wrote,
had grown into a King, Abbo had every advantage which personal knowledge
and local interest could give to a narrator of the struggle. Only we
cannot help wishing that he had stooped to tell his tale, if not in his
native tongue, whether Romance or Teutonic, yet at least in the
intelligible Latin of Nithard in a past generation and of Richer in a
future one.[79]
The poet begins with a panegyric on his city, in which he may, while
dealing with such a theme, be forgiven for somewhat unduly exalting its
rank among the cities of the world.[80] Its position, the strength of
the island-fortress, connected with the mainland by its castles on
either side, is plainly set forth.[81] The defenders of the city are
clearly set before us; Odo the Count, the future King, as we are often
reminded,[82] and Gozlin the Bishop, stand forth in the front rank.
Around the two great local chiefs are gathered a secondary band of their
kinsfolk and supporters, clerical and lay. There is Odo's brother
Robert, himself to wear a crown in the city which he defended, but in
days to which the foresight of the poet did not extend. There is the
valiant Count Ragnar; there is the warlike Abbot Ebles of Saint Germans,
whose exploits are recorded with special delight by the loyal monk of
his house.[83] A crowd of lesser names are also handed down to us, names
of men who had their honourable share in the work, but with whose bare
names it is hardly needful to burthen the memories of modern readers. A
great object of attack on the part of the Northmen was the castle which
guarded the bridge on the right bank of the river, represented in after
times by the Grand Châtelet. The watchful care of the Bishop had been
diligent in strengthening this and the other defences of the city; but
the last works which were to guard this important point were not fully
finished.[84] The Danish fleet now drew near, a fleet manned, so it was
said, by more than thirty thousand warriors.[85] As in the tale of our
own Brihtnoth,[86] the invaders began with a peaceful message. The
leader of the pirates, Sigefrith, the sea-king,--a king, as the poet
tells us, without a kingdom[87]--sought an interview with Count Odo, and
demanded a peaceful passage through the city. Odo sternly answers that
the city is entrusted to his care by his lord the Emperor, and that he
will never forsake the duty which was laid upon him. The siege now
began; the Northmen strove to storm the unfinished tower. After two days
of incessant fighting, and an intervening night spent in repairing the
defences, the valour of the defenders prevailed. The Count and the
Bishop, and the Abbot who could pierce seven Danes with a single shot of
his arrow,[88] finally drove back the heathen to their ships; and
instead of the easy storm and sack which they doubtless looked for on
this, as on earlier occasions, the Northmen were driven to undertake the
siege of the city in form.[89]
One is a little surprised at the progress in the higher branches of the
art of war which had clearly been made by the enemy who now assaulted
Paris. The description of their means of attack, if not intelligible in
every detail, at least shows that the freebooters, merciless heathens as
they were, were at all events thorough masters of the engineering
science of their age.[90] But, through the whole winter of 885, all
their attempts were unavailing. The skill and valour of the defenders
were equal to those of the besiegers, and their hearts were strung by
every motive which could lead men to defend themselves to the last. But
early in the next year, in February 886, accident threw a great
advantage into the hands of the besiegers. A great flood in the Seine
swept away, or greatly damaged, the lesser bridge, the painted bridge,
that which joined the island to the fortress on the left bank of the
river.[91] That fortress and the suburb which it defended, the suburb
which contained the Roman palace and the ministers of Saint Genoveva and
Saint German, were thus cut off from the general defences of the city.
The watchful care of the Bishop strove to repair the bridge by night.
But the attempt was forestalled by the invaders; the tower was isolated
and surrounded by the enemy. The Bishop and the other defenders of the
city were left to behold, to weep, and to pray from the walls, at the
fate of their brethren whom they could no longer help.[92] The tower was
fiercely attacked; the gate did not give way till fire was brought to
help the blows of the Northmen; the defenders of the tower all perished
either by the flames or by the sword, and their bodies were hurled into
the river before the eyes of their comrades.[93] The conquerors now
destroyed the tower, and from their new vantage ground they pressed the
siege of the island city with increased vigour.
The chances of war seemed now to be turning against the besieged. The
stout heart of Bishop Gozlin at last began to fail; he saw that Paris
could no longer be defended by the arms of its citizens only. He sent a
message to Henry, the Duke of the Eastern Franks, praying him to come to
the defence of the Christian people. The Duke came; we are told that his
presence did little or nothing for the besieged city;[94] yet in the
obscure verses of the poet we seem to discern something like a night
attack on the Danish camp on the part of the Saxon Duke and his
followers.[95] But in any case the coming of the German allies did
nothing for the permanent relief of the city. They went back to their
own land; Paris was again left to its own resources, and at last the
Bishop, worn out with sorrow and illness, began to seek the usual
delusive remedy. He began to enter into negotiations with Sigefrith,
which were cut short by the prelate's death. The news was known in the
Danish camp before it was commonly known within the walls of Paris, and
the mass of the citizens first learnt from the insulting shouts of the
besiegers that their valiant Bishop was no more.[96]
The Bishop, as long as he lived, had been the centre and soul of the
whole defence, yet it would seem that, at the actual moment of his
death, his removal was a gain. We hear no more, at least on the part of
the men of Paris, of any attempts at treating with the enemy. One bitter
wail of despair from the besieged city reaches our ears, and the hero of
the second act of the siege now stands forth. The spiritual chief was
gone; the temporal chief steps into his place, and more than into his
place. Count Odo appears as cheering the hearts of the people by his
eloquence, and as leading them on to repeated combats with the
besiegers.[97] At last hunger began to tell on the strength of the
defenders; help from without was plainly needed, and this time it was to
be sought, not from any inferior chief, but from the common sovereign,
the Emperor and King of so many realms. Count Odo himself went forth on
the perilous errand; he called on the princes of the Empire for help in
the time of need, and warned the sluggish Augustus himself that, unless
help came speedily, the city would be lost for ever.[98] Long before any
troops were set in motion in any quarter for the deliverance of Paris,
the valiant Count was again within its walls, bringing again a gleam of
joy to the sad hearts of the citizens, both by the mere fact of his
presence and by the gallant exploit by which he was enabled to appear
among them. The Northmen knew of his approach, and made ready to bar his
way to the city. Before the gate of the tower on the right bank, the
tower which still guarded the northern bridge, the lines of the heathen
stood ready to receive the returning champion. Odo's horse was killed
under him, but, sword in hand, he hewed himself a path through the thick
ranks of the enemy; he made good his way to the gate, and was once more
within the walls of his own city, ready to share every danger of his
faithful people.[99]
Such a city, we may well say, deserved to become the seat of Kings, and
such a leader deserved to wear a royal crown within its walls. Eight
months of constant fighting passed away after the return of Odo before
the lord alike of Rome, of Aachen, and of Paris appeared before the city
where just now his presence was most needed. Towards the last days of
summer Duke Henry again appeared, but it was fully autumn before the
Emperor himself found his way to the banks of the Seine.[100] Duke Henry
came, with an army drawn from both the Frankish realms, Eastern and
Western.[101] With more show of prudence than he had shown at his former
coming, Henry began by reconnoitring both the city and the camp of the
enemy, to judge at what point an attack might be made with least
risk.[102] But the Northmen were too wary for him. They had surrounded
their whole camp with a network of trenches, three feet deep and one
foot wide, filled up with straw and brushwood, and made to present the
appearance of a level surface.[103] A small party only were left in
ambush. As the Duke drew near, they sprang up, hurled their javelins,
and provoked him with shouts. Henry pressed on in wrath, but he was soon
caught in the simple trap which had been laid for him; his horse fell,
and he himself was hurled to the ground. The enemy rushed upon him, slew
him, and stripped him in the sight of his army.[104] One of the
defenders of the city, the brave Count Ragnar, of whom we have already
heard, came in time only to bear off the body, at the expense of severe
wounds received in his own person.[105] The corpse of the Duke was
carried to Soissons and was buried in the Church of Saint Médard. The
army of Henry, disheartened by the loss of their chief, presently
returned to their own homes. Paris was again left to its own resources,
cheered only by such small rays of hope as might spring from the
drowning of one of the besieging leaders in the river.[106]
The news of the death of Henry was brought to the Emperor.
Notwithstanding his grief--perhaps an euphemism for his fear--he
pressed on towards Paris with his army; but even the chronicler most
favourable to him is obliged to confess that the lord of so many
nations, at the head of the host gathered from all his realms, did
nothing worthy of the Imperial majesty.[107] All in truth that the
Emperor Charles did was to patch up a treaty with the barbarians, by
virtue of which, on condition of their raising the siege of Paris, they
received a large sum as the ransom of the city, and were allowed to
ravage Burgundy without let or hindrance.[108] We are told indeed that
this step was taken because the land to be ravaged--are we to understand
the Kingdom of Boso?--was in rebellion.[109] At all events, the
Christian Emperor, the last who reigned over the whole Empire, handed
over a Christian land as a prey to pagan teeth, and left Paris without
striking a blow. Charles went straight back into Germany, and there
spent the small remnant of his reign and life in a disgraceful domestic
quarrel.[110] One act however he did which concerns our story. Hugh the
Abbot, the successor of Robert the Strong in the greater part of his
Duchy, had died during the siege. The valiant Count of Paris was now, by
Imperial grant, put in possession of all the domains which had been held
by his father.[111]
But the Count was not long to remain a mere Count; the city and its
chief were alike to receive the reward of their services in the cause of
Christendom. Presently came that strange and unexampled event by which
the last Emperor of the legitimate male stock of the Great Charles was
deposed by the common consent of all his dominions. The Empire again
split up into separate Kingdoms, ruled over by Kings of their own
choice. The choice of the Western realm fell, as it well deserved to
fall, upon the illustrious Count of Paris. The reign of Odo indeed was
not undisturbed, nor was his title undisputed. He had to struggle in the
beginning of his reign with a rival in the Italian Guy, and in latter
years he had to withstand the more formidable opposition of a rival King
of the old Imperial line. And chosen as he was by the voice of what we
may now almost venture to call the French people, hallowed as King in
the old royal seat of Compiègne by the hands of the Primate of Sens, the
Metropolitan of his own Paris,[112] Odo had still to acknowledge the
greater power and higher dignity of the Eastern King. He had to confess
himself the man of Arnulf, to receive his crown again at Arnulf's hands,
while Arnulf was not as yet a Roman Emperor, but still only a simple
King of the East Franks.[113] Still the Count had become a King; the
city which his stout heart and arm had so well defended had become a
royal city. The rank indeed both of the city and its King, was far from
being firmly fixed. A hundred years of shiftings and changings of
dynasties, of rivalry between Laon and Paris, between the Frank and the
Frenchman, had still to follow. But the great step had been taken; there
was at last a King of the French reigning in Paris. The city which by
its own great deeds had become the cradle of a nation, the centre of a
kingdom, was now placed in the foremost rank at their head. The longest
and most unbroken of the royal dynasties of Europe had now begun to
reign. And it had begun to reign, because the first man of that house
who wore a crown was called to that crown as the worthiest man in the
realm over which he ruled.
But we must go back to the enemy before Paris. By the treaty concluded
with the Emperor, they were to raise the siege, but they were left at
liberty to harry Burgundy and other lands. The citizens of Paris,
however, steadfastly refused to allow them to pass up the Seine; so the
Northmen ventured on a feat which in that age was looked on as
unparalleled.[114] They saw, we are told, that the city could not be
taken; so they carried their ships for two miles by land, and set sail
at a point of the river above the city.[115] While the Empire was
falling in pieces, while new kingdoms were arising and were being
struggled for by rival kings, the Northmen were harrying at pleasure.
Soissons was sacked;[116] after a long and vain attack on the mighty
walls of Sens, the enemy found it convenient to retire on a payment of
money.[117] Meaux also, under the valiant Count Theodberht, stood a
siege; but after the death of their defender, the citizens capitulated.
The capitulation was broken by the Northmen; the city was burned, and
the inhabitants were massacred.[118] By this time Odo was King.
Meanwhile the Northmen, after their retreat from Sens, had made another
attempt on Paris, and had been again beaten off by the valiant
citizens.[119] The King now came to what was now his royal city, and
established a fortified camp in the neighbourhood to secure it from
future attacks.[120] Yet when the Northmen once more besieged Paris in
the autumn of 889, even Odo himself had to stoop to the common means of
deliverance, The new King, the first Parisian King, bought off the
threatened attack by the payment of a Danegeld, and the pirates went
away by land and sea to ravage the Constantine peninsula, the land
which, a generation or two later, was to become the special land of the
converted Northmen.[121]
Paris was finally secured against Scandinavian attack by the
establishment of the Duchy of Normandy. By the treaty of Clair-on-Epte
in 913, Rolf Ganger, changed in French and Latin mouths into Rou and
Rollo, became the man of the King of Laon for lands which were taken
away from the dominion of the Duke of Paris. Charles the Simple, the
restored Karling, was now King; Robert, the brother of Odo, was Duke of
the French, and there can be no doubt that the tottering monarchy of
Laon gained much by the dismemberment of the Parisian Duchy and by the
establishment at the mouth of the Seine of a vassal bound by special
ties to the King himself. The foundation of the Rouen Duchy at once
secured Paris against all assaults of mere heathen pirates. France had
now a neighbour to the immediate north of her--a neighbour who shut her
off from the sea and from the mouth of her own great river--a neighbour
with whom she might have her wars, as with other neighbours--but a
neighbour who had embraced her creed, who was speedily adopting her
language and manners, and who formed, part of the same general political
system as herself. The shifting relations between France and Normandy
during the tenth and eleventh centuries form no part of our subject, but
it will be well to bear in mind that Paris was at once sheltered and
imprisoned through the Norman possession of the lower course of the
Seine.
It follows then that the next besiegers of Paris came from a different
quarter; and these next besiegers came from the quarter from which its
last besiegers have come. In the course of the tenth century, the
century of so many shifting relations between Rouen, Laon, and Paris,
while the rivalry between King and Duke sometimes broke forth and
sometimes slumbered, Paris was twice attacked or threatened by German
armies. Both the First and the Second Otto at least appeared in the near
neighbourhood of the city. In 946, the first and greatest of the name,
not yet Emperor in formal rank, but already exercising an Imperial
pre-eminence over the kingdoms into which the Frankish Empire had split
up, entered the French Duchy with two royal allies or vassals in his
train. One was the Burgundian King Conrad, Lord of the realm between
the Rhone and the Alps; the other was the nominal King of Paris and its
Duke, Lewis, alike the heir of all the Karlings and the descendant of
our own Ælfred, whose nominal reign over the Western Kingdom was
practically well nigh confined to the single fortress of Compiègne.
Among the shifting relations of the Princes of the Western Kingdom, Hugh
the Duke of the French and Richard the Duke of the Normans were now
allied against their Carolingian over-lord. He had lately been their
prisoner, and had been restored to freedom and kingship only by the
surrender of the cherished possession of his race, the hill and tower of
Laon. Otto, the mighty Lord of the Eastern realm, felt himself called on
to step in when Teutonic interests in the Western lands seemed to be at
their last gasp. The three Kings united their forces against the two
Dukes, and marched against the capitals both of France and Normandy. But
never were the details of a campaign told in a more contradictory way.
There can be little doubt that Rouen was besieged, and besieged
unsuccessfully. Thus much at least the German historian allows;[122] in
Norman lands the tale swells into a magnificent legend.[123] What
happened at Paris is still less clear. Laon, for the moment a French
possession, was besieged unsuccessfully, and Rheims successfully.[124]
Then, after a vain attempt on Senlis, the combined armies of the Kings
of Aachen, Arles, and Compiègne drew near to the banks of the Seine.
Flodoard, the canon of Rheims, the discreetest writer of his age, leaves
out all mention of Paris and its Duke; he tells us merely that the Kings
crossed the river and harried the whole land except the cities.[125] The
Saxon Widukind tells us how his King, at the head of thirty-two
legions, every man of whom wore a straw hat[126] besieged Duke Hugh in
Paris, and duly performed his devotions at the shrine of Saint
Denis.[127] From these two entries we are safe in inferring that, if
Paris was now in any strict sense besieged, it was at least not besieged
successfully. But Richer, the monk of Saint Remigius, one of the
liveliest tale-tellers of any age, is ready with one of those minute
stories which, far more than the entries of more solemn annalists, help
to bring us face to face with the men of distant times. The Kings were
drawing near to the Seine. In order that the enemy might be cut off from
all means of crossing, the Duke of the French, Hugh the Great, aware of
their approach, had bidden all vessels, great and small, to be taken
away from the right bank of the river for the space of twenty miles. But
his design was hindered by a cunning stratagem of the invaders. Ten
young men, who had made up their mind to brave every risk,[128] went in
advance of the army of the Kings, having laid aside their military garb
and provided themselves with the staves and wallets of pilgrims.
Protected by this spiritual armour, they passed unhurt and unchallenged
through the whole city of Paris, and crossed over both bridges to the
left bank of the river. There, not far from the suburb of Saint German,
dwelt a miller, who kept the mills which were turned by the waters of
the Seine.[129] He willingly received the comely youths who professed
to have crossed from the other side of the river to visit the holy
places. They repaid his hospitality with money, and moreover purchased
wine, in the consumption of which a jovial day was spent. The genial
drink opened the heart and the lips of the host, and he freely answered
the various questions of his guests. He was not only a miller; he was
also the Duke's head fisherman, and he moreover turned an occasional
penny by letting out vessels for hire. The Germans praised the kindness
which he had already shown them, which made them presume to ask for
further favours. They had still other holy places to pray at, but they
were wearied with their journey. They promised him a reward of ten
shillings--no small sum in the tenth century--if he would carry them
across to the other side. He answered that, by the Duke's orders, all
vessels were kept on the left bank to cut off all means of crossing from
the Germans. They told him that it might be done in the night without
discovery. Eager for his reward, he agreed. He received the money, and,
accompanied by a boy, his step-son, he guided them to the spot where
seventy-two ships lay moored to the river side. The boy was presently
thrown into the river, the miller was seized by the throat, and
compelled by threats of instant death to loose the ships. He obeyed, and
was presently bound and put on board one of the vessels. Each of the
Germans now entered a ship and steered it to the right bank. The whole
body then returned in one of the vessels, and each again brought across
another. By going through this process eight times, the whole
seventy-two ships were brought safely to the right bank. By daybreak the
army of the Kings had reached the river. They crossed in safety, for all
the inhabitants of the country had fled, and the Duke himself had sought
shelter at Orleans. The land was harried as far as the Loire, but of the
details of the siege of Rouen and of the siege of Paris, if any siege
there was, we hear not a word.[130]
The military results of the first German invasion of France and Normandy
were certainly not specially glorious. Laon, Senlis, Paris, and Rouen,
were, to say the least, not taken. All that was done was to take Rheims
and to ravage a large extent of open country. But, in a political point
of view, the expedition was neither unsuccessful nor unimportant. From
that time the influence of the Eastern King in the affairs of the
Western Kingdom becomes of paramount importance, and under his
protection, the King of the West Franks, King of Compiègne and soon
again to be King of Laon, holds a far higher place than before in the
face of his mighty vassals at Paris and Rouen. The next German invasion,
forty years later, found quite another state of things in the Western
Kingdom. The relations between King Lothar and Duke Hugh Capet were
wholly different from the relations which had existed between their
fathers, King Lewis and Duke Hugh the Great. No less different were the
relations between Lothar and Otto the Second from those which had
existed between their fathers, Lewis and Otto the Great. The elder Otto
had been a protector, first to his brother-in-law and then to his
nephew; the younger Otto was only a rival in the eyes of his
cousin.[131] On the other hand, it was the policy of Hugh Capet to keep
up the dignity of the Crown which he meant one day to wear, and not to
appear as an open enemy of the dynasty which he trusted quietly to
supplant. For a while then the rivalry between Laon and Paris was
hushed, and the friendship of Paris carried with it the friendship of
Rouen and Angers. Thus, while Lewis, a prince than whom none ever showed
a loftier or more gallant spirit, was hunted from one fortress or one
prison to another, his son, a man in every way his inferior, was really
able to command the forces of the whole land north of the Loire. Again
the King of Gaul looked Rhine-wards; the border land of Lotharingia
kindled the ambition of a prince who might deem himself King both of
Laon and Paris. That border land, after many times fluctuating to and
fro, had now become an acknowledged portion of the Eastern Kingdom. But
a sudden raid might win it for the King of the West, and the Duke of
Paris would be nothing loth to help to make such an addition to the
Kingdom which he meant one day to possess. The raid was made; the hosts
of the King and the Duke crossed the frontier, and burst suddenly on the
Imperial dwelling-place of Aachen. The Emperor, with his pregnant wife,
the Greek princess Theophanô, had to flee before the approach of his
cousin, and Lothar had the glory of turning the brazen eagle which his
great forefather had placed on the roof of his palace in such a
direction as no longer to be a standing menace to the western
realms.[132] As in a more recent warfare, the Gaul began with child's
play, and the German made answer in terrible earnest. The dishonour done
to their prince and his realm stirred the heart of all Germany, and
thirty thousand horsemen--implying no doubt a far larger number of
warriors of lower degree--gathered round their Emperor to defend and
avenge the violated Teutonic soil. Lothar made no attempt to defend his
immediate dominions; he fled to crave the help of his mighty vassal at
Paris.[133] The German hosts marched, seemingly without meeting any
resistance, from their own frontier to the banks of the Seine.
Everywhere the land was harried; cities were taken or surrendered, but
the pious Emperor, the Advocate of the Universal Church, everywhere
showed all due honour to the saints and their holy places.[134] In
primatial Rheims, in our own days to be the temporary home of another
German King, the German Cæsar paid his devotions at the shrine of Saint
Remigius, the saint who had received an earlier German conqueror still
into the fold of Christ.[135] At Soissons Saint Médard received equal
worship, and when the church of Saint Bathild at Chelles was burned
without the Emperor's knowledge, a large sum was devoted to its
restoration. But if the shrines of the saints were reverenced, the
palaces of the rival King were especially marked out for destruction.
Attigny was burned, and nearly equal ruin fell upon Compiègne itself.
Meanwhile the King had fled to Etampes, in the immediate territory of
the Duke, while Hugh himself was collecting his forces at Paris. At last
the German host came within sight of the ducal city. Otto now deemed
that he had done enough for vengeance. He had shown that the frontiers
of Germany were not to be invaded with impunity; he had come to Paris,
not to storm or blockade the city, but to celebrate his victorious march
with the final triumph of a pious bravado. He sent a message to the Duke
to say that on the Mount of Martyrs he would sing such a Hallelujah to
the martyrs as the Duke and people of Paris had never heard. He
performed his vow; a band of clergy were gathered together on the sacred
hill, and the German host sang their Hallelujah in the astonished ears
of the men of Paris. This done, the mission of Otto was over, and after
three days spent within sight of Paris, the Emperor turned him to depart
into his own land.[136]
Such, at least, is the tale as told by the admirers of the Imperial
devotee. In the hands of the monk of Rheims the story assumes quite
another shape, and in the hands of the panegyrist of the house of Anjou
it inevitably grows into a legend.[137] Richer tells us how the Emperor
stood for three days on the right bank of the river, while the Duke was
gathering his forces on the left; how a German Goliath challenged any
man of France to single combat, and presently fell by the dart of a
French, or perhaps Breton, David;[138] how Otto, seeing the hosts which
were gathering against him, while his own forces were daily lessening,
deemed that it was his wisest course to retreat.[139] As for the details
of the retreat, our stories are still more utterly contradictory. One
loyal French writer makes Lothar, at the head of the whole force of
France and Burgundy, chase the flying Emperor to the banks of the Maes,
whose waters swallowed up many of the fugitives.[140] The monk of Rheims
transfers the scene of the German mishap to the nearer banks of the
Aisne,[141] while the Maes is with him the scene of a friendly
conference between the two Kings, in which Lothar, distrusting his
vassals at Paris, deems it wiser to purchase the good-will of the
Emperor by the cession of all his claims upon Lotharingia.[142] The most
striking details come from the same quarter from which we get the
picture of the Hallelujah on Montmartre. The Emperor, deeming that he
had had enough of vengeance, departed on the approach of winter;[143] he
reached the Aisne and proposed to encamp on its banks. But by the advice
of Count Godfrey of Hennegau, who warned him of the dangers of a stream
specially liable to floods, he crossed with the greater part of his
army, leaving only, on the dangerous side, a small party with the
baggage.[144] It was on this party that Lothar, hastening on with a
small force, fell suddenly, while a sudden rise of the stream hindered
either attack or defence on the part of the main armies.[145] Otto then
sends a boat across with a challenge, proposing that one or the other
should allow his enemy to cross without hindrance, and that the
possession of the disputed lands should be decided by the result of the
battle which should follow.[146] 'Nay rather,' cried Count Geoffrey,
probably the famous Grisegonelle of Anjou, 'let the two Kings fight out
their differences in their own persons, and let them spare the blood of
their armies.'[147] 'Small then, it seems,' retorted Count Godfrey in
wrath, 'is the value you put upon your King. At least it shall never be
said that German warriors stood tamely by while their Emperor was
putting his life in jeopardy.'[148] At this moment, when we are looking
for some scene of exciting personal interest, the curtain suddenly
falls, and this, our most detailed narrator, turns away from the
fortunes of Emperors and Kings to occupy himself with his immediate
subject, the acts of the Bishops of Cambray.[149]
Putting all our accounts together it is hard to say whether, in a
military point of view, the expedition of Otto the Second was a success
or a failure. If his design was to take Paris, he certainly failed. If
he simply wished to avenge his own wrongs and to show that Germany could
not be insulted with impunity, he undoubtedly succeeded. In either case
the political gain was wholly on the German side. King and Duke acted
together during the campaign; but each, in its course, learned to
distrust the other, and each found it expedient to seek the friendship
of the Emperor as a check against his rival.[150] And more than all, the
Imperial rights over Lotharingia were formally acknowledged by Lothar,
and were not disputed again for some ages.[151]
This campaign of 976 has a special interest just now, as its earlier
stages read, almost word for word, like a forestalling of the events of
the present year of wonders. How far its later stages may find their
counterpart in the great warfare now going on, it is not for us to
guess. But it is a campaign which marks a stage in the history of
Europe. It is the first war that we can speak of--a war waged between
Germany and anything which has even the feeblest claim to be called an
united France. When Otto the Great marched against Paris and Rouen, he
was fighting in the cause of the King of the West Franks, the lawful
over-lord of the Dukes against whom he was fighting. When Otto the
Second marched against Paris, he was fighting against King and Dukes
alike, and King and Dukes between them had at their call all the lands
of the strictly French speech, the tongue of _oil_. Aquitaine of course,
and the other lands of the tongue of _oc_, had no part or lot in the
matter; then, as in latter times, there were no Frenchmen south of the
Loire. But if the expedition of Otto was in this sense the first German
invasion of France, it was also for a long time the last. It is not
often that Imperial armies have since that day entered French territory
at all. The armies of Otto the Fourth appeared in the thirteenth century
at Bouvines, and the armies of Charles the Fifth appeared in the
sixteenth century in Provence. But Bouvines, lying in the dominions of a
powerful and rebellious vassal, was French only by the most distant
external allegiance, and Provence, in the days of Charles the Fifth, was
still a land newly won for France, and the Imperial claims over it were
not yet wholly forgotten. Both invasions touched only remote parts of
the kingdom, and in no way threatened the capital. Since the election
of Hugh Capet made Paris for ever the head of France and of all the
vassals of the French Kingdom, the city has been besieged and taken by
pretenders, native and foreign, to the Capetian Crown, but it has never,
till our own century, been assailed by the armies of the old Teutonic
realm. The fall of the first Buonaparte was followed by a surrender of
Paris to a host which called up the memories alike of Otto of Germany
and of Henry of England. The fall of the second Buonaparte is followed
before our own eyes by the siege of Paris, the crowning point of a war
whose first stages suggest the campaign of the Second Otto, but which,
for the mighty interests, at stake, for the long endurance of besieger
and besieged, rather suggests the great siege at the hands of Sigefrith.
But all alike are witnesses to the position which the great city of the
Seine has held ever since the days of Odo. Paris is to France not merely
its greatest city, the seat of its government, the centre of its society
and literature. It is France itself; it is, as it has been so long, its
living heart and its surest bulwark. It is the city which has created
the kingdom, and on the life of the city the life of the kingdom seems
to hang. What is to be its fate? Is some wholly different position in
the face of France and of Europe to be the future doom of that memorable
city? Men will look on its possible humiliation with very different
eyes. Some may be disposed to take up the strain of the Hebrew prophet,
and to say, 'How hath the oppressor ceased, the golden city ceased!'
Others will lament the home of elegance and pleasure, and what calls
itself civilization. We will, in taking leave of Paris, old and new,
wind up with the warning, this time intelligible enough to be striking,
of her own poet--
Francia cur latitas vires, narra, peto, priscas,
Te majora triumphâsti quibus atque jugâsti
Regna tibi? Propter vitium triplexque piaclum.
Quippe supercilium, Veneris quoque feda venustas.
Ac vestis preciosæ elatio te tibi tollunt!
Afrodite adeo, saltem quo arcere parentes[152]
Haud valeas lecto, monachas Domino neque sacras;
Vel quid naturam, siquidem tibi sat mulieres,
Despicis, occurant? Agitamus fasque nefasque.
Aurea sublimem mordet tibi fibula vestem,
Efficis et calidam Tyriâ camera preciosâ.
Non præter chlamydem auratam cupis indusiari
Tegmine, decusata tuos gemmis nisi zona
Nulla fovet lumbos, aurique pedes nisi virgæ,
Non habitus humilis, non te valet abdere vestis.
Hæc facis; hæc aliæ faciunt gentes ita nullæ;
Hæc tria ni linquas, vires regnumque paternum
Omne scelus super his Christi, cujus quoque vates,
Nasci testantur bibli: fuge, Francia, ab istis!
ART. VI.--_The Established Church in Wales._
(1.) _An Essay on the Causes which have Produced Dissent from the
Established Church in Wales._ By ARTHUR JAMES JOHNES. Third Edition.
(2.) _Letters on the Social and Political Condition of Wales._ By HENRY
RICHARD. London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder.
(3.) _History of Nonconformity in Wales._ By THOMAS REES, D.D. London:
John Snow.
(4.) _Hanes y Methodistiaid Calfinaidd gan._ JOHN HUGHES.
(5.) _Llyfryddiaeth y Cymry, gan y diweddar Barch._ WILLIAM RAWLANDS.
Llanidloes: John Pryse.
(6.) _The Church of the Cymry. A Letter to the Right Hon. W. E.
Gladstone, M.P._, from HENRY S. EDWARDS, B.A. Oxon., Vicar of Carnarvon.
London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
(7.) _The Church of England in Wales, in Seven Letters to the Right Hon.
W. E. Gladstone, M.P._ By the Rev. WILLIAM REES, Liverpool.
The Act for the Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Irish Church
was one of great importance for what it did, but of still greater
importance for what it implied; for in that measure there was a distinct
legislative recognition of certain general principles, which are
susceptible of far wider application than to the particular case they
were invoked to sustain. It disposed, once for all, of the fond fantasy
that the State is bound in its collective capacity to have a conscience,
and in obedience to the dictates of that conscience, to impose its own
creed upon the community, as the established faith of the country, to be
supported by the authority, and enforced by the sanction of law. It
acknowledged the principle that where an established church never has
been, or has ceased to be the church of the nation, and fails,
therefore, in its professed function as the religious instructor of the
people, it has no longer any _raison d'être_, and ought to be swept
away as an anomaly and encumbrance. It recognised the fact, if not for
the first time, at least with more distinctness and emphasis than was
ever done before, that ecclesiastical property is national property,
which the nation has a perfect right through its legitimate organ, the
legislature, to apply to any purpose it may think fit, whether sacred or
secular.
We need not wonder that when the Irish Establishment was abolished,
men's minds should turn almost instinctively to the sister institution
in Wales, as furnishing a case in many respects parallel, but in other
respects still less admitting of justification. The discussion of this
subject in Parliament last session, on the motion of Mr. Watkin
Williams, did not take place, perhaps, under the most favourable
auspices. But it was at least attended with this advantage, that it
obliged those who oppose the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church to
show their hand. As Mr. Gladstone, in addition to his many other merits
as an orator, is the most accomplished debater in the House of Commons,
we may safely assume that whatever could be said in defence of the
Church in Wales, and in deprecation of its proposed severance from the
State, was said by him with the utmost degree of plausibility and point.
But certainly on a calm review of the arguments he used on that
occasion, they do not appear to be very formidable.
It may be said, indeed, that the Prime Minister made no attempt to
defend the Welsh Church. He abandoned it to the strongest condemnation
pronounced upon it by its adversaries, for the 'gross neglect,
corruption, nepotism, plunder,' to use his own words, by which it has
been marked; and only tried to account for these evils by laying them
all to the charge of 'Anglicizing prelates.' He admitted that, even
granting what Churchmen claimed, namely, about one-fourth of the
population as belonging to the Establishment,--a claim, let us say in
passing, which in the face of notorious facts is simply
preposterous--'the disproportion is very remarkable in the case of a
Church purporting to be the Church of the nation.' He admitted,
moreover, as a circumstance seriously militating against the Welsh
Church, that 'so large a proportion of her members belong to the upper
classes of the community, the classes who are most able to provide
themselves with the ministrations of religion, and therefore, in whose
special and peculiar interest it is most difficult to make any effectual
appeal for public resources and support.' But while acknowledging all
this, he resists the proposal for its disestablishment. On what grounds?
First, on this ground--that there is no hostility in Wales to the
Church Establishment, and that its existence does not, as in Ireland,
produce alienation or bitterness of feeling between different classes of
the community. But this argument, if it were well founded in fact, which
unhappily it is as far as possible from being, does not address itself
in the least to the reason or justice of the case. Even if the Welsh
people were so devoid of spirit and self-respect as to feel it no
grievance to have a costly Church Establishment, which exists almost
exclusively for the benefit of the rich, saddled upon their necks,
surely that is no proof that it is right to perpetuate the privileges of
a body, whose history for generations has been marked by 'gross neglect,
corruption, and nepotism,' and which, purporting to be the Church of a
nation, does not pretend, even according to the claims of its most
audacious advocates, to number among its adherents more than one-fourth
of the nation. But Mr. Gladstone is wholly misinformed as to the fact.
Because the Nonconformists of Wales are an eminently peaceable, loyal,
and orderly people, and do not proclaim their grievances with clamour
and menace, it is imagined that they do not feel the gross injustice and
indignity of the position they occupy. They do feel it deeply, and they
are made to feel it, by events continually occurring in their social and
political life, which all spring from this one root of bitterness. We
need only refer in illustration of what we mean to the circumstances
which attended and followed the last general election. Every form of
unfair pressure was brought to bear upon the people to induce them to
vote against their convictions, and many of those who had the courage to
resist, were mercilessly evicted from their holdings, or otherwise
injured and persecuted. All this sprang from the existence of the
Established Church, as is evidenced by the fact, that in every instance
we believe without a single exception--the oppressors were Churchmen and
the sufferers Nonconformists.
The other, and the only other, argument of Mr. Gladstone is this--that
except for conventional purposes, there is really no Church in Wales,
that the Welsh Church is only a part of the Church of England, and
cannot therefore be dealt with separately. We confess we are not very
much dismayed by this difficulty; for we can remember the time when the
same reason was urged to show the impossibility of touching the Irish
Church. Properly speaking, we were told there was no Church of Ireland,
but only the united Church of England and Ireland--the two churches
having, at the time of the Union, been joined together by a compact so
solemn and binding, that Her Majesty the Queen could not give her
consent to any measure for dissolving that compact, without incurring
the danger of committing perjury and bringing her crown into jeopardy.
And as for providing legislation for Ireland distinct from that of
England, the suggestion was scouted as an absurdity. Ireland was as much
a part of the United Kingdom as Yorkshire or Lancashire, and must be
governed by the same laws. The sense of justice, however, and the urgent
necessities of the case, triumphed over these foregone conclusions.
There is one fact that gives a sort of sinister unity to the religious
history of Wales through all its vicissitudes. It is this: that the
influence of its relations with England, whether they were hostile or
friendly, whether under Saxon or Norman rule, whether in Catholic or
Protestant times, has been, in this respect, uniformly disastrous. We
can only glance very briefly at the proofs of this allegation. Without
raising again the controversial dust which envelopes the discussion as
to the time and manner of the first introduction of Christianity into
this island, we may at least assume it as an admitted historical fact,
that early in the second century the Gospel had been planted here, and
that long before the Saxon invasion there was a flourishing Christian
Church in Britain. In the records of the first three or four hundred
years of its existence, we find that many large collegiate
establishments were formed and dedicated to religion and literature.
From these institutions went forth men thoroughly instructed in the
learning of their times, some of them bearing the fame of their
country's piety and erudition to the uttermost parts of Europe. In the
oecumenical councils summoned under Constantine the Great and his
sons, in the third and fourth centuries, at Arles, at Nice, and at
Sardica, to decide the great Donatist and Arian controversies that
disturbed the unity of the Catholic faith, we are told that the British
Churches were represented by men who bore an honourable part in the
defence of sound doctrine; for Athanasius himself testifies that Bishops
from Britain joined in condemnation of the heresy of Arius, and in
vindication of himself. But when, in the sixth century, the Pope sent
the celebrated Augustin, as a missionary, to convert the pagan
Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of this island to Christianity, there came on
the British Church a time of terrible persecution. Having resolutely
refused to recognise the papal authority, Augustin and his successors,
in accordance with the policy of that persecuting Church which they
represented, incited their Saxon converts to make war upon the British
recusants, exasperating the national animosities, already sufficiently
bitter between the two races, by adding to it the fanatical frenzy of
religious bigotry. For many ages, therefore, the Britons were liable to
frequent incursions from their Saxon neighbours, who, instigated by the
councils of Rome, invaded their country, destroying their churches,
burning their monasteries, and putting to death the pious and learned
monks, who, in the seclusion of those establishments, were pursuing the
peaceable occupations of literature and religion.[153] This struggle
between the ancient British Church on the one side, and that of Rome,
backed by the Saxon sword, on the other, continued for centuries. And
when the Saxon conquerors had in their turn to succumb to the Norman
invaders, that struggle was renewed with greater fierceness than ever.
Religion was again unscrupulously used as an instrument of State, the
Norman princes forcing ecclesiastics of their own race into all the
higher offices of the Church in Wales, not from any regard for the
spiritual interests of the people, but that they might aid in
extinguishing the national spirit of the Cymri, and in subjugating the
country to the Norman yoke. This policy, of course, failed, as it richly
deserved to fail. The bishops and other dignitaries thus intruded upon
the country were only safe when surrounded by bodies of armed retainers,
and whenever the Cymric arms won a victory in the field, the interlopers
had to flee to England to save themselves from popular indignation.
About the end of the twelfth century, the Welsh princes appealed to the
Pope for a redress of these intolerable wrongs. A petition couched in
eloquent language was presented to his Holiness from Llywelyn, Prince of
Gwynedd; Gwenwynwyn and Madoc, Princess of Powys; Gruffydd, Maelgwn,
Rhys, and Meredith, sons of Rhys, Prince of South Wales. It is curious,
in reading this document, to observe that some of the ecclesiastical
grievances of which the British princes complain, are precisely those
which the friends of the Church in Wales are still reiterating in our
own day:--
'And, first, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as a matter of
course, sends us English bishops, ignorant of the manners
and language of our land, who cannot preach the word of God
to the people, nor receive their confessions but through
interpreters.
'And besides, these bishops that they send us from
England, as they neither love us nor our land, but rather
persecute and oppress us with an innate and deep-rooted
hatred, seek not the welfare of our souls; their ambition
is to rule over us and not to benefit us; and on this
account they do not but very rarely fulfil the duties of
their pastoral office among us.
'And whatever they can lay their hands upon or get from us,
whether by right or wrong, they carry into England, and
waste and consume the whole of the profits obtained from
us, in abbeys and lands given to them by the king of
England. And like the Parthians, who shoot backwards from
afar as they retreat, so do they from England excommunicate
us as often as they are ordered so to do....
'Besides these things, when the Saxons (English) rush into
Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury puts the whole land
under an interdict, and because we and our people defend
our country against the Saxons and other enemies, he places
us and our people under judgment of excommunication, and
causes those bishops whom he sent among us to proclaim this
judgment, which they are ready to do on all occasions. The
consequence is, that every one of our people who falls on
the field of blood, in defence of the liberty of his
country, dies under the curse of excommunication.'
When the Reformation came, the influence of the connection with England
was, if possible, still more disastrous on the religious interests of
Wales. 'The robbery in times of peace,' says Mr. Johnes, 'proved worse
than the spoliation in the times of war, and the rapacity of the
Reformation was added to the rapacity of Popery.' He then describes, in
language of eloquent indignation, how the ecclesiastical endowments of
the Principality were pitilessly plundered by being bestowed upon
laymen, the descendants of the Norman invaders, or by being alienated
from the Church of Wales to endow English bishoprics and colleges! For
the last century and a half, again, the policy of the civil and
ecclesiastical authorities in dealing with the Welsh Church has, it
would seem, been steadily directed to the extinction of the Welsh
language and nationality by the appointment of Englishmen to bishoprics,
canonries, deaneries, and most of the richest livings in Wales, in utter
contempt of all decency. And now when, by the legitimate operation of a
State establishment of religion, nearly the whole nation has been
alienated from the Church, so that it has become a mere encumbrance in
the land, we are told that Wales is so inseparably united with England
that it cannot expect to be rid of the incubus until England has made up
its mind to deal with its own Church Establishment.
But what we have to do with most especially at present is the Protestant
Church Establishment in Wales, and our indictment against it is this,
that at no period of its history has it fulfilled, in anything
approaching to a satisfactory manner, its proper function as the
religious instructor of the Welsh people. We have a chain of testimonies
in support of this allegation that are unimpeachable as to their
quality, and of overwhelming force in their concurrence and cumulation
of evidence. We are anxious to make this point clear, because the line
of defence that has been lately taken by the friends of the Church of
England in Wales is to this effect. It is true, they say, that towards
the middle of the last century the Church had fallen into a deep sleep,
and so afforded occasion, and to some degree excuse, for the rise of
Nonconformity, which was previously almost unknown in Wales. And then
they point in vague and sounding phrases to the golden age that preceded
that period of spiritual torpor, when the Church, alive to her high
mission, ruled by native bishops, who understood the language and
commanded the confidence and veneration of the country, comprehended and
cared for within her ample fold the whole population of the
Principality. Dissent, we are assured, is in Wales an exotic of quite
modern growth, which, it is further implied, will prove to have a very
ephemeral life, like Jonah's gourd, which came up in a night and
perished in a night. Now all this is pure fiction. Dissent is not a
thing of modern growth in Wales. It has existed more or less for 230
years, and whatever of vital religion has existed there during the whole
of that period, has been owing far more to its influence than to that of
the Established Church. It is not correct to say that the Church 'fell
asleep' in the last century, simply because it had never been awake.
'The wisest thing, in my opinion, that our Church friends can do,' said
Mr. Henry Richard, in his address at the opening of Brecon College--
'instead of pluming themselves on their antiquity, would be
to cut off, so far as they can, all connection with and all
memory of their past history in Wales. The succession
through which they derive their ecclesiastical lineage, in
this country at least, is about as unapostolical a
succession as can be conceived--a succession of simony,
pluralism, nepotism; of ignorance, incompetence, and utter
indifference to the duties of their own high office and the
claims of the unfortunate people left to their charge, on
the part of those who called themselves the priests of
God.'
And to begin with what must surely be considered as the first and most
solemn duty of a Protestant Church, that of supplying the people of whom
it professes to take charge with the Word of God in their own language,
how does the account stand with the Welsh Established Church in this
respect? Dr. Llewellyn, the learned author of the 'Historical Account of
the Welsh Versions of the Bible,' states
'that for upwards of seventy years from the settlement of
the Reformation by Queen Elizabeth, for near one hundred
years from Britain's separation from the Church of Rome,
there were no Bibles in Wales, but only in the cathedrals
of parish churches and chapels. There was no provision made
for the country or the people in general; as if they had
nothing to do with the word of God, at least no further
than they might hear it in their attendance on public
worship once in the week.'
But how did the ecclesiastical authorities act in reference to the
translation of the Scriptures into the Welsh language, even for use in
the churches? In the year 1563, an Act of Parliament (5 Eliz. c. 28) was
passed, ordering this work to be done. In the preamble it is recited,--
'That her Majesty's most loving and obedient subjects
inhabiting within her Majesty's dominion and country of
Wales, being no small part of this realm, are utterly
destitute of God's Holy Word, and _do remain in the like or
rather more darkness and ignorance than they were in the
time of Papistry_.'
It was therefore enacted that the Bible, consisting of the New Testament
and the Old, together with the book of Common Prayer and the
Administration of the Sacraments, should be translated into the British
or Welsh tongue. The duty of seeing this done was devolved upon the
Bishops of St. Asaph, Bangor, St. David's, Llandaff, and Hereford, and
they were subjected to a penalty of £40 each if the work were not
accomplished by March, 1566. The New Testament was translated within the
given period, principally by William Salesbury, a lay gentleman, with
some help from the Bishop and Precentor of St. David's; but there was no
version of the Old Testament for twenty years later, and that was done
not by the initiative or at the instigation of the bishops, but by the
spontaneous piety and patriotism of one individual, Dr. William Morgan,
vicar of Llanshaidr-yn-Mochnat, Denbighshire, whose name ought to be
held in everlasting veneration by all Welshmen. This was published in
1588. He acknowledges, indeed, that he received some encouragement and
help from the Bishops of St. Asaph and Bangor. Ingenious apologies have
been urged for the gross neglect of the bishops in fulfilling their
commission. But Dr. Morgan, in the Latin dedication of his Bible to
Queen Elizabeth, ascribes it to what, no doubt, was the true cause,
mere 'idleness and sloth.'[154] There was no other edition of the Welsh
Bible for thirty-two years. But in the year 1620, Dr. Parry, Bishop of
St. Asaph, brought out a new issue. This also seems to have been the
result of individual zeal, for in his preface Dr. Parry says, that the
former edition having been exhausted, and many or most of the churches
being either without any or with only worn-out and imperfect copies, and
nobody, so far as he could learn, even thinking of a republication, he
was moved to undertake the work.[155] This, likewise, was exclusively
for use in the churches. The first edition of the Bible for popular use
was published in an octavo form in 1630, but does not seem to have
originated with the Church in any way. 'The honour,' says Dr. Llewellyn,
'of providing for the first time a supply of this kind for the
inhabitants of Wales, is due to one or more citizens of London,' namely
Mr. Alderman Heylin, 'sprung from Wales,' and Sir Thomas Middleton, also
a native of the Principality, and an alderman of London.[156] For the
next half century there was only one edition of the Scriptures in Welsh
published by Churchmen, a large folio of 1,000 copies, for the pulpits
of the churches. But during the same period the persecuted
Nonconformists--Walter Cradock, Vavasor Powell, Stephen Hughes, Thomas
Gouge, and David Jones--published nine editions, consisting of about
30,000 copies of the whole Bible, and above 40,000 of the New Testament
separately. During the subsequent half-century (from 1718 to 1769) we
acknowledge with cordial gratitude that several large editions were
issued by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, two of them at
the instigation of the Rev. Griffith Jones, and one at the instigation
of Dr. Llewellyn, a dissenting minister. But let it be observed that the
former period, from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the beginning of
the eighteenth century, synchronises as nearly as possible with the
golden age which some members of the Welsh Church fondly believe to have
existed in the history of that institution.
But let us now enquire how, in other respects, the Established Church
in Wales discharged its duties as the teacher of the people. In the
absence of the Bible there was, of course, all the more need for
personal earnestness and activity on the part of its ministers in
preaching the word and catechising, and the regular and solemn
administration of all religious ordinances. But how was it in this
respect during the beatific period, when, as some of the modern
advocates of the Church exultingly declare, there was 'no dissent in
Wales?' We will begin our inquiries with the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
In the year 1560, Dr. Meyrick, Bishop of Bangor, writes that he had only
two preachers in his diocese. Strype, in his 'Life of Archbishop
Parker,' describes the condition of the bishoprics of Llandaff and
Bangor, one in South and the other in North Wales, about the year 1563,
as follows. The former had been two or three years, in effect, void, and
wanted a vigilant bishop to manage that diocese. But the great
dilapidations had so impoverished that see, that few who were honest and
able would be persuaded to meddle with it.
As for Bangor (he continues), the diocese was also much out
of order, _there being no preaching used_, and pensionary
concubinacy openly continued, which was allowance of
concubines to the clergy, by paying a pension,
notwithstanding the liberty of marriage granted.
... So that Wales being in an evil condition as to
religion, 'the inhabitants remaining still greatly ignorant
and superstitious, the Queen left it particularly to the
care of the Archbishop to recommend fit persons for those
two sees now to be disposed of.'
In 1588, John Penry published his 'Exhortation unto the People and
Governors of Her Majesty's Country of Wales,' every line of which was
aflame with the fire of a righteous and eloquent indignation at the
negligent bishops and 'unpreaching ministers,' to whose tender mercies
his 'poor country of Wales' was abandoned. We need not quote at large
from the melancholy picture he gives in this and his other pamphlets of
the state of the Principality in that day, as his writings have been
rendered familiar to many of our readers by Dr. Waddington's 'Life of
Penry,' and Dr. Rees's 'History of Nonconformity in Wales.' We will
therefore cite only one or two pregnant sentences:--
'This I dare affirm and stand to, that if a view of all the
registries of Wales be taken, the name of that shire, that
town, or of that parish, cannot be found, where, for the
space of six years together within these twenty-nine years,
a godly and learned minister hath executed the duty of
teacher, and approved his ministry in any mean sort.... If
I utter an untruth let me be reproved, and suffer as a
slanderer; if a truth, why should not I be allowed.'
The Rev. Henry T. Edwards, the author of the very able and vigorous
pamphlet mentioned at the head of this article, has permitted himself,
in an evil moment, and in stress of argument and information, in defence
of the Welsh Church of those days, to describe this noble-minded and
devoted Christian and patriot in very opprobrious terms, as 'a
sour-minded Puritan, recognising no truth save in his own interpretation
of the written Word,' &c., &c. But Strype, at least, cannot be called 'a
sour-minded Puritan.' Let us then revert to his testimony in reference
to precisely the same period. In his 'Annals of the Reformation'[157] he
makes the following statement. We borrow Dr. Rees's summary:--
'Dr. William Hughes, Bishop of St. Asaph, was accused, in
the year 1587, the year before the publication of Penry's
"Exhortation," of misgoverning his diocese and of
tolerating the most disgraceful abuses. When the case was
inquired into, it was found that the Bishop himself held
sixteen rich livings _in commendam_; that most of the great
livings were in possession of persons who lived out of the
country; that one person who held two of the greatest
livings in the diocese boarded in an alehouse; and that
only three preachers resided upon their livings viz., Dr.
David Powell, of Ruabon; Dr. William Morgan, of
Llanrhaidr-yn-Mochnat, the translator of the Bible; and the
parson of Llanvechan, an aged man, about eighty years old.'
We will now follow the history of the Welsh Church into the reign of
James I. At that time, there lived and laboured in Wales a very
remarkable man, the Rev. Rees Pritchard, Vicar of Llandovery, in
Carmarthenshire, the author of a work which has had a larger circulation
in the Principality than any book except the Bible. It is entitled
'Canwyll y Cymry,' or, 'The Welshman's Candle,' a series of moral and
religious poems, most simple in their language, and even slovenly in
their metrical composition, but full of poetry and feeling, and
thoroughly saturated with evangelical truth. He flourished between the
years 1616 and 1644. John Penry, in his most vehement remonstrances,
does not employ stronger language to portray the utter ignorance,
irreligion, and immorality in which the people were sunk, than does this
excellent clergyman. But what we have specially to do with now is the
testimony he bears as to the condition of the Church, a testimony all
the more unimpeachable, as he continued through life a member and a
minister of that Church. In one of his poems, after describing all
classes as wholly given up to every species of depravity, he adds that
the clergy were asleep, leaving the people to wallow in their sins, and
to live as they liked, unwarned and unrebuked.[158] In another poem, he
puts the clergy at the head of various classes, whom he enumerates, who
were 'contending with each other, which of them should most daringly
affront the Most High.' There is evidence still more conclusive, if
possible, in the reports presented to the King by Archbishop Laud,
between the years 1633 and 1638, which are still extant among the
Lambeth MSS. This bigoted prelate had, it seems, in those years, been
specially instigating the Bishops of St. David's and Llandaff to
persecute without mercy those in their dioceses who were guilty of
'inconformity;' that is, who refused to read 'The Book of Sports,' and
other similar obligations which were laid on the consciences of the
clergy. After commemorating the success with which the Bishop of St.
David's had silenced one Roberts, a lecturer, for inconformity, and
reduced three or four others to submission, he adds: 'He complains much,
and surely with cause enough, that there are few ministers in those poor
and remote places that are able to preach and instruct the people.' And
the Bishop of St. Asaph tells Laud that 'they were not anywhere troubled
with inconformity; but that he heartily wished that they might as well
be acquainted with superstition and profaneness.'
In the year 1651, there was published a translation in the Welsh
language of the once celebrated 'Marrow of Modern Divinity.' This
translation was by the Rev. John Edwards, one of the clergy ejected by
the Parliamentary Commission appointed under the Commonwealth. In the
preface, he deplores the neglect into which the Welsh language had
fallen, and declares that, 'among the Church clergy (y Dyscawdwyr
Eglwysig), scarcely one in fifteen knew how to read and write Welsh.'
The reader will observe that we are following our chain of evidence link
by link. In 1677, a work was published in Welsh entitled 'Carwr y
Cymry,' that is, 'The Welshman's Friend; an Exhortation to his dear
countrymen for the sake of Christ and their own souls, to search the
Scriptures according to Christ's command, John v. 39.' This is supposed
to have been written by a clergyman of the name of Oliver Thomas. The
introduction is in the form of an earnest and affectionate address to
'Welsh Churchmen.' In this he says:--
'Often does sorrow beyond measure strike my heart in
observing and reflecting upon the great deficiency and the
utter neglect which prevails among us Welsh Churchmen, in
taking pains to teach our flocks conscientiously, through
our not giving ourselves with full purpose of heart to
reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. We are ourselves,
many of us, unskilful in the word of righteousness, and
therefore incompetent to direct others.... Yea, my dear
brethren, give me permission to say, what it pains me to be
obliged to say, that in each of the Welsh bishoprics forty
or sixty churches may be found without any one in them on
Sundays, even in the middle of summer, when the roads are
driest, and the weather finest.'[159]
We have brought our chain of testimonies down to near the end of the
seventeenth century. But from that time to our own they are still more
abundant.
In 1721 was published, 'A View of the State of Religion in the Diocese
of St. David's, about the beginning of the Eighteenth Century,' by Dr.
Erasmus Saunders. It contains a most deplorable picture of the condition
of the Church, as regards both its material and spiritual interests. He
describes some churches as totally decayed; they
'do only serve for the solitary habitations of owls and
jackdaws; such are St. Daniel's, Castelhan, Kilvawyr,
Mountain, Capel Colman, and others in Pembrokeshire; Mount
Llechryd, in Cardiganshire; Aberllynog, in Breconshire;
Nelso, in Gower, Glamorganshire, and others in
Carmarthenshire. And it is not to be doubted, but as there
are districts of land, so there were originally just
endowment of tythes that did belong to all those several
churches; but whatever they were, they are now alienated,
the churches, most of them, demolished, the use for which
they were intended almost forgotten, unless it be at
Llanybrec, where, I am told, the improprietor or his tenant
has let that church unto the neighbouring Dissenters, who
are very free to rent it for the desirable opportunity and
pleasure of turning a church into a conventicle'--(pp. 23,
4.)
'As the Christian service is thus totally disused in some
places, there are other some that may be said to be but
half served, there being several churches where we are but
rarely, if at all, to meet with preaching, catechising, or
administering of the Holy Communion. In others, the service
of the prayers is but partly read, and that perhaps but
once a month, or once in a quarter of a year.... The
stipends are so small, that a poor curate must sometimes
submit to serve three or four churches for £10 or £12
a-year.'
He then refers, though with great forbearance and tenderness, to the low
type of character which such a state of things produced among the
clergy; and then exclaims, sorrowfully, 'Such is the faint shadow that
remains among us of the public service of religion!'
'And now,' continues the author, 'what Christian knowledge,
what sense of piety, what value for religion are we
reasonably to hope for in a country thus abandoned, and
either destitute of churches to go to, or of ministers to
supply them, or both? Or how can it well consist with
equity and conscience to complain of the ignorance and
errors of an unhappy people in such circumstances? They are
squeezed to the utmost to pay their tithes and what is
called the church dues (though, God knows, the Church is to
expect little from it), and, at the same time, most
miserably deprived of those benefits of religion which the
payment of them was intended to support, and delivered up
to ignorance and barbarity, which must be the certain
consequence of driving away the ministers of religion, or
of depressing or incapacitating them for their duty'--(p.
26.).
To aggravate the evils of all kinds already sufficiently rife in the
Welsh Church, the English Government, about the beginning of the
eighteenth century, adopted the practice, which it has continued ever
since, of appointing Englishmen utterly ignorant of the Welsh language
to Welsh bishoprics.[160] And the bishops, following the example thus
set by those acting for the head of the Church, inundated the
Principality with English clergymen, their own relatives and
connections, to whom all the highest dignities and the richest livings
were, almost without exception, assigned. A more monstrous abuse than
this it is difficult to conceive, and yet it has been persevered in for
150 years in the face of all complaint and remonstrance, and in the
teeth of the express judgment of the Church itself, which declares in
its 26th Article that 'it is a thing plainly repugnant to the word of
God, and to the custom of the primitive Church, to have public prayer in
the church, or to minister the sacraments in a tongue not understanded
of the people.' We need not wonder, therefore, that great prominence
should be henceforth given by the friends of the Church to this, as one
of the causes, if not, indeed, the sole cause, of its inefficiency and
decay. How far they are justified in attaching such supreme importance
to it we shall consider hereafter. But we shall for the present resume
our series of testimonies to the matter of fact. Most of our readers
will doubtless have heard of the Rev. Griffith Jones, of Llanddowror,
the founder of the remarkable circulating schools, which, during the
latter half of the eighteenth century, rendered such inestimable service
to the people of the Principality. We cannot here enter upon the history
of the life and labours of this admirable clergyman. If one man could
have saved the Church in Wales, he would have saved it. But as Mr.
Johnes has remarked with great sagacity--though he does not appear to
see the inevitable inference to be drawn from the remark--'it is a truth
but too well sanctioned by experience, that a few pious ministers are
the weakness, and not the strength, of an establishment, when the
majority of its ministers are sunk in indifference to their sacred
duties.' Our object now, however, is merely to cite the Rev. Griffith
Jones as a witness to the condition of the Church about the middle of
the eighteenth century. In the year 1749 he published a letter in Welsh,
on the 'Duty of Catechising Ignorant Children and People.' In that
letter he observes that the
'peasantry cannot understand from sentences of deep
learning in sermons the Articles of Faith without being
catechised in them, which, at present, is more necessary,
because there is among us such _monstrosity_ (anferthwch)
and such evil and barefaced craft in some places, as the
frequent preaching of _English_ to the _Welsh_ people, not
one jot more edifying or less ridiculous than the Latin
service of the Papists in France. One author states that he
could not help rebuking such clergymen, in spite of the
spleen and wrath it was likely to bring upon him, viz., the
lazy vicars and rectors, who have led a careless life from
their youth, and have set their mind on keeping company,
and going unsteadily from tavern to tavern, and not minding
their books; in consequence of which they are as ignorant
of their mother tongue as they are of Greek and Hebrew, and
therefore read the service and preach in English, without
sense or shame, in the most purely Welsh assemblies
throughout the country. Not much better, if any, are those
who patch up a sermon of mixed language and jargon sounds,
inconsonant, dark, and unintelligible, to the great scandal
and disgrace of the ministry, and to the grief, damage, and
weariness of the congregation.'
There is one other eminent Welsh clergyman whom we must add to this
cloud of witnesses before we speak of the rise of Methodism in Wales.
The Rev. Evan Evans, better known, perhaps, by his Bardic name, _Ieuan
Brydydd Hir_, was a man of learning and genius, a friend and
correspondent of Bishop Percy and other _literati_ of that age. He was
especially well versed in ancient British literature, and published a
Latin essay, _Dissertatio de Bardis_, containing Latin translations from
the poems of Aneurin, Taliesin, and Llywarch Hen. In 1776, he published
two volumes of Welsh sermons. To the first volume he prefixed a
dedication to Sir W. W. Wynn in English, and an address to the reader in
Welsh, in both of which he describes in bold and burning language the
miserable state of the Church in Wales at that time. Here is one out of
many extracts we might have given. After complaining that most of the
gentry had 'thrown away all regard for religion and morality,' and that
'the ignorance and immorality of the lower class of the people was
pitiful, owing to the slothfulness and neglect of many of the clergy,'
he thus proceeds:
'As for the clergy, such of them as still enjoy the
remaining emoluments of the Church might do some good in
their generation if they were so disposed. But alas! so
little has been done by the clergy of the Established
Church in this way, that there is hardly a book or a sermon
left behind by any of them to testify their fidelity in
their vocation, for almost a hundred years past. It is a
pity they should not do something to convince the world
that they are ministers of the gospel. And it is a great
pity that most of them are so _scandalously ignorant of the
language_ in which they are to do the duties of their
function, that they can do very little to the edification
of their flocks. Those who enjoy the richest benefices in
the Church are most deficient in this respect, copying
herein the Church of Rome very faithfully, and leaving
their sheep to perish. And I am afraid that upon this and
other accounts many sincere Christians abhor the sacrifice
of the Lord, who were well disposed to the Church
established. And such abominations, if continued, will make
it desolate!
'Now, the question is what a faithful minister of the
gospel ought to do in such dangerous times? I am very sure
that some conscientious ministers of the gospel have
suffered severely of late years under these lordly and
tyrannic prelates. The number of such disinterested
persons, it must be owned, was small, and every art and
method have been used to discountenance them. If what I
here aver be doubted, I appeal to the writings of the late
pious and truly reverend Mr. Griffith Jones, of
Llanddowror, who underwent the scurrilities of a venal
priest _hired by the bishops_ to _bespatter him_, though he
was by the special grace of God without any stain or spot.
By far the greater number of the clergy, like Gehazi, run
after preferments, and have left the daughter of Zion to
shift for herself. And his doom, in a spiritual sense, is
likely to follow them and their successors.'
It is well known that the man who may be called the father of Welsh
Methodism was Mr. Howell Harris. He was, and continued to the day of his
death, a dutiful son of the Church. He applied for ordination, but was
refused. He pressed his request for six years, but to no purpose.
'Wherever he went,' we quote again the language of a Welsh clergyman,
'as a simple and unoffending preacher of the gospel, either in the South
or the North, he was denounced by the clergy from their pulpits, he was
arrested by the magistrates, and persecuted by the rabble.[161] Now let
us hear his own account of the reasons which induced him to commence and
continue preaching to his countrymen. He describes his being taken
before the magistrates at Monmouth, for the work of God and the
testimony of Jesus Christ, and then continues--
'After this, I was more satisfied than ever that my mission
was from God, especially as I had so often applied for holy
orders, and was rejected for no other reason than my
preaching as a layman. I saw both from Scripture and the
practice of the Church that the preaching of laymen was
proper in times of necessity; and I thought that time of
greater necessity could hardly be than the present, when
the whole country lay in a lukewarm and lifeless condition.
_In many churches there was no sermon for months together;
in some places nothing but a learned English discourse to
an illiterate Welsh congregation_; and where an
intelligible sermon was preached, it was generally so
legal, and so much in the spirit of the old covenant, that
should any give heed to it, they could never be led thereby
to Christ, the only way to God. Seeing these things, and
feeling the love of Christ in my heart, I could not refrain
from going about to propagate the gospel of my dear
Redeemer.'[162]
The second great name in connection with the rise of Methodism in Wales,
was the Rev. Daniel Rowlands, of Llangeitho, a man whose powers as a
preacher are described by those who knew both, to have surpassed even
those of Whitfield. The effect of his eloquence among his countrymen was
extraordinary. It ran like a stream of electricity through the nation,
kindling into life thousands who had been previously wrapped in
spiritual torpor. Like Howell Harris, he was not merely content, but
anxious to continue his ministrations in the Church. 'But he was cast
out of the Church of England,' says one of his biographers, the Rev. J.
C. Ryle, 'for no other fault than excess of zeal.' And what was the
condition of the church, from which this over zealous man was expelled
by Episcopal judgment? Mr. Ryle shall answer. 'This ejection took place
at a time when scores of Welsh clergymen were shamefully neglecting
their duties, and too often were drunkards, gamblers, and sportsmen, if
not worse.'[163]
The inference from all this has already been drawn for us by a candid
Churchman. Mr. Johnes, in his 'Essay on the Causes of Dissent in Wales,'
says that he is irresistibly led to the conclusion 'that before the rise
of Methodism in Wales the churches were as little attended by the great
mass of people as they are now: and that indifference to all religion
prevailed as widely then as dissent in the present day.' Of the early
Methodists in Wales, as indeed of the early Nonconformists, it may be
said most truly that they did not leave the Church of their own accord.
Most of them clung to it with a most touching fidelity, in spite of
incessant persecution and obloquy from those within its pale, and were
at last thrust out of it, for no offence but the excess of their zeal
for the moral and spiritual improvement of their countrymen. It is not
necessary now to put in any defence for these men; for it has become the
fashion of late among our Church friends in Wales, while denouncing
modern Nonconformity as schismatic, turbulent, self-seeking, and other
choice epithets with which we are so familiar in this connection, to
speak with great tenderness and respect of the founders of Welsh
dissent, and especially the early Methodists. Retaining, of course, that
_de haut en bas_ air of extreme candour and condescension which any
Churchman, however small, thinks it right to assume when referring to
any Dissenter, however illustrious for capacity and service, they do
nevertheless admit that the men in question were admirable men, full of
genuine zeal for evangelical truth and the salvation of souls. Nor do
they scruple to deplore and censure the perverse policy which persecuted
such men and drove them from the Church. Nay, in some cases, clergymen
have even become their admiring and eulogistic biographers. But this is
the old thing over again. 'Ye build the tombs of the prophets and
garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the
days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the
blood of the prophets.' But then, unhappily, by displaying the same
spirit towards the successors of these men, and branding them with the
same epithets of contumely and reproach as their fathers applied to
_their_ fathers, and that for doing precisely the same work, they are
witnesses unto themselves that they are the genuine children of them
which persecuted the prophets.
Having brought our review down to the great revival of religion about
the middle of the last century, let us now inquire what the Church has
done since that time to make up for centuries of gross neglect or
perfunctory service. It might have been thought that this stirring of
spiritual life in the country, through other agencies than its own,
would have roused it, were it from no better motive than that of jealous
emulation, to make some effort to retain or recover its influence over
the population. And this, indeed, has been the case to some extent
within the last quarter of a century. But for nearly a hundred years
after the appearance of Harris and Rowlands, during which all bodies of
Dissenters were labouring incessantly for the evangelization of the
Principality, the Church was settled on her lees. Her rulers not only
winked at for their own profit, but actively maintained and promoted the
existence of abuses as audacious and monstrous as ever dishonoured a
Christian Church. Her clergy, wholly abandoned to themselves, with
little or no episcopal supervision or stimulus, were content with
enjoying their temporalities while they neglected their duties, leading
lives of mere worldly ease, and sometimes much worse lives than that. If
any reader should imagine we are indulging in exaggerations, we can
refer him for exuberance of proof to Mr. Johnes' most able and admirable
work, which we have already mentioned. It was published in 1832, and
describes the state of things then in actual existence. The sole object
of most of the alien bishops who had been and were in occupation of the
Welsh sees, seemed to have been to provide for themselves and those of
their own households. Never was episcopal nepotism carried to so daring
an excess, with this peculiar and enormous aggravation, that 'in Wales
every relation of a bishop is in language a foreigner; and his uncouth
attempts to officiate in his church in a tongue unintelligible to
himself, can be felt by his congregation as nothing better than a
profanation of the worship of God.'[164] As a specimen of how the chief
pastors of the Welsh Church acted in this matter, we subjoin an extract
from a speech delivered in the House of Commons, in 1836, by Mr.
Benjamin Hall, afterwards Lord Llanover, a gentleman whose name and
memory ought to be held in grateful and honourable remembrance in the
Principality, for the strenuous efforts he made in and out of
Parliament to remedy many flagrant abuses in the educational and
ecclesiastical institutions of the country, and to procure something
like justice for Wales:--
'What he complained of most was the unbounded spirit of
nepotism which seemed to take possession of some of these
English Bishops the moment they took up this episcopal
power in the Principality. He found that in the diocese of
St. Asaph a relation of the late bishop held the following
preferments:--He was dean and chancellor of the diocese,
with the deanery house, worth about £40 a year; parish of
Huellan, £1,500; St. Asaph, £426; Llan Nevydd, £300;
Llanvair, £220; Darowain, £120; Chancellorship, from fees,
£400;--making £3,006. Besides all this, he was lessee of
Llandegele and Llanasaph, worth £600, and this all
exclusive of the rectory of Cradley, in the diocese of
Hereford, £1,200; vicarage of Bromyard, £500; prebend of
Hereford, £50; portion of Bromyard, £50 at present, but it
is expected on the death of an old life that this
preferment will be worth £1,400. Thus he had no less than
_eleven_ sources of emolument, producing between six and
seven thousand a-year. It appears also that his brother had
about £3,000 a-year, and the total enjoyed by relations of
the late bishop of the diocese alone, amounts to between
seven and eight thousand. But it appeared, moreover, that
the amount enjoyed by the bishop, and the relations of the
former bishops alone, amounts to £23,679, _and exceeds the
whole amount enjoyed by all the other resident and native
clergy put together_.'
To what unseemly consequences the appointment of English clergymen to
Welsh incumbencies must have led, our readers may conceive by imagining
a number of Frenchmen installed in livings in England, and attempting to
perform the service in the English language. Here are a few examples of
the ludicrous scenes often witnessed in Welsh churches. They are taken
from a speech delivered in 1852 by the Rev. Joseph Hughes, a very able
clergyman, a native of the Principality, but residing then at Meltham:--
'The mistakes,' he says, 'that are made by Anglo-Welsh
clergymen, both in the reading-desk and pulpit, are nearly
as many as the words in a Welsh glossary. Some of these
mistakes are of an absurd and revolting character, and
subversive of that due solemnity which should be observed
in the house of God. Yea, the meaning of different words
and sentences of Scripture is often painfully associated in
the minds of the people with those mistakes.'
Before citing these specimens, we may premise that if any of our readers
should be acquainted with the Welsh language, they will immediately
perceive how probable it is that the blunders described should have been
committed by an Englishman trying to read Welsh, or rather, how next to
impossible it is that he should not have committed some of them.
'Bishop Burgess, in pronouncing the blessing in Welsh, used
to say, "The peace of God which passeth all vengeance."
"Tangnefedd Duw yr hwn sydd uwchlaw pob _dial_."
'A clergyman of the name of Lewis preached at Chapel
Colman, and while speaking of man's depravity, said, "Every
man is exceedingly _tall_ by nature." "Y mae pob dyn yn
_dal_ iawn wrth natur." He meant to say blind--yn _ddall_.
The little men in the congregation looked at each other
with great astonishment, and seemed to question the truth
of the statement. I was present at the time, and heard this
as well as other mistakes.
'The same clergyman, while officiating at Llandygwydd,
committed the following blunder:--He made "Hail, King of
the Jews," to mean "_An old cow of straw, King of
Ireland_." "Hen fuwch wellt, Brenhin yr Ywerddon."
'Another, reading the words, "These things are good and
profitable unto men," gave them this meaning, "These graves
are good and wordly to men." "I beddau hin si da a bydol i
dinion."
'Another Anglo-Welsh clergyman, in his sermon quoting the
words, "but the righteous into life eternal," gave them the
following sense, "but to some chickens the food of the
geese"--"ond i rai cywion fwyd y gwyddau."
'A. B. officiating at ---- and reading the words, "let us
here make three tabernacles," was understood to say, "let
us here make three _pans_, one for thee, one for Moses, and
one for Elias." "Gwnawn yma dair _padell_."
'A clergyman in the county of Pembroke, while reading the
funeral service, made it to say, "it is sown the body of a
_beast_." "Efe a hoir yn gorph _anifail_."
'A late dean in North Wales, in repeating the following
beautiful lines,
"Ymddyrcha o Dduw'r nef uwch ben,
Daear ac wybren hefyd,"
"Be thou exalted, O God of heaven, above the earth and
firmament," gave them the following interpretation:--
"_Arise O God above the head
Of two hens and the crows egg also_."
"Ymddyrcha o Dduw'r nef uwch _ban
Dwy iar_ ac _wy brân_ hefyd."
'Another dean, addressing his work-people at their
drinkings, said, "_pori_ yr ydych etto," "you are still
_grazing_." His work-people not perceiving that the blunder
was unintentional, thought their master treated them as
brute beasts, and were much offended.
'Another clergyman reading that part of the "Venite," "In
his hand are all the corners of the earth," said, "In his
hand are all the afflictions of the earth,"
"_gorthyrmderau'r_ ddaear."
'A clergyman reading, "The whole head is sick, and the
whole heart faint," was understood to say, "the _back
parts_ are sick, and the _middle of the back faint_." "Y
_pen ol_ sy glwyfus a'r _hol ganol yn lesg_."
'Another reading, "The crooked shall be made straight, and
the rough places plain," "A'r gwyrgeimion a wneir yn
uniawn, a'r geirwon yn ffyrdd gwastad," read it thus, "The
_crooked men_ shall be made _straight_, and _the rough
men_, smooth ways;" leaving the women, I suppose, still
crooked and rough.'
But while admitting, as who could hesitate to admit, that the practice
so long followed of appointing Englishmen to all the higher
ecclesiastical offices in Wales, could not fail to affect most
injuriously the interests of the Welsh Church, we must utterly demur, as
we have already intimated, to the exaggerated influence ascribed by the
modern defenders of the Church to this circumstance, as though it were
the sole cause of its inefficiency. For let us look a little more
closely into the matter. The period to which the advocates of this
theory are fond of reverting, as constituting the ideal era of the
Established Church in Wales, when it was governed principally by native
prelates, is, speaking in general terms, the interval between the
accession of Queen Elizabeth and the reign of William and Mary, or to
take the precise dates, adopted by those among them who have most
carefully investigated the subject, from the years 1558 to 1715. They
specify the names of twenty-four Welshmen elevated to Welsh sees during
these 257 years. But what was done by these Cymric bishops for the
spiritual good of the Principality? Mr. Johnes, whose work is the great
repertory of information on all matters connected with this subject,
mentions three out of the whole number who seem to have distinguished
themselves by some service rendered to their country. First, Bishop
Morgan, who translated the Bible into the Welsh language; but he did
this _not_ as bishop, but as the vicar of a small country parish in
Denbighshire, and he undertook the work precisely _because_ it had been
neglected by the Welsh prelates to whom it had been entrusted. Second,
Bishop Parry, who brought out a new edition of the Bible for use in the
churches. Third, Bishop Owen, who succeeded to the diocese of St. Asaph
in 1629, and of whom we are told that 'he began first by his order and
decrees, to establish preaching in Welsh in St. Asaph parish church, and
as it is supposed, in other parish churches, in his diocese. He repaired
his cathedral at his own cost, and set up a new organ in
it;'--expressions which evidently seem to imply, that these very simple
and obvious duties had been neglected by his predecessors, though they
also were native prelates. We have, also, seen a general statement that
some of the others established and endowed schools in particular
localities in Wales. Of most of the rest we know nothing, but of some of
them we know something. We know of Bishop Hughes, of St. Asaph, that he
held sixteen rich livings _in commendam_, and left his diocese in the
disgraceful condition already described in the early part of this
article. We know that under Bishop Meyrick, of Bangor, there were, by
his own acknowledgment, only two preachers in his diocese; and that
according to the testimony of Strype, the grossest scandals were openly
practised by the clergy. We know that the four native bishops, who by
the Act of Elizabeth, of 1563, were charged with translating the
Scriptures into Welsh, so neglected their duty as that even the churches
were left without Welsh Bibles for twenty-five years after that date. We
know that for seventy years after the settlement of the Reformation, not
a single edition of the Bible in the Welsh language was issued for the
use of the people. We know that from 1640 to 1690, which forms a
considerable portion of the vaunted era of Welsh bishops, Churchmen
published only one edition of the Scriptures--a large folio, for use in
the churches--while during the same interval the Nonconformists
published nine editions. We know that the contributions of the 'native
bishops' to the moral and religious literature of the Cymry are
conspicuous by their absence. We have examined with some care Rowland's
'Cambrian Bibliography' ('_Llyfryddiaeth y Cymry_'), containing an
account of all books published in the Welsh language from 1546 to 1800,
and, between the years 1558 and 1715, the era of Welsh bishops, we have
failed to discover a single work written in Welsh or translated into
Welsh by any one of these prelates, except 'A Letter to the Welsh,' by
Bishop Davies, introducing Salesbury's translation of the New Testament.
Nor is there any proof that they helped or promoted in any important
degree the publication of religious books in the Welsh language, while
the Nonconformists of that age laboured indefatigably to enlighten the
people through the press. Even Vicar Pritchard's work, 'The Welshman's
Candle,' left by him in manuscript, and which, next to the Bible, had
the greatest influence on the religious character of the country, was
published by the care and at the expense of Mr. Stephen Hughes, a
Nonconformist minister. But above all, we know what was the state of the
Church and the country during, and at the end of, the reign of this long
dynasty of Welsh bishops. It is described in the language already cited
of Strype, and Penry, and Pritchard, and Edwards, and Thomas, and
Erasmus Saunders, and Griffith Jones, and Howell Harris. And we beg our
readers specially to observe, that all the witnesses we have summoned to
depose to the character and condition of the Welsh Church during three
centuries of its history, have been members of the Church itself. If
there is one exception, it is that of John Penry. But he also was born
in the Church, and baptized in the Church, and ordained in the Church,
for we are told that he was 'a famous preacher of the University' and he
had, moreover, the honour of being persecuted, imprisoned, and hung by
the Church. With that one doubtful exception all the rest lived and died
within its pale. We might, of course, have added a large number of
witnesses from the ranks of Nonconformity, whose testimony, we believe,
would have been quite as trustworthy. But we have preferred omitting
whatever might be thought open to even the suspicion of sectarian
prejudice. Let us remember, that several of the 'native bishops' lived
several years into the beginning of the eighteenth century, and if they
had exercised so blessed an influence on the Church and the country as
it is now the fashion to affirm, that influence could not have suddenly
vanished immediately after their death. _Nemo repente fuit turpissimus_
is surely as applicable to a community as to an individual. And yet we
know by the confession of all candid Churchmen, that when Griffith Jones
and Howell Harris began their labours--the former in 1730, and the
latter in 1735--the Welsh Church was in a most lamentable state of
inefficiency and corruption.
The simple truth is, that the history of the Welsh Church is only a
crucial illustration of the invariable and inevitable evils that attend
State establishments of religion. It is true that in its case these
evils appear in a somewhat aggravated form, from the attempt made by the
English Government to treat Wales as a conquered country, and to employ
the Church as an agent in the extinction of its language and
nationality. But when the life of a Christian Church is made to depend
not on the faith, love, and liberality of its own members, and the
presence and blessing of its Divine Master, but upon the protection and
patronage of the civil government, and when, as a necessary consequence,
the administration of its affairs falls into the hands of worldly
politicians, who use it as an instrument of State, what can be expected
but what always has ensued, that its spiritual life should wither, until
those who seek real religious nourishment from its breasts are driven in
sheer desperation to seek it elsewhere?
Indeed, it is curious that the friends of the Welsh Church, while
enumerating the secondary causes which have led to her ruin, do not find
their way, which they may do by a single step, to the right conclusion
as to the primary cause from which all the others spring. Our Church,
they say, has suffered grievous injustice from the alienation of her
revenues, from the appointment of unqualified persons to all her highest
offices, from the most flagrantly corrupt use of patronage, from the
neglect of native talent, from laxity of godly discipline. But who has
alienated her revenues? The State. Who has made those unfitting
appointments? The State. Who has exercised patronage so corruptly? The
State and its nominees, the bishops. Who has overlooked native talent?
Again, the State and its nominees. Who has neglected to enforce godly
discipline? Still, the State and its nominees. Yet, when it is proposed
to strike away the fetters which bind them to the power that has thus
maltreated and oppressed them, they hug their chains with frantic
vehemence, and even use them as weapons with which to assail those who
would fain assist in their liberation.
But let us now inquire into the condition of the Church in our own day.
And in the phrase 'our own day,' we suppose we may include a period of
twenty-five years. We have previously observed that, for a long time
after the revival of religion which stimulated the Dissenters in Wales
to such extraordinary activity in providing the means of religious
instruction for the people, the Church continued sunk in utter apathy.
It is impossible to find a more conclusive illustration of this, than is
afforded by the following statement of the comparative progress made in
church and chapel accommodation during the first half of the present
century. It is founded on the Census Returns of 1851, and appears in Mr.
Richards's 'Letters on the Social and Political Condition of Wales,'
where it is cited on the authority of a very accomplished statistician,
the late Mr. Plint of Leeds. North Wales, in 1801, stood thus as to
religious accommodation:--
Proportion to all
Sittings Sittings
Church of England 99,216 75·2
All others 32,664 24·8
------- -----
Total 131,880 100·0
In the fifty years following, the population increased from 252,765 to
412,114, or 63 per cent. To have kept up the ratio of sittings to
population by each of these sections of religionists, the former should
have supplied 62,505 sittings, and it did supply 16,164. The latter
ought to have supplied 20,576, and it did supply 217,928. The Church of
England fell short of its duty 73·5 per cent., and all other
denominations exceeded it 950 per cent. The ratio of sittings to
population, which, in 1801, was 52·1 per cent. (5·9 less than the proper
standard, according to Mr. Horace Mann), was, in 1851, 88·9--that is, 30
per cent. above it.
South Wales, in 1801, stood thus:--
Sittings. Proportion to all
Sittings.
Church of England 133,514 61·8
All others 82,443 38·2
------- -----
Total 215,957 100·0
The population increased from 289,892 to 593,607, or 105·5 per cent. The
quota of sittings required of the Church was 140,854; it did provide
15,204. The other denominations ought to have provided 86,975; they did
provide 270,510. The Church of England fell short of its duty 89 per
cent.; the other denominations exceeded it 211 per cent. The ratio of
sittings to population in 1801 was 74·7 per cent., and in 1851, 84·5.
Can the force of antithesis go further.[165]
But we must descend a little more into detail, and furnish some
practical illustrations, still taken from the testimony of Churchmen
themselves, as to the condition of their Church in Wales in these modern
times. In 1849, Sir Benjamin Hall made a speech in the House of Commons,
in which he described the state of things at that time, especially in
the diocese of St. David's. He spoke of the total neglect of
archidiaconal visitations, of the small number of services performed in
the diocese, and of the ruinous and deserted state of the churches. Here
are a few extracts from his statement, taken, we believe, from the
Report of the Commissioners on Education:--
'No. 1. Kemys Hundred.--In the whole country between
Fishguard on the north, and the Precelly mountain on the
south, there is no day-school, and the state of the church
exemplifies the neglect in which the population of the
parishes are left. The churches of Llandeilo and
Maenchlogag are in ruins. In that of Morfyl the panes of
the chancel window were all out, the inside of the church
wet, as if just rinsed with water--indeed it had been, for
the afternoon was raining.
'No. 2. Hasguard.--School held in the church, where the
master and four little children were ensconced in the
chancel, amidst lumber, round a three-legged grate full of
burning sticks, without funnel or chimney for the smoke to
escape; how they bore it I cannot tell. There had been no
churchwarden in the parish for the last ten years, nor, it
is believed, for a much longer period.
'No. 3. Llanafan Fechan.--Mr. Rees, farmer, who lives close
to the church, informed me that divine service was very
seldom performed here, unless there are banns to publish, a
wedding, or a funeral.
'No. 4. Llandulais.--This church is a barn-like building
with large holes in the roof, evincing every symptom of
neglect and discomfort.
'No. 5. Llanfihangel Abergwessin.--No service performed in
this church five out of six Sundays for want of a
congregation.
'No. 6. Llanfihangel Bryn Pabuan.--Divine service not often
performed here, except a wedding or funeral takes place.
The vicar rides by on a Sunday afternoon, but seldom has
occasion to alight and do duty, from the want of a
congregation.
'No. 7. Llanfair tref Helygon,--The parish church was in
ruins many years ago; the oldest inhabitant does not
remember it standing.
'No. 8. Llandegley.--The clergyman is forbidden to have his
horses in the churchyard, but he puts in two calves. The
school is held in the church, into which the belfry opens,
which is open to the churchyard. Calves are still turned
into the churchyard, and, I was told, still sleep in the
belfry.
'No. 9. Llangybi, four miles from Llanbedr College, has
neither doors nor windows. The sacrament has not been
administered for _ten_ years. Service seldom performed at
all. Cows and horses walk into the church and out at
pleasure.
'No. 10. Llanfihangel Ar Arth, also near Llanbedr.--Here
there was once a chapel of ease; the stones of its ruins
have now disappeared, though a yew-tree marks the spot; and
the baptismal font was lately seen used as a pig-trough.
Yet the dissenters have five chapels, and congregations
amounting to 1,200.
'No. 11. Llandeilo Abercywyn.--The incumbent is
occasionally obliged to ring the church bell himself; but
sometimes the congregation amounts to two or three persons.
'No. 12.--In another parish the vicar has been in the
Insolvent Court; and was also suspended for three years for
immorality, but allowed to return. He has only a
congregation of about fifty, whilst the dissenters have
four chapels, with congregations of about 1,300.
'No. 13 Llandeilo Fach.--No service here for about _ten_
years. The roof has fallen down for several years; but,
fortunately, there is a dissenting chapel, with a
congregation of about 300.
'No. 15. Llanddowror.--This parish is a frightful
demonstration of the destruction of the Church in Wales by
the present system. About eighty years ago this parish was
under the pastoral care of a native Welshman, the excellent
and eminent Griffith Jones, renowned for his piety,
abilities, and qualifications. This church had then 500
communicants, and people came many miles to attend the
service. But this church has now no roof to its chancel,
of which it has been destitute several years. The
churchyard has neither wall nor fence; sheep were seen
standing on the church tower some months ago. In one parish
the curate has only of late been suspended, of whom the
parishioners said he was "so bad the devil would soon be
ashamed of him." The vicar had not preached in this parish
for ten years, and lives twenty miles off. He has had the
care of the parish since 1812, which is now reduced to the
above deplorable state, though formerly, when in other
hands, it was quoted as the model parish of Wales.'
Such was the aspect of the Church in the diocese of St. David's only
twenty years ago; and we have no doubt there were scores of other
parishes in the same diocese in little better condition than those
specified in the above extracts.
Let us now turn to look at another diocese. In the year 1850 a vigorous
effort was made to promote church extension in the diocese of Llandaff.
An appeal was issued in the form of a letter from the Archdeacon of
Llandaff to the Bishop, stating the facts of the case, which were these.
The population of the two Archdeaconries of Llandaff and Monmouth was
173,139. There was church-accommodation for only 17,440. Let our readers
specially remark this fact. After having been in possession of the
country for three hundred years, the Established Church in that part of
Wales did not pretend to have made provision, in the year of grace 1850,
for the religious instruction of more than one-tenth of the vast
population committed to her care. But, did the people avail themselves
of her ministrations even to that extent? The answer is at hand. Among
others to whom the appeal for help in building new churches, founded on
the above showing, was sent, was Sir Benjamin Hall. Before responding to
that appeal, Sir Benjamin, who was intimately conversant with that part
of the country, and who had his doubts whether more church-accommodation,
scanty as it was, was really needed for the district, instructed
competent persons to count the actual numbers who attended the churches
and the dissenting chapels in forty of the parishes of the diocese on a
given Sunday. He published the result in a pamphlet, in the form of a
letter to the Bishop, from which it appeared that, while the sittings
provided in the churches were 17,440, the total number of actual
attendants at the most numerously-attended service on Sunday, October
13th, 'the weather being particularly fine,' was 7,229; while the number
which attended the 227 chapels provided by the Nonconformists, in the
same district, amounted, on the same day, to 80,270. 'From the above it
appears,' says the writer of the pamphlet, 'that so far from the
churches being too small to hold the remnant of Churchmen which the zeal
and activity of Dissenters have not wrested from us, there is, at
present, room for 9,591 persons in addition to those who now attend the
divine service of the Established Church.'
If we turn to one of the North Wales dioceses, that of Bangor, it would
seem that even now, notwithstanding the energetic efforts which the
present bishop is known to have made to infuse some life into the
church, its condition, according to the acknowledgment of its own
friends, is sufficiently discouraging. At a meeting held in Bangor last
year, the bishop in the chair, a lay churchman said that Anglesey has
seventy-nine parishes, fifty-two of which have no parsonages. The
seventy-nine parishes are held by forty rectors; two of them possess
four livings each, eight of them possess three livings each, and
seventeen two each. He said that the desirable thing for Anglesey was
the residence of the clergyman among his parishioners. He declared that
the church there was now 'empty.' Another of the speakers, Lord Penrhyn,
acknowledged that Dissent had prevented Wales from becoming a heathen
country. At a clerical conference held in the same city in August, 1868,
also under the presidency of the bishop, the Rev. P. C. Ellis,
Llanfairfechan, in the course, we are told, of 'a very earnest address,'
made these remarks:--'He believed if the Church of Ireland were
disestablished it would be a just judgment upon the clergy of that
church for their shortcomings, and he was convinced that investigation
would show that the clergy of the church in this country had fallen as
far short of their duty as their brethren in Ireland. He trembled to
think what the report of the state of the Church in Wales would
disclose, as he believed its position was worse than that of the Church
in Ireland. If the Church in Ireland were to go down, the Church in
Wales must surely follow.'
With regard to the number of persons still attached to the Church in
Wales, there is great discrepancy of opinion. Without pronouncing
dogmatically on the subject, we propose to furnish our readers with
certain data, which may assist them in drawing their own conclusions. So
far as we know, the first, and we believe the most careful attempt that
was ever made to procure a return of the ecclesiastical statistics of
Wales, was in 1846, by Mr. Hugh Owen, Honorary Secretary of the Cambrian
Educational Society, a gentleman to whom the Principality is indebted
for many valuable services. What provoked that inquiry was this. About
that time the National Society was making a strenuous effort to cover
Wales with day-schools, wherein, according to the fundamental
regulations of that Society, 'the children were to be instructed in the
Holy Scriptures, and the liturgy and catechism of the Church of England,
such instruction to be subject to the superintendence of the parochial
clergyman;' 'the children to be assembled for the purpose of attending
service in the parish church;' 'the masters and mistresses to be members
of the Church of England,' &c. A special appeal was issued on behalf of
Wales by Archdeacon Sinclair, with a view 'to raise a large fund' to
establish schools on the above principles. In this appeal, the
suggestion 'to adopt a broad basis in which all sects could unite,' was
sternly rejected. No system 'from which the characteristic doctrines of
the Church of England were expunged' could be tolerated for an instant.
To show how utterly unsuited to the country schools of this description
must prove to be, the inquiry of which we speak was instituted. Having
obtained, through means of the relieving officers, the names and
addresses of trustworthy persons in about three-fourths of the parishes
in Wales, Mr. Owen addressed a circular to each of those persons,
requesting a return of--1. The name of every place of worship in his
district. 2. The name of the denomination to which it belonged. 3. The
exact number of the congregation at each place of worship on the first
Sunday after the receipt of the circular, in the morning, afternoon, and
evening. 4. The exact number attending the Sunday-school at each place,
morning and afternoon.[166] Returns were received from 392 parishes,
thirty of which were in Anglesey, fifty-nine in Carnarvonshire,
fifty-three in Denbighshire, seventeen in Flintshire, twenty-three in
Merionethshire, twenty-eight in Montgomeryshire, twenty-seven in
Breconshire, fifty-four in Cardiganshire, forty in Carmarthenshire,
eighteen in Glamorganshire, forty-three in Pembrokeshire, and ten in
Radnorshire. The population of these 392 parishes amounted to 431,000.
As the total population of Wales, not including Monmouthshire, was then
only 911,603, that of the returned parishes contained nearly one-half of
the whole population of the country. The result is thus summarized in a
pamphlet published soon after:--
'From the returns it appeared that the number attending the
morning services of dissenters were 79,694, the morning
service of the church, only 18,128, being more than four
dissenters to one churchman; the afternoon services of
dissenters were attended by 63,379, those of the church by
5,710, or about seven dissenters to one churchman. The
evening services of the church were attended by 9,889, and
those of dissenters by 128,216, or twenty-two dissenters to
one churchman. The average attendance on the Sunday was--
Churchmen 11,242
Dissenters 90,415
-------
Total average attendance 101,657
Hence the average attendance of dissenters as compared with
churchmen was as eight to one.
'The actual morning attendance at dissenting Sunday-Schools
was 40,641, at the church schools 3,396, or in the
proportion of twelve to one. In the afternoon, the
dissenters' schools were attended by 57,243, the church
schools by 6,002, or more than nine to one, giving an
average proportion of eleven to one in favour of dissenting
schools.'
It may be objected that as there were probably many churches in which
only one service was held, the deduction, from the average of three
services, may be unfair. Well, let it be noticed that the maximum number
attending the churches is in the morning, when it amounts to 18,128; and
that the maximum number attending the dissenting chapels is in the
evening, when it amounts to 128,216; hence the ratio of the maximum
attendance at dissenting chapels (evening service) to the maximum
attendance at the churches (morning service) is seven to one. But
leaving out of account for the moment the relative proportions of Church
and Dissent, as indicated by these returns, what do they tell us of the
absolute number of persons attached to the Church, as compared with the
population? Instead of taking the average attendance at three services,
we will, as before, take the number present at the most numerously
attended, namely, the morning service; and if we add to that number
one-fourth to represent absentees, we shall have a total of 22,660
souls. This, in a population of 431,000, would amount to rather more
than one in nineteen of church-goers.
But let us now turn to the official census of 1851. We have not the
slightest wish to impeach the general accuracy of the facts and figures
given in Mr. Horace Mann's masterly report. But the condition of Wales
is very peculiar, and the general rules laid down by that eminent
statistician for classifying and formulating the immense mass of figures
with which he had to deal, while fair enough, no doubt, to the normal
state of society in England, may not have been equally applicable to a
country in so exceptional a state as Wales.
That a serious error has crept in somewhere into the returns, as
respects the Principality, is obvious from this one fact. The number of
sittings provided by the Church of England is stated to be 301,807, and
the number of the worshipping population of the same church on the 31st
of March, 1851, is stated to be 138,719. Now Mr. Mann shows that the
proportion per cent. of attendants to sittings in the Established
Church, throughout all England and Wales, is only thirty-three; whereas
by the above showing, the proportion of attendants to sittings in Wales
alone is 40 per cent. We venture to say, that no man competently
acquainted with Wales, knowing, as every such man must know, the
miserably meagre attendance at hundreds of churches in that country,
would for an instant believe that the churches are occupied in the
proportion of 40 per cent. of attendants to sittings. Let us, however,
take the figures given to us in the census. The population of Wales,
including Monmouthshire, in 1851, was 1,188,914. The total number of
places of worship was 4,006, which was distributed thus:
PLACES OF WORSHIP.
Of the places of worship--
The Established Church furnished 1,180
Nonconformists 2,826
-----
4,006
SITTINGS.
Of the sittings (including estimates for defective return)--
Established Church furnished 301,897, or 30 per cent.
Nonconformists 692,239, or 70 per cent.
It appears thus, that the Church had provided sittings for only 25 per
cent. of the population, while the Nonconformists had provided sittings
for nearly 59 per cent.
But how about attendance? According to Table B. of the Census of
Religious Worship, the greatest number by very far of attendants at the
services of the Established Church on the Census Sunday was in the
morning. The number was 100,953. If we add one-fourth to this number for
the absentees, we have 126,191, which represents 10·6 per cent., not
quite one in nine of the population.
But these facts, sufficiently remarkable as they are in themselves, give
really but an imperfect impression of the real magnitude of the anomaly
which exists in Wales. An Established Church is presumably a _national_
Church, and rests its claim to being established on the ground of its
being national. Above all, it ought to be _par excellence_ the poor
man's Church, as some of the friends of the English Establishment are
wont to allege, with what truth we pause not now to inquire, that theirs
is. But in Wales the Church is not only not national, but it is
anti-national; and the whole policy of its rulers for at least a hundred
and fifty years has been inspired by a prejudice as stupid as it was
mean against, the Welsh nationality and language. At present, of the
small remnant of the population which still remains within its pale, by
far the larger part are either English immigrants into Wales, or that
portion of the Welsh people which have become Anglified in their
feelings and tastes; and instead of being the poor man's Church, that of
Wales is emphatically and almost exclusively the rich man's Church.
There are scores, we might safely say hundreds of churches, in which, if
the clergyman's family and the squire's family, and their few dependents
and parasites were removed, there would be absolutely no congregation at
all.
Mr. Gladstone lamented, as members of the Welsh Church also sometimes
profess to lament, the want of accurate and trustworthy information as
to the real facts of the case as regards the several religious opinions
in Wales. But whose fault is that? There would be no difficulty
whatever, in a small country like Wales, in obtaining perfectly accurate
information as to the number of adherents to the church, if that body
were to follow the example of the principal Nonconformist denominations
in the Principality, who collect and publish periodically statistical
returns of the members of their churches, and the attendants at public
worship. But the clergy of the establishment, clinging tenaciously in
the face of notorious facts to the fond fancy that theirs is the
national church, however small a fragment of the nation really belongs
to it, decline to give us the number either of their communicants or of
those who habitually frequent their churches. We are driven therefore to
look for such incidental indications of the real state of the case as
may come within our reach. Some of these, however, are very
significant. In the National Society's report for 1866-7 there is a
return given of the number of persons attending Church Sunday Schools in
Wales. They amounted to 49,358, or 4 per cent. of the population. The
number found in Dissenting Sunday Schools, according to the printed year
books of the various denominations on the same year, was 351,128, or 29
per cent. of the population, thus showing the Church Sunday scholars to
be one-eighth of the entire number. These returns are all the more
valuable, because in Wales it is not the children merely that attend the
Sunday schools, but a very large proportion of the adult population
also.
Very striking revelations have been made, likewise, in connection with
Day Schools in Wales, tending to throw much light on the actual and
comparative strength of the church. When the committee of Council on
Education began to make grants for the erection of schools, there was a
great rush of applicants from the friends of the Established Church in
Wales. They had many advantages in their favour for undertaking the work
of establishing Day Schools. They had nearly the whole land and a great
proportion of the wealth of the country in their possession. As they
drew the means for the support of their clergy, the fabrics of the
church, and public worship--which the Dissenters had to provide out of
their own pockets--from the national endowments, they had all their
resources at liberty to devote to the work of education. The
administrators of the national fund were their partial friends, and
dispensed it with a lavish profusion, with little or no inquiry into the
fitness of those who applied, to direct and control the education of
such a population as that of Wales. The National Society, as already
shown, made an appeal, which was liberally responded to, for a special
fund in which the co-operation of England was solicited, to promote 'the
education of our fellow-countrymen throughout Wales in the principles of
our common church.' Our friends of the Establishment, moreover, were
restrained by no scruple whatever from receiving public money to any
extent for teaching their own peculiar tenets in day schools, while the
Dissenters conscientiously refused the proffered grants of Government
aid for religious instruction. This sudden access of educational zeal
sprang avowedly in great part from proselyting motives. The Bishop of
St. David's, in one of his early charges, adverting to the peculiar
condition of the Principality, confessed that the existing generation
was hopelessly alienated from the church, but that the next could and
must be recovered by attending to the education of the young. The result
of this effort was that State-aided Church schools sprang up in all the
larger towns and villages, and in many remote hamlets, and that often in
places where there were not half-a-dozen church children.[167] In these
schools the principles of the National Society were rigidly enforced.
All the children were taught the Church catechism, and obliged to attend
church on Sundays. But State-aided schools were liable to inspection,
and the inspectors had to present their reports to the Committee of
Council, and these were laid before Parliament and the public. It was
not possible, therefore, in reporting on the state of education in
Wales, wholly to conceal the fact, that an enormous majority of the
people held religious views different from those held by the class who
in many places had undertaken to direct their education. This has often
come out in the reports of even Church of England Inspectors. Thus the
Rev. Longueville Jones, who was inspector of Church schools in Wales in
1854, says:--'The number of children in Welsh schools whose parents
belong to the Church is so very small, that it requires great experience
and delicacy of feeling to treat their young minds as they should
be.'[168] As an illustration of the difficulty with which this gentleman
had to contend, it is only necessary to refer to the statistics he gives
of one school under his inspection, in which out of 107 children, only
five were of parents belonging to the Church, whilst in the following
year the same school contained 144 children, of whom two only were of
church-going parents. To come down to a later period in the report of
the Rev. S. Pryce, Inspector of Church of England Schools for Mid-Wales,
for 1868, we find the following admission:--'The number of children
attending the Welsh country schools I visit, is great beyond all
proportion when compared with the number of persons attending
church.'[169]
Among the inspectors of British schools in Wales was and is Mr. J.
Bowstead. We believe that Mr. Bowstead is himself a churchman. But he is
a liberal and candid churchman. When, therefore, in the discharge of his
office, he began to visit the country, some eighteen or twenty years
ago, he was forcibly struck with the singular anomaly he found to exist,
of a large number of Church schools in some cases liberally subsidized
from the public funds, and in others supported by deductions from
workmen's wages, planted among a population of Dissenters, who felt the
strongest repugnance to much of the religious teaching forced on their
children in such schools. He had the courage in his reports to expose
this injustice, for which he has been ever since the _bête noire_ of the
Welsh bishops and clergy, who often assail him with great acrimony and
conspicuous unfairness. But on the other hand, he has the satisfaction
of knowing that he has won the enthusiastic gratitude of a whole nation,
who owe to him, in a main degree, the exposure of a flagrant wrong from
which they had been long suffering, with little hope of deliverance.
Well, Mr. Bowstead, after extensive and careful inquiry, in order to
show the aggravated character of the anomaly of which he complained,
ventured to say that _nine-tenths of the common people_ in Wales were
Nonconformists. A writer in the April number of the _Quarterly Review_
has assailed him very angrily, and has accused him of 'asserting without
a shadow of proof that _nine-tenths of the Welsh people_ are
Nonconformists.' In a pamphlet issued for private circulation, Mr.
Bowstead has with just severity first rebuked his assailant for
perverting his words, and then shown how little foundation there is for
the charge of his having asserted without 'a shadow of proof,' what
alone he did assert, that nine-tenths of the common people of Wales, of
such people as use elementary schools, are Nonconformists. Now for the
proof of this allegation. When Sir John Pakington's committee was
sitting in 1865-6, Mr. Bowstead was one of the witnesses summoned to
give evidence. He had been asked to procure the best information he
could, as to the comparative numbers of children of church people and
children of Dissenters in the schools he visited. He had no difficulty
in getting at this from the school register, because the name of the
Sunday school which each child attends is entered in a column provided
for the purpose, a very satisfactory index of the denomination to which
its parents belong. And what was the result? He received returns from
thirty schools, 'which were the only elementary schools in their
respective localities. These thirty schools had an aggregate of 6,799
children under instruction, and of these 756 were returned as belonging
to the Church. The children of parents attached to the Church formed,
therefore, about 11 per cent. of the whole, and the children of
Nonconformists constituted the remaining 89 per cent. But Mr. Bowstead
supplies us with more recent evidence, which we give in his own words:--
'I have not on this occasion attempted to obtain returns
from so wide an area as in 1866; but I have secured very
complete and reliable returns, upon a considerable scale,
from a locality which embraces some 20,000 inhabitants, all
of whom are brought together by the industrial operations
of one large Company; and all of whose children, so far as
they belong to the working classes, receive their education
in schools promoted by that Company. The locality is
Dowlais, which in the matter of education is the Prussia of
South Wales. It has an admirable system of schools,
embracing not only unsectarian Protestant schools for the
bulk of the community, but also Roman Catholic schools for
the Irish. Nearly one-sixth of the whole population may be
found on the registers of these schools at any moment, and
I should think there is scarcely a child in the place that
does not receive some amount of schooling, whilst those of
them who stay long enough at school secure a very thorough
elementary English education, together with some
instruction in the French language and in drawing. I know
of no place where the schools reproduce so complete a
picture of the population around them, or where the free
play of all the social forces presents so true a type of
the characteristic features of the working men of the
district.'
Mr. Bowstead then subjoins a table showing the number of children
belonging to each denomination, in attendance at the Dowlais schools:
out of a total of 2,933, those belonging to the Established Church are
266. 'The Church children therefore would be almost 7·7 per cent., or
one-thirteenth of the whole, and the Nonconformists would claim the
remaining twelve-thirteenths. This gives a larger proportion to the
Nonconformists than any former return.' Accompanying this return there
is a letter from Mr. G. T. Clark, the manager of the Dowlais works,
containing two or three sentences which are of great significance and
value. In sending the tabular statement just referred to, Mr. Clark
remarks:--'The proportion of the several sects may, I think, be taken as
typical of the manufacturing population of South Wales and
Monmouthshire.' We must quote two or three other sentences from Mr.
Clark's letter:--
'I see a great deal is said about the disposition of the
Welsh Dissenters to allow their children to attend Church
schools. We have both Church and neutral schools in this
district, and I believe the Church schools of my friend and
neighbour the Rector of Gelligaer to be as good as any
semi-rural Schools in Wales, and they are largely attended
by the children of Dissenters. But this is not from love of
the Church, but because they desire education, and the
district has no other schools. The Welsh, in this respect,
like the Scotch, have a craving to get on, and they will
make a sacrifice to educate their children; and if the only
accessible school be a Church school, to it they will
apply. They trust and safely trust to the domestic example,
and to the Sunday teaching in the chapel, and chapel
school, to keep the children in the special faith of their
parents.... Those who say that the South Wales
manufacturing population have a regard for the Church of
England speak in utter ignorance of the matter. Their
dislike to the Church, as an establishment, is very strong,
and is yearly becoming stronger.'
It would be difficult to find a more competent and trustworthy witness.
Mr. Clark is himself an attached member of the Church of England. He is
a gentleman of rare intelligence, who has for many years been at the
head of one of the largest and best conducted of the great iron works of
South Wales. His knowledge of the population of the whole district is
extensive and accurate. His testimony therefore as to the comparative
number of Churchmen and Dissenters, and the feelings of the
Nonconformists towards the Establishment, must be held to be
unimpeachable.
But what is the comparative progress in accommodation for worship made
by the Church and the Nonconformists since the Census of 1851? We have
the materials for an approximate estimate. The Bishop of Llandaff, in
his last charge, delivered in August, 1869, states that since 1849, the
number of new churches erected in his diocese is thirty-nine, not quite
two churches in the year; and the number of churches rebuilt on the same
site, but whether enlarged is not stated, is thirty-six, making a total
of seventy-five. Against this we have to place the following return,
furnished to us in detail, but of which we can here give only a summary,
of what has been done in the same diocese by three Nonconformist bodies
since 1850:--
Number of new chapels built by the Independents 68
Number of ditto rebuilt and enlarged 46
-- 114
Number of new chapels built by the Baptists 66
Number of ditto rebuilt and enlarged 39
-- 105
Number of new chapels built by Calvinistic Methodists 52
Number of ditto rebuilt and enlarged 42
-- 94
---
313
Let it be observed that this showing includes only the three principal
Nonconformist denominations, as we have failed to procure returns of the
different bodies of Wesleyan Methodists and other minor sects, which
would make undoubtedly a considerable addition to the total increase of
dissenting accommodation. And yet how does the comparison stand even
with such incomplete elements as we possess? We find that the
Nonconformists have built 186 new places of worship against thirty-nine
built by the Church, and have rebuilt and enlarged 127 more against
thirty-six rebuilt by the Church.
With regard to the whole of Wales, our information as respects what the
Church has done during the last twenty years, is not so perfect as we
could wish. The number of new churches built in the four dioceses
appears, as nearly as we can calculate from the data within our reach,
to be about 110. But there is more difficulty in getting, at those
rebuilt and enlarged, as in one of the returns (that of St. Asaph) we
find churches 'restored' and 'improved'--words implying merely repairs
of existing fabrics without any additional accommodation--mixed up with
those which have been 'rebuilt and enlarged.' We have the precise number
rebuilt, and we are willing to presume somewhat enlarged, in Llandaff,
which is thirty-six, and in Bangor, which is thirty-one. We think it
would be a liberal allowance from the statistical report before us to
assign thirty-five 'enlarged' churches to St. Asaph, and judging by the
number of new churches built in St. David's, we presume that thirty
'enlarged' churches would cover all that has been done in that diocese,
making a total rebuilt and enlarged of 132. Let us now turn to the
Nonconformists. The following are facts on the substantial accuracy of
which our readers may rely. Since 1850, the Calvinistic Methodists have
built 321 new chapels, and have rebuilt and enlarged 435 more, providing
additional accommodation in all for 123,881 worshippers, at a cost of
£366,000. The Independents, during the same period, have built 118 new
chapels, and have rebuilt and enlarged 200 more, furnishing additional
accommodation for 130,000, at a cost of £294,000. The Baptists have
built 142 new chapels, and rebuilt and enlarged ninety-nine more,
furnishing additional accommodation for 81,800, at a cost of £163,000.
Thus, these three denominations alone have in twenty years built 581 new
chapels, and rebuilt and enlarged 734 more, providing accommodation for
308,681 persons, at a cost of £823,000.
But it must be further observed, that it is not merely in the matter of
religious instruction that the Nonconformists have become almost
exclusively the leaders of the Welsh people. As respects literature and
science, and all important social and political movements, it is the
same. The literature of Wales, and not its religious literature merely,
is almost wholly Nonconformist. There are about thirty periodicals,
quarterly, monthly, and weekly, at present published in the Welsh
language. Of these all but three are owned and edited by Dissenters.
There are nine commentaries on the whole Bible, and nine besides on the
New Testament alone, some original and some translated from English, and
only two of these were done by Churchmen, and even they were Dissenters
when they began their work. There are eight Biblical and Theological
Dictionaries, and as many bodies of divinity or systems of theology, and
no Churchman, we believe, has had a hand in the production of any one of
them. There is a History of the World, a History of Great Britain, a
History of Christianity, a History of the Church, a History of the Welsh
Nation, a History of Religion in Wales, all by Dissenters, besides
elaborate denominational Histories of the Calvinistic Methodists, the
Independents, the Baptists, &c. Indeed, all the ecclesiastical histories
in the language are Nonconformist, and all the general histories except
the History of Wales by the Rev. Thomas Price, and a small work called
the 'Mirror of the Principal Ages.' There is a valuable work illustrated
by many excellent maps and diagrams, entitled 'The History of Heaven and
Earth,' treating of geography and astronomy, by the Rev. J. T. Jones, of
Aberdare, formerly a Nonconformist minister. There is another large
geographical dictionary in course of publication by a dissenting
minister. There are two copious Biographical Dictionaries edited and
principally written by Dissenters. There is now, and has been for
several years, in course of publication an Encyclopædia in the Welsh
language (Encyclopædia Cambrensis), dealing as such works do with the
entire circle of human knowledge. It was described by the late
Archdeacon Williams, who had seen the earlier volumes, as 'a work of
great promise, as sound in doctrine as it is unsectarian in principle.'
It is studiously free from denominational taint, and was intended to be
a great national undertaking, the contributors being indiscriminately
selected from the ablest writers of all denominations, the combined
learning and talent of Wales being thus engaged in its preparation. The
enterprising publisher at the outset addressed a letter to all those
among his countrymen of whatever church or creed who had distinguished
themselves in any way by their literary acquirements and productions,
inviting their co-operation. We have now before us a list of the
contributors amounting to ninety names, and out of these ninety, there
are certainly not more than nine churchmen.
The English public has of late years become partially acquainted with a
remarkable institution existing in Wales, which has come down from very
ancient times, called Yr Eisteddfod, or the Session, meaning in its
primitive signification the Session of the Bards. Its object is to
encourage the cultivation of literature, poetry and music. The English
press has tried to throw great ridicule on this institution, as the
English press is wont to do, upon all institutions that are not English.
And yet surely, as the Bishop of St. David's has said, 'it is a most
remarkable feature in the history of any people, and such as could be
said of no other than the Welsh, that they have centred their national
recreation in literature and musical competitions.' Prizes ranging from
£1 to £100 are offered for the best compositions in poetry, prose, and
music. The highest honour bestowed by the Eisteddfod is the Bardic
chair, and the productions entitling the successful candidates to this
distinction are supposed to possess rare merit. There are now living
nine chaired bards, of whom one is a clergyman, seven are Nonconformist
ministers, and one a Nonconformist layman. In musical compositions, the
proportion would be about the same. And certainly the Welsh clergy of
the present day have not, any more than their predecessors,
distinguished themselves as authors. A catalogue of Welsh books
published within the last twenty years, would show a very beggarly
'account' standing to the credit of the official instructors of the
Welsh people.
Such are the past history and the present condition of the Established
Church in Wales. Surely no legislature with any sense of justice can
long refuse to deal with so anomalous an institution as that we have
described; a Church which has wholly failed, and is still failing, to
accomplish the only object for which it pretends to exist, from
which--and that entirely owing to its own criminal neglect--the great
body of the people are hopelessly alienated, and which has no vital
relation with the religions, political, social, or literary life of the
nation. And it is not merely a theoretical anomaly. It is an intolerable
practical grievance, and is becoming more and more so every day. For its
friends, numbering as they do nearly all the landowners and wealthy
classes, galvanized, of late years, into a sort of spasmodic zeal, which
is far more political than religious, are making frantic efforts to
regain for their Church the ascendancy it has so righteously lost, by a
very unscrupulous use of their wealth, their social position, and their
control over the land. The advocates of the Church, especially in the
English press, are trying to wreak their vengeance on a nation of
Dissenters, by traducing the character of the people, and ridiculing
their language, their literature, and their religious institutions; and
this they are not deterred from doing by their utter ignorance of all
three. Some of the Welsh clergy, also, exasperated by seeing their
pretensions contemned, and their ministrations forsaken, are propagating
the most monstrous calumnies against their successful rivals, the
Dissenting ministers. One Conservative journal in London has especially
distinguished itself by throwing its columns open to these anonymous
slanderers. Here are some of the flowers of speech that have been
plentifully scattered in its pages on the Welsh Nonconformists. 'The
Welsh language is made the instrument of evil by preachers and other
supporters of anarchy and plunder.' 'The people are actively taught to
commit arson and murder; they are regularly drilled into Fenianism.'
'Dissenting ministers are the curse of Wales; there is scarcely a sermon
or lecture they deliver that is not full of sedition.'
And yet the country whose population is thus systematically trained to
sedition and murder, is more free from serious crime than any part of
the United Kingdom; so free, indeed, that in many of the counties the
annual visit of her Majesty's judges is almost a work of supererogation.
Take as an example the county of Cardigan, which was the scene of the
most extensive and cruel political persecutions after the last election,
where about sixty tenants were evicted from their holdings, some of them
under circumstances of a singularly exasperating character. And yet at
the Assizes, that were held immediately after, there was not a single
prisoner to be tried. Mr. Justice Hannen, in charging the grand jury,
said 'that a perfectly clear calendar was a circumstance he had never
before met with since he had been on the bench, and he understood from
his brother judges that only in the Principality of Wales was such a
thing known, and that there it was frequent. Whether it was attributable
to race or to the influence of religious teaching he could not say, but
he felt deeply interested in the matter, and whatever might be the
cause, there was the indisputable fact, one of which the county of
Cardigan might well be proud.'
These insane efforts to drive or to drag the people back into the Church
by coercion and calumny, produce, of course, precisely the opposite
effect. Indeed the Conservatives, in their treatment of Wales, are
triumphantly vindicating their right to the title bestowed upon them by
Mr. Stuart Mill, as 'the stupid party.' Unhappily, however, they do
succeed in embittering the heart of the people, and in introducing
alienation and anger into their relations with the classes who are thus
tempted to tamper with their religious and political rights. And all
this is owing to the existence of an Established Church.
ART. VII. (1.)--_The Greek New Testament, edited from Ancient
Authorities, with the Latin Version of Jerome from the Codex Amiatinus._
By S. P. TREGELLES, LL.D. Matthew to Acts--Catholic Epistles--Romans to
Philemon. S. Bagster and Sons.
(2.) _Fragmenta Evangelica quæ ex antiqua recensione versionis Syriacæ
Novi Testamenti a Gulielmo Curetono vulgata sunt Græce reddita textuique
Syriaco editionis Schaafianæ et Græco Scholzianæ fideliter collata._
Pars Prima. J. R. CROWFOOT, S.T.B. Williams and Norgate.
It is difficult to estimate our unpaid obligations to the students and
scholars who have sacrificed their life to furnish us with the
common-places of our knowledge. The elaborate and prolonged effort, the
perseverance, ingenuity, and scientific skill often concealed in the
foundations of a great building or in the underways of a great city, are
no inapt illustration of the lifelong labours of those students and
votaries of literature who have placed in our hands authentic and
accurate copies of the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of ancient thinkers. The
learned, patient, and devout men to whom we are indebted for our present
careful approximations to the text of the New Testament, have undergone
a species of toil which it is very difficult for those scholars even to
appreciate, who have never made the attempt to decipher a single MS. or
to gather around them the abundant and often conflicting evidence on
which the judgment of the critic really turns. Whatever be the ultimate
currency or acceptance of the text which Dr. Tregelles has offered to
the world as the result of his life-long effort, and granting that some
of the disadvantages under which he has suffered have left ineffaceable
marks on the greater part of the work, and that his main principles may
still be under judicature, yet we readily endorse the strong language of
Bishop Ellicott: 'The edition of Tregelles will last to the very end of
time as a noble monument of faithful, enduring, and accurate labour in
the cause of truth; it will always be referred to as an uniquely
trustworthy collection of assorted critical materials of the greatest
value, and as such it will probably never be superseded.'[170] The
Bishop does not regard Dr. Tregelles' text as the final one, but does
not hesitate to speak of it as far better than Tischendorf's, and as
furnishing material which no subsequent editor can afford to ignore.
With the exception of the text of the Apocalypse and of the appendices
rendered necessary by the progress of textual criticism since the
earlier portions of the work were published, this long-expected work is
now placed in our hands. The exception to which we have referred is, we
profoundly regret to say, occasioned by the serious indisposition of the
learned, laborious, and devout editor. The regret is to some extent
alleviated from a literary point of view by the circumstance that one of
the first contributions to Biblical science made by this conscientious
and accurate scholar was published in 1844, and entitled 'The Book of
Revelation in Greek, edited from Ancient Authorities, with a new English
Version and various Readings, by Samuel P. Tregelles.' There is this
difference, however, between the evidence alleged by Dr. Tregelles for
the text of the Revelation and that which he has pursued throughout the
elaborate work now before us, that in the former he was either content
or only able at that time to give the evidence of the few Uncial MSS.
and early versions, then known to contain the Apocalypse, with such
confirmation as they received from a large number of the Cursive MSS.
Although his object was to approximate as nearly as possible to the most
ancient text, his _apparatus criticus_ had not then reached the
proportions it has subsequently assumed, and he did not even attempt to
marshal the evidence of patristic quotations, or to give the arguments
_pro_ and _contra_ any reading that he deliberately adopted. The _Codex
Sinaiticus_ had not then been rescued from the Convent of St. Catherine
by the enterprising Dr. Tischendorf, and the system of careful notation
which is adopted in the _magnum opus_ now before us, had not been
elaborated. Since 1844, moreover, the Rev. Bradley Alford has published
a collation of the celebrated Cursive MS. 38, Dr. Delitzch has
discovered the MS. used by Erasmus, and a careful collation is promised
of the Codex Basiliensis, which Dr. Tregelles proposes to call Q,
instead of adopting the old and confusing symbol B, which has led some
to identify it with _the_ Codex Vaticanus. The introduction to the
interesting volume on the text of the Book of Revelation was expanded in
1854 into a goodly octavo entitled 'An Account of the printed text of
the Greek New Testament, with remarks on its revision upon critical
principles, together with a collation of the critical texts of
Griesbach, Scholz, Lachmann, and Tischendorf with that in common use.'
We know no work on biblical criticism more charged with well-digested
information, and none which reveals a more extensive literary
enterprise, than that which is here recorded. Dr. Tregelles tells us in
the preface to his Greek Testament, that this work contains a detailed
exposition of the principles he holds and the studies in which he has
been engaged, and as his editors earnestly request that it be referred
to in explanation of the principle adopted by Dr. Tregelles, it is
almost incumbent upon us to remind our readers of its contents and
spirit. In the appendix to section 13, occurs a brief and modest sketch
of the extensive and continuous labours of this great student of the New
Testament text. It appears that he commenced his research simply for his
own satisfaction. The text of Dr. Scholz, based so largely on the
consensus of later MSS. but revealing the small group of Alexandrian
authorities and most ancient witnesses in opposition to the text adopted
by him, first called Dr. Tregelles to a consideration of the fact that
these most ancient but rejected testimonies were curiously confirmed by
the older versions. He was thus led to conceive of the creation of a
text entirely based on the authority of the most ancient copies. He did
not even know that Lachmann in 1838 had already made his celebrated
though imperfect attempt to produce the text of the first four centuries
in entire or professed independence of the later authorities and of the
received text. When the Codex Amiatinus of Jerome's Latin Version was
collated and published by Fleck in 1840, Tregelles found it confirm, in
opposition to the Clementine Vulgate, the oldest Greek readings. In
preparing his work on the text of the Revelation, he found it necessary
to collate the Uncial MSS. with his own hand. In 1845 he collated the
Codex Augiensis (in Trinity Coll. Camb.). Though he visited Rome for
the purpose of collating the celebrated _Codex Vaticanus_ he was
prevented from copying unless it were surreptitiously on his
thumb-nails, a single reading. We formerly gave to our readers[171] a
full account of the various imperfect collations made by Birch,
Bartolocci, and Cardinal Mai, and also of the edition which has recently
been published under the auspices of Dr. Tischendorf. In the greater
part of Dr. Tregelles' critical labours he has been compelled to trust
to the faulty and otherwise divergent collations which preceded Dr.
Tischendorf's edition; but while he was deprived of the personal
advantage of investigating Codex B for himself, he did collate at Rome,
with his own hand, the Codex Passonei, and at Florence the Codex
Amiatinus of Jerome's Latin; and at Modena, Venice, Munich, and Basle,
other Uncial MSS. of considerable portions of the New Testament. Many of
these were used by Tischendorf in his second Leipsic edition of the
Greek Testament.
Dr. Tregelles became acquainted in 1849 with the remarkable Syriac
fragment which Dr. Cureton found among the MSS. brought from the Nitrian
monasteries and deposited in the British Museum. This mutilated fragment
contains portions of the four Gospels--Matt. i.-viii. 22; x. 31-xxiii.
25; Mark xvi. 17-20; John i. 1-42; iii. 6-vii. 37; xiv. 11-29; Luke ii.
48-iii. 16; vii. 33-xv. 21; xvii. 24-xxiv. 44; but in the opinion of the
best Syriac scholars, it is older than the Peshito, and would seem to
have been collated with the Greek by the translator of the Greek
Testament into Syriac (Peshito). Dr. Cureton supposed that it represents
a first translation from the original Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, but Dr.
Davidson has we think conclusively proved that it is a translation from
the Greek. Dr. Cureton conjectured that sundry curious blunders or
deviations from the canonical Matthew are due to the mistakes made by
the translator of the Hebrew into Syriac. These conjectures are
ingenious but perfectly gratuitous. Dr. Davidson has shown that in a
variety of places the Curetonian Syriac (as it is called) differs from
the early Greek text by the obvious blunder between two _Greek_ words of
similar appearance. We have been rather explicit on the matter of this
valuable witness to a very early text, not only because Dr. Tregelles
and others have made constant reference to it, but because the second
work which we have placed at the head of this article is a translation
into Greek of the first part of these precious fragments, and is,
moreover, a collation of every reading with Scholz's text, and with
Schaaf's edition of the Peshito. This critical effort of Mr. Crowfoot
will be of real service to the student who is not familiar with Syriac,
and who wishes to see for himself the singular deviations of this text
from the Textus Receptus. Take _e.g._ the additions made to the text of
Matthew in chap. xx. 28, where a passage resembling one in Luke vii. is
introduced. The Cur. Syriac here is sustained by the Codex D. Very
frequently, however, it corresponds in its omissions with the most
ancient MSS. and with the old Latin, as in Matt. xx. 22, 23. It is
profoundly interesting, moreover, in that it retains of Mark's Gospel
only a portion of the very closing passage, which is not to be found in
Codex B. or in א. Partly in consequence of this testimony Dr. Tregelles
leaves the passage as an authentic appendix to the text of the Gospel of
St. Mark. We see that Mr. Crowfoot and Dr. Tregelles sometimes differ,
as we might expect them to do, as to the Greek equivalent which they
suppose most likely to have been the exemplar of the Syriac, but they do
not seriously differ as to the testimony it bears to a particular
reading. In Matthew xi. 23, the Textus Rec. reads καὶ σὺ Καπερναοὺμ ἡ
ἕως τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ὑψωθεῖσα, κ.τ.λ. Mr. Crowfoot gives in place of ἡ, οὐχ.
Dr. Tregelles on the authority of B, C, D, the Vulgate _a, b, c_, and
Syr. Cur., gives μὴ, and makes the clause interrogative.
But to proceed with Dr. Tregelles' labours. The various collations made
by him need not be exhaustively enumerated, though special attention
should be called to the extraordinary effort and patience which was
required by him to form an accurate estimate of the readings of the
Codex Colbertinus, called 33 in the Gospels, and 13 in the Acts and
Catholic Epistles. The leaves of the vellum have been in places sodden
with damp and stuck together. The consequence was that when separated,
'the ink adhered to the _opposite_ page rather than to its own, so that
in many leaves the MS. could only be read by observing how the ink had
_set-off_, and thus reading the Greek words _backwards_.' At Paris,
Leipsic, Berlin, Dresden and Wolfenbüttel, Dr. Tregelles continued his
patient research, and came to such discoveries as that the Codex
Sangallensis (Δ of the Gospels), and Codex Boernerianus (G of St.
Paul's Epistles) were the severed portions of the same book. At Dublin,
the difficult palimpsest fragment (Z) was deciphered after submitting
the vellum to a chemical process, and Tregelles was able to restore the
portions which had been left blank in the edition of this fragment
published by Dr. Barrett.
Special reference may be made to the Codex, called Zacynthius and
designated [Ξ], the property of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
This is almost an illegible parchment palimpsest, containing
considerable portions of Luke's Gospel. The readings of this old
lectionary have been carefully noted by Tregelles and are cited
throughout his text of the Gospel of Luke. The Codex Leicestrensis, the
property of the Town Council of Leicester, has been also carefully
collated by our author, as well as by Mr. Scrivener. It is cited as 69
in the Gospels, 31 Acts, and by other numbers in remaining portions of
the New Testament.
Dr. Tregelles has not paid _much_ attention to the mass of cursive MSS.
It is not fair to accuse him of utterly neglecting them, when he has
gone through the laborious work of collating specimens of cursive MSS.
in each of the divisions of his subject. He has, however, placed far
more confidence in another class of authority and of evidence. The most
ancient versions have been thoroughly noted by him in their several
codices. The old Latin is carefully studied throughout; the Codex
Amiatinus of Jerome's Latin is published in the volume before us, with
all the deviations from it in the Clementine Vulgate. The Peshito and
Harcleian Syriac versions, the Cureton fragments, the Jerusalem
Lectionary, the Memphitic and Thebaic (sometimes called the Coptic and
Sahidic) versions, the Ethiopic and the Gothic, are used throughout this
edition of the Greek Testament. A considerable number of uncial MSS.,
which have been published in facsimile or in a printed text, Dr.
Tregelles has copied with his own hand, and all the rest of the uncial
MSS. he appears to have also collated with his own hand. Having gone
through this extraordinary labour, he has proceeded to give the text of
the New Testament on the authority of the oldest MSS. and versions, and
with the aid of the earliest citations, so as to present the text of the
fourth century. He does not hesitate to deviate from these ancient
testimonies, when they agree in transcriptural error; and he confers
this great advantage on the student, that he states in every case the
authorities on both sides with reference to any disputed reading.
Now there has often been expressed on the part of the advocates of the
cursive MSS. and the Constantinopolitan group of MSS. and of the later
uncial MSS., the conviction that their consensus ought to outweigh the
strong and clearly expressed testimony of the ancient MSS. on the
plausible supposition that the existing later MS. _may_ be the copies
of an older text than that of any existing MS. whatever. Now if Dr.
Tregelles or Dean Alford or Dr. Tischendorf had been mere slaves of the
few uncial MSS. of great antiquity which are extant, and had no further
or corroborative testimony to add in favour of the readings, or the
additions and omissions they have affirmed, there would be much justice
in the protest sometimes raised; but neither of them can justly be
charged with this, and Dr. Tregelles must certainly be acquitted of such
prejudice. He and Dean Alford do indisputably and notoriously differ in
certain cases where subjective reasons and considerations of the
exercise of personal discretion must assume great importance; and in
some of these doubtful and difficult cases Tregelles has been more
influenced by diplomatic considerations, and has more readily yielded to
authority, than Dean Alford; but Dr. Tregelles has stated very acutely
and powerfully his reasons for trusting the ancient MSS., even in these
difficult readings. Let the following phenomena to which he is able, in
most cases, to add the unexceptionable evidence of his own personal
observation and collation, be considered. (_a_) The uncial MSS. are now
known and have been at length collated with such care that we may be
certain of their testimony. (_b_) The palimpsests which have been
recently found and deciphered confirm the readings of the oldest
codices. (_c_) The great discovery of the Sinaitic Codex throws in its
testimony against the bulk of the cursive MSS. (_d_) The Curetonian
Syriac of the Gospels agrees with the oldest MSS. (_e_) Certain cursive
MSS. (such as Codex Colbertinus of the 12th century) agree with the
ancient text rather than with the bulk of the cursives, thus providing a
class of exception which proves the rule. (_f_) There is agreement of
the ancient versions with this older text; and (_g_) not infrequently
there is the express testimony of early patristic writers to the
existence of such a text in their day. Now the principle that Dr.
Tregelles takes great pains to establish is as follows,--While there are
certain readings sustained by the great majority of recent MSS.,
divergent readings of the same passages can be proved to have been in
existence long before the existence of these MSS., by the evidence of
the earliest MSS. of the old Latin version, by the Syriac and other
translations, and by the deliberate discussion of the very peculiarities
in question by some earlier writer like Origen. Now, even if there were
no uncial MSS. which confirmed such divergence, this would constitute a
presumption in favour of such a divergence, if some adequate
explanation could be found of the commonly received text. But, if in
addition to these testimonies, a considerable number of the most ancient
uncial MSS. confirm such readings, then Tregelles urges the adoption of
them as an approximation to the true text. Thus, take his elaborate
argument in favour of the reading of Matt. xix. 17, τί με ἐρωτᾷς περὶ
τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ; εἷς ἐστιν ὁ ἀγαθός. This alteration was first made by
Griesbach and sustained by Lachmann, and adopted subsequently by
Tischendorf and Alford, though condemned by Mr. Scrivener on the ground
of the numerical poverty of the evidence, and because it evinced
theological zeal for the honour of the Incarnate Son. It is interesting
to find, since the judgment of these recensionists was deliberately
given, that the final recension of the Vatican MS. and the testimony of
the Sinaitic MS. have arisen to defend it. The evidence for the
existence of this text in the fourth century, or indeed before the time
of Origen, and before the existence of _Cureton Syriac_, just proves,
according to Tregelles, that it is safe 'to take the _few_ documents
whose evidence is _proved_ to be trustworthy, and to discard the
eighty-nine ninetieths of the evidence shown thus to be less valuable.'
One result of his comparative criticism is, 'that as certain MSS. are
found by a process of inductive proof to contain an ancient text, their
character as witnesses must be considered to be so established, that in
other places their testimony deserves peculiar weight;' and still
further--'that the ancient MSS. were not exceptional documents, because
they contain readings which we learn elsewhere to have been both ancient
and widespread.'
One great advantage in Dr. Tregelles' New Testament is, that he not
merely states but cites the authority of the patristic writers to whom
he appeals, and by a somewhat elaborate notation enables the reader at a
glance to see how his uncial MSS. and principal versions are serving
him, and where all the _lacunæ_ begin and end.
We proceed to give some further account of the contents and
peculiarities of this great work. Dr. Tregelles and Dr. Alford agree in
the great majority of cases where they differ from the received text,
although in some instances they have not with the same facts before
them, come to the same conclusion. _E.g._, both call attention to the
fact that in John vi. 51, the clause ἣν ἐγὼ δώσω is omitted by B, C, D,
L, T, 33, the Latin versions, the Cur. Syriac, Thebaic, and Æthiopic
versions, and by many Fathers, and Alford even mentions a longer list of
such omissions than Tregelles, but Alford allows the _homoioteleuton_
just above, to be a sufficient explanation of the original omission in
the text, and retains the clause: Tregelles strikes it out, making the
verse read thus, 'and the bread which I will give for the life of the
world is my flesh.' Since their discussion, the Sinaitic MS. confirms
Tregelles, by not only omitting the clause, but altering the order of
the words. This alteration of order may confirm Dean Alford in his
continued insertion of the clause, though we think Tregelles is in the
right. Through whole chapters of the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, these
two recensionists may be said to agree _verbatim et literatim_, and to
have come precisely to the same conclusions: still a few specimens of
their divergence may explain more fully than a more elaborate analysis,
the character of their work. In John viii. 41, Alford prefers the less
comprehensible form γεγεννήμεθα, to the form ἐγεννήθημεν, on the ground
of the possible alteration of the tense to the more usual form. We do
not think that Tregelles has acted here on his own principles, for he
shows that versions and citations defend the former rather than the
latter reading. In John viii. 54, they differ again as to the preferable
character of the readings ἡμῶν or ὑμῶν, 'our God' or 'your God,' and
here Tregelles defends the reading ἡμῶν with a great array of evidence;
see also ch. ix. 4, where ἡμᾶς δεῖ ἐργάζεσθαι κ.τ.λ. is given as
preferable to the ἐμὲ δεῖ κ.τ.λ., and largely on the ground that Origen
must have been acquainted with this obscure text, and tried to interpret
it. In each instance a theological zeal might have provoked a copyist to
the ordinary readings. Throughout the ninth chapter of the Acts, where
the received text has passed through so fiery an alembic, Alford and
Tregelles agree, we believe, in every word, with one exception, and that
is the word ἐπείραζεν is preferred by one to the ἐπειρᾶτο of the other
in v. 26. Here strong uncial authority governs Tregelles, and the
disposition to prefer the less usual or less common form has influenced
Dr. Alford. In Romans v. 1, the celebrated reading ἔχωμεν in place of
ἔχομεν is preferred by Tregelles. Alford still has doubts about it, from
the indecision of MSS. in their modes of spelling certain vowel sounds.
The quotations from Origen and Tertullian are decisive of the existence
of such a text in their day, and the array of versions is strongly
confirmatory of the seven uncials and two cursives that are quoted for
it. We need scarcely say, that Tregelles gives his powerful authority in
favour of ὃς, rather than θεὸς, in 1 Tim. iii. 16, and rejects the
reference to the three heavenly witnesses in 1 John v. 7; but in spite
of the authority of Tischendorf's collation of B and of א, and other
authorities in favour of the received text, he gives κυρίου instead of
θεοῦ as the preferable reading of Acts xx. 28.
Our author is strongly moved by the citations of Origen, and
consequently places in his margin as the alternative reading in Heb. ii.
9, χωρὶς θεοῦ by the side of χάριτι θεοῦ. It is clear, from no fewer
than seven citations of Origen, he must have had a MS. before him with
this startling statement, 'that Jesus on the behalf of all without (or
in the absence, or hiding of) God might taste death.' The only MS.
authority for such a reading is the uncial fragment called M of the
tenth century, so that we are surprised to see the high place given to
it in Tregelles' margin. Dr. Tregelles, in the wealth of material at his
disposal, sometimes almost travels into the region of the exegete, as in
the long note upon Rom. ix. 5, where he gives eight or nine quotations
from Greek and Latin Fathers, to show the sense in which they took the
phrase, ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας as not divided
from the ὁ χριστὸς which precedes. It may be added, that he retains ἐν
Ἐφέσῳ in the text of Eph. i. 1, thus preserving the traditional
character of this Epistle as one addressed not to Laodiceans or any
group of Asiatic churches, but to the church at Ephesus.
Dr. Tregelles and Dean Alford differ slightly in 1 Cor. iii. In the
fifth verse, τί οὖν ἐστιν Απολλώς is preferred to the τίς of the
Receptus, by Tregelles, while Alford sustains the latter. Tregelles has
given the adjectives χρυσίον and ἀργύριον in v. 12, in place of the
χρυσὸν, ἄργυρον; and ἔθηκα to the commoner τέθεικα and of v. 10. Here
Alford seems to have the weight of evidence in favour of his view,
though doubtless the _aorist_ gives the finer sense, and makes the truer
affirmation 'I laid,' rather than 'I have been laying the foundation.'
He leaves Ἄγαρ in brackets in his text of Gal. iv. 25. So also he deals
with the εἰκῆ of Matt. v. 22. The βαπτίσαντες of Matt. xxviii. 19, given
on the authority of the doubtful recensions of the Vatican MS. is most
unsatisfactory. Tischendorf, who gave it in some of his earlier
editions, has returned to βαπτίζοντες; and probably Dr. Tregelles will
show us in his appendix that he has done the same, as א agrees with all
the uncial MS. here in the more grammatical reading. We will not further
trouble our readers with details. These will suffice for a specimen.
Every page presents at a glance the presence of the entire group of MS.
versions and fragments collated by the author, and the whole is printed
with extreme beauty of type and arrangement.
In conclusion, we express our profound sense of the obligation under
which the accomplished and persevering editor has laid every student of
the New Testament. There is a fulness and richness of material placed
here by him, at the disposal of those who are utterly precluded from
this kind of investigation. The work is done so conscientiously and
laboriously, that great confidence is inspired in the accuracy and
reliableness of the information thus harvested for general use. The
principles on which Dr. Tregelles has toiled, are so clearly put, and
for the most part so patiently applied, that they command hearty
respect, if not general assent. Such work as this is necessarily
provisional, and cannot be regarded as final. The discovery of the
Sinaitic codex and the recent collated edition of the Vatican MS. since
the commencement of Tregelles' enterprise, is sufficient proof of this;
and until the promised appendices appear we cannot tell to what extent
this circumstance may have modified the text of our author. It is
inexpressibly affecting that the labour of nearly forty years should be
arrested when the patient, true-hearted scholar had just reached, as we
understand, the last chapter of the Revelation, and that he should be
suffering not only from prostration of strength, but be smitten in that
very organ of vision which he had consecrated so lovingly to his
Master's service. We can only deplore and sympathize with such
disappointments as these. We are satisfied that we speak the universal
desire of his collaborateurs, and of his rivals, in this lofty field of
work, when we express the earnest hope that he may yet be spared to
complete his labours, and to see the effect of them in the deeper
reverence paid by his contemporaries to the Word of the living God.
ART. IX.--_The War of 1870._
It is impossible as yet even to guess the consequences of the memorable
war of 1870. It may verify the German exclamation that the hour of the
Latin race has come, and that France has ceased to be a great power, or
it may lead to the moral resurrection of that essentially noble people,
and even to the recovery of its military supremacy. It may develope a
French Republic which from its failure to turn the tide of fortune shall
be followed by a Jacobin successor, and issue in a despotism of the
sword not less fearful than that of Napoleon I. or it may be the
forerunner of a better period when France, purified by adversity, shall
win the esteem and admiration of Europe, by her constancy in affliction,
her lofty patriotism, her renewed energy, her surviving genius. Looking
at it, too, from the other side, it may accelerate the unity of Germany,
cemented by blood poured out in the field, by a brotherhood in arms, and
by common triumphs; or it may tend only to German divisions, and to the
collapse of the policy of 1866, by aggrandising Prussia out of all
proportions, and making her influence intolerable to the minor States.
Who, indeed, shall speculate on the results of this mighty and awful
conflict, when, though it seems for the time to be drawing to a close,
France refuses to acknowledge defeat, and defies the invader behind the
walls of the capital, and when, though apparently struck to the ground,
she still raises the flag of resistance, appeals to the memories of
1793, and endeavours to rally for a final effort those national forces
which, in her case, have so often proved impossible to subdue? Yet, if
we shall not attempt to forecast the remote issues of this tremendous
struggle, or to predict what it shall ultimately bring forth, the time
has come when we can briefly describe its marvellous events and
fortunes, and can truly indicate its immediate lessons of deep
significance to these kingdoms. The momentous war of 1870 is not only
one of the grandest illustrations of the art which founds and destroys
Empires; it not only is an astonishing drama, every scene which the
military student should examine carefully and lay to heart; it not only
fascinates the ordinary observer by its gigantic action and immense
events; it points conclusively to a solemn moral, not to be forgotten by
any country which seeks to maintain its position in the world, and
cherishes a sense of its independence. It shows how weak, in the hour of
trial, may be even a great military power which neglects the real
sources of its strength, and relies mainly on its martial traditions, on
its past honour, on the memory of a name; it proves fearfully how
imperial despotism may rear an edifice of imposing grandeur, which for a
generation shall deceive mankind, and yet fall suddenly at the first
breath of misfortune; it testifies to the old truth that material
prosperity with moral corruption are the fruitful sources of national
decline; and it teaches us what we should never forget, how terrible and
decisive, in modern warfare, are the results of rapid and great success,
and how absolutely necessary it is for England, in the present menacing
condition of Europe, to surround herself with an invulnerable shield,
to look after her national defences, and to take care that by sea and on
land she shall possess the means of repelling aggression.
It would be an unnecessary and unprofitable task to examine at length
the causes of the war. Impartial history, we believe, will pronounce
that though Napoleon gave the challenge, it had been to some degree
provoked by the policy of Bismark, by the attitude recently taken by
Prussia, by the series of events which since 1866 have changed the
centre of power in Germany. It was impossible but that the Emperor
should feel bitterly how he had been outwitted by the unscrupulous
statesman who had purchased his complicity in the spoliation of Denmark
by promises of annexation on the Rhine, and had afterwards coolly
violated his pledges; nor yet that he should not be really alarmed at
the immense development of the military power of Prussia during the
preceding five years. It would have been disregarding the traditions
which, rightly or wrongly, for two centuries have guided the foreign
policy of France, to have witnessed the absorption of the German States
into one dominant and threatening power, without an effort to break the
union; and if an attempt to obtain this, was contrary to modern ideas
and aspirations, it was only carrying out what had always been the views
of Henry IV. and Richelieu. Besides, ever since the battle of Sadowa,
France and Prussia had been watching each other, and tending inevitably
to collision; both Powers had been increasing their armaments, and
events have proved which was the more ready; and we know from the
Imperial correspondence that Napoleon had been repeatedly warned that
Prussia was meditating an invasion of France, and would avail herself of
the first opportunity. It is not, therefore, too much to say that it was
not merely French folly and arrogance which precipitated this tremendous
conflict; the conduct of Prussia and her aggressive acts contributed to
it in no slight degree; and if France, as it has turned out, was unwise
in not accepting accomplished facts, and in chafing at the military
strength of her rival, we can perfectly comprehend this sentiment,
without charging her, as a nation, with any peculiar turn for
aggrandisement, or even any extraordinary ambition. It must be admitted
that the Emperor was utterly in the wrong in the pretext on which he
declared war, and that his whole policy in this respect showed ignorance
of the real state of opinion. After the Hohenzollern candidature of
Spain had been withdrawn at the instance of England, it was an act of
extreme unwisdom to have proceeded to further demands; and the result
was that, to outward seeming, France, at the beginning of hostilities,
was alone to blame for the frightful contest, and that Prussia appeared
the injured defender of the national independence of Germany. In truth,
however, in this as in other matters, Bismark probably outgeneralled
Napoleon; he seems to have been eager for war, and to have been too glad
to find an opportunity to attack France with the support of public
opinion; and now at least when he puts forward claims to wrest from her
some of her present provinces, he can scarcely be considered by
impartial men as the mere opponent of French aggression.
Hostilities were proclaimed on the 15th of July, after efforts at
negotiation on the part of England. There can be little doubt that the
war was welcomed by the classes who form public opinion in Germany,
quite as much as in France. The passionate and foolish cry, 'to Berlin,'
was answered by shouts of defiance, 'to Paris;' and if French chauvins
and journalists talked of the annexation of the left bank of the Rhine,
and of the breaking up of the German Confederation, claims for 'the lost
patrimony of Elsass and Lothringen' were put forward prominently by the
press of Germany. In fact, amiable German professors who back the
arrogant demands of Bismark, and pleasantly insist on 'the line of the
Vosges,' as a necessary bulwark for 'peace-loving Germany,' against the
'intolerable ambition of Frenchmen,' must have a strange notion of the
facts of the case; the war fever was at least as strong in the capital
of Prussia, as in that of France; and it is about as correct to
represent the two nations as differing in this, as it is to repeat the
veracious legend--of which of course the League of Pilnitz and the
barbarous invasion of 1792 are confirmations that cannot be
gainsaid--that France has always been the assailant of her meek and
long-suffering Teutonic rival. Within a few days after the declaration
of war, the army of the Rhine was set in motion, and the heads of the
columns of eight French corps were approaching the verge of the German
frontier; the main bodies, however, being still distant. The first
corps, under the renowned MacMahon, had advanced from Algeria and the
south, and occupied Upper and Lower Alsace, its headquarters being at
Strasburg. The second and fifth corps of Frossard and De Failly were
sent forward, and at St. Avold and Bitsche held the approaches to the
Rhenish Palatinate, from MacMahon's left to near the line of the Saar.
To the left of these again, was the fourth corps, marched from the north
under L'Admirault, and stationed at and around Thionville; while, in
the rear, Bazaine with the third corps, was moving to the great fortress
of Metz; the sixth, under the orders of Canrobert, was on its way from
Chalons to Lorraine; and far behind, the Imperial Guard--the flower of
the French army--was pushing forward from the French capital. In the
meantime, the seventh corps of Douay formed the extreme right of the
great French line; far to the north it guarded Belfort, the 'gate of
France,' between the Vosges and the Jura; and it connected itself with
MacMahon's rear-guard along the Rhine and Lower Alsace. The whole French
army, in its first line, extended in a huge semicircle from Northern
Lorraine to the Southern Vosges; but its second line, massed between
Metz and Chalons, was at a considerable distance from the first; and
though it was well connected by railways, and placed as it was, it
threatened equally the Rhenish provinces and Southern Germany, it was
not yet even nearly concentrated.
Such was the disposition of the army of the Rhine about the 21st or 22nd
of July. It will be seen at once that it was well adapted for an
offensive movement against Germany, if made rapidly and in full force,
for Baden and the Palatinate were threatened, and the exact point of
attack was concealed. Placed as they were, the forces of France could
either pour into the Rhineland, drawing after them their reserves on all
sides, or they could cross the Rhine, and, advancing from Strasburg,
interpose between Northern and Southern Germany and endeavour to break
up their uniting armies. On the other hand, the position of the French
was badly chosen as a line of defence; for their foremost corps were
widely disseminated, and in case of a sudden attack, were thrown too far
beyond their supports; and if they were assailed by a resolute foe,
converging against them in full strength, they would be exposed to
serious disaster. For these reasons we may certainly infer that the
strategic plan of the French Emperor was to march upon the Germans with
much rapidity, and whether the recently published pamphlet does or does
not disclose his purpose, it is evident that he intended to advance
either by the Rhineland on Landau and Mayence, or by Strasburg into the
territory of Baden. Besides, he must have known perfectly well that a
brilliant initiative was his best chance; for not only was it in
accordance with the traditions and genius of the French soldier; not
only was it calculated to sow dissensions and alarm among his foes and
perhaps prevent them from combining; it was the sole means to give full
effect to the one great advantage which France would possess over
Prussia at the beginning of a campaign, the imposing strength of a
standing army, supposed to be ready at all points and formidable in its
numerical proportions, compared with levies, immense indeed when brought
together and set in motion, but believed to be inferior in military
power, and requiring time to be fully arrayed. It may therefore be said
with confidence, that a sudden and vigorous spring on Germany was the
real scheme of Napoleon III.; and, notwithstanding all that has
occurred, it is impossible to say what the result would have been had
this design been carried out boldly, with the promptness and skill of a
great commander who would have led his troops to immediate victory.
Unhappily, however, for the interests of France, vacillation at the
decisive moment took the place of resolution and genius; and her armed
arrays, however imposing to outward seeming, were not in a state to
undertake great and rapid operations. The Emperor lingered a fortnight
at Paris before he went to his headquarters at Metz; even when he had
arrived he passed nearly a week, uncertain, it would appear, how to
strike; and thus the favourable opportunity was lost which might have
changed the whole course of the war. In addition to this, it is now well
known that the army was not ready to march; its commissariat was not
complete; it was deficient in ammunition and supplies; and its real
strength was considerably less than Napoleon III. had been led to
expect. Between the irresolution of its chief, and its own ill-prepared
condition, it had already forfeited its most hopeful chances before even
a blow had been struck.
During these delays of the army of the Rhine Germany had been making
astonishing efforts. If Bismark's reports are to be believed, the German
nation was not prepared for immediate war on a gigantic scale. But
considering that since the battle of Sadowa Prussia had been steadily
increasing her armaments, and that it is tolerably clear from her
government press that she was eager to measure her strength with France,
we shall scarcely credit the Northern Confederation with any want of
military readiness; still immense as their exertions were, it is not
impossible that the Southern States were taken to some extent by
surprise. However this may have been, the summons to arms against the
ancient and dreaded foe met with but one answer from the Teutonic race;
and whatever may be thought of the policy of its rulers, its patriotism
and heroic attitude are entitled to the highest admiration. From the
sandy wastes that border the Niemen to the valleys watered by the
Moselle, and from the shores of the Northern Sea to the Danube and the
Bohemian hills, the martial cry 'to the war' was heard; the integrity of
the Fatherland was the one thought of the whole people; and whatever may
have been the divisions caused by the events of 1866, and whatever the
hopes of dispossessed sovereigns, of blind diplomatists, or of
discontented nobles, it was soon evident that Napoleon III. would have
to contend against an united Germany. This single circumstance shows how
impolitic had been the course of the French Emperor, and how badly he
had been advised; and, in fact, unless, as is not improbable, the
conduct of Prussia shall tend to disunion, the war will have done more
to make Germany a concordant people than any event since 1813. Within a
few days the military system of the nation was in full operation; the
army was 'mobilized' and increased to its war strength within the local
limits assigned to its different divisions, and in an exceedingly short
time a gigantic array composed of regular troops in the first line, with
reserves of landwehr in the second, was in a state to commence
operations under the guidance of leaders of proved ability. Those who
witnessed that mighty torrent of war pouring through Germany towards the
Rhenish frontier have described its tremendous power and impulse; and
none who have observed how it was directed can doubt that it had been
long held in hand to commence as well as to repel aggression. Towards
the last days of July and the first of August, while the French were
still disseminated in Lorraine, three vast German armies had taken
possession of the territory of the Rhenish Palatinate, and, already in
communication with each other, were being marshalled to pour into France
an overwhelming tide of invasion. The first army, numbering about 80,000
men, was under the command of the aged Steinmetz, and was approaching
the Saar from Treves, its outposts reaching to near Saar-Louis. The
second army, nearly 200,000 strong, had crossed the Rhine at and above
Mayence, and, led by King William and Prince Frederick Charles, held the
centre of the Rhenish Palatinate, its outposts almost advanced to the
Saar, and its rearward divisions stretching far backwards. To the left
was the third army, commanded by the Crown Prince of Prussia, about
150,000 strong; it touched the right of the second army, and extended
thence to the course of the Rhine, and its vanguard, along the stream of
the Lauter, approached the northern frontier of Alsace, the main body
being not distant, and concealed behind the adjoining fortresses. From
Treves on the west to Landau on the east, and pressing forward to the
very edge of France, the huge German masses were already in a state to
fall on their enemy with tremendous force.
The manner in which these immense armies were formed, organised, and
moved in concert within a short distance of the French frontier, was one
of the most notable of strategic exploits. In the space of nineteen or
twenty days 430,000 men in the highest state of efficiency for war, with
guns, horses, and other material, had been arrayed and prepared for the
field, and now stood on the verge of the Rhineland ready to overrun
Alsace and Lorraine. We know of no finer military movement, except
perhaps the splendid concentration of Napoleon's forces on the Belgian
frontier on the 14th of June, 1815; and it attests clearly the
calculating forethought and ability of the Prussian Government, the high
training and skill of its generals, and the discipline and power of the
German troops. The French army, scattered and divided on the semicircle
from Thionville to Belfort, and with its first line widely separated
from the second, was already in no condition to offer a successful
resistance to its mighty foe; it was not only much weaker in strength,
being outnumbered fully two to one at the decisive points where it was
threatened, it was also so disunited in its parts, that it could hardly
collect 60,000 men in any position to withstand an attack. In fact, a
glance at the map will show that along the whole line of the Saar and
the Lauter it was exposed to be defeated in detail by a force infinitely
superior in power; and this peril was aggravated by the circumstance,
placed beyond dispute by the clearest evidence, that it believed itself
completely secure, and that its leaders were planning a forward movement
while their enemy was close at hand to destroy them.
It is now well known that a German advance was not suspected in the
French camp even during the first three days of August: the woods along
the edge of the frontier were not searched by the French outposts, and
the German columns were allowed to collect in force behind this
deceptive screen while the Emperor and his Marshals were dreaming of a
march without an obstacle into the Rhenish provinces. The consequences
of this ruinous neglect and self-deception became soon evident. On the
4th of August the Crown Prince of Prussia detached a part of his vast
army to attack the extreme right of the whole French line, this movement
being only the first step of a general advance across the French
frontier. The Prince, with about 40,000 men, fell upon a single
division of about 10,000 which lay encamped near the town of
Weissenburg, surprised it, it is said, when at breakfast, and drove it
back in a state of confusion. The French, rallying on the Geisberg, made
a gallant resistance for a short time; but the hill having been stormed
by the enemy, they were ultimately driven in utter rout from beyond
Weissenburg on the road to Strasburg. The first success, so important in
war, had thus been decisively won; the trophies of the day were 500
prisoners, a gun, and a great deal of material; and the advanced guard
of the German army stood in triumph upon the soil of France, the right
wing of the French forces having been already threatened and struck, and
the secret of their want of preparation having been disclosed to their
able antagonists.
The affair at Weissenburg was only the prelude of operations of a more
serious kind. The 5th of August was spent by the Crown Prince in
bringing the mass of his troops forward, and in arraying them for a
formidable attack on the French forces in his immediate front. There can
be no doubt that in making these dispositions he exposed his flank to
the corps of De Failly, which, stationed at Bitsche, beyond the Vosges,
ought to have combined with that of McMahon, and fallen on the right of
the Prussian commander, while, as yet, his columns were not closed up,
and his whole line was somewhat out of order. This movement, however,
was not executed; the want of intelligence and the vacillation which
characterised the operations of the French, were again too painfully
conspicuous; and though De Failly sent one division through the hill
passes to the aid of his colleague, he remained at Bitsche with the bulk
of his troops, and left MacMahon completely isolated. Meanwhile that
brave, but unfortunate chief, made preparations to resist the attack of
the Germans, now evidently impending. It is a misconception to suppose,
as some have done, that he advanced recklessly against his foe; what he
did was to take and occupy a defensive position on the flank of the
Germans, where he could hope to give them battle, under circumstances of
the least disadvantage, and De Failly, if he wished, could come to his
aid; and we assert, with confidence, that this strategy was the best
open to the Duke of Magenta. The marshal by the evening of the 5th had
drawn up his forces along the crest of a range which extends from
Reichsofen on the left by Woerth to Elsasshausen, and Marbronn on the
right, and which, with the stream of the Sauer in front, and with broken
ground along the rising slopes, formed a strong position against his
enemy. MacMahon's object evidently was to compel the Germans to turn
against him, and assail him as they changed their front; he would thus
divert them from the road to Strasburg, and engage them as favourably
for himself as possible; and at the same time, he as it were summoned
the corps of De Failly to join his rear, while he kept open several
lines of retreat. These were the arrangements of an able commander; and
considering that MacMahon had not more than 50,000 men in his band, his
dispositions certainly give proof of the tactical skill for which he is
renowned. On the morning of the 6th, the Crown Prince advanced to the
attack, with 130,000 men, and not less than 440 guns. As MacMahon had
calculated, the change of front, which the Germans were compelled to
make, threw their line for some time into confusion; and the French
repelled for several hours a somewhat feeble and disunited effort
against their left, at and near Reichsofen. Meantime the French centre
at Woerth had been engaged; there too, for a considerable time,
MacMahon's divisions resisted stoutly, and even for a moment assumed the
offensive. But about two o'clock the huge German line had come up on all
sides in strength; and the Crown Prince prepared to turn the French
wings at both sides, combining with this an attack in front--a movement
justified by his superiority in force, but certainly not without hazard.
MacMahon, who, at this conjuncture, De Failly not having come up, ought,
in our judgment, to have retreated, struck desperately at the German
centre at Woerth, thinned by the extension of its flanks; but the French
onset was bravely resisted, and indeed it could not have been
successful. Ere long the formidable outflanking movement developed
itself, and became decisive; and from Reichsofen to beyond Marbronn the
dense German columns extended threateningly, and overlapped the whole
French position. A sudden panic fell on MacMahon's army; its right and
centre gave way; and it was soon a mass of disheartened fugitives,
broken on all sides into disunited fragments. Six thousand prisoners and
thirty guns were the spoils of the victorious Germans; and for some time
the defeated force was annihilated, in a military point of view.
It cannot be said that the Germans' tactics were remarkable for ability
or boldness during the first part of this desperate battle. They
attacked weakly, and in divided masses; they gave MacMahon more than one
chance; and with their immense superiority of numbers their victory
ought to have been more decisive. On the other hand the French Marshal
showed talent in his original dispositions; he resisted his enemy during
several hours, and at one time placed him in much danger; and had he
when he had been assured that De Failly's corps was not coming up,
effected a rapid and confident retreat, he would have been entitled to
commendation. MacMahon, however, held his ground too long; and when the
Crown Prince, who, as soon as he had ascertained the inferiority of the
French in strength, displayed consummate energy and skill, had advanced
on Reichsofen and Marbronn, it was almost inevitable that the French
line should give way and be totally defeated. As regards the conduct of
the opposing armies, the Germans, cautious and slow at first, became at
last self-reliant and bold; the French fought long with 'consummate
bravery,'--we quote the German official report--but they broke up
hastily under the stress of disaster--a fault almost a national
characteristic. The strategic consequences of the battle were in the
highest degree important. The whole right wing of the French army,
overpowered by immensely superior forces, was driven in and almost
destroyed; it had no chance but to retreat behind the Vosges, too
fortunate if it could make its escape; Alsace was thrown open to the
enemy, and an avenue into the heart of France laid bare. This result was
in some measure due to the criminal negligence of De Failly, who, if he
had chosen, might have joined MacMahon, and whose corps might have
changed the fate of the day; but it was also caused by the bad
arrangement of the whole French line upon the position, which at no
point was in sufficient strength to offer a firm and certain resistance.
This, indeed, was made evident, at the same time, at another part of the
theatre of operations. While the Crown Prince was attacking MacMahon, a
German division of the First Army crossed the Saar and advanced to
Saarbrück, where a few days before the corps of Frossard had made a
demonstration on the frontier, in order, it has been supposed, to
gratify the curiosity of the Prince Imperial. The French were completely
surprised; but, pressing hastily forward, they advanced to repulse the
audacious foe, who with great boldness resisted steadily for some time.
Meanwhile another German division had come to the aid of their comrades;
and seizing promptly the cover of woods which overlapped the right of
the French, they wasted it away with a destructive fire; and further
supports having come up, the Germans stormed with heroic valour a line
of heights called the Spicheren hills, which formed the front of the
French position. The whole French line had begun to give way; and an
additional mass of foes appearing on their extreme left, and having
outflanked it, they retreated in precipitate haste, leaving a
considerable number of guns and prisoners.
The two engagements of the 6th of August, named respectively those of
Woerth and Forbach, were fraught with results of great moment. It was
not only that the renowned French army which had been supposed to be the
first in the world had suffered a double crushing defeat, in one
instance of a dishonourable kind; not only that it had lost its prestige
and given proof of want of steadiness, of indiscipline, and of
disorganization; the invasion of Germany was now impossible; the South
had been united to the North by the pledge of common military success;
and there was nothing to avert the victorious progress of the German
masses on the French frontier. The situation, in fact, had been suddenly
changed; and Europe, which up to that moment had been expecting a French
advance, was now to witness the calamitous recoil of the Imperial forces
at all points, attended with ever increasing disasters. The right wing
of the French army, well-nigh cut off and destroyed at Woerth, was
driven in rout out of Alsace and compelled to abandon Strasburg to its
fate; and it would be too fortunate if it could rally at Châlons,
drawing to it the corps of De Failly and Douay. The right centre, broken
through at Forbach, was forced backward upon Metz; and the centre and
left, involved in its defeat, were obliged to fall back in the same
direction. Meanwhile the Germans ably directed, and collected in
overwhelming strength, poured into France in the successive waves of an
invasion that nothing could resist. The Crown Prince's army, in
communication with the Second by a cordon of cavalry sent through the
Vosges, detached a part of its force to besiege Strasburg, and with its
remaining divisions poured forward through Lower Alsace in pursuit of
MacMahon. The Second Army advancing from the Rhineland, swept across the
Saar in immense forces, and passed into the north of Lorraine, driving
before it the feeble French corps now seeking a refuge under the guns of
Metz. Meanwhile, the Third Army made a parallel movement; and, uniting
with the right of the Second, marched rapidly in overwhelming front on
Metz, already threatening with its right wing to overlap and surround
the great fortress. By the 18th August, 300,000 Germans with large
reserves in their immediate rear had made good their way into France,
and from Strasburg to Thionville and thence into the heart of Lorraine,
were taking military possession of the country and menacing with ruin
the enemy in their path.
During this mighty advance of the Germans, the strategic operations of
the French, in part owing to the bad disposition of their forces for
combined movements, and in part to the weakness of their commanders, had
been characterised by much indecision. MacMahon, indeed, had effected
his retreat from the field of Woerth with the wreck of his troops, and
escaped safely through the Vosges passes; and though his corps was
almost ruined, he had shown some ability in getting away, for he ought
to have been destroyed by the Germans. In fact, the pursuit of the Crown
Prince had not been marked by energy or speed, whatever indiscriminate
flatterers may urge; his own reports more than once refer to the
comparative slackness of his cavalry or at least to their extreme
caution. De Failly, too, though the disaster at Woerth must be laid to a
great extent to his charge, had been prompt in breaking up from Bitsche,
and he had succeeded in approaching MacMahon without being caught by the
enemy; his escape, however, being in a great measure due to the
resistance made by the fortress of Bitsche, which retarded the march of
one of the Crown Prince's columns. The broken right of the French army,
though its losses had been terrible, and its morale was destroyed, was,
in a word, making good its way to Châlons; and, as the corps of Douay
was moving towards it, and as the whole mass was about to concentrate,
we cannot find fault with these arrangements. But in the remaining part
of the theatre of war the French dispositions revealed nothing but
feebleness, vacillation, and want of forethought. The instant Woerth and
Forbach were fought, and the right and right centre of the French were
forced back on either side of the Vosges, it cannot be doubted that the
whole French army ought to have retreated in a parallel line; and it
ought certainly to have retired on Châlons, having thrown a strong
garrison into Metz, for it was at Châlons only that it could hope to
reunite, and when there it would be in a position to save Paris and
defend the interior on the well-known lines of the Marne and Seine. To
effect this would not have been easy, for the disseminated state of the
corps on the frontier from Thionville to Forbach and thence backward to
Metz exposed them whatever moves they attempted; but this was what ought
to have been done, and the attempt would have probably succeeded.
Instead of this the unfortunate emperor drew in his left and centre on
the Nied--and when he had collected these behind the river, he halted
five or six days at Metz, uncertain evidently what to do next, and
hesitating, while there was time to fall back on Châlons. The reason of
this strange and fatal fault, through which the main body of the French
army was exposed to be cut off and destroyed, remains as yet to be
explained; it was probably owing to vacillation and to the dread of
terrifying Paris by the news of a general retrograde movement. While the
bulk of the Army of the Rhine was being detained in camp around Metz,
completely separated from its supports in Champagne, the German armies
advanced to the Moselle; and while a part of the First and Second Armies
were massed close to the great fortress a considerable detachment was
thrown forward, to menace and fall on the French line of retreat should
an attempt be made to retire on Châlons.
The results of these strategic arrangements, so different in ability and
forethought, were developed ere long with great distinctness. On the
14th of August one detachment of the French army with the Emperor at its
head, left Metz and crossed to the left bank of the Moselle; and this
ultimately reached Châlons, where it effected its junction with
MacMahon. The remaining corps endeavoured to begin their retrograde
movement the same day, but being on the eastern side of the fortress,
and their great numbers impeding their march, they were attacked by two
corps of the Germans, whose vigorous onset held them in check. The
combat lasted the whole day; and each side claimed to have won the
victory; but the real issue was in favour of the Germans, who detained
their antagonists round Metz, while their own troops were being pushed
forward to occupy the French line of retreat. Next day, the 15th, the
whole French army began to defile to the left bank of the Moselle; but
it marched only ten or twelve miles on the two roads to Verdun and
Etain, the avenues by which it would reach Châlons; and it bivouacked at
Mars La Tour and Doncourt, still, as it proved, not far from its enemy.
The causes of this disastrous delay, fraught with consequences of a
ruinous kind, remain yet to be explained; much was doubtless due to the
extreme difficulty of moving columns of great length and size,
encumbered with baggage and other impediments; and it is not improbable
that a desire to avoid the appearance of a hasty retreat may have had
influence on the French commanders. It is certain, however, that a
greater distance should have been accomplished by the retiring force; it
was of vital importance to get clear at once of the foes gathering on
the flank and rear; and Marshal Bazaine, who by this time certainly had
been invested with the supreme command, unquestionably committed a
grave error in not having pressed forward the movement. The next day it
was too late; and the Germans found themselves in a position to achieve
success, which it is quite clear from their own despatches, they never
expected. On the morning of the 16th, the retreating French were
attacked on the Verdun road by the cavalry and infantry of a German
corps, which continued for some hours to hold them in check; and aid
having come to the assailants, a sanguinary battle raged at Mars La
Tour, one side endeavouring to cut its way through, the other struggling
to bar the passage. Throughout the day fresh supports thrown forward
judiciously on the flanks of the French, gave terrible effect to the
German attacks; and their enemy, bound to a single road, and in their
extended columns fatally exposed, was compelled to fight at a great
disadvantage. The French, however, fought desperately, aware of the
importance of the issue; and it is possible that they would have
resisted successfully, had it not been for a brilliant charge of a large
mass of cavalry towards the evening, which forced them back a
considerable distance. Meanwhile, a simultaneous attack had been made on
the Etain road, and though the French struggled with great courage, this
too ultimately proved successful. The whole French army about nightfall
withdrew sullenly towards Metz, having failed to make its retreat good,
and the Germans, closing on its communications, already stood on its way
to Châlons.
Driven thus to bay under the guns of Metz, Bazaine resolved to
concentrate his forces in order to fight a decisive battle. He had
probably 130,000 men in hand, with from 400 to 500 guns, the flower and
strength of the French army; and his plan was to choose a defensive
position where he could resist the onslaught of the Germans, and, having
repulsed it, could break through their lines, and get off with the mass
of his troops. With this object he drew up his men along the summit of a
range of uplands, extending from Gravelotte before Metz, to beyond the
hamlet of Privat La Montagne, and which, broken by streams and difficult
ground, and with woods, villages, and thickets in front, offered a
strong barrier to an attacking enemy. The French left rested on
Gravelotte, the centre on Vionville and Amanvilliers, and the right
stretched away to Doncourt and Jaumont, the whole line thus holding the
roads which debouche to Verdun, Etain, and Sedan, protected by natural
and artificial obstacles. This was a position of the strongest kind,
considered as a scheme of defence, for it exposed the assailants at
most points, and especially at that of Gravelotte, to a terrible fire at
great disadvantage; but, as the result showed, it was deficient in this,
that it gave no opportunity for a counter attack, and it enabled the
Germans to draw round from all sides on the enemy before them. The 17th
was spent by each army in preparing for a decisive engagement. The
German commanders by this time had 240,000 men, with from 700 to 800
guns, and they resolved to attack according to a plan, which, if
perilous in some degree, was justified by their superior numbers, and
promised great and remarkable success. While the right of the Germans
was to restrain the French left, their centre and left were to march
across the whole front of Bazaine's position, and having overwhelmed his
right wing, the weakest point in his defensive lines, they were to
converge inwards upon the French and force them back in retreat on Metz.
On the morning of the 18th, three German corps began to engage the
French at Gravelotte, while at the same time, five and a half corps
moved towards Vionville and Privat La Montagne, in order to execute the
great turning movement which was to lead to the expected victory. The
French, immoveable in their positions, were compelled to await the
circling attack which threatened to stifle and hem them in; unlike
Napoleon I. at Austerlitz, Bazaine had not secured the means of striking
his enemy as he swept round on him. Towards the afternoon, the Prussian
guards had outflanked the right of the Marshal; soon afterwards, his
centre was fiercely assailed, and by degrees the great German line
advanced snakelike to encompass its foe. It was now time for the German
right to strike fiercely at Gravelotte; and here a battle of the most
desperate kind raged until nightfall for several hours, the French
certainly having the advantage, and destroying the Germans with
frightful carnage. But gradually the German plan was worked out; the
German masses converging on all sides forced the French backward from
point to point; and at last the whole line of defence gave way, and
retreating, slowly fell back on Metz, having lost the real object of the
battle.
It is not improbable that, in this conflict, the losses of the Germans
exceeded those of the French. At Gravelotte the corps commanded by
Steinmetz was repeatedly driven back with terrific slaughter, and at
other points the ranks of the assailants were cruelly thinned by a
destructive fire. But if in a tactical point of view the battle was
hardly a German victory, and if the resistance of Bazaine with an
inferior force was honourable to him, the strategic results were great
and decisive. The Germans had now obtained possession of the entire line
of the Marshal's retreat; they barred the way to Châlons completely, and
he had been forced back with his army on Metz, where, his communications
with France being cut off, he would be ultimately compelled to
surrender. Unless he could again begin the contest and pierce through
the encircling foes, no prospect awaited him but to resist until famine
dashed the sword from his grasp, and made the army of the Rhine
captive--so ruinous had been the disastrous generalship which had
detained it in isolation at Metz, and had allowed its enemies to gather
round it instead of effecting a speedy retreat!
Leaving Bazaine in this perilous strait, we must now turn to another
part of the theatre, where folly, rashness, and above all the exigencies
of the political situation, were to complete the work of irresolute
weakness in contributing to the ruin of France. About the 16th or 17th
of August MacMahon had made good his way to Châlons with the wreck of
his corps defeated at Woerth, and he was rejoined in a day or two by De
Failly, who had contrived to elude the pursuing Germans--a retreat which
proves that the Crown Prince had moved slowly and with much caution, and
had not made the most of his brilliant victory. About the 19th of August
the corps of Douay, marched back from Belfort, arrived at Châlons; this
body, at the news of the battle of Woerth, having properly retired to
the great strategic point which nature and history have alike marked out
as the position where the defence of France should be undertaken in
front of Paris. Next day, the 20th, about 70,000 men, with more than 100
guns, came up hastily from the French capital, the Government under
Count Palikao having certainly made energetic efforts to reorganize and
recruit the army; and thus MacMahon, by the 21st, had probably about
150,000 men, with from 400 to 500 guns, under his orders at the great
camp at Châlons. When we recollect what Napoleon I. accomplished on this
very ground--the memorable lines of the Marne and Seine--with a force
greatly inferior in numbers, against more than 300,000 Germans, it
cannot be doubted that a great commander would have made such an use of
this army that he would long have kept the invaders back, and possibly
changed the whole situation. But ability and caution were especially
requisite, for the troops now under MacMahon's orders were in fact raw
or demoralized soldiers; and plain common sense ought to have suggested
that they were not fit for operations that demanded speed, or that could
bring them in contact with a superior enemy.
At this critical moment a plan was formed, the responsibility for which
is unknown, but which led to the greatest of military disasters.
Considering the state of MacMahon's forces, there can be no doubt that
his proper course was to delay his enemies as they advanced on Châlons,
to endeavour to defend the Marne and the Seine, and, retreating slowly,
to fall back until he had reached a position at which he would be in the
flank of the Germans as they approached Paris. A great general,
operating in this way, would have retarded the foe for weeks, would
certainly have inflicted much injury on him, and while he inured his own
troops to war, would assuredly have kept his army intact in order to
make a stand for the capital, the fortifications of which, with a force
before them, would perhaps have changed the issue of the campaign. It is
true that the strategy would have been an apparent abandonment of
Bazaine; but this really was inevitable. Bazaine, as the event proved,
was not in need of immediate relief; shut up, as he was, inactive at
Metz, he still detained an immense mass of Germans around the great
fortress; and in any case, as affairs now stood, the first consideration
ought to have been the security of the last army of France, and a
settled purpose to defend the capital. Had Wellington been in MacMahon's
place, we are convinced that these would have been his tactics; and we
feel certain that he would have succeeded, if not in defeating the
Germans in the field, at least in greatly reducing their strength, in
preserving Paris from real danger, and in saving his forces for an
effort to be undertaken when his raw troops were rendered more equal to
their antagonists. Instead of a rational operation like this, a resolve
was made at the French head-quarters which can only be described as
insanely rash. It was determined to relieve Bazaine with MacMahon's weak
and undisciplined army; and the manner in which this was to be done was
marked by thoughtless and strange presumption. The French troops were to
leave Châlons, and moving northwards to Rheims and Rethel, were to
strike from that place across the Argonnes, to pass the Meuse and attain
Montmédy, and descending thence upon Thionville, were to fall on the
rear of the Germans at Metz, to extricate Bazaine, and in conjunction
with him, to annihilate the astounded enemy by an attack worthy of the
first Napoleon. By this operation MacMahon's army was to slip round the
flank of the Crown Prince, known to be advancing from Nancy on Châlons;
it would probably attain the northern frontier before its destination
could be ascertained; and if it ever reached the neighbourhood of Metz
and came into communication with Bazaine, what would be the fate of the
insolent invaders, and what the triumphant issue of a campaign begun
under ill-omened auspices?
Whether the pamphlet recently published at Brussels be the work of
Napoleon III. or not, it is now clear that Marshal MacMahon was not the
real author of this strategy. A glance at the map will clearly show that
it exposed the French army to ruinous disaster, and it has been proved
that it was inspired by the Government of the Regency at Paris,
ill-informed as to the real situation, and fearful lest a retrograde
movement should cause the sudden fall of the Empire. And what was the
projected operation, which it was assumed was proposed by an eminent
French Marshal, who, we may suppose, knew the art of war, and certainly
had very great experience? It was simply to make an immense flank march
with a weak and thoroughly untrained army, within full reach of an enemy
twice as strong, who would be able to arrest the movement, and to fall
on his adversary in overwhelming force; and it was to do this along a
line on which a defeat would probably entail destruction, or a surrender
upon the Belgian frontier. Let it be granted that MacMahon might expect
to cross the Meuse before he would be intercepted, still it was all but
certain that the German armies, which assuredly would turn northward at
once, would come up with him between the Meuse and Thionville; and if he
were caught, what chance had he of contending against the enormous
forces which, in that event, would be directed against him? A crushing
defeat was to be expected, and if he were defeated would not his army,
hemmed in along the narrow belt of land extending from the northern
Argmues to Lorraine, be either utterly broken to fragments or forced
helplessly to lay down its arms? And it was for a reckless scheme such
as this--one in which success was hardly conceivable, and of which ruin
would be the natural result--that the rational and legitimate course of
retreating leisurely and defending Paris from point to point, was to be
abandoned! The correspondence recently published shows that this plan
did not originate with MacMahon; and that it was adopted must be
ascribed to the necessity felt at the Tuileries of avoiding a retrograde
movement in the interest of the tottering Empire. MacMahon, however, did
consent to it; and for this he must be held responsible. Beyond all
doubt he ought to have rejected a project fraught with calamity to his
country, at the risk even of resigning his command; had he done so, the
position of France might have been different from what it is now, and
his own reputation would not have suffered from the consequences of a
dire catastrophe. Making every allowance for his difficult situation, we
cannot acquit him of want of resolution, though sheer ignorance and
incapacity did not lead him to make the greatest of blunders ever made
perhaps by a commander-in-chief.
Our space precludes us from describing at length the series of great
events that ensued. On the 22nd of August MacMahon's army, already
giving melancholy proofs of weakness, indiscipline, and insubordination,
had reached Rheims from the camp of Châlons; and on the 23rd it was on
its way to Rethel. The march of the columns was extremely sluggish, in
consequence of the bad organisation of the troops, and eye-witnesses
have recorded that the unfortunate marshal was even now evidently
dispirited and anxious. Rethel was not passed until the 25th; and as the
movement to the Meuse and the Argmues was to be accomplished as soon as
possible, MacMahon divided his army into three parts; one to go
northward, by railway to Mézières, and the other two to advance easterly
by Vouziers and Nouart, and Le Chène and Stonne. The Emperor and his
ill-fated child attended mournfully the doomed army, but if we are to
credit newspaper reports, Napoleon III. still felt confident that he was
marching to assured victory. Though the dispositions of the French
marshal were evidently made with a view to speed, the movement of his
columns was exceedingly slow, no doubt owing to their inefficient state,
and also probably to commissariat defects; and even by the morning of
the 29th they had only attained Nouart and Stonne, that is, they were
still a day's march from the Meuse, which they ought to have found on
the 28th. These delays aggravating the inherent perils of a strategic
plan essentially vicious, were sure to lead to disastrous consequences;
and while MacMahon had been going northwards the German commanders had
been preparing the means of utterly overwhelming him. On the 19th and
20th of August, after Bazaine had been shut up in Metz, a fourth German
army had been despatched, under the command of the Crown Prince of
Saxony, to co-operate with that of the Crown Prince of Prussia, and it
had been moved by Verdun, on St. Menehould, to be in readiness for any
event. Meanwhile the third German army, after passing Nancy, had
advanced on the great road to Paris to Ligny and Bar le Duc, its light
cavalry, the well-known Uhlans, having scoured the whole country to
beyond Châlons. By the 24th the Crown Prince of Prussia, who had been
rejoined by the king from Metz, had his head-quarters at Bar le Duc, and
when there the news arrived that MacMahon had broken up from the camp,
and was aiming northward toward Mézières and Rethel. The plan of the
French was immediately perceived by the eminent strategist who in this
campaign had been the genius of the German armies, and he proceeded to
defeat it, and ensure victory. Orders were at once issued to the Crown
Prince of Saxony to move northerly towards the Meuse, and intercept the
heads of MacMahon's columns; while the third German army, under the
Prussian Prince, was to advance rapidly in the same direction, and fall
on the French flank and rear. By the 25th the huge German array,
numbering nearly 250,000 men, with from 700 to 800 guns, was marching
forward in dense masses to overwhelm the much weaker force that
incautiously presented its flanks to it, and that soon would be within
its formidable reach.
By the 28th and 29th of August the game began to be gradually developed.
The vanguard of the Tenth German Army, having passed Verdun and reached
the Meuse, appears to have crossed the river at Stenay, and it struck
one of MacMahon's columns about Buzancy and again at Nouart. Meanwhile
the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia advancing by Clermont, Grand
Pré, and Suippes, had closed on the flank and rear of the Marshal and
had made it certain that he would be overtaken. Headed thus, as they
approached the Meuse, and threatened with a destructive attack, which,
if successful, would prove ruinous, the French were compelled to diverge
northwards, and MacMahon endeavoured to make his escape though his case
was already well-nigh desperate. Drawing one of his columns towards the
other, and leaving a strong rear-guard at Beaumont, with orders to make
a determined resistance, he sought to concentrate his remaining forces,
and having passed the Meuse between Sedan and Mouzon, to move rapidly on
Carignan, and thence to march direct on Montmédy, thus eluding the
tightening grasp of the Prussians. In these operations we see the
windings of a general who feels that a disaster is at hand; but,
situated as MacMahon was, they were the best that could have been made.
By the morning of the 30th the whole French army, except the corps at
Beaumont, was collected from Lethêne to near Stenay; and it has been
said that the unhappy Emperor was still confident as to the issue. His
powerful antagonists were not likely to allow their prey to slip out of
their clutches. The German columns on the 29th had closed more firmly on
their retiring enemy; and while a portion of the Fourth Army had taken
possession of both banks of the Meuse, the Third was in readiness to
attack Beaumont, and to press MacMahon as he crossed the river. These
dispositions assured success which could hardly fail to be ultimately
decisive. As the French army approached the Meuse, the Crown Prince of
Prussia made an attack on the detachment which had been left at
Beaumont; and these corps, commanded by the incapable De Failly, were
overwhelmed after a feeble resistance. Meanwhile MacMahon had contrived
to get two of his corps across the river, which had marched towards
Carignan; but as the remaining ones were passing they were caught and
routed by the Crown Prince of Prussia with a great loss of guns and men
at Mouzon. At the same time the Fourth German Army advancing from the
right bank of the Meuse, had driven the French from the road to
Carignan; and thus the whole French army baffled and defeated was forced
in confusion still further northward. By the evening of the 30th its
routed divisions had been re-formed in front of Sedan behind the
defensive line of the Chiers, the huge German forces gathering all round
and hemming in their intended victim.
We can only devote a few sentences to describe the decisive battle that
ensued. The 31st of August was spent by MacMahon in drawing up his army
in a line of defence extending from Givonne on the Belgian frontier,
across ranges of eminences in front of Sedan, and thence backward to the
rear of the town, as far as the plateaux of La Garenne and Floiny. The
left of the Marshal rested on Giomne, his centre protected by the Chiers
and by the villages of Bazeilles and Balan, spread before Sedan in
strong positions, and his right and right centre stretched beyond Sedan,
holding the Meuse nearly to Floiny northwards. The Fourth German army in
the meantime had been marched on the opposite bank of the Chiers, while
that of the Crown Prince had come up to the Meuse in full force; and the
German commanders now pursued the plan of hemming in MacMahon
completely, and having forced him upon Sedan, of destroying him by their
overwhelming strength. With this object the French left was to be turned
and passed by, the centre was to be fiercely assailed, the right was to
be surprised and struck, and the whole German armies, having united in a
perfect circle around Sedan, were to accomplish the ruin of their
entrapped enemy. Considering the extraordinary disproportion between
the hosts about to join in battle--230,000 men at least with from 600 to
700 guns against 110,000 of inferior quality with one-third less
pieces--this ambitious and astonishing design may be justified in a
military point of view; but, notwithstanding all that has been said, it
is by no means to be admired in its conception; and a great commander,
who in such a position, should break out from the centre with resolute
troops, might cause an attack of this kind to end in a terrible defeat.
On the morning of the 1st, the Fourth German Army, in consequence of the
neglect of the French outposts, effected the passage of the Chiers
without loss; and its right soon turned the French left at Givonne, the
defenders of that important point having offered only the feeblest
resistance. At the same time a considerable part of the forces of the
Crown Prince having crossed the Meuse during the previous night,
attacked Bazeilles and Balan in great strength; but here the French
showed a bold front, and the battle hung in suspense for hours.
Meanwhile, however, the remaining corps of the Third German Army had
faced the Meuse at a point much lower down the river, and falling on the
extreme right of the French at or near a hill that commands Floiny, had
driven it in after a brave defence, and placed themselves in
communication with the victorious troops of the German army which had
approached them from Givonne. The inner circle was now completed; the
French centre still fighting obstinately was obliged to evacuate
Bazeilles and Balan; and the whole French army was compelled to recoil
inwards upon Sedan, where it was crushed by a death-dealing artillery.
No alternative but a surrender remained; the German tactics had
completely succeeded; and on the 2nd of September, the last army of
France in the field had passed under the yoke, and was a mass of
prisoners of war. The Emperor was one of the trophies of the conqueror;
MacMahon, more fortunate, had been severely wounded and did not witness
the capitulation; but upwards of 90,000 men and from 400 to 500 guns in
the hands of the triumphant Germans attested the magnitude of the
catastrophe.
The results of the terrible battle of Sedan--a catastrophe unparalleled
in the annals of war--were the destruction of the only French army that
remained to the nation in the field, the complete isolation of Bazaine
at Metz with a certainty of his ultimate surrender, the exposure of
Paris to an immediate siege, and the prospect of the subjection of
France to the will of an implacable conqueror. At no conjuncture in
military history has a strategic error of the gravest kind been fraught
with such calamitous effects; and the march to Sedan will long be noted
as one of those frightful mistakes of generalship which have deeply
influenced the fate of kingdoms. A day or two after this dire event a
revolution broke out in Paris; the empire collapsed with the captive
Emperor; the Empress Regent was compelled to fly; and, although a
Government of National Defence was formed, composed of men of very great
eminence, who--after fruitless attempts to negotiate--bravely resolved
to carry on the struggle, sooner than consent to the dismemberment of
France, hardly anyone believed that the defeated nation would be able to
offer serious resistance. The situation of France, indeed, appeared
desperate even to her well-wishers--even to those who resented the
dictum of the cynical scorner of popular rights, that whether their
inhabitants liked it or not, Alsace and Lorraine 'would belong to
Prussia'--and for several weeks her exulting enemies remained absolute
masters of the situation, and trampled down the defenceless country. The
German armies which had fought at Sedan marched without a moment's delay
to Paris, arrived before the forts on the 18th September, and, having
routed a few raw troops, who endeavoured to harass them at Versailles,
invested the capital on all sides, and inclosed it in impenetrable
lines. The surging waves of the tremendous invasion meanwhile flowed
furiously over the northern provinces, carrying with them devastation
and ruin. Strasburg, after a siege which clearly indicated the temper of
the people of Alsace, and their assumed sympathy with their 'German
liberators,' fell on the 29th September; most of the fortresses of the
Vosges, with the exception of Bitsche and Phalsburg, submitted; Toul,
which had gallantly resisted for weeks a whole army, met the same fate,
and by the close of October the German hosts had cleared their
communications with Paris, were masters of the whole region between the
Seine and the Rhenish Provinces, and had laid hold of Picardy and the
valley of the Loire, which locust-like they devoured by requisitions.
The consummation seemed at hand, when after making many attempts to
break the iron ring of his foes, Bazaine on the 27th of October
surrendered the fortress he had so long held; and the whole remains of
the army of the Rhine, the garrison, and a mass of auxiliary troops,
became prisoners of war as they defiled from Metz. France seemed under
the Caudine forks; the iron had entered into her soul; and even the most
far-sighted observers believed that the end of the war was close at
hand.
For two whole months after the battle of Sedan, France thus appeared
altogether ruined, trampled under the hoof of a ruthless invader. Her
capital was invested; her provinces were overrun; fortress after
fortress became an easy prey; the grasp of the Prussian upon the country
seemed day after day to become stronger, and few signs of resistance
appeared except a desultory partisan warfare. Some military critics at
Versailles exclaimed that the 'hour of the Latin race had come;' the
King of Prussia piously resigned his spirit to the triumph that seemed
close at hand; Bismark with grim humour declared that Paris was 'frying
in its own fat;' writers disposed complacently of Lorraine and Alsace,
and congratulated France that her fate was no worse, and only a small
minority of Englishmen entertained a hope for the fallen nation. Yet
during all that terrible time vitality was returning to the stricken
frame, and France was preparing for mighty efforts which, whether they
prove successful or not, have been some of the noblest in history, and
are entitled to the highest admiration. The first symptom of reviving
animation was seen in the attitude of Paris, which, under the control of
General Trochu, a commander who has already won a high place in the
annals of fame, put off her Sybarite pride and luxury, and from behind
her ramparts prepared herself for a defence which must be pronounced
astonishing. Day after day the immense capital which the Germans
declared would consume itself by internal revolution and anarchy, and
which was not expected to hold out a fortnight, encompassed itself with
fresh defensive lines, drilled its raw levies within its walls, and
arrayed itself in such a panoply of war that before long it had become
evident that its speedy reduction was impossible. The bombardment which
it was predicted would soon 'bring these fools to their senses,' was
postponed for the simple reason, that it had not the faintest chance of
success; and as amazed Europe beheld the works of Paris growing in
formidable power, and actually threatening the investing circle, it
learned to set a proper value on the profession that 'there was no
intention to destroy by fire a noncombatant population,' as if
starvation was a more humane process. Meanwhile silently, and hardly
observed by the correspondents of the English Press, enormous
preparations for the renewal of the contest were made in every part of
the country. Arms were produced in prodigious quantities, old soldiers
were recalled to their colours, recruits were summoned in hundreds of
thousands, the nuclei of several armies were formed, and the splendid
memories of 1793-4 were invoked by the representatives of the people,
and created wide-spread martial enthusiasm. While Bismark jeered at the
'gentlemen of the pavement,' and cynically redoubled his confident
insults, while telegram after telegram announced that town after town
was capitulating, France was becoming a vast camp, and sternly, proudly,
and in a very different spirit from that in which it began the war, the
nation girded up its loins for the strife. M. Gambetta, whose journey
from Paris in a balloon excited considerable ridicule at Versailles--for
a while--was the mainspring of this remarkable movement, of which, if we
cannot predict the success, the patriotism and force cannot be disputed.
The first symptom in the turn of the tide which made itself distinctly
perceived, was an engagement which took place on the 9th of November. A
mass of raw levies and depôt battalions, to which had been given the
name of the Army of the Loire, had been driven out of Orleans in
October; and it was generally supposed that it had been all but
destroyed. But a general had been placed at its head who had given it
consistency and strength; it had been furnished with good artillery, and
on the ninth of November it recrossed the Loire and defeated the
Bavarian force in its front, which it succeeded in almost surrounding.
After this the nuclei of armies, in the west, the north, and the
south-east of France, have made their appearance, and are growing
formidable; and the military strength of what had been deemed the effete
and worn-out nation, has shown itself to be great and threatening. The
attitude of the armies of the Loire and of the West has compelled the
Germans to draw in almost their whole available forces to cover the
immense circle of their lines around Paris; and though as yet they have
suffered no reverse, and have even gained some important successes,
their enemies still confront them in the field with rapidly improving
power and discipline, and so long as they hold their present positions,
they are exposed to considerable danger. In fact the German armies round
Paris would be placed in imminent peril, if the covering armies on the
circumference outside, were to meet anything like a defeat; and as the
French levies are day after day acquiring an increase of numbers and
force, this is by no means an impossible contingency. Meanwhile the
beleaguered capital of France has offered to the besiegers a resistance
which has astonished and confounded the world, and its illustrious
governor, General Trochu, has literally created out of the young and
demoralised troops within its walls, armies of unquestionable valour
and worth. These armies commenced offensive operations on the 29th and
30th November, by making immense sorties from the capital; and though
they have not succeeded in breaking through the net which hems them in,
it is not impossible that they may yet do so. The situation, in fact,
has so completely changed since the beginning of the month of November,
that all competent persons now think that if Paris can hold out five or
six weeks more, the result may be fatal to the Germans. It is almost
useless to speculate on events which may be solved before these lines
shall be printed, but we venture to hazard a glance into the future. It
appears to us that in all probability Paris will ultimately succumb to
famine, that it will not be relieved from without, and that General
Trochu and his brave troops will have to yield to adverse fortune. This
blow, if it happens, will be terrible, but if France continues to evince
the resolution and energy of the last two months, its military
consequences need not be decisive. In that event the defence of France
will have to be undertaken on the Loire; and if her young armies are
carefully husbanded; if her generals and statesmen admit the truth that
the siege of Paris has gained time for developing her restored vigour;
and if no fatal mistakes are made, we believe that she yet may repel the
invader. What is most to be feared is, that if Paris falls, a collapse
of authority may ensue, that Red Republicanism may lift its head, and
that the men who have done such eminent service, may be overthrown by
popular fear and terror. But if France is true to herself, if she goes
on as she has done lately, and if her forces are rationally handled, she
may possibly succeed in shaking off her assailants, and avoid the
dismemberment with which she is threatened. Let the nation comprehend
that if Paris falls, it will have done wonders in gaining time, and in
allowing the spirit of France to revive, and then let it go on with the
contest, obedient as a man to the existing Government, and looking
steadily to the one great object, deliverance from impending
subjugation.
Such has been, up to the middle of December, the memorable war of 1870.
We have well-nigh exhausted our space, and can only make a few brief
reflections. History has yet to describe the real causes of this
terrible and devouring conflict, and the persons really responsible for
it; but, allowing that Napoleon was in the wrong for throwing down the
gauntlet to Prussia, what is now to be thought of the Power which is
carrying on an internecine contest after she has received offers of
ample compensation, and is endeavouring to dismember France, and to
annex two of her most loyal provinces for the sole purpose, we fear, of
making her former rival her vassal? Ever since the interview with
Bismark at Ferrières, when, after Sedan, M. Jules Favre proposed to give
Prussia more than satisfaction for all losses incurred by her, the war
has been one of simple conquest on the part of King William and his
minister. France, who at the outset of the conflict may have been, at
least through her ruler, in the wrong, is now fighting against an
invader for her national existence and her place in history; and beaten
down as she is, it is not impossible that she may yet succeed; certainly
she is rapidly winning the sympathy which was at first denied her. It is
creditable to the mind of England, which was at first almost unanimously
on the side of Germany, believing that it was unjustly attacked, that
the majority of our countrymen are beginning to see through the ambition
of Prussia, to distrust the cynical fraud of Bismark, and to wish well
to the nation which is now really fighting for all that makes life dear.
But it may be said, 'France has been beaten; the victor offers her peace
on the terms of the cession of Alsace and Lorraine, which after all were
at one time German; why does she not admit her overthrow, and thus
restore quiet to awed Europe?' But to such suggestions, France, we
believe, will not listen. We do not see how, until her resources are
destroyed, she can consent to abandon Alsace and Lorraine, because these
provinces are absolutely necessary to her safety as an important Power,
as any military student must know; nor ought she, as a leader of
civilization, to give up populations devoted to her to invaders whom
they detest. As for the ethnological argument derived from the German
origin of their territories, France may fairly adduce their present
attitude as evidence of the real sentiments of the inhabitants.
We cannot dwell at the present moment on the lessons to be deduced from
this war. Those who think that it conclusively proves the superiority of
the German over the French soldier, will do well to read a little
history and to study the battles of Jena and Austerlitz. No doubt on
several occasions the French have fought badly under the moral
depression of repeated and overwhelming defeats; but nothing has yet
been seen in this campaign compared to the demoralization of Prussia in
1806. Nor may we assume that the French military character has
deteriorated, though a corrupt layer of Imperialism has injured the
upper ranks of society; the nation which after crushing reverses can
still show such an indomitable front, will be yet found by its foes to
be terrible. What the campaign proves is the immense superiority of
German generalship over its antagonists, a superiority which, seconded
by irresistible force, and by great advantages in artillery, has
produced results of an astonishing kind, yet not more marvellous than
those witnessed sixty years ago on the other side when Napoleon
commanded the Grand Army. As to the military operations of the French
commanders, they have been throughout as bad as possible. From the
outset of the campaign to the first battles we see nothing but reckless
rashness; we then behold vacillation and weakness followed by the
astonishing blunders of Sedan; and the news which has just arrived of
the defeats of the Army of the Loire at Orleans, prove, we fear, that
another series of mistakes in the plainest strategy have been committed.
These have been the causes of the disasters of France of which an able
adversary has reaped the advantage; and to these we should add the
enervating results of Imperialism on the upper classes, corruption and
peculation in the higher ranks of the army, the false confidence
engendered by martial traditions, and not least, the numerical
inferiority of the French forces to those of the Germans. Yet we do not
doubt that if France continues her present resolute attitude, if common
sense prevails in her councils, if she remains united and patriotic, she
may yet pluck safety out of her dangers; and in a long and internecine
struggle the Power which has the command of the sea, superior wealth,
and more compact unity, may in our judgment ultimately triumph. For
ourselves this cruel and fearful war ought to teach us to look after our
national defences, to array ourselves in complete panopoly, to take good
assurance that this England of ours, the home of freedom and good
government, shall at least be secure in the shock of arms now crashing
over a large part of the Continent. It cannot be questioned that the
sudden rise of Bismarkian Prussia is a threat and a peril to the world;
the demands of Gortschakoff and the letters of Bernstorff already prove
that it bodes no good to England; and we shall do better to look after
our fleets, and to put our military organization in order, than to
believe the idyls of sentimental professors who assure us that the
plunderer of Silesia, the divider of Poland, and the despoiler of
Denmark, is 'wise, pious, moral, and unambitious.' If it is not our duty
to interfere actively in the interest of the balance of Europe, we, at
least, in the conflict now rending France ought to read a warning
address to ourselves; and while the boundaries of nations are being
shifted, while justice and right are in danger of being trampled under
foot, that brute force may work its will, we ought to take good heed
that this our England shall retain her high position in the world, shall
be able when necessary to lift her hand in the cause of civilization and
human progress, shall never 'lie' at the proud foot of a conqueror,
shall be as powerful as she is great and glorious.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.
HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TRAVELS.
_History of England, from the Earliest to the Present Time._ In Five
Volumes. By Sir EDWARD S. CREASY, M.A., Emeritus Professor of History in
University College, London; late Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
Vol. II. Completing the History during the Early and Middle Ages.
Walton. 1870.
Sir Edward Creasy's second volume embraces nine reigns, from Edward II.
to Richard III., both inclusive. We consider the strong point of it, and
that which has had most of the writer's heart, to be the constitutional
and social history. The narrative of public and military transactions
has not the same merit; and especially that towards the latter end,
including the Wars of the Roses, which is too compressed--we had almost
said too perfunctory--to be even interesting. In the earlier portions,
where the author takes all the room that he wants, he lets us see that
he does not lack the power of placing the events of war in an
instructive light. Coming to Edward III.'s reign, he corrects the
impression that is probably entertained by many, that the great contest
with France arose from a wanton and ambitious claim upon the crown of
that kingdom; and shows, by a very careful statement of facts and dates,
that it was Philip of Valois' war, not Edward's.
Few of our historians have attempted thoroughly to penetrate Edward's
plan in that famous expedition of 1346-7, in which he traversed the
North of France, landing at La Hogue, and embarking at Calais, just as
though it had been a piratical expedition needing no further
explanation. Sir Edward makes a good suggestion as to the commencement
and early stage of the invasion; namely, that one great object of it was
to deliver a blow at the nourishing woollen manufactures of Normandy,
and thereby relieve English trading towns from their powerful
competitors in that quarter. But we think he fails to account
satisfactorily for Edward's movements after the taking of Caen, when he
assigns it as a sufficient reason for his advance on Paris (after being
obliged to turn away from Rouen, be it remembered), that he wished to
divert French troops from the South of France, where a small English
army was being hard pressed. But could not the king of England have
effected such a purpose by establishing himself in Normandy, where he
rested on his fleet? To dismiss his ships, as he did at Caen, and to
take a moderate force of some 40,000 men into the interior without a
base of operations, in the hope of relieving a distant province, would
not have been worthy of the genius of Edward III. We have little doubt
that after achieving his success as far as Caen, if not before, Calais
itself (not Paris, nor yet Guienne) was in his eye. In fact, the speech
of Sir Geoffrey Harcourt to Edward, at Caen, reported by Froissart,
distinctly recognises Calais as the ultimate goal of the expedition. His
having found the North of France so defenceless (to say nothing of his
having taken prisoner at Caen the Count of Guisnes, on the border of
whose territory Calais lay), probably suggested the feasibility of
capturing Calais on the land side. Hence the immediate attempt to cross
the Seine at Rouen; and hence, when this failed, the march up the
Seine--not to relieve Guienne, but to effect a passage of the river. The
famous fortress fell to Edward as the result of a bold calculation, not
as a piece of good luck after a desperate escapade. To judge how
tempting it must have seemed to him, even so far off as Caen, we have
only to reflect on the immediate use he made of it as soon as it was his
own; to say nothing of his resolution in maintaining a longer winter
siege. He immediately converted what had before been a piratical
stronghold against him into an English colony; besides which he made it
the Continental staple for the English wool trade, by which means he
delivered himself from certain Flemish towns, which hitherto had
converted his necessities into their own gains. Those who understand
something of English State finance in this reign, and the peculiar
importance of the woollen trade to Edward as a financier, will be able
to comprehend his views when he resolved on obtaining hold of this
important position upon the Straits of Dover.
In a fresh history of Edward III.'s reign, various episodes, of minor
importance, indeed, but ineradicable from the English mind, will always
be turned to, to see how far the new lights will permit the old
favourites of the popular imagination to stand their ground. Let us
turn, then, to the Ostrich Feathers. Mr. Longman, in his recent 'Life of
Edward III.,' simply remarks that the current story is a very doubtful
one; while Sir Edward Creasy's remark is, that there is no reason at all
to doubt it. But passing observations like these, on the one side or on
the other, entirely fail to do justice to a very interesting series of
papers (not referred to by either of these authors), that may and ought
to be read in the 'Archæologia,' mentioning the curious discovery of a
contemporary statement of the popular story (Camden having been hitherto
the earliest authority for it), which, nevertheless, cannot overcome the
strong evidence marshalled by the learned antiquaries, that the feathers
really came from Hainault, and through Queen Philippa, not from Bohemia
at all, or its gallant old king. The story of the six haltered citizens
of Calais Sir Edward accepts likewise, and finds himself able to
support it by fresh evidence. In fact, there was never any sufficient
reason to doubt it, and our historic scepticism is apt sometimes to be
over-scrupulous. For the anecdote, singular as it is, is by no means
unique: the incident mentioned in 1 Kings, xx. 31, if not strictly
parallel, was quite sufficient to have originated the custom in the
picturesque days of the Middle Ages, with the genius of which, too, it
entirely harmonises. Monstrelet records a similar instance in the
campaigns of the Duke of Bedford, in the following century; and another
in Papal history, belonging to 1540, may be read in Ranke.
A narrative work ought not to be dismissed without an examination of its
dates. And here we are obliged to admit that our narrator has not shown
sufficient vigilance. The death of Roger Mortimer, Queen Isabella's
favourite, is undated, although we are carefully told that Edward III.'s
real reign only began from that event. One-half of the narrative of his
overthrow is on a page headed 1328, and the other half under 1330. The
death of the Black Prince is described and its importance to public
affairs is acknowledged, but it is undated. The page on which it is
narrated is headed 1376; but the next page, dealing with the events of
the moment, is dated 1377. The battle of Cressy is dated August 25th, a
day too soon. Henry V.'s setting sail for the Agincourt campaign is
twice on one page dated Sunday, August 12th, instead of Sunday, August
11th. The Duke of Bedford engages the enemy at the mouth of the Seine on
August 18th (it should be 13th), returning home August 16th. The famous
coronation of Charles VII. at Rheims, when the Maid of Orleans assisted,
is dated July 18th, instead of Sunday, July 17th. Lord Talbot fell in
the battle of Castillon, and this is dated July 23rd, a date of that
hero's death quite new to us, although we have seen four others
recorded. But we do not at all feel confident that our author gives this
figure as the result of any special inquiry. We are sure that our
writers will never be induced to guard wakefully against the crime of
circulating false dates until their eyes are thoroughly open to the
dreadful state in which our popular chronology stands, making it unsafe
for us to adopt any figures whatever without every means of verification
in our power.
We have expressed ourselves freely as to where this volume might, in our
opinion, have been stronger. We therefore gladly invite attention to
what we have felt Sir Edward Creasy's chief success to be, and to what
we consider our chief gains in possessing this record of his studies.
The constitutional and social history of the period comprised in this
volume will soon attract the reader's warm interest; for he will
perceive that it is not merely inserted for the sake of filling up a
department, but written _con amore_, and out of full stores of
knowledge. The author has made diligent and zealous use of the numerous
and valuable works published under the Master of the Rolls, and has not
lost sight of the researches of our local antiquarian societies, and
other good authorities. Matters which in most current histories are
simply referred to as known, and which therefore remain long unknown,
such as obsolete mediæval taxes, the nature of impeachment, the council,
and the like, are here carefully explained, which makes the history
popular in the best sense, as well as a thorough student's book. What he
calls the Thirty Years' War between capital and labour, from the Black
Death to Wat Tyler, is a most lucid and interesting piece of social
history, fully worked out, and by no means useless in view of
present-day questions. As the result, Tyler's insurrection, as well as
Cade's, will wear a new complexion, we suspect, in the minds of many
general readers.
One feature of Sir Edward's pages will certainly gratify not a few; we
mean the conspicuous absence of partisanship and all unfairness of
statement. While forming his judgments on the past, he succeeds in
throwing himself into the times he is describing, and consequently
preserves a calm and reasonable tone, without being querulous and hasty.
A striking instance of this judicial temper occurs in his account of
persecuting Arundel and the frightful statute _De heretico Comburendo_,
the tenor of his observations on which we hope no one will be so
uncandid as to misunderstand or misrepresent. The danger of such a habit
of mind is, of course, a liability to that amiable weakness which wants
to whitewash everybody and palliate everything; but this danger we think
Sir Edward succeeds in avoiding. He has a moral firmness of his own, and
an independence of mind which would not permit him to be simply an
allowance-maker. If we wanted a proof that he has his strong
partialities, unfalteringly expressed in the right direction, we should
point to his chapter on Wycliffe, which also is the weightier, from its
being, as usual, discriminating. Here, facing the great religious
movement of the Reformation, our historian expresses himself as a
Christian believer, and one who venerates the Holy Bible, and as though
he considered himself writing for those who ought to be both.
_Lectures and Essays_. By Professor SEELEY. Macmillan & Co.
To those who are acquainted with 'Ecce Homo,' we need not say that this
is an interesting volume. There is something so fresh and bold, so frank
and vigorous in all that Professor Seeley writes, that we must enjoy
reading him, whether we agree with him or not, and whatsoever topic he
discusses.
He writes on the 'Revolution at Rome,' and on the 'Decline and Fall of
the Empire,' with a masterly grasp on an obscure and complex subject. We
entirely agree with him in his estimate of Julius Cæsar's motives and
character; and while we acquit Brutus himself of any mean and sordid
impulse, we cannot think that he served Rome or humanity in the 'taking
off' of the Dictator. If we can trust Sallust at all, the nobles for
whom Pompey fought were quite unfit to govern Rome. Our author's
explanation of the final fall of the Empire has more than probability.
The facts justify it to a large extent. Wherever population is at a
standstill, we may be sure 'there is something rotten in the State,' and
may confidently anticipate its dissolution. Is not the prostrate
condition of France at the time we write another illustration of the
truth? Have not similar causes there produced like effects?
Our author's analysis of Milton's opinions and his critique on Milton's
poetry, deserve perusal. He appreciates the solitary grandeur of the
gentle and cultivated Puritan,--Titanic, yet not coarse. It is not easy
to reconcile the utter disappointment, the deep heart-sorrow, of
Milton's old age with his uniform hopefulness. All the more honour to
him! There is nothing more paralyzing than despair. We doubt whether it
should ever find utterance in a Christian's writing. We at once
recognise the parallelism of Carlyle's position with Milton's in some
aspects of it. We were taken aback to hear of Ruskin in a similar
aspect, but our author makes out a good case for him too.
Nothing can be juster in our view than the 'Essay on Art.' These
'elementary principles' must be recognised, one is apt to say, by all
thoughtful men, and we are greatly indebted to the Professor for setting
them forth so clearly. We cannot too soon adopt the principle that 'art
is not always independent, but in some cases parasitic; and accordingly,
in judging particular performances, in architecture and oratory, it is
necessary to apply two standards in succession--the practical and the
artistic ... the decisive test of merit "here" being art in
subordination.'
Surely no one has more right than he to speak with authority on
'University Education.' And his strictures upon the course at Cambridge,
and the effects of it upon both teachers and taught, are well worthy of
attention. Somehow or other it is true that life-long study is not
secured by present methods, and it is a topic deserving of careful
discussion. 'Why is it so, and how can it be mended?' With a great deal
advanced in this searching essay we heartily agree, and we are glad to
see that some suggestions in it are already being acted upon. Many more
we hope and expect will become the usage of the future. We were pleased,
not surprised, to find him frankly acknowledging, that in one important
particular the method at Oxford is to be preferred to that at Cambridge.
It is not a little humbling to us as a nation to have him say
parenthetically (not as 'thesis' to be maintained--observe--but as an
axiom--an unquestioned truth) that 'most good books are in German.'
Again, in regard to the study of 'English in Schools.' Who so competent
as he to speak? With all that he says about the duty of teaching more
fully in our schools, both the language and literature of our country,
we heartily agree, though we are not prepared to go with him quite so
far as to say, 'No Latin at all till a boy is fourteen.' The 'accidence'
of any language are more easily learnt by young minds--it is a mere
effort of memory, and strengthens it--while in later life such matters
cannot be learnt as accurately, in our conviction. We hold with him,
however, respecting the English, and are inclined therefore, in this
matter, to the rule, 'Then ought ye to do, and not to leave the other
undone.'
The strictures on preaching, again, are excellent. How well it will be
if all our young preachers ponder them well! The world needs, and more
than that, it likes practical preaching, if it be intelligent,
sympathetic, and sincere. Every word he says about 'political preaching'
we would gladly endorse. Surely it is as much within a Christian
teacher's sphere as the domestic relations, and we believe that greater
fidelity in the pulpit on the subject of political morality, will be
followed by a great advance at the poll. Men are willing to be told
where they are wrong and ought to amend, if only it be a true man who
tells them so. Wherever one who is 'bone of their bone' speaks 'to them
on vital topics, men will come and hear. They will not then leave the
Church to the women and the children.'
With the inaugural address at Cambridge the volume closes. His subject,
'History, a Teacher of Politics,' promises much, and we are inclined to
envy those who are in the way of hearing the discourses to which this
one is preamble and preface. May they profit by them as much as we think
we should, and our children reap the fruits in the wiser legislation of
the coming generation of statesmen! Somewhere lately, we have seen the
doctrine put forth, with marvellous confidence, that 'the history of the
past cannot give wisdom for the future, inasmuch as Society is ever
progressing, and no past state therefore can ever be exactly
reproduced.' It would be as sensible to say that a legal education is of
no good, because laws are ever being altered (ought we to say mended?);
or a medical training, because no two human constitutions are exactly
alike. 'Men are of like passions' with their forefathers, and masses of
men are moved by impulses similar to those which stirred the men of old.
So we believe in 'History as the Teacher of Politics,' and are glad
indeed that our young politicians at Cambridge have so learned, and
faithful, and courageous a guide. May they have the graces to profit by
their privileges, and give their countrymen the benefit hereafter, and
so disappoint the somewhat disheartening forebodings of the exordium of
this discourse!
_The Mutineers of the 'Bounty' and their Descendants in Pitcairn and
Norfolk Islands._ By Lady BELCHER. John Murray.
Lady Belcher, having obtained possession of a variety of private
documents, and having from private sources gathered a variety of
details, has, in this volume, told over again the romantic story of the
Pitcairn Islanders. Lady Belcher herself is the step-daughter of Captain
Heywood, a midshipman of the 'Bounty' at the time of the mutiny--she
naturally, therefore, feels a personal interest in the subject. She is
not very skilled in book-making; her narrative is desultory and overlaid
with documents; but she has told the story with a fulness of detail to
which the volume of Sir John Barrow, written for 'The Family Library'
thirty years ago, makes no pretension. The diary of Morrison, a petty
officer of the ship, gives for the first time the details of the
voyage, and of the tyrannous conduct of the commander of the 'Bounty,'
Lieutenant Bligh, prior to the mutiny. Clearly, Fletcher Christian was
maddened by insults and overbearing tyranny. Bligh's conduct indeed
seems to have been that of a madman rather than of a sane person. After
the mutiny the narrative divides itself into three independent branches.
First, a history of Bligh and his companions, who were sent adrift in
the boat; next, of Christian and those who remained in the 'Bounty,'
some involuntarily, having taken no part in the mutiny, simply because
the boat in which Bligh was sent off could contain no more--among these
was Peter Heywood, the midshipman. This section of the crew of the
'Bounty' landed at Tahiti, and there gave themselves up to the captain
of the 'Pandora,' by whom they were treated with great and unnecessary
harshness. They were put in irons, and sent to England for trial. The
'Pandora,' however, was wrecked upon a reef, and after a hazardous boat
voyage, they reached Batavia, and were thence sent to England. Heywood
and Morrison were adjudged guilty, on the formal ground of insufficient
resistance to Christian, but were instantly and honourably pardoned;
others were executed.
Christian and eight Englishmen, who remained in the 'Bounty,' went to
Pitcairn Island, taking with them some Tahitian women, and founded a
colony there. After some dissensions and violence, in which Christian,
Edward Young, and others, lost their lives, the colony, under the rule
and teaching of John Adams, became singularly peaceful and virtuous.
They were not discovered for many years; and were permitted to remain
unmolested; one or two adventurers joined them, and the colony remains
to this day. It outgrew the small island, however, and a few years since
the entire population was transferred, under the auspices of Sir William
Dennison, to Norfolk Island; a few of them returned, and were last
visited by Sir W. Dilke, who gives an account of them in his 'Greater
Britain.'
No wonder that so romantic a narrative, and so picturesque a community,
fascinated the muse of Byron, and elicited 'The Island' from his pen.
Lady Belcher has told a plain unvarnished tale, but it is one hardly to
be paralleled in the romance of the seas.
_European History, narrated in a Series of Historical Selections from
the best Authorities._ By E. M. SEWELL and S. M. YONGE. Macmillan and
Co.
This is the second volume of an attempt to render history attractive and
popular with young readers, and there is much to be said in its favour.
The era of which it treats is from 1088 to 1228. The characters foremost
on the scene are Henry II., Frederick Barbarossa, Richard I., Philip
Augustus, John, St. Bernard and Abelard, Becket, Longchamp, and Langton.
According to the design, we have a set of pictures by hands of very
unequal power. Gibbon and Capefigue are side by side with Milman and
James, while from Mr. Stubbs's masterly analysis of Henry II.'s
character we pass to a portrait of Longchamp by Lord Campbell, and one
of Langton by Dean Hook. The result is rather like a mosaic, but of
course it could not well be otherwise. The editorial introductions are
admirably done; the first, which describes the position and character of
our Angevin kings, is a sketch both brilliant and accurate. The chief
objection to this method of teaching history is, that writers of
historical monographs are too apt to become amorous of their theme, and
to indulge in much fine writing in consequence; and this objection
specially applies to Mr. Morrison's account of St. Bernard, which is
painfully verbose and magniloquent. Undoubtedly the best chapter in the
book, and the one that will most severely tax the young student's mental
energy, is that which contains Mr. Stubbs's account of Henry II.
_On the Trail of the War._ By ALEXANDER JAMES SHAND, Occasional
Correspondent of _The Times_. Smith, Elder and Co.
This little volume purports to be nothing more than a full and true
account of the ordinary incidents in an extraordinary state of things
which occur on the trail of the war. To this position the author
strictly confines himself, leaving the more stirring events of the front
to be described by others. Some of the papers are reprints from _The
Times_, but the greater portion of them are original, and may be
supposed to be a veracious account of the progress of the armies as
beheld from the rear. The author's departure from London is told with a
picturesque dash, which predisposes the reader for the hacking, hewing,
and slashing he has subsequently to go through; while the last chapter
resumes the situation, as the French say, in a warm outburst of dread,
and admiration of the strength of new-born Germany. Mr. Shand evidently
sees amid all this ponderous power, the stumbling-block over which she
must one day totter and fall. To the paramount passion of nationality
from which this gigantic Germany has been created, will likewise be
owing her quick decay and sudden dissolution. This feeling makes the
wisest of Germans lose his head when speaking of united Germany, and
proclaim himself proud to belong to God's chosen people. To this we can
only answer from our own personal experience, that if the impatience
created by the restless variety and overweening self-laudation of the
French, are to be exchanged for the cold pedantry and haughty arrogance
of the Prussians, Europe will have made but a sorry bargain. We cannot
agree with Mr. Carlyle in his opinion that we may be greatly benefited
by this sudden transfer of moral power from light satirical France to
heavy overbearing Prussia. We can only pray to be preserved from both.
_The Revolt of the Protestants of the Cevennes; with some Account of the
Huguenots in the Seventeenth Century._ By Mrs. BRAY, Author of 'The Good
St. Louis and his Times,' 'The White Hoods,' &c. John Murray.
Of all the stirring romances hitherto published by Mrs. Bray, the _true_
history before us is assuredly the most stirring and the most romantic.
The single story of Jean Cavalier, the baker's boy of Anduze, contains
the elements of a dozen romances. From his first appearance on the stage
of history to do his allotted work, to his final sinking into honourable
obscurity when his work was done, Jean Cavalier shines out as the true
and gallant soldier of the cross, the faithful defender of the right,
the constant avenger of the wrong. He was a youth of seventeen, the
eldest of three sons of a shepherd of Anduze. 'Altogether,' says Mrs.
Bray, 'he was such as we may fancy him to have been, who, armed with the
shepherd's sling in the cause of the Lord, overcame the giant
Philistine.' None could have thought that such a one could have been
chosen to avenge the iniquitous Edict of Nantes, issued by the greatest
monarch of Europe, at the instigation of the wisest woman of her day.
The boy had been apprenticed to a baker at Anduze, and this circumstance
was in itself a fund of amusement at the court of Versailles, where the
'_Petit Maître_' and the '_Garçon Boulanger_' served as whetstones to
the wit of the courtiers at the _petit lever_ and _grand coucher_ of the
king. But the baker's boy had been endowed by heaven with the strangest
and most mysterious of gifts--a military genius untaught, and frank as
nature's self--which ere long caused the boldest of the Great Monarch's
generals to tremble and turn pale at even the mention of his name. No
other account of this extraordinary talent has been given than that
during his shepherd life he would love to spend whole hours on the
Garden watching the manoeuvres of the soldiers, who at that time were
stationed in the country in order to force the Protestants into adoption
of the Catholic faith. No other lesson in military science had he ever
taken, and yet he defeated the boldest troops and ablest generals of the
proudest army in the world! The mysterious nature of his mission,
reminds one strongly of Joan of Arc. At nineteen years of age he quitted
France for ever, leaving behind him the memory of his glory and the
grateful affection of the Protestants of the Cevennes, by whom his name
is revered and cherished to this very day.
Mrs. Bray has performed her task of biographer of Jean Cavalier in the
most satisfactory and conscientious manner, with all the stedfastness of
the historian and the enthusiasm of the romance writer. 'The Revolt in
the Cevennes' is a charming book, and should be placed in the hands of
every Protestant boy and girl throughout the world.
_The Correspondence of the Right Honourable William Wickham, from the
year_ 1794. Edited, with Notes, by his Grandson, WILLIAM WICKHAM, M.A.
Two vols. 8vo. London. 1870.
These volumes are another contribution to the still increasing store of
material for the history of the great French Revolution; the first act
of that great drama of which another is now being played amid sympathies
and antipathies, hopes and fears, perhaps as intense, certainly more
widely felt, than those which accompanied the first lifting of the
curtain. Now, however, the Revolution and the _ancien régime_ have
become accustomed to each other, and know that though it be but as cat
and dog, they must awhile lead some sort of life together; and they have
modified their reciprocal attitude accordingly. Then each startled by
the first apparition of the other, glared at it with the hate, not of
prolonged antagonism, but of instant death-grapple. Free England, guided
by great and noble-minded men--Pitt, Lord Grenville, and Burke--not only
joined in, but led the resistance of the Continental sovereigns, and we
have no need to blush for the conduct of our grandsires. Whether,
looking from our present coign of vantage, we may judge England's course
then wise or imprudent, the evidence afforded by these volumes is enough
to show--admitting the hostile prejudice which an established and
aristocratic government must needs have against a mushroom
democracy--that our statesmen descended to the fray with an honesty of
purpose, and an elevated sense of national duty on which we may reflect
with grateful and patriotic pride.
Mr. Wickham was twice sent by Lord Grenville as minister to Switzerland;
to the comparatively slight duties of which office was added the onerous
task of concerting, in correspondence with the Royalists in France, with
the Prince of Condé, the Court of Vienna, Marshal Suwarrow, General
Pichegru, and many others, the measures to be taken against their common
foe--the Directory in Paris. At the time of Mr. Wickham's earlier
mission, Bonaparte had not yet risen to power, and if Mr. Wickham could
have inspired with his own zeal and prudence the selfish and blind
potentates whom he was aiding with English counsel and treasure, the
glittering series of Napoleonic phenomena might never have appeared. Mr.
Wickham was regarded with the most perfect confidence by his own
Government. How dangerous he proved to their foes may be judged from the
fact that when at a later period he was named to represent his country
at the courts, first of Berlin and then of Vienna, his appointment was
objected to because it would be displeasing to the French Government.
By those who are either well acquainted with, or are studying the
history of the French Revolution, these volumes will be highly prized,
while general readers will find much of great interest in a
correspondence which comprises letters from George III., Louis XVIII.,
the Prince de Condé, and the Duc d'Enghien, the Archduke Charles,
Marshal Suwarrow, and many others, besides the despatches and other
communications which passed between Mr. Wickham and his chief, Lord
Grenville. The present Mr. Wickham has added succinct biographical notes
concerning the several correspondents and persons named, some
introductory remarks to the several groups of despatches, and a slight
sketch of his grandfather's career, written with grace and modest pride.
The first volume is embellished with a portrait of the diplomatist; and
the second with a very interesting one of the most eccentric of great
men--Suwarrow.
Nearly all the letters now published relate to Mr. Wickham's foreign
missions. He afterwards served as Secretary for Ireland, and while he
held that office Emmet's rebellion occurred. He was also a member of the
ministry of 'All the Talents.' If he has left as interesting memorials
of his later services as of his earlier ones, we hope that his grandson
may at a future time let his present good work be followed by a
publication of Mr. Wickham's later correspondence.
_Cicero_. Select Letters. With English Introductions, Notes, and
Appendices. By ALBERT WATSON, M. A. Macmillan and Co. Clarendon Press
Series.
The letters of Cicero, on account of the materials they supply for the
history of the Roman constitution during its last struggles, the light
they throw upon the motives and movements of the partisan leaders, and
the insight they afford into the character of Cicero himself, are justly
regarded as the most important and instructive of his literary
productions. Cicero's correspondence extends over the space of
twenty-six years; and of the letters written during this eventful period
to a wide circle of literary and political friends and connexions, there
are extant upwards of 850, which are undoubtedly genuine. Up to the
present time, this portion of Cicero's writings has received but little
attention at the hands of English editors. In Germany, excellent
editions have been published by Billerbeck, Boot, Frey, Hofman, and
Süple; while in England we have only an inferior edition of the letters
to Atticus by a Master of Arts, and a selection of 111 letters by E. St.
John Parry, intended to illustrate the public life of Cicero, accompanied
with notes which are purely historical. The volume before us is also a
selection of 148 letters, taken almost exclusively out of the two chief
divisions of Cicero's correspondence--the _Epistolæ ad Familiares, those
ad Diversos_, and the _Epistolæ ad Atticum_--containing together 822
letters. The first letter in this volume is dated July 65 B.C., and the
last July 43 B.C. The collection, therefore, covers one of the most
momentous periods in Roman history. Mr. Watson, in making the present
selection of letters, has been principally guided by considerations of
their historical importance, or of their value as illustrating Cicero's
character. The collection is divided into parts or groups, each of which
is preceded by a lengthy and valuable introduction, furnishing the
reader with a digest of the leading public events, and a review of the
state of political parties during each period. In this portion of the
work, the editor has borrowed largely from the well-known 'History of
Rome,' by Professor Mommsen, and from Brückner's 'Life of Cicero.' The
works of Zumpt, Drumann, Abeken, and Reen, have also been laid under
heavy contributions. In the appendices to those sections, the reader
will find discussed with clearness and ability many legal and historical
questions, highly important for the right understanding of allusions in
the letters--_e.g._, the legal question at issue between Cæsar and the
Senate, the Calendar, the meaning of the terms 'colonia,' 'municipium,'
and 'præfectura,' &c. These introductions and appendices add greatly to
the value of the volume. The notes are far more numerous, but not so
learned and valuable as those of the German editions. Indeed, many are
so brief and unimportant that it is difficult to account for their
insertion, and seem quite out of place in a work which is evidently not
intended for tyros. The only persons qualified to read the letters of
Cicero are the highest classes in schools, and students at the
Universities, neither of which stand in need of a translation of
passages and of words that involve no particular difficulty. The
following are taken _ad apertram libri_:--ὕστερον πρότερον, 'I will
answer your last question first;' Ὁμηρικῶς 'after the manner of Homer;'
contiones, 'addresses to the populace;' manum, 'crew;' in eo ... erant
omnia, 'on that everything depended;' inopiam, 'the neediness;'
judicium, 'the trial.' Most of the notes are, in our opinion, too
elementary for qualified readers of the correspondence of Cicero. The
abundant references to Madvig's Grammar will be found exceedingly
useful. On the whole, it is an excellent edition, and cannot be perused
without greatly enlarging one's knowledge and deepening one's interest
in these unique epistolary writings.
_The Life of Richard Deane, Major-General, and General at Sea, in the
service of the Commonwealth, and one of the Commissioners of the High
Court of Justice appointed for the Trial of King Charles the First._ BY
JOHN BATHURST DEANE, M.A., F.S.A., of Pembroke College, Cambridge;
Corresponding Member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society;
Rector of St. Martin Outwich. Longmans, 1870. 8vo.
Another successful attempt to rescue a great historical reputation from
the slanders of the scurrilous pamphleteers of the Restoration, and one
of which it is no mean praise to say, that it is not unworthy of a place
beside Mr. Markham's recently published noble vindications of Fairfax.
The 'Goodman Button (a hoyman of Ipswich), his boy' of the 'Mystery of
the Good Old Cause,' which would seem to have been the source from
whence Bates, Winstanley, Heath, and the author of the 'Lives of the
King-killers,' as well as Clarendon, drew their inspiration, turns out
to have been the son of a Gloucestershire gentleman, who was connected
both by birth and by marriage with such families as the Wickhams, the
Hampdens, and the Mildmays; and the 'Hoyman of Ipswich' to have been a
captain in the King's service, who was attached to the Royal Dockyard,
at Harwich, and was a kinsman of Sir Thomas Button's, a near relative of
the St. Johns and the Cromwells. Mr. Deane having been fortunate enough
to discover a copy of the elaborate and elegant Latin inscription which
was composed for the tablet erected to the memory of his illustrious
ancestor in Westminster Abbey, among the additional MSS. in the British
Museum, has been directed by it to the entry of his baptism in the
register of the parish of Lower Guyting, near Winchcombe. It is as
follows: 'Anno Dni. 1610, ye viii daie of Julie, was baptized Richard
Deane, ye sonne of Edward Deane.' His mother was a Warre, and his
grandmother a Wickham, through whom he was connected with the Hampdens
and the Cromwells; and his aunt Joan seems to have married Robert
Mildmay, of Terling, the grandson of Sir Thomas Mildmay, one of the
auditors of the Court of Augmentation in the reign of Henry VIII., and
grand-nephew of Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge. We have no knowledge of Deane's career up to the year 1642,
beyond the fact of his having served under Captain Button, of Harwich,
during some part of that period; nor have we any of his private life at
all, except that he married Mary Grimsditch, and that at his death he
left two daughters by her, Mary and Hannah, the former of whom died
unmarried, and the latter married Goodwin Swift, attorney-general of
Tipperary, and uncle to the well-known Dean of St. Patrick's, Jonathan
Swift. From the year 1642 to that of his death, however, few names are
more frequently mentioned in the annals of his day than that of Richard
Deane. He early and heartily espoused the cause of the Parliament in the
great civil war, under a conviction that in no other way could the
religion and the liberties of the country be saved; and soon proved
himself to be 'one of those extraordinary men, produced by revolutionary
times, who by the innate force of an energetic character, surmount the
difficulties of birth and station, and, rising to authority, seem as if
they had been born and educated for it; no one wondering either at their
elevation, or at the ease with which they discharge the duties of the
highest offices.' His biographer has related his great services to the
cause which he espoused with singular impartiality, which renders his
work a valuable contribution to the general history of his times. After
the trial and execution of the King, in which, as is well known, Deane
took a very prominent part, he was appointed, 'in connection with
Colonels Edward Popham and Robert Blake, as one of the three generals at
sea,' with 'co-ordinate powers.' In 1651, he assumed the chief command
in Scotland, where he was the principal means of bringing about the
'eight years' tranquillity' which Bishop Barnet 'so commends and
attributes to the (happy) usurpation.' War now breaking out with the
Dutch, Deane was hastily summoned to rejoin the fleet. It was in action
with the Dutch that he met with his death, June 2, 1653. 'He fell at the
moment of victory, sword in hand, in the bow of his ship, as he was
waving his sword and encouraging his men to follow him in boarding 'the
Dutch Admiral,' Van Tromp. Deane was buried with all honour in the
chapel of Henry VII., at Westminster Abbey, on the 24th of February
following. 'The corpse,' the authors of the 'Parliamentary History of
England' inform us, 'was brought from Greenwich to Westminster Bridge by
water, attended by thirty barges in mourning. The procession was saluted
in their passage by all the ships in the river, and the Tower guns. In
the evening, the body was interred in the Abbey with great pomp; the
lord-general and his council, with all the officers of the navy and army
then in town, attending the funeral.' After the Restoration, his body,
together with those of twenty others of his contemporaries, was removed
and re-interred in the adjoining churchyard. The sympathies of his
biographer may be inferred from the following comments on this act of
Charles II. and his advisers. 'If their bodies had been decently removed
from the church to the churchyard, no blame can justly attach to the
King for the removal, for he naturally desired to clear his own family
vaults of those whom he might undoubtedly regard as intruders. But it is
not quite so certain that the removal and re-interment were so
decorously conducted as tradition says they were. The present Dean of
Westminster, with the laudable desire of ascertaining not only the
place, but also the manner of re-burial, caused, in November, 1869, the
ground to be opened on the spot supposed to be the grave of the removed,
but found no evidence of a decent and careful interment, such as
fragments of coffins, and skeletons lying side by side in the order of
deposit, but only a confused mass of bones, so mixed together as to
suggest an irreverent emptying of coffins into a large common pit. The
Dean, and other members of the Chapter who accompanied him, went away,
and still remain in the charitable hope that they have failed in
discovering the deposit which they sought, but have fallen in with some
other not unusual spectacle in crowded churchyards, where the callous
sexton of one generation shovels away the coffinless bones of the
preceding, to make room for the bodies of his own contemporaries who may
have occasion for his services. It is earnestly to be hoped that such
was the case here, and that the only indignity to which Richard Deane
and Robert Blake were exposed, was the removal of their remains from the
burial place of kings to that of ordinary Christians, with no other
memorial of their names than that of their deathless renown. Be the case
as it may, these facts are certain, they fought on the same deck, died
in the same cause, and were buried in the same pit. They had been loving
and pleasant in their lives, and in their graves they were not divided.'
We congratulate Mr. Deane on the ability, the fairness, and the
diligence which he has brought to his praiseworthy undertaking. He has
rendered the historical student admirable service.
_John Wesley and the Evangelical Reaction of the Eighteenth Century._ By
JULIA WEDGEWOOD. Macmillan and Co.
_The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of the
Methodists._ By Rev. L. TYERMAN. Vols. I. and II. Hodder and Stoughton.
Our literary and ecclesiastical authorities are much occupied at present
with the life-work and surroundings of John Wesley, with his relation to
the Church of England, and with the probable position that would have
been assigned to an ecclesiastical reformer, or revivalist, occupying in
the Church of Rome a position analogous to that of John Wesley in the
English Church. We do not endorse the big words with which Mr. Tyerman
opens up his subject. 'Is it not a truth (he asks) that Methodism is the
greatest fact in the history of the Church of Christ? Methodism has now
existed one hundred and thirty years. Is there any other system that has
spread itself as widely in an equal period? We doubt it.' Whether the
victories of Methodism over other ecclesiastical organizations, or over
religious indifferentism, or over the stubborn resistance to God's truth
of the barbarian or the idolater, can be paralleled with the past
successes of the Apostolic Church or not, and whether numbers or area
can now be used as measures of greatness, may be considered open
questions, but no ecclesiastical writer pretending to honour truth or
candour can hide his eye to the fact of Methodism, or to the vitality it
displays at the present moment. We are thankful for this instalment of
Mr. Tyerman's valuable work. There is a mine of wealth, a store-house of
treasure, in the unimpeachable diary and authentic correspondence
contained in this first volume, which will amply repay most careful
attention.
Miss Julia Wedgewood, in our opinion, has done very excellent service.
She has not attempted to write a memoir of John Wesley or his brother,
or a history of Methodism, nor has she kept up a chronological
continuity in her fascinating pages, but she has shown us the remarkable
figure of Wesley upon a great variety of backgrounds. Methodism at
Oxford, with its first obstacles in the painfully exacting conscience
and scrupulosity of Wesley himself, becomes a vivid sketch of Oxford
life at the commencement of the eighteenth century. Methodism in
Virginia becomes an impressive representation of the relation of England
to her colonies. The conflict of Methodism with Bristol and Cornwallese
colliers; its hand to hand fight with the devils of hysteria and fear,
and with those of bigotry and exclusiveness; with Moravian theology, and
with Calvinism and its old problem of the universe, are all well told in
a succession of bright and thoughtfully conceived pictures. There is
very remarkable candour, much good sense, and wise use of material in
her work; and the volume will bring the high enthusiasm and glorious
earnestness of Wesley into contact with classes that would remain
strangers to the more elaborate biographical details of Mr. Tyerman. The
subject is so large--so important in all its bearings--that we cannot
dismiss these works with a cursory notice; we shall hope, at an early
date, to return to the literature and ecclesiastical position of the
Wesleys.
_Memorials of the late Rev. William M. Bunting; being Selections from
his Sermons, Letters, and Poems._ Edited by the Rev. G. STRINGER ROWE.
With a Biographical Introduction by THOMAS PERCIVAL BUNTING. Wesleyan
Conference Office.
The characteristic of William Bunting which all who knew him would
assuredly mention first was an unbounded power of loving; and as the
effect of this as near an embodiment of the 'charity' of the Epistle to
the Corinthians as is perhaps possible to men who love truth and the God
of truth. 'Grace to all them that love the Lord Jesus Christ in
sincerity,' was not only a sentiment upon his lips, it was an
instinctive, irrepressible feeling of his heart. Few men were more
attached to his own Church; few men had more large-hearted and loving
appreciation of the good men and good things of all other Churches.
Charity was the 'bond of his perfectness.' Wherever Christ was to be
served, the souls of men benefited, faithful preachers to be heard,
fervent worship to be joined in, there, according to his opportunity,
William Bunting was to be found. Our cathedrals were familiar with his
tall, attenuated, intellectual figure. In any Nonconformist congregation
in London, where worship and preaching were edifying, he was at any time
as likely to be found as in a Wesleyan Chapel. Few of the principal
Nonconformist pulpits were unfamiliar with his ministrations. His
friends were the best ministers of every evangelical church. He was a
lover of all good men, and all good men loved him. He was a kind of
_tertium quid_, around which the best men and feelings of the different
sects crystallized into beautiful forms of charity. No one thought of
him as belonging to any one section of the Church; the feeling towards
him was that he belonged to all. This volume of memorials will be valued
by his friends. The brief biographical sketch by his brother is
sufficient for the record of his uneventful life; it is racy and piquant
in its style, yet fervent and tender in its love and devout sympathy.
As a preacher, Mr. Bunting was diffuse and therefore lengthy, and
sometimes tedious, although his brother testifies to his great
efficiency.
As a letter-writer he was wonderfully loquacious; some of his letters,
as he says, 'as long as a life,' even as abbreviated here, filling eight
or ten pages of print. Rarely could he have said with Paul, 'I have
written a letter unto you in few words:' but they are wonderfully
loving, enthusiastic and brilliant, full of delicate sympathy and
beautiful piety and charity.
Chiefly, however, Mr. Bunting excelled as a writer of hymns. Two or
three of his compositions have found their way into popular hymnals, and
are not likely to be forgotten. The tender pathos of the 'Song in the
Night Season,'
'Thou doest all things well,'
has not often been surpassed.
_The Life of Arthur Tappan._ With Preface by the Rev. NEWMAN HALL,
LL.D. Sampson Low and Co.
Mr. Tappan was a New York merchant, of a type which the _laudator
temporis acti_ would tell us was once not uncommon, but is now rarely to
be met with either in America or England. This we are loth to believe.
There are still, thank God, not a few upright, God-fearing,
noble-hearted men, who will do and dare whatever righteousness and
religion may demand. Mr. Tappan was eminently one who 'feared God and
eschewed evil,' whose business was as much a religion to him as
church-worship. His one simple maxim was to do right at any cost. He is
said to have been the first man in America 'to make use of money in
large sums for benevolent objects.' Certainly he was generous, to the
verge of prudence; and when reverses came upon him he did not begin
retrenchment with the things of God. His high-toned morality did not
always square with the morals of Wall-street, and often involved him in
perplexing and ludicrous entanglements; but nothing could shake his
determination to do right. Several business friends wished to help him
in his pecuniary difficulties, but urged upon him as a tacit condition
the desirableness of lessening his anti-slavery denunciations. His short
and decisive answer was, 'I will be hung first.' He was the prime mover
and leader of many things, greatest and best, in the religious life of
America. He was president of the Anti-Slavery Society, and one of the
founders of the Bible Society, the Tract Society, Oberlin College, and
the American Education Society--to all of which he gave large pecuniary
and laborious personal assistance. He was a kind of American John
Thornton in his religious philanthropy. He fought many a fierce and
fearless battle, especially in the anti-slavery cause--when to be its
advocate was to imperil life. He was mobbed, and had a price set upon
his head. A more beautiful, single-hearted, noble life of integrity,
industry, fearlessness, and generosity has rarely been lived. His
closing days at Newhaven have an interesting setting of New England
Puritanism, and were quiet, devout, and beautiful. In a higher sense
than mere amassing of money he was a 'successful merchant.' Our
merchants will do well to read this interesting memoir, and to learn
anew from it the old lesson that 'the fear of the Lord is, indeed, the
beginning of wisdom.'
_Journeys in North China, Manchuria, and Eastern Mongolia; with some
Account of Corea._ By the Rev. ALEXANDER WILLIAMSON, B.A., Agent of the
National Bible Society of Scotland. With Illustrations and 2 Maps. Two
vols. Smith, Elder and Co.
Mr. Williamson has contributed to the literature of travel and of
science another of those thorough, sober, and instructive books which
have been one of the incidental results of Christian Missions. To the
ordinary advantages over casual visitors, which long residence and
familiar intimacy gives to a missionary, and to the conscientiousness
which his religious position and character impose upon him, Mr.
Williamson, as a highly-educated medical man, adds a higher degree of
scientific knowledge than many of his brethren possess, which qualifies
him to speak of the configuration, products, and possibilities of the
country in a way that will impart valuable knowledge. Mr. Williamson
first visited China as a missionary in connection with the London
Missionary Society. His health failed after two or three years'
residence, and he returned to England. On the re-establishment of his
health he returned to China, about seven years ago, as an agent of the
National Bible Society of Scotland. These volumes are, virtually, the
journal-records of eight extensive journeys through various parts of
North China, which he has made in the prosecution of his evangelistic
labours. It need scarcely be remarked that a man so occupied, the very
business of whose life is to travel from place to place, and to
cultivate familiar intercourse with the people, has opportunities for
the acquisition of knowledge, to which no mere casual traveller, or
resident merchant, or professional man can pretend. Accordingly, Mr.
Williamson's volumes are full of minute, thorough, and novel information
of all kinds concerning the country and the people; they are utilitarian
enough for a blue book, while they have the general interest of a book
of travels in countries of which we are almost entirely ignorant. We do
not, in fact, remember two volumes the information of which is so
valuable, and the interest of which is so great, at this particular
juncture especially, when our peaceful relations with China are again in
peril. Our Government, as well as the general public, may gather from
them more accurate and extensive information respecting the sources and
character of Chinese feeling towards us, than from any other source
whatever--not excepting even the valuable and intelligent information
furnished by our diplomatic agents. Mr. Williamson has been among the
people as distinguished from officials, and he speaks confidently
concerning the peacefulness and friendliness of their disposition
towards Protestant missionaries. He travelled unarmed, and encountered
no violence or rudeness, nothing more than the occasional attempts at
extortion with which travellers are not unfamiliar in London and New
York. They are grossly ignorant, and in some places look upon Europeans
as a different species of beings. 'In some places they calls us
"devils," not in impertinence, but in genuine ignorance of our origin
and character; so much so, that they often use this term with
complimentary prefixes, as _e.g._, their practice of calling a friend of
ours Kwhe tze ta jen, "His Excellency the Devil." Moreover, they often
use this term in our courts of justice. In other places they look upon
us as a race of fierce men not quite up to the mark in mental powers.
Many a time have foreigners been provoked by Chinamen coming up to them,
patting them on the shoulder, and caressing them just as we would a huge
Newfoundland dog, or a semi-tamed lion. Nor is this all. They appear in
many districts to look upon us as a species of fools. Often have I
observed Chinamen address myself and others just as mendacious
nursery-maids address children, as if we were incapable of seeing
through their barefaced lies and shallow deceit.' The Imperial claim is
as preposterous as ever--as shown by the refusal to receive Prince
Alfred--and is a serious obstacle in national intercourse. Lord Elgin
attempted effectually to destroy this by a march on Peking, which was
baffled by the flight of the Emperor to Tartary. The Chinese people
sadly lack truth, uprightness, and honour, the fear of God. The opium
trade, which has been our great disgrace, and which has, it is feared,
extended beyond all legislative or diplomatic control, is the deadly
curse of the country. 'There are literally millions,' says Mr.
Williamson, 'to whom opium is more valuable than life. The only hope is
the creation of a public opinion against it among those who abstain from
the poison, and among the young; so that the generation of opium smokers
may, in due course, die out. The reformation has already commenced, and
only needs to be fostered and systematized.'
The Roman Catholics are much disliked by the Chinese, chiefly because of
the outrages committed by the French soldiers during the late war--the
fatal blunder into which our neighbours always fall in their dealings
with weaker nations, or in their attempts to colonize: wherever they go,
they invariably succeed in getting themselves well hated. Another cause
of dislike to the Roman Catholics is the assumptions of the priests, and
their arbitrary claims to property. 'There is no hostility on the part
of the people towards Protestant missionaries.' And Mr. Williamson
thinks that 'were the matter of inland residence made a provision in
treaty engagements, there would be little or no difficulty in carrying
it out.' The hostility of the mandarins during the last year or two, the
Tien-tsin massacres, and other indications of dislike in the governing
classes, are attributed by Mr. Williamson to 'the ultra-liberal policy
of our Government, and especially to that outburst of hostile criticism
in the spring of 1869, on the part of our officials and leading
politicians and writers at home, all of which was duly communicated to
the Chinese authorities, leading them to believe either that we were
sure of our strength, or had lost all interest in our countrymen in
China.' Mr. Williamson lays great stress on a demand being made for
'inland residence under proper sanction;' and he argues this from the
perfect success of the experiment, so far as it has been made.
'Protestant missionaries, British, German, and American, have been
labouring unmolested for some years, in many of their inland cities.'
The Chinese opponents of missionaries are not the people, but corrupt
officials, who oppose everything foreign and everything calculated to
enlighten or improve the moral tone of the people. Mr. Williamson's
reply to such diplomats and writers as denounce the missionaries in
China, or sneer at them, is not only conclusive, it is perfectly
crushing. Five powerful foreign legations have for several years
resided in Pekin, viz., the British, American, French, Russian, and
Prussian. They had very able men and very great facilities. Not long
ago, the head of the British Legation thought fit to taunt the
missionaries, by urging them to begin by converting the higher classes,
adding that 'China would be raised through them, not in spite of them.'
Mr. Williamson pertinently asks, what with all their ability and
opportunities they have done, and unhesitatingly answers, nothing! All
the European books, lesson books, and books of science especially, which
it is no part of the missionary's function to produce, have been
compiled or translated by them. 'Dr. Hobson has given them works on
Physiology; on the Principles and Practice of Surgery; on the Practice
of Medicine and Materia Medica; on the Diseases of Children; on the
Elements of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy. Mr. Wylie has given them
the whole of _Euclid_; De Morgan's _Algebra_, in thirteen books; Loomis'
_Analytical Geometry and Differential and Integral Calculus_, in
eighteen books, and also the first part of Newton's _Principia_ which is
now in process of completion. Mr. Edkins has translated Whewell's
_Mechanics_, and given them many other contributions on science and
Western literature. Mr. Muirhead has produced a work on English history,
and another on universal geography. Dr. Bridgman has published a finely
illustrated work on the United States of America. Dr. W. P. Martin has
translated Wheaton's _International Law_, and just published an
elaborately illustrated work in three large volumes, on Chemistry and
Natural Philosophy. Other missionaries have given them works on
Electro-telegraphy, Botany, and elementary treatises on almost every
subject of Western science.' Would it not be as well for some of these
diplomatic gentlemen to employ their abundant leisure in emulating,
rather than in sneering at the earnest philanthropy of these
hard-working missionaries. Until they can show something like such a
list of contributions to Chinese enlightenment, shame should keep them
silent, even if they are incapable of generous appreciation.
These matters, however, are only touched in the introductory part of Mr.
Williamson's book, which is an intelligent traveller's account of China
and the Chinese. It is full of matter for quotation; but for this we
have no space. At one of the temples in Manchuria, Mr. Williamson saw an
instrument, which was the famous praying machine. 'Prayers are pasted
both on the inside and outside of the barrels, which being turned round,
their prayers are presented, as they suppose, to their god.' Some
curious church music was aided by 'two trumpets, each of which was about
twelve feet long, with a mouth two feet in diameter; they were mounted
on small wheel-carriages, like guns, and the players reclined upon the
ground when playing.' This was in the famous Temple of Do-la-nor. At one
place the landlord, having no clock, fastened a huge fat cock under Mr.
Williamson's bed, lest he should oversleep himself. We will add only,
that the book is written in a plain, business-like style, that it is
full of valuable facts, that, in appendices, Mr. Edkins and others have
contributed valuable papers, and that, in our judgment, it is one of the
most sterling and instructive, as it is one of the most modest books of
travels that has appeared for years.
_Westward by Rail: the New Route to the East._ By W. F. RAE. Longmans,
Green and Co.
The temptations to fulsome eulogy or to exaggerated caricature are, to a
writer of a book of American travels, so great and are so rarely
resisted, that Mr. Rae, as a signal exception, deserves the very highest
praise. His feeling to America and Americans is evidently of the
kindest, and yet he has had such a wholesome fear of fulsome praise,
that he has put himself under almost undue restraint--the greys
predominate in his colouring. He has everywhere manifestly endeavoured
to see things as they are and to describe them as he saw them; the
result is a sober, judicious, intelligent book, that vouches for its own
trustworthiness. Mr. Rae describes only the route across the American
continent from New York to San Francisco by the Great Pacific Railway.
He tells us that the basis of his book is two series of letters which
appeared in the _Daily News_, revised and recast. He writes in an easy,
accustomed style, as men write whose pen is the weapon with which they
fight the battle of life. He has imagination enough and descriptive
power enough to redeem his narrative from the dryness of a log, and he
has sufficiently large and varied knowledge of the world to qualify him
to form wise, practical, and genial estimates of things. Much in
American life is novel and experimental, and demands in its judge no
small power of constructive imagination. Much in American feeling is
provincial, wayward, and almost morbidly sensitive, and needs great
candour for the appreciation of its fresh, generous, and noble elements.
The Americans are rapidly outgrowing some of the follies of their youth;
there are still in the practical administration of politics and social
economies many things--worse than follies--that belie the noble
principles of their constitution, and that the warmest friends of
America cannot but look upon with anxiety. The extent of administrative
corruption, the unscrupulousness of party politics, not only as towards
each other but as towards other nations--such passionate, undignified,
and manifestly venal messages as the one just sent to Congress by
President Grant for instance, with the political interpretations of
which it is susceptible--render it a question of great solicitude
whether these are the moral weaknesses of childhood, which experience
and discipline will cure, so as to develope a nation high and courteous
in political as in social and personal honour, or whether its political
maturity will manifest the faithlessness and unscrupulousness which so
sadly stain the escutcheons of some European nations, and which
necessitate a constant and suspicious vigilance; we strongly hope in the
higher developement, but the centenary of the nation's birth is near at
hand, and we are longing to see a high-minded government and policy
such as we do not see yet.
Mr. Rae describes with smartness, the railways and cars and travelling
ways of America as they have often been described. He especially
commends to our own greater railway companies the luxury of Pullman's
sleeping cars, and we heartily endorse the recommendation. It is no
small luxury to be able to go to bed while traveling at the rate of
thirty miles an hour in America--of from forty to fifty here--those who
cannot sleep may at any rate enjoy a sprawl with disencumbered limbs. We
would also add a recommendation of the check system with luggage; what
should prevent our companies giving passengers a check, to which a
corresponding number is affixed to the piece of luggage, so that the
latter might be delivered to the porter or a servant presenting the
check? The comfort of being delivered from all anxiety about luggage is
a great luxury of American travel. Mr. Rae describes Chicago 'the Garden
City,' 'the Queen of the West,' 'the Queen of the Lakes,' as it is
proudly called. Forty years ago it was a log fort, to-day 300,000
well-to-do people, many of them as wealthy merchants as any in the
States, occupy in palatial residences one of their most imposing cities.
Mr. Rae's account of the Mormons is not very eulogistic, and is we
suspect much nearer the truth than most of the superficial accounts, the
result of an hour's conversation, note-book in hand, that have reached
us. Brigham Young's peculiar institution does not commend itself even on
utilitarian grounds: the intolerance, jealousy and violence of the
Mormon city, restrained only by the adjacent United States' camp, must
make it an unenviable residence: while even the vaunted industry of the
residents is seriously qualified in Mr. Rae's estimate of what has been
done in relation to the condition of the place. We commend Mr. Rae's
careful study of Mormondom to all who have been fascinated by the
glamour of writers like Mr. Dixon. Mr. Rae has much to say concerning
California, the enterprise of the people and their great future; but he
gives special emphasis to their ultra-provincialism, and what surprises
us more, implies a slighting estimate of their hospitality. Of their
literature he speaks in glowing terms--indeed he seems to think the
provincial press of the States superior to the New York press. Mr. Rae's
book is restricted to the route which he travelled, and to matters
connected with it; it is therefore limited in its range. He has also a
slight tendency to preach, but, as a whole, his book may be very highly
commended as an honest and successful attempt to represent Brother
Jonathan as he really is.
_A Voyage round the World._ By the Marquis de BEAUVOIR. In Two vols.
John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1870.
These charming volumes come before us with every claim to interest. The
author is a Frenchman without national prejudice--a mere boy in years
without either self-sufficiency or vain-glory--a nobleman of high degree
without _morgue_ or arrogance, to whom fortune has allotted an
inestimable opportunity of improving the gifts of nature by sending him
as companion to the young Duc de Penthièvre, on this easy, pleasant
'Voyage round the World.' All these conditions unite to predispose the
reader to a series of novel emotions in traversing an already beaten
track. The Duc de Penthièvre is introduced to us as a young man of high
intelligence and sterling character, who, in spite of his youth, had
already seen six years of service in the United States' navy, and gained
promotion therein by merit alone--not as homage to his position as scion
of a royal house. The princes of the House of Orleans have been apt
scholars in the great school of adversity. It would be well for France
if the lessons they have been learning could be turned to account in the
government of their own country. We learn from M. de Beauvoir's preface
that, during the space of three months, three princes of Orleans left
Europe to see if in some distant land they might not utilize their
talents and energy, as at present they were unable to devote them to the
service of their own. The Duc d'Alençon entered the Spanish service, and
took command of the artillery during the glorious expedition to the
Philippine Islands; the Prince de Condé went to India and Australia,
where death cut him off at the commencement of his career; and the Duc
de Penthièvre, the Prince de Joinville's son, started on a voyage round
the world. No greater proof of the great change which has come over the
social world of France could be found than this announcement made so
simply by our author.
The two volumes under review are devoted to Australia, Java, Siam, and
Canton. The novel judgments of men and things, attributable to the
extreme youth and exceptional position of the writer, gives an entirely
original insight into the manners and customs of the higher classes of
these different countries. Naturally enough, we turn at once to
Australia. Throughout the whole of the volume which treats of Australia,
the national pride of the English reader is gratified to its fullest
extent, not by empty praise of material wealth and rich produce, but by
solid admiration of the perseverance, tenacity of purpose, and high
intelligence with which the mother country has resisted all temptation
to impose a yoke upon her distant children; and has thereby caused their
hearts to cling closer to her own, than those of her nearer and dearer
progeny. We can readily sympathise with the pleased astonishment which
seizes upon the Marquis de Beauvoir, when he contrasts the wise
abstention from all interference in the local government of the colony,
with the petty and vexatious pressure of French authority in Algeria.
One instance of the equity of the law as practised in the colony,
contrasted with the following of its mere letter, peculiar to the
tribunals of Europe, we cannot pass over.
'In going through the workshops we remarked two native blacks, mere
children, and utterly hideous, but with a perfectly gentle expression.
Their extremely white teeth exposed to view by a mouth split from ear to
ear, formed a strong contrast with their black skins, as their jolly and
perpetual laugh did with the dress which is worn by those condemned to
hard labour for life. Their appearance was so cheerful, that we were
naturally much interested in them. Besides, there was a great deal in
their novelty as aborigines.' All interest in these merry culprits was,
however, at an end, when the visitors were informed that one of them had
murdered three sailors, and the other had waylaid and hacked to pieces
two white women. They had not been condemned to death, because 'they
were natives--and none of the aborigines had as yet been hung--their
instincts and belief being so different, that with them murder is no
crime; they are tamed more by gentleness than cruelty.'
The Marquis expatiates, with true youthful ardour, upon this generous
forbearance, and declares that a government professing such principles
after invading, in the name of civilization, a country occupied by a
barbarian race, deserves the admiration of all Europe. The records of
Sydney law confirm the distinction made between barbarous native and
civilized colonist; for a little while after, seven white men, having
murdered a family of natives, were hung without mercy, to give a good
example to the rising generation of the young colony, who are taught to
pity the blind, ferocious instincts of the native race, and to feel
contempt and horror of the civilized white men guilty of the same
cold-blooded atrocities.
Life in the bush has charms for our youthful author as great as those of
the handsome drawing-rooms of Melbourne and Sydney. After much visiting
amongst the highest circles of Sydney--banqueting at the Government
House, and dancing in the spacious halls of the great officials of the
colony--the buoyant spirits of the young Marquis lead him to throw
himself, _a corps perdu_, into the delights of savage life. His
enthusiastic description of the visit to Mr. Capel--the arrival of the
party at the hut inhabited by the triple millionaire, on the banks of
the Murray river--the glee with which he recounts the danger of fording
the stream, while the horses were left to swim to the bank as best they
could, and the subsequent scramble up the muddy side to Mr. Capel's
dwelling, will make many an English boy's eyes sparkle with delight and
envy as he reads.
We can only mention the journey through Java, Siam, and Canton. Much of
the interest lies in the description of the court of the King of Siam,
rendered familiar to the English public by the recent account of the
'English Governess.' At Hong Kong, the author's admiration of English
rule again breaks forth. And we take our leave of the distinguished
party, of which he appears to have been the very life and soul, with
hearty thanks for the boldness with which the young Marquis has dared to
assert his conviction that the English alone are fitted to found a
colony, and that no other nation is possessed of the patience, the
calmness, and true sense of justice which are needed to render the
natives submissive to civilization and the yoke of the foreigner.
_Fair France._ By the Author of 'John Halifax, Gentleman.' Hurst and
Blackett.
At a time when France is torn and tortured by the most terrible war the
world has ever known, it seems strange to open a volume of peaceful
travel in the beautiful country which most of us know so well, and which
has undergone such an unparalleled transformation. The authoress (_pace_
Thackeray) of this charming volume is well known to the public as a
novelist, and however critical judgments may vary as to her artistic
power, of her purity of tone and freedom from the vicious tendencies of
modern fictitious literature, there can be no question. For our own
part, we find her even more agreeable as a tourist than as a novelist.
She looks at the world with unprejudiced eyes; she finds that even
French _curés_ are human beings, and not the frightful demons that they
appear to the excited imagination of the honourable member for
Peterborough. We have, in these days, been accustomed to travellers of
many kinds: there is the sensational tourist, who bursts into mysterious
eloquence on the slightest provocation; and there is the cynical
tourist, who with upturned nose regards all the world as a gigantic
imposture--looking up into the dome of St. Peter's, or down into the
crater of Etna, and contemptuously remarking that 'there is nothing in
it.' But the truly pleasant traveller is the man or woman who starts
with intent to enjoy the trip, who looks at the bright side of
everything, and who, writing a book, writes cheerily and gaily. This is
precisely what we find in 'Fair France.' The dedication deserves to be
quoted: 'I inscribe "Fair France"--France of yesterday--to those heroic
and suffering souls in the France of to-day, who yet suffer in hope,
seeing light through the darkness, and believing in a new and nobler
"France of to-morrow."' That new and nobler France is no dream of the
ivory gate. This siege of Paris, to which the siege of Troy seems
trivial, will purge the French people of many evil qualities, and leave
them greater than before. This is the belief of all who know them
well--who know how their higher life has been eclipsed by noxious
influences. However this war may terminate, and whatever may be the fate
of the country of Lothair, it is pretty certain that the fatal follies
which have misguided the French people are now exploded for ever.
_The Land of the Sun._ By Lieutenant C. R. LOW. Hodder and Stoughton.
1870.
This book makes no pretensions to be regarded as a regular diary of
connected travel, but is a series of vivid sketches of such places in
the East as the author frequently visited. In a succession of
interesting chapters he carries us from place to place, describing each
locality with many of its historical associations, and his own personal
impressions and incidents of adventure. He tells us something of Aden,
Massowah, and the Red Sea, the Andaman Islands, and many other places
of interest, some of growing importance; leaving us finally at that city
of romance, Bagdad. Those who have commercial relations with 'the Land
of the Sun' will find valuable information in this volume, especially in
the chapters on Aden and Persia. As Mr. Low says, 'The Suez Canal has
opened a new era for Aden and Persia, and indeed for all the ports of
the Red Sea, and it is impossible to exaggerate the mighty future in
store for them.' It did not require that the title-page should inform us
that the writer belonged to the navy, for almost every paragraph
contains expressions which are possible from only a joyous, enthusiastic
sailor-nature. He makes the reader feel as though he were listening to
some clever Jack-tar, who can describe the places and people he has
visited, and can spin a yarn with startling effect. The lieutenant
revels in adventure, and any skirmish excites his vigorous sympathy.
Like a true British sailor, he has an infinite contempt for all his
enemies, and a supreme belief in English seamanship and courage. Our
readers may get considerable instruction and many a hearty laugh out of
this capital book.
_Two Months in Palestine; or, a Guide to a Rapid Journey to the Chief
Places of Interest in the Holy Land._ By the Author of 'Two Months in
Spain.' Nisbet and Co.
This little volume is what its title indicates. It gives useful
information, and records the _impressions du voyage_ of an intelligent
traveller. While it does not wholly refrain from historical reminiscence
and archæological speculation, it touches them lightly, and without
dogmatism. It is a pleasant record of experiences in sacred scenes,
whose interest no number of travellers' books can exhaust. Readers of
'The Leisure Hour' will be familiar with the papers here collected into
a volume.
_Daybreak in Spain: a Tour of Two Months._ By the Rev. J. A. WYLIE,
LL.D. Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1870.
Whatever other distinguishing traits Dr. Wylie may possess, he is at
least a famous hater of the Papacy. In several former volumes he appears
as the earnest champion of Protestantism, and in his vigorous
declamatory rhetoric gives the enemy no quarter. It is no matter of
surprise, therefore, that the remarkable movement in Spain which
preceded and followed the expulsion of Isabella II. should have awakened
his most energetic sympathy. With a _naïveté_ perfectly charming he
informs the reader that he entered Spain on the anniversary of the
Queen's summary dismissal. The coincidence of the two events may be an
important historical incident, but as yet we fail to see it. However, he
presents to us the results of two months' tour in a light sketchy
manner, though in a very readable book. His descriptions of the scenes
and people are sometimes vivid, but they leave the impression of haste
and effort to be striking. The author also compiles a number of
noteworthy facts concerning the progress of the Gospel in that long
unhappy land, which enable us to share his prophetic hopes for its
brighter future. The book would be immensely improved by the omission of
many of those eulogistic paragraphs on the Bible, which mar the
continuity of the narrative, and read like the perorations of
innumerable speeches. The illustrations by Gustave Doré, which he says
(page 12) accompany the first chapter, are wanting in our copy.
_History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the
Spanish Armada._ By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter
College, Oxford. Vols. VIII.-XII. Longmans, Green, and Co. 1870.
This most admirable and faultless reprint of the classic history of a
great period of our annals is now completed. Never have publishers
considered more carefully the convenience and comfort of the general
reader. The volumes are portable, and the type is suited to the most
defective sight. The pleasure of consulting Mr. Froude's works is
moreover enhanced by a copious and well-arranged index, which occupies
no fewer than one hundred pages. The dates are given on every page, from
first to last; and this great work, on which we have so often commented,
is now placed within the reach of thousands who have for their perusal
of it hitherto had to depend on library copies. Whatever difference of
opinion may be entertained as to the justness of certain conclusions,
and the good taste of some revelations, the extraordinary merit of this
history of the most eventful epoch in the development of the English
church, nationality, and constitution, can hardly be exaggerated.
_Sketches from America._ By JOHN WHITE, Fellow of Queen's College,
Oxford. Sampson Low and Co.
Mr. White's book has but very little of the character of a tourist's
book of travels, although it is, he tells us, 'founded upon a tour that
was undertaken without any design of collecting materials for a book.'
Personal experiences are but little obtruded. We get the most of them in
the second section, 'A Pic-nic to the Rocky Mountains.' The party
consisted of newspaper editors and Mr. G. F. Train; who probably is an
editor, and a dozen things besides. This personal part of Mr. White's
book indicates a keen observer and a graphic pen. We would gladly, had
we space, extract some of the amusing incidents of his journey. The
first and third parts of the book--on Canada, and on the Irish in
America--are disquisitions founded in part upon personal observation,
but chiefly upon facts and opinions collected from diversified sources
with care and discrimination. They constitute, therefore, a series of
judgments by Mr. White, and are to be taken simply as such, _quantum
valeat_. We are bound to say, however, that they are marked by great
moderation, scholarly intelligence, and plausible credibility. But
clearly, other observers equally well-informed and judicial, might come
to very different conclusions. We can only indicate some of Mr. White's
opinions. He points out acutely the distinctive characteristics of the
Canadians; their many points of difference from the citizen of the
States, both in manners, feeling, and political interest. Canadians are
strong in a theoretic loyalty, and are proud of their English
belongings, while they have very little of patriotic passion. The Irish
in Canada are not, Mr. White thinks, so loyal as is often boasted,
although they are less hostile than the Irish in America. They feel no
affection for the English, and, as a class, desire annexation. The
French Canadians are contented without being patriotic. They are not
annexationists, and see nothing better for themselves than English rule.
The best classes in Canada, like those in the States, studiously eschew
politics, and affect indifference, even while the streets of Montreal
are crowded at an exciting election. Mr. White conveys no very exalted
idea of the dignity of Canadian legislation, by the account he quotes of
the behaviour of the members of the Ottawa Parliament singing choruses
and indulging in other forms of obstructive boisterousness all night.
'Men, not measures,' is the Canadian political motto, although to a less
extent than in the United States. Mr. White gives a good account of the
Church legislation of the last few years, and of its beneficial results,
which we commend to our Church and State partisans. While admitting that
the feeling of Canada is adverse to annexation with the States, Mr.
White seems to think that commercial interests and necessities will make
it inevitable--a forecast from which there is both room and reason for
differing.
Mr. White's book is, throughout, written with an amount of information,
a scholarly intelligence and care, and a studied moderation of feeling,
which place it above most books of its class, and entitle it to a
permanent place in the library. It will have value when the interest of
ephemeral books of mere travel has passed away.
POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND ART.
_The Transformation of Insects._ By P. MARTIN DUNCAN, F.R.S. Cassell,
Petter, and Galpin.
The metamorphoses of insects comprise some of the most interesting
phenomena of the most attractive class in the animal kingdom. They lose
none of their attractions in the hands of the enterprising publishers to
whose energy the public are already indebted for so many handsome and
profusely illustrated works on various branches of natural history.
The present volume, like the rest, abounds in pictures of all kinds,
from those which are diagrammatic, and should accompany a scientific
treatise, to those which are highly pictorial and life-like; and they
are all of high merit. Of course, the illustrations, for the most part,
are not original. They do not come from the hand of the author, nor were
they designed to illustrate his text. No work with such first-class
engravings, drawn expressly to elucidate the meaning of a writer, could
be produced at ten times the cost of the book before us. Collected from
all sources, and more or less judiciously distributed through the
volume, the plates constitute the chief value of the work. The
letter-press, however, like the illustrations, is full of interesting
matter. Almost all the well-known facts which science has revealed to us
concerning the whole life-history of the _Arthropoda_, are stripped of
their technical phraseology, invested in an amusing, and sometimes a
grotesque garb, and displayed so as to attract those to whom real
scientific study would be repulsive. To our youth, and to that numerous
class of casual and unscientific observers of Nature who rather delight
in interesting facts than in the causes which underlie them, 'The
Transformation' will, no doubt, be found amusing and satisfactory. On
the other hand, we are bound to state that there is nothing in the book
before us, either in the shape of original contribution to our
information, or of philosophic grouping of phenomena into wider
generalizations, which will really assist the scientific student.
We have purposely mentioned the publishers rather than the author as the
originators of this work, because the resources of the former are far
more evident than those of the latter. Probably no one but the
publishers could have produced so handsome and entertaining a volume at
so small an expense, while almost any one might have been the author of
it. We have also designedly made the plates occupy the first place in
our commendation. It is evident that the book was made to order from a
large stock in hand. We do not wish to disparage the work at all, or any
more than is necessary to let the public know exactly what it is. Such a
book would not be written except to order, and could not be so good
unless there were a large stock of material on hand. Such books have a
definite use, and this particular book is good of its kind. It is, as it
professes to be, an 'adaptation of M. Emile Blanchard's work.' If the
author had done for his own work what he has done for M. Blanchard,
_i.e._, 'eliminated large portions which, although very interesting, do
not refer directly to the phenomena of metamorphosis,' we should have
been deprived of half the volume; and as the illustrations could hardly
have been crowded more closely together, we should have lost them also,
and this would have been a great pity. That the letter-press is but
accessory, and sometimes hardly accessory, to the pictures is abundantly
manifest. Thus, at p. 366, we have a beautiful engraving representing
the transformations of _Cicada fraxini_--an insect belonging to, and
even the type of, the homopterous division of the order
'Hemiptera'--incorporated, without reference to it, into the chapter on
the 'Neuroptera;' while, in the chapter on the 'Hemiptera,' the
metamorphosis of the same species is described without reference to the
engraving.
The term 'insects' is used in the old Linnæan sense, and not according
to its more modern and definite scientific signification, and so is made
to include not only moths, bees, beetles, locusts, dragon-flies, bugs,
and flies, and the orders of which they are the types, but also
spiders, hundred-legs, and crustaceans. _The Metamorphoses of the
Arthropoda_ would be the more correct title, but this would not have
been so popular, and therefore not so well suited to a popular work.
This dominant idea of rendering the book popular is always kept in view.
Thus, when we have a description of the habits of that popular
favourite, the water spider (_Argyroneta aquatica_), it is hoped, no
doubt with some degree of confidence, that we shall be so pleased with
the wonderful facts, that we shall forgot to ask why a species which has
no metamorphosis, and belongs to a genus, family, and order which never
exhibit transformations, should have been introduced to our notice at
all. Again, when we are facetiously told that _Cimex lectularius_ drops
from the ceiling on to sleepers, and grows more or less rapidly
according to the temperature of the room and corpulency of its
inhabitants, and we have 'to thank Providence that it has no wings,' it
would be ill-natured to inquire whether the statements are strictly
accurate, and with regard to the latter statement, to whom we are
indebted for the rest of the anatomy?
Mr. Duncan thinks it only just that M. E. Blanchard should be relieved
from the authorship of opinions as to the nature of metamorphosis
contained in this work, but as the only part of the book which treats of
metamorphosis philosophically consists of a long, well-chosen, and
acknowledged quotation from Newport's 'Essay,' we think this delicate
sense of justice somewhat misplaced.
We cannot too highly recommend the 'Transformation of Insects' as a
glorious picture-book full of moderately trustworthy anecdotes; but we
warn all students of physiology or natural history that there is no such
royal road to learning as its pages present.
_Rome and the Campagna: an Historical and Topographical Description of
the Site, Buildings, and Neighbourhood of Ancient Rome._ By ROBERT BURN,
M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. Deighton and Co.
1871.
There is something singularly opportune in the publication of this book
at this time. Rome, dear to all men of taste, for its countless
treasures in the department of the arts--to all scholars, for its
multitudinous associations with relics of classical times--to many a
Christian too, for its memories of our holy religion, has just passed
into new hands, and is henceforth to be subject to other rulers. We will
not affect to regret this. We have long despaired of any substantial
improvement under the _régime_ now happily brought to an end; but there
can be no reason, in the nature of things, why modern Rome should be the
worst drained and dirtiest of Christian cities, and why the Pontine
marshes, once so fruitful, should now be a pestiferous waste. We believe
that a thorough revolution may be worked, both in Rome itself and all
around it, not only without any detriment to those precious relics of
the old world with which this volume deals, but with great advantage to
them; and we hope to read ere long of the appointment of a commission
(we are not sure what is the proper Italian word for it) with some such
man as the Cavaliere Rosa at its head, whose business it shall be to
guard with jealous care whatever already discovered may interest the
student of art or of history, and to watch for new matter of a kindred
nature wherever public works or private enterprise may lay open the
still unworked mines which underlie in all directions the accumulated
rubbish of many centuries in this city of Rome. A board of antiquaries
and artists, with two or three practical men amongst them, may earn for
themselves the gratitude of the civilized world, by an enlightened and
earnest prosecution of this work.
As to the book before us, we can hardly find words to express our sense
of its varied excellence. It has evidently been a _con amore_ labour
with its author; and he has brought to his work the three qualifications
essential to its thorough discharge--learning, sagacity, and zeal. His
references to the classical writings of Rome, and to those who have been
his pioneers in these researches, prove the first; while the accuracy
with which he observes and compares both objects and opinions are
sufficient evidence of the other qualities.
Starting with a geological discussion of the soil on which the city is
built, we are introduced to the original materials for building in Rome
and its immediate neighborhood. There is abundant evidence of volcanic
action in the tufaceous rock which is characteristic of the region; and
this is associated with the depositions of water--both salt and
fresh--and in some cases has been manifestly modified by their action.
Indeed, there is proof that the valleys between the famous hills were
marshes, frequently flooded by the Tiber, down into the early period of
Roman history. There are two sorts of tufa, one more granular, and so
lighter than the other, as well as a fair portion of a limestone rock,
named travertine, harder than either of the tufas; besides these there
is capital clay for bricks, and matter which makes the best mortar in
the world. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that not only during
the Republic, but in later times, when, under the emperors, the wealth
and luxury of the Romans was boundless, the main substance even of the
most magnificent of their buildings was brick; and marble 'facings,'
columns, and pavements came in to give finish and beauty to their solid
brickwork. Indeed, to this fact we owe it that so much is still left to
us. The barbarous rapacity of the Middle Ages, which ruthlessly
appropriated these enrichments, would no doubt have taken all, had all
been marble.
Our author regards the myths which connect the early Romans with the
Greeks, and with the Trojans under Æneas, as belonging rather to the
domain of poetry than history, and confining himself to the facts as
illustrated by these ruins, begins with the Palatine, as the hill
originally occupied by the first fathers of the Romans; and he gives us,
in chronological order, as far as possible, notices of all ruins now
uncovered there. He then passes on to the Capitoline, as having been
occupied next in point of time, dealing with it in the same manner;
after this we return southward to the Aventine; thence, turning east, we
cross the valley of the Circus Maximus to the Cælian Hill, and then
proceed northward to the Esquiline, the Viminal, Quirinal, and Pincian,
in succession. On all these we are introduced to the remains of ancient
buildings; their chronology, their identity, their extent, their present
condition, and their associations with such historic matter as has come
down to us, are all set before us with great accuracy of detail. Then we
cross the Tiber, and visit Janiculum and the Vatican Hill; recrossing
into the valleys among the hills, we visit the Circus Maximus, the
Campus Martius (now occupied by the modern city), and the Via Lata. The
'Forum' (Romanum) is discussed in the earlier part of the work, and with
it the Fora of the emperors, which were meant to supersede it and its
associations, and did so. The line of the walls of Servius, built mainly
of the tufa already mentioned, in large rectangular blocks, is traced
all round the city with ingenious care; and then the more extensive
walls of Aurelian, with notices of the fortifications of the present
day. Before we have done we take a delightful, though hasty, run through
the Campagna. We visit Hadrian, at his villa Tiburtina (Tivoli); Cicero,
at Tusculum (Frascati); and dear old Horace, at his Sabine farm. At
Laurentum we inspect, in detail, the country seat of our communicative
host, the unlucky Pliny, who perished miserably when Pompeii was
destroyed.
We would gratefully acknowledge our sense of obligation to our
intelligent guide; and shall reckon it henceforward as among our
pleasantest reminiscences that we have thus visited with him the spot
where Virginia bled, where Cicero spoke, where Cæsar fell; that we have,
in his company, trodden the Forum, the Capitol, and the Appian way; and
wandered, silent and awe-stricken at their grandeur, in the golden house
of Nero, the Forum of Trajan, the Coliseum of Vespasian, and the baths
of Diocletian.
We must not close our notice without a word about the maps and ground
plans, and the illustrations. All are worthy of the work. Here and
there, in the ground plans, we miss the arrow-head, indicating the
points of the compass, and this, we hold, should always be put in; and
if the illustrations, engraved from photographs, as we are told, are a
trifle too sharp and hard, we gain in accuracy what we lose in beauty,
and would not have it otherwise. We heartily thank Mr. Burn for his
valuable work, and his publishers for the style in which they have put
it forth; and shall be only too happy to find it in our portmanteau when
we next visit Rome.
_The Wonders of Engraving._ By GEORGES DUPLESSIS. Illustrated with Ten
Reproductions in Autotype, and Thirty-four Wood Engravings, by P.
Selher. Sampson Low, Son, and Marston.
This translation of 'Les Merveilles de la Gravure' will doubtless, in
the words of the editor, be 'acceptable to all lovers of this important
and deeply interesting branch of art. It traces from its different
origins in wood engraving and _nielli_, this effort of one high art to
become the handmaid and herald of another, until the genius of the
engraver has developed a comprehensive department of original design and
elaborate artistic work of his own. Our author has told the story of
this development as it unfolds itself in the different schools of
Italian art in Spain, in Flanders, in Holland, in Germany, England, and
France. This necessitates brief sketches of distinguished engravers in
wood or copper, belonging to all these countries, with some account of
their works. As many of these engravers are far better known to fame by
their paintings, we have fresh interesting details concerning the
life-work of Leonardo da Vinci, Marc Antonio Raimondi, Albrecht Dürer,
Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Lucas v. Leyden, Paul Potter, Hogarth, Gillray,
Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorraine, with very many others. The author
rather glories in a clever reference which he made of some anonymous
engraving of the early Italian school to the hand of Leonardo himself,
and in some interesting and independent confirmation of his guess, which
he afterwards derived from other quarters. To those who have not made
the art of engraving a practical and prolonged study, many of these
chapters may have the appearance of a catalogue of strange names, and of
partially comprehended work, rather than of a dissertation to make one
wise. The transition is rapid from one great name to another, and the
volume will be used as a book of reference rather that as a continuous
treatise. The autotype copies of several old engravings, as well as
numerous woodcuts, greatly enliven and enrich the pages. It is very
interesting to see in this department of human endeavour, how great
results have followed accidental discovery. The Italian goldsmiths, who,
before running their enamel (_nigellum_) into the ornamented and
engraved gold, tried the effect of their work by staining paper or
linen, and by the impressions (_nielli_) which the engraved surface when
first washed with colouring matter would produce, no more anticipated
the extraordinary development which their chance trials would receive,
than could the early printers have prophesied the marvels of the modern
printing-press. M. Duplessis has briefly and clearly enumerated and
described all, or nearly all, of the processes of engraving. We are
surprised that he has not given some place to the wonderful process of
lithography. The volume is a marvel of finish and beauty.
_Art in the Mountains._ By HENRY BLACKBURN. London: Sampson Low, Son,
and Marston.
Mr. Blackburn is well-known as a traveller with a special faculty; he
has an artist's eye, and his record of wanderings in Algeria, Spain,
Normandy, are pages of picture. Hence was he the very man to make a
pilgrimage into the Bavarian highlands, and bring back an intelligible
account of that strange Passion-Play performed by the peasants of
Ober-Ammergau; and excellently well he has done it. There is something
strange, something almost weird in the enactment of a mediæval
miracle-play in this nineteenth century--by peasants, too, who are some
of them before Paris by this time, obeying Bismarck's iron will.
Extremes meet in the oddest manner. As to this old-fangled
representation, which has come off once a decade for the last two
centuries, there seems to be nothing irreverent about it. They are a
child-like folk, these Bavarian peasants; they have no Prussian _geist_;
they possess a strong imitative faculty, such as belonged to the first
villagers who, in ancient Greece, originated what we now call comedy.
Mr. Blackburn's illustrations amply show what sort of people they are.
Look at the maiden at page 59, with the mild bovine eye that Homer loves
to attribute to Hebe, and the well-shapen yet utterly unlightened face,
and the comfortable, unfascinating curves of shoulder and arm, a
woman--a dull, good, unimaginative 'young person'--with no tendency
towards witchery or ladyhood. Having examined that portrait, you have no
difficulty in understanding how it is that a Passion-Play lives
alongside the railway and the telegraph. The slow-moving, cow-eyed
maiden is typical; that she would heartily and reverently enjoy the show
of our Lord's Passion is clear enough. But how long she, and such as
she, will crawl on in their snail-like groove, now that our 'own
correspondent' has appeared in Ammergau, now that the representatives of
Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate have gone together to besiege Paris,
is a question not easy to settle. Mr. Blackburn states that there will
probably be ten performances of the Passion Play in 1871, and that then
it will not be repeated till 1880. We commend anybody who really desires
to see it to go to Ammergau next year. We move fast nowadays--that
Bavarian village will be quite another sort of place in 1880.
_Church Design for Congregations: its Developments and Possibilities._
By JAMES CUBITT, Architect. With nineteen plates. Smith and Elder.
The practical divorce of Art and Utility has told nowhere more
disastrously than in the building of churches. Gothic buildings with
'long-drawn aisles and fretted roof,' designed and adapted for the
processional and ritual worship of the Romish Church, have for three
centuries been the dreary reverberating theatres of Protestant reading
and preaching. Perhaps few of us could recall a more comfortless ideal
than a rural parish church in winter, half the congregation excluded
from seeing, and the other half from hearing the monotonous reader of
prayers and sermons. Nonconformists, while rightly deeming that the
Episcopal Church had no monopoly of Gothic architecture, have not been
always wise in their appropriation of it. They have built the old Gothic
church with its nave, two aisles, transepts, and chancel, its clustered
stone pillars and clerestory, utterly unmindful of the fact that of all
styles of ecclesiastical building it was the most unsuited for their
worship and preaching. Their dignified discomfort led to the
substitution of iron columns, as incongruous, and, in artistic effect,
as ugly as anything that could be imagined--'a mediæval church,' as Mr.
Cubitt says, 'in the last stage of starvation.' If we must have nave and
aisles, as he justly remarks, we seem shut up either to bad arrangement
or bad architecture. Fame and fortune await the architect who can create
a new order of buildings for Congregational worship which shall avoid
both. Mr. Cubitt seems ambitious to attempt this, and he breaks a lance
with old conventionalism with great courage and skill. The type that is
required, he says, 'does not present itself in the ordinary nave and
aisles plan, whether its nave-piers are thick or thin; but it may be
hopefully sought in either of these two ways--'by designing our churches
without columns at all, or by designing them with substantial columns
placed where they will cause no obstruction. The former system is
already adopted in small buildings, and there are some signs of its
future employment on a larger scale. It allows great variety of form.
Its plans may be oblong, cruciform, circular, or polygonal; or still
better, a fresh combination of three different elements. On the latter
system the columns may be few in number and far apart, or they may be
placed so near the side walls as to obscure, not the seats, but only the
passages leading to them. We may thus have either the wide nave with
narrow side aisles, or the ordinary nave with very wide bays, or both
together. We may plan a grand open space before the pulpit and communion
table--surely a natural arrangement for a Protestant Church--and we
shall find ample scope for architecture in its external and internal
treatment.' The subsequent chapters are virtually a development and
illustration of these ideas. The writer advocates the admission of the
dome into Gothic architecture; he has much to say on behalf of the
Eastern mosque; and no one who has stood in the vast and simple area of
St. Sophia, at Constantinople, built, it must be remembered, as a
Christian church, could fail to have been greatly impressed with its
magnificent congregational capabilities. Galleries in theatre form, iron
column churches, lanterns, and most other things that perplex church
builders, are discussed. The merit of Mr. Cubitt's work is that it is
strictly utilitarian. It recognises the actual necessities, not only of
Congregational worship, but of Congregational church builders; it boldly
grapples with all inartistic incongruities; it avoids 'schools' and
'orders,' and honestly seeks to supply what is wanted under genuine
artistic conditions. Abundance of plates and drawings illustrate Mr.
Cubitt's theories. We heartily commend this book to all whom it may
concern, as the most independent, intelligent, and scholarly attempt in
the direction indicated that has been made.
POETRY, FICTION, AND BELLES LETTRES.
_The Window; or, the Loves of the Wrens._ Words written for Music, by
ALFRED TENNYSON, Poet Laureate; the Music by ARTHUR SULLIVAN. Strahan.
So many rumours have been for so long in circulation about this volume,
and the names of its joint authors are so eminent, that it is not
surprising it should have excited much curiosity and many hopes. We
venture to predict that neither the curiosity nor the hopes will be
disappointed. Mr. Tennyson's songs need not fear being 'tested' in the
same crucible with the 'Lotos Eaters,' or 'In Memoriam,' or we may add
with 'Maud,' or the 'Princess.' Nor will Mr. Sullivan's music be found
less characteristic of his genius, or other than fully worthy of the
words to which it has been composed.
The 'Window' is, we believe, the first attempt in English--certainly the
first attempt of any eminent English poet--to cast a series of events or
emotions into the form of a set of connected songs. Wordsworth's
well-known series of sonnets are an approach to the same thing; but the
song--a composition of two or three stanzas, suitable to music--is not
so favourite a form with English poets as with those of Germany. There
the cycle of songs--the _Liederkreis_ or _Liedercyclus_--is better
known. Readers of Heine and Chamisso will remember more than one
instance. We are glad to welcome it to English literature, not only as a
new form of verse, but also because of the promise which it gives of
many a marriage between fine poetry and fine music--a marriage hitherto
far too rare among us.
The 'Window,' then, is a 'circle of songs,' twelve in number, describing
the hopes and fears of a lover parted from his mistress, and uncertain
what her reply will be to the great question he has asked her.
In the first--'On the hill'--he stands on the slope of the valley which
separates his home from hers, and as he looks across the distance sees
the flash from the window-pane of his love:--
'The lights and shadows fly!
Yonder it brightens and darkens down on the plain.
A jewel, a jewel dear to a lover's eye!
O is it the brook, or a pool, or her window-pane,
When the winds are up in the morning?
'Clouds that are racing above,
And winds and lights and shadows that cannot be still,
All running on one way to the home of my love,
You are all running on, and I stand on the slope of the hill,
And the winds are up in the morning!'
He knows the window of which the flash has thus come to him, and is
familiar with all the charm both of what surrounds it, and what it
enshrines:--
'Vine, vine, and eglantine,
Clasp her window, trail and twine!
Rose, rose and clematis,
Trail and twine and clasp and kiss,
Kiss, kiss; and make her a bower
All of flowers, and drop me a flower,
Drop me a flower.'
The flowers are there, but their mistress is gone:--
'Gone!
Gone till the end of the year,
Gone, and the light gone with her, and left me in shadow here!
Gone--flitted away,
Taken the stars from the night and the sun from the day!
Gone, and a cloud in my heart, and a storm in the air!
Flown to the east or the west, flitted I know not where!
Down in the south is a flash and a groan: she is there! she is
there!'
The winter comes, but our lover holds out in spite of the season:
'Bite, frost, bite!
You roll up away from the light
The blue woodlouse, and the plump dormouse,
And the bees are still'd and the flies are kill'd,
And you bite far into the heart of the house,
But not into mine.'
and it passes, and spring-time comes, with
'Birds' love and birds' song,
Flying here and there;
Birds' song and birds' love,
And you with gold for hair!
'Birds' song and birds' love
Passing with the weather;
Men's song and men's love,
To love once and for ever.'
At last he can bear the suspense no longer--
'Shall I write to her? shall I go?
Ask her to marry me by and by?
* * * * *
Go little letter, apace, apace;
Fly!
Fly to the light in the valley below--
Tell my wish to her dewy blue eye.'
The letter is sent, and no answer comes; and then he despairs, as he
well may, and in the 'wet west wind' of the spring he wishes himself
dead:
'The mist and the rain, the mist and the rain!
Is it ay or no? is it ay or no?
And never a glimpse of her window-pane!
And I may die but the grass will grow,
And the grass will grow when I am gone,
And the wet west wind and the world will go on.'
The answer is still delayed:--
'Winds are loud and you are dumb:
Take my love, for love will come,
Lore will come but once a life.
Winds are loud, and winds will pass!
Spring is here with leaf and grass:
Take my love, and be my wife.
After-loves of maids and men
Are but dainties drest again:
Love me now, you'll love me then:
Love can love but once a life.'
But at length it comes:--
'Two little hands that meet,
Claspt on her seal, my sweet!
Must I take you and break you,
Two little hands that meet?
I must take you, and break you,
And loving hands must part--
Take, take--break, break--
Break--you may break my heart.
Faint heart never won--
Break, break, and all's done.'--
and its tenour is obvious, from the rapture of the reader--
'Be merry, all birds, to-day,
Be merry on earth as you never were merry before,
Be merry in heaven, O larks, and far away,
And merry for ever and ever, and one day more.
Why?
For it's easy to find a rhyme.'--
the rhyme to 'Why' being of course 'Ay.'
After this the progress of things need no telling.
'Sun comes, moon comes,
Time slips away;
Sun sets, moon sets,
Love, fix a day.
* * * *
"To-morrow, love, to-morrow,
And that's an age away."
Blaze upon her window, sun,
And honour all the day.'
The last song of the series is too fine and too even a union of fancy,
feeling, and art not to be quoted entire--
'Light, so low upon earth,
You send a flash to the sun.
Here is the golden close of love,
All my wooing is done.
O the woods and the meadows,
Woods where we hid from the wet,
Stiles where we stay'd to be kind,
Meadows in which we met!
Light, so low in the vale,
You flash and lighten afar:
For this is the golden morning of love,
And you are his morning star.
Flash, I am coming, I come,
By meadow and stile and wood:
O lighten into my eyes and my heart,
Into my heart and my blood!
Heart, are you great enough
For a love that never tires?
O heart, are you great enough for love?
I have heard of thorns and briers.
Over the thorns and briers,
Over the meadows and stiles,
Over the world to the end of it
Flash for a million miles.'
Surely these songs, even in the fragmentary state in which we have been
forced to give them, will be recognized as the work of a great master,
by everyone who has the feeling and the fancy requisite for any
appreciation of poetry, and are surely as worthy of Mr. Tennyson's
genius as Shakspeare's songs are of his, or the lyrics in 'Wilhelm
Meister' of Goethe's. They are full of the old exquisite art that has
endeared the songs of the 'Princess' to so many thousand hearts. We find
here, as in those and other old favourites, those lovely and
indescribable touches which seem to paint in sound or air the very
things they name--the
'Winds and lights and shadows that cannot be still;'
the
'Wet west wind, how you blow, how you blow;'--
There is the alliteration that is so magical because so seldom used--
'Woods where we hid from the wet,
Stiles where we stay'd to be kind,
Meadows in which we met;'
There are the familiarity with nature and the accurate observation at
once so characteristic of English poetry and of Mr. Tennyson's muse--
'The blue woodlouse and the plump dormouse.'
'The wren with the crown of gold.'
'The fire-crowned king of the wrens from out of the pine!
Look how they tumble the blossoms, the mad little tits!
Cuckoo! Cuckoo! was ever a May so fine;'
There too the hundred links of connexion which bind the twelve songs
into one golden chain--the constant references to the 'light,' or the
'blaze,' or the 'flash,' or the 'window pane,' which form the keynote of
the whole; and lastly the human sentiment at once so deep and broad
which fuses the whole into poetry in its noblest sense--all these
proclaim the deep and abiding worth of this unpretending series of
lyrics.
The Shakspearian ring in one or two of them (especially in No. 8), is as
obvious, though in a different vein, as in any of the well-known lyrics
in the 'Idylls of the King.'
It will be obvious that we do not agree with those who regard Mr.
Tennyson's last effort as 'a trifle from beginning to end.' Slight in
texture it may be, but slightness is not triviality.
Mr. Sullivan's task in setting these charming songs to music has not
been without its difficulties. The very qualities which render verse
characteristic of its author often militate strongly against its
adaptability to music. The subtleties which form the main charm of the
poet may be mere blemishes and hindrances to the musician. Irregularity
of metre and variety of form are among his most serious difficulties.
What the composer requires is a strong pervading sentiment or idea to
inspire character to his music, with regular even verse for the vehicle.
The finest songs of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann are written to
little poems of the simplest structure, almost always in stanzas of four
lines of eight or ten feet, the syllables linked together in easy
concatenation. Such are the 'Auf Flügeln des Gesanges,' the 'Widmung,'
the 'Junge Nonne,' and the 'Sey mir gegrüsst.' Was it instinct or
calculation that led Goethe, Heine, Eichendorff, and other great poets
of Germany, to throw so many of their enchanting thoughts and passionate
emotions into these simple forms? Whichever it was, the end has fully
justified the means; and the poems of these great geniuses have a double
beauty and a double gift of immortality in the strains of their
composer-brethren. Now the very charm of the songs of the 'Window' on
which we have been insisting, and so rightly insisting, are all in
opposition to those of the poems just spoken of. What is he to make of
such stanzas as
'Gone!
Gone till the end of the year,
Gone! and the light gone with her, and left me in shadow here.
Gone--flitted away'?
or such unequal lines as
'Go little letter apace, apace,
Fly!'
or,
'For it's ay, ay, ay, ay, ay;'
or,
'And my thoughts are as quick and as quick, ever on, on, on'?
If we want to see what can be made of them, by what adroit shifts their
difficulties can be avoided and overcome, we have only to turn to Mr.
Sullivan's music; and the examination will well repay the trouble, and
will open the eyes of anyone who was not before aware of the laws which
must govern verse that is to be married to music. No. 6 has been altered
since it was set, and we thus have the advantage of two versions.
For the music itself we must really refer our readers to the book.
Dissertations on music, unless in connection with actual performance,
or with technical study, are very much like attempts to paint a sunrise
in words. At any rate, without musical quotations, any description of
these songs would be unintelligible.
The finest of the set are indisputably the first and the last. Next,
perhaps, for depth of sorrow, comes No. 7, 'The mist and the rain.' No.
3, 'Gone,' with its persistent accompaniment, is beautiful. Of the
tender songs, Nos. 9 and 10 are especially charming, while No. 4 is a
bold air, which we venture to predict will be in the mouth of many an
amateur baritone before a month is out. We have only one word of regret
to add--if regret be not too strong a term. We wish that Mr. Sullivan
had availed himself of the chance which the words gave him to do what
Beethoven has so finely done in his 'Liederkreis,' namely, to
re-introduce the melody of the first song in the last one, and thus make
his work really a 'circle.' But this is so obvious that we do not doubt
he had some sufficient reason for not doing it.
Mr. Sullivan has written many fine songs; and indeed great as is his
genius for the orchestra, it often seems as if it were equally great for
vocal music. And it is not too much to say that in this direction at
least, his last effort has been his greatest, and that these songs
surpass all that he has written before. Of their popularity among the
best class of amateurs--that class which we delight to believe is
rapidly increasing--there can be no doubt. They will want not only good
singing, but what is rarer still, good accompanying, and we trust some
opportunity may be shortly found for their being given in public by Mr.
Reeves and Mr. Stockhausen, or Mr. Santley, accompanied by the composer
himself. After that we are bold enough to hope that he may score some of
them for the orchestra. Connected though they be, they are not
indivisible, and there are several which would not suffer by being taken
from their place in the 'cycle' and transferred singly to the
concert-room.
_The Paradise of Birds._ By WILLIAM JOHN COURTHOPE. Edinburgh: William
Blackwood and Sons.
Verily the young English poet who dares tread in the footsteps of the
Attic Aristophanes has a fine audacity. This does Mr. Courthope, and not
altogether without justification. He is a lover of birds; he is
disgusted at the way in which they are murdered at pigeon matches, and
for the adornment of ladies' hats. He goes to Aristophanes for
inspiration, and gives us a very charming poem as the result. Mr.
Courthope is unquestionably a poet. The fault we find _in limine_ is,
that he is not sufficiently original and varied in rhyme and rhythm, for
a professed follower of Aristophanes. All the birds of the air sing in
the pages of the mighty Greek, sing in character, with the very music
that belongs to them. We cannot say this of Mr. Courthope, yet is he
often fortunate and felicitous. Here is the Nightingale, pitying us
unfeathered bipeds:
'Man that is born of a woman,
Man, her un-web-footed drake,
Featherless, beakless, and human,
Is what he is by mistake.
For they say that a sleep fell on nature
In the midst of the making of things;
And she left him a two-legged creature,
But wanting in wings.'
Wings! ay, that is what we should all of us like. Fancy being able to
soar and tumble in mid-ether, like those pigeons that flash round our
roofs. Fancy having power to follow the summer like 'the temple-haunting
martlet,' which leaves its house under our eaves for a residence
somewhere in Central Asia! What Mr. Courthope wants, in our judgment, is
greater imaginative intensity: he plays laughingly with his theme, and
even so did Aristophanes, his master; but he does not attain as yet the
lofty poetry, the strong humour, which are born of earnestness in
Aristophanes.
_The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis; and other Poems._ By TANKERVILLE
CHAMBERLAYNE, B.A. Hurst and Blackett.
There is curious variety of style, of finish, and of theme in this
little volume. A classical epos is followed by a monody on Lord Derby,
and translations from Horace and Heine. Elegies on Napoleon, Peabody,
and Mozart, are interspersed with love ditties and theological
speculations. A discussion of the probable condition of Napoleon's soul
in the other world is terminated by the following most inappropriate
couplet:--
''Tis ours in peace to let him rest
With hope upon his Saviour's breast.'
There is some spirit and fire in the 'Song of the Rhine,' weakened,
however, by sad doggrel. The impression produced by the whole is, that
an accomplished and well-meaning graduate has favoured the public with
the contents of his college portfolio without due selection.
_Loveland, and other Poems chiefly concerning Love._ By WADE ROBINSON.
London and Dublin: Moffat and Co.
There is a charm of novelty and freshness about these poems. The
thoughts expressed are often both original and beautiful; and in this
lies the chief attraction of the book. The language in which the
thoughts are clothed is not remarkable for elegance, and the style is
occasionally rather obscure, but the reader will find it worth his while
to take the little trouble that may now and then be needed fully to
grasp the author's meaning. There is no particular arrangement in the
poems, but they all turn in some way on the subject indicated in the
title-page; one (by no means the best of them) describing an Utopian
world perverted and ruled by love alone. There is an elevated tone of
feeling about the work in general, befitting the high theme to which it
is devoted. We will content ourselves with one specimen of the poetry,
though it would be easy to select many. The following lines are taken
from a short poem called 'Spring-time in the Woods':--
'Is that next life indeed a Paradise?
But whether I shall leave my flowers for aye
When leaving earth, or in some other world
Shall find them all again, this much I know:
Whate'er in me communes with them shall not
Be left in loneliness. That sense of mine
To which God comes in hues upon the cheeks
Of innocent flowers, and in their perfumed breath,
Expands in strength and purity, and God
Will come to it again as shall be best.
I cannot now declare how He shall come;
I only know that this poor world, so sad
And still so beautiful, cannot exhaust
The beauty in the mind of God, or yet
His artist power to mould and paint his thoughts.'
_Poems_. By WILLIAM TIDD MATSON. Groombridge and Sons.
_The Inner Life: a Poem._ By WILLIAM TIDD MATSON. Elliot Stock.
Mr. Matson does not now first come before the world as a poet, but in
his best poem, on 'The Inner Life,' he has done something better than
any of his previous productions. The book consists of meditations, not
perhaps very strictly connected, yet passing naturally from one into
another--all treating on themes of the deepest interest, as the title
implies; the poetical strains adding greatly to the charm of the
Christian philosophy that is conveyed in them. It is true poetry, though
not poetry of the highest order. The reader of this little work will be
glad to turn to a volume of poems by the same author which appeared some
years ago. Mr. Matson speaks in the preface to this book of the joy he
has found in poetry. We do not feel in his case as we are sometimes
tempted to do, that the poet himself is the only person benefited--the
pleasure found in making the verse being the only pleasure it can ever
afford. Far from this: we are much indebted to Mr. Matson for giving his
poetry to the world. The versification is unusually easy and flowing--no
straining after effect; no determination to be original at all costs:
all seems to come naturally and without effort. There is an evenness of
merit in the poems which would make it difficult to specify one above
another; but one characteristic marks them all, and distinguishes them
from those of many other writers, _i.e._, the Christian sentiment by
which they are all pervaded. Instead of the wail of unrelieved
disappointment and regret for the past, and dark and vague forebodings
for the future, the voice of resignation and heavenly hope is never
wanting, mingled with the plaintive strains in which we always expect to
hear a poet sing. We cordially recommend both the books to all lovers of
this class of poetry among our readers.
_The In-Gathering_. By JOHN A. HERAUD. Simpkin, Marshall and Co.
Mr. Heraud, whose first poem was published in 1820, ten years before
Tennyson, shows no perceptible decrease of poetic faculty now, after the
lapse of half a century. It is doubtless true with some men that
'The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.'
The little volume before us contains 'Cimon and Pero,' a series of two
hundred somewhat mystical sonnets under the title of 'Alcyone,' and
several minor poems. 'Cimon and Pero,' which we prefer to any of the
other poems, is based on the fine old story, told by Valerius Maximus,
of the Greek woman, who, to save her imprisoned father from starvation,
fed him at her own breast. Mr. Heraud has avowedly chosen to tell the
tale in the austere style of Wordsworth's noble 'Laodamia,' and not
without success. It may be but a fable this, but no fable is devoid of
significance, and we may say with Valerius, 'Putaret aliquis hoc contra
rerum naturam factum, nisi deligere parentes prima naturæ lex esset.'
Several of the minor poems have a delicate beauty: among these may
specially be noted the short lyric entitled 'Eres,' which is quite in
Herrick's vein; the well-known story of 'The Brides of Venice' is also
pleasantly told. The author's admirers will be glad to find that he has
still the vigour and versatility of his youth, with greater skill of
artistic execution.
_The Poetical Works of William Cowper._ Edited, with Notes and
Biographical Introduction, by WILLIAM BENHAM, Vicar of Addington. Globe
Edition. Macmillan and Co.
It was a matter of course that Cowper's works should form a volume of
the Globe series. His popularity has scarcely waned since he first
became the poet of the religious world, beloved for his piety by those
who had but small appreciation of his poetry, and admired for his poetry
by those who had but little sympathy with his themes or his spirit. As a
realistic painter of middle-class life he anticipated, and in delicacy
and sensibility infinitely surpasses Crabbe; while as a humorist of the
purest water he took the kind of hold upon the general public that
Sydney Smith afterwards did--only Cowper's humour was more delicate and
subtle--and as a poet of nature he was the literary progenitor of
Wordsworth. Mr. Benham's biographical introduction is very carefully and
very modestly done. He is, we think, right in his judgment on the point
questioned by the _Spectator_, 'that Lady Austen would gladly have
married Cowper;' and perfectly conclusive, we think, is the evidence
concerning the contemplated marriage with Mary Unwin. Newton and Bull
were Cowper's most intimate friends, and the denial of Southey, who was
by no means so accurate as the _Spectator_ assumes, cannot be put
against their positive and explicit evidence. The works are arranged in
chronological order, and the notes are intelligent, accurate, and true.
Altogether, we possess in the Globe volume the best edition of Cowper
hitherto given to the world.
_The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, reprinted from the
Originals, with the latest Corrections of the Authors; together with the
poems of Charles Wesley not before published._ Collected and arranged by
E. OSBORN, D.D. Vols. VII. to X.
This admirably edited collection of the poetical works of the Wesleys
proceeds steadily towards its completion. It reveals a surprising
fecundity of verse, and an amazing degree of sustained fervour,
strength, and excellence. There are treasures of song in Charles
Wesley's compositions, unused and unknown as yet by the Church, that
would give him high rank as a hymn writer, independently of the
compositions which are in every church and on every lip. We do not think
he ever reaches the reverent sublimity of the best hymns of Watts.
Watts, for instance, would scarcely have used the somewhat incongruous
adjective 'tremendous deity;' nor would Watts have fallen into the
German jingles of some of his metres; but in devout inspiration, sacred
passion, and felicitous verse, Wesley holds his own against any hymn
writer of the Church of Christ. We shall have more to say concerning him
when the collection of his poetical works is complete. The eighth volume
contains his admirable version of the Psalms, and a great variety of
personal and national hymns, which furnish a kind of devotional
commentary on the history of both. The ninth volume consists of the
first portion of the short hymns on 'Select Passages of the Holy
Scriptures.' The two-volume edition of 1762 has long been a table book
with us. We specially commend some of Wesley's exquisite poetical
versions or uses--this, for instance:--
'O that I knew where I might find him,
Where but on yonder tree?
Or if too rich thou art,
Sink into poverty,
And find him in thine heart.'
_A Syren._ By J. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE. Three vols. Smith, Elder and Co.
Mr. J. A. Trollope has returned to the scenes of his first love--to
Italian skies, artists, maidens, marchesi, and friars. We are plunged at
once into the hot sunshine and tropical excitements of a Ravennese
Carnival. The author gives us exuberant descriptions of female beauty,
of fastidious adornment, dexterous _deshabille motivée_, and of fierce
sexual passion met by cold calculating resolve to play a high stake
without love, or faithfulness, or even wisdom. Mr. Trollope is matchless
in his portraiture of Italian _artistes_, and of the simple _contadina_
of refined and delicate taste, and pure seraphic devotion to the one
over-mastering affection. He has, in this story, contrasted the natures
of two beautiful portionless girls, who by strange fortune are thrown,
during the same carnival, into the way of the two Marchesi Castelmare.
The one is an opera singer, the other a painter. The former resolves on
making a conquest of the elder nobleman, and the latter does win the
affections of the younger. The uncle is described as the pattern of the
highest virtue, of stone-cold passions, of infinite proprieties; and La
Lalli, the syren, succeeds during the carnival in bewitching, maddening,
and befooling him into promise of marriage, and inspiring the most
deadly jealousy of any interference with his claim. A noble nature is
ruined by the fierce fires of a foolish attachment, and most tragic are
the issues. We will not diminish the fascination of the story by
revealing its secret. _La diva Lalli_ is actually murdered on the very
day when the old marchese has publicly admitted his intention to marry
her, and everybody but the murderer seems to have run the risk of having
to bear the brunt of the charge. More than a volume is occupied with an
endeavour to answer the question, 'Who has done the deed?' There is more
delicacy, and subtlety, and meaning in the inquiry, than in the inquiry,
'Who killed Tulkinghorn?' and the reader is reminded of the
heart-searching of Mr. Browning's 'Ring and Book,' rather than of Mr.
Dickens's popular story. The story cannot be called pleasing or
profitable. It is a wonderful drawing, full of brilliant effects, and
crowded with narrative and suggestion. The style is clear, and the
Italian expletives and appellatives give it an operatic grace and
sweetness that are very attractive. If '_tesoro mio_' had been
translated 'duck of diamonds,' and the rest of the prettiness turned
into plain English, perhaps the blue sky and the _circolo_ and the
_carnival_ would have had to vanish likewise.
_Against Time._ By ALEXANDER INNES SHAND. Two vols. Smith, Elder and Co.
1870.
The machinery that Mr. Shand has contrived is clumsy, and looks like a
violent effort to be original. The hero of the story is put into
circumstances of maddening temptation to make money by unfair means. He
is exasperated by discovering that a relative has made him sole heir to
her vast estates, on the proviso that in the course of three years he
developes out of the few thousands that are left to him, a fortune equal
to that which he may then receive. On his failing to fulfil this
condition, the designation of the property is concealed from all except
a pair of contemptible villains, who endeavour to play a series of
underhand tricks to secure it ultimately for their own uses. The hero
came from the Kursaals of Germany to hear of this race that he had to
run 'against time,' and he is determined, by huge speculation, to win
the prize. The monetary scheme, the Credit Foncier and Mobilier of
Turkey, is described by one who has seen the eggs of many of these
vipers hatched in the sun of England's prosperity. There is a grandeur
about the conception, and a rapidity in the inflation of this great
balloon, that is enough to take away the breath of ordinary financiers.
The young aristocrat is the Ulysses in council, the Achilles in strife,
the Bayard _sans peur, sans reproche_; and though he makes, in the
course of three years, some quarter of a million sterling, and might
claim the possession of family estates, he has positively contrived to
withdraw the greater part of it from the 'concern,' and to have done it
without dishonour. He has been dabbling up to the elbows in boiling
pitch, and is neither scorched, nor blistered, nor defiled. Most
surprising is his nobility. When the bubble bursts, he has the
magnanimity and magnificence voluntarily to sacrifice his splendid
fortune, and more splendid prospects, at the shrine of the honour which
seems for a moment in the dust. Finally, of course it all turns out for
the best, and the young lady who has won the heart of the great
financier is prepared to second his sublime sacrifice, and as the two
are starting for Australia in beautiful poverty, it turns out that on
the bridegroom's failing to fulfil the conditions of the will, the
penniless bride has herself become the heiress of the immense estates,
and so the pair are happy ever after. There is much brilliant writing in
the story, some caustic satire, and a great deal of clever and pleasant
characterization.
_Diary of a Novelist._ By the Author of 'Rachel's Secret,' 'Nature's
Nobleman,' &c. Hurst and Blackett. 1871.
The title of this volume is attractive. What speculations and hopes are
excited by the mere announcement, 'Diary of a Novelist!' The secrets
into which curious readers have attempted to pry are about to be
unfolded, the originals of the characters described are to be revealed,
a real personal living interest is to surround the author's fictions
ever after. What would we give to have such a diary from the pen of
George Eliot or Charles Dickens! But amid such a rush of eager
anticipations, we turn to the book itself, and find that no explanations
are given--the authoress does not lift the veil. It is the journal of a
year's most striking thoughts and noteworthy experiences. The first
feeling is one of disappointment that the volume is so different from
our expectations; but disappointment soon changes into hearty admiration
and sincere gratitude. It is emphatically a good book. Sympathy with all
that is beautiful and noble pervades the whole, and it is written with
the ease of a practised hand. The rippling chat runs on through a
succession of bright sunny scenes, ever and anon deepening into shady
pools of profounder thought, and then again merrily hastening on its
way. We are permitted to read the aims of this novelist's life, so true,
pure, earnest, that we involuntarily exclaim, 'O si sic omnia!' There is
also a cheerful religiousness in this diary, which will equally surprise
those who think that a fiction-writer's only use is for amusement, and
those who indiscriminately condemn all novels as unmitigated evils. The
following sentence gives us the key-note of the book:--'I like to feel
that this fair earth, which God has made, which even now, where man has
not marred it, keeps the touch of his hand upon it still--breathes back
its life to Him in love. And so the whole world becomes to me at once a
Temple and a Home--a place for worship and for happy life: and I live in
it, not alone, but sharing with all created things in the great Father's
care, and joining with them in their many-voiced psalm of love and
praise.' The charming sketches of natural scenery show the touch of an
artist and a poet; the outline descriptions of character reveal the
writer as a keen observer of human life; while her reflections on some
of the tangled problems of the world tell us that she, too, has wrestled
with the mighty mystery, and found peace only in trust.
We notice an exuberance of enthusiasm which might be toned down with
advantage to the general style. The attempt to transcribe the Yorkshire
dialect is not successful; but, as we have ourselves failed in that
accomplishment, we appreciate the difficulty, and only notice the
fact--'a fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind.'
_The Iliad of the East._ By FREDERICK RICHARDSON. Macmillan.
The title of this book is of course _ad captandum_; the East has no
Iliad, in any intelligible sense. What is here offered us is a series of
legends, taken from Valmiki's Sanskrit poem, the 'Ramagana,' and taken
from the French version of M. Fauche. It is a readable little volume,
and may be recommended to those who desire to obtain some slight
knowledge of the early Sanskrit poetry. When we compare a work like the
Ramagana with the Iliad and Odyssey, we cannot avoid the conclusion that
in the Greek mind there existed a vivid view of poetry, which is quite
absent from the Hindoo mind. Rama's adventures are absurdly grotesque.
We meet garrulous vultures, chivalrous monkeys, and so forth. The
supreme imagination, which obtains a sublime effect by depicting
humanity in its intensest forms, as in Achilles, Diomed, Odysseus, as in
Helen, Andromache, Penelope, has no place in the Oriental poems. They
are childish, exaggerated, mere nursery tales. The theorists, foremost
among whom is Mr. Max Müller, who conceived that both the Greek and
Sanskrit poetry come from one source, ought assuredly to explain to us
why there exists so wide a difference between the Homeric poems and all
the Oriental cycle. Homer's epic, like the goddess Athene, seems to have
sprung perfect in person and panoply from the brain of its creator. The
Eastern pseudo-epics are mere strings of ridiculous stories, with no
definite connection, no beginning, middle, or end. This manifest
literary difference would appear to indicate some definite racial
difference. Valmiki is not an entirely unreadable author, but between
Homer and him there is about as much difference as between Shakespeare
and Quallon. Now, what the Sanskrit scholars ought surely to do for us
is to state some theory whereby to account for the fact that their
favourite language contains no literature worth perusal. There is
neither the poetry of the Greek nor the theosophy of the Hebrew in
Sanskrit. Hence we venture to infer that there is some innate racial
distinction as yet undiscovered by the modern ethnologist.
_John._ By Mrs. OLIPHANT. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
Mrs. Oliphant's delicate touch in social description is too well known
for it to be necessary to dwell upon it here. She is one of the few
lady-novelists who improve as they go on; the truth being that she has
never sought to obtain startling effects by absurd means, but has always
studied nature and human nature. In 'John,' re-published from
_Blackwood's Magazine_, which is a novelette rather than a novel, she is
very felicitous. There is no more story than Canning's knife-grinder had
to tell: it is a mere love-tale, 'Silly sooth,' as Shakespeare hath it.
John is a country parson's son, and Kate is a banker's daughter, and she
is thrown from her horse near the parsonage, and has to be taken there,
and as she convalesces makes sad havoc with poor John. A simple story,
but charming in its simplicity. The _situation_ is well conceived. Dr.
Clifford is a worldly person; his son John is utterly unworldly;
Crediton, the banker, is a plutocrat of the first force; Kate is a
spoilt child, who means to have her own way in marriage. The end of it
all is easily conceivable; but the comedietta is played out with
consummate skill, especially by its heroine. We are less interested in
her lover than in her; and although doubtless Mrs. Oliphant is an able
nomenclator, we venture to think that the book would have more properly
represented its title if that title had been 'Kate.'
_From Thistles--Grapes?_ By Mrs. EILOART, Author of 'The Curate's
Discipline,' 'Meg,' &c., &c. In three vols. Richard Bentley, Publisher
in Ordinary to Her Majesty, New Burlington-street.
Given a bundle of thistles, how many bunches of grapes can it produce?
Answer, none. This theory Mrs. Eiloart seeks to develope to its fullest
extent; and, as a natural consequence, we find the miserable 'grapes,'
the son, dangling by the neck on the scaffold whither the testimony of
the 'thistles,' the unnatural parent, has sent him. There is nothing so
new or original in the plot of the novel as the title, which with its
note of interrogation at once arouses the interest of the reader, an
interest which unfortunately goes little further than the title-page.
The scene is laid in a cathedral town of England. Dr. Langton, a
sanctimonious divine, who has sown a terrible crop of wild oats, as well
as 'thistles' in his early youth, excites the enmity of one of his
parishioners, a ragged vagabond, who has been convicted of robbery, and
sentenced to one month's imprisonment in the county jail. The fellow,
having escaped from durance, is concealed by the hero till morning, and
succoured by the heroine in a wood, where he lies helpless and prostrate
from a sprained ankle. But unfortunately Dr. Langton, passing by that
way, discovers the poor wretch of whom the officers are in pursuit,
struggling amidst the brambles, and instantly gives the alarm. The
vagabond is consequently conveyed back to prison, muttering threats and
imprecations against his betrayer. From these preliminary incidents
arise a series of events, which, as they pass before us, we salute with
all the reverence to which they are entitled from their venerable age
and ancient service. But notwithstanding the long acquaintance we have
enjoyed, in the land of romance, with the greater part of the adventures
contained in these three volumes, some of them appear before us with
their old garments so delicately patched and mended with Mrs. Eiloart's
new materials that we willingly forget the proverbial weariness of the
thrice-told tale. The death of the heroine is well managed. The kindness
to the wretched offender, her efforts to drag him out of the mire into
the atmosphere of intelligence and feeling, meets with the usual result.
He becomes deeply enamoured of the sweet gentle girl according to the
brutal instincts of his nature, and pushes her through the wood even to
the brink of the precipice down which she is bent on throwing herself,
maddened as she is with the discovery of the hero's attachment to
another. The vagabond, whose brain is as usual muddled with beer,
suddenly becomes sobered at the sight of her peril, and rushes forward
to save her. Seizing her by the folds of her dress, the frail material
gives way, and a portion of it remaining in his hand and afterwards
found in his possession, becomes the circumstantial evidence, which
causes his arrest. Now the thistles come forward to bear witness to
having beheld the frantic flight of the girl through the wood, and the
subsequent appearance of the boor on the very spot where she had met
with her death. The testimony is crushing, the offender is condemned to
die, and mounts the scaffold proclaiming his innocence. The revelation
of the relationship in which he stands to his denouncer is made too
late, and Dr. Langton arrives with the proof of the young lady's
meditated suicide just in time to see his own illegitimate son swing in
mid-air as the drop falls, and the shoutings of the crowd announce that
all is over. The perseverance and tenacity of purpose which bear an
author through the labour of executing three goodly volumes unaided in
the task by incident, description, or dialogue, are beyond all praise.
'_Il est si facile de ne point écrire_,' exclaims Boileau. But the
lady-writers of modern times evidently reverse the saying--with them it
far more difficult to refrain.
_'Six Months Hence.'_ Being Passages from the Life of Maria _née_
Secretan. Three volumes. Smith, Elder and Co.
In the anonymous author of this story we have, we suspect, a new writer
of fiction, and of considerable power. The novel is mainly a
psychological one--although full of tragic incidents, and complicated in
its plot. Indeed, the story is constructed with a mechanical ingenuity,
which in the minuteness and mosaic of its incidents, is not unworthy of
the author of the 'Lady in White.' The story is told autobiographically
by the heroine, in a plain matter-of-fact way; full, however, of
psychological self-analysis that would do credit to the author of 'Dr.
Austin's Guests,' especially in the delineation of Fortescue's madness.
The heroine enters upon a situation as governess in the family of Mr.
Armitage, of Harcourt Villa, Hastings; who, being left a widower, with
a son and daughter, Charles and Helen, has married, a second time, a
woman of coarse nature and unscrupulous character, who has one son,
Fred, a little boy of six. A Mr. Fortescue, an accomplished and wealthy
young man, is a constant visitor at the villa, and is the presumptive
lover of Helen, although he has never declared his love. Helen, and
Maria, the governess, who are of the same age, become fast friends;
gradually, however, Mr. Fortescue transfers his attentions to Maria,
whose first guilt consists in yielding to ambitious desires, and
permitting in herself and Mr. Fortescue treachery to her friend. The
incipient attachment is strengthened by a long nursing of little Fred,
who meets with an accident; the rescue of Maria from the tide by Mr.
Fortescue precipitates matters, and they are secretly engaged to be
married; two or three days before the intended disclosure of the
engagement, and a few days before the intended marriage, Mr. Armitage
dies, having, through the machinations of his wife, made an iniquitous
will, whereby little Fred is made his heir in the event of his attaining
the age of twenty-one; should he die before that age, the estates revert
to the natural heir, no other provision being made. Maria and Mr.
Fortescue are married. On the very week of their arrival at Dalemain
Castle, Mr. Fortescue's seat in Cumberland, little Fred is
murdered,--Mr. Fortescue being absent from home on some business in
another part of Cumberland. Helen is suspected and tried; then suspicion
falls upon Charles, against whom circumstantial evidence is strong, and
public indignation stronger still. The mob at Lewes attempt to lynch him
on the day of his trial, and he receives injuries of which he dies. In
the meanwhile, Maria discovers that she has married a maniac, who
inherits the fatal taint from his grandmother. In the event of such a
contingency, by the grandfather's will, the property is to go to the
next heir. Now comes the struggle between Maria's cupidity and her
conscience; she tries to hide the fact of her husband's insanity, and
discovers that, under a strong hallucination, he has been the murderer
of little Fred. Again a struggle between selfishness and
conscience--Helen is accused of the murder, and Maria conceals the
evidence that will exculpate her, and, to put it out of her power to
save her, goes with her husband into Switzerland; there she hears that
the accusation is transferred to Charles, whom she has secretly but
passionately loved. What conscience would not do for Helen, love does
for Charles; she hastens to England with proofs of his innocence, but
arrives only in time to see him die of the injuries received from the
mob. All this is told with great power--the anatomy of selfishness in
herself, of madness in her husband, and of love in Helen and Charles is
very masterly, and almost painfully minute. The story is one of intense
interest, and gives promise of another powerful writer of fiction, who,
notwithstanding the feminine autobiography, and the minute analysis of
female passions, is, we suspect, of the sterner sex.
_The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson_. By One of the Firm.
Edited by ANTHONY TROLLOPE. Smith, Elder, and Co.
Mr. Trollope has, in this little _brochure_, essayed the epic of modern
advertising. The following sentences epitomise the moral
thereof:--Robinson, _loquitur_--'Did you ever believe an advertisement?
Jones, in self-defence, protested that he never had. And why should
others be more simple than you? No man, no woman, believes them. They
are not lies; for it is not intended they should obtain credit. I should
despise the man who attempted to build his advertisement on a system of
facts, as I should the builder who lays his foundation on the sand. The
groundwork of advertisement is romance. It is poetry in its very
essence. Is Hamlet true?'
'I really do not know,' said Mr. Brown.
'There is no man, to my thinking, so false,' continued Robinson, 'as he
who in trade professes to be true. He deceives, or endeavours to do so.
I do not. Advertisements are profitable; not because they are believed,
but because they attract attention.'
_Per contra._ 'The ticketing of goods at prices below their value is not
to our taste, but the purchasing of such goods is less so. The lady who
will take advantage of a tradesman, that she may fill her house with
linen, or cover her back with finery, at his cost, and in a manner which
her own means would not fairly permit, is, in our estimation, a robber.
Why is it that commercial honesty has so seldom charms for women? A
woman who would give away the last shawl from her back will insist on
smuggling her gloves through the Custom-house. Is not the passion for
cheap purchases altogether a female mania? And yet every cheap
purchase--every purchase made at a rate so cheap as to deny the vendor
his fair profit, is, in truth, a dishonesty--a dishonesty to which the
purchaser is indirectly a party. Would that woman could be taught to
hate bargains! How much less useless trash would there be in our houses,
and how much fewer tremendous sacrifices in our shops?'
Those who read in the _Cornhill Magazine_ this sketch of the advertising
firm, its wonderful puffs, and the sensations they caused in
Bishopsgate; with the unromantic, hard, business-like match-making which
is interwoven with it, will remember with what a keen and somewhat
cynical satire, too much upon a dead realistic level perhaps, the story
is told. Those who have not read it there, are recommended to make
themselves acquainted with it. It is but 'An Editor's Tale,' but its
moral is wholesome and timely.
_Mariette; or, Further Glimpses of Life in France_. A Sequel to Marie.
Bell and Daldy.
This story of humble life in the French provinces is intended as a
sequel to that of 'Marie,' and is a mere narrative of events occurring
in the daily existence of the humblest of serving women, who reports the
sayings and doings of her masters, through the incidents, political and
municipal, occurring in the good town of Nantes, where they reside. The
book is amusing enough, a sort of French country town chronicle, such a
record as Mrs. Gaskell would now and then give us of English life under
the same conditions; there is nothing in it to stir the
passions--nothing to irritate or vex; but on the other hand, nothing to
soothe or calm the nerves. It resembles a long unbroken chant, as if
from the lips of an aged crone, which neither commands the attention of
the listener nor prevents him from bestowing it on anything else, and
yet is regretted when it is over, simply because the scenes, the
characters, the conversations are all familiar to our memory, and
hallowed by long association. The little volume possesses one charm of
its own. It is written without the smallest pretension, easy and simple
in style, and delicately subdued in sentiment, in keeping with the
character and station of the supposed narrator.
_Lorna Doone._ A Romance of Exmoor. By R. D. BLACKMORE. Sampson Low.
We spoke of this novel when it first appeared in almost the highest
terms of commendation that we could command. A re-perusal of it only
confirms our impression, that in scholarly conscientiousness, artistic
skill, and romantic interest, it more nearly approaches the best of the
Waverley novels than any fiction that has appeared since then. We can
give it no higher praise. We only wonder that it has so tardily won the
honours of a cheap edition.
_The Victory of the Vanquished._ A Tale of the First Century. By the
Author of the Schönberg-Cotta Family. T. Nelson and Co.
In her new story, Mrs. Charles has ventured to tread the oft-trodden
paths of the age of the Incarnation, and with a delicacy, grace, and
devout tenderness that perhaps none of her predecessors have attained.
The story opens in Rome in the year A.D. 17. Its personages are a
captive German family, brought to Rome by Germanicus--slaves in his
household, first becoming acquainted with the pagan life at Rome, then
with the heaving Jewish life, which He who was Immanuel was stirring to
its depths. Jew and Roman, Greek and Christian represent the various
classes of contemporary life. Mrs. Charles is too refined and reverent
an artist to bring us into the actual presence of him who taught in
Capernaum; but we vividly feel and realize his life; and Siguna and her
children, Seivord and Hilda, and Laon, the old Greek, and Cloelia
Diodora, the Roman maiden, find its salvation. A more beautiful,
pellucid, and tender story has rarely been written.
_Chips from a German Workshop._ By F. MAX MULLER, M.A., Foreign Member
of the French Institute, &c. Vol. III., Essays on Literature, Biography,
and Antiquities. Longmans, Green, and Co.
The first and second volumes of Mr. Max Müller's occasional essays on
the subject of comparative mythology, and on the so-called science of
religious development, received the modest and quaint title of 'Chips
from a German Workshop.' Our author has given the stress of his energy
and the prime of his life to great undertakings. His edition of the
'Rig-Veda,' and now his elaborate translation and interpretation of its
hymns, have not prevented his delivering important courses of lectures
on the Science of Language. The great assistance he rendered to Baron
Bunsen in his Oriental and philological speculations has been abundantly
recognised by all students of the greater works of Bunsen. But
scientific scholarship on this high scale has brought our author into
contact with other and allied themes of literary research; and we find
in the present volume a reprint of sixteen additional essays, of varied
interest and merit, which greatly enhance our idea of the wide extent of
Mr. Max Müller's scholarship, and are, moreover, of a class which may be
safely commended to the general reader. Comparative grammar is clearly
the key which this accomplished student of ancient and modern languages
is tempted to use on all occasions, and for the solution of all puzzles,
historical, theological, political, and even scientific. His keen and
penetrating eye sees analogies, histories, reaches of civilization,
bonds and bars of fellowship, in non-extant words, where one less
trained to the business would utterly fail to discover them; and his
linguistic omniscience makes us, in our ignorance, not seldom feel that
he is too clever by half, and that his conclusions come almost too 'pat'
upon his speculative theses. Be this as it may, we thank him very
heartily for the exceeding refreshment and peculiar charm of this
volume. The three articles on 'Cornish Antiquities,' on the question
'Are there Jews in Cornwall?' and on 'the Insulation of St. Michael's
Mount,' which were written in 1867, form a trilogy of extreme interest.
We have seldom read anything more perfect or complete in its way than
his demolition of Mr. Pengelly's plausible theory, that the Cornish
language was spoken before the insulation of St. Michael's Mount, in
Cornwall, could have taken place; even though, geologically speaking,
that event must be thrown back from 16,000 to 20,000 years. His learned
refutation of the idea that Jews worked in the mines of Cornwall, in
part effected by the discovery of the true etymology of the name of the
town Marazion, on which so much had been built, and his instructive
exposition of the nature and value of the Cornish antiquities and
language, will well repay perusal.
The gem of the volume is the eloquent and affectionate tribute to the
memory of Bunsen, in the form of a review of his memoirs. To these Max
Müller has now added a valuable postscript, in a selection of some
hundred letters addressed to himself by the great scholar and
diplomatist. They are charged with kindly and generous feeling, and with
noble enthusiasm; and they give fresh insight into Bunsen's astounding
activity, far-reaching glance, and prodigious range of literary
endeavour. They would many of them be more intelligible if they were
read in their proper place in his biography; but the perusal of them
recalls the zest with which three years ago the memoirs of this great
man were devoured rather than read. We are not surprised that M. Müller
should say, 'It has been my good fortune in life to have known many men
whom the world calls great philosophers, statesmen, scholars, artists,
and poets; but take it all in all, take the full humanity of the man, I
have never seen, and I shall never see his like again.'
One of the essays to which we would direct special attention is that on
the language and poetry of Schleswig-Holstein. The biographical articles
on Schiller, and Wilhelm Müller, and some of the shorter 'chips' on 'Ye
Schyppe of Fools,' 'Old German Love-songs,' and on 'A German Traveller
in England, A.D. 1598,' are racy, and highly entertaining.
_The World of Moral and Religious Anecdote; Illustrations and Incidents
gathered from the Words, Thoughts, and Deeds in the Lives of Men, Women,
and Books_. By EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Hodder and Stoughton.
Mr. Hood is a man who reads everything, and who, making allowance for
such slight inaccuracies as are characteristic of voracious readers,
forgets nothing that he has read. It would be difficult to name a man
better qualified to compile a volume of anecdotes. We wish, however, he
would not call Samuel Bailey, the thoughtful author of the 'Essays on
the Formation and Publication of Opinions,' Bail_lie_. Eccentricities of
this kind are frequent in Mr. Hood's writings, and not easy to be
accounted for.
The volume published by Mr. Hood, under the more general title 'The
World of Anecdote,' has met with a reception so favourable, that he has
published this companion volume, 'The World of Religious Anecdote,'
filled with anecdotes of religious men or things, gathered from a very
wide circle of religious biography and history, and from all imaginable
miscellaneous sources--from a quarterly review to a newspaper. Mr. Hood
does not exaggerate the importance and significance of anecdote, either
in history or biography; if exactly told, such incidents as constitute
anecdote, indicate the movement or the man, more truthfully than formal
disquisition. We do not pretend to have read through Mr. Hood's
volume--this would be a task, less arduous only than to read through a
dictionary--but we have read enough of it cordially to commend it as a
repertory of many things that are both new and good, and of some that
are neither.
_The Essays of an Optimist_. By JOHN WILLIAM KAYE. Smith, Elder, and Co.
Mr. Kaye tells us that he had no particular design when writing these
papers; no purpose, that is, of illustrating any special philosophy.
They were not to him a serious work--they were 'holiday tasks, written
by snatches, and sent off piece by piece as they were written; the loose
thoughts of a loose thinker, desultory, discursive,' written away from
books, 'in country inns, or sea-side lodgings, or other strange places
far away from home.' Criticism is exonerated from dealing in any serious
way with a book so produced. Literature is not thus achieved.
Cameo-cutting should be as artistic and patient as _genre_ painting. Mr.
Kaye is pleasantly garrulous, and intelligently superficial. He writes
as one would write good letters; and what he writes is very pleasant to
read. He throws the regulating good sense of a sober well-informed man
upon such matters as Holidays, Work, Success, Growing Old, Toleration,
&c. He has done and can do good work; therefore we accept with a certain
degree of interest these 'chips.'
_A Book of Golden Thoughts_. By HENRY ATTWELL, Knight of the Order of
the Oak Crown, &c. Macmillan and Co.
This is one of the most charming volumes of the Golden Treasury series.
The author, with rare discernment and fine taste, has selected the
richest, sweetest thoughts of our greatest and wisest teachers on a
marvellous variety of themes, but all tending in the direction of high
spiritual culture. The apothegms or longer passages extracted from
French or German writers are translated with delicate tact and placed in
an appendix. The words of Pascal--_J'ecrirai ici mes pensées sans ordre,
et non pas peut-être dans une confusion sans dessein: c'est le veritable
ordre, et qui marquera toujours mon objet par le désordre même_--are
placed at the head of the volume. It would take a long time to try and
unravel the design of Mr. Attwell, but whoever wishes to have the
choicest words of Bacon, Pascal, Montesquieu, Goethe, Ruskin, Helps, and
many others, may find them here brought together into small compass, and
presented in a very attractive form.
_Publications of the Early English Text Society_. 1870. Extra Series.
Trübner and Co.
X.--_The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, made by Andrewe
Boorde, of Physycke Doctor_.
_A Compendyus Regyment, or a Dyetary of Helth_. By the same Author.
_Barnes in Defence of the Berde_.
XI.--_The Bruce_. By Master JOHN BARLOWE, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, A.D.
1375.
These issues are not quite according to the Society's programme in their
report of January last, which, stated that three or four other works
besides the first part of the 'Bruce' were in the press for their extra
series of 1870, and made no mention of the volume which Mr. Furnivall
has edited. Indeed, the opportunity for his undertaking this work did
not, he tells us, occur until February, when he purchased an early copy
of the Dyetary at Mr. Corser's sale.
Dr. Andrew Boorde or Borde, was a Carthusian monk of Henry the Eighth's
time, who 'was dyspensyd of the religion,' whatever that may mean--a
point obscure to Mr. Furnivall--travelled over a great part of Europe,
and returned to practise as a physician, having for his patient the Duke
of Norfolk, when that great noble was in the Royal favour. Of several
works which the Doctor wrote, Mr. Furnivall has printed two; in a
preface and epilogue which he is pleased to style 'Forewords and
Hindwords,' are collected many particulars of the author's life, and
long extracts from others of his writings. 'The Introduction of
Knowledge' is a book of travel, partly in rhyme, giving characteristics
and specimens of the languages of the several countries the author had
visited. The Dyetary is a book of hygiène, containing many prescriptions
which modern physicians would approve. Both tracts abound in quaint,
curious, and shrewd remarks. One of the Doctor's last works was a
treatise on beards, which he seems to have condemned, and to have
advocated shaving. For this Mr. Furnivall, who 'left off the absurdity
some three years before his neighbours,' thinks him 'a noodle,' as it
seems did 'Barnes, whoever he may be,' whose defence of the Berde is
here printed. There is, however, some reason to suppose that the learned
editor thinks Barnes was a noodle also. The subject is clearly a pet
with him.
The 'Bruce' is well-known, and has been frequently reprinted, editions
having appeared as lately as 1856 and 1869. The last was issued after
Mr. Skeat had begun his labours; but its character was not such as to
lead the Society to desire less the completion of their own edition.
About half the poem is now printed. Mr. Skeat's preface and glossarial
index await the publication of the second part. John Barlowe was the
contemporary of Wycliffe, Chaucer, and Gower, and his poem is a worthy
member of the group of noble works which were the first fruits of
English literature. It may be called English, now that Scotland and
England have a common inheritance, though it is a Scot's story of his
countrymen's resistance to the dictation and encroachment of the English
king, and the Archdeacon would doubtless have scorned and repudiated the
epithet. The subject-matter of the poem is a great one. It tells how, on
the death of King Alexander, a doubt arose, whether, according to the
true law of inheritance, the Bruce or the Baliol ought to succeed to the
throne; how the dispute was referred to the arbitration of the English
Edward,--
'For that the king of Ingland
Held swylk freyndship and company
To thar king, that was swa worthy
Thai trowyt that he as gud nychtbur,
And as freyndsome compositur
Wald have Iugyt in lawtes;'
how, instead of judging loyally, he seized the opportunity for insisting
on his own claim to a feudal superiority over the Scottish crown,
deciding for the Balliol because he 'Assentyt till him in all his will,'
while the Bruce replied,--
Schyr, said he, sa God me save,
The kynryk zham I nocht to have,
Bot gyff it full off rycht to me:
And gyff God will that it sa be,
I sall as frely in all thing
Hald it, as it afferis to king;
Or as myn eldris foronch me
Held it in freyast reawte;'
how English invasion and Scottish insurrection followed, and how the
long-baffled Bruce fought out his triumph. The story is told with
archaic simplicity, but with much grace of diction.
_The Riches of Chaucer, &c._ By CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE. Second Edition,
carefully Revised. Lockwood and Co.
_Tales from Chaucer in Prose, designed chiefly for the use of Young
Persons_. By CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE. Second Edition, carefully Revised.
Lockwood and Co.
Mr. Clarke is a veteran in the field of Shakespearian literature;
although this is not necessarily a qualification for the exposition of
Chaucer, who lived two centuries and a quarter earlier, and at the very
dawn of our literature: the scholarly character of his Shakespearian
work, however, is a presumption in favour of a worthy presentation of
Chaucer. The work itself justifies this presumption. The first of these
volumes is an expurgated, modernized, and accentuated edition of
Chaucer. Scholars, or perhaps we should say, pedants, will likely enough
turn up their noses at this, and pour upon Mr. Clarke the ridicule that
has been the meed of Bowdler; but Chaucer and Shakespeare stand in
different relations to modern popular readers. To such the archaic
language of Chaucer makes him simply unintelligible, while his
coarseness absolutely excludes him _puerisque virginibus_. No idolatry
of English literature can warrant a parent in putting Chaucer as he is
into the hands of his children. Nor can much moral benefit accrue to
anyone from his perusal. If, therefore, Chaucer is to be a popular book
at all, to be read by any but scholars, both processes are essential.
Mr. Clarke has every desirable qualification for the work, which demands
both a scholar and an artist. The accentuation of the rhythm too will be
a great help to unpractised readers. This edition of Chaucer may be put
into the hands of young people and modest women, with the assurance also
that it will be easily understood and thoroughly enjoyed. We trust that
through it our first and one of our greatest poets will be introduced
into schools and homes, and win a popularity hitherto denied him.
The second volume is an attempt to reproduce the Tales of Chaucer in
modern prose after the manner of Lamb's 'Tales from Shakespeare.' This
is a far more arduous undertaking. Mr. Clarke tells us that he has
endeavoured to render the poetry in as easy prose as he could, without
at the same time destroying the poetical description and strong natural
expressions of the author. Some of the long discussions are omitted, as
of course is all that is offensive in coarse expression or allusion. The
task has been difficult. 'I was,' Mr. Clarke says, 'to be at one and the
same time modernly antique, prosaically poetic, and comprehensively
concise.' That he has succeeded in so large a degree is very high merit.
We trust his little volume will be widely read.
THEOLOGY AND PHILOLOGY.
_The Origin, and Development of Religious Belief._ By S. BARING-GOULD,
M.A. Part II.--Christianity. Rivingtons.
We have already called the attention of our readers to the first part of
this remarkable work, in which the writer, taking the standpoint of
positive science and the facts of human nature, endeavoured to account
for the developments of religious belief in all ages and places, and
uttered his conviction that they all correspond to some necessity and
quality of human nature. He then hazarded the opinion that the true and
absolute religion would take account of, and embody, and satisfy, the
cravings expressed in the strange worship and religious ideas of all
peoples. He has now pursued his inquiry into the positive dicta of
Christian theology, and seeks to show that they rest on facts anterior
both to the text of Scripture and the very existence of the Divine
Society. Revelation, if it exists at all, must take up into itself all
the varieties not only of Mosaism or heathenism, but of polytheism, of
idolatry, fetishism, and mysticism, because these and many others are
facts of human nature, and have had a great part to play in the
development and progress of human thought. Christianity, to our author,
is true--and by Christianity he appears to mean the whole dogmatic and
hierarchical and social edifice of Catholicism, because it contains in
itself the utterance of all truths. All other religions and all sects
and schism of the one Church, so far as they hold positive truth, hold
only what the Church holds; their negations are to his mind 'nothing,'
and are destitute, therefore, of all vital power. The Quaker, the
Lutheran, the Anglican, the Greek, the Presbyterian, the modern
Christian philosopher, not to say the Pagan, the Arian, the Pelagian,
the Donatist, grasped severally and forcibly some one truth; perhaps
one-half of the antinomy presenting itself in some great synthesis. Let
this be granted, and, according to Mr. B. Gould, Catholicism held the
same great truth. It may be found embedded in her system, taught with
greater explicitness there than by the sectary; but each of these has
_denied_ some truth or placitum of Catholicism, and its negation has
been nothing, has added nothing to the value of belief as positive
truth. Yet with all this, the author falls foul of Rome at a hundred
points. The union between the Church and the temporal power is denounced
with unmeasured terms; the Papacy is a violation and a 'negation' of the
_oecumenicity_ of the Church, and the encyclical of Pius IX. comes in
for a series of terrific blows. The Inquisition and the persecuting
spirit which arose in Rome under the union of sacred and secular powers,
is treated with as sincere a condemnation as is every form of
Protestantism. Still further, when the author comes to deal with the
evidence for the Incarnation, on which his whole theory turns, he
disposes of every vestige of proof which may be supposed to linger in
the New Testament in favour of this stupendous mystery of grace, and
this 'conciliation of all antinomies.' The chapter on 'The Evidence of
the Incarnation' is a feeble _rechauffé_ of the most ultra type of
modern scepticism. Miracles and prophecy, the inspiration, authenticity,
and genuineness of the Gospels, the evidential value of specific
occurrences in the life of Christ, all go to the wall. Much is made of
discrepancies and contradictions, of the silence of contemporary
historians, and all the rest of it, with which we are so familiar; and
our author's conclusion is, that there is no evidence worthy of the name
for the chief fact on which the whole of the religious development of
Christianity turns. Relinquishing every proof of the divinity of Christ
derivable from the New Testament as less than useless, the grounds on
which he calls for a belief in the incarnation of God in Christ (who, by
the way, need not ever have existed as an historical character at all)
are, that 'such a union of divinity and humanity is necessary to me,
that my nature may find its complete religious satisfaction;' 'such a
dogma alone supplies an adequate basis for morals, establishes the
rights of man on a secure foundation, enables man to distinguish between
authority and force, conciliates my double nature, rational and
sentimental, and my double duties, egoistic and altruistic, and supplies
an adequate incentive to progress.'
These several points furnish the matter of several chapters; and while
it must be observed here that Mr. Baring-Gould's 'negations,' as well as
those of other sectaries, are 'nothing,' and his condemnations and
denials of many positions for which the Catholic Christian would be
prepared to die, put him, in spite of himself, among the most extreme
left of the Hegelian school, yet his arguments on the worth of the dogma
of Incarnation, from his own point of view, deserve serious
consideration. After his numerous indications of a negative criticism
and spirit as hardy and audacious as could be well imagined, he sets to
work with a will, to blaspheme Protestantism as the negation of moral
truths. His monstrous perversions of Luther's and Calvin's position
merit severe castigation. Thus, 'Calvin denied free-will, and therefore
denied duty.' Can he have read the 'Institutes?' The statement 'that
Reformers denied the holiness of God,' with Jewel's 'Apology,' or any of
the Protestant symbols in his hand, is too flagrant a violation of
common fairness. The charge in this chapter against Protestants, that
they deny or negative the Personal Christ, and in a later chapter, that
they have only a dead Christ and not a present Christ to worship or
love, comes with a bad grace from one who has thrown away the evidence
of the existence or divinity of Christ as an historical fact. He appears
to glory in the sacramental system of the Romanist, and assures us that
the Protestant sacraments are reduced to two, and these are not baptism
and the Lord's Supper, but the 'Ministry' and the 'Bible;' the latter of
which, in its sacramental character, he pleasingly describes for his
purpose, as just so much 'washed-up rags and black treacle stains,' an
euphuism for the printed page, which is the _matériel_ for the
communication of such truth and reality as we poor destitute beings
possess. We are content. The mighty Word itself, with all its power to
kindle life and instruct intelligence, to stir the affections, and
discern even the thoughts and intents of the heart, is graciously
communicated to us by the printed page, and by the living voice of men
charged with the Holy Ghost; and for an actual communication of the
living Christ to our true nature, it is on an infinitely higher level
than that which can only reach our emotional nature through the medium
of our alimentary canal and gastric juices. When our author holds up to
heartless Protestants certain acts of special worship which Cardinal
Wiseman described so feelingly and poetically, we can hardly refrain
from telling him that such Cremorne splendours of religious awe, such
blendings of fetishism and wax-candles with the stupendous conception of
the ever-present Christ, will have little effect upon those whose
intellectual, moral, and sensuous nature have been brought into their
due relation with each other, who know the Christ, who love Him and
could die for him.
There is much that is worthy of profound consideration in Mr.
Baring-Gould's positive assertions with reference to the Incarnation and
the Atonement, the dogma of immortality and the Christian sacrifice; but
he has a strange habit of putting a few transcendental propositions one
after the other, mounting up from a 'positive' basis to something like
'Catholic doctrine,' and then calling his string of dogmas,
demonstration. He appears perfectly rabid in his hatred of Protestantism
and Protestants, in his dislike of the doctrine of the Atonement, as
expounded in every phase of evangelical Christianity; and he never
wearies of accusing Protestants of worshipping a dead Christ, because
they cannot, after his Hegelian fashion, accept the Tridentine dogma of
transubstantiation and eucharistic sacrifice. With all his rapturous
admiration of the Church and denunciation of Protestants, it is
sufficiently amusing to find him perpetually--when he wants to give high
utterance to his most enthusiastic dream--driven to quote the poetry of
Sectaries; and once he is so far left to himself as actually to make
that heretic, Isaac Watts, do him some service, and say for him one of
his sweetest thoughts. After all said and done, we find him still
outside the Roman Church, and the next thing we may hear is, that his
interesting, eloquent, and original book is placed in the 'Index.' There
is surely scarcely a position of high importance adopted by him which
would not be repudiated by a Catholic theologian.
_The Athanasian Creed, and its usage in the English Church: an
Investigation, as to the General Object of the Creed, and the Growth of
prevailing Misconceptions concerning it._ A Letter to Very Rev. W. F.
HOOK, D.D., from C. A. SWAINSON, D.D. Rivingtons.
This letter is extremely interesting, coming, as it does, on the morrow
after the publication of the Report of the Ritual Commissioners, and
following the courageous articles of Dean Stanley and Professor Maurice
in the _Contemporary Review_, and the long discussion of the subject in
the _Guardian_. Dr. Swainson is well entitled, by his prolonged studies
in this department of ecclesiastical literature, to be heard in defence
of the symbol of Athanasius. The upshot of his argument is, that it is a
'hymn,' and not a 'creed.' Here he does but re-echo the language of Dr.
J. H. Newman, Mr. Maurice, and others. He conceives, however, that he
has proved that it was in the first instance used to prepare candidates
for baptism, and that the damnatory clauses do not belong to it in
essence, and have not the same authenticity or value as the exposition
given in it of the Catholic faith; that their meaning is not intended to
cover every individual clause of the exposition, but to refer to the
Catholic faith as a whole; that they merely assert the grand distinction
which faith makes between those that are being saved and those that are
perishing for ever in the darkness of unbelief; that the inaccuracies of
the English translation are due to the influence of the Greek
translation of Bryling, and to the obscurity introduced by Luther's
version of it into German; that it ought to be 'sung,' in a true
translation, as an addition to the psalmody, and not in place of the
Apostles' Creed; that as 'the articles were never intended originally to
be made a test to be subscribed or enlarged from that point of view,'
the reference to the Athanasian Creed in the Articles does not bind us
to believe that every clause in it is agreeable to the word of God, any
more than a multitude of other propositions in the Articles, about which
it would be absurd to make a similar assertion. These various
refinements will not avail to reconcile the Anglican clergy to continue
much longer the use of a formulary which, though certain portions of it
may, by antiquarian scholars, be severed in thought from the rest, does
yet assume to the majority of those that are called to 'sing' or 'say'
it, the appearance of a homogeneous whole. Dr. Newman's description of
it as a war-song of the Church, is unquestionably true; if so, it does
condemn, in the language of triumphant dogmatism, the opinions of Arian,
Sabellian, and Apollinarian, as well as those who repudiate the Double
Procession of the Holy Spirit; and it declares that, without doubt,
those who hold such opinions shall perish for ever. Scarcely one in a
thousand of the Anglican clergy can believe in the obvious literal
interpretation of the symbol as a whole.
_The History and Literature of the Israelites, according to the Old
Testament and the Apocrypha._ By C. DE ROTHSCHILD and A. DE ROTHSCHILD.
Two vols. Longmans, Green and Co.
The first element of interest to us in this work is, that it is a
history of the Jewish people and their literature, by members of their
own nation and faith. It must ever be of great interest and of great
importance to Christian students of the Old Testament to see the views
of it taken by Jews, who certainly do not bring to it the Christian
preconceptions which so often overlay and perplex its interpretation.
If, as we think, the interpretation of the modern Jew errs through his
refusal to see the relations of its predictions and types to Jesus of
Nazareth, it is certain that the interpretation of Christians often errs
through the excess of Christian allusion which they imagine themselves
to find there. One way of correcting the latter is to see how
intelligent, pious, and conscientious Jewish interpreters look at it.
Many things are placed by them in natural lights, which are not the less
artificial in Christian hands, because Christian thought and meaning are
imported into them. The Messrs. Rothschild, who claim the conjoint
authorship of the book, are accomplished and devout men, and are
remarkably free from polemical one-sidedness. A chaste and gentle
elegance of style, illumined with quiet lights of a poetic but
restrained imagination, make the volumes very pleasant to read. The
work, moreover, is popular in form. Its critical power is not great, and
the criticism that there is, is latent rather than formal, and is
exhibited in its results rather than in its processes. It is sufficient,
if not to determine great controverted questions, yet to give
intelligence to the quiet assumption of conclusions. Nothing is debated,
everything is assumed and affirmed as unquestionable truth, although
there are indications that the writers are aware of the positions of
modern criticism.
The first volume is a simple recast of the Old Testament story; the
ordinary conclusions of popular orthodoxy are accepted. It makes no
pretensions to the rectification and reconstruction of Ewald or Stanley;
Ewald, indeed, is not once referred to. This volume, therefore, which
completes the history, calls for no remark, except that it is written
freshly and pleasantly. The second volume, which deals with Hebrew
literature, presents many more points for criticism. The writers have
arrived at conclusions, some of which are warranted by the most
authoritative judgments of modern scholarship; others of which are so
far from this, that it was almost incumbent upon the authors to justify
their assumption of them. They are such as these,--that there were two
Isaiahs, the first living down to the time of Josiah, the second a
hundred and fifty years later in the time of Cyrus--the one the prophet
of prosperity, the other of adversity; that the Messianic prophecies of
the latter, those contained in the fifty-third chapter for instance, had
reference to contemporary martyrs; that the traditions of Jonah, the
fretful prophet, were handed down through many generations, until they
were embodied in their Biblical form by some able writer of the
Babylonian period; the writers, however, repudiate the idea of its being
a legend, and contend for its historical character--that the book of
Daniel was written about the year B.C. 160; that the canonical book of
Psalms was ever used or intended to be used 'as a kind of liturgy of the
Jewish Church,' and 'that the poems were made to serve this purpose,
however different their original object might have been;' that the book
of Job was an imaginative drama, or dialogue, written about the
Babylonian period, constructed to prove the true doctrine of human
calamity; that the book of Ecclesiastes was written 'in the Persian, if
not in the Macedonian period,' and that the author 'put his ideas very
appropriately into the mouth of King Solomon;' that the 'Song of
Solomon' was 'written not long after the death of Solomon, by a poet
living in the Northern Kingdom,' was supposed to be the production of
Solomon himself, and 'naturally believed to have a religious tendency,'
and that through this misconception it obtained its place in the Canon.
As the writers give no reasons for their assumptions, it is impossible
to indicate the reasons of our agreement with them or difference from
them; we content ourselves with remarking, that the absence of reasons
in matters so greatly controverted, deprives the volume of scholarly
character and critical value. We can only say that, taking it for what
it is, it is an intelligently and agreeably written book. Although
making no pretensions to the ability or historical power of Stanley's
'Jewish Church,' it does not fall into any of his great assumptions. The
general remarks on the office and character of the Prophets, and on the
schools of the Prophets, are very meagre and feeble compared with the
chapters of Dr. Payne Smith, or of Dean Stanley. The work, indeed, must
be commended as simply a popular and uncritical reproduction from a
Jewish point of view of the Old Testament story.
_Present Day Papers on Prominent Questions in Theology._ Edited by the
Right Reverend ALEXANDER EWING, D.C.L., Bishop of Argyll and the Isles.
Strahan and Co.
These pamphlets have been published separately, and subsequently
collected into a volume. The first bears the title 'The Atonement,' by
the Rev. Wm. Law, a reprint of that great writer's 'Dialogue on the
Atonement,' with an elaborate introduction; the second, by the editor,
is on 'the Eucharist;' the third to the sixth are anonymous, under the
titles 'The Rule of Faith,' 'The Present Unbelief,' 'Words for Things,'
and 'Meditations and Prayers;' the seventh is a translation of Luther's
theses on 'Justification by Faith,' by the Rev. J. Wace. It is
impossible to deal with these papers separately in the compass of a
brief notice. One strong spirit pervades almost the whole of them. The
burden of several is to charge upon Evangelical doctrine the entire
blame of the 'present unbelief,' to represent that which we hold to be
the essence of the Gospel of Christ as little better than blasphemous
misunderstanding of God, as immoral, as defamatory to the true nature of
God and the work of Christ. It is urged that Socinians and infidels
would have had their deadliest weapon wrenched from their hands, if
schoolmen and theologians had not perverted the Gospel by representing
the Atonement of Christ as a means adopted to reconcile the Father to
his rebellious children, propitiate His wrath, or satisfy His justice.
We quite agree so far as this with Mr. Law, and with the spirit of
several of the pamphleteers. If the Church of Christ had been converted
to the view of Christ's work held by the Socini and their followers,
such disbelievers would have gained a great victory. The doctrine of
'substitution' is the _bête noire_ of these writers. Whatever else they
attempt to explain away or refute or repudiate, this hated doctrine
comes in for condemnation. The editor, in his paper on the Eucharist,
devotes great space to show that the 'basis of morality is overthrown by
the idea of a substituted or equivalent righteousness, ... all true
conception of the righteousness and holiness of God is lost, and we are
only saved from profanity ... by our non-observance of its real nature.'
To 'accept the sacrifice of the Son' in lieu of man's righteousness, or
in place of man's punishment, 'is a terrible misconception,' changing
'all that we naturally know and believe about God, as good and right,
into darkness.' The paper on the 'Present Unbelief,' which turns on
man's indisposition to recognise the self-evidencing revelation of God,
and propounds much wise and true remark on the undue reverence paid by
men and Churches to the logical processes once needed for special combat
with evil, but now no longer useful, tells us that 'the definitions of
God too often among ourselves, of God under the name of Christ Jesus, or
the anointed Saviour, have been too similar to the heathen--to Saturn
devouring his children, painted, no doubt, in milder colours, and
clothed in decent cloud, but very near the old heathen conception, the
old pictures of the Greeks.' 'God was not only in danger, but lost by
such a belief.' The author of the paper on 'the Rule of Faith,' after
much vague declamation and mystical enthronement of the inner life, says
what is very excellent on the fact 'that the proof of revelation being
true from the character of its operation, is the highest kind of proof,
and is not liable to the accidents which affect other or external
evidence.' He lays great emphasis on that inner verification of revealed
truth which also makes it to be revelation to each man. 'The God of
another is not my God; He is not my God by authority; I must be the
authority myself.' After developing the older 'rule of faith,' as
understood by the writer, and saying some useful though not very
satisfactory or clear things about the canon of Scripture, he endeavours
to show that the old 'rule of faith and practice in Christ has been
essentially altered.' The climax of the offence of modern theology is
represented here and elsewhere in these papers as a transformation of
the statements, 'God so loved the world that He gave His Son for it,'
into 'God so loved his Son as to give the world for Him.' What the
writer means we are at a loss to understand, but he actually tells us,
with a very grave and solemn look, that 'in the theology of substitution
the way is turned into the end,' 'darkness is brought in at the centre,'
God's 'love for man, as such, and individuals, as such, was lost sight
of, and the soul left to a conventional relationship with Him which
left it entirely outside, and from whence it could draw no nourishment.'
All we can say here is, that the author does not understand the alphabet
of the doctrine of substitution, or has wilfully misrepresented it. The
introduction to the reprint of William Law's dialogue is full of these
misconceptions, and seems utterly blind to the mighty powers of the new
life which, in the reformed theology, are the direct form in which the
justification of the soul by faith in Christ's sacrifice becomes a
matter of experience or consciousness. The paper on 'Words for Things'
is largely occupied with the same theme. That man should not suffer to
the full the consequences of his sins in this world and the next seems,
we suppose, to these writers a fearful violation of order; that the work
of Christ should be adapted to save a man from his sins by guaranteeing
and assuring him of the Father's forgiveness is incomprehensible to
them. To us this state of mind is only explicable on the supposition
that these writers cannot have felt the awfulness, hideousness and peril
of sin against the irresistible order in the midst of which we are
placed. Christianity seems to us a very worthless thing if this key-note
of its melody, this key-stone of its masonry be abstracted. From
Confucius to Marcus Antoninus, from Seneca to Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
from English Deists to French Positivists, we are _told_ by sages and
philosophers of all kinds to be good and self-sacrificing, to love God
and our neighbour, and do justice and love mercy, and that all will be
well. Leave out of Christianity the 'grace' that, to a broken heart and
to a mind conscious of guilt, comes not only with the Divine life that
makes a man a new creature, but with the assured conviction that the
order of God's universe, the will of the Father, the justice of His
rule, are manifested in His infinite love to the world through the death
of His Son; leave out the sublime truth that pervades the whole
revelation, and then the Bible and the Christ have little more to tell
us than we can find in enlightened heathenism and pagan philosophy.
There is much in these papers of which we cordially approve, and for
which we feel grateful; but this dead-set at what seems to us the heart
of Christianity wounds and distresses us. Mr. Wace's translation of
Luther's theses is pitched in another key, and deserves separate
treatment.
_The Theology of the New Testament._ A Handbook for Bible Students. By
the Rev. J. J. VAN OOSTERZEE, D.D. Translated from the Dutch by MAURICE
J. EVANS, B.A. Hodder and Stoughton.
_Biblical Theology of the New Testament._ By CHRISTIAN FRIEDEREK SCHMID,
D.D., late Professor of Theology, Tübingen. Translated from the Fourth
German Edition. Edited by C. WEIZÄCKER, D.D. By G. H. VENABLES.
Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
_The Theology of Christ from His own Words._ By JOSEPH P. THOMPSON. New
York: Charles Scribner.
We anticipate great advantage from the translation of these two
excellent manuals. We are learning in this country to value 'historical
theology' and the genesis and development of Christian ideas. Many
efforts have been made to present to the student the first stages and
earliest forms of this wondrous element of religious thought. Neander in
his 'History of the Planting of the Christian Church,' Reuss in his
'Histoire de la Théologie Chrétienne,' and Dr. Bernard in his Bampton
Lecture, have made us familiar with the fact that the teaching of the
New Testament, though resulting in glorious harmony, is yet not
homogeneous, and reveals throughout a progress from less to more--from
germinant seeds to rich efflorescence, from mysterious reticence to open
secrets, from fundamental principles to elaborate and systematic detail.
The peculiar type of doctrine conspicuous in the Synoptic Gospels
differs from the spirit and burden of the fourth gospel. The Petrine
doctrine is not identical either with Pauline or Johannine theology. We
are, perhaps, too apt to explain the language of James by that of Paul,
or both by that of John, without sufficiently taking into account the
specific teaching of each Evangelist and each Apostle. Dr. Oosterzee's
'Biblical Theology' presents, in small compass, the results of much
careful study, and seeks, at each stage of the inquiry, to place the
student in relation with the authors of the New Testament respectively,
and with them alone for the time being. The references to literature are
ample, and various points of stimulating inquiry are suggested. The
author does not go very deeply into the separate positions, nor does he
attempt any elaborate exegesis of the Scriptures cited in proof of the
induction he makes. The Evangelical bias of the inquiry is not
concealed, and his summaries of doctrine and the higher unity which he
claims for the somewhat divergent forms, reveal very clearly the
dogmatic tendencies of his own investigations. We can most cordially
commend this work--especially to those who have not access to larger and
more voluminous treatises--as an admirable compendium of Biblical
theology, and a valuable preliminary to all honest study of scientific
and dogmatic theology.
The second work mentioned above pursues the same general theme, and
contrasts the Biblical theology of the New Testament with exegesis on
the one hand and systematic divinity on the other. This manual is a
translation by Mr. G. H. Venables of the fourth German edition of the
late Dr. Schmid's work as edited by Dr. Weizäcker, and is a far more
elaborate treatise than that of Dr. Oosterzee. It is divided into two
parts, the one a development of the teaching of Jesus, and the other an
exposition of the teaching of the Apostles. The first part is preceded
by an historical review of the life of Jesus, and the second by a
fruitful and suggestive sketch of the lives of the Apostles. The
strength of learning and high analytical powers of the author are
reserved for the doctrinal review, and very beautifully does he bring
forth the teaching of our Lord under the three divisions--(_a_) the
glorification of the Father in the Son, involving the full sublime
teaching of Christ with reference to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit;
(_b_) the redemption of man, including the object of redemption, man and
the world, and the subject of redemption in all His relations; and (_c_)
the whole teaching of Christ about the kingdom of God, which is
identified with the Church; there the author reveals his sacramentarian
proclivities, and his high idea of the function of the Church and
development of the kingdom both in this world, and that which is to
come. In developing the teaching of the Apostles, his chief point is
that that of James and Peter presents Christianity as in living unity
with the Old Testament, and that of Paul and John in its fundamental
distinction from the Old Testament. Great care and skill are shown in
showing how the teaching of Paul and John roots itself in the previous
teaching of Jesus, and the result of the entire discussion affords high
subsidiary proof of the unity of the New Testament, the authenticity of
the later as well as the earlier of Paul's Epistles, and the fundamental
identity of doctrine in the Apocalypse and fourth Gospel.
Dr. J. P. Thompson of New York, in the third work mentioned above, has
confined himself to the high, grand, noble theme of illustrating the
'theology of Christ.' He takes, as we think, higher and broader ground
in his illustration of the 'kingdom of God' than either Dr. Oosterzee or
Dr. Schmid, and admirably states the truth when he represents the Church
as a form of the kingdom of God, embracing the whole 'commonwealth of
believing souls who, through all diversities of race, language, and
ecclesiastical institution, fraternise in the love of Christ.' Dr.
Thompson developes the teaching of Christ under a great variety of
themes which are not concatenated in any such classification as Dr.
Schmid's, though they traverse much of the same ground. Such topics as
'prayer,' 'providence,' and 'eschatology,' occupy much of the space. The
exposition is wise, candid, and eloquent.
_A Dictionary of Doctrinal and Historical Theology._ Edited by the Rev.
JOHN HENRY BLUNT, M.A., F.S.A. L--Z. Rivingtons.
We see no reason for modifying the judgment of Mr. Blunt's Dictionary
which we ventured to pronounce upon the first section of it. His
extensive knowledge is beyond all doubt, and his indefatigable industry
beyond all praise. We give him all credit for both painstaking and
conscientiousness; but he sorely lacks the scholarly faculty of using
his knowledge in a dispassionate way. Rash assertion, hasty
generalization, partial and illogical inference, disfigure every page of
his Dictionary. Mr. Blunt is fairly carried away by his sacramentarian
theories; they possess him like a fever, and affect both his vision and
his judgment. Above most of his brethren even, and that is saying very
much, he infuses a polemic into every scrap of antiquarian fact that he
can collect, and into every particle of reasoning that his ingenuity can
devise. We are aware that a statement like this is a very grave
accusation, and that it can be substantiated only by a patient
induction such as a brief notice will not permit; but we pledge our
critical judgment to the assertion that there is not a page in which
statements do not occur, which no judicial mind can accept. Thus, on the
very first page, _sub voce_, 'Laity,' Mr. Blunt chooses to interpret the
Hebrew word עַם, which Gesenius and all lexicographers render
'people'--in the sense of nations--by the ecclesiastical word 'laity,'
_i.e._, the people as distinguished from the priests. This enables him
to give to a number of instances in which the word occurs just the twist
of interpretation that his theory demands. Surely a conscientious
scholar would refrain from giving a general term such a special
significance for the sake of sustaining an ecclesiastical theory. It
matters not that the term is sometimes used in this sense, and is
applied to the people as distinguished from the priests--Mr. Blunt
treats it as the generic sense. Under the word 'Latitudinarianism,'
among much prejudiced statement, we meet this astounding assumption,
'this article (the 18th of the Church of England) is somewhat loosely
worded; but by comparison of the language used with the use of similar
language in the New Testament, it will be plainly seen to amount to a
statement that salvation is only to be obtained within the boundaries of
the Church.' Under the word 'Lay-Co-operation' we have this unscholarly,
and must we not say spiteful, assumption: 'Puritanism confounded the
idea of the κλῆρος and the λαὸς, and if the phrase
"co-operation of the laity" had been known to it, the theory of such
co-operation, as well as the practice, would have been resolved into a
substitution of the laity for the clergy, by setting the former to do
those works chiefly or solely which especially belong to the office of
the latter.' Is it the function of a theological dictionary to utter
hypothetical prophecies founded upon rash and gratuitous statements, and
conceived in a spirit of theological malice like this? Under the head
'Lay Priesthood' we read: 'This sacerdotal function of the Christian
laity is a consequence of the anointing which they receive from God the
Holy Ghost in baptism and confirmation.... The Holy Eucharist is offered
at the altar by the priest ordained for that purpose, and the lay priest
co-operates with him by saying "Amen" at the giving of thanks.' Will Mr.
Blunt permit us to say that no lay scholar could possibly have been
guilty of such desperate assertions?
Passing over the word 'Limbo,' and some regrets that it cannot be used
on account of prejudice, although perfectly unobjectionable in itself,
we find under the word 'Liturgy' the usual assumptions of men of Mr.
Blunt's school, _e.g._, 'the circumstances under which, the Holy
Eucharist was instituted, make it absolutely certain that the Apostles
celebrated it from the first with a considerable amount of ritual
preciseness, and the same circumstances make it probable that they also
used from the beginning some liturgical form. It seems to be unnecessary
to prove that the Apostles used some set form of liturgy in celebrating
the memorial of their Lord.' And yet if Mr. Blunt would condescend to
furnish such proof, it would convert to his views of things one-half of
Protestant Christendom.
Under the word 'Lollards,' Mr. Blunt is disingenuous enough to cite
against Wickliffe the articles prepared for his indictment in the trial
before Archbishop Courtenay; among them, '7. That God ought to obey the
devil;' and then to say, 'Such was the teaching initiated by Wickliffe,
and assiduously promulgated by his followers.' It is surely a new thing
to adduce an indictment of enemies as a witness to character. Does Mr.
Blunt really believe that this was Wickliffe's teaching? If he does,
what are we to think of his scholarship? If he does not, what are we to
think of his candour?
This brings us only to 'Ló,' under the first letter in this division of
Mr. Blunt's work. We need not say that these are fair samples of the
whole. We protest against such gross assumptions and perversions in the
name of simple scholarship. We greatly regret that so much labour and
knowledge are thus perverted to the aims of the fanatical polemic. His
book is not without its value, but it sorely tries the patience of a
simple inquirer after fact and truth. Mr. Blunt has done his best to
make worthless a work that might have been a valuable contribution to
popular ecclesiastical knowledge.
_The Leading Christian Evidences, &c._ By GILBERT WARDLAW, M.A.
Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark.
_The Evidences of Christianity in the Nineteenth Century._ By ALBERT
BARNES. Blackie and Son.
We have bracketed these two volumes together, not simply because they
are alike in theme, but because by a peculiar coincidence they are
complementary of each other. Written as we need scarcely say, altogether
independently, they yet arrive by opposite methods at similar
conclusions. From Scotland and from America come the same earnest,
forcible national testimony to the truth of Christianity. There are both
likeness and unlikeness. Each author treats his subject in a clear,
attractive, popular manner, candidly confessing difficulties where such
exist, yet carrying the reader forward by the almost irresistible power
of his reasoning to the most decided conviction. The literary style is
eminently different, as is to be expected when two diverse thinkers
express themselves on a common topic. This, however, arises not only
from the individuality of the writers, but also from the very
circumstances in which their works were produced. Mr. Gilbert Wardlaw
has been 'secluded, during the later years of life, from other
opportunities of service to the cause of truth,' and his book therefore
bears the impress of a thoughtful mind evolving for itself arguments in
support of a faith in which has been found the truest consolation during
years of retirement. We imagine that his very seclusion from active life
has compelled him to re-examine in the light of modern scepticism the
foundations of his belief. His work is characterized by a calmness and
quiet force which we cannot too highly admire, and which must be
productive of the happiest results upon the minds of sincere doubters.
Mr. Barnes's volume, on the other hand, had a different origin. It
consists of a series of Lectures in a Theological Seminary, which are
somewhat elaborate, diffuse, and theoretical, and were evidently
intended to produce an immediate impression on an audience by their
style as well as their matter. Yet each work is admirable. Both should
be studied together, since they look at the argument from diverse
stand-points. Their methods of treatment, not only in manner but
substance, are in harmony with the circumstances in which these volumes
originated. The one may be described as the subjective, the other the
objective method. Mr. Wardlaw, believing that the moral aspect of the
Christian revelation and the attitude of the inquirer are the most
important preliminary questions in determining the truth of
Christianity, commences with the internal and experimental evidences;
while Mr. Barnes deals with external proofs, looking at the Bible as a
book to be accounted for on historical grounds. It has been a real
mental gratification to study these diverse methods, and to watch how,
though travelling by distinct lines of thought, both authors arrive at
the conviction that Christianity is from God. The volumes are in many
ways helpful to each other, for if Mr. Wardlaw's seems to suffer from
condensation, leaving too much to his readers' minds, the same points
are often elaborated by Mr. Barnes with abundance of detail. It would
have been an improvement if, in 'The Leading Christian Evidences,'
italics or some other form had been adopted by which the successive
stages of the argument would have been indicated, so that we could at a
glance gather up the main points discussed. We do not venture on any
criticism of positions which we consider weak or unsound, as our space
is limited, and therefore content ourselves with congratulating these
authors on their well-reasoned additions to our apologetic literature.
_The Brahmo Somaj._ Lectures and Tracts. By KESHUB CHUNDER SEN. First
and Second Series. Edited by SOPHIA DOBSON COLLETT. Strahan and Co.
We have on previous occasions given considerable space to the remarkable
movement in Hindu thought which is known to us under the above title.
Some of these lectures, notably that on 'Jesus Christ--Europe and Asia,'
have long been before us, and offer a remarkable sign of the effect
produced on Indian society, by the truth of Christ's life, and its
sublime ideal of conformity with the will of God enshrined in the
Gospels. The lack, the negation, the blank in the theology of Mr. Sen
need not be wondered at. This is a very different phenomenon from a
similar mental position when adopted by a professedly Christian teacher.
These lectures and tracts will receive special attention in consequence
of the recent visit to England of this remarkable man, whose obvious
earnestness and passionate yearnings after the regeneration of India
have produced so deep an impression. We do not in the least sympathize
with the hasty disposition shown by some to accept Mr. Sen as a prophet
of an undogmatic theism, nor with his somewhat arrogant address to
English Christians from certainly very small acquaintance with them and
their work. All that he knows of the higher life of faith and true
holiness, and all the stimulus that his own moral nature and Hindu
society have received of late years, are so conspicuously due to the
indirect effects of missionary labour and Christian teaching, that his
disposition to ignore the source of the new light that has flooded his
soul is unsatisfactory in the extreme. At the same time, we do rejoice
at the moral dignity and spiritual ideal and religious exercise which he
is proclaiming to his countrymen. His protest against Pantheism, his
grasp of the idea of 'the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,'
of man's sin, and need of regeneration, of man's dependence, and need of
faith and resignation, of self-sacrifice and prayer, are very
instructive. But let us clearly recognise the position assumed by him,
that Hinduism and Mahometanism are themselves, in some purified form, to
'harmonize and form the future Church of India.' The words of Jesus or
His Apostles are often quoted by him with respect, as something
'excellently and wisely said,' but there is no acknowledgment of fealty
to the Lord, no Gospel but what he calls 'the Gospel of Divine mercy,'
based upon his own intuitions and experiences.
'The true faith,' which is expounded in a series of apothegms arranged
under a variety of headings, is intended to appeal to those who are
accustomed to the style of some of the best of the sacred books. There
is much that is most excellent and Christian in its tone of feeling,
beautiful and attractive in form, lofty in conception and ideal, as were
the meditations of Antoninus. He and his friends reveal the potent
influence, the pungent leaven, the grain of mustard seed, that has been
cast into the Oriental mind. They are feeling after God and finding Him.
God has given them by His Spirit some faith. May it daily grow to more
and more!
_Christus Consolator._ The Pulpit in Relation to Social Life. By
ALEXANDER MACLEOD, D. D. Hodder and Stoughton.
_Ad Clerum._ Advices to a Young Preacher. By JOSEPH PARKER, D.D. Hodder
and Stoughton.
_A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons._ By JOHN A.
BROADUS, D.D., Philadelphia. Smith, Elder, and Co.
The literature of homiletics is becoming almost redundant. It is
singular that every man whose business it is to teach this difficult
science is dissatisfied with the text-books and manuals that his
well-meaning predecessors have prepared for him, and tries his hand at a
new one. We cannot see any very sufficient reason for the work of Dr.
Broadus. It is neither better nor more comprehensive nor more helpful
than the well-known treatises of Vinet, Kidder, and Shedd. It is not so
philosophical as M. Vinet's, nor so erudite as Dr. Kidder's, nor so rich
and suggestive as Dr. Shedd's. It goes over the old ground in very much
the old way, and tells some of the old stories, and gives much the same
old advice. Those who can work by rule, and who thoroughly trust the
rule-maker, will find the subject carefully and exhaustively but not
energetically treated by Dr. Broadus. The contrast between Dr. Broadus
and Dr. Parker is great. The 'Advices to a Young Preacher' are racy,
caustic, and stimulating. They are not confined to the great theme, but
wisely condescend to give useful hints on little things. The personal
allusions to living men, the astounding eulogiums passed by Dr. Parker
on some of his brethren, the withering satire pronounced on others, the
conversational criticism on certain printed sermons, and the familiar
epistolary offer to all and sundry to send the respected author a sermon
to criticise, almost take the breath out of one's mouth, and certainly
remove the volume from the range of ordinary literature. The specimen
prayers introduced by the author, though very excellent in their way,
appear out of place. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the book is full
of strong and wise advice. Here is caricature and broad farce, and
extreme exaggeration and violent personal attack under assumed or blank
names, all of which are strangely out of tune with the manly and
reverent tone of the author when he touches the deepest themes. A
preacher of such high reputation and undoubted success must be listened
to by young preachers with great interest. Dr. MacLeod's volume has
greatly delighted us. Seldom have the high functions of Christian truth,
and the possibilities of the pulpit, been more powerfully or more
candidly put. We wish that some of the unsuccessful men whom Dr. Parker
grinds to powder, would ponder with the aid of this volume the sublime
work which may even now be within their reach. Dr. MacLeod has described
with singular power and freshness 'the preacher as an _Elevator_, as a
_Healer_, as a _Reconciler_, as an _Educator_, as a _Liberator_, and
_Regenerator_.' Under these several headings he has touched the sorest
places in our social life, has carried a torch into some of the darkest
chambers of human sorrow and need, and has shown the mission of
Christianity and the function of its minister with conspicuous success.
Dr. MacLeod is wise and stringent, moreover, in his condemnation of
those who only preach fragments of the truth of God. His rebuke has a
loving, helpful peal in it, which makes the heart soft, and calls aloud
for higher effort and more consecrated zeal. There is neither
common-place exaggeration nor rasping personality; it is full of wisdom,
strong sense, and earnestness.
_Culture and Religion in some of their Relations._ By J. C. SHAIRP,
Principal of the United Colleges of St. Salvator and St. Leonard, St.
Andrew's. Edinburgh; Edmonston and Douglas.
The volume before us consists of five lectures delivered by the
principal of the United Colleges of St. Leonard and St. Salvator, on a
theme of high interest, at a time when the elevating process indicated
by the rather vague term 'culture' bids high to supersede the divine
claim and authoritative sway of religion. Professor Shairp, though
dealing with the relations of culture and religion in a vein and manner
suited to popular address, reveals on every page his own deep sympathy
with the paramount claims of religious truth and the spiritual life of
man, and a large-hearted appreciation of those aspects of 'culture,'
which its exclusive advocates imagine never to have shed their light on
deeply religious minds. With great dexterity, if, in the present case,
such a term is applicable, our author shows that starting from a fair
definition of 'culture,' 'it must embrace religion and end in it;' and
on the other side, that Christianity is the great harmonizing principle
of human affairs, bringing one region of human cultivation after another
under its sanctifying influence 'to reconcile all true human learning
not less than human hearts to God.' In lecturing on the 'scientific
theory of culture,' our author exhibits the ideally educated man on
Professor Huxley's theory, and quotes and criticises the celebrated
comparison drawn by him between the liberal education he demands, and
the acquaintance which an imaginary chess-player should possess with the
laws of the mighty game with nature, on the success of which his fortune
and his life depend. Mr. Shairp has shown with great beauty and force of
expression, that if there were no other than the fixed laws of this game
determined by scientific investigation, 'men would be more than ever
driven inward, and their natural selfishness be tenfold concentrated and
intensified;' that for the 'tender conscience' which Mr. Huxley
postulates as an element in wisely playing this great game of life the
'theory' makes no provision; and indeed that such conscience, though the
highest part of a man's nature, would be no help, but a hindrance, to
any successful issue of the struggle. The scientific theory of culture
leaves out facts of our nature which are as certain, though not so
apparent, as any fact which science registers. With fine appreciation of
all the excellencies of Mr. Arnold's theory of culture, which he
designates as literary or æsthetic, Mr. Shairp contends that Mr. Arnold
has erred in his estimate of what the spiritual energy really is in
which our highest good is to be sought, 'has made that primary which is
secondary and subordinate, and made that secondary which by right ought
to be supreme.' He argues with much force, that the first great
commandment 'cannot be made subservient to any ulterior purpose;' that
religion is either a good in itself or it is not a good at all. We have
not space to describe the remaining lectures on 'Hindrances to Spiritual
Growth' and 'Combinations of Religion and Culture.' The volume is
charged with weighty suggestions.
_The Witness of St. John to Christ; being the Boyle Lecture for 1870;
with an Appendix on the Authorship and Integrity of St. John's Gospel,
and the Unity of Johannine Writings._ By the Rev. STANLEY LEATHES, M.A.
Rivingtons.
This is the third series of Boyle Lectures delivered by the Rev.
Stanley Leathes. In the first and second series, the author dealt with
the witness of the Old Testament, and that of St. Paul to Christ. In the
volume before us, he pursues a similar method; and taking nothing for
granted, not even the genuineness of the fourth Gospel, nor the
inspiration of this, or of other portions of the New Testament, 'he does
not assume that its conception is true, but he does affirm that if its
message is fraught with substantial truth, certain results will follow,
and--do follow.' In the appendix, there is an effort made to grapple
with the question of the genuineness of the fourth Gospel, and to meet
the difficulties raised by Dr. Davidson, the Rev. J. J. Tayler, and
others. There is nothing special or peculiar in this argument, with the
exception of the detailed effort which Mr. Leathes has made to show the
abundant similarity of theme, doctrine, historical fact, and even form
of expression between the three Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John.
We have never seen this point so well elaborated elsewhere, and the
obvious conclusion is that much too great a stress has been laid upon
the supposed discrepancy of subject-matter and ethical tone discernible
between these documents. We think that both Dr. Hengstenberg and the
Rev. John Godwin have handled the Paschal difficulty more successfully
than Mr. Leathes, but few writers have shown with more sufficiency and
clearness the unity of the Johannine writings. In fact, everything turns
in this discussion on satisfactorily showing the possibility, from a
literary standpoint, of the identity of authorship of the Apocalypse and
the fourth Gospel. The Tübingen school, Dr. Davidson, J. J. Tayler, and
the most thorough-going opponents of the genuineness of the Gospel,
admit, nay contend for the Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse. They
uphold the external evidence for it against Lücke and others; they
establish the relations between the John of the Synoptists and the
Apocalyptist. If, then, by accumulation of independent evidence, the
identity of the author of the fourth Gospel with the Apocalyptist is
established, or a belief in it is shown to be perfectly rational, a
great victory is won for the faith of Christ. We commend Mr. Leathes'
argument to the profound consideration of students. The eight lectures
deal with the credibility of the witnesses, the characteristics of
John's teaching, the essentials of this teaching, John's appeal to the
inward witness, the unity of John's writings, their authority, John's
message to the age, and John's place in Holy Scripture. There is much
fine and strong, though rather cold and artificial reasoning in these
lectures. The reader feels a little too much as though he were under the
authoritative commands of a drill-sergeant, or rather of a too officious
guide, who tells him exactly where he must stand, or where he must not
stand, in order to see some glorious panoramic landscape. The hand of
the critic and the logician is always on the shoulder, and forcing head
and heart into the appropriate and rational conclusion. Yet, with this
drawback, every lecture leaves a healthy impression; and the testimony
of the beloved disciple to our Divine Lord seems at length to be so
strong and self-evidencing, that it matters comparatively little when,
where, or by whom the testimony is given.
_Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts._ By FRANCIS JACOX. Hodder and
Stoughton.
This volume is the result of very extensive and discursive reading.
Sixty or seventy passages of Scripture have been annotated by the author
from the copious stores of his secular erudition. Choice fragments of
poetry, philosophy, and history, the analogies of life and thought, with
the high themes suggested by the sacred text, are heaped in almost
prodigal affluence of illustration upon the foundation of each text.
Thus, on 'the Tempter's it is written,' our author quotes in
illustrative vein not only Bunyan, and the criticism on the Dublin Synod
of Irish Catholics, but Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice,' Gray,
Coleridge, Burns, Diderot, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens. In his
beautiful comment on 'Consider the lilies,' we have Tennyson, and
Justice Shallow, Leigh Hunt and Mr. Proctor, Bishop Copleston, Isaac
Taylor, Shenstone, and Dr. Croly's Salathiel, Mr. Hannay, and Mrs.
Browning, all laid under contribution, and a very charming mosaic is the
result. We might imagine the book to be the work of a life-time, or the
hobby of a highly-cultured and devout man. Many a sermon and many a
platform-speech may hereafter benefit by Mr. Jacox's labour of love; but
none will take the pure delight in it which it must have given to the
author in his quiet hours. The annotations of the words 'Strangers and
Pilgrims,' 1 Peter ii. 11, are peculiarly rich and beautiful.
_Rain upon the Mown Grass, and other Sermons, 1842--1870._ By SAMUEL
MARTIN, Minister of Westminster Chapel. Hodder and Stoughton.
The ministry of the Rev. Samuel Martin has now for nearly thirty years
exerted a spiritual force upon an ever widening circle. Westminster
Chapel has constituted a focus of holy influence, where his varied,
thoughtful, continuous instructions have not only gathered around him
one of the largest congregations in England, but have conferred upon it
a character for wise effort, liberal sympathies, and Christian
devotedness. It would be impossible to measure the circumference of that
influence. Few nonconforming churches in the kingdom have failed at
least to seek Mr. Martin's presence and assistance when any great thing
was to be done; when any difficult enterprise needed a special
consecration, when a young pastor at his ordination, or a church
entering on a new career of usefulness, craved sanctifying counsel and
tender sympathy. It would be difficult to convey to a stranger, or to an
unsympathizing critic, any conception of the strange fascination, the
deep thrill of holy excitement, the solemn hush of spirit which the
spoken words of Samuel Martin have produced on susceptible minds. It is
quite beyond our power to analyze or account for the overwhelming
impression we have known him produce by his mode of quoting some
well-known words of Holy Scripture, or by iterating and reiterating in a
manner almost unique, the key-word or clause of some discourse on which
he has put forth all his strength. His sermons are often characterized
by an exceeding quaintness which from any other lips than his might
provoke a smile; by a subtle ingenuity of illustration which reminds one
of Brooks, or Sibbes, or even of Thomas Adams; by an elaboration of
argument which seems to throw a disproportionate weight on some minor
truth of God's word; by a fulness of illustration bordering on the
efflorescent; and by a tone of meditation, fitted, as it might seem, to
the cloister or some learned leisure rather than to this busy,
world-harassed, distracted age: yet it is almost impossible to listen to
one of those exceptional discourses without an intense desire for a
higher, more beautiful, more self-sacrificing life. The exquisite
sensitiveness of the preacher to all the sorrows of men, his obvious
personal distress over the breaking heart of suffering humanity, his
quivering sympathy with the weak and diseased, the poor, the out cast,
the prisoner, 'the publican and the sinner,' the old man and the little
child, make almost every sermon a lesson in the 'enthusiasm of
humanity.' Much of every good sermon, is beyond the power of
reproduction by the press; and this noble volume of Mr. Martin's
discourses has to some extent the effect upon the reader which a volume
of Beethoven's symphonies might have upon a musical student who had lost
the power of hearing. Notwithstanding this necessary peculiarity
disparaging the printed and revised report of all the noblest
productions of the pulpit, we render Mr. Martin our unfeigned thanks for
the volume. It contains thirty-two discourses. Many of them have been
preached on special occasions, and demand a little imagination from the
reader before he can understand their full significance. Take, for
instance, the sermon preached at the opening of the new church at
Halifax on the text, 'Then the king said unto Nathan the Prophet, See
now, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwelleth within
curtains.' The three sacred places, 'the home,' 'the grave,' 'the
sanctuary of God,' have never been more admirably described, and the
sketch given of 'the history of places of true worship' has never been
drawn with more graphic force or spiritual beauty; but all the
circumstances of the day and the place of that discourse gave it tenfold
meaning. It would be well for those who disparage the Puritan theology
and its professors, to understand that the high strain with which the
volume opens on the genial influence and character of the Gospel, was
preached with electrifying power to one of the great gatherings of
Nonconformist ministers and churches in the North of England.
The sermons on 'The Saving Name,' 'The Precious Blood of Christ,' 'The
Fulness of God,' show how Mr. Martin handles some of the great
theological problems, and there is hardly one which is not charged with
deep emotion, with carefully expressed thought, and spiritual force.
This last element is the distinctive virtue of a volume which can
scarcely be touched without perceiving some electric flash of light,
some new pulsation of holy, Christ-like feeling.
_The Shepherd of Hermas._ Translated into English, with an Introduction
and Notes. By CHARLES H. HOOLE, M.A., Senior Student of Christ Church,
Oxford. Rivingtons.
It is not long since we called the attention of our readers to the
admirable translation, from the Greek test, of the 'Shepherd of Hermas,'
which was published, together with other writings of the so-called
Apostolic Fathers in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library. The Greek text
of this ancient Christian allegory or romance was found, together with
the epistle of Barnabas, attached to the Codex Sinaiticus of the New
Testament; and this may account in part for the revival of interest
among the students of ecclesiastical history in this once popular but
long-neglected fragment of antiquity. Mr. Hoole has executed his task
with great care and painstaking, and has given in his 'introduction and
notes' some very valuable information bearing on its interpretation, and
on its reception by the Ante-Nicene Fathers of the Church. We are
brought by it 'into the earliest period of Christian antiquity.' It was
doubtless quoted by Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and
Eusebius, with a decreasing respect; and we can only admire the fine
tact and good sense which ultimately led the later writers and the
Church Councils unequivocally to exclude it from the Canon of the New
Testament. The question of the authorship is enveloped in great
obscurity, and the apparently explicit statements are easily refutable.
It is not even certain, but indeed very doubtful, whether the author was
an ecclesiastical officer of any kind. The supposed Ebionitic tendencies
of his doctrine have been maintained strongly by Hilgenfeld, but refuted
by Dörner and Donaldson. We are surprised that in virtue of the
non-appearance in Latin translations of the main passage on which this
charge rests, Mr. Hoole has thought fit to omit it. Dr. Donaldson shows
at length that there is 'nothing in the teaching of Hermas with regard
to God, Christ, the Church, or the work of salvation, which is contrary
to the truths or spirit of Christianity.' It is interesting also to
observe from various passages, that Hermas identified the office of
bishop and presbyter, and makes no reference to the Eucharist.
_Ante-Nicene Christian Library._ Vols. XVII. and XVIII. Edited by Rev.
A. ROBERTS, D.D., and JAMES DONALDSON, LL.D. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
These two volumes are extremely valuable; one is the third and last
volume of Tertullian, and the other contains 'The Clementine Homilies'
and 'The Apostolical Constitutions.' The Homilies are a translation by
the Rev. Thomas Smith, D.D., by Peter Peterson, M.A., and Dr. James
Donaldson, and the 'Constitutions' have been carefully revised from
Whiston's translation. If Bunsen's theory be correct, that they take us
into the end of the second century or beginning of the third, and can
be almost conclusively shown to be the work of one to whom the
interpolations of the Ignatian literature were familiarly known, we
obtain a valuable additional test of the quality of second century
literature, and another assurance that the Gospel of John must have
preceded them by more than a generation. It is not merely the abundant
quotation from the fourth Gospel, but the profound difference of tone
between these documents, that is so remarkable. If this is the second
century theology and ecclesiasticism, how comes it that an author living
in that century could rise such an untold height above them and omit
what unfortunately had become the chief features of his time? Krabbe, in
his elaborate work on the Apostolical Constitutions, concludes that the
eighth book could not have been written before the end of the fourth or
beginning of the fifth century. Bunsen thinks that the law of
interpolation may account for the several references to later customs
and offices which are to be found there. At all events, throughout the
earlier books, we hear nothing or next to nothing of the sacerdotal
order, and no other officer is mentioned intermediate to bishop or
deacon. In the eighth book we have full-blown sacerdotalism and
episcopacy, and the several apostles are made responsible for all the
innovations. We owe a great debt of obligation to the careful editors of
these translations now approaching their term. The admirable indices of
all kinds greatly enhance the value of the work thus accomplished.
_The Miracles of Our Lord._ By GEORGE MAC DONALD. Straham and Co.
Mr. Mac Donald is well known in the circles of the Church, for the
ministry of which he was educated, as a preacher of remarkable freshness
and power. Whatever judgment may be passed upon some points of his
theology, there are few living men whose words are fuller of high
religious inspiration, and indicate a more reverent and intense love for
the Lord Jesus. This is his distinctive claim as a religious teacher. He
disregards the conventionalities of sermon-structure, and of
sermon-speech, and brings to bear upon his themes the fresh thought of a
man of genius, and the penetrating spiritual insight of a man of fervent
piety. Whether any of these papers have been preached as sermons we do
not know; thousands of readers have become acquainted with them in the
pages of the _Sunday Magazine_, to which they were contributed. Mr. Mac
Donald has no difficulty in accepting the miraculous; nay, he justly
says that if the Supreme Being 'be a God worthy of being God, yea (his
metaphysics even may show the seeker), if He is a God capable of being
God, He will speak the clearest, grandest word of guidance which He can
utter intelligible to His creatures.' 'The miracles are mightier far
than any goings on of nature, as beheld by common eyes, dissociating
them from a living will; but the miracles are surely less than those
mighty goings on of nature with God, beheld at their heart. In the name
of Him who delighted to say, "My Father is greater than I," I will say
that His miracles in bread and in wine were far less grand and less
beautiful than the works of the Father they represented, in making the
corn to grow in the valleys, and the grapes to drink the sunlight on the
hill-sides of the world, with all their infinitudes of tender gradation
and delicate mystery of birth.' Whether we agree with every minute
interpretation or not, this little volume, precious as fine gold, is
full of penetrating spiritual insight, of fine spiritual sympathy, and
of suggestions and inspirations greatly helpful to the noblest spiritual
life.
_Saint Paul: his Life, Labours, and Epistles._ A Narrative and an
Argument. By FELIX BUNGENER. Translated from the French. Religious Tract
Society.
M. Bungener's is one of the numerous books elicited by M. Rénan's
assaults upon Christianity. Such have always produced the effect of
multiplying defensive exposition and arguments. They are therefore not
to be regretted; their resultant good is much greater than their
incidental evil. Untenable positions are tested and abandoned, and
valued defences are strengthened. M. Bungener's argument is the
narrative. He goes steadily through the incidents of the Apostle's
history, parrying attacks, and setting forth evidences and arguments as
he goes. His French brevity and his religious earnestness give a great
charm to the volume.
_History and Revelation: the Correspondence of the Predictions of the
Apocalypse with the marked Events of the Christian Era._ By JAMES H.
BRAUND. Two vols. Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.
In the exposition of the Apocalypse, literally everything depends upon a
right principle of interpretation. Whether the symbolism of the book has
its solution in historic facts or in spiritual principles, determines
everything that a writer has to say respecting it. Into these two
schools all interpreters of the Apocalypse may be divided. Of the
former, Mr. Elliott is the modern Coryphæus, and he has found in Mr.
Braund a laborious disciple. 'The Horæ Apocalypticæ,' he says, 'will be
found, perhaps, the nearest to perfection of its kind extant;' and these
two volumes are devoted to a patient working out of historical
coincidences and congruities. Mr. Braund confidently trusts that the
proof from such congruity will be so self-evident that it will be
impossible to doubt. But clearly it must depend very largely upon the
historical knowledge and imaginative ingenuity of the interpreter,
whether a fulfilment can be demonstrated or not. For instance, there is
much more of ingenuity than of demonstration in the fancy of Mr. Elliott
adopted by Mr. Braund, that the white horse of the first seal is the
Roman Empire, that the rider is Nerva, and that the bow in his hand is
the symbol of his Cretan origin--the Cretans being great votaries of
Apollo. It may be so; but the mere statement of it does not, in virtue
of its congruity, carry with it demonstrative proof. It is a mere piece
of _ipse dixitism_, which might find a hundred parallels of equally
ingenious suppositions. On what authority, again, does Mr. Braund affirm
that the 'seven horns of the Lamb symbolize his atoning work, because
the blood of the sin offering was sprinkled on the horns of the altar,
and the seven eyes, his mediatorial character between God and men'?
Horns are usually the symbol of power, and eyes of wisdom. The statement
of Mr. Braund, so far from being self-evidencing, provokes our
incredulity.
For ourselves, we hold to the opposite principle of interpretation, as
substantially adopted by Hengstenberg, Godwin, and others, viz., that
the rise, progress, and overthrow of antichristian principles--Jewish,
pagan, infidel, worldly and ecclesiastical--are symbolized in the
Apocalypse, and that with the development of these, national events have
to do in only a very subordinate way. Then much of the symbolism takes
its place as mere parabolic drapery. Whether any specific historical
event find its type in an Apocalyptic symbol or not, we cannot err
seriously if we lay hold upon a great principle; certain it is that
every antichristian power in the history of the world has had its
strength in the domain of superstition, rather than in mere historic
incident; and to be assured of the destruction of this is to be assured
of the main thing. We cannot help thinking that such laborious
demonstrations as Mr. Braund's are, comparatively speaking, exercises of
painful and wasted ingenuity.
_Moses, the Man of God._ A Course of Lectures. By the late JAMES
HAMILTON, D.D., F.L.S. James Nisbet.
These lectures have been selected for separate publication from Dr.
Hamilton's MSS. They have all the fascinating characteristics of his
pen--graceful description, imaginative reconstruction, unconventional,
and often very ingenious, sometimes learned, disquisition, with the
light, graceful touch of poetic style and delicate fancy which ally all
his productions with general rather than with sermon literature. As
sermons they seem to us to want point and cogency: they read rather like
chapters of a book; but it is a sufficient commendation to say they are
James Hamilton's.
_Memories of Patmos; or, some of the Great Words and Visions of the
Apocalypse._ By J. R. MACDUFF, D.D. James Nisbet and Co.
Dr. Macduff disavows all pretensions to be a hierophant of the mysteries
of the Apocalypse. We are left to gather incidentally that he himself
inclines to what may be called the spiritualistic, as distinguished from
the historic school of interpreters. His object in this volume, however,
is to present those 'manifold isolated passages of transcendent
grandeur, beauty, and comfort ... which can be see by the naked eye,
without the aid of the prophetic lens or telescope.' His selections are
made chiefly from the opening and closing chapters. Dr. Macduff's manner
of discoursing is too well known to need characterizing; it is enough to
say that in these glorious manifestations of the exalted Christ, he
has, with due regard to exegesis, indulged, wisely and profitably, in
the unction of description and application which have made his books so
popular. No man may discourse of the new heavens and the new earth
without palpable shortcoming, but he has given to devout readers a wise
and edifying book.
_Hours of Christian Devotion._ Translated from the German of A. THOLUCK,
D.D., Professor of Theology in the University of Halle. By ROBERT
MENZIES, D.D. Blackwood and Sons.
This excellent manual of devotional thought, the work of one of the
greatest Biblical scholars that Germany has produced, has passed through
many editions, and has been translated into several different languages
with more or less of abridgment. Dr. Menzies has accomplished the
difficult task not only of translating the prose meditations, but the
numerous poetical effusions that enrich and pervade the volume.
Seventy-six brief meditations on personal, experimental, and practical
religion, are of course very varied in their character. Thus one of them
is a running comment of extreme beauty on Psalm xxiii., followed by a
poetical rendering of the spirit of the Psalm, which, even in Dr.
Menzies' translation, is of a high order, as thus--
'I strayed a wild tumultuous road along,
My mind not less tumultuous than the way;'--
And a few verses later on--
'Rich is the banquet both for heart and eye,
As varying still their hues by night and day,
A world of flowers, like sparkling jewelry,
Their opening loveliness around display.
'When shines the sun aloft without a cloud,
His smile evokes a pomp of colour bright;
Or if in gloom his radiant face he shroud,
Sweet violets shed their perfume thro' the night.'
We are tempted somewhat profanely to ask, however, whether the perfume
of the violet quite carries out the idea of flowery beauty as a banquet
for the _eye_ through the night? To many of these meditations four or
five great texts are prefixed, and the reader feels that the gentle
pressure of a powerful hand has crushed these sacred fruits, and handed
him the fragrant wine of the kingdom in a golden goblet. The writer
seems to blend his own spiritual history with his exposition in such a
way as to aid the reader to make such experience his own. Reading
between the lines it is easy to perceive the philosophic dissertant, the
accomplished Biblical scholar, the learned theologian, but all is
subdued to the language of simple, earnest piety and profound devotion.
Some of the deepest mysteries of the kingdom of God are made more
comprehensible when thus brought into the light and glory of the Most
Holy Place. We note particularly the meditations on 'Drawing nigh to
God,' and on 'By grace made free from sin.' Thus, 'If peace have
departed from thy heart, build upon the vacant spot a penitential altar,
and peace will again return, for the Lord Himself will place upon it the
atoning sacrifice. Can any suppose that a servant who has transgressed
his Lord's will, and then with anxiety in his heart sets about amending
his ways, is as well qualified to do good works as the child who has
wept repentant tears upon his Father's bosom, and has had his faults
forgiven? Oh, no; the future cannot be made better until the evil be
made good.' The abundance and variety of the material furnished in this
volume for quiet pondering render further characterization difficult. We
are thankful for the introduction of this wise, thoughtful, helpful book
in this dark, sad season.
_The Holy Bible, according to the Authorized Version, arranged in
Paragraphs and Sections; with Emendations of the Text, also with Maps,
Chronological Tables, &c._ The New Testament. Religious Tract Society.
It is very difficult to amend the authorized version without proceeding
to a thorough revision which again would necessitate a revision of the
_textus receptus_ of the Greek. There is no intelligible principle to
guide an editor in pursuing a middle course. Dr. Jacob has improved the
renderings in the _more important instances_ in which the labours of
later critics have shown that the translators to whom we owe our justly
venerated English version were in fault. We are too thankful to have
errors removed in any degree to demur. The truth is, that a false
superstition for the authorized version, like all false things, is
permitted to suppress true reverence for the Divine Word as God gave it.
It will soon cease to be a question of the excellencies or defects of
the authorized version, and will become the imperative duty of all who
reverence that which is the truest and most perfect record of
revelation, to protest against its usurpation of a reverence due only to
the original text. Another bondage from which the editors of this
admirable edition are helping to deliver us is that of chapters. The
arrangement of the text in paragraphs according to the sense, and its
division into sections corresponding thereto, is a much greater service
in interpretation than many might suppose. This beautiful, clearly
printed, and carefully edited volume deserves very high praise.
_Night unto Night._ A Selection of Bible Scenes. By the Rev. DANIEL
MARCH, D.D. Hamilton, Adams, and Co.
Certain well-known night-scenes of Scripture are here sketched with a
vividness and graphic force which make us spectators of the varied
incidents, while the lessons that are drawn from them of warning, of
hope, or of duty, are brought home to the heart and conscience with
tenderness and power.
_Bible Lessons._ By the Rev. EDWIN A. ABBOTT, M.A., Head Master of the
City of London School. Part II., New Testament. Macmillan and Co.
Mr. Abbott has very opportunely published the substance of the Bible
lessons which he gives to his fifth and sixth forms, thereby
demonstrating how practicable it is to give to pupils the very highest
form of religious teaching, without any ecclesiastical or even dogmatic
sectarianism. He must be a fanatical theorist indeed who can take
exception to the contents of this volume; and yet pupils receiving them
would be possessed of all that the most exigeant need care for in
religious teaching. It is not every teacher who can inculcate religious
truth with such penetrating wisdom and catholic breadth of sympathy as
characterize Mr. Abbott; but it is almost certain that, practically, he
must be an ingenious fanatic indeed, who, with the Bible alone in his
hand, can do much in sectarian teaching; at any rate if he do, he will
do it wilfully, and the remedy will neither be far to seek, nor slow of
application. Mr. Abbott has done good practical service--over and above
the intrinsic value of his book, which is great--by this timely
publication.
_The Pulpit Analyst._ Vol. V. Hodder and Stoughton.
The 'Analyst' has completed the fifth year of its existence, and has, we
think, continued to grow from the beginning. The present volume is a
rich and valuable one. A course of sermons by Alford 'On the Parable of
the Ten Virgins,' a very valuable series of discourses by Mr. Baldwin
Brown 'On Misread Passages of Scripture,' a miscellaneous series of
fresh and vigorous sketches by Mr. Watson Smith, and a short series by
the Editor on the life of Jacob, constitute a homiletical department of
unusual excellence. Dr. Parker's odd concatenation of wise, clever, and
incongruous advices to a young preacher, of which we have spoken
elsewhere, run through the volume under the title 'Ad Clerum.' Mr.
Godwin contributes two or three able discourses on 'Proving Knowledge,'
and a new translation, with notes, on the Epistle to the Galatians. The
'Analyst' again changes hands. It comes with the new year under the
editorial control of Mr. Paxton Hood. It enlarges its dimensions, and
changes its name to 'The Preacher's Lantern.'
JUVENILE BOOKS.
At Christmas time all pleasant things abound:--from turkeys to
pantomimes, from oysters to gift books, from staid family gatherings to
snapdragon and hunt the slipper; all domestic and social charities are
in highest exercise, as if the carol of the angel, and the blessed
advent of the Holy child inspired all forms of brightest joy and most
loving thought. Not least among the blessings which Christmas pours
from her cornucopia are her gift-books. If we welcome with satisfaction
the higher works of art which Christmas brings, and which, ministering
to the sense of the beautiful, elevate and refine the entire man, moral
and intellectual, as well as æsthetical, we welcome still more heartily
the affluent Christmas supply of books which more especially address
themselves to the young. Artistic excellence, romantic adventure, fairy
imagination, natural phenomena, the wonders of travel and of science,
creations of fiction and fancies of poetry, are all brought under
requisition--and their very highest products consecrated to the nurture
of youthful imagination and fancy, mind and heart. This is one of our
distinctive glories, and, we will venture to say, a mark of distinctive
wisdom, that our literature for the young is so rich in quality and so
affluent in quantity. Few nations possess a juvenile literature--France
has no children's books; neither has Spain, nor Italy. Even our American
cousins have a very meagre native supply. Only Germany can make any
pretence to a comparison with us. Month by month books for the young are
produced, and at Christmas-tide they are poured forth in bewildering
profusion; publishers of gravest repute lay themselves out for them; the
staidest literary journals review them. We have come to understand that
no service to a people can be greater or more momentous than to supply a
pure, bright, merry-hearted literature for the young, which shall wisely
minister to their imaginations, and in pleasant ways sow the seeds of
good things in their hearts. Happy are the children of these days
compared with those of the days of 'Goody Two Shoes' and 'Sandford and
Merton.' What a small British-Museum-library a child of twelve would
possess who should have, from its birth, acquired and retained the
hundreds of juvenile publications of each year; and what is more, how
intelligent, if it had imbibed all their instructions, how good if it
had embodied all their lessons. Tales of fairies and genii abound, as is
fitting and wise; but it is no less a national blessing that our
juvenile literature is so wholesome. We can speak only of a very few of
the books which, in every variety of form and character, seek to
brighten the nursery and the fire-side.
In the very foremost rank, whether in respect of artistic attractiveness
or of literary excellency, we must place the dainty publications of
Messrs. Nelson. _In the Eastern Seas; or, The Regions of the Bird of
Paradise._ A Tale for Boys. By W. H. G. KINGSTON. _In the Wilds of
Africa._ A Tale for Boys. By W. H. G. KINGSTON. Two books of imaginative
travel, in the style that Mr. Kingston has made his own, full of
descriptive information carefully compiled, and of adventurous incidents
well imagined. Mr. Kingston wraps the pill of useful information in the
jam of romantic adventure so deftly that young patients will scarcely be
conscious of the physic--only of the gratification of their intellectual
palate. In the first of these works Mr. Kingston carries his young
friends to fresh scenes and pastures new, and opens out to them the
tropical wonders of the Malay Archipelago. Walter Heathfield, the hero
of these adventures, is a fatherless boy, who, with his sister, are
taken to the East by Captain Davenport. The voyage is, of course, full
of adventure and peril, and all the phenomena of Eastern seas and skies
are observed. Singapore and Nagasaki open to the young travellers the
worlds of China and Japan. Walter, with a companion, is washed overboard
in a typhoon, and, of course, is cast upon a desolate island; after
hair-breadth escapes he returns to England, as the heir and successor of
his relative, Lord Heatherley; the personal story being cleverly
interwoven with the useful knowledge. In the second book named, Andrew
Crawford is sent to sea, in consequence of the mercantile reverses of
his father, with a due charge of good advice from the latter. The
captain dies, and the ignorant mate permits the ship to be stranded on
the coast of Africa. A slaver picks up Andrew, and part of the crew
getting on shore, they resolve to journey inland to the Crystal
Mountains, through the gorilla district, the wonders of which are
described. On the river, among the mountains, through the wilderness,
they wander, until all the marvels of Central Africa are described.
These two books will be prime favourites with boys. They are worthy of
Mayne Reid.--_The Sea and its Wonders._ By MARY and ELIZABETH KIRBY.
This is a companion volume to 'The World at Home,' published last year,
of which it is in every way a worthy successor. Both books are
beautifully got up as to paper, type, and binding, and are most
profusely illustrated with steel engravings. The wonders of the sea
itself, and of its productions, are described in a clear and simple
style, and in short chapters, with paragraphs and words equally short,
so that the book has a most inviting look to even an inexperienced
reader. It would be difficult to find a more interesting as well as
instructive book for children from seven to fourteen, while to many
beyond that age, its facts will be new and interesting.--_The Fall of
Jerusalem and Roman Conquest of Judea._ A condensed account of the 'Fall
of the Sacred City,' and a summary of the events that led to it;
followed by a vivid narrative of the final subjugation of Judea. The
last chapter gives us the characters which Dean Milman introduces in the
'Fall of Jerusalem,' and quotations from it. It is an interesting and
valuable little book, well furnished with engravings.--_Lighthouses and
Lightships._ By W. H. DAVENPORT ADAMS. A very complete and readable
account of the ancient Pharos and of our modern lighthouses, with their
principles of construction; together with a correct list of those that
guard the dangerous coasts of Great Britain and Ireland. A chapter is
given to French lighthouses, and to the manner of life of those who
spend their days in tending these safeguards for our sailors. As a book
of reference it will be very useful, but it will repay a careful reading
before being consigned to the reference shelf. The illustrations, over
sixty in number, give life and interest to the little volume, which is
intended for no especial class of readers, but for both young and old
who care for the welfare of humanity.--_Cyril Ashley._ A Tale. By
A.L.O.E. Another of A.L.O.E.'s instructive stories for young people,
which the authoress, in a touching preface, 'thinks will be the last
time she may be permitted to bring her pitcher from the well-spring in
which she has so often dipped it.' Cyril Ashley is a young man of
singular prudence and goodness, who has thrust upon him by stern duty
the reformation of a weak, selfish step-father, and a number of unruly
half-brothers and sisters. The history of Jonah is the stimulus and
deeply pondered lesson which gives him the resolution to carry that
trying task to a satisfactory issue.--_Birds and Flowers._ By MARY
HOWITT. A volume of verses on birds and flowers, enlarging the latter
term, that is, so as to include orchard and forest trees; written on
that high level of excellence which makes Mrs. Howitt's poetry so
pleasant and readable, although there are not many pieces of it that
abide in the memory, or will take their place in our permanent poetical
literature. The illustrations by M. Giacomelli, the French artist who
illustrated 'the Bird' of M. Michelet, are very beautiful. They are all
vignettes, or initial letters, or chapter headings, but they are done
with great artistic skill and delicacy. Altogether this is one of the
most beautiful of smaller Christmas books. Graceful song and artistic
picture together will charm young readers, and supply a very choice
gift-book for them.--_The Spanish Brothers._ A Tale of the Sixteenth
Century. By the Author of 'The Dark Year of Dundee,' &c. The author of
the series, of which this is one volume, has much of the careful skill
and fascination of the author of the Schönberg-Cotta series. Many
suspected her first work to be from the pen of the latter. The 'Spanish
Brothers' contains a vivid picture of the horrors of the Inquisition,
and of the heroism with which many of the early Protestants in Spain
endured its inflictions--life-long incarcerations, and _auto-dá-fé's_,
at which men, and even women of gentle birth were burned to death before
crowds of exulting spectators. Such things are strange to read of in
these our 'soft times,' but there is abundant evidence to prove that
both the cruelty and the heroism in their extremest forms were real
facts. The fictitious part of the book is a story (interesting, but
rather too long) of two brothers devoted to each other, and to the idea
of a father whom they had never seen, until one of them comes
accidentally to share his prison. The two then remain together till the
death of the father and the martyrdom of the son.--_The Story of our
Doll._ By Mrs. GEORGE CUPPLES. The adventures of little Maggie's
foundling doll will appeal very successfully to the make-believe
imagination of little children, and greatly delight them.--_Wonders of
the Plant World; or, Curiosities of Vegetable Life._--_Useful Plants.
Plants adapted for the Food of Man, Described and Illustrated._--_Walter
in the Woods; or, Trees and Common Objects of the Forest Described and
Illustrated._ Three little books designed to give young people popular
botanical knowledge. The first is the more scientific in form. The last
two have recourse to that kind of conversational incident and
illustration which children will listen to for hours. All three may be
commended.--_Pictures and Stories of Natural History._ A series of short
sketches of different animals, with very effective coloured plates of
each animal described. Admirable for juveniles.
Foremost and best among Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton's juvenile books
comes _Old Merry's Annual_, the prince of its class, as Aunt Judy's
volume is the princess. Brilliant in crimson and gold, and chubby in
form like a winter apple, Old Merry comes forth to brighten Christmas
firesides, as cheery, wise, wholesome, and quaint as ever. Among the
annuals we like it the best. Stories, gossipy chats _de omnibus_,
puzzles, useful information about most things that interest boys, and
didactic papers, make up a miscellany which it is impossible to
describe, and difficult to overpraise. M. D. Liefde's story is the
_vale_ of an able man, a great favourite with young people. It is
chiefly a posthumous publication.--_Madeleine's Trial, and other
Stories._ From the French of MADAME DE PRESSENSÉ. A group of simple
stories illustrative of the law of love. The translator has made them so
English in tone as well as in style that the flavour of the original is
well-nigh exhaled.--_Walter's Escape; or, The Capture of Breda._ By J.
B. DE LIEFDE. A spirited account of one of the most remarkable exploits
in the heroic struggles of the Dutch to secure their liberty. It is
written with the author's wonted vigour.--_Model Women._ By WILLIAM
ANDERSON. This volume gives us slight sketches of the Mother of the
Wesleys, Elizabeth Fry, Amelia Sieveking, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More,
Elizabeth Browning, Caroline Herschel, Selina Countess of Huntingdon,
and a few others whom the author conceives to have been respectively
'model women,' either in domestic life, philanthropic effort, literary
achievement, scientific research, or Christian consecration. There is
not much power or point in the characterization of these distinguished
women, but the brief memorials of some of them are interesting, and may
help to raise the idea of women's work.
Messrs. Griffith and Farran sustain the reputation of the house that
became famous by the publication of 'Goody Two Shoes.' They have an
admirable staff of writers for young people, and the works they produce
are of a highly interesting and instructive character. One of the best
this year is _Household Stories from the Land of Hofer; or, Popular
Myths of Tirol._ By the Author of 'Patrañas; or, Spanish Stories.'
Between twenty and thirty stories of myth and magic of the old-fashioned
sort, embodying the wild legends that hang about the valleys of the
Tyrol (the writer pedantically spells it Tirol), and have haunted them
for a thousand years. The Norgs, or little men, are the chief heroes, a
kind of southern Trolls, or dwarfs of the Black Forest. It is a class of
myths less known than those of Scandinavia, but having many of their
weird characteristics. The most popular are 'Nickel of the Mine,' the
little man of the mountain who dug riches for the covetous, selfish
Aennerl; and the 'Rose Garden of King Sweyn,' made by the Norg king for
his mortal bride, whom, however, after a fierce combat, he had to
surrender to Theodoric the Visigoth. Many of the stories are legendary
embodiments of the struggle between Christianity and Paganism. Since Dr.
Dasent's 'Norse Tales,' a more important and interesting collection of
legends has not appeared.--_Tales of the Saracens._ By BARBARA HUTTON.
These tales are history, not fiction, treating first of Mohammed as
prophet and as conqueror, and then of the line of Caliphs by whom he
was followed. The book is written in a clear and lively style, and to
intelligent readers will prove both entertaining and instructive.--_Sunny
Days; or, A Month at the Great Stowe._ The Great Stowe is a farmhouse in
the country, at which a family of little town-folk spent a month. We are
told all that they saw and did, and a right merry party they were; none
the less so for the wise discipline and sententious wisdom and clever
stories of Aunt Gommie. 'Aunt Gommie is like a spider; she goes on spin,
spin, spin, and she is never at a loss for a web.'
Sampson Low & Co. have re-published a charming American Story, _Little
Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy_. By LOUISA M. ALCOTT. Whether Miss
Alcott is the most popular of American writers for young people we do
not know; but beyond all question, 'Little Women' is just now the most
popular American juvenile fiction. You see it upon every American
book-stall, and find it in almost every American home. It is having a
greater run than any recent fiction; and it is really a very charming
story. The 'Little Women' are the four children of Mr. March, an
American pastor, away South at the war. Their characters are delineated,
and their history, from early girlhood to motherhood, traced with a
consummate cleverness. Miss Alcott has not, perhaps, so delicate a touch
as the author of the 'Gayworthy's,' nor so graphic a power as Mrs.
Beecher Stowe; but she has delicacy, descriptive power, and force of no
ordinary kind. One of the most promising characteristics of American
fiction is its individuality. There is a marked family likeness among
the fictions by female writers, which during the last few years have
obtained such popularity among ourselves. They are redolent of American
character and life, especially of New England life, and have also an
intellectual cast of their own--a kind of household idealism,
quaintness, and piety, not easy to describe, but unmistakably to be
recognised. We predict for 'Little Women' a popularity greater than that
of the 'Wide, Wide World,' 'The Gayworthy's,' or 'Faith Gartney's
Childhood.' We are not sure that our American cousins do not, in this
department of literature, far excel any writer that we can boast There
are two or three other books of Miss Alcott's ('The Old-Fashioned Girl,'
for instance) with which we should like English children to be
acquainted, although they are not quite equal to 'Little Women.'
Messrs. Bell and Daldy send _The Brownies, and other Tales_. By JULIANA
HORATIO EWING. Beautiful stories, charmingly told, with capital
illustrations by our old friend George Cruikshank.--_Aunt Judy's
Christmas Volume for Young People_ contains a wealth of instruction and
amusement, which we have neither time nor space to describe. Our young
readers should get it, and judge for themselves, and we assure them they
will not be disappointed.--_Waifs and Strays of Natural History._ By
Mrs. ALFRED GATTY. An elementary book of instruction, concerning corals
and coral islands, the Beaver, sponges, zoophytes, microscopic objects,
&c., conveyed in Mrs. Gatty's charming way. Nothing lends itself more
easily to romance than natural phenomena, and Mrs. Gatty's readers need
not to be told how magical Aunt Judy's pen is.--_Parables from Nature._
Fifth Series. By Mrs. ALFRED GATTY. Eight more of Mrs. Gatty's popular
parables, about 'Consequences,' 'Ghosts,' 'Unopened Parcels,' 'See-Saw,'
&c. The one on 'Unopened Parcels' is the longest and the
best.--_Deborah's Drawer._ By ELEANOR GRACE O'REILLY. The author of
'Daisy's Companions' cannot fail of an eager welcome from the readers of
that charming little volume. Here is a companion to it. Deborah is the
dead sister of Lavinia Meek, who had a great gift of telling and writing
stories for children. These had been put away in a drawer, which Lavinia
Meek opens for the amusement of little Averil, who reads four or five
clever and touching little stories which she found there. These are set
in a neat framework of personal history. The little book is a gem.
Messrs. Seeley and Co. send us _Aunt Judith's Recollections; a Tale of
the Eighteenth Century_. By the author of 'Missionary Recollections.'
Aunt Judith flourished in the days of Wesley and Whitfield, and in a
pleasant chatty way, though somewhat garrulous withal, the old lady
tells her young niece Annie the story of those times--of the darkness
which had settled on this England of ours, and of the great awakening
that followed the labours of those holy, earnest men.--_Hetty's Resolve;
a Story of School Life._ By the Author of 'Under the Lime Trees.' There
is but little power or point in these rather prosy details of school
routine; but if they should lead some young readers to shun the slippery
ways of Florence Benson, and to imitate the honest work of the
kind-hearted Maggie, they will not have been written in vain.--_Curious
Facts about Animals._ For Little People. _Evening Amusement._ Two little
books for little folk, simply written and attractively illustrated; the
former describing the habits of the mole, the badger, the otter, the
deer, the dog, the sheep, the horse, &c., and telling anecdotes
respecting them; the latter a series of juvenile stories of the simplest
kind, which derive their main interest from the children cutting out
figures in black paper to illustrate them.--_Tony and Puss._ From the
French of P. J. STAHL. With Twenty-four Illustrations from designs by
Lorenz Frölich. Another dainty book for very little children, with
multitudinous groupings of Tony and Puss in varied relationship. Some of
the illustrations are very clever, though Herr Frölich's typical 'Papa'
looks rather of the feeble order; but he may not be less welcome to the
Tinies, for whose special advantage Messrs. Seeley and Co. cater so
lavishly.--_Sunday Echoes in Weekday Homes._ By Mrs. CAREY BROCK. This
book is a history of the home life of some young people, who having been
trained to look upon the Bible as connected with every thought and
incident of their lives, find in the journeyings of the children of
Israel types and emblems of their own doings and trials, at home and at
school. It is none the less interesting to the class for whom it is
written, if less true to Nature, that the children themselves suggest
the warnings given and the lessons taught by God's dealings with the
Israelites. From the 'passing over Jordan' of the youngest of the family
the rest derive much comfort in seeing one of their number enter the
'promised land.'
Messrs. Cassell cater liberally and successfully for young readers. _The
Log of the Fortuna: a Cruise on Chinese Waters._ Containing Tales of
Adventure in Foreign Climes, by Sea and by Shore. By Captain AUGUSTUS F.
LINDLEY. A Collection of 'Seven Sailors' Yarns'--not all of them,
however, relating to China. The scene of one of them is laid in Paris;
of another, among Australian Bushrangers; of another, in the Sea of
Azof. The 'Yarns' are told on board the _Fortuna_, which has got upon a
mud-bank in Chinese waters, and waits for spring tides. Captain Lindley
wields a vigorous, incisive, and humorous pen. His stories are therefore
clever and amusing: some of his descriptions and bits of rollicking
humour would not discredit Charles Lever. The book is profusely
illustrated, and, like all the publications of this firm, marvellously
cheap.--_Home Chat with our Youngsters._ By C. L. MATEAUX. Never was
instruction more acceptably given or more sweetly sugared than in this
attractive volume. The twenty-two chapters on 'People, and things which
the Young Folks see or hear about,' are illustrated on almost every
page. The chapters are conversational in form, the young folks asking
only sufficient questions to mask the monotony of unbroken information.
The story of 'Columbus' is thus told, and is made lucid by
illustrations. Simpler synonyms for some of the words might have been
found, but the book will be a great favourite in the nursery. It is, for
children a stage farther advanced, almost as good as 'The Children's
Album.' We can give it no higher praise.
From the Religious Tract Society we have received--_Spanish Pictures
Drawn with Pen and Pencil._ By the Author of 'Swiss Pictures Drawn with
Pen and Pencil.' We have done--what doubtless some of our readers have
done--tested the 'Swiss Pictures' by taking it to Switzerland as a
_quasi_ guide-book. We found it carefully accurate, and full of
intelligent observations. This bespeaks our confidence for this
companion volume about Spain. 'Africa begins at the Pyrenees,' says the
French proverb: so does our author: and even veteran travellers will
feel that once over the Pyrenees they are in a _terra incognita_. And
yet few lands are physically more unique, romantically more full of wild
legends, historically more full of romance, ethnologically more
interesting, and socially and religiously more full of undeveloped
possibilities. Madrid, the Escurial, Granada, Seville, &c., are visited
and described. Cathedrals, bull-fights, gipsies, Murillo, religious
customs, literature, trade, the Moors, all receive due notice; and have
thrown upon them gleams of history, snatches of poetry, and visions of
the future. The author has freely laid under contribution writers of
renown, large extracts from whom are interwoven with his narrative of
personal experience. Gustave Doré is among the eminent artists who have
supplied the illustrations. It is an instructive and effective popular
book.--_The Picture Gallery of the Nations_ is a series of short
descriptive chapters of about seventy of the nations of the earth; each
occupying only a page or two, and illustrated with very effective
wood-cuts, some of them whole-page size, others smaller. It is a popular
book of the best kind for young people who delight in the help which the
eye affords to the instruction of the pen.--_Original Fables._ By Mrs.
PROSSER. Readers of 'The Leisure Hour' and 'The Sunday at Home' are
familiar with Mrs. Prosser's name as the writer of two or three capital
serial stories which appeared in these publications. With these fables
they will, through the same medium, have made acquaintance. To write
fables successfully has been given to only three or four of the human
race--the author of those which pass under the name of Æsop, La
Fontaine, and Kriloff are the only three names of great fable-writers
that occur to us. Mrs. Gatty very successfully attempts parabolic
stories, but not the terseness and brevity of the fable proper, which is
to fiction what the sonnet is to poetry--what the proverb is to the
sermon. Mrs. Prosser has done fairly where so few have done well. From
the nature of the case we cannot quote (to analyze would carry us beyond
our space); we content ourselves therefore with a general commendation.
The morals which she weaves into fables may catch the fancy of children,
whom an apothegm would only make callous.--The _Leisure Hour_ and the
_Sunday at Home_ are sustained at a degree of almost unrivalled
adaptation and efficiency. Tale, biography, sermon, and song, often of a
very high order, diversify and enrich their pages. We are glad to see in
the 'Leisure Hour' the wise breadth and impartiality which supplies
biographers of characters so diversified as those of Miss Burdett
Coutts, Charles Dickens, Père Hyacinthe, Professor Huxley, Mr. Disraeli,
and General Trochu. Mr. Lord, Naturalist to the Egyptian Exploring
Expedition, supplies a valuable series of papers on the 'Peninsula of
Sinai.'--_Cousin Mabel's Experiences._ By E. JANE WHATELY. Cousin Mabel
having been absent from England for some years, in visiting various home
circles is much struck by the diversified errors and follies into which
religious people have fallen, whose earnestness and seriousness cannot
be doubted. The ritualism of young ladies run wild upon church
decorations, the spiritual gossip in which certain elderly people
indulge, the doing for the poor and strangers to the neglect of home
duties, the party spirit pervading missionary work, with other forms of
worldliness and selfishness, which are so largely mixed up with many
forms of religious life--all these grave errors are exemplified in a
series of unconnected stories of family life. Miss Whately does not
exaggerate in her characters the follies she wishes to point out; and
her way of combating them is one of much wisdom, and is combined with
many practical hints, calculated to effect in actual life the reforms
which in these tales is always achieved. We trust the practical result
may be the same.--_The First Heroes of the Cross._ By BENJAMIN CLARKE.
Sunday School Union. Mr. Clarke's 'Life of Jesus, for Young People,' has
been received with so much favour that he has attempted to tell the
story of the Acts of the Apostles in the same way. He has done this
admirably, with great simplicity, and in a very interesting way. Mr.
Clarke has spared no pains to qualify himself for forming and expressing
true conceptions of the incidents that he narrates.
THE
BRITISH QUARTERLY
APRIL 1871
ART. I.--_Burton's History of Scotland._ Vols. V., VI., and VII. London.
1870.
The affairs of Scotland will always occupy an honourable and conspicuous
place in the grand drama of national development which makes up the
history of the British Empire. It has been the destiny of the Scottish
people to influence the general fortunes of England in a larger degree,
and more permanently, than could have been expected from their mere
numbers, or their position in the north of our island. In the years
which succeeded the Norman Conquest, Scotland was, in some measure, a
place of refuge for the English name from foreign oppression; and though
deeply penetrated by the Norman elements which consolidated and
strengthened her feudal monarchy, she held up something like a beacon of
hope before the eyes of the down-trodden Saxon, during the calamitous
period of alien domination. Two centuries later, when her nationality
had become more firmly established, when her Highland clans, her
Anglo-Norman colonies, her Norse settlements, and her Lowland commonalty
had been brought nominally under a supreme government, though not yet
formed into one people, she exhibited to the world a magnificent
spectacle of prolonged, stubborn, and successful resistance to the
encroachments of a very superior power; and, in the internecine struggle
which ensued, we see distinctly the high qualities which have made her
the worthy compeer of England. It was probably one of the results of
this contest that France, aided by her Northern ally, was enabled to
throw off the Plantagenet yoke, and to acquire the position she still
holds in Europe; and, but for Verneuil and other battles, it is
possible that, in the fifteenth century, England might have become a
military despotism, extending from the Western Isles to the Pyrenees,
and have had a completely different history. It is unnecessary to say
what Scotland accomplished at the great crisis of the Reformation; if,
in the person of Mary Stuart, her dynasty threatened England with
subjection and with the despotism of the Catholic League, her people
proved the defence of Protestantism, rejected the sovereign they justly
detested, gave strength to the counsels of Elizabeth, and contributed
largely to the success of the policy which culminated in the ruin of the
Armada. For it was at the momentous period of the civil wars of the
seventeenth century that the house of Stuart and part of the Scottish
nobility endeavoured to blight the prospects of England, to stifle
freedom by military power, and to restore what was Romanism all but in
name; but the mass of the nation opposed the movement, and set the noble
example of resistance to it; and though they ultimately separated from
England, they did much to cause the series of events which ended in the
Revolution of 1688. Scotland, in a word, has had a beneficent influence
of a marked and even extraordinary kind in shaping the course of our
English story; and we need not notice how her independent spirit has
affected for good the national character, what eminent men she has given
the State, what valuable additions she has made to the treasures of
British literature and thought, what use some of her institutions have
been, as patterns for our own imitation.
The author of the interesting volumes before us has long held a
distinguished name in connection with the literature of his country. He
has given us an exceedingly good account of the transitional period in
the history of Scotland, which embraces the Revolution of 1688, the
Union, and the final extinction of the reactionary and half-Romanist
party in the nation, when Jacobitism perished in 1745. He has also
described with clear insight, and, on the whole, with an impartial pen,
that honourable episode in Scottish annals, of lasting importance to
these kingdoms, the 'ancient league' of Scotland with France; and no
writer, perhaps, has done more to elucidate whatever is most noteworthy
in the antiquarian remains and monuments of the races which from the
earliest times have inhabited the northern division of our island. The
history, however, which he has just completed, and which deals with the
affairs of Scotland from the Roman invasion, under Agricola, to the
overthrow of the House of Stuart, is, beyond comparison, his greatest
work; and as a repository of the learning with which modern research and
criticism have explored the national life of his countrymen, it stands
alone, and without a parallel. Mr. Burton, in his first four volumes,
which were published in 1867, carried down his narrative from the
legendary period of the Roman occupation, of the Scots and Picts, of
Fergus and the old Celtic monarchy, to the rise of the feudal kingdom of
Scotland and its long contest with the power of England; and he went on
to describe the memorable era when the ascendancy of France, and
national pride resenting Flodden and Pinkie Cleugh, struggled with the
forces of the Scottish Reformation; and Mary Stuart, but for her crimes
and her fall, would probably have united the two crowns, and become the
sovereign of a Romanized Britain. If in treating this important part of
his subject Mr. Burton was sometimes carried away by a somewhat too
exuberant patriotism, if he, perhaps, assigned too high a place to the
position of Scotland in British annals, and if he was never eloquent or
picturesque, he displayed rare and extensive knowledge, a judgment
usually calm and correct, and the faculty of forming sound conclusions;
and his account of the Scottish war of independence, and of Scottish
politics in the sixteenth century, is worthy of very high commendation.
His last three volumes, which have recently appeared, and which we
purpose now to review, comprise the last years of the reign of Mary
Stuart, the triumph of the Reformation in Scotland, the struggle between
the Kirk and the Crown, which marked the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the reaction against James I. and his son, and the memorable
events which were the result; they proceed to describe the great civil
war, the important attitude of Scotland in it, the conquest of the
kingdom by Cromwell, and the dreary epoch which followed the
Restoration; and, as may be supposed, they exhibit the merits and the
shortcomings of the earlier volumes. Mr. Burton is inclined to
exaggerate the part which Scotland played in 1640-1649: he is rather too
lenient to the Stuart kings, and he is not skilful in the art of
composition. But, on the other hand, his learning is profound; his views
of most of the great questions which arose during this memorable epoch,
are sound and judicious, and deserve attention; and, on the whole, he
has placed the events of the drama of which he has followed the
chequered scenes, in their true light and real significance.
Mr. Burton's narrative begins at the period of the imprisonment of Mary
Stuart at Lochleven. A few months previously the Scottish queen had been
the hope of the Catholic Powers, which were ever planning the ruin of
Elizabeth, and the overthrow of the Reformation in England; and, widely
as they were divided from each other, they looked upon her as the
appointed instrument with which to assail the common enemy. Her beauty
too, her extraordinary gifts, the magic of her presence, and her rare
abilities, had won the hearts of the Scottish nobility; and though she
had never deceived Knox and the earnest champions of Scottish
Protestantism, the pride of the nation was aroused in her favour, from
the circumstance that it seemed probable that the two crowns would unite
on her brow, and that she would become the sovereign of England and
Scotland. Distrusted as she was in England by all the real friends of
the Reformation, she was supported by the Catholic party, still most
formidable in rank and numbers; and she had on her side the conservative
feeling, of extraordinary strength in that age, which saw in her the
heir to the throne, Elizabeth being without children, and the means of
bringing England once more into the old order and ways of Europe. Had
Mary Stuart not disgraced herself in the opinion even of that
generation, not over-scrupulous about the acts of princes, there can be
little doubt that she would have been acknowledged as Elizabeth's
successor; and very probably she would have brought the reign of the
heretic Tudor to a close, would have become the ruler of England and
Scotland, arrested the Reformation for a time, and changed the whole
tenor of our history. Providentially, however, this was not to be; and
Mary Stuart, by her own hand, was to destroy the prospect of power and
ambition, fraught with destruction to the destinies of mankind, which
fortune seemed to have opened to her. The murder of Darnley, followed by
the shameless and infamous marriage with Bothwell, revealed the depths
of recklessness and crime in the existence of this singular woman, and
placed her at once under the moral ban of Scotland, England, and
Catholic Europe. At Carberry Hill her followers' arms dropped, as it
were, from their nerveless hands; the nation rose in fury against her;
her adherents were for the time silenced; and she found herself on a
sudden a prisoner, her son proclaimed, the Reformation victorious, and
Murray exercising the powers of a regent; the whole scene changing as if
by magic. Catherine de Medicis, also, gave her up, alarmed at the storm
which had burst out in Scotland; and though undoubtedly the Florentine
queen was not guided by moral considerations, and, at this moment was
beginning to adopt a conciliatory policy towards the French Huguenots,
her complete abandonment of Mary Stuart was caused chiefly by a true
conviction that she had ruined herself in general opinion. Philip II.
also declined to give the slightest countenance to the beautiful fury,
in whom he had hoped to find a St. Teresa; and in Catholic and
Conservative England the revulsion of feeling was so strong, that
thenceforward the cause of Mary Stuart ceased to be national in any real
sense.
Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Froude have given us very different accounts of
the captivity of Mary Stuart at Lochleven. Mr. Burton has taken great
pains to ascertain the facts, and to judge of them, and we quote a few
words from his description:--
'The conclusion of all is, that there is nothing in the
conditions to justify the inference that the captive was to
be sent thither as to a place of sordidness and severity,
as well as of seclusion and security.... There is no
evidence that the Lady of Lochleven treated her prisoner
harshly. Much vigilance was necessary, however, and that
could not be accomplished without giving annoyance and even
pain. The daughters of the house shared the prisoner's bed.
To one who had enjoyed full command over the stately
reserve of the court of France, and the impregnable barrier
of isolation which it had put at her disposal, this may
have been a heavy grievance; it can be paralleled only by
the sufferings of people accustomed to civilized
refinement, when their lot is cast among
barbarians.'--(Vol. v. 98.)
The only personage, as is well known, who seems to have shown any real
sympathy with the Queen of Scotland, in this forlorn condition, was the
sovereign who, it might be supposed, was of all persons the least
likely to do anything in behalf of her cause. On hearing of the
imprisonment of Mary, Elizabeth not only refused to give open support to
her 'rebellious lords,' but actually threatened to invade Scotland,
should they not restore their mistress to the throne, on terms, however,
dictated by England. To suppose that this conduct is to be ascribed to
chivalrous generosity would be a mistake; nor do we think with Mr.
Burton, that it was due wholly to Tudor dislike of disobedience to the
Lord's anointed, though this certainly was one ruling motive. Elizabeth,
undoubtedly, throughout her entire reign, especially in the case of the
united provinces, was averse to countenancing revolted subjects, even
when to do so was her evident interest; but in this instance she was, in
fact, guided by other considerations in her conduct. She seems to have
wished in this, following the traditional policy of English rulers, to
have taken upon herself the settlement of Scotland; and she did not
choose that that kingdom should be revolutionized without her sanction.
She also had a particular aversion to Knox and the Reforming leaders;
and very probably her sagacious advisers may have foreseen that the rule
of Murray and his associates was far from secure. These motives probably
influenced her policy in not siding with the Regent and his followers;
and in one respect the event vindicated, in a great measure, her
cautious prudence. Though the infant James was formally crowned, though
the Reformed Church was established in Scotland, and Murray proved
himself an able ruler, a strong reaction set in in favour of the
imprisoned queen; and though unquestionably the great mass of the nation
remained completely hostile, she was able to rally a party sufficient to
cause a violent counter-revolution. The numerous adherents of the old
Church, the whole body of the Catholic clergy, and a large minority of
the Scottish nobility enlisted themselves on the side of Mary Stuart;
they were joined by some of the politicians and patriots whose one idea
was the giving a Scottish sovereign to England; and pity for misfortune,
the recollection of rare beauty and great gifts, and that strange
loyalty which so often has shown itself superior to the sense of right,
of justice, and of the successful cause, contributed to swell the ranks
of her followers. Mr. Burton describes the escape from Lochleven, and
the stirring incidents of the struggle which ensued, with much research
and even animation; but we can only refer our readers to them. The
unimportant battle of Langside showed that, however imposing it was in
name, the party of the queen was not supported in any degree by the
Scottish nation; a defeat, though little more than a skirmish, was
sufficient to overthrow her career, and to compel her forthwith to leave
her kingdom. After her flight, in which she found few friends, Mary
Stuart was obliged to take refuge in England, abandoning for ever a
country in which she had played one of the most astonishing parts that
have ever fallen to the lot of woman, and which, excepting a
revolutionary faction, had repudiated her for crimes which had effaced
the sentiment of former affection.
We agree generally with Mr. Burton in his estimate of Elizabeth's policy
when her rival had placed herself in her power. That policy was not
generous or high-minded; it was even temporising, doubtful, and
tentative; but it was essentially crafty and prudent. To have listened
to the petition of the Scottish queen, and to have sent her over to
France or Spain, would have been to arm the enemies of England with a
weapon of the most perilous kind, and, at the same time, to make all
Protestant Scotland permanently hostile. On the other hand, Elizabeth
refused to hand her guest over to the Scottish lords, in part certainly
from compassionate feelings, in part from her known antipathy to
rebellion against a lawful sovereign, and in part from a well-founded
doubt whether the government of Murray was really stable, and whether,
if the surrender were made, a violent reaction would not follow. A
middle course was artfully struck out, which had the advantage of
seeming just, of ruining the fair fame of Mary Stuart, and depriving her
of all moral influence, and which, moreover, gave her the right of
intervening in Scottish affairs, and making England the arbiter of them.
Under the form of a charge against her revolted subjects, Mary Stuart
was really put on her trial before the most distinguished personages in
England; and the result of the inquiry was that she was disgraced in
public opinion, that her detention was in part justified, and that,
though made somewhat dependent on England, Murray and the Regency were
confirmed in power. This is what Elizabeth and Cecil had aimed at, and
whatever may be thought of the dignity of their conduct, it fell in with
the interests of England; and it was, on the whole, inspired by wisdom.
Mr. Burton describes at much length the conferences at York and Hampton
Court, but we have no space to dwell on his narrative. The only real
question was as to the guilt of Mary, and of this, like ourselves, he
has no doubt. The evidence contained in the casket letters is confirmed
by numerous subordinate proofs; the authenticity of the letters
themselves was hardly questioned in that generation, and not a single
member of the Commission--though several were devoted to Mary--not even,
apparently, her own advocates, attempted to challenge this decisive
fact. As the Scottish queen has found defenders of the boldest kind,
even in our day, we quote a part of Mr. Burton's comments:--
'There are two theories on which the guilty conclusion to
which the casket documents point has been resisted with
great perseverance and gallantry; the one is, that, as we
now see them, they have been tampered with; the other, that
they are forgeries from the beginning. All questions raised
on the prior theory, are at once settled by the fact that
those to whom the letters were first shown, drew
conclusions from them as damnatory as any they can now
suggest.... The theory of an entire forgery seems not to
have occurred to any of those friends or foes of the queen
who saw the documents.... And it is impossible not to
connect the stream of contemporary impugnment with a
notable peculiarity in these documents. They are as
affluent in petty details about matters personally known to
persons who could have contradicted them if false, that the
forger could only have scattered around him, in superfluous
profusion, allusions that must have been traps for his own
detection. Wherever any of these petty matters come to the
surface elsewhere, it is in a shape to confirm the accuracy
of the mention made of them in these letters.... Though
this controversy has produced dazzling achievements of
ingenuity and sagacity, I would be inclined not so much to
press technical points of evidence, as to look to the
general tone and character of the whole story. In this view
nothing appears to me more natural than the casket letters.
They fit entirely into their places in the dark history of
events.'--(Vol. iv. p. 436, _et seq._)
Events showed that Elizabeth and Cecil were right in calculating that
the power of Murray did not rest on a secure foundation. The Regent was
one of the best governors who ever appeared in Scottish history; he was
honourable, upright, firm, yet humane; and during his too brief rule he
maintained order in a manner unknown in that generation. The religious
movement, too, of which he was the unselfish and sincere champion, was
followed by the great mass of the nation; and though most of the
Reforming lords were simply greedy for the spoils of Popery, Knox and
his adherents went with them, and, as a people, Scotland was sincerely
Protestant. These combined elements of power, however, did not render
the Government safe, and it was exposed to a series of formidable
attacks which kept the country for some years in anarchy. The united
parties which Langside had quelled again formed a perilous coalition;
and the old Church, many of the great feudal lords, and the statesmen
who wished above all things to place a Stuart on the Tudor throne, once
more rallied in behalf of Queen Mary. The leading spirit of this
ill-assorted league was that singular character, Maitland of Lethington,
one of the ablest men of that stirring age, yet, with his keen intellect
and clear brain, an enthusiast possessed by a vain idea. Long one of the
chief opponents of the queen, he had yielded to the alluring
prospect--held out to him skilfully by his wife, one of the captive's
principal attendants--of making Mary Stuart the sovereign of Great
Britain, and he now schemed and plotted in her cause in conjunction with
his worst former enemies. At the same time, Elizabeth maintained a
dubious attitude towards the Regency: wishing to stand well with the
Catholic Powers, with whom for the moment she was at peace, and always
disliking undutiful subjects, she more than once declared she would
release the queen; and though we do not believe she was sincere in this,
the effect was to weaken the Scottish Government, and to add strength to
its many adversaries. Besides, Elizabeth contrived to stir the sense of
Scottish patriotism to the quick by an imperious demand for the
extradition of one of the leaders of the Northern rebellion; and the cry
went forth that the pusillanimous Regency was the dishonoured instrument
of Tudor oppression, and that Scotland under her lawful sovereign should
again vindicate her independence with the assistance of her old ally,
France. The result was a furious civil war, of which, after the murder
of the Regent, the issue was for a time doubtful; and, as Mr. Burton
correctly observes, Scotland was more thoroughly and widely divided than
she had been at any former period. An event, however, which in that age
revolutionized the politics of Europe, was, in Scotland also, to change
the situation. The atrocious massacre of St. Bartholomew stirred to its
depths a people essentially Protestant, confounded the adherents of Mary
Stuart, made the French alliance a source of dread, and threw the nation
on the side of the Regency, now in the hands of the vigorous Morton. At
the same time, it showed Elizabeth that the interest of England
compelled her to support 'the lords,' Knox, and the Reformation; that in
Mary she had an implacable enemy; and that her only chance was to strike
in boldly with Morton and the national Protestant party. The union of
these forces was decisive; Morton and his adherents, backed generally by
the spirit of an indignant people, overcame quickly Mary Stuart's
faction; an English army invaded Scotland, and the siege and fall of the
Castle of Edinburgh put an end to the French alliance, destroyed for
ever the chances of the Scottish queen, and, with the death of
Lethington and Grange, extinguished the prospects of her cause.
Mr. Burton thus describes this conjunction, one of the turning-points in
the history of Scotland:--
'For the future three great disturbing forces, prolific in
action, are seen no more. In the first place, the game of
conquest has been entirely played out by England. We may
say, perhaps, that it came to an end with the Reformation;
but there was still room for it, and it might start up any
day. Now its place was occupied. On both sides of the
border, men looked to another solution of the problem, how
the two nations should be made into one. Secondly, it
followed that there was no longer danger from abroad, since
French protection was no longer needed. The ancient league,
if not dead, was paralyzed, and all its long romance of
heroism and kindly sympathy was at an end.... Thirdly,
Queen Mary has no longer a place in the history of her
country. She was in one sense busier than ever ... but in
Scotland, however many may have been the hearts secretly
devoted to her, her name passed out of the arena of
political action and discussion.'--(Vol. v. 384.)
After these events the history of Scotland passes through a period of
intrigues and factions, in the midst of which James I. grew up. He
abandoned his ill-fated mother, and the Catholic Powers endeavoured to
make his youth the instrument of their designs. The ascendancy of
D'Aubigny and Arran marks the short-lived triumph of this policy. These
attempts, however, were in the long run fruitless; the great body of the
people adhered to Protestantism and the English alliance; the Kirk and
the Reforming nobles worked together against the common enemy; and
James, as he grew to man's estate, had sagacity enough to see the
strongest side, and to direct accordingly his public conduct. Mr. Burton
omits to dwell upon the base selfishness of the young king, in throwing
over the unhappy princess, to whom he owed the love of a son. But
morally he was always a coward; and the prospect of the inheritance of
England, and the dread of alienating Elizabeth, was more than enough to
determine his purpose. The extremely unsettled state of Scotland, after
the death of the Regent Morton, and the rudeness and barbarism of its
government, appear in the frequency and sudden violence of the changes
which took place in its rulers; and it seems to have been assumed, that
whatever faction had possession of the person of the king, was rightly
invested with supreme authority. In these circumstances, as may be
supposed, the progress of Scotland was only slow; the face of the
country seemed scarred with the marks of desolation and war; the nation
was rent by intestine troubles; and travellers from England drew marked
contrasts between the aspect of the Southern land at peace under the
Tudor sceptre, and that of its lawless Northern neighbour. Nevertheless,
the course of events tended inevitably to the approaching union of the
two crowns under a common sovereign--invasion from England had wholly
ceased--and though the aged Elizabeth would not acknowledge the title of
James to her glorious throne, every politician in both countries was
aware that the time was not distant, when the policy inaugurated by
Edward I., and pursued by every great English monarch, of joining
together the whole of the island, would be consummated without civil war
or bloodshed. Meanwhile the tragic and striking figure which had played
such an awful and mournful part in the historical drama of the two
kingdoms had passed away for ever from the stage, and the terrible
career of Mary Stuart had been cut short by the Fotheringay headsman.
Mr. Burton properly does not dilate on the incidents of her melancholy
life during the later years of her long imprisonment, for they hardly
belong to his subject, but his estimate of them is generally correct.
Mary Stuart, after the final overthrow of her party in Scotland,
transferred her energies to intriguing with the Continental powers; and
it can admit of no question that she continued to maintain her claims to
the crown of England, that she plotted directly against the life of
Elizabeth, and that she kept England in a state of apprehension,
intolerable to the Parliament and nation. She was a conspirator of the
worst kind, and deserved the death she bravely encountered; and the
crooked policy, the vacillation, and the duplicity of her rival towards
her prisoner, should not render us blind to the real issue.
While, in circumstances such as these, Scotland was working out her
political destiny, her ecclesiastical and religious reformation was
being developed and matured. In no country, perhaps, in Europe had the
Church of Rome been so grossly corrupt as in the northern part of our
island; it had been the appanage of a vicious court, and the instrument
of coarse spiritual tyranny; and in none, accordingly, was the reaction
against it more rapid, popular, and thoroughly decisive. Although
Beaton and the men of his faction had endeavoured to associate the
defence of Popery with the spirit of stern opposition to the Southron,
their policy had, in the long run, failed; and before Mary Stuart
ascended the throne, Scotland, as a nation, had become Protestant. The
grand and striking figure of Knox was the chief exponent of this
movement; but it is idle to imagine that even Knox could have changed
the spiritual life of Scotland, if the people had not been generally
with him. As usually has happened, the baser elements of selfishness
mingled with this revolution; and the support given by most of the
Scottish nobles to the overthrow of Romanism was chiefly prompted by a
greedy appetite for the spoils of the fallen Church. Nevertheless, the
Reformation took firm root; the old ecclesiastical system of the country
and its ancient faith were violently changed; and the accession of
Murray to the Regency marks the period of this great transformation. Mr.
Burton's account of the new Church which rose on the ruins of its
predecessor, and of its peculiar ritual and doctrine, is one of the most
interesting parts of his book, and abounds in learning and sound
criticism. The Scottish Kirk was founded upon the model of the Huguenot
Church of France; with a large admixture of lay elements, it had the
same definite and strong organization, and the same tendency to create
what was a powerful priesthood all but in name; and its teaching
exemplified the austerity and strictness of the theology of Calvin. From
the first, accordingly, it was calculated to encourage pretensions among
the ministry, and to become an _imperium in imperio_, not without risk
of collision with the State; and its whole system, in its excess, led to
fanaticism and contempt of civil authority. We transcribe a few passages
from Mr. Burton's description of the Second Book of Discipline of the
Scottish Kirk, a specimen of its general principles:--
'It sets forth that, "as the ministers and others of the
ecclesiastical estate are subject to the magistrate civil,
so ought the person of the magistrate be subject to the
Kirk spiritually, and in ecclesiastical government."
Further:--"The civil power should command the spiritual to
exercise and do their office according to the word of God;
the spiritual rulers should require the Christian
magistrate to minister justice and punish vice, and to
maintain the liberty and quietness of the Kirk within their
bounds." Nothing could be on its face a fairer
distribution. The civil power was entitled to command the
spiritual to do its duty; but then the magistrate was not
to have authority to "execute the censures of the Church,
nor yet prescribe any rule how it should be done." This is
entirely in the hands of the Church; but in enforcing it
the State is the Church's servant, for it is the
magistrate's duty to "assist and maintain the discipline of
the Kirk, and punish them civilly that will not obey the
discipline of the same." Thus the State could give no
effective orders to the Church, but the Church could order
the State to give material effect to its rules and
punishments. It was the State's duty, at the same time, to
preserve for the Church its whole patrimony; and we have
seen that this meant all the vast wealth which had been
gathered up by the old Church. Among the prerogatives of
the clergy, it was further declared that "they have power
to abrogate and abolish all statutes and ordinances
concerning ecclesiastical matters that are found noisome
and unprofitable, and agree not with the time, or, are
abused by the people."'--(Vol. v. 470.)
While Knox and his generation survived, the tendencies of the new
establishment were prevented from fully showing themselves. The great
Reformer was at bottom moderate; he had a real reverence for the powers
that be, however he abhorred Mary Stuart. The lay lords had sufficient
influence to control the ministry throughout the country; and the
presence of a common danger compelled the Scottish Protestants to uphold
the Government. But, when the Kirk had become settled, and the
Reformation was completely secure, dissensions rapidly grew up between
the spiritual and civil powers, and the Presbyterian clergy began to
assume that attitude in the affairs of Scotland, which led, afterwards,
to such momentous consequences. The leader of the new school of divines
was the celebrated Melville, thus described by Mr. Burton:--
'Knox had a respect for hereditary rank which only yielded
to a higher duty, when, as the successor of the prophets of
old, he had to announce the law of God even to the highest.
Melville, though born to a higher position, was more of the
leveller. He was the type of a class who, to as much of the
fierce fanaticism of the Huguenots as the Scottish
character could receive, added the stern classical
republicanism of Buchanan.'--(Vol. v. 404.)
An organization of this kind, supported by such spiritual leaders, ere
long displayed its natural tendencies. The Kirk, with its powerful local
ministry, connected with each other by numerous links, attempted to
revive in Scotland the pretensions of the old dominant Church, and it
succeeded in creating a vast spiritual power, often in conflict with the
authority of the State. The principal fact in Scottish history, during
the last years of the sixteenth century and the first of the
seventeenth, was the opposition given, by the Presbyterian clergy, to
the acts and even the rights of the Crown; and though the conduct of
James I. was, as usual, arrogant and unwise, he was subjected to extreme
provocation. The enthusiasm which followed the defeat of the Armada, the
supposed inclination of the king to High Church, and even Romanist
doctrines, and the open favour he showed to several of the old Catholic
Scottish houses, gave strength to the champions of the Kirk; and for
some time, as he ruefully exclaimed, he was not a ruler in his own
dominions. The formal abolition of Episcopacy in Scotland--the
institution had existed in name even after the iconoclasm of Knox--marks
the highest point of Presbyterian ascendancy; and, more than once, the
king and his council were compelled to yield to the demands put forward
by those whom he called the 'Popes of Edinburgh.' Undoubtedly, however,
if James had been a really able and popular ruler, he could have
vindicated his supreme authority, and the national estates, which even
at this juncture often showed jealousy of the heads of the Kirk, would
have upheld the prerogatives of the Crown. As it was, Scotland was
divided by a contest between the Church and the State, and the
Presbyterian Hildebrands assumed an attitude which contributed
afterwards to many troubles. We quote a passage that gives an idea of
the bickerings between the king and the clergy:--
'Entering in the cabinet with the king alone, I show his
Majesty that the Commissioners of the General Assembly,
with certain other brethren ordained to watch for the well
of the Kirk in so dangerous a time, had convened at Cupar.
At the which word the king interrupts me, and angrily
quarrels our meeting, alleging it was without warrant and
seditious, making ourselves and the country to conceive
fear where there was no cause. To the which I, beginning to
reply in my manner, Mr. Andrew could not abide it, but
brake off upon the king in so zealous, powerful, and
unresistible a manner, that, howbeit the king used his
authority in most crabbed and choleric manner, Mr. Andrew
bore him down, and uttered the commission as from the
mighty God, calling the king but "God's silly vassal," and,
taking him by the sleeve, says this in effect, through much
hot reasoning and many interruptions, "Sir, we will humbly
reverence your Majesty, always, namely, in public. But,
since we have this occasion to be with your Majesty in
private, and the truth is, you are brought in extreme
danger, both of your life and crown, and, with you, the
country and Kirk of Christ is like to wreck for not telling
you the truth, and giving of you a faithful counsel--we
must discharge our duty therein, or else be traitors, both
to Christ and you! And therefore, Sir, as divers times
before, so now again, I must tell you, there are two kings
and two kingdoms in Scotland. _There is Christ Jesus the
King, and His Kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King James
the Sixth is--and of his kingdom, not a king, nor a lord,
nor a head, but a member!"_'--(Vol. vi. 81.)
While seeds of trouble were thus growing up in the contests between the
Kirk and the Crown, the great Tudor queen had passed away, and James
became monarch of the three kingdoms. Both England and Scotland
recognised in him the principle of hereditary right, for there was
little in his character or antecedents to recommend him as a national
sovereign. In his own country he had become unpopular, and in England he
was chiefly known as one who had basely betrayed his mother, who had
intrigued with Elizabeth to obtain her throne, and who had no sympathy
with the great alliance with France and the United Provinces in the war
with Spain. James, however, encountered no opposition in assuming the
sceptre of these realms; and his progress to London from the
North--described graphically by Mr. Burton--was a scene of continuous
joy and festivity. The king, at least, had ample reason to feel delight
at the happy change which had come over his life and prospects. He left
a poor and distracted country--where his reign had long been a long
scene of trouble, and where he was being continually reviled by those
who, in his phrase, 'agreed as well with monarchy as the devil with
Christ'--for rich, peaceful, and well-ordered England; and he might well
expect a season of repose amidst the blandishments of a Tudor hierarchy,
and the submissive acts of Tudor courtiers. For some time he was not
disappointed, and what between the unctuous flattery of prelates, who
said that 'he spake like the Spirit,' and of nobles who vied with each
other in adulation, James must have thought himself translated to a
sphere not unworthy even of his own estimate of himself. Before long,
however, he was destined to find out that in England, as well as
Scotland, he was to earn the contempt and dislike of his subjects.
Essentially timid and short-sighted, he abandoned the foreign policy of
Elizabeth; he disgusted Englishmen by his open preference for worthless
and needy Scottish favourites; and in a few years he found himself in
antagonism with the House of Commons, now becoming a real image of the
nation, and with the tremendous force of Puritanism already growing into
ascendancy in England. Mr. Burton gives us, from a contemporary
chronicler, this sketch of the ignoble monarch:--
'He was of a middle stature, more corpulent through his
clothes than in his body, yet fat enough; his clothes ever
being made large and easy, the doublets quilted for
stiletto proof; his breeches in great plaits and full
stuffed. He was naturally of a timid disposition, which was
the greatest reason of his quilted doublets. His eyes
large, ever rolling after any stranger came in his
presence, inasmuch as many for shame have left the room,
being out of countenance. His beard was very thin; his
tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak
full in the mouth, and made him drink very uncomely as if
eating his drink, which came out into the cup on each side
of his mouth. His skin was as soft as taffeta sarcenet,
which felt so because he never washed his hands--only
rubbed his finger-ends slightly with the wet end of a
napkin. His legs were very weak, having had, it was
thought, some foul play in his youth, or rather before he
was born, that he was not able to stand at seven years of
age--that weakness made him ever leaning on other men's
shoulders.'--(Vol. vi. 162.)
As is well known, the dislike entertained for James in England was in
part owing to the favour he showed to Scotch favourites. The nation,
too, abounding in keen adventurers--poor, hardy, and pushing--came in
for a share of this feeling; and the wits and satirists of the day
indulged in sarcasms on the greedy race who crossed the border in hungry
swarms to feed on the wealth of the well-fed Southron. We quote from
one of these pasquinades:--
'Bonny Scot, we all witness can,
That England hath made thee a gentleman.
Thy blue bonnet, when thou came hither,
Could scarce keep out the wind and weather;
But now it is turned to a hat and feather;
Thy bonnet is blown--the devil knows whither.
Thy shoes on thy feet when thou camest from plough,
Were made of the hide of an old Scots cow;
But now they are turned to a rare Spanish leather,
And decked with roses altogether.
Thy sword at thy [back] was a great black blade,
With a great basket-hilt of iron made;
But now a long rapier doth hang by his side,
And huffingly doth this bonny Scot ride.
Bonny Scot, we all witness can,
That England hath made thee a gentleman.'
--(Vol. vi. 191.)
During the years that followed the union of the crowns, Scotland made
considerable material progress, though still troubled by occasional
disorder. The strife which for ages had made the border a theatre of
desolation and rapine came, to a great extent, to an end, and signs of
good husbandry and growing comfort began to appear in this wild
district. The great house of Huntly, 'the cock of the North,' and the
terror of the Reformation party, was balanced by the rival house of
Argyle, and the barbarous Highlands were reduced in some degree to
subjection to the Crown. The wealth of Scotland increased apace under
the influence of trade comparatively free; and the political
consequences were important in weakening the connection of the country
with France. At the same time, the authority of the law, which, since
the death of Murray, had been feeble, began to be again vindicated. The
following, from a contemporary eye-witness, will show the progress of
this revolution:--
'The Islanders oppressed the Highlandmen; the Highlanders
tyrannized over their Lowland neighbours; the powerful and
violent in the country domineered over the lives and goods
of their weak neighbours; the Borderers triumphed in the
immunity of their violences to the ports of Edinburgh; that
treasons, murthers, burnings, thefts, reifs, heirships,
hocking of oxen, breaking of mills, destroying of growing
corns, and barbarities of all sorts were exercised in all
parts of the country--no place nor person being exempt or
inviolable--Edinburgh being the ordinary place of butchery,
revenge, and daily fights.... These and all other
abominations, which, settled by inveterate custom and
impunity, appeared to be of desperate remeid, had been so
repressed, punished, and abolished by your Majesty's care,
power, and expenses, as no nation on earth could now
compare with our prosperities.'--(Vol. vi. 283.)
Yet, though Scotland was growing in wealth, and the authority of the
Crown was increasing, the nation, during the last years of this reign,
abounded in discontent and disorder. The Scots seem to have felt
bitterly the transference of their ancient Royal House to an alien and
lately hostile country; and though they had no affection for James, they
resented the visible loss of the monarchy. A High Commissioner and
Council at Edinburgh could not supply the place of the sovereign; the
evils of absenteeism began to be felt in the capital and the rural
districts; and complaints were made that what had been a kingdom was now
treated as a subject province. Dissatisfaction of this kind, however,
was small, compared to the angry sentiments engendered by the
long-standing quarrel between James and the Presbyterian clergy. Puffed
up by the oriental flattery of the courtiers and prelates at Whitehall,
that sagacious ruler formed the design of revolutionizing the Kirk in
Scotland, and of restoring the mode of Church government which the
Reformation had violently overthrown; and he proceeded to his work with
a timid arrogance which provoked contempt and indignation alike. Many
circumstances concurred to second a purpose, which in the next
generation was to culminate in disaster and ruin to the House of
Stuart. The pretensions of the Presbyterian ministry had disgusted many
moderate persons; their despotic claims to spiritual domination had
aroused the jealousy of the national estates; a large party among the
nobility were ready to comply with the wishes of James; and though the
nation was fanatically Protestant, a minority of it had no sympathy with
what they thought was sacerdotal tyranny. The result was that, without
seeming difficulty, Episcopacy was again set up in Scotland; the king
was enabled to boast complacently that he had built up the chief pillar
of the throne, and he even succeeded in introducing innovations into the
simple ritual which had been established after the Reformation. James,
however, prudently abstained from allying aristocratic selfishness with
popular feeling, and did not venture to lay hands on the forfeited
possessions of the Church, long in the ownership of lay families; and,
on the whole, notwithstanding the tone of pompous dictation assumed by
him, he avoided wounding powerful class interests when he insisted upon
the return to 'Prelacy.' His bishops, indeed, were very different
personages from the mitred tyrants who, a century before, had lorded it
over thousands of vassals, and had exasperated Scotland by their pride
and wickedness. They were, for the most part, needy and insignificant
men, who thought a great deal more of 'making ends meet,' and of winning
the royal ear by adulation, than of asserting the claims of the Church,
and they had little in common with the class of the Beatons. Mr. Burton
gives us a most interesting account of their difficulties and
privations, and of the ignoble means some of them took to keep up their
state. We quote an anecdote to that effect:--
'When I was in England his Majesty did promise to me the
making of two serjeants-at-law, and I travailed with some
to that effect, with whom I covenanted, if they were made
serjeants by my means they should give me eleven hundred
pounds sterling the piece, and the projector a hundred
pounds of it for his pains. Now I have received ane letter,
that these same men are called to be serjeants, and has
received his Majesty's writ to that effect, and desires me
to write to them anent that indenting. I beseech you to
know if his Majesty's will is I be paid by that course or
not.'--(Vol. vi. 265.)
This change, however, though it did not provoke a violent revolution in
Scotland, created a large amount of discontent. The Presbyterian clergy
declared that the Kirk had been contaminated and profaned; they kept up
a sullen agitation; and many of their congregations only awaited an
opportunity to revolt openly. Whenever James paid a visit to his
Scottish dominions, which he occasionally did, his devout respect for
the Anglican ritual, his reverence for 'my Lords, the Bishops,' and his
assiduous care about forms and vestments, aroused indignation and
contempt, and before his death it had become evident that a great
religious movement was at hand. The King, however, continued to avert a
passionate explosion during his life; he avoided acts of high-handed
oppression; and it is remarkable that he expressed an unfavourable
opinion of the wrong-headed personage who in the next reign was to
precipitate the catastrophe and bring his son to ruin. We quote James's
account of the character of Laud:--
'The plain truth is, that I keep Laud back from all places
of rule and authority because I find he hath a restless
spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to
toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of
reformation floating in his own brain, which may endanger
the steadfastness of that which is in a good pass, God be
praised. I speak not at random. He hath made himself known
to me to be such a one; for when, three years since, I had
obtained of the Assembly of Perth to consent to five
articles of order and decency in correspondence with this
Church of England, I gave them promise by attestation of
faith made, that I would try their obedience no further
anent ecclesiastic affairs. Yet this man hath pressed me to
incite them to a nearer conjunction with the liturgy and
canons of this nation.'--(Vol. vi. 339.)
The death of James, in 1625, was the inauguration of a new era in
Scotland. The king, though full of arrogant pretensions, was timid,
feeble, and not without a certain kind of political insight; and if he
had irritated and alarmed the nation, he did not venture to outrage its
feelings or to assail some of its most powerful interests. His
successor, naturally a firmer man, and taught to believe the odious
doctrines of passive obedience and divine right, had no scruples in
overbearing opposition, however stern and national, to the line of
policy he had marked out for himself; and the conscientiousness he
undoubtedly possessed with respect to certain cardinal principles, made
him obstinate in carrying them out in government. Besides, he seems to
have really thought it was no part of the duty of a king to keep faith
with ministers or subjects, that something in his office placed him
outside the pale of ordinary moral obligations; and in addition, like
all the Stuarts, he was especially addicted to favourites, and to lend
an ear to their unwise counsels. Such a man, a bad ruler as it were on
principle, was calculated to precipitate the great revolution which in
England and Scotland alike had been gradually in course of development.
As Mr. Burton truly observes, the teasing, fitful, and hesitating
attempts of James to cross the will of his people, were as nothing to
the steady and resolute efforts with which Charles endeavoured to
accomplish the ends which from the first he had clearly in view. The
battle in Scotland, as might have been expected, commenced upon the
affairs of the Church; and the king, with singular unwisdom, contrived
to unite against him most of the nobility, the Kirk, and the bulk of the
people, and to stir to its depths the national sentiment. There can be
little doubt that Charles intended to force the Anglican system on
Scotland, and to introduce into that kingdom the well-endowed State
Church, the rich courtier prelates, 'the midge-madge of doctrine,' and
the gorgeous ritual which he considered divine in England. His first
step was audaciously to claim the resumption of the revenues of the old
Church of Scotland, which had been forfeited at the Reformation:--
'A proclamation announced the general revocation by the new
king of all grants by the Crown, and all acquisitions to
the prejudice of the Crown, whether before or after his
father's Act of Annexation in 1587. This was virtually the
proclamation of that contest of which King Charles was
destined never to see the end. It proposed to sweep into
the royal treasury the whole of the vast ecclesiastical
estates which had passed into the hands of the territorial
potentates from the Reformation downwards, since it went
back to things done before King James's annexation.'--(Vol.
vi. 355.)
By this wicked and insensate measure, Charles made enemies of all the
powerful men, the leaders of the nobility of Scotland, who were in
possession of ecclesiastical property, and he gave the whole nation a
significant example of the iniquities of mere arbitrary power. But he
was not satisfied with exasperating a class; he proceeded to touch to
the very quick the religious and patriotic feelings of the nation. At
the stroke of a pen he completely changed the ecclesiastical polity of
Scotland, by proclaiming his right to make canons for the Kirk; and he
not only introduced many of these ordinances, but he peremptorily
enjoined the use of forms and symbols in worship for many years detested
in Scotland. This was done, too, with a coarse contempt of Scottish
sentiment which was especially galling; the innovations being thrust
upon the country by English prelates, regarded as aliens. We quote a
specimen of scenes which, doubtless, were not unfrequent at this
juncture:--
'At the back of this altar, covered with tapestry, there
was ane rich tapestry wherein the crucifix was curiously
wrought; and as those bishops who were in service passed by
this crucifix they were seen to bow their knee, and beck,
which, with their habit, was noticed, and bred great fear
of inbringing of Popery.... The Archibishop of St. Andrew's
and four bishops did "the service" "with white rochets and
white sleeves and copes of gold, having blue silk to their
foot." Bishop Laud took Glasgow, and thrust him from the
king with these words, "Are you a Churchman, and wants the
coat of your order?"'--(Vol. vi. 376.)
In this kind of foreign innovation, Laud, now made a royal favourite,
was badly and conspicuously eminent. This meddling priest, who thought
that he could bind the faith of two nations within his formulas, was
made an overseer of the Scottish prelates, and presented to them with
insolent rudeness the ecclesiastical policy they were to adopt. There is
reason to believe they disliked him heartily, while he was execrated by
the Presbyterian clergy. We quote a few words from one of his
dictatorial letters:--
'You are immutably to hold this rule, and that by his
Majesty's strict and most special command--namely, that
yourself, or the Lord Ross, or both of you together, do
privately acquaint the Earl of Traquair; ... and the earl
will readily do all good offices for the Church that come
within his power, according to all such commands as he
shall receive, either immediately from the king, or
otherwise by direction of his Majesty from myself.'--(Vol.
vi. 386.)
By this policy, Charles had contrived to unite the great mass of the
nation against him. The descendants of the lay lords of the Reformation,
the moderate men who reverenced law, the still powerful Presbyterian
clergy and their congregations throughout the country were alarmed,
irritated, and provoked; and signs of discontent were manifest even in
the Council of National Estates. The last drop that made the cup
overflow was the publication of the famous Liturgy of Laud, which,
itself odious to all true Protestants, was forced on the people in a
manner certain to exasperate a high-spirited country. Mr. Burton
criticises at length and learnedly this celebrated attempt on the faith
of Scotland: it must suffice to say that the new Liturgy was in conflict
with all the forms of Scottish worship, devised, as we have seen, from
the Huguenots, which had existed since the Reformation. The scenes that
ensued are well known, and it is not necessary to dwell on them. The
'rabblings' of the angry mobs at Edinburgh, Jenny Geddes and her 'devout
sisters,' the terror that fell on the appointed bishops, were merely
symptoms of the deep indignation which had taken possession of the
people of Scotland; and, in a short time, a general opposition was
organized against the king and his government. How ignorant Charles and
his ministers in England were of the tempest they had waked, will be
seen from the following passage:--
'The truth is, there was so little curiosity either in the
court or the country to know anything of Scotland, or what
was done there, that when the whole nation was solicitous
to know what passed weekly in Germany and Poland, and all
other parts of Europe, no man ever enquired what was doing
in Scotland; nor had that kingdom a place or mention of one
page of any gazette.'--(Vol. vi. 451.)
Meanwhile the opposition to the king in Scotland had assumed a
formidable shape, and throughout the country crowds of 'supplicants,'
demanding a repeal of the obnoxious measures which had been passed
during the preceding years, had formed themselves into regular
assemblies, connected with a central convocation, which expressed
angrily the will of the people. It has been supposed that the Council of
Edinburgh connived, to say the least, with this movement; it certainly
recognised the representative quality of the delegates by treating
officially with them; and the institution of the celebrated 'Tables'
marks the commencement of the great revolution. Charles, however, and
his councillors were unrelenting; and Laud especially distinguished
himself in invoking fire and sword upon the audacious 'rebels.' The
'Tables,' that is, the leading men of the nation, acknowledged as a
lawful power, in direct opposition to the Sovereign, resolved to make
their authority felt; and the famous compact of the 'Covenant' found the
entire sympathy of all classes with them. The Covenant, in fact, was the
solemn protest of Scotland against the wrong done by the king. The
following, from a contemporary account, shows the deep enthusiasm with
which it was welcomed:--
'Gentlemen and noblemen carried copies about in their
portmanteaus or pockets, requiring subscriptions thereunto,
and using their utmost endeavours with their friends in
private for to subscribe. It was subscribed publicly in
churches, ministers exhorting their people thereunto. It
was also subscribed and sworn privately. All had power to
take the oath, and were licensed and welcomed to come in;
and any that pleased had power and license for to carry the
Covenant about with him, and give the oath to such as were
willing to subscribe and swear. And such was the zeal of
many subscribers, that for a while many subscribed with
tears on their cheeks; and it is constantly reported that
some did draw their own blood, and used it in place of ink,
to underwrite their names.'--(Vol. vi. 488.)
Charles now began to act after the fashion which was to lead him at last
to ruin and death. He had not yet alienated the hearts of his people,
and timely concession and simple justice would certainly have allayed
the tempest. But he resolved to dissimulate with them, to hold out hopes
that he would comply with their requests, and, at the same time, to
prepare the means of chastising them as audacious 'rebels.' He sent
Hamilton, as a commissioner, to Scotland, with full power to redress
grievances, with a promise that a General Assembly and a free Parliament
should be convened; but he secretly determined to put down opposition by
sheer military force. If Charles was not what is called a 'bad man,' if
he was not a mere reckless and wicked tyrant, it must be allowed that
the detestable doctrines of kingcraft had poisoned his understanding; he
acted on system, as though he were free from all obligations of good
faith with his subjects. Mr. Burton gives us the following letter,
written to Hamilton at this juncture; it is one of the worst extant
specimens of royal duplicity:--
'And to this end I give you leave to flatter them with what
hopes you please.... This I have written to no other end
than to show you I will rather die than yield to those
impertinent and damnable demands, as you rightly call
them.... As the affairs are now, I do not expect that you
should declare the adherers to the Covenant traitors until,
as I have already said, you have heard from me that my
fleet hath set sail for Scotland.'--(Vol. vi. 505.)
According to the promise given by the king, a General Assembly was now
held, described fully by Mr. Burton. This great convention met at
Glasgow; and Episcopacy was condemned and set aside, as in the days of
the first Reformation. Charles replied by seizing Edinburgh Castle, and
taking possession of the chief Scottish fortresses; and Hamilton openly
issued proclamations denouncing the Covenanters as audacious rebels.
Civil war broke out in 1639; and in a few weeks, an irregular contest
was raging in the east and south-east, and threatening to overrun the
kingdom. At this juncture, Scotland abounded with soldiers trained in
the Thirty Years' War, not mere mercenaries of the Dalgetty type, but
men really fitted to command; and a resolution was formed to march to
the south, and to make an armed demonstration against England. In an
incredibly short time, 22,000 men were arrayed under the orders of
Leslie, and making for the English border--a force relatively to the
population of Scotland, of extraordinary numerical amount, and a
conclusive proof of the enthusiasm of the country. The composition of
this army, led by some of the noblest men in Scotland, shows all
classes, high and low, joined in the movement against the king:--
'Our crouners (that is, colonels) for the most part were
noblemen. Rothes, Lindsay, Sinclair, had among them two
full regiments, at least, from Fife. Balcarras, a horse
troop; Loudon, Montgomery, Erskine, Boyd, Fleming,
Kirkcudbright, Yester, Dalhousie, Eglinton, and others,
either with whole or half regiments. Montrose's regiment
was above fifteen hundred men.'--(Vol. vii. 56.)
The Scottish army having reached the Border, the king consented to the
brief truce known by the name of the Pacification of Berwick. Once more
Charles made specious promises with a resolution to break faith: the
wishes of the nation were to be respected; Episcopacy was not to be
restored; Presbyterianism was to be the form of Church government; and
the National Estates were to sanction the reforms confirmed by a
paternal and high-minded sovereign. The Parliament, however, was hardly
assembled before it was indefinitely prorogued; and there is ample
evidence that Charles intended, as soon as an opportunity came, to
invade Scotland, and take summary vengeance. At this juncture, the
Scottish leaders unquestionably remembered the 'Ancient League,' and
looked to France and Richelieu for aid; and if we cannot approve their
purpose, we at least should remember the great provocation. The king
thought that the time had arrived to inflict punishment on the 'rebels
of the North;' he felt assured that the old English jealousy of a
political connection between Scotland and France would throw all England
upon his side; and he issued orders for a general armament, for the
invasion and even the conquest of Scotland. But, at this crisis,
political sympathy got the better of past national dislikes; and
England, as a people, was averse to aid the king in crushing discontent
beyond the Tweed. For a series of years the government of Charles had
provoked indignation in England, only less than that which existed in
Scotland; the tyranny of Strafford and the arrogance of Laud had
combined the Constitutional and Puritan parties, and a great revolution
was fast approaching. The future chiefs of the Long Parliament
co-operated with the Scottish malcontents; and Charles found it
impossible to collect a sufficient army to carry out his purpose. Mr.
Burton describes the situation thus:--
'The result is described by one on whom heavy
responsibility lay--the Earl of Northumberland, who was to
command the army of the North: "Most of the ways that were
relied on for supplies of money have hitherto failed us,
and, for aught I know, we are likely to become the most
despised nation of Europe. To the regiments that are now
raising, we, for want of money, have been able to advance
but fourteen days' pay--the rest must meet them upon their
march towards Selby, and for both the horse and foot
already in the North, we can, for the present, send them
but seven days' pay." Those who were considered liable to
serve in the army resisted the conscription; and when
embodied, they were often so mutinous as to be more
dangerous to their officers than they were likely to be to
the enemy.'--(Vol. vii. 99.)
The Scottish army, as is well known, encountered no opposition on the
Tweed, and, having taken Newcastle, was advancing southwards, when its
progress was stayed by the Treaty of Ripon. The sword had been struck
out of the hands of the king; his English subjects had refused to second
his efforts against their ancient enemies; and, in England and Scotland
alike, the national cause was about to triumph. From this time, the
chiefs of the opposition to the court cooperated in the two countries;
and the acts of the Long Parliament and the Scottish Estates were, in a
great degree, of the same kind, and had objects almost similar. Mr.
Burton, however, correctly shows that Scotland certainly has the honour
of having inaugurated this glorious resistance; but for the resolution
displayed by the nation, it is not impossible that Stratford's scheme of
'Thorough' might have been successful for many years, and the
constitutional liberties of England might have been suspended for at
least a generation. Mr. Burton describes at some length the visit of the
Scottish Commissioners to London, and the first proceedings of the Long
Parliament; but we have no space to dwell on a subject which, however
interesting and picturesque, belongs more properly to the History of
England. In 1640-41, the Scottish Estates were convened in accordance
with the conditions of the Treaty of Ripon, and it became evident, at
once, that the authority of the king would be swept away by a violent
revolution. This Assembly, formerly little more than an instrument of
the will of the king, was now intent on putting an end to the policy and
the power of Charles; it was overflowing with religious zeal and with
national, if not democratic passion; and it resolved once for all that
the House of Stuart should no longer trifle with the rights of Scotsmen.
As Scotland had suffered more grievously than England from the tyranny
of the court, the legislation of the Estates was more violent than that
of the Long Parliament, and marked more strongly with precipitate haste;
on the whole, it does not contrast favourably with that of the English
Assembly; but, undoubtedly, not a few of its measures served as
precedents for the Long Parliament, in the later stages of the conflict
with Charles. For instance, after destroying Episcopacy, and sweeping
away all the innovations in Church and State of the twenty years before,
the Estates proceeded practically to abolish the prerogatives of the
Crown in Scotland; and the course they took seems to have suggested the
Nineteen Propositions of the Long Parliament:--
'One of the points which the Estates had determined to
carry, was the appointment, by themselves, of all public
officers. The Secret Council and the Court of Session were
recast, the appointments being made in two separate Acts.
In a general Act, applicable to Government offices at
large, the king's form of appointment is treated with all
reverence; but, at the same time, it is to be exercised in
each instance "with the advice and approbation" of the
Estates.'--(Vol. vii. 140.)
It was not to be expected, after this, that a revolution could be
avoided. Charles, unquestionably, resolved to draw the sword as soon as
an opportunity offered; the Estates, backed by the mass of the nation,
were as determined to maintain their advantage. When such were the
feelings on either side, there is little use in examining with care how
or by whom the Civil War was commenced. But, as in the case of the Five
Members, so in that of the mysterious Incident, the king seems to have
acted with that treacherous malice which so often provoked the
indignation of his subjects; and after this event, war was inevitable.
The great Irish rebellion of 1641 came to add fuel to the gathering
flame; and Scotland, like England, was impressed with the belief that
Charles had connived at an infamous scheme of overthrowing the colonists
of Ireland, and of marshalling a Papist Irish army to put down the
Estates and the Parliament. Mr. Burton examines at some length the
evidence against the king in this matter, and certainly is not inclined
to acquit him; however that may be, it is somewhat curious that he does
not allude to a most significant fact, that the alleged commission to
the rebellious Irish was given under the great seal of Scotland, and was
said to be in the interest of the Scotch, and that the Irish carefully
avoided to lay a hand, at first, on the Scottish colonists, while they
massacred wholesale their English fellows. Civil war now broke out in
England and Scotland; and for some time, as is well known, success
inclined to the side of the king. Mr. Burton describes the brilliant
campaigns of Montrose in the North minutely and well; but he shows
correctly that they were mere raids, of which the importance has been
exaggerated; and Montrose was defeated without difficulty, when
encountered by a really able soldier. The real struggle was in the
South; and Mr. Burton, perhaps, underrates the extraordinary efforts of
Cromwell in restoring the Parliamentary cause, and overestimates the
weight which Leslie and the Scottish army threw into the balance.
Undoubtedly, however, Leslie and the Scots were auxiliaries of extreme
importance. We quote this brief description of Marston Moor, where
Leslie and Cromwell commanded together:--
'Prince Rupert headed one of those impetuous attacks for
which he was renowned, and scattered before him the right
of the allied army under Fairfax and Leven. It was one of
those great blows that may confuse a whole army; but the
other half was in very competent hands--those of Cromwell
and David Leslie. They beat back their opponents, not by a
rush, but a hard, steady fight, and were on the enemy's
ground, when Rupert returned from a pursuit which he had
carried too far. He found that while he had been away
pursuing the defeated enemy, events behind him had arranged
matters for a second battle, in which each occupied the
ground that earlier in the day, had belonged to the other
side. The end was an entire victory.'--(Vol. vii. 180.)
Meanwhile the Solemn League and Covenant had attested the Union of
England and Scotland, and the celebrated Assembly of Divines at
Westminster had been employed in devising means for establishing one
faith in both kingdoms. The inherent difference between the
Protestantism of the two countries was fully developed. The Scottish
Presbyterians, true to the narrowness and bigotry of their peculiar
tenets, claimed that the Kirk was of Divine institution, and endeavoured
to compel a universal adoption of its ritual and forms of worship. These
vain pretensions were strenuously opposed by the Parliament, broad and
Erastian in view, and by the great mass of the Puritan party, trained by
the results of the persecution of years to acknowledge the rights of
freedom of conscience. Disputes, leading to memorable consequences, were
the result of these divergent views which Mr. Burton has fully set
forth:--
'To the Scottish covenanters the calling of this Assembly,
and the adoption of the Solemn League and Covenant as
revised by it, were rapidly bringing on the consummation of
that great scheme of Divine Providence destined to
establish the Presbyterian polity over all mankind. The
government of the Church by a General Assembly, Synod,
Presbyteries, and Kirk Sessions, was the divine form of
Church government, and all others must dissolve before
it.... The Parliament, however, had other views, and
skilfully prepared for the consummation. There lurked at
that time, in the class of men who made the Parliament and
the influential circles, a disinclination to reconstruct
any strong priesthood.... The Brownists, Independents, or
Congregationalists, were a large body in England, and had
been growing, even in Scotland, too rapidly for the peace
of the Covenanting party. Their principle was, that there
should be no combined system of Church government, whether
prelatic or Presbyterian, but that each Christian
congregation should be a church in itself.'--(Vol. vii.
209.)
The civil war had gone on during these long and important discussions.
The genius of Cromwell and the power of his army had everywhere overcome
the Royalists; and the great Republican had become the arbiter of the
situation, and supreme in England. In these circumstances the auxiliary
force of the Scots became of little importance, and jealousies had
already begun to grow up between the soldiers of the two nations. As is
well known, the unfortunate king repaired to the Scottish camp, and the
Scottish leaders delivered him up to Commissioners of the Parliament for
a sum of money. We quote Mr. Burton's account of this transaction,
which, if not so base as has been described by writers of the Junius
type, does little credit to Scottish honour:--
'Apart from any question about trust, had the king really
fled from enemies to find refuge with friends? The Scots
army were older and steadier enemies than the English. It
was in the future, no doubt, that in England he was to be
put to death; but the Scots had no more reason to expect
this of the English than to be themselves suspected of such
a design; and it was not by the party to whom he was
intrusted or "sold" by the Scots that he was put to death,
but by the enemies of that party. The Scots had made up
their minds to return home when their arrears were paid.
They could not keep the king except by taking him with them
into Scotland, and such an act would have implied at once
suspicion and hostility towards those who had been so long
their allies. The Scots showed in what they afterwards
attempted for him and his son, that, had he agreed to their
terms, and consented to be a Presbyterian king over a
Presbyterian people, they would have fought for him instead
of "selling" him.'--(Vol. vii. 236.)
It is unnecessary to dwell on the melancholy scene of the execution of
Charles I. In his case, as in that of Mary Stuart, sufferings and a
violent death endured with dignity, have atoned, in the eyes of many
persons, for misgovernment and political crimes. This event was the
signal for an open rupture between the leaders of the various parties
which, in England and Scotland alike, had accomplished the great
revolution of the time. The English Independents, already supreme under
Cromwell and his invincible army, had resolved to establish the
Commonwealth, and to set up Puritanism as the national faith; the Scots
insisted on placing Charles II. on the throne as a covenanting King, and
on Presbyterianism as the church of these realms. A brief but decisive
struggle ensued, which, as might have been expected, ended in the
overthrow of the weaker country, and the complete ascendancy of the
great soldier who had never yet met his equal in the field. Mr. Burton
describes at some length the 'crowning mercies' of Dunbar and Worcester,
but we have no space to refer to the narrative. In the settlement of the
religious affairs of Scotland, the breadth of view and even the
toleration of Cromwell contrast favourably with the high-flown
pretensions and narrow-mindedness of the Presbyterian clergy, who
approved themselves the Pharisees of pedantic formalism. His grand
exclamation--'In the bowels of Christ, I beseech you think that you may
be mistaken,' shows that he recognised one of the principles which in
matters of faith enjoins charity. We quote Mr. Burton's account of the
closing of the General Assembly:--
'Lieutenant-Colonel Cotterel beset the Church with some
rattes of musketeers and a troop of horse. Himself (after
our fast, wherein Mr. Dickson and Mr. Douglas had two
gracious sermons) entered the Assembly House, and
immediately after Mr. Dixon, the moderator, his prayer,
required audience, wherein he inquired if we did sit there
by the authority of the Parliament of the commonwealth of
England, or of the commander-in-chief of the English
forces, or of the English judges in Scotland. The moderator
replied, that we were an ecclesiastical synod, a spiritual
Court of Jesus Christ, which meddled not with any thing
civil; that our authority was from God, and established by
the laws of the land, yet standing unrepealed; that by the
Solemn League and Covenant the most of the English army
stood obliged to defend our General Assembly. When some
speeches of this kind had passed, the lieutenant-colonel
told us his order was to dissolve us; whereupon he
commanded all of us to follow him, else he would drag us
out of the room.... Thus our General Assembly, the glory
and strength of our Church upon earth, is by your soldiery
crushed and trod under foot, without the least provocation
from us at this time in word or deed.'--(Vol. vii. 303.)
It is, however, but just to add that Cromwell did not countenance this
violence; and though the General Assembly was closed, no restriction
existed during his _régime_ on the exercise of the Presbyterian form of
worship.
The northern and southern parts of our island were now under the rule of
Cromwell, the Long Parliament having been swept away, and the great
soldier wholly supreme. Even the worst enemies of the Protector must
allow that in Scotland, as elsewhere, his government was in advance of
his time, and, if despotic, was wise and judicious. After long
conflicts, the nation was at rest; and if its patriotic spirit was
quelled, it enjoyed a large share of real freedom, and grew rapidly in
material wealth. Though the Kirk was no longer established, all forms of
Protestantism were tolerated and favoured; and the Catholic nobles also
had no cause to complain of the harshness of the civil magistrate. In
governing the country Cromwell gave proof of that profound policy and
anticipation of the future, which marks him out as one of the greatest
of statesmen. All restraints on commerce were removed. Scotland was
completely united to England; the feudal jurisdiction of the great
nobles and Highland chiefs was summarily abolished; and forts, armed
with sufficient garrisons, kept the half-barbarous clans in subjection.
In a word, all the capital reforms which it took a century after the
Restoration to introduce into Scotland again, were, in a few years,
carried out by Cromwell; and it is but the truth that his Scottish
policy was a model for three generations of statesmen. Under his
far-sighted and firm government the country began to thrive apace. We
quote from a contemporary chronicler this curious account of Leith and
Glasgow:--
'The town of Leith is of itself a pretty, small town, and
fortified about; having a convenient dry harbour, into
which the Frith ebbs and flows every tide, and a convenient
quay on the one side thereof, of a good length, for the
landing of goods. This place formerly, and so at this time,
is indeed a store-house, not only for her own traders, but
also for the merchants of the City of Edinburgh, this being
the port thereof.... Glasgow, seated in a pleasant and
fruitful soil, and consisting of four streets, handsomely
built in form of a cross, is one of the most considerable
burghs of Scotland, as well for the structure as trade of
it. The inhabitants, all but the students of the college
which is here, are traders and dealers.'--(Vol. vii. 313.)
Our space precludes us from dwelling at length on the history of
Scotland after the death of Cromwell, described fully by Mr. Burton. As
is well known, a loyal reaction set in, in favour of Charles II., and
this was followed by a period of tyranny in Church and State of extreme
severity. Not only were proscriptions frequent, and the scaffold crowded
with many victims, but the legislation of 1641 was cancelled, Episcopacy
was insolently restored, the authority of the Crown considerably
increased, and Presbyterianism barely allowed to maintain a weak and
inglorious existence. The era, indeed, of the ascendancy of Sharp, and
of the tender mercies of Claverhouse and his dragoons, was one of
darkness and sorrow in Scotland--it far exceeded in its melancholy
features that of the Cavalier reaction in England; and the question
arises why a nation, which had proved itself so fiercely tenacious of
its independence in the preceding generation, submitted for years to
this cruel oppression. Mr. Burton has hardly brought out sufficiently
the causes of this remarkable quiescence, which are of deep interest to
the student of history. They are, we think, to be found in the facts
that, after the exertions of the great civil war, Scotland was, in a
great degree, exhausted; that after the Restoration, the power of the
Crown was upheld for the first time by a standing army, not large, but
formidable; and, above all, that the Government avoided one capital
error of Charles I.--it conciliated instead of injuring the nobles, and
did not attempt to assail their interests by threatening to resume the
old Church revenues. Worn out, borne down, and without leaders, the
nation was for a time submissive; its discontent exhibited itself in a
few occasional risings only; and Lauderdale, Charles II., and his
brother were allowed a season to fill up the measure of iniquity and
wrong. At last the fierce awakening came. But it should be observed that
at this conjuncture the movement for freedom began in England; and if
Scotland inaugurated the events which led to the meeting of the Long
Parliament, she played a very subordinate part in the Revolution of
1688. The passages of that memorable time are not narrated in this work,
so it is not necessary to allude to them. An estimate of Mr. Burton's
history will be gathered from what we have already written. It is
deficient as a picturesque narrative; it sometimes, as may be supposed,
displays a too fervent national patriotism; but it is singularly
well-informed and complete, and its conclusions on men and events are
usually careful, correct, and judicious.
ART. II.--_Early English Texts. Publications of the Early English Text
Society._ London: Trübner and Co. 1864-70.
'O Poesy divine! O sacred song!
To thee bright fame, and length of days belong:
Thou goddess, thou eternity canst give,
And bid secure the mortal hero live.'
Thus sings Nicholas Rowe in his translation of the poet Lucan; but can
we agree with the sentiment expressed? It is partly true and partly
false, for although the poet possesses this wonderful power, he himself
creates an enemy that wars against his own and his hero's immortality,
and this enemy is the medium he uses to express his thoughts. Few men
will take the trouble to learn a language for the special purpose of
enjoying an author's works, and therefore for the many it is requisite
that some one should be ready and willing to reintroduce the old writer
into new society. The poet Waller feared that the time would come when
his countrymen would be unable to understand his writings, and he thus
expressed his fear--
'Poets that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
We write in sand, our language grows,
And like the tide our work o'erflows.'
This is, of course, an extreme view, and time has proved it to be a
false one; but the writers of the centuries previous to Waller are
already in the position that he expected soon to be in himself. Chaucer
is a household name, but we fear that few read his works, and still
fewer the works of those who went before him. This is a state of things
that should not be allowed to exist; but that it does exist, no one
would be rash enough to deny. We do not blame those who neglect foreign
literatures, but we do blame those who turn away from the authors of
their own land because there is some little difficulty in understanding
their writings.
It cannot be right that the literature of England for eight or ten
centuries should be quietly ignored by Englishmen, because it is not
easy to read its language; and, moreover, this difficulty is much
exaggerated, for although a Saxon book may, without previous study,
appear as if written in a foreign tongue, yet the few difficulties of
its language will in a graduated study speedily disappear. The pedigree
is complete that takes us back from the language of the nineteenth to
that of the fifth century. Both in language and literature it is
emphatically true that the child is father of the man, and no one can
thoroughly appreciate the greatness of Shakspeare, Milton, and our
moderns, who has not contrasted them with the authors who preceded them;
no one can rightly judge the force of words and phrases, who has not
followed them up to their sources, and seen the meads of thought they
have flowed through.
Not long ago the early history, language, and literature of England were
thought to be unworthy of study. Men of culture studied the languages
and literatures of France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, but utterly
neglected the early literature and language of their own country, which
were considered rude and unworthy of attention. We do not expect to find
any among the uneducated caring for the old forms of speech, but it is a
disappointment to find men of education, who ought to be justly proud of
the grandest literature in the world, treating our old writers with
neglect. This feeling of contempt for our early literature is by no
means yet destroyed, and therefore no lover of the work done by his
ancestors should rest until it is entirely and for ever eradicated.
In the old English literature there is a choice for all tastes: history,
biography, theology, science, romance, lyrics, and merry tales, have all
come down to us from the earliest times, and in them may be seen the
gradual development of the nation's mind. It should be a cause of pride
for the Englishman to remember that the links in the chain that connects
the language of Tennyson with the language of Alfred are all perfect.
Shall we, then, allow the treasures of the past to crumble and decay? We
are now living in the enjoyment of an intellectual feast that centuries
of our forefathers have prepared for us; and shall we in return leave to
our children less than we have ourselves received? Are we not bound
rather to take no rest until all our MS. treasures are placed beyond the
reach of decay? The printing press must not be allowed to pause in its
work until every line is set in type. Nothing is more likely to
encourage our desire to attempt this great work than for us to see what
has been done of old. All honour is due to the unnamed writer of the
Vernon MS.,[172] to Shirley and Thornton, the contemporaries of Chaucer
and Lyndesay, who recognised the value of the treasures that came in
their way, and copied MS. libraries that have survived in safety to our
times. The man who has consulted the grand Vernon MS. in the Bodleian
Library has obtained a glimpse of the olden time, with its noble desire
to benefit posterity, that he is never likely to forget.
The student, however, may naturally ask, 'Where can I study these works?
I can't read at Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, or London; and even if I
could I don't understand the writing. I want the books in print, and not
only in print, but in an accessible form.' It is this question that we
will attempt to answer; this want that we will try to show can be
satisfied.
Various worthy men have at different times laboured to diffuse a
knowledge of our old literature, and societies have been formed for the
same purpose. Hickes, Junius, Gale, Lye, the two Elstobs, and many
others, are editors whose works have been so widely circulated that we
need hardly dwell on them; but the issues of printing clubs are less
known, and we therefore propose to summarize them. In 1812, the
Roxburghe Club was instituted in London, to commemorate the grand sale
of the Duke of Roxburghe's library, and although many trifling matters
were printed by its members, yet through its aid several important texts
have been brought to light. In 1818, John Gower's 'French Ballads' and
other poems were printed; in 1819, Caxton's translation of six books of
'Ovid's Metamorphoses,' 'Le Morte Arthure,' and 'Sir Lancelot du Lake;'
in 1828, 'Havelok the Dane;' in 1832, 'William and the Werwolf;' in
1838, 'The Owl and the Nightingale,' and Old English versions of the
'Gesta Romanorum,' and in later years the 'Alliterative Romance of
Alexander,' the 'Ayenbite of Inwyt,' and the 'History of the Holy
Graal.'
In 1823, the Bannatyne Club was started at Edinburgh, and in 1827, it
printed the 'Palice of Honor,' by Gawin Douglas, and in 1839, a
collection of all the poems relating to Sir Gawayne, and Douglas's
translation of the 'Æneid of Virgil,' which it has left without preface,
glossary, or notes.
In 1828, the Maitland Club was founded in Glasgow, and it printed three
old romances, viz.: 'Clariodus,' 'Sir Beves of Hamptoun,' and 'Lancelot
du Lak.'
The Abbotsford Club commenced its career in 1835, at Edinburgh, and
printed several romances from the Auchinleck MS., as 'Rouland,' and
'Vernagu,' and 'Otuel,' 'Arthour and Merlin,' 'Sir Guy of Warwick,' and
'Rembrun,' and 'Sire Degarre.'
The Spalding Club, which was founded in 1839, at Aberdeen, printed
Barbour's 'Brus' in 1856.
Although the publications of these clubs are very praiseworthy, and
have done much good, the number of copies is so small, and their
commercial value so great, that they are placed almost as far beyond the
reach of the ordinary literary man as the manuscripts themselves. We
believe that all true lovers of their country's literature will echo the
words of a living editor quoted in the first prospectus of the Early
English Text Society. 'I should rejoice to see my books in the hands of
a hundred, where they are now on the shelves of one.'
Soon after the select printing clubs were started, a more popular
movement set in, with the foundation in 1834 at Durham of the excellent
Surtees Society. Although its publications are mostly of an historical
or local character, it has issued several literary relics, such as 'The
Anglo-Saxon and Early English Psalter,' 'Latin Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon
Church,' and 'The Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels.'
Four years afterwards, the Camden Society was started in London, and
from 1838 to the present time it has continued to publish a most
valuable collection of works. Its chief object has been to advance
historical studies, but it has issued the 'Thornton Romances,'
comprising the early English romances of Perceval, Isumbras, Eglamour,
and Degravant; three early English metrical romances--viz., 'The Anturs
(or Adventures) of Arther at the Tarnewathelan, Sir Amadace, the
Avowynge of King Arther, Sir Gawan, Sir Kaye, and Sir Bawdewyn of
Bretan;' 'The Ancren Riwle,' a treatise on the rules and duties of
monastic life; an 'Apology for Lollard Doctrines' attributed to
Wicliffe; and Mr. Way's invaluable edition of the old English and Latin
Dictionary, entitled 'Promptorium Parvulorum.'
All students of English literature owe a debt of gratitude to the Percy
Society, which was founded in 1840. Unfortunately it did not meet with
the success that it deserved, and died a natural death after some
unfortunate dissension among its editors. Nevertheless, it published in
a convenient form, among other works, 'Selections from the Minor Poems
of John Lydgate;' 'The Owl and the Nightingale' from a better MS. than
that which the Roxburghe Club had printed; 'Reynard the Fox;' 'Poems of
John Audelay;' 'Romance of Syr Tryamoure;' 'Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,'
from the oldest and perhaps the best manuscript known; 'Songs and Carols
of the fifteenth century;' and William de Shoreham's 'Religious Poems.'
In 1843, the Cheetham Society was formed at Manchester, in order to
print the historical and literary remains connected with the palatine
counties of Lancaster and Chester; and the Ælfric Society in London, for
the publication of Anglo-Saxon works, both civil and ecclesiastical.
The Caxton Society was started in 1845, and the Warton Club in 1854.
The late Canon Shirley at one time projected a Wycliffe Society, which
was to print our great reformer's works, but instead he induced the
Oxford delegates to undertake the task, and after great labour he
published, in 1865, his catalogue of Wycliffe's works. His lamented
death has not stopped the undertaking, and one volume of the Latin works
has been published at Oxford, and three of the English ones are nearly
ready for issue.
In January, 1857, the Master of the Rolls submitted to the Treasury a
proposal for the publication of materials for the history of this
country from the invasion of the Romans to the reign of Henry VIII.,
which has resulted in the issue of the valuable series of chronicles and
memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the middle ages. Many of
these works are in Latin and French, but among those to be mentioned as
written in English are Capgrave's 'Chronicle,' Pecock's 'Repressor,'
Cockayne's 'Saxon Leechdoms,' the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,' and Wright's
'Political Poems and Songs.'
We have now scoured the field and shown shortly what had been done
before the formation of the Early English Text Society. This was but
little, for there was a mass of unprinted literature entirely unknown
and unregistered, and it was felt by a few lovers of early English that
the time had come when the great work of producing this literature in
cheap editions must be grappled with.
The Philological Society commenced in 1858 with the occasional
publication of some Old English MSS., and issued 'Early English Poems
and Lives of Saints,' 1250-1406; 'The Play of the Sacrament;' 'Liber
Cure Cocorum,' a cookery book in verse; Hampole's 'Pricke of
Conscience;' and the 'Castel off Love.' In 1864, these texts were
discontinued, and a few of the members of the Philological Society
'formed a committee for the purpose of collecting subscriptions, and
printing therewith early English manuscripts.' From this small beginning
the Early English Text Society has grown to its present flourishing
condition, with a yearly income of over £900.
The publications of the Society are naturally of a very varied
character, but they may be divided under four heads. There are first the
Arthurian and other romances; and these form a large, and probably the
most popular class, for they were the light literature of our
ancestors, and in them we see as in a mirror the love for war and women,
and for action of all kinds. Few of these are of native growth, but are
translations from the French.
The second division consists of works illustrating our dialects and the
history of our language, including a series of early English
dictionaries. Some of these last are of great value and interest, and we
are glad to see that the Committee propose to edit some which will form
worthy companions to the 'Promptorium Parvulorum' of the Camden Society.
A rare old rhyming dictionary has already been issued, and it is
proposed to bring out shortly the 'Catholicon Anglicum' from Lord
Monson's MS. This is a dictionary of a slightly later date than the
'Promptorium,' which contains many new and unregistered words. To this
second division all the texts may be said to belong more or less,
because most of the editors give careful glossaries and introductions on
the dialect of their authors. Dr. Morris's introductions, especially,
are the only real grammars of our early language, and are of the
greatest value to the student of the history of the formation of our
tongue.
The third division consists of Biblical translations and religious
treatises; and the fourth of texts, such as 'Piers Plowman,' which do
not come under either of the three first headings.
We will now pass in review some of the works issued by the Society, and
we shall do so according to their dates, beginning with the 12th
century.
The most valuable monuments of our language are chiefly of a theological
character, and in 'Old English Homilies'[173] Dr. Morris has given us a
deeply interesting collection, from which a curious insight into the
religious views of the time may be obtained. Much of the religious
teaching of these old preachers was of an evangelical character, and is
but little mixed up with the legends of later writers. One writes: 'We
must forsake the broad way which leads to hell, and choose the narrow
and green way along the high cliffs which leads to heaven, where there
are no earthly luxuries, but where the sight of God alone constitutes
the eternal life, bliss, and rest of his saints.' In the homily on the
Lord's-day the author tells the curious legend of St. Paul's and St.
Michael's descent into hell, and how they obtained for the damned one
day's rest in the week unto doomsday. He admonishes all to honour the
Sunday, and fortifies his position thus:--'We ought to honour Sunday
very much, and to observe it in all purity, for it hath in it three
worthy virtues which ye may hear. The first virtue is that it on earth
gives rest to all earth-thralls, men and women, from their thrall works.
The second virtue is in heaven, because the angels rest themselves more
than on any other day. The third virtue is that the wretched souls in
hell have rest from their great torments.'
In the 'Story of Genesis and Exodus,'[174] the author has versified the
most important facts contained in those books, and has included portions
of Numbers and Deuteronomy, so as to give a complete history of the
wanderings of the Israelites, and the life of their leader Moses. The
poet (of whom nothing is known) invokes the aid of the Deity in these
terms:--
'Fader god of alle ðhinge,
Almightin louerd, hegest kinge,
ðu giue me seli timinge,
To thaunen ðis werdes biginninge,
ðe, leuerd god, to wurðinge,
Queðer so hic rede or singe!'[175]
He then goes on to relate, in a spirited manner, the chief incidents of
the Bible narrative. Lamech's bigamy is thus referred to:--
'ðis Lamech was ðe firme[176] man
ðe bigamie first bi-gan.
Bigamie is unkinde[177] ðing,
On engleis tale, twie-wifing.'
To bigamy is afterwards added murder:--
'Twin-wifing and twin-manslagt,
Of his soule beð mikel hagt.[178]'
The author thinks that Christian men ought to be as glad as birds are of
dawn, to hear the story of man's bliss and sorrow.
'Seinte Marherete,'[179] is the first of a triad of saints' lives, to be
edited for the Society, the other two (St. Juliane and St. Katherine)
are still to come. The editor is Mr. Cockayne, whose observations are
always worth a hearing, although they are of a very pugnacious
character. In 'Hali Meidenhad,'[180] he expresses great offence at the
opinions of his author, whose attacks on wedlock he takes very much to
heart. We find in the side-notes such expressions as these--'highflying
notions,' 'this ranter.' The anonymous author of the treatise is
supposed by Mr. Cockayne to have been a bishop, and the same as he who
wrote the three saints' lives, and the 'Ancren Riwle.' Whoever he was,
he writes with considerable vigour, and describes the troubles of wives
with great goodwill. The maiden is to ask the queens, rich countesses,
and saucy ladies as to their mode of life. 'Truly, truly, if they
rightly bethink themselves and acknowlege the truth, I shall have them
witnesses that they are licking honey off thorns. They buy all the
sweetness with two proportions of bitter.' A husband is held up before
the maiden's eyes in these unfavourable colours:--'While he is at home,
thy wide walls seem too narrow for thee; his looking on thee makes thee
aghast; his loathesome voice and his rude grumbling fill thee with
horror. He chideth and jaweth thee, and he insults thee shamefully; he
maketh mock at thee; he beateth thee and mawleth thee as his bought
thrall and patrimonial slave. Thy bones ake, and thy flesh smarteth, thy
heart within thee swelleth of sore rage, and thy face externally burneth
with vexation.' It shows how much outspoken language has gone out of
fashion, that the author thinks it necessary to put into Latin certain
of the passages which a bishop addressed to some young nuns. Mr.
Furnivall has unearthed from the Vernon MS. a later essay on the same
subject, entitled 'Clene Maydenhood,' in which the author adjures young
women to bind Christ in their hearts, because man's love is never
constant.
'Havelok the Dane,[181] is one of the best--if not the very best--of
early romances, and we are indebted to the Society for bringing it
within the reach of the ordinary reader. It was first edited, in 1828,
by Sir Frederic Madden, for the Roxburghe Club, but since that time it
has been almost unattainable on account of its scarceness and consequent
high price. The story, like most of the romances, is a version taken
from an original, written in French. Two kings, of England and Denmark,
die, and each leaves his child to the care of a steward, who uses it
badly. Grim, the founder of Grimsby, saves the life of Havelok, the son
of the King of Denmark, and comes with him to England, where the boy
grows up stalwart, and becomes the strongest man alive, putting the
stone twelve feet beyond his companions. Havelok marries Goldborough,
'the fairest woman alive,' who was the daughter of the dead King of
England. The two go to Denmark and drive the usurper from the throne,
after which they return to England, and conquer the English usurper.
They reign for sixty years, and fifteen children are born to them, who
all become kings and queens. Havelok's first acts, on his return to
England, were to found a priory of black monks in Grimsby, for the good
of his old friend Grim's soul, and to marry Grim's daughters to two of
his courtiers. 'King Horn,'[182] another romance of the thirteenth
century, is of English origin. Horn, the son of the King of a place
called Suddene, who had been killed by the Saracens, reaches the country
of a neighbouring king with his companions, and is loved by that king's
daughter. The king finds out the attachment, and banishes Horn, who
travels to another kingdom, and conquers a formidable giant. After this,
he returns to Westernesse and claims his lady love. Various troubles
succeed; but, in the end, Horn returns to take possession of the
ancestral throne of Sudden.
We now pass to the fourteenth-century texts; and here we find the most
important work that the Society has attempted, which is a three-text
edition (under the able editorship of Mr. Skeat) of the most valuable
work in early English literature before Chaucer, viz., 'The Vision of
Piers Plowman.'[183] This great 'Puritan' poem was very popular for many
years, and a large number of MSS. of it have come down to us. These
differ very much, and it appears that the author, William Langland, was
induced by the popularity of this work to produce at various times what
may be called, for want of a better term, three editions. These are
represented by--1, the Vernon MS.; 2, the copy printed by Robert
Crowley, in 1550; and 3, that printed by Dr. Whitaker, in 1813; and all
the MSS. at present known can be ranged under one or other of these
types. Before commencing the great work of producing a worthy edition
of this great classic, the Society was anxious to have as much
information concerning the MSS. as it could obtain, and in 1866 issued
Parallel Extracts of twenty-nine MSS., asking, at the same time, that
librarians or possessors of libraries would communicate to the Society's
editor the discovery of other MSS. not noticed in these extracts, as the
committee believed that many valuable ones might have remained unknown.
In the following year Text A, from the Vernon MS., appeared. This only
extends to eleven passus, or less than half of the whole poem, as
subsequently written. The author is very severe upon the vices of his
day, and in scourging them he gives us a valuable insight into the
domestic life of the time.
The poem is divided into two parts, the 'Vision of Piers the Plowman,'
and the 'Vision of Do-well, Do-bet, and Do-best.' In the first, the
author describes how he fell asleep on the Malvern Hills, and saw, in a
dream, much to displease him. The world is represented by a field full
of folk, among whom are ploughmen, spendthrifts, hermits, minstrels,
beggars, pilgrims, friars, a pardoner with bulls, law-serjeants,
bishops, and all kinds of craftsmen. Holy Church comes to the author as
a lovely lady, and points out to him Falsehood, Bribery, Simony, and
Flattery. The King makes up his mind to punish Falsehood, if he can
catch him; but that delinquent flees, and takes refuge with the friars,
who pity him and take him under their protection. The king then appeals
to Reason, but he will not take pity on wrong until lords and ladies
love truth, rioters are holy clerks, knights are courteous, and priests
practise what they preach. The author awakes, but soon dreams again.
Conscience preaches, and is seconded by Repentance in his endeavours to
convert the deadly sins. The preaching has great effect, and all set out
on a pilgrimage to find Truth; but no one knows the way, and a Palmer
who has returned from the Holy Sepulchre, and met many saints, knows
nothing of Truth. They now meet Piers the Ploughman, who directs them to
the way, and promises to guide them when he has ploughed his half-acre;
meantime he sets them to work. At first, the people will not work till
hunger comes in, and then they agree to do whatever Piers wills. All the
names of persons introduced into the poem tell their own story, thus
Piers's wife is called _Work when time is_, his daughter, _Do as you are
bid_, and his son, _Obey your king_. In the second part, _Do-well_ is to
fear God, _Do-bet_ to suffer, _Do-best_ to be lowly of heart. All the
allegory of the poem is very palpable, and at times tedious; but the
incidental allusions to the state of the people are of the greatest
interest. The author appears to have felt strongly the responsibility of
his position as a preacher, and the contempt he evinces for the small
value of the Pope's pardon, shows us that in the middle ages a purer
Christianity was occasionally preached than we are often apt to imagine.
Langland lays great stress on the law of love, and shows the infinite
superiority of a life of righteousness over a mere trust in indulgences.
Mr. Skeat says of him: 'He shows himself to us a man of simple, noble,
and pure faith, the friend of the poor, the adviser of the rich, with
strong views on the duties of a king toward his subjects, together with
a feeling of deep reverence for the kingly character, fearless,
unprejudiced, and ever willing to be taught.'
'Pierce the Ploughman's Crede'[184] is not written by the same author as
the 'Vision,' but is an imitation of it by some one who was glad to
avail himself of the popularity of that work. It is thus analyzed by
Alexander Pope:--
'An ignorant plain man, having learned his Paternoster and
Ave Mary, wants to learn his creed. He asks several
religious men of the several orders to teach it him. First,
of a friar Minor, who bids him beware of the Carmelites,
and assures him that they can teach him nothing, describing
their faults, &c., but that the friars Minor shall save him
whether he learns his creed or not. He goes next to the
friars Preachers, whose magnificent monastery he describes;
there he meets a fat friar, who declaims against the
Augustines. He is shocked at his pride, and goes to the
Augustines. They rail at the Minorites. He goes to the
Carmelites; they abuse the Dominicans, but promise him
salvation without the creed for money. He leaves them with
indignation, and finds an honest poor _Plowman_ in the
field, and tells him how he was disappointed, by the four
orders. The ploughman answers with a long invective against
them.'
Mr. Skeat has followed manuscripts in his edition which had been
previously neglected. Dr. Whitaker and Mr. Wright printed from the first
edition of 1553, but the British Museum MS. is older than this, and
there can be little doubt that both the MSS. and the printed copy are
all copied from a MS. now lost or not forthcoming.
The next work we shall mention is a translation of a French treatise on
sins and virtues into the homely English of Kent. It is called the
'Ayenbite of Inwyt,'[185] two old and expressive words which are now
completely lost to us, and superseded by remorse and conscience. The
book was written for the benefit of laymen, in order that fathers and
mothers might keep their consciences undefiled. There is a very full
account of sins, and the morality preached is very strict, for
backgammon and chess are placed among foul and forbidden games. This
text had been previously edited by Mr. Stevenson for the Roxburghe Club,
but in a very careless manner, as is seen by the author's original
preface and table of contents being left out. Dr. Richard Morris has
remedied these deficiencies, and has prefixed a most valuable
grammatical introduction, in which the characteristics of the Southern
dialect during the early English period (1250-1340) are pointed out.
The late Mr. Toulmin Smith's collection of the statutes of 'English
Gilds,'[186] in the 14th and 15th centuries, is one of the most valuable
works issued by the Society, as its interest is so wide as to include
both the past and the present. The study of the societies of the olden
times gives us a deep insight into the domestic and municipal life that
has been so much neglected by historians, and throws a strong light upon
the present condition of the working classes as developed in the trades'
unions.
A life and coherency has been put into the dead bones of dry statutes by
the valuable essay on the subject by Dr. Lujo Brentano, which is the
first and only 'History of Gilds' in English, and comprises the
Continental Gilds as well as our own. Mr. Toulmin Smith unfortunately
died before the work was completed, but his daughter, with filial piety,
has worked at the completion of her father's design, and the result is a
book that forms a worthy monument to an able and good man.
The 'Early English Alliterative Poems'[187] consist of the 'Pearl,'
'Cleanness,' and 'Patience.' The first poem is an allegory of great
beauty, in which resignation to the will of God is enforced. The writer
has lost a daughter of two years old, and he dreams of gleaming rocks,
crystal cliffs, and silver trees, and sees his child in bliss on the
opposite side of a stream. The second poem is a collection of Biblical
stories tending to enforce purity of life, and the third is a paraphrase
of the Book of Jonah. All three show the author to have possessed much
poetic power.
'William and the Werwolf'[188] was edited by Sir Frederic Madden, in
1832, for the Roxburghe Club, but his edition had become very scarce
before the Early English Text Society undertook its publication as the
first text for their Extra Series. Mr. Skeat, who has edited this
edition, has wisely changed the name of the English romance to William
of Palerne, because it is a translation of the French 'Guillaume de
Palerne,' and has been able to fill up the missing parts of the English
version from the French MS., portions of which were supplied to him by
M. Michelant, of the Imperial Library at Paris. The story is as
follows:--William, the son of the King of Apulia, is about to be
murdered by his uncle, when he is carried off by a wolf, who is found
subsequently to be a werwolf or manwolf, enchanted by his stepmother.
William is adopted by a cowherd, and afterwards taken into his household
by the Emperor of Rome, whose daughter falls in love with the boy. To
save herself from being married to another prince, Melior leaves the
palace with William, both of them being disguised as bears. They are
taken care of by the werwolf, and afterwards re-disguise themselves as a
hart and hind. William performs marvels, taking the werwolf's
step-mother a prisoner, and only releasing her on condition that the
werwolf shall be disenchanted. All ends happily, with several marriages
as a climax.
We have not yet referred to the great cycle of Arthurian romances, which
have lately been brought so prominently before the reading public by the
charming poems of the Poet Laureate. Most of these romances were
introduced to an English public in the 15th century, but some are of an
earlier date. 'Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight'[189] is one of these
last, and appears to have been written by the author of the
'Alliterative Poems' previously mentioned. Sir Gawayne, the matchless
and faultless son of Loth, was one of the leading spirits in his uncle's
court, and the present text contains one of the most interesting
incidents in his career. While Arthur is holding a Christmas festival at
Camelot, a knight of gigantic stature, clothed entirely in green and
riding on a green foal, enters the hall. He carries an axe, sharp as a
razor, and asks that some one should strike him with it, on condition
that he may return the stroke at the end of a year. All are silent.
Arthur accepts the challenge, but Gawayne beseeches his uncle to allow
him to undertake the encounter, and the king consents. The Green Knight
adjusts himself, and after Gawayne has struck off his head, walks off
with it under his arm. The company feel more comfortable after his
departure, but the year soon comes to an end, when Gawayne must travel
to seek the Knight of the Green Chapel. After many adventures, Gawayne
comes to the loveliest castle ever beheld, where he is welcomed warmly.
The lord (who is the Green Knight in a more ordinary costume than that
he had before adopted) treats him nobly, and tells him that he will
direct him to the Green Chapel. The two make a covenant between them
that the lord shall go to the chase and Gawayne stay at home, and at the
end of the day give each other what they have got in the meantime. On
the first day the hostess tempts Gawayne, but he is proof against her
charms, and she leaves him with a kiss, which he gives the host at
night; on the second day she does the same and gives him two kisses,
which he gives to his host; the third time Gawayne is again tempted and
receives three kisses, and a girdle of green lace that will preserve
whoever wears it from wound or death. At night Gawayne gives the kisses
but keeps the girdle. On the morrow, after much trouble, he finds the
Green Chapel, from which the Green Knight comes out, and makes a feint
to strike him. The Knight pretends to strike again, and the third time
he brings blood, when he explains his conduct to Gawayne thus:--'Two
blows I aimed at thee, for twice thou kissedst my fair wife, but I
struck thee not, because thou restoredest them to me according to
agreement. At the third time thou failedst, and therefore I have given
thee that tap.' The Green Knight, who is Bernlak de Hautdesert, now
tells Gawayne that his aunt, Morgain la Fay, lives at his castle, and
presses his friend to return with him, but Gawayne will not, as he
wishes to return to Arthur's court. Here he is received with joy, and
all the knights wear a green belt in his honour. The author tells all
this, which we have been obliged to relate in the baldest manner, with
great spirit and vivacity; and in the midst of his story he gives
lively accounts of boar and fox hunts, which display a wonderful mastery
over language. Another of the prominent knights of Arthur's court was
Lancelot of the Laik.[190] His adventures are related in a short romance
paraphrased into the Scottish dialect from a part of the long French
'Lancelot.' The author is in love and dares not tell it, but dreams that
he should write a poem for his lady love to read. He does not know what
to write about until he thinks of the romance of 'Lancelot,' when he
runs over rapidly an enumeration of that knight's early deeds by way of
saying that he will not tell of them. He then commences in earnest with
the wars between Arthur and Galiot. A knight brings a message from King
Galiot, bidding Arthur to yield to him or he will invade his land and
not return until he has conquered and taken Queen Guinevere prisoner.
Arthur returns the defiance, but on asking Gawayne who Galiot is, he
learns that ten kings obey him. At this time Lancelot is imprisoned by
the lady of Melyhalt, and laments his fate, but as he hears of a battle
between Arthur and Galiot, he obtains leave from the lady to join Arthur
on condition that he returns to his prison at night. The lady provides
him with a red courser, and red shield and spear, and he goes to the
fight, where he performs wonders, and sees the queen, with whom he falls
in love. He returns to prison, where the lady visits him, and is smitten
with love. She goes to court, and returns after being sumptuously
entertained. She now promises to let Lancelot go on one of three
conditions--either he must tell whom he loves, or declare his name, or
say if he expects again to equal his former exploits. He refuses to tell
his lady's name, or his own, but declares his trust to do more than he
has done before.
The lady of Melyhalt asks Lancelot to remain with her till the next
battle, when she will provide him with black armour. Arthur's forces are
led in the fight by Gawayne, who is severely wounded. Lancelot joins in
the battle on the third day, and laments over Gawayne, but he does not
waste time in regrets; for on all the ladies, with the exception of the
queen, sending him a message, he overthrows several knights, and does
great damage to the enemy. At last, on Gawayne's instigation, the queen
sends him a message, the receipt of which affects him so much that he
seems to grow a foot in height, and nothing can withstand him, as he
goes into the thick of the fight. His foes leave the place in mortal
fear at the sight of him; for whilst his thoughts are of his lady's love
he achieves unheard-of-wonders. At last he is borne to the earth, and
Galiot, who has seen his powers, says he shall not die on his account,
and gives him his horse. Here the Scottish romance closes, and the rest
of the story is only to be learnt from the French original. Gawayne
swoons when he sees Lancelot with Galiot; but the latter is induced by
Lancelot, although he is conquering, to submit to Arthur. When all are
friends, Galiot and Arthur go to see the wounded Gawayne, and then they
speak of Lancelot. Gawayne says that he would wish to be a woman, if
Lancelot would love him all his life. The queen seems to approve of the
sentiment, for she admits that she can say no more. Now the serious part
of the story commences, for the queen, through the instrumentality of
Galiot, visits Lancelot, and promises to love him. She takes counsel
with the lady of Melyhalt, and after a general understanding they all
part, with hopes of soon meeting again.
Mr. Furnivall has printed a short and rapid sketch of the life and wars
of _Arthur_,[191] king of men, which occurs in an incomplete Latin
'Chronicle of the Kings of Britain,' belonging to the Marquis of Bath.
The author seems to have got excited, and found dull Latin prose unequal
to his feelings, so he breaks out into English verse. There are many
spirited and lively sketches in the Lincoln 'Morte Arthure,'[192] which
was first printed by Mr. Halliwell, in 1847. It opens with a general
statement of Arthur's conquests, and then proceeds with the account of
the summons from the Emperor Lucius. When Arthur hears it, his face is
so terrible that the Romans who bring the letter quail before him. The
king has a magnificent feast prepared, at which boars' heads are served
upon silver, and peacocks and plovers upon golden plates. There are also
sucking pigs, herons in sauce, huge swans, cranes, and curlews, tarts
and conserves, hams and brawn in slices, wild geese and ducks, young
hawks, stews, curries, and all kinds of made dishes. So much for the
food; and the drinks are on as grand a scale of magnificence. Wine of
various kinds is made to run in silver conduits, and the rare sorts are
served by the chief butler in goblets of gold, decked with precious
stones, in order to preserve the drinkers from the deadly effects of
poison. All this grandeur astonishes the Roman senator, who allows that
Rome itself could show nothing equal to this luxurious feast. Arthur
sends a grand message to the Roman emperor, in which he threatens to
throw down the walls of Milan, ravage Tuscany, and besiege Rome. All
these big words seem to have frightened the Roman senator, for he prays
to be protected on his homeward journey; and Arthur tells him that if
his coffers were crammed full of silver, he would be quite safe with a
passport from him. Nevertheless, the Romans were glad to get away, and
'Of alle þe glee undire Gode so glade ware þey nevere,
As of þe sounde of þe see and Sandwyche belles.'
In the great battle that follows, Lucius's army is preceded by sixty
giants, born of fiends and witches, riding on tower-bearing camels. In
spite of all this, Arthur is victorious, and sends the body of the
emperor, whom Lancelot had killed, to Rome, as his arrears of tribute.
Other battles[193] succeed this, till Arthur learns of the villany of
his bastard son, Mordred, when he at once sets out for Britain, and he
might well say with Edgar--
'The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.'
Gawayne, always rash, fights Mordred like a madman, and is slain in the
deadly struggle. Thus dies the merriest, the kindliest, and the bravest
of knights--he who was the hardiest of hand, the happiest in arms, and
the most polished in hall. Now all grows dark, and the end begins to
close upon all. Arthur finds the dead body of his nephew, and his great
grief is beautifully exhibited in the following description:--
'Than gliftis[194] þe gud kynge, and glapyns[195] in herte,
Gronys fulle grisely with gretande teris;
Knelis downe to the cors, and kaught it in armes,
Kastys upe his umbrere,[196] and kysses hyme sone!
Lokes one his eye-liddis, þat lowkkide ware faire,
His lippis like to þe lede, and his lire[197] falowede!
Þan the corownde kyng cryes fulle lowde,--
"Dere kosyne o kynde, in kare am I levede!
Ffor nowe my wirchipe es wente, and my were endide!
Here es þe hope of my hele,[198] my happynge of armes!
My herte and my hardynes hale one hym lengede!
My concelle, my comforthe, þat kepide myne herte!
Of all knyghtes þe kynge þat undir Criste lifede!
Þou was worthy to be kynge, those I þe corowne bare!
My wele and my wirchipe of alle þis werlde riche
Was wonnene thourghe Syr Gawayne, and thourghe his witte one!
Allas," saide Syr Arthure, "nowe ekys my sorowe!
I am uttirly undone in myne awene landes!
A dowttouse derfe dede, þou duellis to longe!
Why drawes þou so one dreghe, thow drownnes myne herte!"'
Arthur now, with his 1,800 men, fights desperately against 60,000, and
is successful in conquering them, and killing Mordred; but what
signifies victory, when he has got his death wound, his wife has
deserted him, and his friends are dead around him. The great conqueror
and pattern of all knightly virtues dies a broken-hearted man, and the
grand old story comes to an end. The writer really felt what he was
writing about, and the consequence is, that his history stirs our very
blood. And not in vigour alone is the writer's power shown; the lines in
which he describes a bright morning in spring, and others in which he
tells of love, can hardly be beaten by any other early work.
'Merlin'[199] is one of the longest of the romances, and although the
whole of the text has been issued in three parts, the work still awaits
for its completion Mr. Wheatley's introduction, index, and glossary. It
has, however, two interesting essays prefixed--one by Mr. D. W. Nash,
who learnedly draws the distinction between Merlin the enchanter and
Merlin the bard; and another by Mr. J. S. Stuart Glennie, on the
Arthurian localities which he finds in Scotland. The story commences
with the miraculous birth of Merlin, and a description of King
Vortiger's tower. The various events occur very rapidly at first.
Pendragon and Uter defeat Vortiger, and Pendragon becomes king, but
soon after he is killed in a battle, and Uter succeeds him, taking his
brother's name at the same time as a surname. Uter Pendragon falls in
love with Ygerne, the wife of the Duke of Tintagel, and by the help of
Merlin he deceives her into receiving him as her husband while the duke
is away. This ill-used man is killed in a fight, and the king at once
marries Ygerne, who soon after bears him Arthur. Merlin is now very
busy, and by his help the child is carried away. When Uter Pendragon
dies, Merlin points Arthur out as the heir. He is made king, but the
barons revolt against him, and now a long series of battles commence,
which are graphically described by the old author. Gawein and the other
nephews of Arthur come to him to be knighted, and through their
instrumentality the rebel kings are gradually reconciled to their chief,
to whom they do homage.
Merlin is enchanted by Nimiane, in a hawthorn bush, in the forest of
Brochelond, and Arthur is heavy at heart on account of the long absence
of his adviser. Gawein and his fellows go to seek for Merlin, and with
the account of their adventures the book is brought to an end.
The 'Romance of the Chevelere Assigne'[200] is a translation of the
French poem, 'Chevalier au Signe,' and was formerly edited for the
Roxburghe Club by Mr. Utterson. The present editor, Mr. Henry Hucks
Gibbs, gives in his preface a description of a curious ivory casket of
14th century workmanship, belonging to Mr. William Gibbs, which
illustrates the story.
King Oryens and his queen Beatrice have no child to succeed them, and
when one day they see a woman with twins, the queen is unkind enough to
revile her. As a punishment, she herself soon afterwards bears six sons
and one daughter, each with a silver chain about its neck. The king's
mother, Matabryne, gets a man to drown the children, which she replaces
by seven whelps, and then bids the king to burn his wife. Marcus, the
man employed to take away the children, leaves them in a wood, wrapped
up in a blanket, a hind then suckles them, and a hermit takes them home.
The forester sees them, and tells Matabryne, who has the eyes of Marcus
put out, and employs Malkedras to kill the children, and take away their
chains. The man only finds six, as one is with the hermit; but he smites
the chains from off these, and the children are turned into swans. The
queen gives the chains to a goldsmith to make into a cup, but one chain
increases so that half of it does for a cup, and the workman keeps the
other five. The poor queen is to be burnt for her crime of bringing
forth seven whelps, and a day is fixed for the purpose; but in the
meantime, an angel comes to the hermit, and tells him the whole truth,
commanding him at the same time to take the child he has with him to
court, and have him christened Enyas. The angel counsels the child, who
is twelve years old, to say that he will fight for the queen. There is
then a great combat, in which right is victorious.
'Alle þe belles of þe close rongen at ones,
Witheoute ny mannes helpe while þe fyghte lasted.'
Enyas cuts off the head of Malkedras, and the old queen is burnt instead
of the young one, who is unbound. The goldsmith comes forward with the
five chains, which being given to the swans, bring them back to their
proper form. The unfortunate sixth one, however, is obliged to remain a
swan because its chain is irrevocably gone.
The 'Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry'[201] is a very entertaining
work, as it gives us a good insight into the condition of woman in the
fourteenth century, which cannot be considered as at all satisfactory.
The worthy knight set about instructing his three daughters on their
various duties, and all his directions are enforced by some tale from
the Bible or monkish legends. He employed two clerks and two priests to
look up examples and anecdotes for him, and a curious medley is the
result of their labours. He seems to have been a credulous man, and a
good friend to the priests, for he never fails to uphold their views. He
tells us that the Virgin saved the life of an evil woman when she fell
into a well, because she fasted on Fridays and Saturdays, and kept
herself from sin on those days; but a good woman was lost because she
did not confess one sin. He is very severe upon the dressiness of the
women, and says that young ladies _now_ often take so long to adorn
themselves that they are too late for service. Some ladies who washed
their hair in wine and other things, to change its colour, could not get
into the church of our Lady until they had cut off their hair. Besides
waste of valuable time, much money was thrown away by these ladies, and
the knight laments that one woman's dress would have clothed many poor.
The worthy man wrote a book for the benefit of his sons, on the same
plan as this one for his daughters; but, unfortunately, it has been
lost.
'The Wright's Chaste Wife'[202] is really, as it is here styled, 'a
merry tale.' A wright or carpenter marries a fair maiden, whose mother
can only give, as her portion, a garland of roses, that will keep its
colour while she is true to her husband, but will change if she is
faithless. The man makes a room in his house, with a trap-door, out of
which escape is impossible, and then goes to build a hall for a certain
lord. This lord asks the wright about his garland, and thinks he will go
to try its efficacy. He gives the wife forty marks, and she tells him to
go to the secret chamber, where he drops through the trap-door. He
threatens, but his passion is of no avail; and when he is hungry, the
woman will give him nothing to eat until he has earned his dinner by
work. The steward follows the lord, and gives the woman twenty marks,
when he also is sent upstairs, and tumbles through the trap-door. This
man won't work until he is very hungry. Next comes the proctor, who also
gives the woman twenty marks, and likewise tumbles through the hole
prepared for his reception. He very much objects to work, and stands out
for a longer time than the others; but at last he is obliged to give in
too, and spin for his meal. At last the wright comes home, and wonders
at the noise. When he finds out the cause, he asks his wife to let the
lord out, but she will not until his lady is sent for. At last all three
are set free, and the garland remains as fresh as ever.
'Here endyth the wryghtes processe trewe,
Wyth hys garlond feyre of hewe,
That neuer dyd fade the coloure.
It was made by the avyse
Of hys wywes moder, wytty and wyse,
Of flowrys most of honoure,
Of roses whyte þat wylle nott fade,
Whych floure alle ynglond doth glade,
Wyth trewloues medelyed in syght;
Unto the whych floure I wys,
The loue of God and of the comenys,
Subdued bene of ryght.'
This story is a reproduction and improvement of one of the 'Gesta
Romanorum,' in which the carpenter gets with his wife a shirt that will
never want washing as long as she is faithful to him. In the original
story the three lovers are fed on bread and water, and not made to work,
as in Adam de Cobsam's poem.
Mr. Furnivall seems to have a special gift for hunting interesting tales
and bringing them to earth. His 'Political, Religious, and Love
Poems'[203] are a miscellany of good things of various dates; but the
'Babees Book'[204] is a perfect treasure-house of curiosities, which
tend to illustrate the manners of the fifteenth century. It contains a
'lytyl reporte' of how young people should behave; 'how the good wijf
tauzte hir douztir;' 'how the wise man tauzt his son;' the 'Book of
Nurture, or schoole of good maners for men, servants, and children,' by
Hugh Rhodes; the 'Boke of Nurture, by John Russell;' the 'Boke of
Kerninge;' the 'Booke of Demeanor, and the allowance and disallowance of
certaine misdemeanors in companie, by Richard West;' the 'Boke of
Curtasye;' the 'Schoole of Vertue, by F. Seager,' and various other
pieces on the customs of the times. The authors of these pieces give
very good rules for behaviour, and some of them would be appropriate in
a book of etiquette of the present day; but others discover a state of
society now happily passed away. The subjects treated of rise from the
rules laid down for boys, which if they follow,
'Than men wylle say therafter
That a gentylleman was here,'
up to the difficulties that beset chamberlains, ushers, and marshals, in
ordering the precedence of the great men entertained by their lords.
Mr. Furnivall has prefixed to his book a valuable introduction on the
subject of Education in Early England.
'The Booke of Quinte Essence'[205] is a short text with a long title, on
a revelation delivered to Hermes, the prophet and king of Egypt. It is
here said that God's greatest secret for man's need is how to restore
old feeble men to the strength of youth. A walnut-shell full of the
wonderful liquid is sufficient to turn an old man young again, to cure
one given up by the doctors, and to make a coward bold and strong.
Besides all these advantages, it has the further one of driving away the
devil. As the price of the book that contains these wonderful secrets is
only one shilling, we should not be surprised to learn that the Society
had sold a very large number of copies.
We now pass to some of the purely religious texts of the fifteenth
century, commencing with the hermit of Hampole.
Richard Rolle, author of the 'Prick of Conscience,' was formerly held
in great estimation as a prolific writer, and his 'English Prose
Treatises'[206] are a real addition to our literature. The hermit was
not a priest, but a recognised, although an irregular sort of preacher.
One John de Dalton gave him a hermit's clothing and a cell, and provided
for his maintenance. His gaze was ever upwards, and he was so absorbed
in his work that his friends could take off his tattered coat and put it
on again when mended without his knowledge. He was an ascetic himself,
but saw that some men must lead an active life or the world would come
to an end; and although much of his teaching is gloomy, it is generally
Scriptural. Hampole died of the Black Death, in the year 1349, and his
shrine became a favourite resort of pilgrims, who believed that he
performed miracles of healing after his death. Mr. Perry has discovered
a very great curiosity in a Latin office, prepared for the time when the
hermit should be sainted. Whether this time did arrive, or whether the
office was actually used, does not appear.
The 'Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse'[207] contain Dan Jon
Gaytryge's sermon, 'the whilke teches how scrifte es to be made, and
whareof and in scrifte how many things solde be consideride' (this has
also been wrongly attributed to Wiclif); the 'Mirror of St. Edmund,'
which contains some good precepts, although gloomy and ascetic; the
'Abbey of the Holy Ghost,' and a few hymns and poems. The 'Abbey of the
Holy Ghost' is founded in the conscience, and the maidens that cleanse
the place are righteousness and purity. The abbey is built on the river
of tears, meekness and poverty prepare the ground, the walls are raised
by obedience and mercy, the love of God and right faith are the cement.
Patience and faith shall raise the pillars, shrift make the
chapter-house, preaching the hall, prayer the chapel, contemplation the
dormitory, sadness the infirmary, devotion the cellar, and meditation
the store-house. The Holy Ghost is the warden and visitor, charity the
lady abbess, wisdom the prioress, meekness the sub-prioress, discretion
the treasure, orison the chauntress, jubilation the helper of the
chauntress, devotion the cellaress, penance the cook, temperance the
waiter, soberness the reader, pity the answerer, mercy the almoner,
dread the porteress, honesty the mistress of the novices, courtesy and
simplicity the receivers of the guests, and reason the purveyor. But
with all these excellent virtues about, four evil damsels are introduced
into the abbey, and they are envy, pride, grumbling, and evil-thinking,
who do much mischief; but in answer to prayer the visitor expels the
evil damsels.
John Myrc, a canon of Lilleshall, in Shropshire, knowing how ignorant
many priests were, compiled his 'Instructions for Parish Priests,'[208]
for the purpose of 'coaching' them in their duties. He instructs them as
to the questions they should ask the penitent in confession, and gives
forms of absolution. He says that bad Latin does not spoil the
Sacrament, if the first syllable of each word be right. The author,
however, does not confine himself to priests, but adjures the laity to
be reverent in their behaviour at church; and not to jest or loll
against pillars and walls. This treatise affords, as may be supposed
from its subject, very valuable illustrations for the life of its time.
We have left to the last, one of the texts that we like best, and that
is, the 'Hymns to the Virgin and Christ.'[209] These poems are full of a
pure devotional feeling, and many of them exhibit their authors as true
poets. 'The Mirror of the Periods of Man's Life; or, Bids of the Virtues
and Vices for the Soul of Man,' is a striking and vigorous poem; but
there is a tender philosophy breathing throughout 'Revertere' (in
English tunge, turne aghen!) which is very charming:--
'In a noon tijd of a somers day,
Þe sunne schoon ful myrie þat tide,
I took myn hauk al for to play,
Mi spaynel rennyng bi my side.
A feisaunt hen soone gan y se,
Myn hound put up ful fair to flight,
I sente my faukun, y leet him flee:
It was to me a deinteouse sight.
'My faukun fligh faste to his pray,
I ran þo with a ful glad chere,
I spurned ful soone on my way,
Mi leg was hent all with a brere.
Þis brere forsoþe dide me grijf,
And soone it made me to turne aghe,
For he bare written in every leef,
Þis word in latyn, revertere.
'I knelid and pullid þe brere me fro,
And redde þis word ful hendeli;
Myn herte fil doun unto my too,
Þat was woont sitten ful likingly.
I leete myn hauke and feysaunt fare,
Mi spaynel fil doun to my knee,
Þanne took y me wiþ sighynge sare
Þis new lessoun, revertere.
'Revertere is as myche to say
In englisch tunge as, turne aghen:
Turne aghen, man, y þee pray,
And þinke hertili what þou hast ben;
Of þi livynge be-þinke þee rijfe,
In open and in privite.
Þat þou may come to everlastinge lijf,
Take to þi mynde, revertere.'
Besides the texts we have noticed, there are many of a later date than
the fifteenth century; but we cannot do more than mention the names of
Lauder's 'Poems,' Hume's 'Orthographie of the Britan Tongue,' Thynne's
'Animadversions of Chaucer,' Lyndesay's 'Works,' 'The Romance of
Partenay or Lusignen,' Levins's 'Manipulus Vocabulorum,' Awdeley's
'Fraternitye of Vacabondes,' &c., &c.
The list of books to be printed in the future is a very tempting one,
and we notice many works of great interest, which we trust the Society
will have money enough at its disposal to allow it to issue. This can be
done only by a large accession of members, and we are sorry to see that
the income has not increased as it ought to have done during the last
year. The following are the totals of the balance-sheets of the various
years from the formation of the Society in 1864, when the income was
only £152 2s.; 1865, £384 0_s_. 11_d_.; 1866, £681 0_s_. 1_d_.; 1867,
£941 6_s_. 10_d_.; 1868, £1,229 1_s_. 3_d_.; 1869, £1,227 19_s_. 4_d_.
The committee seem to feel the greatness of the work before them, and
calling for further assistance, write in their fourth report:--'Thus
reinforced, the Society can proceed with fresh vigour to the
accomplishment of its task, with the determination not to rest till
Englishmen shall be able to say of their early literature, what the
Germans can now say with pride of theirs, "Every word of it is printed,
every word of it is glossed."' And in their second report, they had
previously said, 'The Society will be ready to take on itself the burden
laid by the late J. M. Kemble on the Ælfric Society, to leave no word of
Anglo-Saxon unprinted.' In redemption of the latter pledge it has now in
the press, King Alfred's translation of Gregory's 'Pastoral Care,' the
'Homilies of 971 A.D.,' belonging to the Marquis of Lothian, and a fresh
set of Ælfric's 'Homilies,' most of which are in verse.
We ought never to lose sight of the urgent need there is for printing
our MS. treasures. A unique manuscript may be destroyed at any moment,
as has lately occurred in the total destruction of the Strasburg
library, to the irreparable loss of the whole literary world.
All tastes are catered for in the set of Early English Texts. Do you
wish for ballads and short poems? You have them here. Do you care only
to read romances? You have the tales of battles and gallantry that
delighted our grandfathers while they sat as open-mouthed listeners to
the reading of the great volume that lasted them for many a long winter
evening. Do you wish to study manners and customs, to find out how our
ancestors lived, worked, and played, what were their religious beliefs
and superstitions? Here are ample materials for your investigation. Or
is the old language the object of your examination? Then the great
object of the Society is to popularize the old works that illustrate the
history of our native speech.
There is everywhere evidence of a growing living interest in modern
languages, and of an attempt to study them with the thoroughness that
has heretofore been confined to the classical languages. At present,
although we are comparatively in the dark as to our grammatical forms,
we are gradually constructing a history; but we cannot build without
bricks, and the Early English Text Society proposes to supply them.
No pleasure is thoroughly enjoyed until it is imparted to another, so
that as we have had the satisfaction of conversing with, and studying
the mind and manners of our ancestors, we are anxious that others should
enjoy the same pleasure; and we cannot but feel that those who will only
read printed books are under great obligations to those gentlemen who
undertake the arduous task of reading and explaining the manuscripts for
their amusement and instruction. We have made a rapid sketch of the
literature of several centuries as illustrated by the publications of
the Society, and necessarily, from the extent of the subject, in a very
slight and cursory manner, but we shall be quite satisfied if its
imperfections lead our readers to consult the originals themselves.
We may add, for the benefit of those whom it may interest, that the
subscription to the Early English Text Society is one guinea a year
(with an additional guinea for those who subscribe to the Extra Series),
and the honorary secretary is Mr. Henry B. Wheatley, 53 Berners-street,
W.
ART. III.--_Parties in the Episcopal Church._
(1.) _Judgments of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council._ By the
Hon. G. C. BRODRICK and Rev. W. H. FREEMANTLE. London: John Murray.
(2.) _The Church Times._
(3.) _Church Association Reports._
The glory of the Episcopal Church, according to many of her loudest
eulogists, is her comprehensiveness. She is not, they say, like the
sects, bound within the narrow lines of a rigid orthodoxy. She does not
expect that from all her pulpits the same doctrines should be preached
in stereotyped phraseology, not even that her ritual shall always
conform to the same pattern. She recognises diversities of tastes, and
adapts herself to them. Instead of checking, she encourages the widest
freedom of inquiry, and secures for her clergy a liberty which the
members of voluntary communities will not tolerate in their ministers.
Hence she includes in her ranks men of innumerable varieties of opinion,
from believers in the extreme theory of verbal inspiration on the one
hand to Doctor Colenso and his sympathizers on the other; from upholders
of sacramentarian and sacerdotal systems, which run to the very verge of
Romanism, to men whose Church principles are hardly to be distinguished
from those of the Plymouth Brethren. Whether such diversity is
consistent with the fundamental principles of the constitution of the
National Church; whether it was ever contemplated by the men who, at the
time of the Restoration, gave her her present character; whether the
advocates of this comprehensiveness support it by arguments drawn from
their own ideal of what a National Church should be, rather than from
the documents which determine what the Anglican Church really is;
whether the principle they lay down is worked out to the extent which,
if admitted at all, justice would demand; whether, on the whole, it
works for evil or for good, are questions which we do not propose to
discuss at length here. The fact at all events is patent, and was never
more so than at present, that the Church of England includes not only
individuals of different views, but great antagonistic parties having
their separate organizations, pursuing their own ends, and two of them
at least, so far from admitting that the Church should be of this
comprehensive character, asserting that they themselves are the only
loyal Churchmen, and that all others have more or less of the taint of
heresy upon them. The lines of demarcation have become even wider, and
the feelings cherished by the more eager partizans on either side more
intense than when, eighteen years ago, one of the distinguished divines
of the day gave to the world his celebrated sketch of the rival hosts.
During the interval there have been many fierce struggles, in the
settlement of which the courts of law have been called to intervene.
Decisions of great importance in their bearing upon the liberty enjoyed
by the clergy have been given. Toleration has been secured for doctrines
and practices which it was generally thought were inadmissible, and the
legislature has gone so far in its desire to relieve scrupulous
consciences as to modify the terms of clerical subscription. The result
of the liberty thus given, has been, as perhaps might have been
expected, a wider divergence of opinion than has existed at any previous
period; but this, unfortunately, has not been accompanied by a growth of
that mutual tolerance which even the result of the various suits,
instituted for the suppression of what was regarded on one side or the
other as heresy, ought to have produced. The parties who have failed in
their attempts to purge the Church of error have sat down under their
defeat, angry and discontented, the loud talk of a determination to
secede rather than be parties to the toleration of false doctrines has
died away, but the lesson as to the limitation of their power has done
nothing towards producing a spirit of greater charity.
The Broad Church party--if indeed it is right to speak of a number of
men who have no party organization and no party aims, among whom are to
be found all shades of opinion, and whose one bond of connection is
their common love of freedom--have consistently maintained that the
Church of England belongs neither to one section nor the other, but is
intended to comprehend all. The aim of the courts has been as far as
possible to maintain this view, on behalf of which they have often
strained the language of the law to a dangerous extent, and in fact have
allowed mere custom to set aside the authority of law in a way which
certainly would not have been tolerated in any proceedings relative to
property or civil right. The expositions of ecclesiastical law, as given
even by the highest court, have often been remarkable as illustrations
of the dexterity with which the judges have rescued the Church from
positions of great difficulty, rather than as examples of sound
interpretation of the statutes. Considerations of public policy have
affected the decisions, and the strict letter of the law has been
disregarded in a fashion which would find little favour in Westminster
Hall. The question has been, not as to the positive requirements of the
statute if construed on the ordinary principles of language, but as to
the amount of latitude to be permitted; and so far has this been
carried, that the defendant in a recent suit was bold enough to quote a
passage from a letter of Dr. Arnold, which was not published till after
his death, as illustrative of the liberty which had been granted to him,
and which, therefore, though to a much greater extent, he demanded for
himself. Statesmen and lawyers in truth, understanding that the absolute
victory of either of the contending parties meant the downfall of the
National Church, have anxiously sought to protect all in the enjoyment
of their position, and to make them understand that the continuance of
the great institution, to which in common they profess so hearty an
attachment, depends upon their mutual recognition of each other's
rights. But the lesson has been given to reluctant pupils, of whom it
would not be too much to say that they cling to that which they ought to
forget, and turn a deaf ear to all they need to learn. If among the best
men on all sides there has been the steady growth of a better feeling,
and if there is an increasing body of the ablest and most thoughtful of
the clergy who refuse to identify themselves with any party, the
majority of the strong adherents both of the High Church and the
Evangelicals display all the old spirit, and if they had the power
certainly do not lack the will to make the Church the exclusive preserve
of their own section.
A better illustration of this could not well be found than that which is
given in the introductory Essay on 'Anglican Principles' in the recent
volume of 'Essays on the Church and the Age,' the manifesto of moderate
High Churchmen. In this party the Dean of Chichester deservedly holds a
very high place. His great abilities, his large and varied experience,
his distinguished services in various departments of labour, his high
character, rightly give him position and influence. He is not a man of
illiberal temper, and if he ever had the heat of the partizan, the
mellowing influence of time has toned down its ardour. He is so far from
being a man of extreme views or from cherishing any sympathy with the
Ritualist party, that he says, 'They assert dogmas which are scarcely to
be distinguished from some of the errors of the Church of Rome.' 'To
this party,' he adds, 'those who adhere to the principles of the English
Reformers, and who were, till of late years, known on that account as
High Churchmen, are as much opposed as they have ever been to the
Puritans, and on the same grounds.' His opposition to these Romanizing
tendencies, however, does not lead him to regard more favourably those
who are at the other pole of the theological compass. On the contrary,
if he condemns Ritualists, he lays much of the blame for their position,
as well as for that of the Rationalizers, on the Evangelicals, whom he
charges with infidelity to their ecclesiastical obligations, and with
all the consequences which have resulted from those lax notions of
subscription of which they gave the first example. 'The only
difference,' he says, 'between the Tractarian and the Puritan, in regard
to the formularies of our Church, is this, that the former honestly, if
not discreetly, has avowed the principle upon which the other party has,
from the time of the Reformation, never ceased to act. The Puritans did
not use the term non-natural; but what else is meant when they clothe in
the garment of Calvinism what the Church has laid before them as plain
and simple Catholic truth?' Having himself no sympathy with those who do
not care to inquire what the Church really means in the dogmas which she
has laid down, and who are satisfied if they can so torture her
formularies as to make them lend an apparent sanction to preconceived
opinions, he contends that 'if the thumb-screw be allowable to one
party, it cannot be withheld from the other;' ... that if liberty be
granted to one, it must be extended quite as freely to the other; and
that if this be conceded, the only conclusion is that 'we possess no
authoritative statement of doctrine whatever.'... 'The question is--we
repeat it--the principle having been conceded to the Puritans, where is
it to stop!' This is certainly turning the tables to some purpose. The
Evangelicals have been in the habit of denouncing, with a good deal of
righteous indignation, the Popish traitors who eat the bread of a
Protestant Church, while all the time they are labouring only to betray
her into the hands of her enemy; or the still greater offenders who
continue to occupy Christian pulpits, while their writings show that
they have accepted even the fundamental doctrines of Christianity in a
non-natural sense. It is somewhat startling for them to be told, not
only that they are equally guilty, but that their own laxity has been
the fruitful parent of the excesses of which they complain so bitterly
in others; that as the definite meaning of formularies must be
maintained or universal liberty be conceded, and every man left to
believe as seemeth right in his own eyes, the toleration to a Gorham
necessitated toleration to a Bennett and a Mackonochie and a Colenso;
and that on them, therefore, rests the responsibility for the disorder,
the anarchy, and the heresy by which the Church is afflicted. The
argument is not new, for it is substantially that which was employed by
the Rev. W. G. Ward in his defence before the Oxford Convocation, and
the Evangelicals would doubtless have a good deal to say in opposition
to its conclusions. We quote it here only as indicative of the strong
feelings that prevail between different parties. Mr. Ward used it in
self-defence, and in an extremity when the _tu quoque_ plea was about
the only one which was available. From Dr. Hook it comes as a judicial
utterance; and when such a man adopts this style of criticism, we can
easily understand with what bitterness the struggle will be carried on
by those who have neither his ability nor his self-restraint.
While High Churchmen are thus determined on their side, and while the
more advanced section of the party never attempt to conceal the contempt
they entertain for Evangelicals, we have only to turn to the utterances
on the opposite side to see how fully the sentiment is reciprocated. It
would be hard to conceive of a sadder caricature of Christianity than
would be presented by a series of extracts from the _Church Times_ and
_Church Review_ on the one side, and the _Record_ and the _Rock_ on the
other. That there are members of both parties who are shocked by the
violence, the narrow-mindedness, the unreasoning partizanship of their
organs, we do not doubt; but it is impossible to deny that these
journals do represent large classes, whose antagonism to each other they
at once stimulate and express. The scenes which two or three years ago
disgraced the meeting of the Christian Knowledge Society, and the
prosecutions which occupy so much of the time, and must sometimes try
the temper and patience of the judges, are other indications of the same
virulence of spirit. We hear about the comprehensiveness of the Church,
but while this internal strife continues, that comprehensiveness is its
scandal, not its glory. It is the legal association in a Christian
Church of men who have no faith in each other, whose principles are
mutually subversive, who lose no opportunity of expressing their disgust
with their companions and their belief that they are where they are,
only by unfaithfulness to conscience and disobedience to law. It is the
maintenance of an outward and visible form of union where there is not
the inward and spiritual grace; not the fellowship of those who have
subordinated minor differences that they may cultivate a true spiritual
unity, but of those whose antagonism is deep-rooted and intense, and who
remain in the same Church from mutual jealousy and distrust rather than
from any better feeling. It is a comprehensiveness which is the child of
legal moderation, not of Christian charity, which, so far from being
the legitimate development of noble and generous sentiment, is the
result only of external constraint, whose hollowness is evident in the
railing accusations to which both parties condescend, and which survives
only because neither is willing to withdraw from an enforced and hateful
union, and so leave all the prestige and emoluments of the National
Church in the hands of its opponents for the promotion of what it
regards as deadly error.
The ideal of a church which allows the greatest latitude of opinion
consistent with an adherence to the primary truths of the Gospel, which
trusts for the maintenance of Christian truth to its own living force
rather than to any artificial defences, which aims to cultivate unity of
spirit rather than agreement in creed, which, proceeding on the belief
that where there is the same spirit there will yet be diversities of
gifts, and under the same law differences of administration, does not
attempt to curb the free development of individual belief or allow the
divergence to which it may lead to interfere with the enjoyment of true
spiritual fellowship, is a very exalted one. If the Church of England
were really striving to attain that, or if it exhibited any signs of an
approach to it, we should be prepared to condone many faults, and, even
though it failed to realize its own conception, to honour it for aiming
at such an ideal. But this is just the view which High Church and Low
Church would alike repudiate. Little love as they bear to each other,
they have still less for the only section which is honestly seeking to
give the Church this character. Whether or not the members of the Broad
Church party are right in their interpretation of the facts of history
or the principles of ecclesiastical law, it is due to them, at least, to
say that they are consistent in their maintenance of clerical liberty.
Others demand freedom for themselves, and are very loud in their
protests against ecclesiastical despotism if there is any danger that
they may themselves become its victims. Broad Churchmen vindicate the
liberties of all, and have more than once, in times of fierce
excitement, exposed themselves to a storm of unpopularity by their
gallant defence of men who had made themselves obnoxious by their avowal
of what was branded as heresy. All others have in their turn been
assailants; they, never. From all the crusades against heresy they have
stood aloof, and have been content to bear the reproach of heterodoxy
themselves rather than do anything which might narrow the boundaries of
the Church, or curtail the freedom of the clergy. We could not find a
better illustration of this than in Dean Stanley's recent volume of
Essays. We find him in the Gorham controversy breaking a lance in
defence of the Evangelicals when an attempt was made to deprive them of
their status in the Church; and when they, forgetful of their own
difficulties, turned round, and in their turn became assailants of the
authors of 'Essays and Reviews,' we find him equally resolute in
courageously withstanding them. His own views in opposition to Ritualism
are expressed with sufficient distinctness, and, when dealing with its
favourite South African prelate and his attack on Dr. Colenso, he is
bold and unsparing; but if any wish him to unite in an effort to expel
Ritualists from the Church, his answer is, 'As we would wish to include
the Nonconforming members of the Church who are without its pale, so we
would wish to retain those Nonconforming members who are within its
pale.' The very thoroughness with which the Dean carries out his
principle itself irritates many. They cannot understand how a man should
be so zealous a champion of the rights of those whose theological and
ecclesiastical opinions he has not a spark of sympathy. But nothing
tempts him to swerve from his position. The Church is nothing to him if
she be not comprehensive, and he will resist to the death anything which
threatens to deprive him of this boasting on her behalf.
All that Broad Churchmen can thus do, however, is to justify themselves.
They cannot alter the fact that there is an Act of Uniformity defining
exactly what the character and constitution of the Church shall be; and
when we come to examine the history and requirements of that Act, it is
difficult to see how it can be maintained that the Church was intended
to be comprehensive. It is so in fact; but it is so certainly in
opposition to the designs of the ecclesiastics of the Restoration who
gave it its present constitution, and in opposition to the letter of the
law.
But if the existence of separate parties with views in such complete
antagonism as to be mutually destructive is an anomaly, these parties
may plead in their own behalf that they are as necessary to the
Establishment as the Establishment is to them; that they could exist and
work for the advancement of their own views even though they should be
expelled from the Establishment, but that in such case it must assuredly
fall; and that so conscious of this have been the administrators of the
law, that until the extreme views of Mr. Purchas and Mr. Voysey have
dictated a somewhat different course, their constant effort has been to
avoid any decision which might compel any one of them to secede--a
tenderness certainly not prompted by any regard to them, but solely by
a consideration of the probable results to the Establishment. How far
this should reconcile conscientious men to retain their position, is a
point which must be left for themselves to settle. Nonconformists have
sometimes been too ready to settle it for them, and condemn both
Evangelicals and Ritualists for infidelity to truth because they do not
take the course which, under like circumstances, they themselves would
feel bound to adopt. Imputations of this kind are as impolitic as they
are unfair. They leave out of sight the different aspect in which the
same facts present themselves to different minds, and the diversity of
conclusion which may be reached with perfect honesty on all sides. It is
certain, however strange it may seem to those looking at the subject
from a different stand-point, that of the two extreme parties there are
numbers who sincerely believe that the Church was intended to be of
their particular type--'Evangelical or Catholic,' as the case may be. It
requires a good deal of faith, perhaps, to believe that any man can
honestly think that Gunning or Sheldon intended to make the Church
Evangelical, but it is nevertheless certain that numbers have a sincere
conviction that Evangelicals are the true Churchmen. That 'Catholics' on
their side are satisfied of their own ecclesiastical orthodoxy is less
surprising; while any, whether High Churchmen or Low Churchmen, who are
candid enough to confess their rubrical transgressions, would maintain
that no one conforms to the pattern in all things, and that if they err,
it is only in common with all beside.
One of the most remarkable features in the history of the Church during
the last twenty years has been the development of High Church
principles; and in this we do not so much refer to the extreme extent to
which they have been pushed by the Ritualists, or to the increase of
professed adherents of the party, as to the higher tone of Church
sentiment which is so perceptible, and which has affected numbers who
would disown all connection with any section of the party. The
Tractarian movement has undoubtedly been one of the chief causes of
this. Mr. Bennett and others of the early leaders who still remain
faithful in their allegiance to the Church of their birth, may well
congratulate themselves on the different atmosphere by which they now
find themselves surrounded. They have not indeed succeeded in moulding
public opinion, they have not undermined the strong Protestant feeling
of the nation nor have they persuaded the people that the National
Church is anything but a Protestant Church. But practices are tolerated
to-day which formerly were regarded with horror and alarm;
battle-grounds which once were hotly contested have been left in
possession of the High-Anglicans, and they, grown bold by the successes
they have won, have put forth new claims and are seeking to introduce
innovations--or, as they would call them, restorations--which the most
sanguine among them would not have dared to contemplate a few years ago.
To preach in a surplice, for example, is no longer regarded as an
evidence of Romanising tendency, although, perhaps, it is still a sign
that the preacher is not of the Evangelical party. In the struggle,
however, which is now waged to prevent the adoption of sacrificial
vestments, it is almost forgotten how recently the appearance of the
preacher in a surplice was sufficient to provoke popular commotion and
to furnish an occasion of legal prosecutions. In the style of Church
architecture and music, in the more elaborate form of service adopted in
places innocent of High Church tendencies, and in the increased
attention paid to some of the festivals, we find the same advance. Nor
is it only in such points as these that the change is seen. Even more
significant is the quiet revival of Convocation, and the amount of
influence it has been able to gain. Power in the strict sense of the
term it has not; and there is often a ludicrous contrast between the
loudness of its talk and the feebleness of its performances. But if it
has no legislative authority, it continually passes its judgment on
questions affecting the interests of the Church, and its pretensions
have sometimes been treated with a consideration, not to say deference,
which is indicative of an alteration in the spirit of the times. No
English Prime Minister, indeed, whatever might be his personal
proclivities, would dare to concede what its leaders consider themselves
entitled to ask; yet a careful observer cannot fail to see that it has
been quietly asserting itself in a way most grateful to the advocates of
ecclesiastical ascendancy. The Bill for the Revision of the Lectionary,
introduced in the last session of Parliament, afforded a very striking
proof of this advance. Convocation was first consulted as to the changes
proposed to be made, and greatly to the satisfaction of High Churchmen,
the preamble of the measure contained a distinct reference to the
opinion which that august body had expressed on the subject. It is true
that the Bill did not pass the House of Commons, and would probably not
have been able to secure the assent of an assembly chosen by household
suffrage without the sacrifice of this point of the preamble, but the
fact that it was introduced by the ministers of the Crown and, in
opposition to the protests of Lord Shaftesbury and some other peers, was
accepted by the House of Lords, is itself painfully significant. It may
even prove that the move has been premature and impolitic, and the
result may be the awakening of a spirit of jealousy that will prevent
any further encroachments. Still, such progress as has been made in this
development of Church authority would not have been possible if there
had not been, in certain quarters, a state of feeling friendly to it--a
reaction against the Erastianism which would treat the clergy as mere
officers of the State, whose duty was simply to carry out the will of
Parliament--a growing tendency to accept the rule of the Church in the
business of the Church.
There are many who attribute this High Church development to the
influence of what they call the 'Catholic revival' throughout Europe. A
wave of deeper spiritual feeling, more humble reverence for authority,
more perfect faith in Catholic truth, and more earnest desire to work
out the true Catholic ideal of holiness has, they say, been passing over
the Continent, and it has reached us. Before we admit the fact of this
revival, we are entitled to ask where its evidences are to be found. Is
it in Belgium, esteemed the most Catholic country in Europe except
Ireland, where the closer our acquaintance with the people the more
clearly does it appear that underlying much show of outward devotion,
there is, especially in the male part of the urban population, a spirit
of silent but decided revolt against the superstitions of Rome? Or is it
in Austria, whose ecclesiastical policy has been growingly liberal in
its character, and has been continually putting it more and more out of
accord with the Vatican? Or in Spain, where once priests and Jesuits
ruled supreme, but where the fall of their wretched instrument, who so
long disgraced the throne of that unhappy land, has inaugurated an era
of freedom? Or is it in Italy herself, preserving indeed her outward
allegiance to the Papal See, but it is to be feared with little faith of
any kind surviving among her people? As we look at these nations where
the dominion of Rome is supposed to be most secure, it seems absurd to
talk of 'Catholic revival.' Still we cannot say that it is only a dream
of enthusiasts. In a certain sense there has been the revival of which
Archbishop Manning is so fond of boasting. Ages and countries in which
we find great material prosperity, love of luxury, a low standard of
morals, are those in which we find also a strong development of
superstition, and a readiness to bow to the will of the priest. Europe
in the nineteenth century is no exception to the rule. France in
particular would perhaps be pointed out as the scene of the great
Catholic revival of the day; and if the desertion by the great body of
the Gallican bishops and clergy of the cause for which their
predecessors so gallantly contended, the readiness of priests and people
to accept the most extreme views of Papal infallibility and Mariolatry,
the restoration of the rites of the Church in the old cathedrals in
their full pomp and circumstance, and the shameless subserviency of
French politicians to Papal ambition, be the signs of a 'Catholic
revival,' such revival there undoubtedly has been. Side by side with the
falsehood, the frivolity, the idle display, the incredible extravagance,
and the immorality which were the scandal of Paris, and in which the
court of the Second Empire was so deeply implicated, there was also an
outburst of superstitious devotion, yclept, we suppose, a 'revival.' The
Empress was the great leader of fashion, and as she was a devotee of
Rome and the Jesuits, it became fashionable in the circles of which she
was the centre, to affect an earnest zeal for the Church and her
observances. As in Paris, so to some extent in other capitals; and thus,
though there is little on which a Church intent only on spiritual ends
could congratulate herself, there have been an increased splendour in
ceremonial, a more facile acceptance of Church dogmas, a greater show of
deference to the priest, and especially to the Holy Father, which have
been gratefully welcomed. Looking back at the position of the Papacy in
1848, and tracing its rise from the extreme depression into which it had
fallen at that time, to that sense of power which encouraged the Pope
eighteen months ago to convene a Council in the hope that it would
realise the grand idea of years, and proclaim his infallibility, we
cannot be surprised that we hear boasts of a revival. But the more
closely it is examined, the less of a religious character will it be
found to possess.
In England it has been different. Whatever we may think of the doctrines
of the Tractarians, it would be worse than uncharitable to doubt their
sincerity, their conscientiousness, their intense devotion to the
principles they hold, their spiritual life and fervour, as it would be
foolish to deny that they have been the authors of what may fairly be
described as a 'Romish revival.' So far as there has been any real
religious movement in the Roman Catholic churches of the Continent, we
believe that it has come from this country. It was no small thing for
the Papal See to gain the distinguished band of converts, of which
Newman and Manning are the most conspicuous. Bringing with them subtle
and highly-cultured intellects, high reputations, and fervid zeal, they
threw themselves into the service of the Church in which they professed
to have found rest with all the passionate devotion of new converts, and
their influence could not but be felt throughout the whole Romish
community. The prospect of the return of England to the true Church that
so large a secession from the Anglican ranks seemed to hold out, was
itself sufficiently stimulating, while the example of their ardour and
diligence stirred up their new associates to nobler efforts in the
common cause.
But while they thus breathed new life into the movements of the Roman
Catholic Church, their influence did not end there. The leaven of their
teaching and spirit remained in the Church they had forsaken. Contrary
to what was once expected, their secession neither deterred many of
their sympathisers from venturing still further in the dangerous paths
which had conducted their leaders to Rome, nor induced them to follow
their example, and reconcile themselves with the Holy See. So far from
the Church being purged of Tractarian principles, these are more defiant
and rampant than ever. Mr. Bennett, Dr. Littledale, and Mr. Mackonochie
have only developed the idea of Mr. Newman and his coadjutors; but they
have done this to an extent which their predecessors never attempted,
and which in those days they would not have thought possible. It is
possible now, because these teachings have done much more than merely
indoctrinate a certain number of minds with their opinions, they have
created a High Church tone in a much wider circle than that which they
are able directly to affect. Men who would scorn to accept them as their
leaders, who declaim about the absurdity of some of their practices, and
the Romish tendency of the whole movement, are yet to an extent, perhaps
almost unconsciously, influenced by them. How is this?
Something is due to their very audacity. They speak with no faltering
tone, they act with decision and fearlessness, and the confidence which
they show in themselves and their opinions begets a similar feeling in
others; while even with those who refuse to yield themselves absolutely
to their lead, there is a disposition to think that, though they may
push their notions too far, they would not have dared to go to such an
extreme unless they had been in the main right. There are large numbers
of Englishmen, who, looking on at the spectacles provided for them in
Ritualistic churches, are induced, after the first feeling of surprise,
and possibly of indignation, is over, to say, 'There must be something
in these men; they have gone too far, but that is only what others are
doing in the opposite direction. They have borrowed too much from Rome,
while others approach too near Geneva. We like neither the one nor the
other. What we want is the service of our own Church well done.' Thus
they have carried a large body who condemn Ritualism to a position in
advance even of the old High Church view, and they have done it mainly
because they had the courage of conviction, and did not shrink from the
consequences to which their boldness might expose them. What the
Protestant public would think and say of them, how many prejudices they
would awaken, what condemnation they would have to face, they must have
foreseen. But they have braved all, and they have a reward, even beyond
the progress they have made in winning converts to their party, in the
subtle but powerful influence they have exerted on Church sentiment.
They have had, too, the life and energy characteristic of the youth of
religious parties. In the abundance of their labours, in their freedom
from conventionalism in their work, in their willingness to adopt any
plan which has been found successful by others, they are an example to
ministers of all churches. There are, of course, among them those who
have little sympathy with the noble aims of their brethren, and who have
no higher object than a gratification of their own strong priestly
instincts, perhaps even of their childish love of display, who delight
in the show of the gorgeous service, and have little care for the truths
it is intended to symbolize, and who bring contempt upon the whole
movement by words and deeds which stamp on it a character of weakness
and puerility. It is the fate of every party to attract some followers
of this type, and it would be as unfair to judge it by them, as it would
be uncandid not to recognise the higher qualities of those who have
given it weight and importance. The truth is, these men have a faith,
and they are not afraid of avowing and of acting upon it; and in an age
which is only too prone to seek after compromises, this itself gives
them power. Their very dogmatism, offensive as it is to inquiring minds,
is a reaction from the too prevalent laxity of religious belief, and
commends them to a large class who are weary of endless disputations,
and crave for something positive. To the clamour for liberty--which is
not unfrequently only another name for lawlessness, the sign of an
unwillingness to submit to any rule either of faith or practice, the
assertion of a man's right to believe what he likes, and do what he
will--they oppose the law of a Catholic Church, ending all discussion,
and silencing opposition by the mere assertion that the Church has
spoken, and that through her we receive the will of God. In the presence
of a widespread disbelief in the supernatural, and a desire to eliminate
the miraculous from the teachings of Scripture, they assert the
existence of a perpetual miracle in the presence of the Lord upon His
own altars, and find the best evidence of His Incarnation in the
extensions of that incarnation through the sacraments for the
nourishment of the spiritual life of His followers. Such a creed is out
of harmony with all Protestant opinion, and does not bear the test of
either reason or Scripture; and when, as it must be, the demand for its
acceptance is based on the authority of the Church, it is open to attack
from the Roman Catholic side equally fatal with that which it has to
encounter from Protestantism. But illogical and unscriptural as it
appears to us, it is held by Anglicans with a tenacity, and worked out
with an enthusiastic ardour, of which we find too few examples among the
believers in creeds of a more Scriptural order. They are ready to
proclaim its articles on the housetops; so far from attempting to hide
the extravagance of any of their pretensions, they seem rather to
delight in bringing them out in their most pronounced obnoxious forms;
and by their outspoken boldness they constrain even the admiration of
those who like them least.
If this party have gained power by the strong assertion of their
distinctive principles, they have largely increased it by the way in
which they have identified themselves with various popular movements,
and the earnestness, combined with a certain kind of practical wisdom,
with which they have prosecuted their work. With all the deference they
claim for tradition in relation to doctrine, they show not the slightest
respect to traditional notions, so far as Christian work is concerned.
Of that regard to dignity which restrained the High Church clergy of a
former time from everything that bore the most distant resemblance to
Methodism, they have not a vestige, and, indeed, they view it as one of
the errors of that dreary Hanoverian Protestantism which they hate
intensely, and certainly not without good reason. They set out with an
ardent longing to recover the masses of the people to their allegiance
to the Church, and any means that will contribute to that end they
adopt. 'All other sections of the English Church save one,' Dr.
Littledale tells us, 'have stood their trial and have failed.' The time
is come when an effort should be made on a different principle, and that
principle is a careful regard to the tastes and necessities of the
people whom they have to win; for past failure is to be attributed
largely to 'a refusal to face the fact, that it is with beings with
human wants and frailties, and not pure disembodied rationalities that
the Church has to deal, that the shopkeepers and artisans have gone to
Dissent, and the labourers have gone to the devil.' Acting on this
conviction, they have sought to understand the nature of the influences
by which the people have been drawn on both sides in order that they
might fight both dissent and the devil with their own weapons. They have
been willing to learn everywhere, believing that if the children of this
world are in their generation wiser than the children of light, the
latter cannot do better than become pupils in their school. Hence they
have not been particular as to who their instructors were, if only they
had something to teach them, and have been content to learn from a
gin-palace as well as from a conventicle, from the Odd-Fellow or
Forester as well as from the Primitive Methodist, borrowing from the one
the histrionic style of their Ritual, and from the other the spiritual
enthusiasm which expresses itself in revival services with stirring
addresses and glowing hymns. There is certainly something singular in
the idea that, inasmuch as the landlord of the gin-palace caters for his
customers by means of painting, light, and music, the Church of Christ
should do the same, and that ministers of the Gospel, adopting the arts
of the managers of benefit societies, and pandering to that childish
love of display which the latter gratify by glittering insignia of
office, processions with a great deal of pomp and show, and rites around
which a mysterious awe is thrown, should seek to attract the people by
churches with gaily decorated altars, processions with banners and
music, and a regular succession of church festivals celebrated with
accessories that appeal to both the eye and ear. It indicates, however,
the spirit of the party. Their Ritual has a deeper meaning than this,
but by many it has undoubtedly been developed with the prominence they
have given it under the belief that it would produce great popular
effects.
Had they, however, confined themselves to the cultivation of this
histrionic element, they would never have gained the power they possess.
They have been equally active in the employment of means of a higher
order. With the contempt for preaching which was, and still is, so
prevalent amongst a large number of the Anglican clergy, they have
little sympathy; for while they attach supreme importance to the work of
the sacrificing priest or the confessor, they take ample care also to
cultivate the art of popular address. This was specially apparent in the
celebrated 'twelve days' mission,' which brought into notice more than
one public orator of a type very different from anything with which the
Episcopal Church has been familiar. That mission itself, disfigured as
it was by many extravagancies and eccentricities, lowered in its
character as a Christian work by the loud flourish of trumpets by which
it was heralded, and the jubilant exultation as to its success in which
its promoters indulged, and especially discredited by their manifest
design to make it an opportunity of familiarising the minds of the
people with Romish notions and practices, was, nevertheless, a
remarkable proof of the skill as well as enthusiasm of the party. We
should be sorry to think that among those by whom it was carried on
there were not many influenced by a higher desire than to secure a mere
party triumph; but regarded in that light only, we cannot too much
admire the knowledge of human nature, and particularly of English human
nature, shown by those who conceived the idea. Its very novelty was sure
to arrest attention and draw crowds, and the fact that crowds are drawn
by whatever means to religious services is with many sufficient to cover
a multitude of offences against good taste, and even against Christian
truth. There are those who apply to everything what they call practical
tests, and one of their surest tests of the power of a preacher, is his
capability of attracting large audiences. Of course, the proclamation of
a grand crusade against sin and Satan, to be undertaken by a number of
clergymen whose peculiarities had already attracted to them a large
share of public attention, awakened curiosity, and, if there had been no
other feeling, that would have been sufficient to crowd the churches.
Among those who attended these services were many good people who went
to see in what fashion and with what weapons this new warfare would be
carried on. They saw the unusual sight of numbers, and many of them
belonging to classes seldom found in a place of worship, coming night
after night, and apparently impressed by the services. They heard
eloquent preachers preaching to them the great truths of the Gospel, in
forcible and striking language rebuking the sins of the day, in vivid
and glowing pictures setting before them the love of Christ and His
redeeming work, and in thrilling appeals beseeching them to believe and
obey. Though even this could not reconcile them to a style of worship so
strongly Romish in its character, or lead them to accept the error which
was so subtly insinuated, it disarmed not a few prejudices, and led
numbers, who never had a friendly thought towards Ritualism or
Ritualists before, to think that, despite all their faults, these men
were doing a great work, and were not lightly to be evil spoken of. The
spectacle of so many clergymen banding themselves together for earnest
evangelistic work, casting aside the traditions of their Church and
their office, throwing themselves heart and soul into services in which
the freedom and fervour, characteristic of Methodist revivals were
substituted for the dulness and decorum with which the high Anglicans of
former days were satisfied, and determined that, so far as lay in their
power, they would make their Church what it has so often claimed to be,
and what as a National Church it ought to be, the Church of the people,
could not fail to produce a deep and favourable impression. Men who
maintain an attitude of indifference to all parties did homage to the
earnestness which marked the movement; and even among those who regarded
it with strongest disapproval, and believed that its effect, so far as
it was successful, would be to Romanize rather than Christianize the
people, there were many who felt that the only way of overcoming such
workers would be to display a spirit as devoted, as self-denying, and as
practical as their own. Ritualists would be mistaken if they accepted
the ungrudging praise which was given in many quarters to their daring
courage, their free and energetic modes of action, their conscientious
attempts to solve in their own fashion one of the most important
problems of the day as indicating any abatement of decided opposition to
their teachings, or of the righteous indignation with which those who
are most ready to honour them for all that is good in them or their
work, view their disloyalty to the Church of which they are ministers,
and the wretched quibbles by which they seek to cloak or excuse their
unfaithfulness. But, on the other hand, the Evangelicals will be equally
mistaken if they forget that practical service of this character tells
powerfully on behalf of the party by whom it is undertaken, and that
those who feel that duty compels them to take a position of antagonism
to it must, if they are to carry popular sympathy with them, justify
their faith also by works.
Another feature in the conduct of the Ritualist clergy deserving of
commendation, is the tact they have shown in utilising the power which
was lying dormant in their congregations. The experience of all Churches
testifies that nothing does more to attract a man to a religious
community than the assigning to him a place and a work, and so making
him feel that he contributes something to its power and prosperity. The
'Catholic' party (as they would have us call them) understand this, and
have acted upon it. They endeavour to find a place for every one who
will heartily give himself to the common work. They take care, of
course, to preserve the sanctity and authority of the priesthood, and
have clearly-marked boundary lines beyond which no layman will be
allowed to go; but they perceive that one grand secret of the weakness
of the Episcopal Church has been the unwillingness or the inability of
the clergy to use the services which numbers in their congregations were
willing to render, and they have sought to remedy the defect. Let it be
granted that much of the work they give to their followers is not of a
very exalted or edifying character. Still, even the masters of
ceremonies, the cross-bearers, the choristers, the acolytes, the
sacristans, feel themselves honored by the kindly notice of the clergy.
They are pleased to think themselves of some use and importance, are led
to identify themselves with the movement, and are often among its most
zealous propagandists. The Christian work of women has been made a
special study, and a number of devoted labourers called forth, who are
among the most trusty adherents of the party, and whose ministry of love
has been an immense gain to the influence of the Church in the neglected
districts where it is carried on, and is a tower of strength to it. If
we were intending here to estimate the exact value of the service done
in these and other ways by the Ritualist clergy, we should be compelled
to make many deductions. But the point on which we wish to insist, is
simply the effect of their work in ministering to the growth of High
Church sentiment in the country--a growth which has been aided by the
unwise opposition of the Evangelicals, who have been too prone to oppose
every movement of Ritualist origin without regard to its character. They
have thus not only enabled their opponents to monopolise the entire
credit of movements which might just as consistently have been
undertaken by one party of the Church as another, but have caused
Evangelicalism to be viewed by men of a more catholic spirit, who belong
to no party organization, but are willing to accept wise suggestions
from whatever quarter they come, as obstructive and impractical. The
_éclat_ which never fails to attend activity and enterprise has thus
unfortunately remained with the Anglicans.
But while High Churchmen owe much of their present position to
themselves, or, to speak more accurately, to the small but active
section who form their extreme left, it cannot be denied that they have
to some extent been favoured by circumstances. There are different
characteristics of the age, distinct from and even opposed to each
other, which have been friendly to them. They have profited by its
material prosperity, and the consequent increase of its wealth and
luxury; and they have profited, though in a different way, by its spirit
of philosophic inquiry, its intelligent freedom, its political
earnestness. A religion which delights in show, which attaches high
importance to externals, which will be lenient in its judgments of those
who obey the priest and regularly attend the sacraments, is certain to
find many votaries in an age when there are such numbers who have no
higher business in life than the pursuit of mere pleasure. The love of a
new sensation alone is enough to attract crowds of this class to a
church like St. Alban's. But it is not the novelty alone which
captivates them; it is the type of religion which meets their tastes. It
is true that they may hear from the pulpit eloquent denunciations of the
frivolity of the life they are leading, but these oratorical thunders do
not disturb them, save for the time. It is a remarkable fact, indeed,
which has often been noticed, that sermons directed against their own
special sins are rather popular than otherwise with hearers gathered
from the world of fashion. They listen with interest, and if a preacher
does his work well, are, perhaps, moved to some degree of sentimental
emotion; they meekly submit to the castigation which they have to
endure, and accept it as a species of penance which is to be borne with
all humility, and having discharged what they consider a religious duty,
feel themselves entitled to return with all the more zeal and avidity to
the scenes from which they have for a time been withdrawn. They have had
indeed the virtues of an ascetic life set before them, but they do not
apply the exhortations to themselves. These, they quietly assume, belong
to the 'religious,' the clergy, or those who have a vocation to a more
exalted type of piety. For themselves, they are satisfied with a much
humbler _rôle_; and if they are regular at church, observe the Holy
Communion at proper times, and practise some degree of abstinence on
Fridays and in Lent, they consider that they have amply satisfied all
the claims of conscience and religion. If they are zealous at all,
their zeal is shown in a very different direction. They leave to others
all services demanding self-denial or patience. They are never found in
the crowded alleys where the poor congregate, visiting the sick or
succouring the needy. For the painful austerities which some practise
they have no love. It is by the histrionic element that they are
attracted. To them the decorations of the church and the vestments of
the priests are subjects of supreme interest. They go into ecstasies
over the cut of a chasuble or the colour of a stole, can tell the exact
difference between a dalmatica and an alb, can give the most orthodox
opinion as to the colour proper to each church festival, and are
wonderfully captivated with a religion in which millinery plays an
important part. 'You should (said one of this class) visit ---- church.
It is so delightfully high; the vestments are superb, and the clergyman
has got such dear little boys, with red stockings, for acolytes.'
There is a better side of the system which appeals to another and higher
class, also to be found in aristocratic circles. Repelled by the
wretched frivolity of fashionable society, wearied of its incessant
round of pleasure, conscious that life ought to have some higher end,
and seeking after something to satisfy the craving of their souls for
the real good,--they are taken by the ascetic view of Christian life as
given by High-Churchism. The idea of an authority in the Church which
shall relieve them from the trouble of deciding between the conflicting
opinions which are abroad, and shall give them some resting-place in
which they may find secure footing and so be saved from the indifference
and unbelief into which such numbers are drifting, is itself welcome.
They are pleased with the idea that they have the faith held by the
Catholic Church for centuries, while the prospect of a life marked by
self-sacrifice and active labour is that above all others the most
calculated to kindle their aspirations. Romanism has always had these
two sides by which it has attracted adherents of the most opposite
character; and it is not surprising that Ritualism, which has sought to
follow so closely in its steps, should exhibit the same characteristics
with the same results,--drawing from out the circles of fashion both the
superficial and frivolous, who are captivated by its outward and
objective character, and the more earnest, who are won by that ideal of
a life with nobler aims, and under the government of unselfish
principles which it exhibits before them.
The controversies of the day, too, have helped the development of High
Church feeling. When a Church is or is supposed to be in danger, when
enemies are assailing her from without, and some of her own adherents
are seriously compromising her character and influence, and when there
is a need, therefore, for the display of special zeal on the part of
those who would maintain her position, the party which is conspicuous
for the highest idea of her rights, and for the most uncompromising
spirit in their assertion and defence, is sure to be specially popular.
High Churchmen have known how to use to the utmost advantage the
existing state of things. By a singular coincidence, the Judicial
Committee have been engaged in hearing the case of Mr. Voysey on the one
hand, and Mr. Mackonochie and Mr. Purchas on the other; and although the
Vicar of St. Alban's and the Brighton Incumbent have both been
condemned, we doubt whether the High Church will not profit more by the
spectacle presented by Mr. Voysey than it will lose by the suspension of
Mr. Mackonochie or the prohibition of the extravagancies of Mr. Purchas.
By the one, indeed, the High Church, as distinguished from the Ritualist
section, will gain, rather than lose, if the result be the repression of
outrages upon Protestant feeling and defiances of law, which check the
sympathy that otherwise would flow much more decidedly in a High Church
direction. By the other, however, the gain is immediate and very
considerable. Here, we are told, is the outcome of Protestantism.
'Rights of private judgment, free inquiry, individual responsibility--see
to what they all lead us! There is safety only in abiding by Catholic
truth, and submitting implicitly to the authority of the Church which
asserts it. The assumed right of conscience which is the basis of
Protestantism is the root of all evil, and the consequence of admitting
it will be an absolute eclipse of faith. Reject the voice of the Church,
and men will soon cease to believe in the Bible, or even in God at all.'
There are not a few who receive all this; even sincere lovers of
Evangelical principles will declare that they would rather men should
believe too much than believe too little, forgetting that the one evil
is tolerably sure to be the cause of the other; that it is just where
the dominion of superstition has been most absolute that, in the
inevitable sway of the pendulum, scepticism becomes most rampant and
powerful; and that no more fatal error could be committed by the friends
of truth than to appeal to ecclesiastical authority on its behalf. The
fact, however, is undeniable, and it is only another illustration of the
general law of which we have just spoken, that in the reaction from
rationalizing views and the fear of their consequences, numbers are
ready to throw themselves into the sheltering arms of High-Churchism.
They love truth more than liberty, and are content to surrender the
latter rather than brave the risk of any danger to the former.
The progress of opinion in favour of the separation of Church and State,
so manifest in different quarters, has produced a similar effect.
Anticipating the possibility of disestablishment and of its coming soon,
thoughtful members of the Episcopal Church are anxiously considering in
what way she will be best able to meet the difficulties and demands of
the novel position in which she will find herself when she is placed on
a level with other Christian churches. They see that when the prestige
of State connection is gone, something will be necessary to make up for
the loss which she will sustain, and they hope to find it in that
exaltation of her claims in which High Churchmen delight. In the view of
High Churchmen, the Evangelical who has nothing on which to rely but his
faithfulness and power in carrying on the work of his ministry, and who
admits that the Congregational minister by his side is on a level, so
far as authority is concerned, with himself, reduces the Church to the
position of the sects; and in the competition which is provoked, she
will not necessarily be the gainer. What is wanted, according to them,
is that the clergy should assert their prerogative. The maintenance of
an ornate and gorgeous ceremonial is important, for it has been shown
that it has great attractions for the mass of the people, and has been
able to win back numbers who, so long as simplicity was the order of the
day, saw no difference between the service of a church and that of a
dissenting chapel, and, in fact, preferred the latter because of its
greater freedom and warmth. But of still greater moment is it that the
Church should mark out distinctly the line which separates her from the
sects; should insist on the authority which belongs to her clergy as
being in the true line of the Apostolical succession, and should make it
felt that her members possess advantages in which those outside her pale
do not participate. We do not believe that experience will justify the
policy, or that the pretensions which are intolerable in an Established
Church would meet with anything but ridicule when put forth by a Church
which has not even the special patronage of the State to encourage such
un-Christian arrogance. In the meantime, this is a prevalent view, and
it is of material service to the party who are contending for High
Anglican principles.
From those various causes a High Church spirit is showing itself far
beyond both sections of the clergy who have identified themselves with
Anglican movements, and, in fact, is more or less affecting all parties.
We heard of a conversation the other day between some laymen of
extensive information and strong Evangelical sympathies, in which the
question was asked in relation to a place which had once been a
stronghold of Evangelicalism, 'Are they not becoming rather high at
----?' 'Where' (was the reply) 'is it that they are not becoming high?'
We have taken some trouble to get information, and it all goes to
corroborate this view. There are few of our larger towns, even those
which have been most distinguished for their zeal for Evangelical
principles, where we do not find the intrusion of a High Church, and
indeed, a Ritualist element, which in some cases may become strong and
popular. We regret to add that several of the Episcopal appointments
made by the present Government must still further strengthen the hands
and encourage the hopes of the sacerdotal party. Already we note some
ominous signs in a southern diocese, where, after the lengthened rule of
an Evangelical bishop, one of a very different character--a prelate of
great power of eloquence and extraordinary tact, not to say
subtlety--has been appointed in his room. Some of the Evangelical clergy
have, we are told, suddenly awakened to a perception of the great worth
of their new diocesan, and are adopting practices which hitherto they
have condemned, and a tone which will certainly be much more acceptable
to him than that which they have been accustomed to maintain. We venture
to predict, that if he preside over the see for a few years, he will be
able to report a different state of things from that which he found when
he commenced his administration. It is not probable that he will so
completely expel the Evangelical element as, if we are to accept his own
statement, he had excluded Ritualism from his late diocese, but we fear
that his influence may so transform some of his clergy that their old
friends will hardly be able to recognise them. Whether Nonconformists
have any reason to congratulate themselves on this result of the Liberal
triumph to which they so largely contributed, is a question on which we
need not enter. They do not owe so much to the Evangelical prelates on
the bench, that they have any special reason to regret that their number
has not been augmented. Still, the increase of the power of the High
Church party was not the direct and immediate object for which they gave
their support to Mr. Gladstone; and we are bound to say that the amount
of encouragement given to that party, both in the appointment of its
members to important positions, and in the favour shown to certain
points of its policy, has not been regarded with satisfaction.
One result of the new spirit that has been awakened in the Anglican
party, has been the almost entire extinction of that particular section
of the Episcopal clergy known as the 'high and dry' school. So long,
indeed, as the present system of patronage continues, it is never likely
altogether to cease from among us. While there are a considerable number
of livings in the gift of the Universities and colleges, who appoint to
them members of their own body, who have lived so long among the musty
records of the past that they have little fitness for the work of the
living present, who have, in fact, by the very force of circumstances,
became so many Dryasdusts; and while there are a still larger number
regarded as the appanages of great families, who give them to younger
sons or needy cousins, without any thought either of their mental or
spiritual qualifications, many of the clergy are sure to be 'dry, yea,
very dry;' and because they are dry they will also be high. They have
nothing on which to rest their claims except the authority of the Church
and the dignity of their office, and they are sure to exalt the one and
magnify the other. Still, the section is a diminishing one, and the
Church may well rejoice both that it is diminished in numbers, and that
what remains of it is improved in quality. We have before our eyes now,
one whom we knew in our childhood, a quiet, dignified old gentleman, who
might have earned respect in any other position but that of a clergyman.
He resided in the parish for many years, but what influence for good he
ever exerted upon it, except by means of his charities, which were
always free enough, it would have puzzled his admirers to tell. Of
course, he had a righteous horror of Dissent and Radicalism; but even in
opposition to them he never showed any enthusiasm. Such men belong to
another generation, and where they are found now occupying positions of
importance, in the midst of the busy life of this nineteenth century,
they only hold them to the injury of the Church of which they are the
representatives.
The papers announced, a few weeks ago, the death of one of this class,
with some facts of whose story we happen to be acquainted. He was one of
the few pluralists who still remain, residing on one of his livings in a
midland county, and holding another in a large manufacturing town in the
North of England. This town, with its teeming population and growing
importance, he had never visited for more than twenty years. The work
was left to be done by two curates, living on very inadequate incomes,
while their rector satisfied himself with drawing the lion's share of
the ample revenues of the parish. He found more congenial employment in
the small village where his other cure was situate, and where he
discharged, doubtless with becoming grace, the duties of a country
gentleman. A glimpse of his life was given through a side-light in a
speech of one of his curates, who, in acknowledging his rector's health,
at a great agricultural dinner in the town of which he was so negligent
an overseer, assured the company that the rector would gladly have been
present, as he took a deep interest in all agricultural pursuits, and
was himself one of the most successful breeders of pigs in the county of
----. It is hardly necessary to say that Dissent has a powerful hold
upon the parish, or that numbers have grown up in indifference, if not
in absolute hostility to religion altogether. And yet even he was not of
the worst type. We remember, some years ago, driving several miles in a
midland district, with a friend who was thoroughly acquainted with the
region and its history. The country was rather thickly studded with
churches and parsonages, and, as we passed them, our friend gave us some
account of the men who had lived and worked in them. Many of the livings
were in the gift of colleges and other public bodies, while others were
the property of the country gentry, and, as might be expected, the
clergy had almost invariably been of the 'high and dry' school; and as
we heard story after story of indolence, incompetence, heresy, or, in
some cases, ministerial delinquency, we could not but feel that the
Church of England might well rejoice that there are but few remaining of
so unworthy a generation.
The Anglican clergyman of to-day (and the class is very numerous in
rural districts) is of a very different pattern. Even where he has not
actually embraced Ritualistic opinions, he has generally breathed
something of their spirit, and is determined to carry it into his work.
He loves Dissent as little as his 'high and dry' predecessor, but he is
determined to deal with it in a different way. He is courteous in his
manner toward the Dissenting minister, but he means, all the time, to
'stamp out' Dissent. But it is to be done by outworking it
everywhere--in schools, in pastoral visitation, and in public services;
any weakness in preaching being compensated by increased splendour of
service. It is impossible not to admire the intensity of devotion with
which some of these young clergymen give themselves to their work. A
Congregational minister of our acquaintance was telling us of one of
them who had recently come to his neighbourhood, and who was working a
wondrous change among a remarkably slothful and apathetic people by the
earnestness of his spirit and the abundance of his labours. He had
himself been called to visit one of his own members, and, though he
immediately responded to the summons, he found the clergyman already
there, proffering services of every kind, and unwilling to accept a
denial of his request to sit up and watch all night by the bedside of
the sick man. The Nonconformist convictions of a poor man must be very
clear and decided if he can be insensible to such a mode of approach as
this, and it was only natural that, when he recovered, the recipient of
such kind attentions should be found occasionally in the parish church.
But it is by means of the schools, especially, that this gentleman and
his class operate, and operate to considerable effect. We are told, and
with some truth, that children cannot enter into nice theological
distinctions; but it is not in theological subtleties that they are
instructed. The lessons given are plain and intelligible enough, as to
the rights of the Church and the evils of Dissent, the reverence due to
a clergyman and the Church, and the sin which they commit who neglect to
show it. Besides there are innumerable ways in which, indirectly, both
parents and children are affected; and a clergyman knows well enough,
that when he has once got a child to the national school, he has taken
the first step towards securing the parent for the Church. Hence the
resolute determination of the clergy to get hold of the education of the
people, an attempt in which they have been helped by those who,
twenty-five years ago, persuaded Nonconformists to take up an untenable
position that prevented their just scruples from receiving proper
attention, and shut them out from a work in which they had previously
been the leaders. Hence, too, the remarkable outburst of zeal and
liberality in the extension of denominational schools since the passing
of the late Act. Denominational schools are, for the most part, Anglican
and Roman Catholic, and a large proportion of the grant to them will, as
a matter of fact, go to build up the power of the Establishment and
suppress Dissent in the rural districts. It is true the new national
schools will be under a conscience clause, but they must be credulous
indeed who believe that it will be of much avail in parishes where there
is an active and influential clergyman, wielding, in conjunction with
the squire, a supreme authority. A more potent instrument could scarcely
have been put into the hands of the priesthood; and among the young
recruits of the Anglican party, there are numbers who know how to wield
it with the greatest effect. They do not trust to the influence of the
teaching alone, but they find various ways of interesting the children:
they form them into singing classes; they prepare them for their choirs;
they accustom them to the observance of Saints' Days; they please them
by giving them a place in processions, or employing them as acolytes. In
short, they find them in the National schools, and they lose no
opportunity of so training them that they shall naturally grow up to be
loyal sons of the Church. We have neither the intention nor the desire
to reproach them for the manner in which they thus carry on their work,
or for the care which they specially devote to children. With their
views of the Church, they are only showing a proper loyalty to
conscience in the course which they adopt. What we object to is, that
the nation should be called upon to support them in this hierarchical
crusade by increasing the grants they now enjoy. We have asserted from
the first that schools already in existence had a fair right to be left
undisturbed in the enjoyment of advantages which the State had virtually
engaged to secure them, and which they had won by their own efforts.
What we complain of is, that facilities should be given for the
multiplication of these denominational schools at the very time that the
Government are establishing a great National system.
The National school, however, is not the only theatre on which the
activity of the advanced Anglican priest is manifest. His coming into a
parish is the signal for a series of changes, all directed to one end.
First, the interior of the church is to be remodelled to adapt it to the
style of service he means to introduce. Pews which, it must be
confessed, are often unsightly enough, are displaced to make way for
benches. If it be practicable, a part is railed off for a sanctuary; and
the altar, with its tall candlesticks, and, where they can be obtained,
with its embroidered and coloured cloths, assumes an entirely new
aspect. Fast days and feast days, hitherto unknown, begin to be
celebrated; intoning takes the place of the quiet and orderly reading of
the service, and by degrees the people find their church and their
worship bear a striking, and, to many, not pleasant resemblance to that
of Romanism. In all this there is no consultation, either of diocesan or
of parishioners. The clergyman assumes the position of a dictator, and
resolves to carry out his own ideas, whatever be the result. Sometimes
there is fierce discord and, not unfrequently, there are many
secessions; but even where this is not so, the changes are, as we hear,
in many cases anything but satisfactory to the squirearchy, who have
hitherto been found among the most steady supporters of the Church. They
valued it as furnishing a respectable and quiet type of religion, which
did not make any excessive demands from them. Their old High Church
clergyman neither disquieted himself nor disturbed them. He was a
welcome guest at their boards, and the slight requisitions which he
made, in the way of subscriptions to his charities, were not
particularly burdensome, and were generally met with cheerfulness. The
new-fangled notions, which make it a far more difficult thing to be
zealous Churchmen, requiring not only money for schools and other
objects, but some amount of personal effort and sacrifice, and often
involving a man in unpleasant controversies with his neighbours, are far
from being welcome, and already quiet murmurings may be heard in various
quarters. We have given the party by whom this work is carried on, all
the credit to which they can possibly lay claim. We are therefore the
more at liberty to condemn that which is reprehensible; and one of their
most prominent features is their utter contempt for the law to which
they owe subjection. Not content with adopting the most pitiful evasions
in order to introduce practices contrary to the whole spirit of the
Church to which they belong, they have invented a convenient theory of
their own as to the distinction between the law of the Church and the
law of the State, refusing to obey the one when it comes into collision
with the other. In the economy of the Episcopal Church, such a
distinction cannot be maintained for an hour. In the eye of the law, the
nation is the Church, with Parliament as its legislator, and the courts
as its administrators. If any of the clergy feel that their consciences
are aggrieved by this subjection to civil authority, they have the
remedy in their own hands. Nonconformity has after a long and difficult
struggle, succeeded in obtaining for itself a recognised legal status,
and the liberty which it has thus secured is opened to them, if they are
content to accept the conditions. They can have the freedom, if they are
satisfied to pay the price at which it can be obtained. What they cannot
do, is to enjoy the advantages which the law gives to the national
Church, without, at the same time, submitting to its control. Their
declamation about the rights of the Church, and the iniquity of any
secular Parliament putting restraints on its free action, or any civil
tribunal undertaking to adjudicate on matters of doctrine and
discipline, sounds well enough, but coming from those who still claim
to enjoy the prestige and emoluments of a national Church, it is simply
idle bunkum which can impose on no one. Were they manfully to resolve
rather to be free than to retain a position which they can only hold on
condition of their disobeying what is to them a higher law, they would
command sympathy from all who know how to honour loyalty to conscience.
As it is, their attempts to represent themselves as victims of
persecution because they are required to obey the law, expose them only
to contempt and ridicule.
It is only fair to add that there is a considerable section of the party
by whom the force of this reasoning is felt, and who are prepared to
carry their objections to State interference to their ultimate issue.
'It would be' (says Mr. Orby Shipley, one of the ablest and
most fearless exponents of Ritualistic views) 'the crowning
labour; it would be the culminating honour, it would be the
blessed consummation of the Catholic reformation to be the
means in the Divine economy of terminating that wicked,
immoral, and godless alliance which, under present
circumstances, exists under the title of the Union of
Church and State.'
How far it is consistent for any man to lend his personal support to an
alliance which he pronounces 'wicked, immoral, and godless,' by
continuing to accept the advantages which it secures to him, is a
question which his own conscience must be left to determine; but it is
at least satisfactory to find that Mr. Orby Shipley and his friends have
begun to feel the inconsistency of their present position. Whether in
the event of the Judicial Committee condemning their distinctive
principles, as it has already condemned their symbolic practices, and
deciding against Mr. Bennett as it has done against Mr. Purchas, they
would secede from the Establishment, is not very clear. What is clear
is, that they regard the present relation of the State to the Church as
hindering the work of the 'Catholic' restoration, and therefore seek
disestablishment as the first essential to the realization of their
ideal. But this cannot be brought about at once, and in the meantime
circumstances may force on a separation. Perhaps, however, it is more as
a menace to the bishops than as an indication of any serious purpose
that Mr. Shipley tells their lordships that the 'conspicuous want of
success which has attended Episcopal hindrance to the Catholic revival
has certainly postponed, but has not at all removed the prospect of
impending schism.' We are left to infer, therefore, that if the attempts
to repress Ritualism should be crowned with more success than has
hitherto attended them, we must be prepared for schism, which, Mr.
Shipley says, would be an untold evil to the Church; adding, and in this
we agree with him, 'that the present state of abnormal antagonism, in
any Christian sense, is less harmful, it is hard to believe.' If,
however, this calamity should come, he gives the Episcopal Bench to
understand that on them the responsibility will rest.
'If they precipitate a schism, either by actively hostile
legislation, or by unconstitutional illegality, or by the
continuance of vexatious antagonism, the sin of schism will
rest upon their individual consciences. Neither those who
see below the surface from without, nor those within, who
can feel the pulse of the Catholic Party,[210] and know its
deepest sentiments, need to be told that the scandal of
Episcopal sanction and apology for the desecration of the
Blessed Sacrament in Westminster Abbey, and the dishonour
done to God's Holy Word, by entrusting the revision of the
Authorized Version to heretics and schismatics, out of
which this scandal arose, has done more to render such a
schism possible than any other act of the English bishops
during the last half century.'
These thunders will not disturb the serene complacency of the Episcopal
Bench, nor are such petulant utterances to be regarded as indicating any
serious idea of separation, but their insolent and lawness tone is
eminently characteristic of the party. They have formed their ideal of
the Church, and in defiance of all authority, whether civil or
spiritual, they are determined to work it out. They know and confess
that they are at variance with the bishops, whom they have promised
'reverently to obey,' 'following with a glad mind and will their godly
admonitions, and submitting themselves to their godly judgments;' but
they have a convenient theory as to the necessary limitations of the
obedience they are bound to render, by which they satisfy themselves
that they are right in their resistance to the authority which they have
in the most solemn manner bound themselves to accept. The bishops 'are,
it may be, good results, but still they are results of a bad, vicious,
immoral system; of a system which is utterly un-Catholic;' they have
pronounced against the Catholic revival from beginning to end, and
having thus set themselves against all that 'priests of the Catholic
school' are doing, they have condemned themselves, and forfeited all
title to unlimited obedience, by condemning these developments. In other
words, the want of harmony which they confess exists between the mind of
the Episcopate and the mind of the Presbyterate is a sufficient reason
why priests should refuse their allegiance. The conclusion is not that
which suggests itself to ordinary minds, but these men are so thoroughly
convinced that they have Catholic truth, and are doing a great Catholic
work, that they seem to suppose themselves superior to the laws by which
ordinary mortals are governed. They may seem to be arrogant and
overbearing, they may indulge in railing and vituperation, they may
condescend to a style of controversy, happily altogether cast aside by
Christian gentlemen, but everything is done in the interests of the
Catholic revival, and these are to be advanced at all costs. Mr. Shipley
candidly avows that their aim is to 're-Catholicize the Church of
England,' and he appears to think that because that object cannot be
secured without disobeying the bishops, there is sufficient reason why
they should be disobeyed. After enumerating the changes that require to
be made in the election of bishops and the remodelling of Convocation,
he says:--
'We have again to make confession the ordinary custom of
the masses, and to teach them to use Eucharistic worship.
We have to establish our claims to Catholic Ritual in its
highest form. We have to restore the Religious Life, to say
Mass daily, and to practise Reservation for the sick.
Looking at these and other more or less pressing needs of
our communion, I confidently ask, "Can these and suchlike
wants, in the providence of God, be restored to His
afflicted, and to this extent indigent, Church, if we admit
the theory of limitless obedience, not, observe, to the
Episcopate combined in a Sacred College, but to any or to
all the individual members of the Bench of Bishops?"'
The simplicity of this is no doubt beautiful, but its weakness is
manifest. 'Limitless obedience' no one expects them to render; but the
justification of their refusal to obey at all, on the ground that
disobedience is necessary to their design of revolutionizing the
character of their Church, has certainly the merit of novelty. They seem
to imagine that the first essential to success is audacity, and expect
that they will prevail, in virtue of their blustering self-confidence
and contemptuous treatment of all opponents. But the ultimate result of
such a policy cannot be doubtful. A party which sets up a plea of
liberty to excuse the violation of distinct obligations, whose
Catholicity has in it not a single element of true charity, which seeks
to subject others to authority while it disclaims all authority that
comes into collision with its own ideas and designs, which brands every
man, however eminent and good, who will not bow down to its idols as a
heretic or an infidel, is not a party that is likely to exert any
permanent influence. The age is tolerant, disposed to permit great
latitude of opinion, perhaps too ready to sympathise with those who are
resisting constituted authority, but it is not to be cajoled by the
specious sophistries of men who, professedly contending for liberty, are
seeking only to establish a new priestly despotism.
But if we have no fears of Anglican Catholics being able to shape the
future of the Church of England according to their wishes, neither can
we look hopefully on the condition and prospects of the Evangelical
party. Thirty years ago it was the most popular and influential, if not
the most numerous section of the Church. Its most sanguine friend would
hardly pretend that it holds the same position to-day. We have already
marked incidentally the disadvantage under which it lay in contending
against a party full of the passionate zeal and energy of youth, and
with ability equal to its earnestness, its members claiming to be _par
excellence_, the assertors of Church principles and the champions of
Church interests, skilful in adapting themselves to the wants of
different classes of minds, fertile in expedients, and indefatigable in
labours. Under any circumstances, it would have been no easy task to
have maintained an equal struggle against such adversaries, hampered as
the Evangelicals necessarily are by their position in the Church. Still
they had many compensating advantages, and had they known how to avail
themselves of the forces at their command, they might not only have held
their ground, but have been to-day masters of the situation. In the
great conflict which has been going on between authority and freedom,
the reactionary forces are not the strongest, and had the Evangelicals
been prepared fully to identify themselves with the cause of liberty,
they need not have feared the result of the struggle. They had on their
side the prestige of the noble work which they had done in rousing the
Church from torpor and idleness, and in regaining for her much ground
that she had lost, in quickening the spiritual life of the nation, in
promoting social and philanthropic movements at a time when they were
not viewed with so much favour as at present. As the representatives of
Protestantism in the National Church, they were able to rally to their
support a strong national sentiment, not always very intelligent or
reasonable, but deep and passionate in its hatred of everything that has
on it the taint of Romanism, and only too easily roused in opposition to
any party which could fairly be suspected of Popish sympathies. Their
position, too, seemed to mark them out as the connecting link between
the Established Church and the Nonconformists. Their theological views,
if not identical, were in close sympathy with those of Evangelical
Dissenters: they were frequently brought into association in Christian
work, and had often to fight side by side against the common foe; and
though there never was a chance that the Nonconformists could be won
back to the Church, kindly and intimate relations might have been
established with them, which would have told greatly to the credit of
the party by whom they had been promoted. Yet with all these
circumstances in its favour, the Evangelical party has been declining.
Its enemies point to it with triumph, and exaggerate the weakness over
which they rejoice. Its friends reluctantly confess it, and find the
explanation in the wickedness and degeneracy of the age.
The tone of a recent gathering of the leaders of the party at Islington
shows that they are conscious of the fact, and alive to the necessity of
making some strenuous effort, perhaps of effecting a considerable change
in their policy, in order to recover the ground that has been lost. To
outsiders, however, the real causes of their weakness may be more
apparent than to themselves, and we shall therefore attempt to explain a
state of things which we unfeignedly regret. The Episcopal Church,
whether Established or not, must be one of the most powerful religious
forces in the country, and we must desire to see its influence wielded
by men whose theology is that of the Reformers, who recognise the rights
of the individual conscience, whose creed is derived from the Bible and
not from Church tradition, who preach salvation by faith in the living
Christ, and have no confidence in priests and sacraments. It would
therefore be cause of sorrow to us, as it will assuredly in the issue
prove disastrous to the Church and injurious to the nation, if the
Evangelical party should be overborne in the present struggle, its power
crippled, or its character so modified as to impair its usefulness. We
are fully alive to its defects. As Nonconformists, we have little for
which to be thankful to it; but not the less should we deplore the loss
of what has been the most spiritual element in the Church, and therefore
we can only regard with sorrow the state of things of which we have to
speak.
The decline of the Evangelical party is attributed by many, both friends
and foes, to a growing distaste for evangelical doctrine. The age, we
are often confidently told by those in whom the wish is father to the
thought, has outgrown the old theology; it is too intelligent to rest in
the dogmas which were once received without question; the leading
spirits of the time are known to be unbelievers, and that fact itself is
sufficient to make unbelief a fashion among a class who desire to be
esteemed intellectual. Very sorrowfully we admit there is some ground
for these statements, but they are only half-truths. The philosophic and
scientific movements of the day, have undoubtedly affected theological
opinion; the spirit of inquiry has become more searching in its
investigation; the rebellion against the bondage of creed has, in some
instances, led to an indifference to all forms of belief; and in
general, doctrines that were thought to be established, are discussed
with freedom, and rejected when they do not stand the more severe tests
by which they are proved. Orthodoxy counts for less in the estimate of
Christian character, and there is less disposition to condemn any man
because of his inability to accept all its shibboleths. But all this
does not indicate that the power of the Gospel is diminishing; and,
indeed, there are many things that point in the opposite direction.
Preaching _quâ_ preaching may be less influential; but the preaching
which is a power at all, never was a greater power than it is at
present. Men chafe against the notion that it is their duty to hear a
certain number of sermons, even though they be made up of platitudes
rendered additionally wearisome by the style in which they are
delivered; but where a preacher has a message from God, and knows how to
deliver it he is quite sure of having a large audience. Nor is it at all
likely to be diminished by the fact that his sermon is decidedly
evangelical and even strongly dogmatic. We have popular Ritualist as
well as popular Evangelical preachers; but the discourses of the former
are in their leading features as decidedly evangelical as those of the
latter. Indeed, at the conference at Islington, it was frankly admitted
that whatever might be the actual condition of the party, the doctrines
for which it contends were never so widely preached by the clergy as at
present. Certainly, the Nonconformist Churches know no decline, nor is
their prosperity to be traced to any abandonment or concealment of
evangelical doctrines. Congregationalists, accustomed as they are to
breathe the atmosphere of freedom, and unfettered by the restraints of
any formal creed, have, perhaps, felt more of the influences of the age
than any other body of Christians; but no one who is acquainted with
them would assert that they have at all faltered in their loyalty to the
Gospel. Perhaps one of the best proofs of this is to be found in the
essays in 'Ecclesia.' Their writers speak with great frankness; they
admit many defects in their system, and suggest various changes; they
are anxious, as far as possible, to adapt themselves to the wants of the
age; but withal, there is a consistent adherence to the essential
principles of the old theology. Changes in the forms in which doctrines
are expressed, differences in the modes of expounding and defending them
there are, but change as to the root-ideas there is none. And
Congregationalism upholding the great truths of the Trinity, the Godhead
of our Lord, and the Atonement, and basing all on the authority of
Scripture, not only maintains its ground despite the opposition it has
to meet from the renewed activity of the Established Church, but is on
the increase.
If, then, the Evangelicals are decreasing in numbers and influence, the
cause must be sought in some errors in their policy, and not in the
increased unpopularity of the principles they profess. We are confirmed
in this view by the refusal of some of the best men of the day to
identify themselves with the party, even though they hold the
principles. It would be invidious to name living men; but there is one
recently passed from among us, to the great loss not of his own
particular Church only, but of all Christian Churches, who affords,
perhaps, the most striking illustration of the remark. Others there are,
of whom the late Canon Melville may be taken as a type, whose
High-Church ideas are sufficient to prevent them from uniting with a
party with whom in doctrinal sentiment they have much in common. But the
Dean of Canterbury, we need not say, had no such hindrance. Mr. Ryle
himself is not more free from any tinge of ecclesiasticism, as he
certainly is not more heartily and thoroughly Evangelical, than was Dean
Alford. Yet the latter stood aloof from the Evangelical party; and they,
we fear, did not desire his union with them. His case was a typical one,
and enables us to understand the enfeebled state in which the
Evangelicals find themselves. They did not like the Dean's breadth of
view; they regarded the opinions on the subject of inspiration, to which
his Biblical studies had led him, as unsound and dangerous; they did not
understand, what was one of his marked characteristics, a large-hearted
sympathy with goodness even in the professors of a false creed. So,
though he was educated in the school, and (as the Rev. E. T. Vaughan
truly says) though he 'preached the Gospel which they preached with a
force and simplicity which they might well have wished to emulate,' they
looked coldly on him, and he could find no home in their midst.
Here, then, is one great secret of their loss of influence. Their ideas
of Evangelical doctrine are narrow and rigid, and they are maintained
with an intolerance which is at once repulsive and inconsistent. We
complain that the 'Catholic' champions of authority should demand for
themselves that individual liberty for which Protestantism contends, but
it is still more intolerable that these Protestants of Protestants
should set up a claim to infallibility, and brand all those who do not
agree with them as traitors to the Gospel. By maintaining the verbal
inspiration of Holy Scripture, insisting on a particular theory of the
Atonement as alone Evangelical, committing themselves to a particular
scheme of prophetic interpretation, and adhering to those old ideas of
the religious life which make worldliness to consist in certain outward
acts which are therefore forbidden to the spiritual man, rather than in
the world-spirit which can make everything common and unclean, and which
is the evil to be resisted, they have placed themselves in direct
collision with the culture of the age--even that part of it which
retains a hearty allegiance to the Gospel. But when with these extreme
views is combined a spirit of intolerant conservatism, when new modes of
thought, and even new forms of expression are regarded as dangerous
novelties, when all wisdom is supposed to be summed up in the
determination to walk in the old paths and to meddle not with those who
are given to change, and when those who dare, even in relation to
subjects that do not affect the essentials of the faith, to take
independent ground are treated as enemies of the truth, it is not
difficult to account for the weakness of the party. A creed that is not
only unpopular, and in some points illogical, but which can be regarded
as the creed only of a section, and that not the most intelligent
section of Evangelical Christians, and which is yet set forth as the
only true representation of the Gospel, must alienate many; but a spirit
of exclusiveness, a Pharisaic pride of orthodoxy, a dislike of free
inquiry, are sure to alienate still more.
It may be said, indeed, that the dogmas of the Anglican school are still
more narrow and extreme, and its intolerance still more arrogant and
exclusive; but this does not mend the case. The intolerance of the
Anglicans is extreme enough, but then it is consistent. Their system is
based upon the assumption of a special sanctity and authority belonging
to their Church party. The name of 'Catholic' which they arrogate to
themselves is itself an insult to all other Christians. For them,
therefore, to abjure the spirit of exclusiveness would be to renounce
their own principles. But the Evangelicals are in a very different
position. They are the children not of the bond-woman, but of the free.
They rest their doctrines not on an appeal to authority, but to reason.
The Scripture is their one rule of faith, and they recognise the right
of every man to interpret its teachings for himself. When, therefore,
they attempt to put a bar on all progress, when they claim for the
traditions of their school a position hardly less authoritative than
that which their opponents demand for 'Catholic' tradition, when they
discover a spirit of watchful jealousy in relation to all the
intellectual movements of the day, and seem afraid of the light which
science and philosophy have to shed upon the difficult problems of human
life, they are untrue to themselves and their principles. Their
watchword is, 'The Bible and the Bible only as the religion of
Protestants,' but with them there is a reserved condition that the Bible
must be interpreted as Puritans and Reformers interpreted it. They are
afraid of the liberty to which they owe their existence, and are
continually throwing themselves back on that Church authority which, if
it is to be accepted at all, will pronounce in favour of their
opponents.
It is this ignorance of their true strength which has betrayed the
Evangelicals into errors of policy which have been fraught with serious
injury. As Protestants, they ought to have been the most liberal party
in the Church; the most desirous to secure the greatest liberty
compatible with loyalty to truth; the most ready to welcome every
advance in scholarship that might help to a more thorough understanding
of the Word of God; the most candid in examining and pronouncing upon
the conclusions which modern Biblical criticism has reached; the most
anxious to establish cordial relations with Nonconformists outside the
pale of the Church. Unhappily, the very opposite of this has been the
case. They have left to others the duty of practically developing those
Protestant principles of which they claim to be the representatives, and
have again and again employed their influence in favour of the party of
reaction. The spectacle which they have presented in the ecclesiastical
controversies of the last few years has, indeed, been humiliating in the
extreme. They have been the most timid in every panic,--the first to
raise the cry of danger,--the most eager in the assault, whether upon
Rationalists within or Dissenters outside the Church--the facile
instruments of the High Church party, whose leaders have gladly accepted
their aid, knowing well that any prestige or advantage that might be
secured must remain with those who were the consistent champions of
authority. At present they are the most zealous champions of the
Establishment, and their organ the most Erastian in its tone of any of
the journals of the day. Yet there is no party which owes so little to
the Establishment, or would have so glorious a future before it if the
union between the Church and the State were dissolved. Except during the
brief interval when Lord Palmerston scattered mitres so lavishly in its
ranks, it has had but a scant share of the higher honours of that Church
which owes so much to the devoted labours of its members. Even of the
more important parochial charges, but a small proportion is held by the
Evangelicals, many of whose ablest men are the incumbents of churches
dependent entirely upon voluntary contributions for their support. If
the Evangelical leaders would make a careful estimate of the exact
position of the two parties in the Church, and of the amount of the
national revenues which go to the maintenance of that which they are
continually telling us is deadly error as compared with that which is
devoted to the support of their own principles, we think they would be
inclined to doubt the wisdom of the position they take in relation to
the Establishment. That they who ought to have the most confident faith
in the spiritual forces of the Church, and whose own experience affords
ample proof that that faith would not be misplaced, should cling the
most tenaciously to the union with the State, with all its painful and
compromising conditions, is surely a strange phenomenon. Yet this is not
the worst of the case. Unfortunately, their zeal for the Establishment
is not allied with charity, and their characteristic intolerance marks
their treatment of those Nonconformists who feel themselves constrained
to seek the dissolution of an alliance which they believe to be contrary
to the mind of Christ and injurious to the interests of truth.
Apparently unable to understand that this difference of opinion is
perfectly consistent with the preservation of Christian unity and mutual
respect, they have resented the assertion of Nonconformist principles as
a personal injury, and have urged it as a sufficient reason for
withdrawing from Christian intercourse with those who have been guilty
of so flagrant an offence. They expected that Dissenters would purchase
their friendship by unfaithfulness to their own principles, and have
been disappointed and indignant when they have discovered their mistake.
If Nonconformists will play the _rôle_ of poor relations, content to
receive a patronizing notice on the platforms of Bible and Missionary
Societies, and for the sake of this to suppress their own convictions,
they are willing to be on terms of kindly intercourse with them; but
that they should presume on this, and venture to assert their religions
equality, is more than they will tolerate. The inevitable result has
been a division between two parties who have much in common, and whose
union would have been a tower of strength to Evangelical Protestantism.
We should not care to have written thus fully on these points, but for
the conviction that we are on the eve of important ecclesiastical
changes, and that the character of the future will depend largely upon
the position taken by the Evangelical party. The Broad Church dream of
comprehension must remain a dream. It is beautiful, and it speaks much
for the liberality of men trained amid the influences and associations
of an Established Church, that they should have indulged in such a hope.
But it cannot be realized. Nonconformists do not wish for a place in the
National Church, and could not accept one without the renunciation of
all for which they have been contending. And assuredly, the recent
meetings at Sion College show that a large and powerful party in the
Establishment have no desire for union with them. But if comprehension
is impossible, disestablishment must come, and come speedily, and with
it will come a new phase of the great struggle. 'I disbelieve,' said Mr.
Orby Shipley, himself an able advocate of the separation between Church
and State, 'in anything but a change in the contest of the Church
militant, a change from a contest against the State without to a contest
within, against Puritanism, against Latitudinarianism, against
Infidelity, and against what may be termed "Lay-elementarianism in the
Church."' The sacerdotal party believes that its position in this
struggle will be improved by disestablishment; but if the Evangelicals
are loyal to their Protestant principles, we predict that it will find
itself mistaken. Disestablishment will remove the one obstacle to hearty
co-operation between the two great sections of English Protestantism,
and united, they will be fully able to withstand the fierce onslaught
with which they are threatened. But if the Evangelicals are to play
their part in this controversy, the sooner they choose their position,
and resolve to hold it firmly, the better. Two great principles are
daily coming more and more directly into conflict, and they must elect
to abide by the one or by the other. They must abandon all tamperings
with the delusive fancy of an apostolical succession, or of special
virtue attaching to Episcopal ordination. They must cease the foolish
coquetting in which a few of them seem disposed to indulge with High
Church ideas and practices, they must show a broader spirit and
cultivate closer relations with those of kindred opinions who do not
belong to their party or even to their Church; in short, they must not
shrink from the full development of their own principles, and they will
soon regain the strength which has been lost by the timid and
compromising policy of the past.
Meanwhile it is evident that the Establishment is on the eve of a great
crisis. The condemnation of Mr. Purchas has goaded the High Church
party, some almost to madness; and should it be followed by a decision
against Mr. Bennett, it is not easy to predict the result. Indeed, be
the deliverance of the Court what it may, 'there are breakers ahead.' If
it be against the Vicar of Frome, it will be fatal to the hopes both of
Anglican and Broad Churchmen. It will compel the former to secede, for
we believe the body of them to be honest men who will not renounce
principles which they hold to be the very essence of Catholic doctrine.
It will teach the latter that their dream of comprehension is at an end.
On the other hand, a decision in his favour will not conciliate the
Ritualists, since it will still leave them subject to the restrictions
imposed by the Mackonochie and Purchas judgments, while the Evangelicals
in their turn will be placed in extreme perplexity. At present the
Church Association is in the ascendant. We wish we could say that its
deportment in the hour of victory was such as to assure us in relation
to the future of the Evangelical party. We cannot wonder that it is
jubilant, but wisdom would have suggested some moderation in the
expression of its joy, especially considering that the decision yet to
be given may prove that its exultation has been as premature as it
certainly is undignified and impolitic. We read the report of the
meeting at St. James's Hall to celebrate the victory with extreme pain
and sorrow. The evident failure to realise the gravity of the crisis,
the unseemly tone adopted towards defeated adversaries, the apparent
unconsciousness of the scandal such a strife is bringing upon the Church
and upon religion in general, and perhaps more than all, the disposition
to rest so much on the power of the law, are all indicative of extreme
weakness. Men who can talk in the style of the Dean of Carlisle clearly
do not comprehend the spirit of the times or the true position of the
party which they represent. They seem to think they can stamp out High
Churchism at all events, in its more advanced forms. They do not appear
to understand that, could they succeed, they would secure the downfall
of that Establishment which they love 'not wisely and too well.' If they
would think less of law, and remember that the true weapons of their
warfare are not carnal, but spiritual, they would take a position more
in harmony with their principles, and be more sure of ultimate success.
ART. IV.--_Ingoldsby._
(1.) _The Life and Letters of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham._ By his
Son. London: Bentley.
(2.) _The Ingoldsby Legends._ By THOMAS INGOLDSBY, Esq. London: Bentley.
(3.) _The Bentley Ballads._ Edited by JOHN SHEEHAN. London: Bentley.
'Ingoldsby,' like Odysseus, has become a name. The word, used as a _nom
de plume_ by a facile versifier, has come to indicate the kind of verse
which he produced, and in which he has had hundreds of inferior
imitators. Mr. Carlyle, who objects utterly to the whole herd of
'Corvos poëtas et poëtrias picas,'
as being the emptiest shams the world has ever seen, would probably
regard the 'Ingoldsby Legends' as fathom-deep below contempt; but with
the highest respect for the philosopher of Chelsea, we hold such things
worth notice, and do not intend to allow his virtue to prevent our
reference to 'cakes and ale.' Indeed, there are times when the laughing
philosopher does considerable service in the removal of abuses and
prejudices; and if our Democritus writes in rhyme, it does not appear
that he is any the worse. The world, probably, would be none the less
happy for more true mirth than we at present get. There are laughters
hideous and contemptible--aye, and even pathetic. Ruin and cynicism, and
scorn and spite, have their hyæna laugh; but it differs wholly from the
pleasant laughter of the man to whom the world brings always joyous
impulses. We English are, assuredly, a humorous race, more humorous, in
all likelihood, than any other; this is shown, not only in Chaucer,
Shakspeare, Butler, Sterne, Dickens, but in the incidents of our
country and city life, in the quaint colloquy and light chaff of the
market-place and the way-side. 'Merry England,' is an ancient phrase;
and there is much merriment in our modern England that is not always
observed by philosophers and politicians. We happen to have walked
through most English counties, and to have enjoyed the marvellous
differences of humour which exist through the breadth of the land. We
have tracked Shakspeare through Central Warwick; have trodden the paths
of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Wilson, in the realm of lakes; have
talked with moormen on Dartmoor, and with shrimpers at Poulton-le-Sands.
Everywhere we have encountered a joyous humour, inextinguishable by
poverty and toil--a humour clearly designed to lighten men's hearts in
their passage through a world of many troubles. Recognising this, we
think that any form of humour is worth cultivation, and that a writer
like Barham, who, to many grave thinkers, might seem a lover of
ineffable nonsense, was not without his use in the world.
Three things may be affirmed in his favour. He caused good honest
laughter, by telling stories in a ridiculous style, without writing a
word to which the most absolute purist could object. He ridiculed
foolish and superstitious legends, blowing them away as the winds of the
vernal equinox blow the dead wood from the trees. And he proved that the
position of a minister of religion, doing his duty in a manner
thoroughly conscientious, was not inconsistent with a pleasant
mirthfulness of temper. Of him we may say, as Rosaline of Biron--
'A merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour's talk withal.'
And, with all his merriment, Barham did not for a moment neglect his
clerical duty; indeed, there are indications that he was a remarkably
good specimen of the parson of the parish. If we found any fault with
this biography, which is, for the most part, well executed, it is that
Barham's life as a clergyman is too slightly indicated. His friend, Mr.
Hughes, father of the member for Frome, wrote of him thus in the _New
Monthly_:--
'It is not always an easy task to do as you would be done
by; but to think as you would be thought of and thought
for, and to feel as you would be felt for, is perhaps more
difficult, as superior powers of tact and intellect are
here required to second good intentions. These faculties,
backed by an uncompromising love of truth and fair
dealing, indefatigable good nature, and a nice sense of
what was due to every one in the several relations of life,
both gentle and simple, rendered our late friend
invaluable, either as an adviser or peacemaker, in matters
of difficult and delicate handling. How he managed to get
through his more important duties is a marvel. Certain it
is that they were well and punctually performed in every
point relating to cathedral matters, as well as his
engagements as a parochial incumbent and priest of the
Household, which, I believe, was the nature of his office
at the Chapel Royal.'
This testimony from one who knew him well, makes us regret that more of
Barham's parochial life has not been revealed to us. Often there is a
curious difference between the practical and the literary half of a
man's career. _A priori_, one would not expect the 'Lay of St. Cuthbert'
to be the work of a Canon of St. Paul's. More information as to Barham's
clerical career would have been intensely interesting to the
psychological student; but his filial biographer has refrained from
entering on the subject to any extent. We are not certain as to his
motive. Perhaps he thought it hopeless to persuade the world that a good
parson could be a lover of fun. Well, another lover of fun was one
Sydney Smith, well known to all of us, also a Canon of St. Paul's. Smith
was a resolute Whig, Barham a high Tory, yet were they excellent good
friends. Here is proof. Barham sent Smith some game: here is the other
Canon's epigrammatic ironic reply:--
'Many thanks, my dear sir, for your kind present of game.
If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world, it
is the roast pheasant and bread sauce--barn-door fowls for
Dissenters, but for the real Churchman, the thirty-nine
times articled clerk--the pheasant, the pheasant!
'Ever yours,
'SYDNEY SMITH.'
The pheasant for rectors, the fowl for Dissenters--a characteristic bit
of chaff from Peter Plymley to Tom Ingoldsby. In these days, after
wonderful rapidity of movement, when the questions which troubled the
last generation have been merged in others far deeper and wider, it is
pleasant to think of Whig and Tory in the same cathedral precinct--Tory
sending Whig some game, and Whig replying with a gibe at all dwellers
without the orthodox limits. Few years have passed, yet the atmosphere
is marvellously clearer; there is not precisely the same relation
between Conformist and Nonconformist. The pheasant and the barn-door
fowl are rather more equally distributed, perhaps.
Mr. Barham's son and biographer thus states his determination not to
record his father's clerical life. 'With the details of his experience
as a clergyman, rarely suitable for publication as such particulars are,
I do not propose to deal. Of course, an outline will be given of his
professional progress; but the reader must, once for all, be requested
to bear in mind that it is intended, in the following pages, simply to
throw together some slight records of his leisure hours and recreative
pursuits.' This design has been very well executed; but we certainly
think that more might be done. However, we must perforce accept the
editor's view of the matter, and learn what we can of his father by
sidelong glimpses of him. Taken solely as a man of letters, Barham is
well worth study. Taken as husband and father, he is delightful. His
correspondence with his children is equal to Tom Hood's letters to
infant friends, though in quite a different style. His nonsense, prose
or verse, was always pleasant nonsense. Thus he writes to his daughter
Fanny:
'What do you think of Mr. Sydney Smith having offered me
his residentiary house to live in, together with a garden
at the back--magnificent for London--containing three
polyanthus roots, a real tree, a brown box border, a
snuff-coloured jessamine, a shrub which is either a dwarf
acacia or an overgrown gooseberry bush, eight broken
bottles, and a tortoiseshell tom-cat asleep in the sunniest
corner; the whole, as George Robins would say, capable of
the greatest improvement; with a varied and extensive
prospect of the back of the Oxford Arms, and a fine hanging
wood (the new drop at Newgate) in the distance, all being
situate in the midst of a delightful neighbourhood, and
well worth the attention of any capitalist wishing to make
an investment....
There is work enough cut out for you, I promise you, when
you get back: eighteen jars of onions to pickle, as many
double-damson cheeses to press, some dozen niggers to boil
into black currant jelly, and jams and marmalades to make
without end; for, unfortunately for you and all other
females connected with the family, the new house is
provided with that domestic curse, a roomy store-closet.
So, my dear old Fan, make hay or dirt pies, which is the
same thing, while you can, in comfort.'
_Pater peramans_, evidently. Here again is a pleasant piece of chaff
addressed to the same young lady, on 'having nothing to say' in a
letter:--
'As your correspondence increases, my dear girl, you will
find that this having nothing to say, and being obliged to
say it, will be one of the great and incipient stumbling
blocks of your literary life. Nothing, in fact, is so
difficult to express--that is, with any degree of
propriety--as nothing; and when once you have attained a
proficiency in this, your education may be considered to be
to a certain extent completed. Till then many people may
think, and may assure you, that you know nothing, but do
not believe them. You may know, and I dare say do, very
little; but to be thoroughly acquainted with nothing
requires not only a great deficiency of talent far below
the common run of intellect, but also a want of application
which, though it is possible you may possess it in a very
considerable degree, I have never yet seen in you to the
extent absolutely requisite.'
So easy and regular was the course of Barham's life, that there is
really nothing to say about it. As landowner, Canon of St. Paul's,
parson of a City church, he moved pleasantly in society, and had only to
encounter life's inevitable troubles. We remember him in our hot youth,
at the long-extinct Chapter Coffee-house in St. Paul's churchyard, whose
landlord bore the appropriate name of Faithful, improvising marvellous
verses over a glass of antique port. Perhaps his life was almost too
facile; perhaps men of serious temperament would regard such productions
as the 'Ingoldsby Legends' as things intolerable: but Barham had his
mission, depend on it, and if you go to a 'Penny Reading' in the country
any winter evening, the chances are that you will get selections from
'Pickwick' or from 'Ingoldsby,' whatever else may greet your ear.
Everybody knows Sam Weller and Tiger Tim--both typical man-servants:--
'Tiger Tim was clean of limb,
His boots were polished, his jacket was trim;
With a very smart tie in his smart cravat,
And a smart cockade on the top of his hat;
Tallest of boys, or shortest of men,
He stood in his stockings just four foot ten;
And he asked, as he held the door on the swing,
"Pray, did your lordship please to ring?"'
Everybody also recollects that rascally 'Jackdaw of Rheims'--related,
doubtless, to the _graculus superbus_ of Phaedrus--who stole the
Cardinal's ring just as his Latin predecessor stole the peacock's
feathers. There is no _reductio ad absurdum_ extant equal to this
whimsical legend. Excommunication, which was slightly damaged in value
by the curse of Ernulphus, came to a ridiculous end when the Cardinal
Lord Archbishop of Rheims tonitrated his worst maledictions at a
thievish jackdaw. 'Maledictus sit vivendo, moriendo, manducando,
bibendo, esuriendo, sitiendo, jejunando, dormitando, dormiendo,
vigilando, ambulando, stando, sedendo, jacendo, operando, quiescendo,'
&c., &c.
'The Cardinal rose with a dignified look,
He called for his candle, his bell, and his book.
In holy anger and pious grief,
He solemnly cursed the rascally thief.
He cursed him at board, he cursed him in bed,
Prom the sole of his foot to the crown of his head;
He cursed him in sleeping, that every night
He should dream of the devil, and wake in fright;
He cursed him in eating, he cursed him in drinking.
He cursed him in coughing, in sneezing, in winking,
He cursed him in sitting, in standing, in lying;
He cursed him in walking, in riding, in flying,
He cursed him in living, he cursed him in dying:
Never was heard such a terrible curse.
But what gave rise
To no little surprise--
Nobody seemed one penny the worse.'
When after awhile the mystery was out--when the poor little comminated
jackdaw presented himself in a sad state, so that of the cathedral
officers, sacristans, and vergers, and the like, it is recorded,
'That heedless of grammar, they all cried,
"That's him!"'
the absurdity reached its climax. For our own part, though these humours
are not of the highest or deepest order, we laugh at them. Life has its
follies; Shakspeare had his clowns. In the old forgotten coaching days,
there was wonderful humour at the wayside inns. Sam Weller was possible
then: a railway porter has no time to be humorous. Of the Ingoldsby
humour, as practised by Barham himself, there is this to be said: it was
always harmless, and it was directed against absurdity and nonsense.
Ingoldsby has had disciples, who have not disgraced their master, yet
who have never quite equalled him in certain peculiar points. There is
Hood's admirable story of 'Miss Killmannsegg,' wherein, if we remember
aright, he depicts certain folks as--
'Washing, their hands with invisible soap
In imperceptible water.'
There is Praed's 'Red Fisherman:'--
'All alone, by the side of the pool,
A tall man sat on a three-legged stool,
Kicking his heels on the dewy sod,
And putting in order his reel and rod.
Red were the rags his shoulders wore,
And a high red cap on his head he bore;
His arms and his legs were long and bare,
And two or three locks of long red hair
Were tossing about his scraggy neck,
Like a tattered flag o'er a splitting wreck.
It might be time, or it might be trouble,
Had bent that stout back nearly double;
Sunk in their deep and hollow sockets
That blazing couple of Congreve rockets,
And shrunk and shrivelled that tawny skin,
Till it hardly covered the bones within.
The line the Abbot saw him throw
Had been fashioned and formed long ages ago,
And the hands that worked his foreign vest
Long ages ago had gone to rest:
You would have sworn, as you looked on them,
He had fished in the flood--with Ham and Shem.'
Then, again, there is Browning's 'Pied Piper of Hamelin,' a rare old
story rarely versified:--
'Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And eat the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.'
There is vast difference between the three writers; the courtly epigram
of Praed, and the scholarly variety of Browning, differ widely from the
style of the master whom they imitate. But it is a high testimony to the
literary value of what we may call the Ingoldsby method, that men so
original and so desperate have tried their hands at it. A glance at the
'Bentley Ballads' shows that the same thing has been done by a great
number of very different men; Sheehan and Creasy, Maginn and Mahony, Sam
Lover the versatile, whom we remember delighting us with improvisations
at Barnes-terrace just above the Thames, Tom Ingoldsby's son who follows
his father with filial felicity, have done excellently well in this
style of spirit and humour.
Indeed, to succeed in it to a certain degree, demands only abundance of
animal spirits and a capacity for rhythm and rhyme. But it is clear that
Barham had more than this. What, indeed, makes him perfect and absolute
master of his craft, is his power of invariably catching the whimsical
aspects, the humorous sides, of an event. Hood was too fond of a pun,
Praed was too fine a gentleman, Browning is too subtle and curious, to
attain the precise humour of Ingoldsby. Wherever we open the 'Legends'
we find the frolicsome fancy of their author fresh and facile. Take the
description of Winifred and David Pryce, in 'Look at the Clock!' It is a
picture easily realized in the Principality:--
'Winifred Pryce was tidy and clean,
Her gown was a flowered one, her petticoat green,
Her buckles were bright as her milking cans,
And her hat was a beaver, and made like a man's;
Her little red eyes were deep set in their socket-holes,
Her gown-tail was turned up, and tucked through the pocket holes:
A face like a ferret
Betokened her spirit:
To conclude, Mrs. Pryce was not over young,
Had very short legs, and a very long tongue.
Now David Pryce
Had one darling vice;
Remarkably partial to anything nice,
Nought that was good to him came amiss,
Whether to eat, or to drink, or to kiss!
Especially ale--
If it was not too stale
I really believe he'd have emptied a pail;
Not that in Wales
They talk of their ales;
To pronounce the word they make use of might trouble you,
Being spelt with a C, two R's and a W.'
Now in this there is absolutely nothing that will bear analysis; it is
the laughing spirit of the man that carries you on, amusing you in spite
of yourself, in spite of your decided feeling that really there is
nothing to laugh at. But, somehow, what with the ready jingle of the
rhyme, and the perfect good humour of the ridicule, amused you are.
Barham's loudest fun was generated when he had to deal with obsolete and
obsolescent superstitions. He loved to laugh at the vulgar idea of the
Devil--the fiend with horns, tail, and hoofs, whom Cuvier ruthlessly
dismissed as 'a graminivorous animal.' Thus, in the 'Lay of Saint
Cuthbert,' we find him describing a group of demons at dinner:--
'Few ate more hearty
Than Madame Astarte,
And Hecate, considered the belles of the party.
Between them was seated Leviathan, eager
To do the polite, and take wine with Belphegor:
Here was Morbleu (a French devil) supping soup-meagre,
And there, munching leeks, Davy Jones of Tredegar--
* * * * *
Here's Lucifer lying blind drunk with Scotch ale,
While Beelzebub's tying huge knots in his tail'--
and so on _ad libitum_. Again, in the 'Lay of Saint Abelard,' he gives
us 'Old Nick' defeated by a saintly personage. It was--
'In good King Dagobert's palmy days,
When saints were many and sins were few,
Old Nick, 'tis said,
Was sore bested
One evening--and could not tell what to do.
He had been east and he had been west,
And far had he journeyed o'er land and sea;
For women and men
Were warier then,
And he could not catch one where he'd now catch three.
He had been north and he had been south,
From Zembla's shores unto fair Peru,
Ere he filled the sack
Which he bore on his back--
Saints were so many and sins so few.
The way was long, and the day was hot;
His wings were weary; his hoofs were sore;
And scarce could he trail
His nerveless tail
As it furrowed the sand on the Red Seashore.
The day had been hot, and the way was long;
Hoof-sore, and weary, and faint, was he;
He lowered his sack,
And the heat of his back.
As he leaned on a palm-tree, blasted the tree.'
Demons and saints were the favourite themes of Tom Ingoldsby's laughter;
he jeered alike the Romish miracle-monger and the anthropomorphic fiend.
A volume might be written on the way in which the popular and vulgar
idea of the devil has gradually arisen. It is clear from 'Paradise
Lost,' that Milton favored the mediæval notion that the Pagan divinities
were really fiends; and it can scarcely be doubted that the hirsute Pan
gave the first sitting for that portrait of the devil which Coleridge
completed, when he wrote
'His coat was red, and his breeches were blue,
With a hole behind for his tail to come through.'
At such matters we can smile contemptuously; but in earlier centuries,
when the Pagan superstition had still some vitality left in it, it was a
serious matter to the Christian convert. Pan might meet him at the
corner of a lonely woodland, and strike him with a panic dread. Worse
than all he might be allured by the terrible enticements of Venus. To
this day, Friday has a tradition of ill-luck, because it is _dies
veneris--vendredi_. That the goddess of evil pleasure still came among
men as a female fiend was a firm belief of the Middle Ages. Hence have
we the legend of the Venusberg, chosen as a theme by more than one
living poet, the version we prefer being unquestionably Lord Houghton's;
hence also that of the betrothal ring inadvertently placed by a
bridegroom on the finger of a statue of Venus, which finger, on his
return, he finds bent, and the ring irremovable. This latter story is
told with prosaic prolixity in the final volume of Mr. Morris's 'Earthly
Paradise.' It must be remembered that the change from Paganism to
Christianity was often effected in curious ways; that the worship of
Apollo, the sun-god, was, by a play upon words, diverted to Elias the
prophet; that temples of Venus were, as a rule, dedicated to the Virgin.
Probably that worship of the Virgin Mary to which Romanists cling so
fondly originated in a weak desire to satisfy proselytes by giving them
one goddess in exchange for another. Any way, the belief in Venus
endured so long that, in 1614, in the good city of Frankfort, a learned
lawyer named Kornman, published a work called 'Mons Veneris,' which
dealt with the legends about her as if they were based on fact. Of such
legends let us name one only; an English story, told by William of
Newbury. In the reign of Henry I., a peasant passed at midnight, near a
hill, not far from the town of Burlington. To his amazement, he heard
sounds of revelry therefrom, and saw a door open in the hillside, and,
entering, beheld a vast chamber, where men and women held high festival.
A cup was handed him, full of some liquid, which doubtless would have
the effect of Circe's magic wine: with singular presence of mind, our
peasant threw away the wine, and ran off with the cup. All the rabble
rout of Venus pursued him, but the swift-footed ploughman brought his
prize safely to Burlington. Somebody (probably the mayor, who should
have been knighted for it) sent the cup to the King, and the King made
it a present to the Queen of King David of Scotland; but King William of
Scotland returned it to Henry II. of England. Whether it is still among
the royal plate is a point to be determined by 'Notes and Queries.'
The growth of letters and of science changes all this; just as Venus
vanished a few centuries ago, Old Bogy also--the foe of our infancy--has
vanished from modern nurseries, nor do very many children of elder
growth believe in an archdemon of the graminivorous type. Hence the fun
of 'Ingoldsby' that ridiculed superstition of this sort is likely to
lose its interest in time. We fear, however, that his laughing
caricature of Romish absurdities--as in 'The Jackdaw of Rheims'--will
scarcely lose its point at present. The Pope may be reduced to 'the
Vatican, and a garden,' but the Papal superstition still clings closely
to multitudes of men, especially of the Celtic race. That race, as M.
John Lemoinne has just said of his French kindred, is feminine, and
seems unable to accept a manly religion.
The 'Ingoldsby Legends' are peculiarly adapted to the palate of youth.
They make fun out of trifles and vulgarities. One can hardly understand
a man of high culture caring much about them after forty. Then the
humour of Shakspeare's clowns, of Cervantes, and Sterne, and Elia,
becomes more enjoyable than the 'Ingoldsby Legends' or the 'Pickwick
Papers.' Then you prefer Autolycus to Sam Weller. The strong point of
Ingoldsby is his gay high-spirited boyishness; but this quality is only
attractive under certain conditions. It may, perhaps, be roughly stated
that a man will care to read Ingoldsby so long as he cares to play
cricket. It is, in fact, the eager buoyancy and rather perspiring fun of
the cricket-field which one finds in the rollicking strophes of the
'Legends.' When their writer knocks over a saint or a demon as if he
were a wicket, you almost expect to hear the shout of, 'How's that,
umpire?' Indeed, the book is a _loud_ book, scarcely to be tolerated,
one might think, in a quiet library. Yet was its author a quiet haunter
of libraries, and we find in one of his letters how he received in one a
royal visitor:--
'What think you of a visit from, and confabulation with,
the Queen of the Belgians. On Saturday, I was in the
library at St. Paul's, my custom always in an afternoon,
with a book-binder's 'prentice and a printer's devil,
looking out fifty dilapidated folios for rebinding. I had
on a coat which, from a foolish prejudice in the multitude
against patched elbows, I wear nowhere else, my hands and
face encrusted with the dust of years, and wanting only the
shovel--I had the brush--to sit for the portrait of a
respectable master chimney sweeper, when the door opened,
and in walked the Cap of Maintenance, bearing the sword of,
and followed by, the Lord Mayor in full fig, with the
prettiest and liveliest little Frenchwoman leaning on his
arm. Nobody could get at the lions but myself. I was fairly
in for it, and was thus presented in the most _recherché_,
if not the most expensive, court-dress that I will venture
to say the eyes of royalty were ever greeted withal.
_Heureusement pour moi_, she spoke excellent English,
however, and rattled on with a succession of questions
which I answered as best I might. They were sensible,
however, showed some acquaintance with literature, and a
very good knowledge of dates.'
Her lively Majesty might have been felicitated on finding Tom Ingoldsby
as a guide to the library of the great cathedral. But to return to the
'Legends.' Besides their extreme boyishness, their redundancy of
pulsation, there is a deficiency in them which must prevent their
becoming classic. They are devoid of poetry. Master of the grotesque as
he was, Barham had no mastery of the picturesque. Keen to see and seize
the humorous aspects of affairs, he had none of that deeper humour
which creates character. A real poet who had written some fifty or more
eccentric legends, could not have helped inventing or describing certain
individual characters in the course of his work. He must have done it
unconsciously, must have done it if even he had tried to avoid it. There
are two tests on the very surface of the true poet. If he describes a
scene, you see it; if he describes a man, you know him. Barham's
grotesque descriptions are often remarkable; indeed, his legends
somewhat remind us of the hideous gurgoyles of old churches, wherein
tradition sayeth the old ecclesiastic architects depicted their enemies,
making of them waterspouts, that during rain they might seem to vomit.
The men who carved those gurgoyles could not have sculptured an Apollo;
and of Barham it may be said that, though he wrote laughable stories
with supreme felicity, he never produced a line of poetry. He appears,
indeed, to have regarded only the surface of life. There is nothing in
his published works to show that he had an original idea, or that he
cared about ideas. Of course, having given us the 'Ingoldsby Legends'--a
piece of work absolutely unique, and quite unlikely to meet with a
readable rival--he will be forgiven if he had a contempt for ideas; but
one feels some desire to know whether such fertility of fun was not the
upper stratum of something stronger and finer. Tom Hood's fun, for
example, grows out of his profound melancholy, as under Etna's laughing
vines the volcanic fire is sleeping. Shakspeare's fun grows out of his
masterful knowledge of the world, of men, of women. In a play of his you
seem in some city of chivalry and romance, where the great knight passes
to deeds of high emprise, and the lovely lady smiles on him from her
balcony, and the troubadour sings of 'the Lord of Oc and No;' and all
the while you hear the chaffer of the market-place, the chatter of
street gossips, the insignificant laughter of loitering louts. Fun that
has no root in something deeper seems morbid and hysterical; and we
cannot help believing that there was more in Barham than his writings
reveal, than his most intimate friends knew, than perhaps he knew or
even guessed himself.
Dr. Maginn, a man like yet unlike Tom Ingoldsby, wrote these four
lines--part of a poem which we have no means of obtaining:--
'For those who read aright are well aware
That Falstaff, revelling his rough mates between,
Oft in his heart felt less the load of care,
Than Jaques, sighing in the forest green.'
Maginn had, if we may judge from appearances, higher poetic instincts
than Barham; his 'Homeric Ballads' are a very remarkable contribution to
the literature of Homeric translation; but he unwisely expended himself
upon periodical writing, and has left nothing behind him worthy of his
powers. It is, we think, a subject for congratulation, that the cheap
magazines of the day are so anxious to please the populace, that a
first-rate writer has absolutely no chance with them, and is obliged to
do work worthier of him. The shilling magazine has to suit the taste of
the railway reader, who wants to be amused during the hour in which
Great Western or Great Northern accepts him as a parcel to be delivered
at a friend's house by dinner-time. How this is done we need not say, as
anybody who likes to expend a shilling can judge for himself; but it is
so done as to render it absurd for men of the calibre of Barham and
Maginn to write for the majority of these magazines. This we take to be
an advantage. Such men are obliged to work harder--and better.
Another instance of a man with something nobler in him and better than
he ever gave the world, or even his friends, is Theodore Hook. Until his
private diary came into the hands of those who knew him best, they had
no knowledge of the depths of passionate remorse for a wasted life which
lay beneath the too brilliant surface of his character. 'In every page,'
wrote Lockhart,
'We trace the disastrous influence of both the grand
original errors perpetually crossing and blackening the
picture of superficial gaiety--indications, not to be
mistaken, of a conscience ill at ease; of painful
recollections and dark anticipations rising irrepressibly,
not to be commanded down; of good, gentle, generous
feelings, converted by stings and dartings of remorse into
agonies of torture. If we were to choose a motto for this
long line of volumes, it would be a maxim so familiar to
himself, that it is repeated over and over in his tales of
fiction--hardly omitted in any one of them--"Wrong never
comes right."'
Theodore Hook laboured under the double disadvantage of an irremovable
load of debt, and of an illicit connection which effectually prevented
his marrying a woman who might have directed his marvellous powers into
their true channel. The consequence was that he lived a false factitious
life; worked terribly hard to produce income necessary for him to meet
wealthy peers on apparently equal terms; was always pestered by
money-lenders; yet all the while his daring spirit maintained an
external gaiety unquenchable. At the very time when his spirit seemed
highest, when his wit was memorably brilliant, when at club or country
house he was amazing every one by his victorious vivacity, there occur
in his diary entries that show a broken spirit, a wounded heart, an
infinite regret for the past and despair of the future. Such was the
inner condition of a man whose conversation had such unique sparkle,
that men dined at the Athenæum for the chance of being allowed to draw
their chairs to his little table in a favourite corner (Temperance
Corner) after dinner--so that the diners at that club fell off more than
300 a year after his disappearance from his wonted seat.
It is unfortunate that the early career of men of letters is often
turned awry by the well-meant interference of their relations. A boy of
genius, who happens to appear in the midst of a steady, stolid,
respectable family, is usually regarded as a 'black sheep.' They try to
make him work in some regular groove, and, of course, he fails. If they
are very determined, he quarrels with them, and then, too often, he runs
headlong into debt, or love, or both, and burdens himself in such a way
that he has to toil for freedom through the best years of his life, and
possibly never emancipates himself. Of course, it is always hard to say
whether the young gentleman is right who fancies himself a genius. Dr.
Holmes, in his latest novel, has a capital sketch of a young poetaster
who 'eventuates' behind the counter of a store. Such youths require
Darwinian compression; but there are just a few of higher mould, with
the irrepressible vocation for pen and ink which nothing can cure, who
would do better if some way could be devised to give them a chance in
literature. Perhaps when the school boards have leisure to consider the
subject, they will try to discover a way of developing those latent
powers, mathematical as well as poetical, which often exist in regions
wholly unexpected. Inspectors of schools might be directed, after they
have registered the triumphs of the clever boys, to investigate the
habits of the stupid ones. A great poet or mathematician is almost
certain to seem stupid in his boyhood.
It may appear that we have tried the 'Ingoldsby Legends' by too high a
test; and, indeed, it is a very unpretentious production. Its originator
was wholly modest, and did not dream of placing himself in the foremost
seats of the literary amphitheatre. He knew the true value of his
invention. It is designed for those who would rather laugh than think.
It may amuse children at any rate, and there are certain fortunate folk
who, to the end of their lives, can be children now and then--can
listen to merry rhyming, can believe for the moment that in Fairyland
there are mock turtles and March hares, that the dogs there have no ears
because the dog's ears have been used up on the little boys' Latin
grammars, and the sheep no eyes because the little girls have used up
all their sheep's eyes in looking at their sweethearts; can imagine that
in Ghostland one may dine comfortably with one's doppelganger. There are
times--'weird winter nights,' as Shelley calls them, warmed with
merriment, and joyous summer days in which the nightingale seems ebrious
with ozone--when there is a necessity for nonsense of one sort or
another. It is this necessity which Ingoldsby and his followers supply.
Possibly some good is effected by the fact that the occupants of lofty
positions have deigned to play with these toys; that the occupants of
deaneries and canonries (ecclesiastic port-wineries, if we may venture
to coin a phrase) have found in such matters Attic salt for their
filberts.
_Apropos_ of Ghostland, just named, Barham was a great lover of spectral
stories, and the reader who cares about such will find in his memoir
some of the best we have ever seen. As to anecdotes, the book is
brimming over with them. Of course, one meets with one or two that have
been met before; but an old story, like an old friend or an old coat, is
sometimes more enjoyable than a new one. Barham was at Paul's School
with some men as well known as himself, among them being Sir Frederick
Pollock, Nestor of lawyers, and Richard Bentley, Nestor of publishers.
Another of his comrades was Charles Diggle, afterwards Governor of
Sandhurst College. Of him and Barham we find a good story:--
'The two boys having in the course of one of their walks
discovered a Quaker's meeting-house, forthwith procured a
penny tart of a neighbouring pastry-cook; furnished with
this, Diggle marched boldly into the building, and holding
up the delicacy in the midst of the grave assembly said,
with perfect solemnity,
'"Whoever speaks first shall have this pie."
'"Friend, go thy way," commenced a drab-coloured gentleman,
rising; "go thy way, and----"
'"The pie's yours, sir!" exclaimed Master Diggle, politely;
and placing it before the astounded speaker, hastily made
his escape.'
It was very improper, certainly; and we cannot help hoping that the Head
Master of Dean Colet's famous school heard of the impertinence, and
administered to the 'nether-urchin' of the future military pedagogue the
sharp flogging which he undoubtedly deserved. But one cannot help
laughing at these schoolboy absurdities; and the naughtiest boys, if
looked after by a schoolmaster like Tom Hood's,
'Who never spoilt the child and spared the rod,
But spoilt the rod and never spared the child,'
often turn out the ablest men. There is incipient power in these wayward
vivacities of youth.
Musical amateurs of the present day of the strenuous class that elicited
Charles Lamb's verses beginning--
'Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites; for my part
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, or for Handel'
will doubtless deem Lord North an utter barbarian. George III. scolded
him for never going to the concerts of ancient music. 'Your brother, the
Bishop,' said the King, 'never misses them, my Lord.' 'Sir,' answered
the Premier, 'if I were as deaf as my brother, the Bishop, I would never
miss them either!'
Of Lord Thurlow we believe it was that Theodore Hook declared that
nobody could be as wise as Thurlow _looked_. Whether he had much wisdom
is a moot point; but strength of will he possessed in an enviable
degree, as the following anecdote shows:--
'Lord Thurlow had applied to George the Third on behalf of
his brother for the Bishopric of Durham, and having
somewhat unexpectedly met with a refusal, he bowed, and was
about to retire without pressing his suit, when the
monarch, wishing to soften his decision as far as possible,
added, "Anything else I shall be happy to bestow upon your
relative, but this, unfortunately, is a dignity never held
but by a man of high rank and family."
'"Then, Sire," returned Lord Thurlow, drawing himself up,
"I must persist in my request--I ask it for the brother of
the Lord High Chancellor of England!"
The Chancellor was firm, and the King was compelled to
yield.'
This we take to have been highly creditable to Thurlow: it was a
courageous assertion that the aristocracy of genius is at least equal to
the aristocracy of birth. Here is an amusing story of clerical ignorance
from Barham's diary:--
'December 3.--Dined for the first time with Dr. Sumner,
Bishop of Llandaff, who told me, as a fact, that Dr. R----,
a fellow of Eton, had some time since ordered one of his
ponds to be cleared out. A great number of carp, tench,
eels, &c., were taken in the course of the operation. The
doctor was at dinner with some friends, who had been
viewing the work, when a servant came in, to inform him
that in draining off the water the men had found a
chalybeate. "Have they indeed?" cried he, with much
interest; "I am very glad to hear it. Tell them to put it
along with the other fish for the present."'
In those days Eton was not famous for its erudition, and a fellow of
that famous corporation was likely to be a better judge of the 'other
fish' than of the chalybeate. Dr. R---- would probably have known
exactly the right way to dress a red mullet from the Avon or a Coniston
char.
Here is a good story of Dr. Thomas Hume, an intimate friend of
Barham's:--
'They had walked together to the office of one of the
morning newspapers, and there the doctor silently placed
upon the counter an announcement of the death of some
friend, together with five shillings, the usual charge for
the insertion of such advertisements. The clerk glanced at
the paper, tossed it on one side, and said gruffly, "Seven
and six!"
'"I have frequently," replied Hume, "had occasion to
publish these simple notices, and I have never before been
charged more than five shillings."
'"Simple!" repeated the clerk, without looking up; "He's
universally beloved, and deeply regretted! Seven and six."
'Hume produced the additional half crown, and laid it
deliberately by the others, observing, as he did so, with
the same solemnity of tone he had used throughout,
"Congratulate yourself, sir, that this is an expense which
your executors will never be put to."'
We hope that unlucky clerk could understand the rebuke that he received;
but to us it appears that sarcasm is generally thrown away on such
people. They are pachyderms.
The book contains some capital stories of poor Theodore Hook, that
marvellously wasted intellect. His great power lay in _impromptu_, of
prose or verse, spoken or written. No man has ever equalled him at a
paragraph or a squib, except as to the latter, Garrick and Coleridge.
Nobody was ever so exquisite a conversational wit. And certainly no one
has ever possessed his power of improvisation in English. He threw off
stanza and strophe as fast as a knifegrinder's wheel throws sparks. He
scintillated always. Coleridge, after an evening in his company,
declared he was as great a genius as Dante. His felicity was invariable.
When he was improvising at the piano, after luncheon, at his Fulham
villa, enter the ancilla, to say Mr. Winter, the tax collector, has
called. Ejaculates Hook:--
'Here comes Mr. Winter, collector of taxes;
I advise you to give him whatever he axes!
He isn't the man to stand nonsense or flummery.
For though his name's Winter, his actions are summary.'
But how could Hook stand the tremendous dissipation to which he
foolishly condescended? Here is a specimen of his way of living:--
'After a dinner given by Mr. Stephen Price, of Drury-lane
Theatre, all the guests, with the exception of Cannon and
Theodore Hook, having long since retired, the host, who was
suffering from an incipient attack of gout, was compelled
to allude pretty plainly to the lateness of the hour. No
notice, however, was taken of the hint; and, unable to
endure any longer the pain of sitting up, Mr. Price made
some excuse, and slipped quietly off to bed. On the
following morning he inquired of his servant--"Pray at what
time did those gentlemen go last night?" "Go, sir!" replied
John; "they are not gone, sir; they have just rung for
coffee!"'
To revert from anecdotes of this class to the special theme of our
article. Poetry is one thing, and verse-writing is another, and there
may be very good verse-writers who would not condescend to be
poetasters. In the present day there are a multitude of foolish persons
who have discovered that _breeze_ rhymes with _trees_, and that there
are as many syllables as they have fingers in a line of blank verse. So
they flood the shilling magazines with their silliness, and some of them
raise money enough to pay for the publication of a volume of their
trash. Within a few days from this time of writing we have had occasion
to look through about a score volumes of this class, and only one
contained anything that could be called poetry--and that one came from
San Francisco. Now, why cannot people with a faculty for verse write it
sensibly, without trying to be poets? Why can they not give us something
manly, something humorous? Lockhart and Maginn wrote fine verse, but
would have smiled at the notion of being called poets. Barham never
wrote a line of poetry, in the severe sense--but what immense amusement
has the world received from the rhymed stories of Ingoldsby!
ART. V.--_The Downfall of Bonapartism._
(1.) _Documents Authentiques Annotés. Les Papiers Secrets du Second
Empire._ 4e édition. "Fiat lux." Bruxelles: Office de Publicité. 1870.
(2.) _La Guerre de 1870: l'Esprit Parisien produit du la régime
Impérial._ Par EMILE LECLERCQ. 5e édition. Bruxelles. 1870.
(3.) _Napoléon Ier, et son Historien, M. Thiers._ Par JULES BARNI.
Paris, Germer-Baillière. 1869.
(4.) _Histoire de Napoléon Ier._ Par P. LANFREY. Paris: Charpentier.
1867-70. Vols. I. to IV.
(5.) _Napoléon le Petit._ Par V. HUGO. Bruxelles. 1852.
(6.) _Romans Nationaux._ Par ERCKMANN-CHÂTRIAN. Paris: Hetzel. 1868-70.
_Histoire d'un Paysan, ou la Révolution Française racontée
par un paysan._
_Le Conscrit._
_Le Blocus._
_La Guerre._
_L'Invasion._
_Waterloo, etc._
(7.) _Louis's own Account of the Fight at Dame Europa's School._
Literally translated from the French. London: J. Camden Hotten. 1871.
Imperialism has fallen; and with it France has for the present
disappeared from among the great Powers. With Metz in foreign hands, she
is much in the same position as that of Paris when the Prussians had
turned upon her the guns of Mont Valérien. Her eastern frontier is
wholly exposed; she must feel as Lombardy did while Austria held the
Quadrilateral.
As far as material influence is concerned, France is become a
second-rate state. She must confine her aim to doing what she has so
often done before--influencing the world of ideas. She did this in the
Middle Ages in a way which we seldom sufficiently appreciate; she did it
in a less degree during the post-Reformation period, for then her own
religious wars and the preponderance of Germany had thrown her somewhat
into the shade; she did it most of all when the _Encyclopédistes_ began
to claim for her a definite position as the world's teacher. This
position she had not formally claimed before. Under the old _régime_ she
had been slowly getting welded together; feudalism, carried out more
'logically' in France than elsewhere, had kept her provinces almost as
distinct as so many little German kingdoms. Louis XI.'s policy, indeed,
did for the French _noblesse_ much what the Wars of the Roses did for
ours; and Louis XIV., by giving the higher classes a taste for Court
life, drew them together and trained them to a community of habits and
aims; but the mass of provincials were scarcely affected by this
centralization of a single class. Louis XIV., however, did one thing
more: he secured to Paris that fatal predominance which has ever since
made her the arbitress of the national destinies. While saying
'_l'état c'est moi,_' he so arranged that very soon the Parisians
could say, _Paris c'est la France_. The great writers, too, lent their
influence to glorify the capital: the town-loving spirit was strong in
them all. Paris got more and more supreme, while at the same time the
efforts of Government were divided between crushing out provincial
independence and meeting the ruinous expenditure of a Court always
luxurious and very often warlike. Hence a tendency in the old _régime_
to a more and more strictly personal government. Feudal liberties were
crushed; feudal tyranny was aggravated. The provincial parliaments, and
that of Paris into the bargain, gradually lost even the semblance of
power; and the old system degenerated into despotism.
The Revolution, while superficially breaking up this system, left
untouched those parts of it which some say are grounded on the
peculiarities of French character. It intensified centralization, and it
practised most oppressively that interference with the rights of the
individual which is of the essence of personal government. The very men
who so loudly proclaimed the principles of '89 were found most ready to
act on rules which led them straight to the lawless tyranny of the
Terror. Their 'ideas' were grand, but personal freedom was far too
trifling a thing to be allowed to stand in their way for a moment. In
one point the Revolution diverged from the old _régime_: it became
intensely and deliberately propagandist--bent, _i.e._, on carrying
forward, with the strength of the whole nation, the mission which the
thinkers of Voltaire's day had assigned to themselves. We often find
that the man who believes in nothing in particular is the most violent
in opposing the beliefs of others. So it was with the leaders of the
Revolution: they were mad to spread their doctrines over Europe; and
their doctrines being those of Paris, Paris became (in Frenchmen's eyes)
the recognized head, not of France only, but of the civilized world.
Imperialism was at first a reaction from despotic anarchy; the dread of
another Terror made the French welcome with delight a man who seemed
strong enough to be 'the saviour of society.' So it was again in 1849,
when the Socialist struggle in which 13,000 Parisians perished so
alarmed the successful 'bourgeois,' that to prevent its repetition they
condoned the _coup d'état_. Ideas, it was said in 1795, were ruining
France; the men of ideas had been beaten in the field; Imperialism
therefore meant military glory as the basis of French prosperity.
Frenchmen were content to believe that (as M. Louis Blanc said the other
day at Bordeaux) 'glory and liberty are incompatible,' and deliberately
to choose the former.
Of course the Imperialism of 1852 differs somewhat from that of 1804,
but it is the same in its intense selfishness, and its thorough
insincerity. Under the second Empire, there have been commercial
treaties and alliances, and the working class has found good wages, so
long as it has been content with political nothingness; but the two will
be seen to be the same in principle. Each has the radical evil of
depending on success in war, or peace, or both, for its stability; and
this necessary instability makes them more hopeless as systems than the
old _régime_, with all its corruptness, or even than the wild theories
of the Republic.[211]
But it is needless to enlarge on the manifest causes which made a
hereditary monarchy stable so long as it is not wholly intolerable. The
same causes make the best of 'tyrannies' (in the Greek sense of the
word) unstable. Men as 'logical' as Frenchmen are sure to feel that if
such a government is not fulfilling the purpose of its creation, it had
better cease to exist; and feeling with Frenchmen generally means
action.
The first Napoleon had immense success on his side; he 'saved France,'
in his own fashion, and so long as he was successful, very few Frenchmen
cared to inquire into the soundness of the method employed. The third
Napoleon had in his favour the remembrance of his uncle's success, and
the fact that the _règne du bavardage_ had failed as completely in 1849
as it had done in the days of the Directory. Both were helped, too, by
the systematic lying of their newspapers, which, amid the enforced
silence of all who would not speak as they did, could say what they
pleased without fear of contradiction. Both, too, were able
administrators: Louis points out, in 'his own Account of the Fight at
Dame Europa's School'--a bitter satire on the selfish insincerity of
Imperialism--how hard he worked for years, and how by repressing them
with one hand and giving them employment with the other, he controlled
the terrible Paris _canaille_. This is, in fact, his solitary claim for
forgiveness. But both fell when the moment of pressure came, and the
fall of the nephew is irreparable: for him there can be no 'hundred
days;' even the boundless capabilities of treachery which he found in
Bazaine failed to do anything but seal his fate by convincing France
that, whereas the uncle shed French blood like water in support of his
selfish ambition, the nephew actually paltered with the enemy, and
betrayed the strongest fortress in the country, in the vain hope of
securing foreign support.
It is plain to the most superficial observer that of all the things
which have collapsed in France since last July, none has collapsed so
hopelessly as Imperialism. When the ex-Emperor rushed into war as the
only way of staving off a revolution, France showed herself (as she so
often has done at critical periods of her history) culpably passive.
There were complaisant prefects who assured his Majesty that his people
went with him heart and soul; there were crowds, hired or not, such as
can always be collected in any great city, who shouted _Vive la guerre_
and _à Berlin_; but the peasantry still believed that the Empire meant
peace; and when they afterwards found war come upon them, they fancied
(so strong was their faith in Napoleon) that it was the Prussians who
were the aggressors. Just in the same way on the eve of the Spanish war,
in 1808, the servile Senate said: 'Sire, the will of the French people
goes along with you. This Spanish war is just and necessary. Fathers
envy their sons the glory of rushing to join your ranks, and of winning
another Marengo and another Austerlitz.' And this farce was kept up at a
time when the conscription had grown so odious that the Government had
to imitate Louis XIV.'s _dragonnades_, and to quarter _garnisaires_ upon
the families of those lads who had escaped to the woods, or had fled
across the frontier.
France was passive in July, 1870, as she was more than once during the
first Napoleon's career; the difference is, that the nephew's army, on
which he was supposed to have lavished so much thought and money, and
which, since the _coup d'état_, he had pampered into prætorian
insolence, failed him utterly both for defence and offence; whereas the
uncle always had something which he could trust to fight well, if not to
win battles.
Since Sedan, France, no longer passive, has worked wonders; and every
step in her work has made a relapse to the old state of things more
impossible. 'The man of Sedan,' it was felt all along, could never
return, except behind Prussian bayonets. Had he, on that last fatal day,
cut his way at whatever loss through the encompassing host, and,
throwing himself on Paris, raised a _levée en masse_ to the old cry of
'the country in danger,' matters might have turned out very differently,
both for him and for France; but he could not have so acted without
denying his own principles. His whole career had been an attempt to
juggle with universal suffrage while practising the narrowest despotism,
and now to appeal in real earnest to popular principles, and to give the
pledges necessary to make that appeal a serious one, was an
impossibility for the man who had eagerly snatched at the chances of war
which the crafty Bismarck threw in his way, rather than honestly carry
out the liberal measures which he had at last been forced to adopt.
There is a point beyond which charlatanism cannot go. Thrice had the
uncle felt that this kind of appeal is useless when it is contrary to a
man's whole antecedents: once at Arcis-sur-Aube, when in the midst of
the battle, Sebastiani said, 'Are these all your Majesty's forces?'
'Every man I have.' 'Then does not your Majesty think of raising the
nation?' 'Nonsense: you're dreaming of the way they did things in Spain,
or here in France, in '91. How can you talk of raising a nation whose
nobles and priests have been destroyed by the Revolution, and whose
Revolution has been destroyed by me?' There was nothing, he felt, left
to appeal to. Again, on his return from Elba, wisdom said, 'Wait on
French soil, and crush the invaders at Paris and Lyons;' but this would
have necessitated an appeal to the nation and a pledge that all war
except defensive war should cease, and, as Colonel Charras says, in
words which seem almost prophetical of the events of last July, 'to
re-establish his despotism he could not do without the prestige of
victory: he thought to find it on the frontier, so thither he hastened.'
A third time, when, after Waterloo, Napoleon was among the remnant of
his troops at Laon, it was still free to him to show himself not only
the 'child of the Revolution,' but its legitimate offspring and its
protector. He still shrank instinctively from doing so: bolder, indeed,
than his nephew, he did go to Paris; but with the invincible dislike of
all his race to true freedom of government, he went there merely to see
if there was a chance of carrying on the war without making any real
political concessions.
So it was that, after Sedan, the nephew passed out of history: no amount
of plotting can restore the man who showed himself fool as well as
knave, who fell--not, like his uncle, under the blows of banded
Europe--but because he had allowed himself to be wholly deceived, both
as to the quality and composition of his own army and as to the
dispositions of neighbouring powers. France never can forgive such a
result of twenty years of personal government. But that the ex-Emperor
should disappear out of history is natural enough; the marvel is that he
ever became one of the makers of history. His success was due to the
vitality of the Napoleonic idea, nourished as it was after the
restoration by writers of all kinds--notably by the veteran statesman
who now, more than any one else, has made a return to Imperialism
impossible. For this total revolution in literature it is hard to give a
sufficient reason. Before the restoration, literature, when not venal,
was strongly anti-Bonapartist.'[212] After the Bourbons were restored,
writers began to extol Napoleon as industriously as before they had
decried him. This change was owing partly to French feeling against the
mode of his removal: it was a great humiliation; as Madame de Staël said
(deploring the return from Elba), 'It's all over with liberty if he
succeeds, and with the national independence if he is beaten.' The
nation felt that the peace of 1815 had compromised its independence;
and, in writing down the king who had been brought in by foreign armies,
literary men were acting as the mouthpiece of France. But this is not
all; wounded vanity did much. Under the Empire mind had been powerless,
unless, as in the case of Lacépède and other _savans_, it had submitted
to be the humble tool of force: when Sièyes said, 'I'll be the head and
that little Corsican shall be the arm,' he had quite unwittingly spoken
the truth; for, in Napoleon's system, the head was nothing and the arm
everything. Great, then, was the disappointment when under Louis XVIII.,
and still more under his successor, the head seemed almost as powerless
as before. The heart (if such a word may be used of the hollow system of
Popery) came into play; and, unless a man was _dévôt_, or seemed to be
so, ability of any kind served him little. Add to this the wilful
blindness of the Bourbons, who (it was soon seen) 'had learnt nothing
and forgotten nothing.' Their petty despotism disgusted the nation;
while the 'Memoirs of St. Helena' and a crowd of similar writings made
out, with a sophistry so barefaced that we should fancy it could never
have deceived even Frenchmen, that the Emperor had always acted as a
dutiful son of the revolution, according to the programme which himself
had laid down, that 'liberty, equality, and prosperity shall be
ensured.' Will the nephew ever venture to assert, as the uncle did in
1816, that his government was a constitutional and temperate monarchy,
and that the French people under it were the freest people in Europe?
However this may be, there is no doubt that the claim thus made by
Napoleon I. told immensely on the thought of the nation, and through it
on the masses. Claiming to have saved the revolution by moderating its
violence, the exile of St. Helena persistently called himself its
soldier and its martyr. His wars (he said) had been undertaken to spread
its civilizing influence; and the consciousness of this had made kings
and princes so determined on his overthrow. We, of course, can see
through the hollowness of all this: but the French writers of that day,
finding France humiliated, and knowing that she had been glorious,
actually came to believe, or at any rate fostered the belief, that in
the days of her glory she had been free, since undoubtedly in the days
of her humiliation she was fettered. No wonder the rest were deceived,
since a man of consummate ability, M. Thiers, whose honesty is proved by
his having refused office during some seventeen years of 'personal
government,' could write such a marvellous romance as that which he gave
to the world under the title of 'The Consulate and the Empire.'
Thus, by a combination of causes we may partly account for the change in
the mind of France; and this change told upon the more or less educated
masses. When Thiers wrote as he did; when Victor Hugo--whom a strange
Nemesis afterwards urged to write 'Napoleon the Little'--sang the great
man's praises in 'Lui,' and, throwing moral sanctions to the winds,
declared that
'Tu domines notre siécle, _ange ou démon qu'importe_?'
when Beauchèsne, in 'L'Ecolier,' pathetically described the day-dreams
of the boyish enthusiast; and, yet more, when Béranger sang his 'Vieux
drapeau,' and his 'Serrez vos rangs, Gaulois et Francs,' and, above all,
his 'Souvenirs du Peuple,' no wonder men forgot the real Napoleon, and
accepted the ideal which was so persistently put before them.
Béranger was a true prophet when he sang
'On parlera de sa gloire
Sous le chaume bien longtemps;
L'humble toit en cinquante ans
Ne connaîtra plus d'autre histoire.'
It is not easy to trace how this feeling had so penetrated downwards,
and had so thoroughly laid hold of the lowest stratum, the wholly
uneducated peasantry, that the first time the vote by universal suffrage
was taken, many peasants thought they were voting for the old Emperor.
That it did so is one more proof how soon a nation with great
'recuperative powers' loses the memory of disasters. The cruel
conscriptions which drove mere boys to die in Spain under the fire of
Wellington's seasoned troops--the retreat from Russia, after which 'the
man of Smorgoni' was for a time as unpopular as 'the man of Sedan,' were
forgotten. The heroic defence of Champagne, and the glories which
preceded it, were alone remembered. This will account for the growth of
the Imperial idea in the more fighting parts of France, especially in
Alsace and Lorraine, which have always contributed much more than their
share to the army.
How it was in La Vendée we cannot pretend to say. Napoleon there had
been as ruthless in his way as the 'blues;' he had ordered that every
family which could not prove that all its members were at home and quiet
should lose its property, this being divided between the 'good subjects'
and the occupying troops. Nor can we understand how the Southern
peasants should have welcomed the nephew when they had hated the uncle.
It was against them chiefly that the odious _garnisaires_ had to be
employed; and we all know how they showed their feeling in 1814 by
several times nearly tearing the Emperor to pieces when he was on the
way to Elba, frightening him so that he disguised himself as an English
officer.
North-eastern France was Bonapartist because it was anti-Prussian, and
the Emperor had thoroughly humiliated Prussia. For this special hatred
of Prussia there is ample reason. The Prussian character is not
loveable; even at the best it is singularly domineering and
cantankerous; and during the invasions of French territory (not to speak
of the bloodthirsty pursuit after Waterloo) the Prussians had shown
themselves (as unhappily they too often have during this war)[213] worse
than Cossacks. This special hatred of Prussians comes out continually in
the Erckmann-Châtrian series. The contrast between the bitterness with
which the fights at Ligny and Wavre and the final conflict at Waterloo
are described is remarkable; it may almost be said to be prophetic of
the merciless way in which too much of the fighting has been carried on
within the past few months. 'No quarter' is the word on both French and
Prussian side; and scornful hatred lurks in every phrase of the graphic
account of those savage conflicts which at last left the French
nominally victorious. The English, on the other hand, are 'jolly
fellows, well shaved, and with the get-up of _bons bourgeois_.' We do
not think that, even before the Crimean war, French mothers ever taught
their children to hate us; whereas, _mon fils tu haïras les Prussiens_
was a daily lesson among the peasants of the North-east.[214]
To account for the Napoleonism of the peasants in other parts, we must
add to the feeling that Napoleon had glorified France, on the part of
those who (we said) were only too ready to forget how he had also
humiliated and ruined her, the persistent dread of the _spectre rouge_
on the part of the vast class of little landowners, and thirdly, the
influence of the priests. Both these had been made use of by the uncle.
Whenever he wanted an excuse for despotism, he always got up a Jacobin
plot. This was the pretence for that famous 18th Brumaire, by which
'model and prototype of all _coups d'état_,' as M. Barni calls it, he
destroyed the constitution which he had sworn to defend.
When, as First Consul, he arrested a number of those who remained true
to the Republic--among them Jourdain, the hero of Fleurus--and
threatened to banish them to Cayenne, the pretext was 'the infernal
machine' (very probably 'got up,' like so many more recent
conspiracies), which was denounced as a Jacobin invention. Jacobinism
was his apology for forming (at the beginning of the Empire) eight State
prisons, and for exercising the most rigorous censorship both of the
press and of the stage.
How the priests helped him may be judged from the amusingly profane
addresses made to him on his accession to empire by the different
bishops. The Bishop of Aix wrote: 'Like another Moses, Napoleon has been
summoned by God from the deserts of Egypt,' 'God seems to have said
(wrote the Bishop of Orleans), "My heart hath chosen a new ruler to rule
my people; My almighty arm shall help him in his glorious work, and I
will strengthen his throne. He shall reign over the seas, and the rivers
shall become his servants."' In the eyes of other bishops and capitular
bodies the new emperor is 'another Matthias sent by the Lord,' 'a new
Cyrus,' 'Scripture hath given us, in the reign of Jehoshaphat, a
prophetic outline of his reign.' This, the fitting reward of the
Concordat, was the incense offered up by a servile clergy on the eve of
his coronation; and it matches well with the _Catechism_, published by
authority, and in use in all French churches in 1811.[215] After
repeated injunctions as to the special duty of reverence for the Emperor
and his house, the question is asked, 'Are there not yet other motives
to bind us strongly to our Emperor?'--'Yes; for it is he whom God raised
up in troublous times to re-establish the public worship of the holy
religion of our fathers and to be its protector. He has restored and
preserved public order by his profound and energetic wisdom; he defends
the State by his powerful arm; he is become the anointed of the Lord by
the consecration which he has received from the Sovereign Pontiff, chief
of the Universal Church.'[216]
How the Pope, of whose meanly cruel treatment by Napoleon, the Count
d'Haussonville gave such a graphic account in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_ of two years ago, really felt on the subject, we need not
inquire; with Napoleon the case was simple enough: 'he wanted a clergy
(says Madame de Staël) as he wanted chamberlains and courtiers, and all
the old things over again.' As for his being the restorer of religion,
no praise was ever less merited; he told Cabanis: 'This concordat of
ours is _la vaccine de la religion_; in fifty years it will have killed
it out like a moral small-pox.' On the other hand, before the Concordat
was signed there was full liberty of worship, and nearly eight millions
of people were in full practice of Catholicism. His Concordat was
needless, except for his own purposes; at the outset, indeed, the
Assembly had borne heavily on the clergy: to force them to take oaths
and then to persecute those who refused was to show an ignorance of the
first principles of toleration; and one of the few things which we have
to find fault with in MM. Erckmann-Châtrian's excellent novels is the
way in which the 'refractory priests' are spoken of, and in which the
harsh treatment they underwent is justified, because they disturbed the
peace of families, and intrigued for 'royalist restoration.' But by the
Constitution of the year III. Church and State had been separated, and
freedom of worship restored to every one. There was no need, therefore,
for any effort on Napoleon's part to secure what the Constitution had
already secured; he was, as usual, working simply for himself: 'I did
not despair,' (he writes from St. Helena) 'of sooner or later getting
full control of the Pope; and then what a lever for moving the world,
what a help towards keeping men's minds in hand!'
With the Pope and the Italian clergy, indeed, Napoleon never had the
least success; but in France the large salaries which he gave to the
bishops produced the effect he anticipated; and at last, even in La
Vendée, a good deal of the old feeling died out. The _noblesse_ of
course still spoke of him as a mere _locum tenens_: for them he was
always 'the General Bonaparte, Lieutenant-in-Chief of the Forces of his
Majesty's King Louis XVII.' But the peasantry were gradually taught to
accept him as the friend of religion, and not simply as a temporary
police magistrate who was necessary to keep down their hated enemies the
'Reds.' Of this his nephew reaped the reward, and he moreover was able
to come forward as the defender of the Papacy under circumstances in
which his conduct gratified not only the peasants, but every sincere
Romanist in France, while it caused one more breach in the already
divided Republican camp. If the occupation of Rome was actually
initiated by honest Republicans, they never (not even when they made
Louis Napoleon Prince-President) were guilty of a more fatal mistake.
They shared the reward of all trimmers; supporting 'order' at the
expense of principle, they lost the confidence of the best men of their
party; while the Prince-President, assuming to be the champion of that
'order' which after all they had only defended with half-heartedness,
gained all the credit of the act, and won thereby the support of the
Ultramontanists. Of this support his subsequent vacillation could not
deprive him, because the Ultramontanes were sure that, whatever he might
do in other countries, in France he would not relax those fetters which
the Papacy finds so essential in securing the acceptance of its newly
'formulated dogmas and repressive encyclicals. When we say this, we by
no means assert that the ex-Emperor had the full confidence of the
clergy; that confidence it is not the policy of Rome to accord to any
one. Now again, as in 1848, she has shown that on occasion she can be as
revolutionary as Garibaldi himself, if there is an end to be gained by
being so. Napoleon is lost; despite the ridiculous outcry of London
imperialist papers like _La Situation_, his cause is hopeless; therefore
Rome hastens to give him up, and to affirm that he is rightly punished
for having supported Victor Emmanuel. But, so long as he was a power in
Europe, he received support enough to keep him popular among the
priest-ridden classes, because he was less dangerous than those who
would be sure to succeed him. A Republican government would without
doubt have given up the Roman occupation; while the Orleanists, who
would come to the surface if the Republic failed, are, as the real
friends of religious liberty, the most unacceptable of all to the
Ultramontane party. Guizot, the Orleanist statesman _par excellence_,
ventured to doubt whether it is not an abuse of toleration to allow full
scope to such irreconcilable foes to liberty as the Jesuits; therefore
it was better to uphold Napoleon, and to trust to the influence of the
Empress rather than to provoke a change which was sure to be for the
worse.
But we have said enough to account somewhat for the growth of the
Napoleonic idea, after the first Emperor had done his best by the
failures, and still more by the littleness of his later years, to crush
it.
France, moreover, had been humiliated in 1815, and Louis Philippe kept
her at peace without giving an outlet for enterprise in foreign
colonization. If Algeria had been less of a mere military settlement; or
if, instead of Algeria, France had laid hold of a colony better suited
for Europeans to thrive in, the Orleans line might have still been on
the throne. But the nation was slow to realize the amount of waste which
had accompanied the wars of the Empire. France did not like to keep
quiet and repair the ugly gaps left in her prosperity; she wanted to
make a grand figure before the world. Louis Philippe thought that by
combined repression and corruption he could check this restlessness; and
so he, a constitutional king, was led into a career of unconstitutional
conduct--the proximate, though not the remote, cause of the revolution
in 1848.
The _facilis descensus_ from a republic to a despotism was seldom more
inevitable than amid the chaos of parties which succeeded the
Provisional Government. France wanted _prestige_: who more likely to
give it to her than the nephew of the man who won Jena and Austerlitz?
France wanted protection against the 'Reds,' 'the enemies of order and
property:' surely, the very man to secure this to her was _l'homme
providentiel_, who could sway the army as one man, and who, though he
professed to believe in universal suffrage, and to have a high regard
for the working man, was known to be hand in glove with the great
financiers and capitalists? As Victor Hugo puts it in his little history
of the _coup d'état_, 'tous les hommes du passé, depuis tel banquier
juif qui se sentait un peu Catholique jusqu'à tel évêque qui se sentait
un peu juif,' all combined to work up the Napoleonic idea, and to induce
the masses to accept what was the best government for stock-jobbers and
Court tailors and highly paid functionaries of all sorts. It was the
Nemesis of 1793 which produced the _coup d'état_ of December 1851: but
for the recollection of the Reign of Terror, of that wild carnival of
cruelty and rapine, such an outrage would have been impossible. Men of
substance argued that what had been might be again; and therefore they
threw in their lot with the saviour of society, even while they abhorred
the means which he employed for its salvation. National susceptibility,
then, and a half unconscious desire to wipe off old scores, combined
with Popish influence and the dread of the 'Reds,' helped to give
tangibility to this long-cherished Napoleonic idea, by bringing about
the second Empire.
A few words, now, on the causes and the history of its decay. These, as
usual in political and social matters, are complex and seemingly
conflicting. First, those who looked for _prestige_ were not satisfied
with the declaration, _l'Empire c'est la paix_, even explained away
though it was by the many wars undertaken in the last twenty years.
France fighting side by side with England in the Crimea and in China,
was not the same as France carrying her eagles into almost every
European capital. This feeling forced on the war which resulted in the
sudden peace of Villafranca--the suddenness of which peace proved (to
the French Emperor's detractors) that Magenta and Solferino were not
such very decided victories, after all. It always seemed in Napoleon
III.'s undertakings, that he was stopped at a certain point, just as if
he had not really been the master of France, but was only free to use
her resources within the range of his tether. This may be due to the
financial complications in which he and his creatures were always mixed
up, or to that indecision of character which, while it gave him for a
time a reputation for profound wisdom, did him immense harm by making
men suspect him of deep plotting when he was simply at a loss how to
reconcile conflicting ideas, and by exciting profound distrust on
occasions where pity would have been the more appropriate feeling.
Herein he paid the penalty (almost always exacted in all ranks of life)
of seeing both ways. The notion which couples moral obliquity with
crookedness of vision is confined to the vulgar; but comparatively few
can avoid distrusting the mental power of looking at once in several
directions. The ex-Emperor had his English experience; his political
education was far in advance of that of most of his subjects; he saw the
weak points of each party, and saw too how each drew strength from the
amount of truth which it had grasped. Could he have lived as president
of a republic in which all these elements should have had free scope,
France might have thriven morally during the last nineteen years, as
much as she has thriven materially. But the French character, no less
than his own designs, forbade this. Frenchmen cannot bear to 'give and
take;' their _logique_ shows itself by forcing them into the streets to
battle for their cause as soon as there is the feeblest chance of
success; and, above all, his aim was, not to give France the best
government, but to keep himself by all means at her head. Hence, lying
and repression became his instruments. One party was played off against
another. The _prolétaires_ kept in good humour by the Hausmannizing, not
of Paris only, but of half the French cities, were told that the Emperor
was really their friend; and so long as they got _panem et circenses_
they seem pretty generally to have believed it. The _parti prêtre_ was
petted at home; and the control which the clergy was allowed to have
over education more than compensated for the cutting off of the Romagna.
The moneyed class, and all the crowd of little _rentiers_, who are
almost forced to accept the existing order of things, saw by the vast
growth of public credit and by the steady price of public securities,
that the Empire was the millennium of men of means. The army, petted and
spoiled, was full of dislike for civilians, and of chauvinist contempt
for foreigners. The literary class alone feebly kept up the struggle;
and its protest against the dictum 'la France c'est moi,' was chiefly
confined to such far-fetched allusions as we find in 'Labiénus' and in
the 'leaders' of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The French are brave; but
those who did not accept the Empire were cowed by the _coup d'état_;
and in such circumstances they are of all people the most patient under
what they have come to believe inevitable.
But though nothing was done much was felt, and the mistakes and
disappointments of later years soon brought the feeling to the surface.
From the very first, nothing but the _coup d'état_ had thoroughly
succeeded. The Crimean war ended too soon; it failed in its main object,
that of crippling Russia, and it was from the outset distasteful to a
large party because it drew France so close to England. The Austrian war
wanted the dash and vigour of Marengo; and the Mexican campaign (so
opposed by Thiers in 1864) showed that the ruler of France was afraid to
move when the United States bade him stand still. Meanwhile Poland had
been twice given up--and Poland is very dear to a large section of the
French; the Confederate States had been abandoned, and Denmark had been
left unhelped to the tender mercy of Prussia and Austria. Military
_prestige_ had gone, despite the numbers and the ruinous cost of the
army. All the while the occupation of Rome was a standing outrage on the
feelings of the most thinking part of the nation; and, combined with it,
by that strange inconsistency which marks all Napoleonic procedure, the
creation of the kingdom of Italy alienated the Ultramontanes, and set
them plotting, after their fashion, against the man whom it was still
their interest outwardly to support.
Herein uncle and nephew are thoroughly at one. Both Lanfrey and the
author of the 'Romans nationaux' remind us how constantly the first
Napoleon displayed a cynical disregard for men's feelings, without
apparently seeing that thereby he was giving irreparable offence. He
looked on men as reasoning machines, and quite left out of account all
the sentimental springs of action. Those whom he needlessly insulted
would, he thought, recognise both his power to crush and also to benefit
them, and therefore they would be his obedient servants. Such was the
state of the Continent that he was scarcely disabused of this notion
till he undertook to govern Spain. Italy submitted to exactions more
galling though less ruinous than those which the Germans have been
making upon France. Germany, thoroughly dissatisfied with its own serene
highnesses and arch-dukes, and looking upon Napoleon as the true
successor of Hoche and Moreau, and the others who had spread republican
ideas through the Fatherland, was content to bear a great deal before
she showed any signs of anger. Spain certainly set Continental Europe
an example in this. Napoleon might prove beyond dispute that under his
tutelage she would soon rise rapidly in position and wealth; but Spain
had been cruelly outraged by the treatment to which her people as well
as her royal family had been subjected; and Spain cared not a jot for
either position or wealth compared with a successful revolt against
French occupation. We know how wholly, in dealing with individuals, the
uncle left the power of personal feelings out of account; the nephew,
rarely forgetting this in regard to the individual, forgot it when
dealing with classes. To the clergy for instance, he said, 'Italy must
be reconstituted, and to that end the Pope must give up the Romagna and
the Marches. You shall have our troops still in Rome, and I will arrange
that you may control French education pretty much as you please.' The
clergy, accepting what he gave, never even pretended to be grateful for
the boon; they never forgave the 'spoliation of the Church;' and thus
the ex-emperor's conduct, as usual, displeased both parties, and
deprived him of any support except what it was manifestly men's interest
to give him.
Then came the dread of Prussia, and the sudden attempt (almost as bad as
deploying under fire) to reorganise that army for which so much money
had been drawn that had really been expended on other objects. The
severer conscription made the peasants restless; and the _plébiscite_
was called for much in that spirit of distrust which set David numbering
the people. When it was found that a considerable percentage of the army
had voted the wrong way, it was felt that the pyramid, hitherto propped
up on its small end by bayonets, was tottering; and the war, of which we
have lately seen the sad issue, was hurried on as the sole change of
retrieving the fortunes of the dynasty.
It is not our business to gauge the complicity of the French people in
the affair of Benedetti and Gramont.[217] France, as we said, showed
herself culpably passive; Paris, say the French 'irreconcilables,' was
culpably complaisant. We may be thankful that here in England we have
not for centuries seen twenty years of such a debasing system as that
which made Paris what it was till it was purified in the furnace of
affliction. We fancy that the reaction against the despotism of the
capital will be very strong. There is far more independent life left
than most people imagine in the French provincial cities, far more than
in our large towns; and they were increasingly indignant at the
pre-eminence which the imperial system gave to Paris in everything. This
exaltation of Paris is natural in a dynasty which has no roots in France
itself. Paris had proved herself in 1790 capable of taking the lead and
giving the law to all France; Paris, therefore, must be kept strong in
order that all France might be of one mind. How different from the days
of Henry IV., or of any of the old race! To the Corsican intruder the
peasant of Beauce was just the same as the peasant of the
Bourbonnais--merely a fighting machine. Hence the real depression of the
provinces, despite of some exceptional improvements in Brittany and in
the _landes_ of the Gironde. The first Napoleon's levies so reduced the
relative strength of the country districts that Paris, in his time,
gained a position which she has ever since held. Whatever form of
government she chose the provinces echoed her choice. Disliking her,
they still never thought of shaking off her yoke. That Paris, befooled
by Béranger, by chauvinism, and by the popular fiction of imperialism,
should have chosen such a President as she did, is a strange comment on
all the bombastic nonsense which Victor Hugo talks about
_Paris-cerveau_--Paris, the brain of the world. Paris now, conscious of
her degradation, is avenging herself by heaping all sorts of abuse on
the man of her choice--'the phlegmatic perjurer,' 'the silent Tartuffe,'
as M. Leclercq calls him. But the choice was hers, and the degradation
which resulted from the years of personal rule followed with peculiar
rapidity owing to a want in the French character. The most 'logical' of
nations is indeed terribly consistent; it always seems to want that
happy power of stopping short before things have gone so far as to make
a catastrophe inevitable.
The last years of the late emperor's reign were morally unhealthy beyond
the average of the most immoral times since the Reformation. It is not
that people were worse in their conduct: they were more cynical. They
had got to laugh at everything, to despise all sanctions--even those
shadowy ones which the first revolution substituted for the sanctions of
religion. The years in which Cora Pearl and the rest of the demi-monde
were the arbiters of fashion, in which Thérèse was the pet of
drawing-rooms, and the younger Dumas the popular _littérateur_, saw the
extinction of much that was noble in France, for they witnessed what we
may call the apotheosis of epicureanism. Paris seemed to have lost all
moral sense since the time that its government had ceased to have any.
The efforts of Parisian talent resulted in nothing but ill-digested and
unwholesome works. The upper classes did as the Court did--that crew of
wholesale stock-jobbers, like the Duke of Morny, among whom, one who was
a strange mixture of reckless extravagance and gross bigotry presided as
mistress of the revels. The masses were sunk in ignorance, and lived a
life--those Paris _ouvriers_ who have so often taken in hand to
regenerate the world--which it would terrify the average English workman
to contemplate. The middle class, the Famille Benoîton of the play,
vegetated, made money, and reasoned on false premises. It was Babylon
over again, as poor Prévost-Paradol styles it. Tongue-tied on all high
subjects, the Parisians flung themselves mad with delight upon that
class of ideas which soon brings thought down to its lowest level, 'Make
money, never mind how, and live simply to gratify your meanest
instincts,' that was everybody's maxim--_leur esprit s'était abâtardi_.
At the same time Paris still asserted that superiority over all the rest
of the world which her writers had first claimed when they began to
write up the first empire. Her writers kept on blowing one another's
trumpets, and crying out that theirs was the great nation, and that to
the people among whom primary education is more deficient than even in
Spain was entrusted the mission of indoctrinating Europe with ideas.
Grossly ignorant of their own shortcomings the French were, last July,
quite incapable of forming a fair estimate of any other nation. Because
Napoleon III. had always managed to mystify his people as to what he was
going to do, therefore they fancied he had mystified Europe. Because he
had met Bismark at Biarritz, and had been always fond of personal
conference with princes, therefore they dreamed of Tilsit over again,
and refused to see that on every point their master was either outwitted
or else over-mastered by other statesmen. All the follies which come of
boasting, of contempt for one's adversary, of unmeasured self-esteem, of
confidence in one's power of doing anything in any line whatever, seemed
to have burst out at once into monstrous growth in the Paris of last
July. M. Leclercq collects chronologically the choice passages from the
_Figaro_, the _Gaulois_, &c., which show the feeling of those who
claimed to be the leaders of thought; and surely nothing better than
such a collection can justify the almost universal dislike to France
which was felt at the beginning of the war. Belgian as he is, he knows
how bad the supremacy of Paris has been for Brussels, her little
imitator, and he hopes that this supremacy is gone never to be restored.
In this hope he gives us page after page of blatant absurdity, of
grotesque and childish rant, of transparent falsehood, from the
inaugural 'leader' in _Figaro_ down to the wild dithyramb which Victor
Hugo published when he entered Paris after the 4th September.
It is worth while to quote a few sentences from _Figaro_ of the 17th
July:--
'Drums beat, trumpets sound--it is war.'
* * * * *
'France, France, righteous land, hospitable land, noble
people; always thou shalt be first among the first ... thy
name is LEGION!'
* * * * *
'The cannon makes the pavement of the big city ring with a
dull sound.... Make way for the cannon, and hats off! It is
going to clear a passage for civilisation and humanity.
* * * * *
'These Prussians, too, have said that you were drawing
back! France drawing back; 'tis like the sun standing
still. And who is this new Joshua who shall make the sun of
France stand still! Moltke, perhaps!'
And the 'leader' (what an abuse of the word) winds up with a prayer 'to
the God who has said that they who take the sword shall perish by the
sword, and who ordains that liberty's furrows should be blood-watered,
since no otherwise can the germ of freedom be developed.' Many have been
offended during the war with the tone of Emperor William's telegrams;
but even the _Standard_ must confess that they are infinitely preferable
to the blasphemous hiccoughings of the _Figaro_.
The strangest part of it, perhaps, is the monstrous lying; Austria (we
are told) is thirsting for revenge:--'The Austrian aristocracy is wild
about the insolence of these Brandenburg margraves, _these parvenu,
princes_' (the appropriateness of the epithet from a Bonaparte of a
Hohenzöllern deserves remark).... 'Frankfort has shut all its shops, and
its trade won't recover the shock for many years.... Prussia has
withdrawn all the able-bodied men out of Hanover for fear of an
outbreak.' The truth being that, except a portion of the highest class,
and a very few of the lowest, the whole Hanoverian population went in
heart and soul for German unity.
This incredible ignorance of other nations is matched by an equal
ignorance of the French army and its belongings:--'War can bring us no
annoying surprises, for we have the most marvellous body of
_éclaireurs_ in Europe,' is an assertion repeated over and over again
towards the end of last July, at a time when the Uhlans were already
beginning to show what they were capable of, and when French officers
were finding out that they had nothing provided in the way of maps,
except out-of-date plans of East Prussian fortresses. The absurd vanity
which could write in this way when the Prussians were showing that they
knew every inch of French soil, is only equalled by the craven way in
which _Figaro's_ readers gave in whenever Prussian audacity, backed by
Prussian knowledge of their country, enabled Uhlans or regulars to make
a dash. The _Cornhill_ tale, 'How the Prussians took Mousseux-les-Caves'
(under the guidance of a sub-lieutenant who had been clerk to a wine
merchant there), is a story which has been acted out to the letter, not
once but fifty times, to the confusion of those who were boasting all
the while about their 'admirable corps d'éclaireurs.' The boasting was
about as well-grounded as that which, a fortnight later, declared that
of Prince Frederick Charles's army nothing was left but the remnants,
and that the whole corps of Bismark's white cuirassiers had been cut off
to a man.
The companion piece to all this senseless exaggeration, encouraged, we
must remember, and endorsed by the highest authority--first by the
Emperor himself and then by Count Palikao--is Victor Hugo's dithyramb
aforesaid. It appeared in the _Electeur Libre_ of 3rd October, and
surpasses anything which Walt Whitman, in his wildest moments, ever
dreamt of:--
'We are but one Frenchman, but one Parisian, but one single
heart; there is but one citizen left, 'tis you, 'tis I,
'tis all of us. Where the heart is, there will be our
breasts to make a barrier.
'Resistance to-day, deliverance to-morrow: that sums up
everything. We are no more flesh, but stone. I don't know
my own name any more, I am called, "Country, forward on the
foe!" We are called, "France, Paris, stand like a wall."...
'The Pantheon wonders what it can do to make room beneath
its dome for all this people who have a right to lie
there.... Each time the shells fall, and the grape-shot
roars, what see we in our streets? women tripping by with a
smile. O Paris, thou hast crowned the statue of Strasburg
with flowers; history will crown thee with stars!'
It is as hard for sober Englishmen to imagine a people delighting in
edicts penned in that style, as it is for us to read without disgust any
two consecutive pages of _L'homme qui rit_. Hugo's latest novel is well
matched by his latest political utterances.
One encouraging sign is, that Paris journalism grows ashamed of itself:
the lies, indeed, continue to the last: insincerity seems (since the
first Napoleon's time) to have become inseparable from French bulletins;
but the _Siècle_ of the middle of November proves what a change had come
on:--
'It is _esprit_ which has ruined France; the esprit, we
mean, of the boulevards, that _esprit_ nine-tenths of which
are made up of puns and jokes, of scepticism, of _blague_,
and of which the remaining tenth is boastful nonsense and
absurd lies.... So long as the _Figaro_, _Paris Journal_,
_Gaulois_ and all the rest keep up above the circulation of
500, which would suffice for the comic actors and actresses
who ought to be their only readers, there is no hope of
seeing France recover herself. Men talk with scorn of the
Greeks of the lower empire who were arguing about the kind
of light which shone on Mount Tabor, while Mahomet II. was
breaching their walls. But these Greeks were eagles
compared with our _boulevardiers_. They discussed a
theologico-physical question, wild and absurd, no doubt,
but still showing a capacity for lofty thought; our
_spirituel_ newspapers discuss the scandals which they rake
up out of the moral sewers of the capital.... If the
present war ends without having killed, not scotched, this
_esprit boulevardier_, peace will be no use, it will be
nothing but a halt in the mire.'
M. Leclercq's comment on this is--
'If we, whom the second Empire has so poisoned through its
infamous press, have not energy enough to make a reaction
against Parisian manners and Parisian _esprit_, we shall
fall as low as our neighbours, and shall soon imbibe that
scorn of truth and reason which they have shown.'
This, from a Belgian, is at least as humiliating to Paris as any of the
Prussian victories.
From politics, as from warlike criticism, M. Leclercq abstains almost
wholly: of course, he cannot help wondering at Bazaine's behaviour at
Metz; as we heard it lately expressed by a great English financier,
unable, like most financiers, to help liking the Emperor after all:--'I
won't say Bazaine was a traitor; that is not quite fair upon him. But I
will say that he thought more of his government than he did of France.
He might have prevented the investment of Paris, there is not a doubt of
it.' The decay of the Napoleonic idea is put in a startling light, when
we reflect that Bazaine was, before the end of last September, almost
the only Imperialist in France. Paris, which had been so delighted at
the prospect of glory as to forget all about the _coup d'état_, went
round as one man. In fact, Sedan was hurried on because Paris could not
be trusted: there was no sincerity in the ex-Emperor's professions and
concessions. The Parisians knew that, and though they had been ready
enough to shout against the Prussians, they were only waiting for their
opportunity to get rid of their own ruler. It is the old story of a
house divided against itself. The poor men were mowed down at Sedan by
shells from such a distance that they could not see whence they were
fired, simply because it was 'useless' for Napoleon to go to Paris. The
idea of really honestly trusting to the country, and giving pledges for
future conduct, never presented itself as possible in 1870 any more than
in 1814 and 1815.
On one point M. Leclercq finds just fault with the Republican
government: they decreed a second expulsion of Germans from Paris, and
they vowed not only never to yield an inch of French soil, but never to
raze a stone of one of her fortresses:--'As to the soil (says our
author), let the inhabitants decide; but the offer to dismantle Metz and
Strasburg, and, above all, the little fortresses which have so long
wished to be made open towns, would at once have set them right with all
the noblest minds in Europe: to act as they did was to play into the
hands of the King of Prussia.' But M. Leclercq is somewhat of a
peace-at-any-price man.
He is a prophet, too, and delights in the thought that France, before
long, will be a federation like the United States. Its provinces will
then (he says) resume their old importance--'the life now heaped up in
Paris will be spread abroad where it is needed.' Paris, no doubt, has
done nobly, and there is, after all, a good side to her character. He is
as little desirous as we are to deny this; but, then, the fault was
mainly hers. Had she last autumn stood firmly by the Republican party,
instead of falling so readily and blindly into the trap which Louis
Napoleon laid for her, war would have been impossible. She enabled the
Emperor to begin; and then, by her fickle restlessness, she hampered his
movements and forced him to fight, as it were, with one hand tied up.
Instead of Hugo's _Paris-cerveau_, M. Leclercq calls her
_Paris-spectacle, Paris-plaisir, Paris-panache_, and he sees no future
for France except in her humiliation: _il faut trépaner_ (he says) _le
cerveau de la France_.
The _Papiers Secrets_ need not occupy us long; they were hardly worth
the trouble of unearthing. The Government of National Defence might
surely have found better work for men like De Kératry, Lavertujon, and
Cochut, than to be rummaging among the rubbish found at the Tuileries,
at St. Cloud, and at Meudon. If they had so destroyed the environs of
Paris as to prevent the Prussians from finding shelter; if they had (as
common sense would have dictated) fortified Versailles, connecting it
with the _enceinte_ by a strong military line, and used their abundant
labour to make the works impregnable, it would have been far better than
to have wasted precious time in docketing papers which are certainly
disappointing. They reveal nothing, for we already know that the Empire
was based upon corruption and _espionnage_; and all they do is to enable
the curious reader to follow the ramifications of this imperial system
into unsuspected corners.
Thus, at the outset, we have a letter from the Empress _en route_ for
Suez, which shows her grammar and orthography as much at fault as those
of the fine ladies of Queen Anne's time, and which is sadly like what
Henrietta of France might have written to Charles I.:--
'Plus on aura besoin de force plus tard, et plus il sera
nécessaire de prouver au pays qu' on a _des idées_ et non
_des expédients_.' "Amuse-toi" (is her advice to her
husband) 'il faut se refaire un moral, comme on se refait
une constitution affaiblie, et une idée constante finie
(sic) par user le cerveau le mieux organisé.'
Altogether Eugenie does not come off badly in the published
correspondence.
Of the chapter on Napoleon's mistresses we need say nothing except that
it will disappoint the prurient reader. Marguerite Bellanger, who first
fathered a son on him, and then (after being managed by the _président
du cour_, poor M. Devienne) confessed she had cheated him, and Miss
Howard, are the only two who come to the front; the latter, by the way,
appears to have received in the course of two years five and a half
millions of francs--good interest for having paid 'the Prince's' debts
when he was in England. It is unsafe to state anything about the
ex-Emperor's private property. The 'facts' have been contradicted and
re-asserted; but there they are, in this little pamphlet, with full
details, sixty-three millions of francs, including the accounts with
Baring of London, with Kindlet of Vienna, with Funder and Plitz of St.
Petersburg, with Berg von Dussen of Amsterdam, and Jecker in Mexico, and
Brown Brothers of New York. What he had in the French funds the author,
of course, professes himself unable to tell; but _en revanche_ he gives
(in the chapter headed _ce que coûtaient les impérialists_) the whole of
the enormous civil list, a great deal of which was (as is proved by
marginal notes on the documents) paid by the Emperor over and above the
allowance, without the intervention of the Ministry.
We all know how persistently Pierre Bonaparte begged for money, and how
recklessly money was wasted on affairs like the Prince Imperial's
baptism, but the amount expended per month on men like Baron Jérome
David, M. Granier de Cassagnac, and others of the 'vendus' is
prodigious; and we are told that of the actual total we can form no
notion, the usual plan of payment having been one which may be
recommended to our own 'man in the moon'--a trusty go-between used to
breathe on the glass of the office door, and then write with his finger
the sum which he was authorised to draw, whereupon it was paid without
question.
Of the _Cabinet Noir_, where letters were opened, according to a system
adopted in France at any rate since Louis XIV.'s day, we have all heard
a good deal. The actual letter-stealers were certain _concierges_ with
whom the postmen were instructed to leave all letters addressed to
certain persons. These letters were then carried off to M. Saintonier,
18, Rue Les Cases, who opened them, had them copied, if necessary, and,
if possible, returned them in time for the next delivery. Among the
copies found is a remarkable letter from Ducrot, at Strasburg, to
Trochu, dated 1st December, 1866, setting forth the dangerous state of
feeling in Germany, and pointing out that Prussia can get ready 600,000
men and 1,200 guns far sooner than France can muster half the number.
Ducrot animadverts severely on the 'stupid vanity' which makes his
countrymen think they can choose their own time, and get their Great
Exhibition well over before they begin. He says, too, that the frontier
swarms with Prussian agents, and that the feeling between the Moselle
and the Vosges is far less French than people fancy:
'They are sons and grandsons of the men who, in 1815,
petitioned the Holy Alliance that Alsace might be re-united
to Germany.... The Prussians are working here just as I am
told they did in Bohemia three months before their war with
Austria began.'
Surely the Emperor was warned; and that, in spite of all warnings, he
should have acted as he did, justifies as well as explains the scorn
which all parties alike have manifested for him.
These papers, in fact, remind us that imperialism was based on
_surveillance publique_, on a spy system so vast as to embrace lists of
all the 'dangerous men,' of whatever views, throughout the Empire. The
prop of this system was the terrible power of arbitrary arrest given to
all prefects by the 10th article of the Criminal Code. How the nation
which boasts of being exceptionally _logique_ reconciles such an article
with the principles of 1789 we cannot imagine; but it is clear that a
Government, resting on such a basis, could only stand by its prestige.
At whatever cost, it was necessary last July 'to do something,' and at
Sedan the ex-Emperor judged rightly that he had better fall into
Prussian hands than trust to feelings which even his uncle had not
ventured to rely on.
Persigny, according to the letters contained in the _Papiers Secrets_,
was Louis Napoleon's Strafford. As late as December, 1867, he
memorialises the Emperor at great length on the state of the nation, and
exclaims against the folly of concessions:
'Your enemies,' (says he) 'under the pretence of setting up
Parliamentary rule, are working your ruin. I see it in
their every movement. I watch them and note the bitterest
hatred--hatred! and something more--showing itself in look,
word, and gesture; and your Ministers bow down and humbly
beg the Opposition to withdraw their motions.... If your
majesty sees no harm in all this, it's no use my making
plans to put out the fire that's burning up your house;
but, anyhow, I can't go on with abstract studies amid such
moral anarchy as this.'
Persigny, at any rate, was faithful, and, we believe, felt proper scorn
for the miserable policy which tried to secure the _bourgeoisie_ by
alarming them every now and then with sham plots. Except the Orsini and
Pianori plots, and the Villette affair of last summer, all the plots
were, we are told, hatched by Pietri and Lagrange. Thus Greco, who was
condemned to life transportation in 1853, was let out one night from
Mazas by M. Lagrange himself, lived for years in America on a pension of
£250 and then came back to Paris under a feigned name, and worked as a
detective. The man, we read, is now in prison, and has made a full
confession of his antecedents.
That Ollivier, at the end of 1869, was anxious to infuse new blood into
the Imperial councils, and also to win over 'the few men of talent between
thirty and forty years of age _who had not already been driven into
the revolutionary ranks_,' is a proof that the Constitutional-Imperialist
was more clear-sighted than his enemies will admit. That the Empress,
after Wörth, should have telegraphed to her husband not on any account
to return to Paris, as she could not be answerable for the consequences,
shows a weakness of character which the admirers of Eugenie certainly
did not anticipate.
These quotations from Paris newspapers and secret documents help to show
why the Empire fell. It was unsound. However we may differ as to the
amount of culpability shared by the French nation, or even by the
Parisians, there is no doubt of the rottenness of the whole system. That
it has been swept away is a gain for the world--a gain for France which
will outweigh all her hopes, if only (in the words of the _Siècle_) the
_esprit boulevardier_, the street-idler spirit, disappears along with
the _régime_ which fostered it; and if that hardness towards the poor,
and indifference to their sufferings, which are too characteristic of
the French wealthier classes, can be modified.
And now for a very few facts to show what a poor idol was the uncle of
such a nephew. The three writers, Lanfrey, Barni, and Erckmann-Châtrian,
have done more than any others to disabuse the French mind about
Napoleonism. The cheap edition of Barni, from which the analysis and
_seriatim_ confutation of M. Thiers' books are omitted, has been
immensely read; that such a book could be published in France in 1870
was a sign of the times quite as alarming to imperialists as the known
disaffection of a part of the army. Besides these Charras, Scherer,
Quinet, and Eugene Pelletan had for years been working against the
worship of which Thiers was so long the prophet, and had succeeded in
proving to all thoughtful Frenchmen that Fichte and Channing were much
nearer the truth than was the romancer who wrote the 'Consulate and
Empire.'
Our remarks must necessarily be brief; but we would call special
attention to what M. Lanfrey tells about the early life of Napoleon: so
much seems accounted for by such circumstances acting on such a
temperament. Corsica was passing through a crisis when he was a boy; his
father, head of one of the most influential families, went over to the
French side when he saw resistance was hopeless. The son, who began life
an ardent patriot, cursed his father for not having shared Paoli's
exile. The family, however, profited by his change of side. He himself,
displaying that same skill in managing men, above all Frenchmen, for
which his son was afterwards so remarkable, became the confidential
adviser of the governor and his cabinet. His children were provided for
on the different royal foundations then so common in France. Napoleon
went to Brienne, and thence to Paris; the great poverty of his family,
and the humiliating position in which he found himself among the cadets
of noble houses, accustomed to spend money as recklessly at their
military colleges as our boys nowadays do at Sandhurst, made him
cynical. The references to his want of means are frequent in his early
journals; but this consciousness of poverty did not deprive him of his
keen power of observation. His journals are an admixture of practical
shrewdness and of originality expressed in wild bombast. He soon took
the measure of those with whom he was brought in contact, fathomed their
weaknesses, and adroitly made use of them. Life in Paris in the days
when young Bonaparte first went there must have been trying to a young
man's faith. Bonaparte had been 'finished' under the _régime_ which was
said to have existed _par les femmes et pour les femmes_; but before he
was fully a man the old system was swept away, and Paris was a scene on
which the most fantastic absurdities were enacted in the name of
liberty. The selfish greed of the Republicans seems to have done more
than anything else to make the young man a disbeliever in the grand
phrases which he so freely used. His determination to act for himself
comes out strikingly in his first Italian campaign, when by his happy
boldness against Wurmser he had made the convention of Loeben
inevitable. Throughout the preliminaries he behaved as an independent
prince. He told the Directory what he was doing, and received their
instructions, and from time to time acted upon them; but the only way in
which he showed himself a faithful servant of the government was by
putting money and art-treasures in their way. The greed which these
Parisian deputies displayed was something incredible: and their young
general encouraged them in it. He told them that Italy was rich and able
to pay; and the contributions which he levied--though trifling compared
with the amounts of recent Prussian requisitions--were sufficiently
grievous to drive the people of the Milanese to revolt. Leghorn, for
instance, had to pay two million francs for the _privilege_ of being
protected against the English. How Venice was treated is well known.
'The child of the revolution' betrayed that city to Austria as cynically
as he afterwards crushed the Ligurian republic. 'Give them (said he,
writing of the Corfiotes), plenty of talk about old Greece and liberty:
it will please them, and it means nothing.' He is always the same,
pitiless in his scorn of that _bavardage_, to put a stop to which he
tells Menou that he was leaving Egypt. No success ever pleased him more
than the way in which he fooled Sièyes, the man of ideas--making use of
his reputation as a constitution-builder, and then showing 'the head'
that as soon as its work was done it must give way to the arm.
Lanfrey's account of the 18th Brumaire, when only two of the five
directors, Gohier and Moulins, stood firm, and when the affair of the
Orangerie consummated by force what had been begun by corruption, is
exceedingly instructive. It shows how, out of such a chaos, the rise of
the ablest man was inevitable. Had Napoleon been a Washington he would,
of course, have risen for far other than selfish ends; he would at once
have taken in hand the constitution of which he so well knew the
defects, and would have perfected it. Even had he been a Cromwell,
earnest and impressed with a really noble idea, he would have looked at
home instead of abroad, and have proved that 'the empire is peace.'
Being what he was, the successful military commander, with no rule of
action, except to make everything further his own advancement, he began
by destroying representative life, and making even the judges his
creatures, at the same time that he entered on that career of war in
which he never paused save for short breathing times. A true instinct
told him that either the French must have _bonâ fide_ freedom, or must
be drawn away from politics by being kept always at war. He may have
mistrusted his ability to play the part of Washington; or what he had
seen of Frenchmen may well have made him doubt whether they would
appreciate his self-denial. Anyhow he never tried them; war became a
necessity of his position; and to make war he did not shrink from so
thoroughly exhausting France that we may doubt if she has suffered so
much by this last ruinous war, and yet more ruinous peace, as she did by
the long struggle which ended at Waterloo. The recklessness of last July
was but a recognition by the nephew of the uncle's maxim, that 'by war,
and war only, can our position be kept safe.'
Another point in common between uncle and nephew, is reckless
expenditure; we do not sufficiently remember that, besides the
conscription, the first Napoleon had the whole wealth of the nation
under his personal control. He used it as the resources of the Second
Empire have been used. The vast salaries of senators, the bribes, direct
and indirect, the encouragement of a luxury which made large means
essential--all this soon destroyed 'the austere simplicity of the
republic.' '_Il faut se montrer_' was the phrase in everybody's mouth,
'for if we do not come forward as friends of things as they are, we
shall have none of the prizes which are being so lavishly distributed.'
It was imperial Rome over again.
Such a system could not last; and the way in which France succumbed
after Waterloo, while it does not exalt our opinion of French gratitude
(for, after all, the first Napoleon had for years given France all that
the mass of Frenchmen ask for), shows how inherently weak the strongest
'tyranny' (in the Greek sense) must always be. Any one who wants a
simple and natural account of how Napoleonism grew up out of the folly
and corruption and strife of the republicans, and of the helpless
disgust with which the mass of the nation submitted when they saw what
Napoleonism really meant, should study the Erckmann-Châtrian series. We
do not wonder that the writers should have been elected as deputies for
the Meurthe and the Haut Rhin, so thoroughly do their books photograph
life and thought in these most republican departments. The peasant
proprietor, who has bought with his hard-earned savings a little patch
of confiscated land, is as fiercely bent on keeping it as ever tigress
was on defending her cubs. He is told that kings and nobles, creatures
of Pitt and Coburg, are sworn to wrest it from him; and his previous
experience of kings and nobles assures him that he has nothing to hope
if he fall into their clutches. That was the secret of Napoleon's
strength; he went forth as the soldier of the Republic, predestined to
show Europe that it was hopeless to dream of restoring the _émigrés_.
How the true Republicans, who formed the nucleus of his armies, got
gradually depraved until they became the 'dogs of war' of the Old Guard
is wonderfully well set forth; and is, we fear, only too truly
paralleled in this recent war, in which the moral deterioration of the
German citizen-soldier has, like everything else, gone on at railroad
pace.
The Erckmann-Châtrian novels have been compared with the Waverley
series. We do not think the comparison a happy one. They do not aim at
Sir Walter Scott's intricacy of plot; the stories are exceedingly
simple, and the events (_péripéties_ is the untranslateable word which
best describes them) are unfolded historically, rather than after the
manner of a romance; the human agent merely serves to string together a
number of sketches from actual affairs. On the other hand, the
Erckmann-Châtrian books show that rare power of accurate nature-painting
which belongs almost wholly to very modern times, and which shines forth
so conspicuously in our own George Eliot as well as in Dickens, and
which among French writers is best seen, perhaps, in Georges Sand. Very
different this from the landscape style of Scott, which has beauties of
its own, but which differs from them much as a picture of Wilson, or
Constable, or 'old Crome' differs from one by Tenniel. In the 'Romans
Nationaux,' too, there is a vast deal more direct political teaching
than 'the author of Waverley' ever attempted. He no doubt had very
strong views of his own; and he managed, strangely enough, to make a
sentimental Jacobitism fashionable at the very time when 'his most
Sacred Majesty George IV.' was visiting North Britain. He is answerable
for several inversions of historical truth: he makes Balfour of Burley
and his class contemptible, and throws a halo of glory round
Claverhouse, like that with which Byron invests his Werterian villains.
But he never directly teaches politics. The 'Romans,' on the contrary,
do this in almost every page. They assume, moreover, an amount of
political knowledge on the part of their readers which would be very
unwisely assumed by any English novel-writer. The fact is, the average
Frenchman does know his own history since '89 far better than most
Englishmen know the tortuous politics of the Georgian era--knows it
better because he take a vastly more personal interest in it. For us,
Mr. Disraeli well pointed out, history from the Revolution to the Reform
Bill is chiefly the record of the quarrels of a few 'great houses;' to
the Frenchman the earlier half of the eighteenth century is the time
when his country was in the labour pangs of the strange, wild birth
which was to follow; and the close of it is the fitful period in which
the Revolution, surfeited with blood, sank helplessly under the yoke of
military despotism. No need to urge Frenchmen to do what her Majesty's
inspectors have so often recommended in our elementary schools, to begin
history at the modern end and work backwards. Our boys and our men
prefer woad-stained Britons and the strife of Dane and Saxon to the
Rockinghams and Walpoles, and even the Pitts; but in France it is wholly
different. Hence an amount of political knowledge in the country, for
which we rarely give our neighbours credit. Your diligence-driver
between Caen and Falaise will point out the Château Turgot, and will
tell you all about the minister whose name it bears in a way which would
have astonished any of the old mail-coachmen along the Western road, who
knew, indeed, Burke's name in connection with High Wycombe, but who knew
nothing but the name. This is one of the errors of 'our own
correspondent:' because Frenchmen have not that blatant freedom of
speech to which he is used at English hustings, he writes home that they
know little and care less about politics--and this of people who seldom
hesitate, on occasion, to die for their opinions. Their peculiar way of
managing things arises from their habit of looking to authority, of
moving under pressure of a _force majeure_; they have not, and can form
but a faint idea of, that English liberty which is in our air, which M.
de Montalembert used to call a _bain de vie_; but they have generally
speaking, historically at any rate, more political knowledge than we
have.
This accounts for much in the 'Romans' which, to the English reader, is
wearying; they appeal to what he does not possess, a knowledge of the
state of parties from '89 downwards. Every one, however, must appreciate
the way in which the rise of Napoleon is shown to have been due to the
corruption, the gross corruption, as well as imbecility of the
Directory. No wonder Bonaparte despised mankind, when such poor
specimens--vain, self-seeking, blindly conceited--were presented to him
as the pick of republican France. Thus politics, as well as national
character and habits (the habits, be it remembered, of that Alsace which
is now to become the Ireland of Germany), are abundantly illustrated in
these novels. We do not mean to analyse any of them, or to give samples
which would be about as satisfactory as a single stone picked out of a
Greek temple. The most touching of them is 'Madame Thérèse,' which,
showing as it does how heartily the Germans on the frontier sympathized
with the ideas of which Hoche was the expounder, bears on the question,
'How will the annexed districts get on under Junker rule?' Quiet Dr.
Jacob, the hero of the story, is already so smitten with revolutionary
ideas, that when he hears them commented on by the wounded _vivandière_
whose life he has saved, he forgets that she is only the daughter of a
village schoolmaster who had volunteered and had fallen, with his three
sons, at Valmy, and, marrying her, joins Hoche as army surgeon. Men of
this stamp are found on both sides of the Rhine; and to force Junkerism
upon them would provoke a speedy break-up of the German empire. German
optimists say that this danger is imaginary: acknowledging the
disagreeable features in the Prussian character, they say that 'Germany
will open Prussia out.' If not, trouble must ensue.
The 'Blocus' is, perhaps, the most picturesque of the whole series. The
old Jew who, despite his timidity and his hatred of war, gradually
becomes an effective national guard, is admirably drawn; the details of
the siege, the misery, the excitement, are told so differently from the
half flippant, half bombastic manner of even the best of 'our own
correspondents.' The old soldier who, churl as he is supposed to be,
meets the Jew's kindness with still greater kindness, and who, long
refusing to believe in the Emperor's abdication, shoots himself when the
truth is forced upon him, is a finished picture of which any artist
might be proud. And the town thus immortalised is Phalsbourg, which
henceforth is to be German. But we hope our readers will go to the books
themselves: their appearance marks an era in novel-writing; it has done
much more, for they are all novels with a purpose, and have been very
powerful in pulling down the Napoleonic idol, in hastening the decay of
the imperial idea.
The idol is overthrown; what will be reared in its place is doubtful.
Political wisdom is not to be learned in six months, no matter how
sternly its lessons may be enforced. The France which accepted Louis
Napoleon, which gloried in the absurd boast, 'When France is satisfied
the world is at rest,' which suffered itself to be kept in
leading-strings for twenty years, giving full control over its wealth,
its resources, its foreign and domestic policy, to an unscrupulous
adventurer and his stock-jobbing associates, is not likely to rise at
once to the dignity of a free people. 'Unstable as water' has hitherto
been the curse of France's efforts at free government. The mission she
has chosen has been to teach ideas to others, not to work them
practically out for herself. When we read in old files of the approving
_Times_ of the revels at Compiègne, the luxury, the extravagance, we are
reminded of the answer made to the first Napoleon, when he asked, 'Have
I not got back the old system _in toto_?' 'Yes, but you forget that two
million Frenchmen died to root out that old system; and you can't bring
them to life again.'
Why is France, as a whole, sick of 'ideas?' Why, although they could
dance round the statue of Strasburg when they ought to have been making
peace and husbanding their strength for by-and-by, were the besieged
Parisians incapable of any serious effort? Why was Trochu paralysed by
the fear of Blanqui? Why should Bourbaki's wretched army have behaved so
differently from that of Hoche, which was equally shoeless, and almost
as much in want of everything, and which its enthusiastic leader kept at
fighting point by allowing no tents during the bitterest winter that had
been known for years? Man for man, Germans have always been superior to
the French; to succeed, these last must move in masses welded together
by one overmastering idea. They had no idea, no union, last year. Will
this terrible lesson give them that unity of sentiment which Germany,
since 1808, has been gradually feeling after, and has only just
attained? Let us hope that sad experience may, at any rate, teach them
the insufficiency of the very grandest of all merely human ideals. The
noble thoughts of the 'Marseillaise'--
'Nous entrerons dans la carrière quand nous aînés ne seront plus,
Nous y trouverons leur poussière et la trace de leur vertus,'
led to the brutal _Carmagnole_ and the sickening excesses of the Terror,
because, though noble, they were not sanctified. The sickness that comes
from aiming at too much brought on a reaction which has lasted ever
since; and the fact that Romanism is the hereditary religion of the
French masses increases the difficulty of hearty national union. No
earnest political reformer can ever look on the priests as more than
temporary allies; no ultramontane can ever be an honest Republican.
What may come if Rome changes in the direction indicated by the Abbé (so
he styled himself) and now lately by Père Hyacinthe, we cannot say;
anyhow, such changes must be slow. At present the French priesthood must
be reckoned among the bitter opponents of all free constitutional
development.
The next few months will better enable us to determine whether Paris
will still hold its own against France, or whether M. Leclercq's hope
will be realized.[218] We may be quite sure that thousands of Frenchmen
feel what he so well expresses--that it is Paris which made Louis
Napoleon possible, even as it was Paris which enabled his uncle to be
what he was. They both, indeed, used 'France' against Paris; but it was
Paris which gave them a _status_ at the outset. Those who think thus
will feel that in the changed character of the capital is the best
safeguard for the good government as well as for the moral regeneration
of France; and if this change of character seems hopeless, the dangerous
experiment must be tried of moving the Legislature out of such an
unhealthy atmosphere.
We have thus striven to trace the growth and decay of Imperialism--which
in its re-establishment was the practical expression of the Napoleonic
idea--and to contrast it indirectly with the old _régime_, and with the
sad delusion which, beginning so nobly in 1789, too soon ended in
perhaps the bloodiest tyranny that modern Europe has ever seen. We
decline to draw any horoscope of the future; such prophesying is always
useless. Let us hope that God, who 'fulfils Himself in many ways,' will
comfort the faith which this cruel satire on modern progress has so
rudely shaken, by showing plainly that good has come out of all the
evil. We cannot hope that nations will yet recognise the truth that war
is organised crime; but we may hope that for a long time imperialism,
based, as we have shown it to be, on lawlessness and on the
glorification of the individual, will be impossible.
That the beaten nation always deserves to suffer is a maxim which
nothing but a distorted view of Scripture will propound. Berlin is not
many degrees above Paris in morality; and France, despite the character
given of her in her filthy novels, is certainly not without home life
and deep pure home affections.
All that we can say is that we, believing in God's providence, are very
sure that, however strangely things may seem to turn out, the course of
this world is ordered by Him.
ART. VI.--_Religious Tests and National Universities._ By F. A. PALEY,
M.A. Williams and Norgate, 1871.
(2.) _Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on
University Tests._
Owing to the energy with which Her Majesty's Government have pushed
through its earlier stages, the identical Universities Tests Bill which
was so adroitly shelved last year by the resolution of the Marquis of
Salisbury, we may confidently anticipate that, before these pages reach
the public, every hindrance which kept men from the enjoyment of prizes
which they had fairly won, and from posts of honour and usefulness which
they were well qualified to fill, simply and solely because they were
Nonconformists, will be swept away for ever. It would be gratifying if
as reasonable a hope could be entertained that the far more stringent
and objectionable religious test which is a practical bar to the
enjoyment of half the fellowships of Oxford and Cambridge, not only to
Nonconformists, but to all such as cannot say they believe in their
hearts that they are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost, and called,
according to the Will of Our Lord Jesus Christ to His ministry, as
defined by the Church of England, would be as speedily removed from the
threshold of offices which in no way require, and, practically, are
seldom associated with the exercise of this professedly divinely imposed
ministry. The progress of events may discredit our hopes or our fears,
but this need not prevent a review of the struggle for the abolition of
those tests at the universities which are obnoxious to Nonconformists
alone, as though it were a thing of the past; nor a prospective glance
at the clerical test which is obnoxious to all conscientious laymen who
object to give in their adhesion to a complex creed, and hesitate to
assume functions which are imposed by the Majesty of Heaven, but defined
by the Majesty of Britain. This is the point upon which we must next
concentrate our forces.
In the course of a few years it will, no doubt, be a source of wonder
that religious disabilities should have been retained at the
universities so long after they have been removed from almost all civil
and municipal offices throughout the realm. This wonder will certainly
not be lessened by an enquiry into the nature of the offices they are
supposed to guard, or the value of the emoluments which attach to those
offices. That any man otherwise qualified to explain the laws which
govern the physical forces of light and heat, or the principles of
comparative anatomy, should be cut off from a professorship in these
sciences, because he will not conform to a liturgy containing the
Athanasian Creed, can never appear less absurd by the lapse of time. A
fellowship at one of our colleges, is, as Mr. Paley correctly defines
it, wholly and absolutely a sinecure. No duties whatever are required as
a condition of its tenure. Fellowships are held by gentlemen who are
absent from, as well as by those who are resident at their colleges, and
if the residents in any way promote the discipline or education of the
students in those colleges, they have extra payment for such services
altogether apart from their incomes as fellows. The word 'sinecure,'
however, as applied to a fellowship, loses much, if not all the odium
usually attached to that term from the fact that fellows are elected
absolutely according to their merit as scholars, as that merit is proved
by success in the university and college examinations. It seems strange
that one-half of the nation should have been so long content to be
excluded from participation in the prizes of pure scholarship, when the
possession of these, unlike the enjoyment of livings and benefices,
involved no duties either lay or cleric. That creed or conformity should
be required of those whose sole duty was to enjoy an income of £300 per
annum is ridiculous, unless we adopt the theory that the disabilities
were meant to be punitive in their character. The same remarks apply to
the yet more lucrative headships of colleges. Nor can it be supposed
that exclusion from these rewards of learning by a religious test was
submitted to because the rewards were insignificant in amount, either
singly or in the aggregate. Mr. Paley estimates the gross annual revenue
of the two universities and their colleges at half a million of money,
£50,000 of which goes to the heads of forty colleges and halls, while
730 fellows enjoy average incomes of not less than £300 a year. Thirty
years' residence at Cambridge has given Mr. Paley the right to speak
with some authority in these matters, but we think he has understated
the amount of these emoluments. We should not be surprised if, at no
distant day, a commission of enquiry should reveal, that the gross
revenue of these institutions, calculated on the real value of their
rapidly increasing property, is double the sum named. The apathy of
other sects in not urging more determinedly their claims to have the
prizes of the university course open to them, when the course itself is
open to all comers, is not to be accounted for on the ground that they
can afford to despise those prizes. The explanation lies in the fact
that the injustice done them has never till lately assumed a practical
and tangible form. The indifference of the English to theoretical
grievances is proverbial, and a conjunction of circumstances has tended
to mask the character of the injustice.
The circumstances referred to will in a few short years become hard to
understand unless we seize the present moment to record them. On the one
hand Nonconformists had not yet recovered from the repeated blows dealt
upon them by the legislature--blows of which the Act of Uniformity may
be taken as a striking example. Content to be tolerated and glad to be
hidden, finding neither social comfort nor encouragement in the pursuit
of the liberal professions, they sought in commerce a fair field and no
favour, and entered on this avocation with an energy which has not a
little tended to establish our national importance. At the present time
we claim free entrance to the offices and emoluments of our
universities, because they are _national_ institutions, but to a
dissenter a few years ago the very term _national_ conveyed the idea of
exclusion, as it still does in such phrases as 'National Church' and
'National School.' Nonconformists had almost learned to regard
themselves as aliens, for so the legislature had taught them to consider
themselves. The idea of demanding equal privileges with all other
subjects of the Crown, had scarcely entered their thoughts. Hence the
universities were regarded by them, as were also the army, navy, and the
bar, as inhospitable places where they would be slighted and ignored.
On the other hand the universities them selves had, at the commencement
of the present century, fallen from their high estate, and become
corrupt, servile, and dead to all the higher aims which should
distinguish institutions for learning and education. At that period a
very narrow stream of conventional scholarship ran through a very wide
meadow of mediocrity, which it never overflowed or irrigated. The
modicum of knowledge required of the οἱ πολλοι was
contemptible, and every arrangement seemed to be based on the principle
of letting through as easily as possible those who could afford to pay,
and rendering the course of study of the studious as useless as the
nature of study would permit. At the time when Gunning was the
repository of university gossip, it is evident that both university and
colleges were dishonest in their distribution of both honours and
emoluments; they were willing to set the university stamp of education
upon men whose only claim to be considered educated consisted in their
being able to bear the lavish expenditure of college life. From this
depth of degradation the universities have been slowly extricating
themselves, while during the same period Nonconformity has been
relieving itself from civil disabilities, and increasing in wealth and
influence. The two circles, which were once far apart, have by
synchronous enlargement at length cut one another. Despite every
discouragement, Dissenters began to send their sons to the ancient
universities, especially to that of Cambridge. Of those sent up a large
proportion were men of great ability. Messrs. Stirling, Aldis, Wilkins,
and Hartog--and during the present year Dr. Hopkinson--and many others,
obtained the highest places in the competitive examination. These men
were no doubt consciously fighting the battle of liberty of conscience
in general, and of their co-religionists in particular. The stimulus
afforded to their competitors by the prizes incident to a high place in
the tripos lists was, in their case, substituted by a desire to break
down a system of injustice which oppressed their several sects, and the
nobler impulse produced the noblest results. From the time of the
triumph of such men the question assumed a new character. The injustice
had ceased to be theoretical, and appealed for redress to every
right-minded man in language which could neither be misunderstood nor
disregarded. The tacit eloquence of unrewarded merit addressed itself
most powerfully to the most influential quarters. However averse to
self-reform the governing bodies at the universities might be, since
they were composed of men who had climbed to their present dignity by
the arduous path of study, these could not be altogether without
sympathy for men of like ability. Hence the party for the abolition of
tests within the universities has wonderfully augmented of late years,
and, as is natural, numbers as its own the men of the greatest talent.
These tests which had been regarded as the heavy armour of defence began
so to gall that they are now looked upon as more cumbersome than useful.
Whatever might be the necessity for the maintenance of tests, the
incidental evil that men of such industry and acquirement should fail of
their appropriate rewards could not but be deplored by all generous
minds. Henceforth candid enquirers began to ask what were the uses of
tests which were to counterbalance these palpably bad results? and men
not celebrated for candour saw the necessity of finding some arguments
in their favour.
Attention having been imperatively called to the question of tests,
their abolition became certain. Besides the direct injustice done, it
was soon perceived that tests inflicted indirect injury upon the whole
body of Nonconformists, upon the universities themselves, and on the
nation at large. Religion, discredited by her uncharitable janizaries,
longed to repudiate them, and both religion and morality discarded
safeguards which could exclude the man who was so loyal to the God of
truth that he would not violate His truth in the slightest particular,
but could include any infidel, provided he were not only infidel to his
God, but also to his own conscience.
Nonconformists became alive to the necessity of claiming a perfect
political and social equality with all other of her Majesty's subjects:
they perceived that their practical exclusion from the old universities
gave some colour to the imputation of ignorance and narrow-mindedness
which their enemies had sedulously endeavoured to fix upon them.
University reformers, bent on opening the universities to all classes
for the furtherance of every branch of study, saw the necessity of
removing every invidious distinction, and welcoming on equal terms that
half of the nation which had hitherto regarded these institutions as
places where their sons would not have fair play. The rapid growth and
wide influence of the London University, where no such disabilities
existed, no doubt quickened the perception of these reformers, each of
whom beheld his _Alma Mater_ beginning to weep like Niobe for the loss
of her children.
To oppose this rising current of opinion that set against the tests,
their defenders had only such arguments as could be ranged under two
categories; the one retrospective, and the other prospective. It was
contended that by abolishing the tests the wills of the founders and
donors would be violated, and the violence done to them would have a
tendency to weaken the rights of property, and dry up the streams of
benevolence. It was further argued that these tests were the only
safeguards which could defend the minds of our youth from the inroads of
infidelity, and from the hydra-headed monster of unbelief which was
quickening into such active life. These were the two sheet anchors cast
out astern and astem to keep the tests from drifting to destruction. The
cogent logic of facts soon showed that, however good the anchors might
be, their cables could not hold. The application of these arguments was
singularly unfortunate. For the benefit of such uncompromising advocates
of the tests as the Rev. E. H. Perowne, who, if sincere, must now be
pacing the deck of his forlorn craft in fear of instant and imminent
shipwreck, we may show the insecurity of the stays to which he trusted.
It is notorious that the offices and emoluments guarded by the tests
were made, not for churchmen by churchmen, but for Catholics by
Catholics. In the case of the writer of the pamphlet at the head of this
article, we have a singular instance of cruel disregard of the wills of
the founders. Mr. Paley is one of the best instructors in classics, and
perhaps the most voluminous classical author in the University of
Cambridge. He is in every way qualified for any post of classical
instruction, but because he is an adherent of that church to which the
founders of nine-tenths of the colleges belonged, he could receive no
benefit from emoluments which were specially intended, where there was
any limit to their application at all, for his co-religionists. On the
narrowest conservative grounds Mr. Paley might urge his right to enjoy
promotion in the university he adorns. If he were told by an advocate
for tests, that the offices and emoluments were secured to the
adherents of the religion of the state, and that they were since
reserved for the professors of a different faith, because the state had
adopted that new faith, he would doubtless reply;--that his church had
never stooped so low as to admit that articles of faith could be matters
of state legislation, and that the Catholic founders of the colleges
would have stood aghast at the astounding anomaly of a state-made
church. Surely none but an outlaw to the realms of logic and ethics
could after that maintain that he ought to be excluded. Mr. Paley has
chosen to advocate the abolition of tests on broader grounds. He is a
Roman Catholic of the most liberal type, but as a Catholic citizen,
whether liberal or ultramontane, his defence of his right to participate
in the honours of the university is impregnable. We can readily imagine
the just indignation with which the claim to these universities, as
Church of England institutions still carrying out the wills and wishes
of the original Catholic founders, made by those who are perpetually
taunting Catholics with a want of veracity, would be flung aside as a
sophism unworthy of men who ought to identify religion with the
strictest honesty and truth.
But, even if this sophism were more worthy of the adoption of honourable
men, it has become quite obsolete and inapplicable at the present time.
The abolitionists might concede, for the sake of argument, that it is
right that donors, living in a remote age, should be assisted by the
present administration of law to attach conditions to the tenure of
property which have a tendency to modify, restrain, and stereotype the
political and religious opinions of a nation centuries after they had
ceased to mingle with the affairs of men. They might even admit that no
considerations of the wishes and convenience of the present holders of
the property, nor the promotion of that education which is the main
object for which the colleges and universities were founded, nor the
requirements of the nation, ought to be permitted to modify the
administration of the property by the present governing bodies. They
might further forget that the universities were constituted by royal
charter, and upheld by continual renewals of their charters. If colleges
were looked upon as corporations irresponsibly holding property more
absolutely than corporate bodies have ever been permitted to do in any
enlightened state, yet these admissions would in no way affect or
enfeeble the action of those who are now urging on the abolition of all
religious tests. They, at least, are not responsible for introducing
any novel principle of action dangerous to the stability of property.
For, to say nothing of all past legislation,--including that act of
uniformity which by limiting the election to headships, fellowships,
chaplaincies, and the office of tutor to a certain class of persons,
recognises an imperial authority to remove these limits--we have the
recent Oxford and Cambridge University Acts. The latter Act specially
and distinctly empowers the governing body of any college to repeal from
its deeds of constitution, &c., disqualifications to office, and to
abolish oaths and declarations. The Oxford Act has a section of the same
tenor, but owing to its having been passed two years earlier, it is less
distinct and explicit. This interference of the legislature has already
been accepted by many of the colleges. Proceeding under the provisions
of that Act, many of the governing bodies have removed the necessity for
celibacy from the holding of fellowships, and made other important
modifications with regard to the tenure of office, and the receipt of
emoluments. It has therefore been recognised on all hands by Churchmen
and Dissenters, by the authors of the act of uniformity, and the
supporters of the University Acts, by Parliament as well as by the
colleges, that the special provisions of the donors may be set aside in
order to promote the main object of their benefactions. It is strange
that men conversant with these facts should be content to occupy ground
which, while it is completely commanded by their opponents, is to them a
labyrinth of absurdities.
In some cases the Tests Bill will absolutely restore to the colleges
their ancient rights and liberty which the legislature had previously
ruthlessly curtailed. In the statutes of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, it is
expressly and advisedly provided that no religious disabilities shall
bar their offices. At the last annual meeting of the fellows of Trinity
College, the following resolution was passed by twenty-five votes
against ten: "That the master and seniors take such steps as may be
necessary in order to repeal the religious restrictions in the election
and conditions of tenure of fellows at present contained in the
statutes." This vote is rendered nugatory, so far as nonconformists are
concerned, because of an unrepealed clause in the Act of Uniformity.
Thus, at Trinity, we have a governing body intent on rendering its means
of education efficient, and administering rewards strictly in accordance
with merit, but debarred from doing so, not by the wills of the
founders, but by a subsequent innovation which restricts the rights of
the present holders of the college property. Such a state of things
appeals to every true conservative as well as to every wise liberal
instinct for speedy and complete legislation.
The stern cable of the maintainers of tests having parted, is the fibre
of the other more reliable? The confidence in the efficiency of tests,
which was once almost universal, is being every day shaken by fresh
revelations of their futility. At the Universities the tests have been
themselves tested and found to be base metal, stamped indeed with the
die of authority, but current only in those marts where credulity holds
commerce with cruelty. Bishop Colenso was long a resident and, so far as
his powers of imparting mathematical instruction are concerned, an
ornament to the University of Cambridge, yet Bishop Colenso denies the
inspiration of writings which the Church of England holds to be
canonical. If it be maintained that his heterodoxy was subsequent to his
residence, it may be replied, that he has ceased to reside at Cambridge
because he has accepted preferment to an office which involves
submission to a multiplicity of tests, each more stringent than that
which attaches to a fellowship. Professors Baden Powell and Jowitt, two
of the ablest writers in the volume which was once popularly called 'The
Challenge of the Seven Champions of _un_-Christendom,' occupied
distinguished places in the University of Oxford. Probably if we were to
search for the home of the most dangerous kind of skepticism we should
find it not far removed from the Combination rooms of Oxford and
Cambridge, where 'the dons' discuss high matters at their ease 'across
the walnuts and the wine.' This is certainly the case if we may take the
evidence of Mr. Paley, who thus writes:--
'In plain words, every one knows that a person may be an
avowed member of the Church of England, and yet be a
downright rationalist. Thousands are undoubtedly such. To
talk therefore of "admitting free-thinking" by removing
tests, can only raise a smile in those who know intimately
the working of the present system. Indeed, it has been well
said, that if the religious nonconformists who are excluded
from fellowships could hear the conversation of many who
now hold them, they would be as much shocked as surprised
at the fruits which the test-system is producing.'
It is easy to conceive of a case in which these arguments for the
retention of tests might be urged with great force. It is scarcely
possible to imagine a case in which they could be rendered more feeble
and futile by the comment of circumstance.
The progress of events and the logic of facts could scarcely render the
University tests more absurd, did not these make them day by day more
pernicious to the charity and concord of Christians of all
denominations, more galling and injurious to the Universities, now
striving nobly and efficiently to meet the requirements of the age, and
more detrimental to the interests and highest aspirations of the British
nation.
In tracing the causes why these University Tests have existed so long,
it has been impossible to avoid incidentally producing the reasons why
they should endure no longer.
The test imposed at Cambridge, by requiring the graduate when he
proceeds to his B.A. degree to declare himself a _bonâ fide_ member of
the Church of England, not only excludes the nonconformist from a voice
in the senate, which body is the popular and ultimate regulator of the
studies of the university, but it also denies to him a vote for the
members representing the university in Parliament. This is the only
constituency in which a religious belief is made to curtail the exercise
of the franchise.
Headships and fellowships in colleges, as distinguished from the offices
of tutor, lecturer, and dean, are sinecures involving no onerous duties,
and not necessarily connected with the imparting of instruction of any
kind, whether religious or secular. They are posts of honour and not of
trust. Their occupants, no doubt, influence and control the course of
study at their colleges, but they need not be and are not by their
offices personally concerned in education. These posts, therefore, not
only involve no clerical duty, they do not demand the exercise of those
debateable functions which lie between the lay and clerical offices,
such as the education of youth is supposed to imply. To use an
illustration now rendered familiar to most by the practical working of
the Education Act; the master and fellows of a college occupy the
position of a school board, while the tutors and lecturers alone
instruct. Lecturers in the several departments of study are, it is true,
generally chosen from the body of fellows, but by no means necessarily
so. Hence, there is no analogy between the test imposed on the clergy,
and that which is taken by the heads and fellows of the colleges. The
former is a pledge to perform definite functions for which the
functionaries receive a definite stipend, the latter is a test applied
to those who require service to be performed. The test as applied to
these offices has become an unparalleled anomaly. It is the last remnant
of the revengeful policy exercised by the Anglican upon the Puritan
party, after these were driven from their short-lived supremacy.
Thus viewed, the tests at the universities are like the Needle rocks,
which once were continuous with the neighbouring cliff, but are now
become strange and fantastic through the isolation imposed upon them by
the waves of the ever advancing ocean. As political change is as rapid
and certain as geologic change is slow and sure, their bold position is
an evidence not of their immunity from, but of their amenableness to the
influence of the forces which play upon their bases.
The offices of tutor, dean, lecturer, &c., inasmuch as they are directly
connected with the moral supervision and education of the undergraduates
in all branches of study, including theology, stand in a somewhat
different position with regard to tests. To those unacquainted with the
universities, the distinction between these two classes of office is not
obvious. The general impression obtains that these national institutions
are training schools for the clergy of the Establishment, in which
training all resident officials are concerned; but the members of the
governing bodies themselves are quite aware of the difference pointed
out. Unless this distinction could be made there would be no _locus
standi_ for the select committee of the House of Lords appointed for the
purpose of inquiring into the best mode of giving effect to the
following resolution of the house--
'That in any measure for enabling persons not members of
the Church of England to hold offices to which they are not
now eligible in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and
Durham, and the colleges and halls in those universities,
it is essential to provide by law proper safeguards for the
maintenance of religious instruction and worship, and for
the religious character of the education to be given
therein.'
All the gentlemen who gave evidence before that committee, with the
exception of the Rev. E. H. Perowne, who has the reputation of being the
most uncompromising and indiscriminating advocate of tests, recognise
this distinction; and all suggest that while fellowships, or some of
them, be thrown open to all, a modified test be applied to the
functional posts.
The pernicious principle that Government has a right to interfere
between parents and their children in the regulation of the religious
instruction of youth, has, no doubt, been often acted upon. Thus that
Act of Uniformity, which is now the main prop of university tests,
requires subscription not only from persons in holy orders and
university officials, but also from schoolmasters in private as well as
in public schools, and even from tutors in private families.
The recent legislation for the primary education of the country has,
however, thrown a flood of light on the relations of education to
religion, and of the State to both. It is scarcely conceivable that the
Parliament which passed the Elementary Education Act of 1870, should
retain a sectarian test as a safeguard to offices because they are posts
of education. The Education Act was avowedly tentative and incomplete.
It was a compromise, in which the representatives of old ideas obtained
more recognition than they had anticipated. The bill will certainly be
modified before many years are gone, and if so the modification is sure
to be in the direction of eliminating the sectarian element from
education. Yet there was great unanimity of opinion among the parties to
the discussion in certain principles embodied in the Act. These
principles were: 1. That the State might neither provide nor require
definite religious instruction. 2. That where, owing to existing methods
of denominational education, it was necessary for the State to make the
various sects its allies to effect the common object of secular
education, it should deal to all denominations even-handed justice. 3.
That wherever the State interfered or was concerned with education, no
child who was the recipient of the benefactions applied to instruction
should be placed at any disadvantage on account of the religious belief
of the parents of that child.
If the House of Lords should endeavour so to mutilate the University
Tests bill as to substitute a test, however modified or limited in its
action, in place of that imposed by the Act of Uniformity, it would ask
the legislature to violate every one of the aforesaid principles, and
thus to stultify itself. Such an attempt is certain to be successfully
resisted. We had better not legislate at all than re-endorse a time
_dis_-honoured practice.
The Elementary Education Act, while it thus indicated the nature of the
reform required, also furnished the most urgent reason for the immediate
adoption of that reform at the universities. If primary education ought
to be the care of the State, secondary education is not less its duty.
By secondary education we mean a higher education than that rudimentary
training which is thought essential to all children; that is, a higher
class education, not education for a higher class. That the child of a
poor man who has shown himself capable of wider and higher culture by
the readiness with which he has responded to the lower, should not be
able to proceed to a higher class school, because of the poverty of his
parents, would be even more deplorable than that dull ones should lack
education altogether. The universities form the natural apex of the
pyramid of national education. The nation can never rightly economise
and utilise its intellect until every one of its children, capable of
such culture, can pass freely up through all the grades of education to
the very summit. If this is to be the case the capital must be rendered
congruous with the column it should surmount. By reason of tests the
national universities are rendered so incongruous with the rest of the
structure that is in course of erection, that no cement could make them
cohere. If by common consent we must eliminate sectarian religion from
elementary education in the interests of the child whose father is so
stolidly indifferent to the higher needs of that child that he must be
compelled to send him to school; how absurd it is to provide that when
he has grown into manhood and shown a capacity for the reception of the
highest culture, he should be handed over for instruction to a body
rendered exclusively sectarian by the retention of antiquated religious
tests. The inauguration of a national scheme of education is an _epoch_
in the history of the nation. It is a _crisis_ in the history of the
universities. On the present settlement of this question in some measure
depends whether the ancient universities shall stand in the position of
the Doric capitals which crown the columns and support the architrave of
the classic temple, or lie like those same capitals after the earthquake
has dashed them to the ground--the broken and isolated fragments of a
former grandeur.
From a review of the past struggle, in which we have endeavoured to show
how the march of events, the advance of ideas, and the change of
position of parties, rendered the old line of defence formed by these
tests, not only indefensible, but deserted by its defenders, we turn to
examine the ground of the next battle-field.
The necessity of taking holy orders as a condition for holding or
retaining offices and emoluments at the universities and their colleges
is a test of the most stringent and pernicious character. Every argument
against tests in the abstract, may be urged with double force against
this clerical test. Every consideration of the welfare of
nonconformists, of the universities, and of the nation, which has
determined the abolition of the simple tests, is of greater force when
applied to the complex test implied in the taking of holy orders.
Fully one-half of the fellowships of Oxford and Cambridge, and nearly
two-thirds of the headships, can be enjoyed only by clergy of the
Establishment. This clerical test is therefore a practical bar to
Nonconformists of half the preferments of these wealthy national
institutions; and the fact that all conscientious laymen are included
under this academic ban certainly does not commend this test to
exceptional retention. Colleges, where there is a certain minimum of
clerical fellowships, are at the present moment compelled to elect
inferior men when all their lay fellowships are filled. In colleges like
Trinity and St. John's, Cambridge, where all must take orders at a
certain date from their degrees, the more able and energetic men usually
become absorbed in other pursuits and vacate their fellowships to serve
in turn to younger men as means of defying the impecuniosity which
notoriously dogs the early stages of a professional career; while the
idlers as naturally become sinecure pluralists, because the dignity of
the priest need not interfere with the fellow's ease. By this system the
colleges are equally dishonoured by those whom they retain and those
whom they reject. By this system the nation also suffers, by allowing
the large revenues of national institutions to be squandered on cureless
priests, which, by some such arrangement as is explained by Mr. Paley,
might secure to literature and science the labours of our greatest
scholars and ablest investigators. To this catalogue of ill effects may
be added the damage done by the clerical test to the Church of England.
Many years of university life is admitted to be the very worst
preparation for parish work. As a rule, fellows manifest great
repugnance to take upon themselves, in middle life, the duties involved
in the acceptance of a college living; and the man who allows himself to
drift first into holy orders and then into a college benefice, from
sheer inanity, is not likely to bring much zeal to his work.
We are quite aware that a very different view of this result of clerical
fellowships is taken by their advocates; and this brings us to the
examination of those reasons which may be brought forward to show that
the clerical test stands on a footing different from that of other
tests. The advocates of clerical fellowships would state, first, that
the clerical test was not imposed _ab extra_ by the Imperial
Legislature, but rested wholly and solely on the wills of the founders
and donors of the emoluments and offices it guarded. They would argue,
secondly, that by removing the tests from lay fellowships a sufficient
number were thrown open to satisfy and reward all the Nonconformist
scholars who were likely to seek education at the universities, and that
by retaining the clerical fellowships a preponderance would be secured
at the seats of learning in favour of Protestant Christianity, which
preponderance is a desideratum with nine-tenths of the English people.
They would show, thirdly, that these clerical fellowships induced men,
having the reputation and acquirements of scholars, to enter, and
thereby adorn and strengthen a Church which more than ever needs learned
divines to meet scientific sceptics on their own ground.
All this may be true, but it is very little to the purpose. Whether the
colleges, or any of them, were originally monastic institutions is a
curious antiquarian question, but the requirement of holy orders and
celibacy, from every member of the fraternity, in many instances, at
least, originated in times when the recognition of a distinction between
the regular and secular clergy was a part of the public opinion of the
day. A community which accepted the theory that good works could be
performed by a sacerdotal order which would benefit men's souls after
death, quite irrespective of any effect which could be produced upon
them during life, might look with complacency on fraternities freed from
social ties, and consecrated to spiritual uses when these uses were not
apparent. Nowadays, however, a collegiate priest is of all men least
likely to give himself to works of supererogation. The duties of a
fellow of a college and a priest without cure can be defined only as
Bishop Blomfield once defined the functions of an archdeacon, namely, as
archidiaconal. These duties may both once have been burdensome, but now
the academic Issachar crouches down between them, and declares rest to
be good and the land pleasant. The plain teaching of the clerical test
is, not that we ought to follow the letter of the wills of the founders
when it contravenes their spirit, but that well-meaning men can do
little good, and may do much harm, by endeavouring to impose the ideas
of one age on the customs and manners of a remotely future one.
It is a wild expectation that the maintenance of a Christian and
Protestant ascendancy at the universities will establish oases in the
midst of the barren desert of doubt, or clearings in the forest of
Papist superstition, such as the several religious alarmists, according
to their bent and temperament, would induce us to believe our country
will soon become. Let those who delight in clothing bugbears with
imaginary terrors speculate on the possibility of a Mussulman or a
Parsee becoming an examiner for the theological degree, or a positivist
becoming a professor of exegesis. A reasonable man will consider the
conditions upon which such a thing could occur. Our nation must have
forsaken a faith which has existed among us for a thousand years. Our
legislature and our universities, both equally transcripts of the
popular mind, must have forgotten their God. In such a case is it
conceivable that a religion alike abandoned by a people which it has
raised to power and prosperity, and by the Deity which promulgated it,
should be preserved to our colleges by the operation of a test which is
even now profaned by men who avow their readiness to swear _et ceteras_?
The great classical scholar Person, himself a sufferer under, and a
protester against the clerical test, used to say that a fellow's life
was like the lime-tree avenue at Trinity--a long walk with a church at
the end of it. This was said in reference to Coton spire seen in the
distance.
The present Bishop of Carlisle said in a sermon addressed to the
University of Cambridge, 'We want men to enter the ministry of our
Church who, if they went to the bar, would succeed at the bar.' There
was a curious admission implied in these words, but to do Dean Goodwin
justice, he was then speaking, not in defence of clerical fellowships,
but to rouse the voluntary enthusiasm of the students he addressed.
That scholars are induced by the practical working of the system of
clerical fellowships to take their places among the clergy of the
Establishment cannot be denied, but the argument deducible from this,
savours both of bigotry and worldliness. A clerical fellowship is in
this view a skilfully-baited trap to catch a Church decoration. We have
many instances to show that by placing upon learned men the badge of
orthodoxy you do not make them defenders of the faith. Too often the
false position of a man, thus entrapped, makes him cynically sceptical.
Of such an one it may often be said, 'A little grain of conscience makes
him sour,' and causes him--
'Like a dog, that is compelled to fight,
Snatch at his master, that doth tarre him on.'
This endeavour to affix a plume to the helmet of faith worn by the
church militant is in strange relation to the thanksgiving which
proceeded from the Head of the Church, 'I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of
heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.' This is evidently solely a
Churchman's consideration, and does not deserve our further notice; but
it is intimately related to the wider question of the influence of this
test on morality and religion.
We cannot better preface our concluding remarks on this important
bearing of the subject than by quoting the evidence given by the Rev. D.
P. Chase and Professor J.B. Lightfoot before the Committee of the House
of Lords:--
'286. Lord Rosebery: You say that there are Free-thinkers
already amongst the body of fellows at Oxford, who, under
the irritation produced by their false positions, express
their feelings and opinions with some freedom.'
'Dr. Chase: Yes.
'289. Have you reason to think that these gentlemen
deliberately swallow their opinions in order to obtain the
advantage of a fellowship?
'I would hardly put it in that way: I think they have
persuaded themselves that the imposition of any such test
being in itself immoral, they may act in a way in which
they would not act towards an obligation which they
acknowledged.'
Dr. Chase does not endorse this lax morality, for he says as follows:--
'I have my own impression of the men whom I meet, and of
the way in which they obtrude their contempt for religious
opinions in general, but I can say nothing more definite
than that I allude to people who are _already upon
foundations_.
'40. Marquis of Salisbury: They come in in spite of the
existing tests?
'Yes.
'41. Do you think that that is probably due either to some
subsequent change of opinion on their part, or to a
peculiar elasticity of mind?
'It is due to the loss of common honesty and morality, I
think.'
'1001. Earl of Morley: I think you mentioned the fact of
several fellows having retired who had formerly taken the
tests. Would you like to mention any instances of that?
'Dr. Lightfoot: I am not in a position to say exactly the
motives which led them to resign their fellowships; but
there have been two or three instances quite lately where
persons have resigned fellowships, and I believe they have
done so on account of religious scruples.
'1302. Do those facts have rather a bad effect upon the
undergraduates, do you think?
'I think they have. That is my reason for desiring a
change. They create a prejudice against religion.'
Lord E. Fitzmaurice, in the debate on clerical fellowships, is reported
to have said:--
'The clerical fellows might be classed as those who wore
white ties and those who went without. The first class
steadily opposed all progress in the universities, and the
last merely took orders to obtain the fellowship. These
latter, in fact, threw away the outward visible sign of
that inward and spiritual grace which they were conscious
they did not possess.'
Lord Fitzmaurice has so lately left the University of Cambridge that his
recollection of it must be very vivid. The sentences quoted have just
that quality of candid but rather indiscriminate truth, flavoured with
somewhat flippant and irreverent satire; which would have brought down
the house at the Union Debating Society. Indeed we can hardly refrain
from thinking these words were originally prepared for the benefit of
the audience there assembled.
The ingenuity of the great enemy of souls would be taxed in vain to hit
upon a device by which the ministry of Christ and the truth of God could
be more thoroughly brought into contempt in the judgment of susceptible
youth, which is ever keen to detect selfish shams, and ever loyal to
self-sacrificing nobility. The system of clerical fellowships is such a
scheme--
'As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul; and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words.'
If this hoar iniquity of clerical tests be for a few years longer
maintained by a mistaken section of Churchmen, it will be our duty as
Nonconformists, during that time, by making a vigorous protest through
every channel by which public opinion is influenced, to show that if
these tests be _safeguards_ they are safeguards not of Catholic
Christianity, but of sectarian ascendancy; to keep the fair garments of
religion unspotted by a worldly and turbid policy; to cause that the
contempt which cannot but be felt should light not upon the royal
priesthood of Christ, but on the priesthood of the Establishment; and to
demonstrate that, if truth be violated, she is violated by no criminal
consent of ours.
ART. VII.--_The War of 1870-1._
In the last number of this Review we endeavoured to describe what may be
called the first act of the tremendous contest which has convulsed
Europe during the last eight months. We glanced at the original causes
of the war long impending between Germany and France, reviewed the
opening passages of the struggle, the gathering of the antagonist hosts,
the false strategy of Napoleon III., the great ability of his opponents,
the first victories that were the result,--Wörth, Forbach, and the
battles at Metz; and examined the remarkable movements which led to the
catastrophe of Sedan, an event unparalleled in military history.
Pursuing the narrative, we noticed briefly the consequences of that
awful disaster--the advance of the German armies to Paris, and their
investment of the famous capital; and said a few words on the grand
spectacle afforded by France at this conjuncture, when, after her
unprecedented reverses, she unrolled the banner of national resistance,
and tried to stem the flood of Teutonic invasion. We felt, however, that
it would be premature to dwell at length on the scenes of the latter
conflict, because their issue was as yet uncertain, and we postponed to
the present number a more elaborate survey of them. We now propose to
give a short account of the second and closing act of the drama,
comprising the marvellous siege of Paris, the efforts of France to
relieve the city, and their defeat by the German hosts, and, finally,
the fall of the beleaguered capital after an heroic resistance. This
phase of the war is altogether different from that which preceded it,
and in many respects is more interesting. It is not a mere succession of
dazzling triumphs caused by genius and force on one side and incapacity
and weakness on the other; it is a frightful international strife, in
which, owing to peculiar circumstances, the result was for a long time
doubtful; in which the belligerent which at first seemed prostrate made
a rally of an extraordinary kind, and placed its opponent in comparative
danger; and in which victory was decided at last through the continued
efforts of rare ability wielding perfectly organized military force, and
prevailing over patriotic energy, strong in the elements of warlike
power, but untrained, undisciplined, and badly directed. This part of
the campaign shows us how the defences of Paris caused the invading
armies, which had never expected that they would hold out, to be exposed
to formidable attacks; how the breathing-time obtained in this way
enabled France to rise again, and to put immense masses of men into the
field; and how, in consequence of their military situation, the Germans,
although at all points victorious, necessarily occupied a precarious
position; and it shows not less clearly how superiority of generalship,
of skill, and of efficiency in war, turned the scale at last against
mere numbers, though possessing some remarkable advantages. As for the
lessons to be deduced from the straggle, it lays bare painfully the real
causes of the overwhelming calamities of France; it reveals very plainly
the true nature of the gigantic Power now dominant in Europe; and it
makes thinking persons sadly admit that, notwithstanding civilization
and progress, the passions of man remain little changed, that the lust
of conquest burns as fiercely at the close as at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, that experience seems unable to teach that the
triumphs of mere ambition and force are often a curse even to the
victor.
After the disaster of Sedan, the German armies proceeded at once to
march on Paris. At this moment the last regular army of France in the
field was a mass of prisoners; the Army of the Rhine, the hope of the
nation, was shut up with Bazaine at Metz, hemmed in by the corps of
Prince Frederic Charles; and France seemed so utterly vanquished that
even the cautious German leaders could see no possible danger in moving
into the heart of the invaded country, though they had not taken one
important fortress, or even occupied one line of railway. Besides, it
was assumed in the German camp that the advance to Paris would be little
more than a military pageant or demonstration; the city had fallen in
1814 and 1815 after a resistance of a mere nominal kind; though it had
been since fortified, the fortifications were known to be within the
range of modern heavy guns; and, in any case, it was taken for granted
that a population like the Parisians would never venture to make a
stand, or submit to anything like privations. Accordingly, the
magnificent German hosts were directed in two enormous masses from Sedan
against the devoted city, the Fourth Army under the Crown Prince of
Saxony advancing by Vouziers and Rheims towards the Marne, the Third,
under the Crown Prince of Prussia, descending from Rheims upon the
Seine, the object of both being to converge and hem in Paris in an
investing circle. Eye-witnesses have recorded with admiration how superb
was the aspect of these mighty arrays as, flushed with astonishing
success, and in the most perfect military discipline, they rolled on
through the plains of Champagne in all the pomp and circumstance of war,
finding literally nothing to check their progress. By the 15th or 16th
of September the two armies had made good their way to the rivers which,
in their uniting bends, form the first lines of the defence of Paris;
the Crown Prince of Saxony having reached Meaux, and his colleague
having pushed forward to Mélun. Soon after these points had been passed,
the first signs of opposition appeared. After the fall of the Imperial
_régime_, General Trochu, who had been President of the Government of
National Defence, had been making great preparations to enable Paris to
stand a siege; and as it was of vital importance to retard the
assailants as long as possible, he had sent one detachment to hold in
check the Germans in the valley of the Marne, and another to attack the
Crown Prince of Prussia as he crossed the Seine to the south of the
city. Their efforts, however, completely failed, the French troops with
Vinoy and Ducrot, demoralized by repeated defeats, being wholly unable
to withstand the Germans; and on the 19th of September the invading
armies had closed on all sides around the beleaguered city, the Crown
Prince of Prussia having mastered a range of heights overlooking the
defences to the north, and having captured some temporary works erected
by Trochu along their position. The army of the Crown Prince of Saxony
spread along the northern and eastern parts of Paris, from Charenton to
about Argenteuil; that of his brother Prince completed the circle from
the Marne across the Seine to St. Germains, the head-quarters being at
Versailles.
In this way, within two or three days after their first appearance on
the Marne and Seine, the German invaders had encompassed Paris, and by
the 22d of September the investment was complete. It is said that the
fortifications merely saved the city from the terrors of an assault;
but, however this may have been, these works were already in a condition
which compelled the Germans to pause, and to make their approaches with
circumspection. In fact, the natural strength of Paris as a defensible
position is exceedingly great; and the artificial defences, though
constructed before the invention of the artillery of this day, had
rendered the capital a powerful fortress. Paris is protected along its
eastern front by the converging streams of the Marne and Seine, thrown
before it like a series of fosses, and by the succession of heights
extending from the plain of St. Denis to Vincennes; to the west it is
covered by the winding returns of the Seine, from Sèvres to beyond St.
Germains; and to the north and south, though at these points weaker, it
is not without a barrier marked out by nature. The result is that Paris
is, as it were, designed for a vast entrenched camp, very difficult to
surround or attack; for its situation on the rivers which wind about it
not only compels an enemy to divide his forces if he would invest it,
but exposes him to considerable danger, especially if a defending army
held the eastern heights before referred to. This naturally strong and
vast position had been fortified with great care in 1841, by engineers
of the school of the first Napoleon. A ditch had been thrown around the
city, and a rampart with regular bastions made; but these were merely
the internal lines. The real and external defences were a series of
powerful detached forts, so arranged as to support each other, and to
constitute a zone on all sides of great dimensions, difficult to
approach. For this purpose every advantage had been taken of the
character of the place; the forts were so built as to command the
obstacles formed by the Marne and Seine, and thus to enable troops to
bar the passage of an enemy across these streams. They also crowned the
eastern heights, and thence covered St. Denis to the north; and while
one fort only--that of Valérien--threw a shield over the western front,
four or five, along a range of projecting eminences, protected the
southern and southwestern. It must be added, however, that those who
designed the fortifications of Paris always supposed that an army would
be within the zone comprised by the range of the forts, and would thus
be able to oppose an enemy; and, owing to the invention of heavy rifled
guns, the southern forts, from Charenton to Versailles, were
comparatively weak, and liable to attack.
Such was the aspect of the defences of Paris when, at the end of the
third week of September, they were surrounded by their Teutonic foes.
The forts and ramparts were extremely formidable, but they were, as yet,
ill-armed with heavy guns, and, above all, the great element required
for a successful defence--a well-regulated and disciplined army, to
prevent an enemy from closing round--was, for the present, altogether
wanting. General Trochu, in concert with subordinate officers, had for
several weeks laboured hard in bringing into the city artillery and
munitions of war. Paris had become a vast arsenal for constructing
fieldpieces, manufacturing gunpowder, and fabricating all kinds of
military appliances; and an immense number of men fit for service,
amounting, it is said, to half a million, including 250,000 National
Guards, had been congregated within the walls to form the materials of
an organized force. But though the efforts of the Governor and his
assistants, and the patriotism of the population, had been admirable;
though stores of provisions had been laid in; though foundries and
workshops had toiled day and night in casting ordnance and preparing
cartridges; and though the multitude of recruits had been subjected to
continual drill, Paris was not ready when the Germans appeared; and, in
consequence, after the feeble resistance of Vinoy and Ducrot on the
17th, the investment was completed without difficulty, and the first
great object of the besiegers was attained. Yet, though Trochu was thus
driven to a passive defence--what had hardly been seriously contemplated
by those who had fortified Paris--he did not despair or lose heart; and
we may believe that he had good hopes that France would be saved
through the resistance of Paris. He knew that the city possessed
resources of food for several months; he was aware that it was possible
to create a vast supply of cannon and arms; he thought that he would
have time to make out of the crude masses of men in his hands an
efficient army inside the walls; and on these data he formed a scheme
for the defence of the country, which, though it failed, and though, as
we think, it was open to censure, was, nevertheless, not without
grandeur. He would render Paris impregnable to attack, and detain the
Germans around the ramparts for a time passing their calculations; he
would form into soldiers the levies he commanded, while provincial
armies would be raised in France. And if these forces could be made to
combine, and attack the besiegers from without and within, how critical
might their position become, divided, as they would be, around the
capital, and distant from the frontier, perhaps in the depths of winter!
In that case, it was not impossible that the siege would be raised,
perhaps after a great defeat, and that the Germans would be compelled to
retire; and the retreat might become one of extraordinary loss and
disaster.
To make, therefore, Paris as strong as possible, although defended
passively at first; to allow the besiegers to invest it without
molestation for some time, inasmuch as this was unhappily necessary; to
consider the capital the main pivot and cardinal point of the national
war; and to combine operations by means of which an army, to be formed
under his own auspices, was to fall on the Germans, while an army
outside was to cooperate in the attack--such were the leading features
of Trochu's project; and though, as we have said, it invites criticism,
and it did not lead to the deliverance of France, it was nearer success
than may perhaps be imagined. The Governor of Paris addressed himself
energetically and steadily to carrying it out; and during the first few
weeks after the investment, his whole care was directed to the
increasing and strengthening of the defences, and the fashioning into
military shape the enormous levies which had been collected. Heavy guns
were turned out in quantities, and mounted upon the forts and ramparts;
new works were constructed to add their fire to that of the original
fortifications; redoubts were thrown up at several points, and armed
with batteries of a formidable kind; the southern forts especially were
protected; and at Avron and Villejuif, on the eastern and south-eastern
fronts of the city, the investing circle began to be threatened by what,
technically, are called counter-approaches, bristling with large and
destructive artillery. The result was that although the armed masses
within Paris were almost quiescent, and the besiegers were only slightly
molested by an occasional and distant cannonade, their lines were
gradually removed and forced back, and the obstacles to continuing the
siege became more and more evident. At the same time, the organization
of the masses inside the city went on regularly, and before long a real
army of 150,000 men, supplied with artillery, officers and a staff, and
in a fair state of military power, was formed out of the chaotic
multitude crowded together when the siege had commenced--an achievement
marvellous under the circumstances. Meanwhile, having escaped in a
balloon, M. Gambetta had devoted the singular powers of his enthusiastic
and passionate nature to raising and equipping provincial armies; and,
aided by the patriotism of France, his success had been, on the whole,
surprising. Old soldiers were recalled to the standard, recruits joined
the ranks in hundreds of thousands, and immense efforts were made to
procure field guns and small arms in sufficient quantities. In a few
weeks four armies seemed to start, as it were, from the earth, in
France--those of the North, the East, the West, and the Loire--all
intended either to resist the farther advance of the German foe, or to
co-operate in the relief of the capital. The first three armies were, as
yet, in a very bad and ill-disciplined state; but the fourth army--that
of the Loire--composed largely of veteran troops, and numbering nearly
100,000 men, with from 300 to 350 guns, was by no means to be despised
by an enemy.
While France had thus been collecting her strength for a great effort of
national resistance, the Germans on their side had not been idle. Though
disappointed, as days rolled on, that Paris still held resolutely out,
and though conscious that its defences were assuming a very formidable
shape, they seem not yet to have supposed that a long siege was already
certain. Nevertheless, they proceeded to clear their communications with
the frontier, and to collect supplies from all parts of the country
within tolerably easy reach of Paris; and for this purpose the sieges of
some of the north-eastern fortresses of France were begun, and flying
columns were despatched as far as Dreux, Chartres, Beauvais, and
Orleans, to sweep the adjoining districts of their crops and cattle.
These raiders, however, although they formed a kind of observing force
for the investing lines, were not properly a covering army strong enough
to defeat a real effort made in strength to relieve the capital; they
were little more than petty detachments; and there can be no doubt that
the German leaders were not yet sufficiently aware of the power of
France to renew the contest. They seem, indeed, to have specially
under-rated the real force of the Army of the Loire, which was now
collected just north of Orleans, and had between it and the capital only
a Bavarian corps about 25,000 strong; the reason being that in the first
week of October a part of this army had been defeated easily, and had
shown remarkable want of discipline. Yet even at this period--that is
about six weeks after the beginning of the siege--the situation of the
Germans in France, in consequence of her great exertions, was one of
increasing difficulties. Nearly the whole forces of the invaders were
spread around the capital and Metz,--that is, were detained by two vast
entrenched camps, and were liable to attack from within, and that in the
depths of an enemy's country; and while an army far from contemptible
was being slowly created in Paris, immense levies were gathering in the
provinces, and were being trained into regular armies in a condition of
more or less efficiency. The German chiefs, however, elated by success,
disregarded all these menacing preparations, and even now reckoned that
a few days would see them victorious inside Paris, and would bring the
war to a triumphant close. So confident, indeed, were they that no
attack from any quarter was probable, that, instead of sending for
reinforcements to strengthen the army around Paris, they had detached,
after the fall of Strasburg, a force which might have been so employed,
to reduce the fortresses of Alsace, and to Dijon, Besançon, and Lyons.
Such were the positions of the belligerents in the last days of the
month of October. The fall of Metz increased immensely the power and
advantages of the Germans, and threw a weight into the scale against
France which ultimately it became impossible to counterbalance. It was
not only that 200,000 invaders were now let loose to overrun the country
and to strengthen the investment of Paris, nor yet that the whole army
of the Rhine, with the garrison of a first-rate fortress--170,000 men,
four marshals of France, and 6,000 officers--were swept off into
captivity in Germany; the surrender of Metz, it is now well known,
prevented operations which, at this juncture, were being planned for the
relief of Paris, and which, but for that circumstance, would probably
have been successful. As we have seen, the Germans had allowed the Army
of the Loire to collect near Orleans, with only a small Bavarian corps
interposed between it and the French capital; and they still so utterly
despised this army that, although after Metz had capitulated, their
leaders had ordered one corps of those around the fortress to advance to
Paris, the bulk of the troops of Prince Frederic Charles were separated
into two great masses, one directed against the North of France, and the
other towards Troyes, Nevers, and Bourges,--that is, against the centre
of the country, and not immediately on the Loire and Orleans. These
dispositions, which showed plainly that the real strength of the Army of
the Loire was inadequately understood in the invaders' camp, permitted
the commander of that body--a veteran named D'Aurelles de Paladines, who
had done much to improve its discipline--to attempt a design he had been
meditating, and even to strike a blow at his enemy which possibly might
have had extraordinary results. D'Aurelles, aware that the only obstacle
to his reaching the lines around Paris was one corps of 25,000 men,
resolved to attack and overwhelm that detachment; and there can be
little doubt that, in the event of success, he contemplated a march on
the besieged city, even though he must have known that Prince Frederic
Charles had been set free, and was moving from Lorraine. The plan of
D'Aurelles was well designed, though not executed with equal ability. On
the 7th of November he crossed the Loire below Orleans with the mass of
his army, a single column having crossed higher up, his intention being
to surround and destroy the few divisions which stood in his path, and
then to advance, if fortune favoured. Von der Tann, the commander of the
Bavarians, either unaware of his enemy's strength, or confident in the
prestige of success, moved boldly to attack the main French column; but,
finding himself opposed by irresistible forces, he fell back rapidly and
with great skill on the main roads from Orleans to Paris. Although this
retreat was very well executed, and, indeed, was in part effected at
night, Von der Tann suffered a good deal in a series of sharp and
repeated engagements at Marchenoir, Coulmiers, and Baum; and had the
French column which had crossed the Loire above Orleans been
sufficiently quick, he could hardly have escaped a serious defeat. As it
was, when upon the 11th he stood concentrated at Arthenay and Toury,
covering the main route to Paris from D'Aurelles, he had certainly lost
more than 3,000 men, and what is more important, the ascendancy of
success; he had been, in fact, decidedly overmatched; and a French army,
70,000 strong, which could have been increased to 90,000, stood in his
front, eager for battle and revenge.
It is not impossible that at this moment D'Aurelles could have forced
his way to Paris had he known how to seize his opportunity. Considerable
alarm prevailed at Versailles: it had become evident that a powerful
force was only five or six marches from the lines, with nothing between
but one reduced corps; there really was no covering army to repel a bold
attempt at relief, and it was expected that the army of the Loire would
advance obliquely by Chartres and Dreux, and attack the Germans to the
west of the city. Such an attack, which would, of course, be combined
with an attack from the armed masses within, would be too formidable to
be resisted, for it would place the Germans between two fires, spread as
they were on an immense circumference; and accordingly the remarkable
man who directed the operations of the invaders made preparations to
raise the siege, and to incur the consequent moral loss, in case the
columns of D'Aurelles' army should be descried on their way from the
south. As, however, the French general might pause, a corps of about
20,000 men was sent off to the aid of Von der Tann under the command of
the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg; one-half of this corps, however, being
ordered to diverge towards Dreux to observe the French Army of the West,
supposed to be moving from that quarter. Thus, even as late as the 13th
of November, not more than about 30,000 Germans were interposed between
D'Aurelles and Paris; and it is difficult to suppose, had he moved on
the 11th, that he would not have broken down with ease the only barrier
in his way, and not improbably have defeated Von der Tann and the Grand
Duke in detail. The French commander, however, hesitated; he had not
destroyed Von der Tann; he was evidently not thoroughly confident in
himself; and, at this crisis of the affairs of France, he drew back
instead of advancing, and finally retired to a camp at Orleans which he
had marked out for ulterior operations, his success being thus rendered
wholly fruitless. This was a calamitous mistake for the French; yet we
can account for it without charging D'Aurelles with entire incapacity.
Knowing that Von der Tann was still in his front, he calculated with
justice that the Bavarians would be able to obstruct his progress until
reinforcements should come up; and the news, which in all probability
reached him, that the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg was being detached,
caused him perhaps to overrate the Grand Duke's strength, and to halt
until he should ascertain it. In addition, and what was, we believe,
decisive, D'Aurelles knew that Prince Frederic Charles was moving from
Metz towards the south; and though the Prince was still really distant,
the French general not unreasonably feared undertaking a march on Paris,
which might expose the Army of the Loire to be ultimately assailed in
flank and rear. This consideration, though not well-founded, was exactly
such as would influence a commander not of the first class, and thus a
favourable opportunity was missed, of which the consequences might have
been immense.
These operations, when attentively reviewed, show at once what a
terrible disaster to the French cause was the capitulation of Metz, at
the time when it actually took place. Had the fortress held out till the
9th of November, Prince Frederic Charles must have remained around it;
his movement against the centre of France would not have been even
commenced; and, in that event, there would have been no force which
could have even threatened the Army of the Loire in the rear, had it
advanced on Paris. If so, the obstacle which probably prevented
D'Aurelles from pushing forward after the actions of the 9th and 10th
could have had no existence even in his fancy, and, consequently, it is
difficult to believe that D'Aurelles would not have marched, at once,
and succeeded in raising the siege of Paris. As it was, he had, we
believe, the means of attaining this result, had he been endowed with
qualities of the highest order; but, giving him credit for the talents
he possesses, had he known that the Prince was at Metz, he would almost
certainly have pressed forward. And had the siege of Paris been raised,
as was not altogether uncontemplated by Von Moltke, if ever the Army of
the Loire came up, the effect in France would have been prodigious; and
though we differ from those who insist that it would have led to a great
German disaster, we think that it would have prevented a renewal of the
investment of Paris. The question, therefore, presents itself--Did
Bazaine hold out to the last, and is he responsible for the surrender of
Metz at the moment when it occurred? On this subject, as may be
supposed, there is a great deal of conflicting evidence, but some
conclusions seem tolerably certain. We do not think it possible to deny
that Metz really yielded to famine; the army was in a deplorable state,
horseflesh had long been the only animal food, the bread rations had
been greatly reduced, and fever and typhus had made portentous ravages
among the troops, and even the population. But, on the other hand, there
is some proof that, at the beginning of the investment, provisions had
not been carefully preserved, and that the generals and other officers
thought a great deal too much of their own comforts, and did not attend
to the wants of the army; and therefore, although we think that Bazaine
was incapable of anything like treason, and really made a stout
resistance, it is possible that a more self-denying and foresighted
commander might have slightly protracted the defence. The luxury and
pride of the imperial _régime_, it is to be feared, infected the
head-quarters and staff during the siege of Metz; and it may--though we
speak with diffidence--have been the result that the fortress fell
exactly at the least fortunate moment, so far as regards the interests
of France.
The apparition of the Army of the Loire beyond Orleans, and its
unexpected strength, caused a complete change in the plans of the
Germans. It had become evident that a powerful force was in the field
for the relief of Paris, and no one knew better than the great commander
who guided the movements of the invaders, how necessary it was to
interpose an effectual barrier against this foe if the siege of the city
was to continue. Paris, too, was showing no signs of submission; the
winter was coming on apace; and the position of the besiegers might
become critical if they were detained around the capital for months, at
an immense distance from their base on the frontier, and liable to
attacks from without and within. The battles of the 9th and 10th, in a
word, had awakened the able German chiefs to the possible dangers of
their situation, and with characteristic energy and consummate prudence
they applied themselves to avert or remove them. The corps intended to
march northward were kept back and brought nearer to Paris, and the army
commanded by Prince Frederic Charles was diverted from the centre and
east, and ordered to move as quickly as possible to the Lower Loire and
the neighbourhood of Orleans, with the view of checking D'Aurelles'
force, and attacking it, should it attempt to advance. At the same time,
the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg was kept in communication with Von der
Tann along the roads leading from Orleans to Paris, while some of his
divisions were turned towards the Sarthe to face the French Army of the
West; these arrangements, however, being only temporary until the
arrival of Prince Frederic Charles should add largely to the strength of
the Germans. In this way a whole series of covering armies were in a
short time thrown in an extensive circle around the investing lines, so
as to baffle and repel the French; and these would soon become
formidable, though, as yet, they were not in sufficient force to render
an attempt to relieve Paris beyond the reach of a daring commander.
Meanwhile the French had done much on their side, though it cannot be
said that their efforts were equally important or as well conducted.
D'Aurelles retired to his camp near Orleans, entrenching himself with
great care, and meditating ulterior movements, and in a few days he made
his entrenchments exceedingly difficult to turn or attack, though their
proximity to the Loire, just behind, made them dangerous as a defensive
position. At this point, which he had made his base, he awaited his
reinforcements for some days, apparently thinking that the addition of
these would more than counter-balance Prince Frederic Charles, now
hastening forward to arrest his progress--a conclusion utterly false, in
our judgment. These reinforcements, however, it must be said, were, in
mere numbers, exceedingly great, and at the close of November
D'Aurelles' army had more than doubled its nominal strength, being now
upwards of 200,000 men, with from 400 to 500 guns; but the organization
of these new divisions was, for the most part, imperfect and crude; the
recruits were partly young raw lads; the staff and other arrangements
were bad; and not only was the second portion of the Army of the Loire
inferior to the first, but it did not throw into the scale of France a
force even nearly as great as that which, under Prince Frederic Charles,
was now reaching the theatre of war.
Such, at the close of November, was the situation of the belligerent
armies. By this time Trochu had completed his arrangements for carrying
out his plan; had made Paris prodigiously strong; had greatly weakened
the besiegers' lines; had organized two armies inside the city; and he
now prepared for a gigantic sortie, while D'Aurelles should co-operate
from without. That general seems to have been in communication with
Trochu by means of balloons and pigeons; and, for the second time, he
began operations which had for their object the relief of Paris. His
army was very well placed in comparison with that of the Germans, for it
was concentrated on a much narrower front, from Chateaudun to Montargis,
its centre holding the camp at Orleans, and its wings occupying the main
roads to Paris; whereas Prince Frederic Charles was only just in line at
Pithiviers and Nemours. Von der Tann, at Toury, was extremely weak, and
the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, thrown westward, was hardly united to his
Bavarian colleague. There was thus an interval in the German line
immediately in front of the French centre, which offered a favourable
mark for attack; and had D'Aurelles been a great general, we think he
would have advanced on that point, and very probably have been
successful, especially if it is borne in mind that he had a great
superiority in numbers--200,000 to about 100,000. But D'Aurelles again
displayed timidity, indecision, and want of true insight. He commenced
his march on the 28th of November, and attacked one corps of Prince
Frederic Charles, stationed near the village of Beaune la Rolande, and
though the engagement was indecisive, he made no effort with the rest of
his army, and fell back on his camp at Orleans, having thus struck at
his enemy's line, not where it was weak, but where it was strong, having
delivered his stroke with a small part of his forces, and having only
made the Germans aware of his position and movements. Prince Frederic
Charles, who now commanded the whole German army to the south of Paris,
made immediate preparations for a counter-blow which should overwhelm
his timid antagonist. He perceived that Von der Tann and the Grand Duke
of Mecklenburg were perilously divided, and he gave orders for a general
concentration of the whole forces of these commanders, while he advanced
his own to co-operate with them. These movements went on during two
days, the German columns drawing together within easy reach of the
French general, who, however, lingered irresolutely in his camp,
unwilling or unable to attack. On the 1st of December Prince Frederic
Charles moved against his foe, with his divisions in hand; and as the
French were now disseminated, in comparison with the German front, it is
not improbable that, at the decisive points, they scarcely had a
numerical superiority. The result was, of course, thenceforward certain.
D'Aurelles' centre was pierced through and through; his wings were
separated and thrown off in broken and widely-divided parts; the camp at
Orleans, too near the Loire, proved a disadvantage rather than
otherwise; the Army of the Loire was utterly defeated with a loss of
nearly 15,000 men, and the attempt to march to the relief of Paris ended
in complete and ruinous disaster.
In these engagements we see the difference between vigorous and bad
generalship. It is not pretended that the army of the Loire was as well
organized as that of the Germans; but numerically it was nearly twice as
strong; and had it been commanded by an able chief it might not
improbably have been led to victory. But in selecting his point of
attack, in advancing with a fragment of his forces, in retreating when
it was not necessary, and above all, in allowing his enemy to unite,
literally without being molested, D'Aurelles showed want of capacity to
command; whereas Prince Frederic Charles gave convincing proof of vigour
and skill in these operations. That able commander was seriously alarmed
when, on the 28th, he ascertained the strength and positions of the
French, and perceived the space in the long line between Von der Tann
and the Grand Duke; and had he been in D'Aurelles' place, Europe might
have seen the Army of the Loire advancing between the German wings, and
forcing its way in triumph to Paris. When, however, the Prince became
aware of the real nature of the situation, he displayed talent of a very
high order; and the celerity with which he collected his army and bore
down on his vacillating foe was quite worthy of the first Napoleon.
Meanwhile, a grand but unsuccessful effort had been making by the armies
in Paris to break through or turn the lines of the Germans. On the 29th
of November two large masses of troops, commanded by Generals Vinoy and
Ducrot, covered by a terrible cannonade from the southern and
south-eastern forts, attempted to carry the positions of Choisy le Roi
and Chevilly, on the road to Orleans, and to storm Ormesson beyond the
Marne, these operations being evidently intended to be in concert with
those of D'Aurelles' army. On account of the rise in the waters of the
Marne, the attack of Ducrot was not pressed that day; but on the 30th it
was renewed with imposing forces, and four villages beyond the Marne
were seized and occupied by the French, their numbers carrying
everything before them. The German lines were now nearly reached, and
had the attack been repeated next day, it is not impossible that it
might have succeeded, for it is now known that 100,000 men could have
been opposed to about 30,000. But Trochu paused at this crisis, resolved
not to attempt to do more unless the Army of the Loire was at hand; and,
as this force still made no sign, he allowed Ducrot to remain inactive
during the 1st and part of the 2nd of December. Meanwhile the Germans
had been combining their troops for a decisive effort, and on the
morning of the 2nd they assailed their enemy in the positions he had
won. Two of the villages were retaken; but, as the assailants advanced
further, they were smitten by such a fire from the forts, the guns of
which had been unexpectedly strengthened, that they were swept away and
destroyed by thousands. The French pushed forward victoriously again. On
the night of the 2nd they were once more in overwhelming strength near
the investing line; and it may be doubted whether a bold effort would
not have forced it at this juncture. But Trochu would not pursue his
advantage, and as the army of the Loire did not appear, he soon withdrew
Ducrot's army from before the Marne in the wood of Vincennes.
Persons not versed in military science will at once conclude from this
brief narrative that Trochu was an incompetent chief. They will say that
he ought to have cut his way out at all hazards without a second
thought, and that he missed a fine opportunity during any of the first
three days of December. They will point also to the means he possessed
for concentrating on interior lines, and pouring an overwhelming mass of
men on certain selected points; and they will insist that nothing but
skill was wanting to France on this occasion. We do not wholly condemn
the assertions; but considerations of the gravest kind must be borne in
mind on the other side. It is a maxim of the art of war that an invested
fortress must be relieved by the efforts of an army without combined
with those of the garrison within; for, in the first place, it is
extremely difficult for the garrison unaided to break through the
entrenchments formed by the besiegers; and, in the second, if the
garrison breaks through, it is liable to destruction unless it is
received into the arms, as it were, of a friendly force. The case of a
great city like Paris is no exception to this principle, or at least
only in a slight degree; for it would have been an arduous task for
Ducrot to have stormed the German lines in any event; and, if he had,
what was he to have done with from 80,000 to 100,000 men, when he had
got out in the open country, with scanty supplies, and without a base?
There were special reasons also why, in this instance, Trochu should
wait for the Army of the Loire, for if it arrived, the Army of Paris
would be enabled to make its way out without running any serious risk;
and, in that case, combined with the relieving force, it might expect to
do the Germans immense injury, as they drew off from the investing
circle. In acting, therefore, as he did, Trochu was not the temporizing
fool he has been called by certain detractors; and it must be added that
he adhered strictly to the recognised rules of military science.
Nevertheless, had he been a chief of genius, we think he would have
taken the bolder course, and have endeavoured, on the 1st and 2nd of
December, to have broken through the German entrenchments. For, in the
first place, he could not reckon, with anything even approaching
certainty, that the Army of the Loire could reach Paris; and, that being
so, he should perhaps have relied upon himself and his army alone. And,
in the second place, it so happened that if his army could once sever
the lines, it would not be exposed to a want of supplies, even if no
assistance came from outside, for had he seized the great German depôts
a few miles off on the Strasburg Railway, it would have found
everything which it could have needed. Admitting, therefore, all that
can be said, Trochu perhaps showed himself too wedded to mere rules and
general notions in not having made a great effort with Ducrot at this
critical moment; and had he struck with his whole force, that effort
might have been successful.
The failure of Ducrot's great sortie, and the defeats of the Army of the
Loire near Orleans, were cruel and lasting disasters to France. In
another part of the theatre of operations, the balance of fortune hung
more evenly, though the ultimate issue was not very different. The
discomfited forces of D'Aurelles, as we have seen, were broken into
three parts, the centre and wings divided from each other; and even
after the battles of the first days of December, the centre and right,
driven across the Loire, retreated hastily to Bourges and Nevers, while
the left remained on the north bank of the river, clinging to Marchenoir
and the adjoining country. The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg and Von der
Tann, with about 35,000 or 40,000 men, were detached to destroy this
isolated wing, while Prince Frederic Charles pursued the main body, and
a series of operations ensued which throw a ray of lustre on the French
arms. The commander of the broken French left was a general who, though
before unknown, has since given proof of no common talents, and in fact
seems to us to be entitled to no mean rank among able captains. Chanzy,
in a series of obstinate encounters, confronted and baffled his
victorious foes with a force hardly superior in numbers; and after
disputing the difficult country between Beaugency and Vendôme, effected
at last his retreat to Le Mans, where he joined the friendly Army of the
West, and succeeded in obtaining large reinforcements. This retreat was
executed with great skill, and was made exactly on the right points; and
that Chanzy was able to gain his goal in the face of the Grand Duke and
of Von der Tann, and subsequently of a corps of Prince Frederic Charles,
moved up from the Loire to overpower him, does honour to his ability and
judgment. A lull now took place in the operations along the zone of
country to the south of Paris; but from the North an unsuccessful
attempt to relieve the beleaguered capital was made. For some weeks the
French Army of the North had been in a state of comparative order, and
though it had been defeated in November, it had been entrusted to an
experienced commander, who had done much to improve its discipline. In
the third week of December, General Faidherbe advanced to attack at
Pont Noyelles a part of the German Army of the North, his object being,
should he win the battle, to press forward and march to Paris. This
engagement, however, proved indecisive, and Faidherbe in a few days
retired into the chain of fortresses on the Belgian frontier, his
antagonist, Von Goeben, holding him in check along the line of the Somme
and its affluents. Meanwhile Trochu, doubtless informed from without of
the intentions of Faidherbe, had made another effort on the 21st to
attack the German lines to the north; but though he achieved a certain
amount of success, he again declined to strike more decisively, when it
had become apparent that he was not to expect the assistance of a
relieving army. The French captured several outlying positions on the
great northern and eastern roads, and held them for two or three days;
but there being no sign of Faidherbe's approach, they once more retired,
having effected nothing.
While these combats had been taking place, the belligerents had been
making great exertions to increase their forces and renew the war. The
German commanders had discovered that France had developed resources of
which they had no previous conception, and that Paris was stronger and
better provisioned than they could possibly have imagined; and though as
yet they had been victorious, they felt their position to be insecure,
bound as they were to the besieged capital, and, in the depth of a
severe winter, exposed to the attacks of all the French armies
converging on them from every side. In fact, in a strategic point of
view their situation was extremely critical; for if a single one of the
covering armies were broken through by a relieving force, which thus
could reach the line of investment, they might have been compelled to
raise the siege, and might, perhaps, suffer a series of disasters. This
danger was, therefore, to be averted; and as the covering armies had
lost enormously from cold, hardship, and field-service, and the
besiegers' ranks had also been thinned, it was necessary to make very
large additions to the strength of the invading forces. Vast
reinforcements were accordingly despatched across the Rhine to all
points of the war; Prince Frederic Charles, the Grand Duke of
Mecklenburg, and Von der Tann received thousands of recruits; the armies
of Von Goeben and Werder were replenished to a considerable extent, and
the corps selected to protect the different lines of the communications
were increased by important reserves. In this way about 200,000 men were
joined to the armies already in France; and at the same time no pains
were spared to accelerate the arrival of siege trains before Paris, in
order to open fire on the defences. This task, however, was extremely
difficult, on account of the distance from the frontier, and the state
of the roads; and though, during more than two months, heavy guns had
been gradually sent up, it was not until near the end of December that
batteries, more nearly adequate to the purpose, had been constructed and
armed. Meantime, the French had been equally energetic, but the results
obtained had been very inferior. Recruits, indeed, had been despatched
in masses to increase the bulk of the provincial armies; munitions of
war were obtained in quantities, and nothing, it must be said, was left
undone which patriotism and devotion could accomplish. But though the
divided parts of the Army of the Loire, and though the Armies of the
North and the East became very formidable in mere numbers, the accession
of raw and unformed levies, without proper military organization, did
not much augment their real power; and as many of the best soldiers in
the force commanded by D'Aurelles had perished in the recent
engagements, it is not improbable that the strength of France was hardly
greater towards the end of December than it had been three weeks
previously, whereas that of Germany had increased to a degree that made
the German generals masters of the situation in all its aspects.
Such, about Christmas, was the relative strength and condition of the
belligerent armies. At this moment, Prince Frederic Charles, Von der
Tann, and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, held a central position between
Orleans and Chartres, having Chanzy in advance of Le Mans, and the
remainder of the Army of the Loire rallied by Bourbaki at Bourges and
Nevers; Faidherbe was held in check by Von Goeben; to the east Werder,
who had been told off after the fall of Strasburg to overrun the south,
was confronted by the French Army of the East, with an irregular force
under Garibaldi; and, as we have seen, the vast circle of the covering
armies was more formidable than it had been at any preceding time. In
this state of things an extraordinary scheme was formed for the French
provincial armies, and ultimately for the relief of Paris, which we can
only describe as the extreme of rashness. Werder had for some time
invested Belfort, while part of his forces lay in Franche Comté; and as
he had not more than 50,000 men, and Bourbaki was at no great distance
with perhaps not less than 120,000, an opportunity seemed given to
strike a blow, which it was hoped might crush this foe, and even change
the aspect of the contest. If Bourbaki were to assail Werder from
Bourges and Nevers, he would probably destroy him; and if so, he could
relieve Belfort, and furthermore, by a bold advance on Nancy and
Luneville, fall upon the great line of German communications from
Strasburg to Paris along the main railway. But a stroke of this kind
would in all probability compel the siege of Paris to be raised, for the
Germans could not so easily subsist if their supplies were cut off or
even interrupted; and if they were obliged to retire, the paramount
object of French strategy would be attained by this single operation.
The movement of Bourbaki, too, was not only promising in itself, for it
was difficult to imagine that he would not crush Werder, which, being
done, all the rest would follow; but, properly conceived, it need not
endanger the French armies in other parts of the theatre. Let it be
granted that the withdrawal of Bourbaki would relieve Prince Frederic
Charles of an enemy, would the Prince, Von der Tann, and the Grand Duke
of Mecklenburg turn round and fall in full force on Chanzy? And, even if
they did, would not Chanzy, with his large army in position at Le Mans,
be strong enough to baffle their efforts? And even supposing Chanzy
defeated, how little was to be thought of a defeat provided Bourbaki
relieved Paris by seizing and cutting the German communications?
Besides, was it not very conceivable that Prince Frederic Charles would
pursue Bourbaki, in which case that commander would escape him, and that
he would not think of attacking Chanzy?
Such was their plan, and, we repeat, it was, under the circumstances,
simply insensate. No one will deny that to overwhelm Werder, to effect
the raising of the siege of Belfort, and to sever the communications of
the Germans, were desirable objects for the French; and had Bourbaki
reached in force the main railway from Strasburg to Paris, this might
have caused the relief of the capital. But, in the actual state of the
French armies--raw, ill-provided, and ill-disciplined--a movement like
this was extremely difficult, and far from likely to be at all
successful, even as regards the mere reaching Belfort; and it was open
to the decisive objection that it enabled Prince Frederic Charles to
oppose all his forces to Chanzy and overwhelm him, in conjunction with
his German colleagues. The scheme, therefore, exposed the French on one
side to certain disaster, and, on the other, was really far from
hopeful; and it not only made it almost impossible to expect the relief
of Paris, but it might lead to terrible results should Bourbaki fail or
prove a bad General, In an unfortunate hour for France, however, this
reckless project was adopted; and in the first days of January, Bourbaki
broke up from Bourges and Nevers to reach Franche Comté, and made his
way to his first point, Belfort. The operations that ensued were just
such as might have been foreseen. The instant that Prince Frederic
Charles had ascertained that Bourbaki's army was on its way to the
distant east, he turned rapidly upon Chanzy, and directed his own
reinforced corps, with those of Von der Tann and the Grand Duke, to
converge without delay on Le Mans and overwhelm his French antagonist.
The movement began in the first days of January; and as the united
German armies were probably 140,000 strong, whereas Chanzy was hardly
superior in mere numbers, and had little but undisciplined levies in his
ranks, the issue was not for a moment doubtful. Chanzy, who had made a
feint forward, and had threatened the Prince before Vendôme, found
himself pressed by an irresistible enemy, and fell back at once on Le
Mans, not having been, we believe, informed of the project which had
detached Bourbaki. His retreat was conducted with marked ability, his
German foes closing in on all sides, and endeavouring to cut him off
from his point; and nothing save his judicious foresight enabled him to
save even a part of his army. Chanzy had fortified a strong position
before Le Mans, on the river Huisne--so strong that it has been compared
to Torres Vedras by an eye-witness--and he succeeded in making a stand
on this, and even baffling his enemy for a time. The contest, however,
was too unequal; his lines were turned on the night of the 11th; Le Mans
was captured the next day; and Chanzy's army, beaten and demoralized,
lost, it is said, 20,000 prisoners.
While these events had been in progress, Bourbaki had been making his
way across the rugged and hilly country which divides Burgundy from
Franche Comté. The cold of the winter was intense; and his divisions,
composed of young recruits, ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ill-disciplined,
suffered cruelly, and were half demoralized before they saw even the
face of an enemy. At Dijon he obtained reinforcements drawn from the
French Army of the East, and with a force, nominally 140,000 strong,
with from 300 to 400 guns, he proceeded through the intricate defiles,
between the rivers Ognon and Doubs, which lead to the hills around
Belfort. The march of his weak and untrained columns, confined to a
single narrow route, was necessarily extremely slow; and it is decisive
against Bourbaki's generalship that, at a time when speed was of the
greatest importance, he did not advance by four or five roads, and thus
make expedition possible. The French army, worn out and harassed, and
especially wanting in staff officers, moved at the rate of four or five
miles a day only, and the result was that it completely failed to cut
off Werder, as had been expected, and that that general was enabled to
retreat leisurely and cover Belfort. A rear-guard engagement took place
at Villersexel, on the 6th of January, and it was not until the 14th
that Bourbaki reached the Lisaine--a tributary of the Doubs in front of
the fortress--where he found Werder's army drawn up in entrenched
positions, and awaiting its foe. A series of combats ensued, in which
the raw and bad French troops, although numerically three to one, were
unable to gain any success; and, on the 18th, Bourbaki retreated, having
lost from 8,000 to 10,000 men, and having met nothing but heavy
disaster. His army, baffled and half starving, began to disband and go
to pieces; and, as he retreated by the narrow defiles by which he had
before advanced, he did not reach Besançon till the 22nd. Meanwhile Von
Moltke had been directing a terrible and decisive stroke against him. As
soon as the great German commander had become aware of Bourbaki's
movements, he massed a force of some 50,000 men between Auxerre and
Chatillon-sur-Seine, and launched it across the hills of Burgundy upon
the flank and rear of the Frenchman, while Werder, pressing forward from
the Lisaine, advanced against him through Franche Comté. By the 24th of
January, four German divisions had passed Dijon and reached Dôle on the
Doubs, to the south of Besançon, while a large part of Werder's forces
were threatening Bourbaki from the north; and thus the unfortunate
French army was already almost completely hemmed in by its vigorous and
indefatigable pursuers. The disgrace of a second Sedan flashed across
the mind of the French commander, and in a paroxysm of despair he shot
himself, unable to brave the impending peril. His army, a mere
dissolving mass, rolled out helplessly from Besançon, and endeavoured to
make its way southward, but finding all the roads occupied, it turned
aside and crossed the Swiss frontier. There the starving mob of
disbanding fugitives was obliged helplessly to lay down its arms.
Such was the end of the expedition, ill-planned and still worse
executed. The detachment of Bourbaki to the east caused the overthrow of
Chanzy at Le Mans, by setting Prince Frederic Charles free; and the bad
state of Bourbaki's army, and even more, his deplorable conduct, led to
the catastrophe we have described. What, indeed, could have been more
unwise than to have moved in a single column only, when celerity was the
first consideration; and what could have been more shameful than the
management of the retreat to Besançon, and the rash act which left an
army at that place without a commander? These things are simply without
excuse; yet it must be added that the condition of Bourbaki's troops
made it very improbable that he could, under any circumstance, have
accomplished the task which he undertook, at least that he could ever
have reached the great line of the German communications; and
accordingly, even when it seemed most promising, the whole enterprise
cannot be justified. The result might have been very different if the
forces of Bourbaki and Chanzy had been concentrated for a vigorous
attack on Prince Frederic Charles and his colleagues on the line between
Orleans, Vendome, and Chartres. Had this been done the French would have
largely outnumbered their foes, and even had they failed and been
defeated, they would have been able to make good their retreat without
incurring a terrible disaster. The more we study the operations of the
French armies in the month of January, the more we see how ill-devised
they were; while, on the other hand, the strategy of the Germans--of
Werder, in the stand he made on the Lisaine, and of Von Moltke in
surrounding Bourbaki--is deserving of the highest admiration; and,
though no one would think of comparing the young French troops with
their veteran foes, it is not the less true that the final issue was
decided in the main by generalship. Everywhere else in the theatre of
war, while these disasters were taking place, the fortunes of France
were in calamitous eclipse. The German Army of the North was taking the
fortresses on her north-eastern frontier without difficulty by a brief
bombardment, the old bastions of Vauban's time being useless against
modern heavy guns, and the triple barrier of Louis XIV. was thus broken
down from within, and the Northern Departments laid open. Faidherbe had
fought two battles in a vain attempt to resist the invaders; but, though
he gained some success at Bapaume, over a small part of Von Goeben's
army, he had been unable to follow it up, and soon afterwards he was
defeated with great and ruinous loss at St. Quentin--an ominous name in
French annals. After this disaster the French Army of the North was no
longer able to keep the field. Faidherbe took refuge in Lille and
Cambrai, and the tide of German invasion flowed irresistibly to the
borders of Artois and Hainault.
Meanwhile the progress of the great siege had been tending to its
inevitable conclusion. On the 27th of December, the German batteries
commenced the reduction of the outwork constructed by Trochu on Mont
Avron, and in two days it was silenced and destroyed, the defences being
feeble and incomplete. This roused the spirits of the besiegers; and as,
by this time, their siege trains had come up in considerable numbers,
fire was opened on the southern and eastern forts, and for some weeks
was kept up with vigour. The distance, however, of the attacking
batteries from the defences of Paris was very great, nor was their
artillery powerful; and it cannot be said that they succeeded in making
a serious or lasting impression. In fact, the forts, and even the
ramparts, were armed with rather stronger ordnance, and they maintained
a combat at least equal to that of the heavy guns that were directed
against them. The bombardment of the city was next attempted, and shells
were poured into its streets and squares; but as the extreme range of
the German guns extended only to one bank of the Seine, no great damage,
fortunately, was done, and, as often has happened in other cases, the
effect on the spirits of the population was rather to stimulate than to
alarm. 'You might as well have pelted Paris with bottles,' was the
remark of an intelligent eye-witness, and there can be no doubt that the
active siege of the capital was a complete failure. Meantime, however,
famine was doing the work which fire and sword could not have
accomplished. The city had been amply provisioned, but, at the end of
four months and a half, it was reduced to the extreme of misery. For
many weeks horseflesh had been the only animal food of the population;
the bread doled out in scanty rations was a vile compound of bran and
rye; the mortality among the old and young was appalling; the supply of
fuel had fallen short, and that in the depths of a fearful winter. On
the 19th of January, Trochu made a last effort against the besiegers'
lines, but, as might have been anticipated, it failed, his troops having
lost all courage and worth. By this time all hope of relief from the
provincial armies had been frustrated, and at last, on the 130th day of
the siege, the proud capital was subdued by famine. The line of the
defences was almost uninjured; and, unquestionably, Paris would have
held out for months, nay, perhaps might have proved impregnable, had the
citizens possessed the means of subsistence.
The fall of Paris brought to a close the internecine strife between
France and Germany. The extraordinary disasters of January, indeed
(especially the ruin of Bourbaki's army), had made resistance no longer
possible; and, in all probability, had the war gone on, the vanquished
country would have been overrun. Those who, like ourselves, were of
opinion that the expected surrender of the capital need not necessarily
terminate the struggle, could not have anticipated the fatal strategy
which annihilated the provincial armies of France in futile movements
and desperate efforts. We believe the National Assembly was right in
accepting the conditions of the Germans, harsh and relentless as these
were; and we applaud the patriotism of M. Thiers in bowing before the
doom of fate, and offer him our respect and sympathy. Our space has been
already outrun, and we cannot make any general remarks on the mighty
conflict which has just closed.
As regards its consequences, we can only hazard two or three
anticipations of the future. Those who believed in the moderation and
civilization of the gigantic power of which Bismark has been the creator
must have been disappointed at the German terms; but as we are not among
the credulous, we cannot say that we have been surprised. The
annexation, however, of Alsace and Lorraine against the will of two
millions of the brave inhabitants of those provinces, the dismemberment
of France, and her spoliation, and, above all, the evident understanding
between the autocrats of Russia and Germany, are simply the triumphs of
brute force--perpetual menaces to the peace of Europe. As regards
France, her destiny is uncertain; and it remains to be seen whether, as
of old, she will rise superior to misfortune, or whether, like Spain,
she will henceforth decline and sink into an inferior power. If, as we
think, the first alternative is that which history will yet witness,
France certainly will renew the combat, and endeavour to regain from her
pitiless foe, not only her strategic position, but the conquered
territories. To effect this purpose she will avail herself of any
alliances, however abnormal--and for this she is not to be condemned.
From this point of view, also, the prospect for England is not
reassuring. France, however, if she would renew her strength, must first
learn self-government, and to combat anarchy and revolution; and, deeply
as we sympathise with her, she would, we believe, achieve more if she
were to attain these great ends than if she were to avenge Sedan by a
second Jena, and march once more in triumph to Berlin.
ART. VIII.--_Professor Fraser's Edition of Bishop Berkeley's Works._
(1.) _The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne._
Collected and Edited, with Prefaces and Annotations, by ALEXANDER
CAMPBELL FRASER, M.A., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the
University of Edinburgh. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1871.
(2.) _Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of
Cloyne, and an Account of his Philosophy; with many writings of Bishop
Berkeley hitherto unpublished._ By ALEXANDER CAMPBELL FRASER, M.A.,
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh.
Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1871.
The English people have not treated their great philosophers well. They
have profited by them, made use of their results, and embodied in
political, social, and religious life the principles which men like
Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have laboriously thought out
and sent forth to enrich the common stock of human knowledge; but they
have not sufficiently honoured their intellectual guides. They have not
striven to obtain a clear and consistent conception of the whole of each
great man's life, nor have they cared to estimate the full sweep of his
influence upon the thought of his fellows. They have been content to sum
up the result of life labours in the meagre formula, Hobbes, who was the
father of Locke, who was the father of Berkeley, who was the father of
Hume. They have measured the ingathering influence of the lake by the
amount of water carried into it by the stream coming from the lake
above, its outgoing action by the amount of water which the river bears
away to the lake beneath. The thousand rills which trickle down from the
hills and neighbouring highlands are forgotten, the constant unseen
action of air and heat and light bearing away the myriad waterdrops to
store them in the clouds of the firmament, ready to hear when the corn
and the vine call to the earth, and the earth calleth to the heavens,
and to answer in life-bringing showers, is left unremembered. Until
Cambridge gave us Bacon's Works, edited by Messrs. Ellis and Spedding,
England had not one good annotated edition of her great philosophers.
Oxford has now given us Berkeley. We have only hope to trust to for
Locke and Hume, the greatest and most powerful of all. And English
philosophy pays the penalty of the neglect in the one-sidedness,
superficiality, and inadequateness which have to some extent
characterized it. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that we welcome
this beautiful, complete, and carefully-edited edition of the works of
Bishop Berkeley, and thank the authorities of the Clarendon Press for
what we hope is only the first fruits of a series of our great
philosophers.
There is wisdom in the selection. Bishop Berkeley, of all English
thinkers, is most easily misunderstood when detached portions of his
writings are studied by themselves apart from their relation to the
whole, and when his philosophy is criticised by those who have no
knowledge of his life. How many of those who know and have discussed
Berkeley's theory of vision, his nominalism, and his sensationalism, are
aware that the theory of vision was only the first step in the
exposition of a comprehensive theory of causality,--that his nominalism
was only the denial of the conceptualist doctrine of universals, was
suppressed in his latest writings, as if he had felt it to have been too
sweeping, and was supplanted by a doctrine of realism almost akin to
Plato's,--and that his sensationalism, inherited from Locke and
bequeathed to Hume, was only one moment in a Platonic idealism, which he
had learnt in his youth from More and Norris, in his old age from
Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and which he left to be developed by
Kant. The truth is, that in Berkeley we have the meeting-place of two
distinct streams of thought, both of which had already received distinct
but inadequate expression in England. He inherits the intellectual
wealth of the Cambridge Platonists, as well as the clearer, though less
profound results of Hobbes and Locke. He has been misunderstood and
misrepresented because his double position, inadequately expressed, and
not uniformly maintained, has been unknown to so many of his readers,
Berkeley, the disciple of Locke, the Nominalist, the amiable,
unconscious sceptic, is familiar to most students of philosophy.
Berkeley, the Platonist, the Realist, the idealist combatant of
scepticism, who found in Miss Forster the mystic and the disciple of
Fénélon and Madame Guyon the lady 'whose humour and turn of mind pleased
him beyond anything that he knew in her whole sex,' is not so well
known.
The great value which this edition of Berkeley's philosophical writings
will have is that it presents us with the whole of his philosophy, and
by some pregnant annotations enables us to trace the unity of the
principle which binds them into a more or less consistent whole.
Professor Fraser, in preparing this edition, has kept the following
objects chiefly in view:--
'(1.) To revise the text of the works formerly published,
and to present them in a satisfactory arrangement.
'(2.) To help the reader to reach Berkeley's own point of
view in each work, by means of bibliographical and
analytical prefaces, and occasional annotations or brief
dissertations, in which the author might be compared with
himself, and studied in his relations to the circumstances
in which he wrote.
'(3.) To collect and publish any hitherto unpublished
writings of Berkeley which might illustrate his opinions or
character.
'(4.) To offer a comprehensive conception of his implied
philosophy as a whole.'
These objects have been so well realized that we are enabled for the
first time to survey Berkeley's character and opinions as a whole, to
see how his life and philosophy act and react on each other, to view his
great principles dimly shaping themselves in his earliest speculation
recorded in his student common-place book, and to see how his latest and
deepest thoughts are but the more adequate expression of his early
musings. Professor Fraser's summary of Berkeley's philosophy, given in
the fourth volume, will do much to destroy and render impossible the
one-sided criticism to which the opinions of the philosopher have been
so long subjected. He has shown that Berkeley's philosophy is not the
dried-up intellectual cistern of a solitary thinker of the last
century--is not a barren 'subjective idealism' which a breath of 'common
sense' can 'for ever render impossible,' but is a living fountain from
which our greatest modern English thinkers have not disdained to draw;
and he might have shown that it is instinct with the germs of those
philosophical principles which under the name of the _Ideal-Realismus_,
are leavening modern German thought. We venture to predict that
hereafter every historian and critic of philosophy will have to
reconsider the commonplace verdict which, first pronounced by Dr. Thomas
Reid in this country, by Kant in Germany, and by Cousin in France, has
been repeated wearisomely by their successors. At the same time, we
would not homologate every statement which Professor Fraser has made
about the philosophy of his author. We are inclined to think that he has
not sufficiently recognised the historical position of Bishop Berkeley.
He has too much regarded him as occupying a unique place in the history
of speculation, and neglected some of those facts of English philosophy
which serve to explain Berkeley's position and principles. No thinker,
and especially no great thinker, can occupy a position historically
inexplicable. He is the exponent of the thoughts and feelings of his
time, the interpreter of their present meaning, and the unconscious
prophet of their future development. And Berkeley was no exception to
this rule. It is just because he lived in an age in which two different
streams met, and because he alone of the thinkers then living combined
them, that he is to be reckoned among the few great English thinkers;
and it is because the two tendencies then at work and conflicting with
each other contained the undeveloped germs of the living principles now
combining that Berkeley's philosophy is not to be thrown aside as a
useless relic of the past, but to be studied as the inadequate
expression of much that is deepest and truest in the present English and
German philosophy.[219] 'England's Antiphon' against the sensational
psychology, sceptical metaphysics, and utilitarian ethics, which form
the bulk of her contributions to the general stock of philosophy, has
usually found expression in her poetry and religion rather than in her
philosophy; but there have always been thinkers who have refused to
accept the common creed, and to suffer themselves to glide down the
stream of popular opinion. Their protest has seldom been loud-voiced.
They have generally lived solitary, unheeded lives; but their presence,
like a scent unseen, has had its impalpable, invisible influence.
English mysticism is a fact, though unrecorded in the pages of the
history of her philosophers; and English mysticism was never stronger
than in the generation preceding Berkeley. The Cambridge Platonists had
but lately passed away. Four or five translations of Jacob Böhmen had
showed the popular studies, Norris of Bemerton was so well known that
his philosophy could be ridiculed in an elaborate parody, and Tom Brown,
'of facetious memory,' could tickle a not too fastidious public with a
caricature of his Platonic love. The influence of Malebranche was felt
upon English philosophy. Fénélon and Madame Guyon had their English
disciples, and the gross immorality of the times of the earlier Georges
had its opposite in the refined mysticism which appears in many of the
religious and philosophical writers of the period. By education,
training, studies and temperament, Berkeley was fitted to combine this
mystical philosophy with the ruder and more practical sensationalism of
Locke. He did so; and because he did so, he begins the second period of
modern philosophy. However we regard Berkeley--whether as a man, as a
Christian philanthropist, or as a metaphysician--we find the same
unconscious combination of practical sagacity and of refined enthusiasm,
a keen eye for fact, and a deep mind for theory, along with a continual
incapacity to combine adequately or express fully, either by action or
speech, the double tendency which is the secret of his power. We feel as
if Berkeley were always struggling with a great thought which he did not
wholly see, and could not adequately express. The young student of
Trinity College is labouring to record in his commonplace book a
principle which will prove to be the universal solvent, and set right
everything that is wrong. The young philosopher has elaborated the
principles of human knowledge which are to banish scepticism,
re-establish theology, philosophy, and the physical sciences on new and
lasting foundations. The missionary has a scheme for transplanting the
virtues, arts, and sciences to a new continent, since an extravagant
nobility and a reckless and dishonest passion for speculation have
impoverished and demoralized the chief countries in Europe. The
philanthropic bishop finds that a national bank will redeem his country
from all her troubles, and that tar-water is a panacea for every ill the
flesh is heir to. Everywhere we find the practical man and the idealist.
Everywhere we find the same keen eye for facts not quite comprehensive
enough; the same wealth of ideas which, nevertheless, wants the
intellectual momentum needed to carry out a great philosophical
conception; the same prophetic vision of principles and facts which are
afterwards to become plain, accompanied by the inability to clear the
way for their present manifestation.
Professor Fraser has given us a beautiful picture of young Berkeley and
his surroundings in Trinity College, Dublin. Born at Dysart Castle, in
the beautiful valley of the Nore, and educated at the famous Kilkenny
School, the Eton of Ireland, Berkeley came up to Trinity College in the
spring of 1700, and at once found himself near a whirl of intellectual
life, into which he threw himself with ardour. The influence of the
discoveries of Newton, Boyle, and Hooke, and the speculations of
Descartes, Locke, and Malebranche, was beginning to show itself in the
University, and was gradually displacing the old scholasticism; and the
bright, clever lad looked with eagerness towards all the new lights
which were beginning to shine upon him. An amusing story is told of his
fondness for experiment, and his dreamy disregard of consequences. He
had gone to see an execution, and returned pensive and melancholy, but
strangely inquisitive about the sensations experienced by the
unfortunate criminal in the crisis of his fate. He took counsel with an
intimate college friend, Conterini, the uncle of Oliver Goldsmith, and
'it was agreed between them that he should himself try the
experiment, and be relieved by his friend on a signal
arranged, after which Conterini, in his turn, was to repeat
the experiment. Berkeley was accordingly tied up to the
ceiling, and the chair removed from under his feet. Losing
consciousness, his companion waited in vain for the signal.
The enthusiastic inquirer might have been hung in good
earnest,--and as soon as he was relieved he fell motionless
upon the floor. On recovering himself his first words
were--"Bless my heart, Conterini, you have rumpled my
band."'
We need not wonder that this incident caused Berkeley to be looked upon
as an eccentric by his fellow-students, nor that he had to bear the
usual annoyances which befall those who get the name. With all his
eccentricity, however, he seems to have been the centre of a company of
friends, who thought him a prodigy of learning and amiability; and his
college career was very successful.
'He was made a Scholar in 1702. In the spring of 1704 (the
year Locke died) he became Bachelor of Arts. He took his
Master's degree in the spring of 1707. After the customary
arduous examination of that University, conducted in
presence of nobility, gentry, and high officials, he passed
with unprecedented applause, and was admitted to a
Fellowship, June 9, 1707, "the only reward of learning that
kingdom has to bestow," as one of his biographers curtly
says.'
It is his commonplace book, however, and the other records of his
college life, now first published, that show us how the young student
employed himself, and what were his favourite studies and opinions. In
these early days one sees that he learned mostly by negation. Locke is
_not_ right in this particular, Malebranche is wrong in that, More is
not to be trusted in a third,--are the most usual entries in the young
student's journal. It is curious to look at those imperfect jottings and
see as through a window into the eager young soul, sharpening and
training itself by living contact with the thoughts of the great
thinkers who then ruled the intellectual world, and preparing itself to
take rank among them at some future day. Mathematics, metaphysics,
optics, physics, and natural theology were all studied. Locke was his
great teacher, then Malebranche, then the English Platonists; Barrow,
Boyle, Newton, and Molyneux taught him physics and mathematics. He is
always independent, perhaps too fond of independence, perhaps scarcely
aware that as much is learned from what we find ourselves compelled to
deny, as from what we are obliged to affirm. There seems to have been a
great deal of intellectual life in the University, when Thomas Prior and
Samuel Madden--the two founders of the Royal Irish Society--were
fellow-students of Berkeley, when King was translated to the see of
Dublin, and Bishop Browne was Provost of Trinity. Berkeley and his young
friends formed themselves into a society for the purpose of discussing
the problems which life and the new philosophy were presenting to them.
We are not told who the members of this society were, but we can guess,
from jottings in the commonplace book, that the subjects of discussion
were mainly suggested by portions of Locke's essays, and we can fancy
the young metaphysicians disputing with great eagerness, ardour, and
confusion, all manner of soluble and insoluble questions. It is more
than probable that out of the chaos of the thoughts and opinions which
must have formed the intellectual outcome of such a society, there
gradually arose clearly and more clearly before Berkeley the
intellectual insight into the wants and difficulties of modern
metaphysics, pure and applied, which at last realized itself in the
'Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,' and in the 'Principles of Human
Knowledge.' At all events we know that these two works, on which
Berkeley's fame as a metaphysician has rested, were written and
published not many years after the date of the founding of the College
Society; and that many of the questions discussed are to be found among
the list of subjects which Professor Fraser thinks were there debated.
Both works everywhere show traces of the reading and thinking which the
commonplace book reveals, and the results of the two are the expression
of the double tendency to the inductive philosophy and to mysticism,
which, we have said, is the distinguishing feature in Berkeley's life
and philosophy. 'The Theory of Vision' is Malebranche's seeing all
things in God, but on a rational and experimental basis. We see God in
all things, and we see all things by means of his continual contrivance.
The outcome of the 'Principles of Human Knowledge' is, in the main, the
attempt to explain clearly, fully, and in accordance with Baconian
principles, the mystical thought of Norris, that God is the immediate
author of our sensations, and that we therefore participate in Him when
we see, feel, or desire, and the doctrine of providence on which Dr.
More delighted to expatiate.
In 1713, we find Berkeley at the court of Queen Anne, in company with
Swift. He had come over from Dublin chiefly for the purpose of gaining
attention for his metaphysical system. He had endeavoured, while in
Dublin, to interest English philosophers in his new principle, but the
attempt was not very successful. He now tried by personal intercourse
and more popular exposition, in his Essays in the 'Guardian' and in his
Dialogues, to gain adherents to those opinions from which he expected so
much; and in this he was pretty successful. Swift, writing to Lord
Carteret from Dublin some years after, says that 'he (Berkeley) was a
Fellow of the University here: and going to England very young about
thirteen years ago, he became founder of a sect called the
_Immaterialists_, by the force of a very curious book upon that subject.
Dr. Smalridge and many other eminent persons were his proselytes.' We
have very pleasant glimpses of the young Irish metaphysician among the
wits of Queen Anne's court. Then, as afterwards, his amiability and
enthusiasm disarmed enmity and gained friends among all factions. He was
intimate with Steele and Addison, as well as the companion of Swift and
Pope. Swift procured for him the appointment of secretary to Lord
Peterborough, and in that capacity, and afterwards as tutor to Mr. St.
George Ashe, he spent some years abroad. On his return,
'he found London and all England in the agitation and
misery consequent upon the failure of the South Sea Scheme.
This occasioned one of his most characteristic productions
as an author. He now addressed himself for the first time
publicly to questions of social economy. If I am not
mistaken, the deep impression which the English catastrophe
of 1720 made upon him was connected with the project of
social idealism which, as we shall see, filled and
determined his life in its middle period.'
He was shocked at the tone of social morality and his imaginative
enthusiasm perhaps helped to make him fancy the plague more
wide-spreading and more incurable than it really was. His thoughts found
vent in his 'Essay toward Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain,' and he
then probably first began to meditate on the romantic scheme of
missionary enterprise which filled so much of his life.
His second stay in London brought him the beginning of many of the
friendships which lasted through life. He had met in Italy, Benson,
afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, and now became intimate with Secker,
successively Bishop of Bristol, Bishop of Oxford, and Archbishop of
Canterbury, Rundle, Bishop of Derry, Clarke, and Butler,--all of whom
helped him in his attempt to realise the great plan now beginning to
take shape in his mind. He had returned to Ireland as Chaplain to the
Lord Lieutenant, and had been nominated, in rapid succession, Divinity
Lecturer, Senior Greek Lecturer in Trinity College, then Dean of
Dromore, then Hebrew Lecturer and Senior Proctor in Trinity College,
then Rector of Ardtrea and Arboe, and lastly Dean of Derry; but no
sooner had he fairly obtained the church preferment which his position
and talents had merited, than he was eager to resign it--'his heart is
ready to break if his deanery be not taken from him.' He wished to
resign present preferment and future prospects, and to dedicate his
life, means, and energies to instruct the youth of America, as the
President of an ideally perfect University in the Isles of Bermuda. The
old world had grown very evil, and Berkeley wished to make a new one. He
had mysticism enough to imagine a new Atlantis, and the practical turn
for experimenting which made him eager to attempt to realize it. His
thoughts were not content with the patient waiting of the mystical
mediæval piety which inspires the beautiful 'Hora Novissima' of Bernard,
they must take shape in action. His enthusiasm rises to poetic height,
and finds utterance in a few glowing verses prophetic of the dominion
which is to come and increase on the other side of the ocean by the
diffusion of education, the sciences, and the preaching of the Word:
'Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first Acts already past.
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day:
Time's noblest offspring is the last.'
After much anxious waiting and painful pleading at court and with
Parliament, Berkeley at last obtained a charter for his college, and
was promised an endowment of £20,000:--
'The Charter authorized the erection of a college in the
Bermudas to be called the College of St. Paul, and to be
governed by a President and nine Fellows who were to form
the Corporation. Berkeley was named the first President,
and his three Dublin associates the first Fellows. They
were all allowed to retain their preferments at home for
eighteen months after their arrival in the islands. Other
six Fellows were to be appointed by them within three
years, and the surviving members of the Corporation were to
have power to elect all the future vacancies. The Bishop of
London was named as Visitor, and the Secretary of State for
the Colonies was appointed Chancellor. The College was
declared to be for the instruction of students in
literature and theology, with a view to the promotion of
Christian civilization alike in the English and in the
heathen parts of America.'
He sailed from Gravesend with his newly-married wife and a little
company of retainers and friends, and arrived in the Narragansett
waters, on the western side of Rhode Island, at the beautiful harbour of
Newport. Berkeley had meant to call at Rhode Island on his way to the
Bermudas to get information, procure anything needful for the fulfilment
of his great scheme, purchase land as an investment for his college, and
perhaps gain the good-will and interest of friendly New Englanders. He
was not destined to get nearer the Bermudas. The visit, which was
originally meant to be a short one, lengthened out from month to month,
until at last Berkeley began to like the place so well that he
confidentially says to Prior in one of his letters:--'The truth is, if
the king's bounty were paid in, and the charter could be removed hither,
I should like it better than Bermuda.' And Newport would have made a
very good centre for his scheme of educational and evangelical
operations. It was the capital of the State of Rhode Island, and was a
rich centre of foreign and domestic trade. The State had been colonized
by Roger Williams in 1636, and had a constitution which asserted the
right of religious freedom while that was still unknown in every other
State in America. Its society was accordingly very unlike that met with
almost anywhere else. Quakers, Moravians, Jews, Episcopalians,
Congregationalists, Independents, and Baptists of every sect, all lived
together, holding their own beliefs, and tolerating those of their
neighbours. The town population was chiefly mercantile, while that of
the interior of the island, and that along the Narragansett shore, was
pastoral. The inhabitants were famed for their hospitality, and the
society was intelligent and well-informed. Great care was taken of the
education of the children, and the libraries and pictures which still
remain testify to the good taste and culture of the gentlemen of the
island:--
'The Rhode Island aristocracy of Berkeley's time maintained
the character of the old English country gentlemen from
whom they were descended. A state of society supported by
slavery produced festivity. Tradition records the genial
life of those days in the colony. Excursions to Hartford to
luxuriate on bloated salmon were annual indulgences in May.
Pace races on the beach for silver tankards were the social
indulgences of summer. When autumn arrived, there were
harvest-home festivities. Large numbers of both sexes
gathered on those occasions--gentlemen in their scarlet
coats and swords, with lace ruffles over their hands, silk
stockings, and shoes ornamented with silver buckles, and
ladies dressed in brocade, with high-heeled shoes and high
head-dresses. These festivities would sometimes continue
for days, and they were shared by the slaves as well as
their masters. Christmas was the great festival of the
year; twelve days were then given to hospitalities. The
wedding, too, was a great gala in the olden time. And the
fox chase, with hounds and horns, as well as fishing and
fowling, were favourite sports in Narragansett.'
While in Newport, Berkeley mingled in the society of the town, and
frequently preached in the pulpit of Mr. Honeyman, a missionary of the
Church of England. He visited the Narragansett country, and is said to
have made some distant excursions to see the condition of the native
Indian tribes. A few months after his arrival he bought a farm and built
a commodious house, which he called Whitehall. The house is still
standing, and is known in the neighbourhood as Bishop Berkeley's house.
Few situations could be more adapted to the tastes of a student as fond
of nature as of books. It was here that 'Alciphron,' the most elaborate,
and, in the lifetime of the author, the most popular, of all Berkeley's
writings, was written. Tradition points to a natural alcove in the
rocks, commanding a view of the beach and the ocean, as the spot where
the beautiful dialogues were composed.
'"Alciphron" is redolent of the fragrance of nature in
Rhode Island and of the invigorating breezes of its ocean
shore. Smith of Philadelphia, in his preface to the London
edition of Johnson of Stratford's philosophical works, says
that one day when visiting him Johnson took up the book,
and reading some of Berkeley's rural descriptions, told him
that they were copied from the charming landscapes in that
delightful island, which lay before him at the time he was
writing.'
While living this retired life at Whitehall and troubled with anxieties
at the delays which prevented him from seeing the actual realization of
his great scheme, Berkeley found time to mingle in the intellectual
society which Newport afforded, and took the lead in forming a
philosophical association for the discussion of speculative questions.
One of the objects of this association was to collect books, and it
originated the Redwood Library, which still exists in Newport, a memento
of the short but interesting stay of Bishop Berkeley.
One American friend, however, is more closely related to Berkeley than
any other, and must not be passed over without special mention. This was
Dr. Samuel Johnson, the Episcopalian minister of Stratford. He had known
the 'Principles of Human Knowledge' before Berkeley's arrival in
America, and had become a convert to the metaphysical opinions there set
forth. He was one of the first to welcome Berkeley when he landed in
Rhode Island, and the friendship and correspondence which then began
only ceased with the death of the Bishop. His name, too, possesses
special interest to all students of Berkeley's philosophy, and he must
be held in honour as one of the earliest and one of the greatest
metaphysicians which America has produced. Although his works have been
forgotten--obscured, perhaps, by the theological and metaphysical fame
of his great pupil, Jonathan Edwards--they still deserve attention. We
should like to see a new edition of his 'Elementa Philosophica;' and
believe that, if re-published and known, it would be a valuable
contribution to American philosophy. This work possesses a special
interest for the student of Berkeley. It was written by a professed
disciple, was the result of the study of Berkeley's writings, of
conversations and correspondence with him on the philosophical subjects
it discusses. It was dedicated to the Bishop, and may almost be looked
upon as a new and more complete edition of the 'Principles of Human
Knowledge.' It treats of the pure intellect and its notions, and of the
intuitive intellectual light; and so, to some extent, supplies the place
of the second part of that work which was never written, and connects
the philosophy of Berkeley's earlier days with the Platonic mysticism of
his old age. Johnson's 'Elementa Philosophica' can never be separated
from Berkeley's 'Principles of Human Knowledge;' and had the two been
always studied together, the continual misapprehension of the Bishop's
philosophical system, which has characterized most histories of
philosophy, could scarcely have arisen. The philosophical letters to
Johnson are also full of interest, and show other sides of Berkeley's
system than that most prominent in the 'Principles of Human Knowledge;'
and Johnson himself seems to have had no small influence in developing
what, in some respects, may be called the idealist,[220] and in others
the mystical moment in Berkeley's speculation.
While thus employed in philosophical correspondence and composition, and
in social and intellectual intercourse with his friends in and near
Newport, Berkeley was harassed with doubts and anxieties about the
success of his great scheme. He had embarked in the faith that Sir R.
Walpole would fulfil his promise, and that the £20,000 endowment which
had been voted by Parliament would be soon handed over to him for his
college. But the long months spent in waiting lengthened out to years,
and the prospect grew duller and duller, until at length even Berkeley
began to despair. Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, who had been appointed
by the charter the Visitor of the new University, did all he could to
forward the scheme; and when he found that the ministerial delays were
only meant to cover the non-fulfilment of their bargain, he at last got
a conclusive answer from Walpole: 'If you put this question to me as a
minister,' said he, 'I must and can assure you that the money shall most
undoubtedly be paid as soon as suits with public convenience; but if you
ask me, as a friend, whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America
expecting the payment of £20,000, I advise him by all means to return
home to Europe, and give up his present expectations.'
The ten best years of Berkeley's life were given to this scheme of
missionary enterprise, and now it ended in what seemed to be utter
failure. We have only to read his enthusiastic letters to his friend
Prior to see how hopefully he had looked forward to the future, and to
realize how crushing the blow must have been which now fell upon him. He
bore himself bravely enough, however, outwardly, and his own account of
the miscarriage given in 'Alciphron' does not reveal very much
depression:--
'I flattered myself, _Theages_, that before this time I
might have been able to have sent you an agreeable account
of the success of the affair which brought me into this
remote corner of the country. But, instead of this, I
should now give you the detail of its miscarriage, if I did
not rather choose to entertain you with some amusing
incidents, which have helped to make me easy under a
circumstance I could neither obviate nor foresee. Events
are not in our power; but it always is, to make a good use
even of the very worst. And I must needs own, the course
and event of this affair gave opportunity for reflections
that make me some amends for a great loss of time, pains,
and expense. A life of action, which takes its issue from
the counsels, passions, and views of other men, if it doth
not draw a man to imitate, will at least teach him to
observe. And a mind at liberty to reflect on its own
observations, if it produce nothing useful in the world,
seldom fails of entertainment to itself. For several months
past I have enjoyed such liberty and leisure in this
distant retreat, far beyond the verge of that great
whirlpool of business, faction, and pleasure which is
called the world. And a retreat in itself agreeable, after
a long scene of trouble and disquiet, was made much more so
by the conversation and good qualities of my host
Euphranor, who unites in his own person the philosopher and
the farmer, two characters not so inconsistent in nature as
by custom they seem to be.'
But Berkeley felt that his life-work was done. He felt himself to be a
broken man, so far as action was concerned. The practical-working
experimental side of his nature falls into the shade; and the calm
mystical enthusiasm which spends itself in study and in reverie, and can
turn from the vexations and disturbances and wrongs of the real world to
find repose and quietude in the contemplation of the world of ideal
perfection visioned in the dreams of genius, grows stronger and
stronger. He returned to England in the end of 1731, and soon found
himself among old acquaintances. Church preferment awaited him. He was
nominated to the rich deanery of Down, and when the nomination was from
accidental circumstances cancelled, was soon afterwards nominated and
consecrated Bishop of Cloyne. But he did not mingle much in society, nor
take a very active part in the business of life. He more and more
preferred to live in quiet seclusion. A wealthier bishopric was within
his reach, but he contented himself with Cloyne. The offer of the
Primacy of Ireland failed to draw him from his retirement. A growing
feebleness, a love for quietness, and increasing and constant
ill-health, all show how heavily the great disappointment of his life
pressed upon him. He was not fifty when he was made Bishop of Cloyne,
but all that he did afterwards bears the stamp of old age.
The American enterprise, however, was not such a failure as it seemed to
Berkeley. His one great practical enterprise bears a curious analogy to
his philosophical system. His life-work and his life-thought are
strangely parallel. In both there is the combination of shrewd,
practical judgment, with almost visionary enthusiasm. Both were thought
by his contemporaries to be more suitable for a dream-life than for
waking reality. Both fail in completeness of development and adequacy of
expression; and yet both contain in them germs of life to be long
afterwards developed. Berkeley's American scheme did not entirely break
down at his return to England. The farm of Whitehall, which he had
bought near Newport, he bequeathed to Yale College for the purpose of
encouraging Greek and Latin scholarship, and the list of Berkeleian
scholars--a list containing more than two hundred names, among them some
of the most eminent in America--shows how far the designs of the founder
were thus unexpectedly fulfilled:--
'"It is a fact of no slight significance," the writer
remarks, "taken in connection with the original purpose of
Berkeley, that of this list nearly one hundred are marked
as ministers of the Gospel, foremost among whom is
President Wheelock, who founded an Indian school, the germ
of Dartmouth College; while hundreds more, not here
enumerated, have been recipients of this bounty, in the
shape of smaller premiums, among whom may be named David
Brainerd, the 'Apostle to the Indians.'"'
Berkeley's gifts to Yale College did not cease with the bequest of his
farm. He so interested some of his Bermuda subscribers in the American
College that, with their aid, he was able to send over from England a
large donation of books to its library. Harvard College, as well as
Yale, received gifts of books, and, to the end of his life, Berkeley's
constant references in his letters to Johnson, and his continual
kindnesses and recommendations of young American students who from time
to time came over to England, showed the deep interest which he took in
the cause of religion and education in the Western hemisphere.
The Cloyne life was a very retired one, and Berkeley was almost as much,
if not more out of the world there than he had been at Newport. His
intercourse with old friends was mostly by letter. Secker, the Bishop of
Bristol, and Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, are still the most valued
correspondents among the friends of his later life. Gibson, Bishop of
London, writes in dignified style about public events, and about the
analyst controversy. Prior, his old school and college companion, is
still his most useful friend, eager and ready as ever to take up and
defend any one of his theories or fancies. Dean Gervais writes and
receives beautiful letters about Cloyne and foreign politics. These were
stirring times abroad. Frederick the Great was in Silesia, and even a
student recluse cannot help thinking that 'We live in an age of
revolutions so sudden and surprising in all parts of Europe, that I
question whether the like has been ever known before.' Protestant
clergymen were very much afraid of France governed by old Cardinal
Fleury, but the excitement did not last long, and only reawakened when
the next post-bag arrived. The letters from Cloyne give us beautiful
glimpses into Berkeley's home-life. There are musical parties, and
country visits, village charities, and small attempts at the
introduction of manufactures, and his student life in his diocese was
not entirely that of a recluse. Even at this period of his life,
Berkeley's sympathies were active enough to lead him to undertake a
somewhat long and tedious study of the causes of Irish distress and
poverty, and more particularly of the famine and epidemic of 1741-2. The
results of his investigations were published in the 'Querist' and in
'Siris.'
The 'Querist' was originally published in three parts. It consists of a
series of queries concerning the state of Ireland and the remedies
suggested. It is a remarkable book, and very little known; still more
remarkable when we consider that it was written in 1735 by a bishop of
the Irish Church Establishment. The central thought is expressed in the
pregnant query, 'Whether a scheme for the welfare of the Irish nation
should not take in the whole inhabitants; and whether it be not a vain
attempt to project the flourishing of our Protestant gentry, exclusive
of the bulk of the natives?'--and the introduction of manufactures, a
national bank, the admission of Roman Catholics into Trinity College,
Dublin, without compelling them to attend chapel or divinity lectures,
and the election of Roman Catholics as justices of the peace, are some
of the means of realizing such a scheme. Berkeley's belief in the
healing powers of tar-water is better known, and his efforts to get it
recognised as a panacea scarcely require mention. They occupied no small
part of his last years in Cloyne.
During these last years we hear occasionally of an 'Oxford Scheme,' and
there are traces in Berkeley's correspondence of efforts made to give up
his bishopric for the sake of some minor preferment not requiring
residence. The education of his sons and his own imaginative desire for
a 'life academico-philosophical' seem to have been the motives. In
August, 1752, he left Cloyne, and was not destined to see it again. The
journey was more than his weakened body could bear. 'He was so much
reduced by suffering that he had to be carried from his landing on the
English shore, in a horse litter to Oxford.' He did not linger long in
the beautiful University city in the enjoyment of a life to which he had
so often looked forward, and during the months of his residence was
almost withdrawn from society by disease and suffering. He was not
altogether idle, however.
'In October, 1752, "A Miscellany containing several Tracts
on various Subjects, by the Bishop of Cloyne," was
published simultaneously in London and Dublin. With one
exception, the Miscellany was a reprint of works previously
published. But the old ardour was not extinguished. It
contains also, "Further Thoughts on Tar-water," written
probably during his last months at Cloyne; and prefixed to
the Miscellany is a copy of Latin verses addressed to him
by an English prelate on that absorbing enthusiasm of his
old age.
'A third edition of "Alciphron," of which I have given a
minute account elsewhere, was also published at this time.
It is chiefly remarkable for its omission of those sections
in the Seventh Dialogue which contain a defence of what has
been called his Nominalism.'
The end was drawing near, and came almost unexpectedly. Professor Fraser
tells us that
'The autumn and winter of 1752 wore passing away, as we may
fancy, in that enjoyment of academic repose which was
possible in weakness of body more or less disturbed by
acute suffering. We are here left to fancy. One actual
scene has alone been preserved. On the evening of Sunday,
the 14th of January, 1753, Berkeley was resting on a couch,
in his house in Holywell-street, surrounded by his family.
His wife had been reading aloud to the little family party
the lesson in the Burial Service, taken from the fifteenth
chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians, and he had
been making remarks upon that sublime passage. His daughter
soon after went to offer him some tea. She found him, as it
seemed, asleep, but his body was already cold; for it was
the last sleep--the mystery of death; and the world of the
senses had suddenly ceased to be a medium of intercourse
between his spirit and those who remained. "Although all
possible means," we are told, "were used, not the least
symptom of life ever afterwards appeared."'
And so one of the greatest and of the purest thinkers that England has
ever seen passed away to his rest.
The philosophy of Berkeley is not so much a theory of matter as a
philosophy of causality; and the great service which Professor Fraser
has done to the history of philosophy is that he has so far made it
clear that the one important contribution which Berkeley has brought to
the stock of knowledge, the one doctrine of his which has been most
fruitful, and most pregnant with results to after-philosophy, is his
explanation of the word cause, and the place which he assigns to
causality. Berkeley's polemic against abstract ideas, his theories of
vision, and his discussions about the nature of ideas, are all
subsidiary to this one great doctrine of the meaning and place of
causality. It does occur to us that Professor Fraser, while keeping this
clearly before him in his admirable elucidations, by prefaces and notes,
has somewhat obscured it by dwelling at such length on the points of
similarity between Berkeley and Reid and Hamilton. These Scottish
philosophers struggled after a theory of matter from the beginning to
the end; the reality of the external world, as if anybody ever
questioned it, was their alpha and omega. They could think and write of
scarcely anything else. But Berkeley's philosophy was a great deal
deeper and wider. It was free from what we may perhaps call the
provincialism of the Scottish school, which clung with tenacity to what
was after all a very small strip in the wide dominion of philosophy, and
could never free itself from the narrowness which such exclusiveness was
sure to beget. His philosophical writings, containing new and striking
thoughts, some of them only now bearing fruit, upon the great
metaphysical problems of universals, substance, causality, and the
organism of the universe, cannot without danger of misconception be
compared at length with a system which thinks itself competent to
classify all metaphysical systems according as they contain some one or
other theory of perception. We repeat, then, Berkeley's philosophy is by
no means merely a theory of matter or a doctrine of sense-perception--it
is a philosophy of causality--of substance and causality if you will,
but of substance as subordinate to causality.
We are quite aware that these views regarding Berkeley's philosophy have
not met with general acceptance. The great proportion of Berkeley's
critics, roughly speaking, may be set in two classes: those who believe
that his theory is utter scepticism, which the first breath of common
sense dissipates, and those who believe the Bishop's opinions to be
harmless, because quite unimportant. Dr. Johnson kicks a stone, and
Berkeley's theory is disproved. Dr. Reid runs his head against a
lamp-post, and with the same important philosophical result.
'Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin.'
And Hood depicts the terror of the alderman at a system which would
'For mock-turtle make me sup sensations.'
The grave criticisms and arguments of many of Berkeley's opponents rest
on the same basis. On the other hand, Hegel looks down loftily upon the
whole affair, and pronounces the philosophy and its criticism a mere
play upon words. Berkeley says _without_ is _within_. Be it so. He has
done nothing to settle the problem of philosophy, which remains as
before. It may help to bring out more clearly what we believe to be a
juster estimate of the nature and value of the speculations of Bishop
Berkeley, if we shortly summarize these two different modes of
criticizing his system as they appear in their latest form.
Thus it is said, on the one hand, when we look at any object we feel
compelled to assert that we see it to be of a certain colour; but this
assertion, we afterwards find, must be compatible with two facts--that
the same object has different colours as seen by the same person from
different points of view, and also as seen by different persons at the
same time. Yet we stand by our conviction, that we do see the same
thing, because it is our conviction that we do see it. If we were not to
stand by it under these circumstances, we could never stand by such
natural convictions at any time. The whole evidence for the system is
that visible objects look of different sizes and colours at different
distances, and in different lights; while the arguments against the
theory are the primary convictions of men.[221]
On the other hand, a recent German critic says that the reason why
Berkeley's theory has been so little approved of, not only by the great
public of those who are capable of reflection, but also by those who are
philosophers by profession, is that it is not at all in advance of
common opinion; for Berkeley was not the first to declare that the apple
which is seen and felt, is only seen and felt, or is phenomenal. This
assertion is as old as philosophy. Most philosophers, however, in
opposition to Berkeley, have thought, and still think, that the
fundamental cause of the phenomena which brings it about is not merely
phenomenal, but something quite different. This hypothesis is not
without its difficulties. We cannot explain how a motion in the nerves
becomes a sensation which we are conscious of. But Berkeley's theory
does not better the position. He cannot show how it happens that the
divine objective 'ideas' become one human subjective perception or
intuition; he does not tell us how God enables us to share or represent
His thoughts, since He neither speaks to us nor writes to us. Berkeley
cannot, from his point of view, show with any certainty where the truth
lies in the different opinions of men upon the orderly coherence of the
phenomenal world, the relation of phenomenal things to each other, upon
the ground and purpose of human existence, &c. In short, he is as little
able to found a scientific knowledge and a theory of knowledge upon his
hypothesis as the common opinion of man can on its presupposition. His
whole system is only a change of position without result. It explains
nothing, helps us in nothing--it is no philosophy.[222]
We have chosen these two representations, not because they are the best,
but simply because they are the latest.
All such criticisms proceed upon the supposition that the whole of the
philosophy of Berkeley is summed up in the 'Principles of Human
Knowledge,' and do not even take the trouble to investigate the history
of the opinions advanced in that unfinished and imperfect treatise. They
do not know the philosophical importance of the Theory of Vision, the
correspondence between Johnson and Berkeley, nor the Platonism or
Neo-Platonism of 'Siris.' The publication of a complete edition of
Berkeley's writings ought itself to render such criticism impossible,
and the elucidations supplied by Professor Fraser should make them less
excusable. A philosophical critic can scarcely now proceed on the
presupposition that the 'Principles of Human Knowledge' and the
Dialogues are the full and finished results of Berkeley's speculations,
and take it upon him to neglect all else in his critique.[223] He must
now recognise that it is not so easy to sum up Berkeley's principles;
that we are in the same position for judging him as we would be with
regard to Leibnitz if the 'Monadologie' and the 'Nouveaux Essais' had
never been written; that we have a series of treatises, each more
unfinished than the other, from which the latent developing thoughts
have to be gathered as much by reference to history and life as by
actual reference to their pages. He must recognise that there is a
discernible unity in his life and speculations--a unity which may be
traced throughout all Berkeley's writings, and which reconciles the
Theory of Vision with 'Siris,' the Preface to the 'Principles,' &c.,
with the cancelling of the pages on Nominalism in the last edition of
the 'Alciphron.'
Berkeley's whole philosophy is a combination of two currents of
speculation--that of Locke on the one hand, and that of the English
mystics on the other. In his earlier writings the influence of Locke is
predominant, but gradually loses power until at last it almost succumbs
to the influence of the Platonists; but, from first to last, we have the
attempt to combine what is real and deep and true in the old spiritual
philosophy with the clearness, consistency, and relation to physical
science which Nominalism and the Baconian method can bring.
Berkeley seeks, in metaphysics, direct spiritual intuition; in physics,
to abolish what would prevent this intuition. The mystics from whom
Berkeley had learned so much had built their system of philosophy upon
such an intuition, and made it their one thing needful. But their
spiritual intuition was an intuition which was said to be enjoyed in
meditations and trances, not in life and work. The world of things seen
and handled did not bring them into direct communion with spirit; it was
rather a veil to cloud the vision, a clog to hinder the endeavour of the
human spirit ever trying to get beyond it. The senses and
sense-knowledge were despised, and only behind the veil which it hung
athwart the soul was there that universe of things unseen and eternal
which More and Norris delighted to expatiate upon; or, if the senses did
in any dim and uncertain way reveal the invisible spiritual realities
longed for, it was because the soul, rising above them, put a divine
meaning into them, and revelled in the 'lusciousness of this inward
sense.' Such a hazy, unreal way of conceiving the spirit-life which he
believed to be the true reality, was distasteful to Berkeley. He wished
to keep to the spiritual intuition, which was the one good thing in
these mystical doctrines, but he wished to bring it out of dreamland,
and make it serviceable for every-day work and endeavour. Both More and
Norris dreamt of an Atlantis, and celebrated its praises in prose and
verse; Berkeley set sail for America to create the Utopia he had
visioned. More and Norris could only realise the spiritual intuition on
which they based their philosophy in an ecstatic contemplation, when
the soul is borne on the wings of meditation far beyond this world of
sensible things; Berkeley employs his spiritual intuition to account for
puzzles in vision, errors in mathematics, and the virtues of tar-water.
He wishes to mould and fashion, to give clearness and distinctness of
outline to the spiritual beliefs and intuitions of the mystics by
applying to them the _method_ of Locke and Bacon. He wishes to conserve
and give value to the fundamental truths which lie unshaped in the
scholastic Realism, by applying to them the clearness and methods of
Nominalism. This is, we believe, the key to Berkeley's life and
philosophy.
Let us try to show its application.
The English mystics were the reaction against a phase of the new
philosophy which had been so developed by Hobbes as to create a strong
counter opinion. This phase was the doctrine of an inert matter which is
so prominent in the writings of Descartes and Geulinx--matter, whose
distinguishing characteristic was extension, which was entirely void of
all power to act or to influence, and which was set up in opposition to
spirit, whose distinguishing characteristic or property was
consciousness. This theory of matter was so void of all real meaning
that the existence and properties of material substance became gradually
of less importance in a system of philosophy, and at length, as in
Malebranche and Norris, ceased to have any influence on their
speculations. It was outside their system, and of little or no account
in its explanation. Yet the very semblance of its presence prevented a
thorough-going attempt to explain the real meaning of reality, power,
and causality, and recourse is had to meditation and ecstasy instead of
to philosophical explanation and analysis. Locke's philosophy, on the
other hand, with its calm, experimental analysis of the facts of
knowledge, and its concentration of effort upon the senses and the
knowledge they supplied, had brought the mind of man back to facts, and
pointed to another path than that of vision or ecstasy, by which one
might ascend to the understanding of what is meant by the world of
things known and knowable. But if Locke is always judicious, he is never
deep. He solved the theory of substance more by ignoring than by
explaining it; and his Atomism, if one may call it so--his assertion
that all knowledge is of particulars, and particulars only--not only
turned him aside from any complete statement of causality, but forced
him into theories of abstract ideas or conceptions that seem
inconsistent with his own principles. When Locke had to account for the
fact that this, that, and the other, sensation of colour were felt to be
the same, he explains away this seeming contradiction to his favourite
doctrine that all knowledge is of particulars, by saying that there is
an abstract idea of whiteness framed from the particular ideas or
sensations. But the necessities of language, thought, and science
require that this abstract idea of whiteness must be as often, if not
oftener, before the mind than any one of the particular ideas out of
which it has been constructed, and thus the abstract idea is much more
important than the particular sensation. When Locke is called on to give
an account of our knowledge and its origin, his Atomism is always
brought forward; when he wishes to speak of truth, certainty, &c., he
cannot help paying more attention to abstract ideas. He thus figures two
worlds just as the mystics had done, the sensible and intelligible, and
while elevating the worth of the former, is inclined to make certainty,
demonstration, &c., belong to the latter.
Locke's theory of abstract ideas was an hypothesis to account for and
explain a really objective knowledge--that is, a knowledge which is true
for others as well as for the individual. Objectivity, in this simple
sense of the word, was a great difficulty in Locke's system. He had
reduced all our ideas to ideas of sense and of reflection. He had
insisted on the purely subjective origin of whatever is known. And at
the same time he had insisted that what was known in this way were
particular things and particulars only. He seems both in his account of
the origin of knowledge, and in his description of the things known, to
exclude the possibility of a knowledge common to several individuals at
once. Each man seems rather to be shut within the sphere of his own
ideas of sense and reflection about certain particular objects. But a
subjective theory of knowledge and things known cannot be maintained. It
would render all social intercourse impossible. There could be neither
language, propositions, nor even common nouns. And the theory of
abstract ideas is the way out of the difficulty. Now Berkeley, with his
strong spiritual intuition, regarded Locke's system of abstract ideas
very much as Aristotle, with his strong faith in progressive motion
towards a final end (τελος), looked at Plato's ideal theory. It
was only reproduction, a shadowy reflection, a cold crystallization of
the world of sense ideas, and really did nothing to explain the life,
motion, and order of the sense-world, nor furnished us with a basis for
our real common or objective knowledge. We do not think that Berkeley
altogether appreciated Locke, nor fully recognised the use which he, as
well as Hobbes, had made of the doctrine of association of ideas, to
explain community of knowledge and objective certainty. For in Hobbes
and Locke we see the beginnings of that modern psychological theory
which, under the names of association of ideas and relativity of
knowledge, explain the existence, permanence, and objectivity of things
and classes of things by a manifold flow of phenomena. Ideas or
sensations, by rubbing themselves against consciousness, in various ways
coalesce into things, and things into those possibilities of
reproduction, intercourse, and communion which are represented by common
nouns. But Berkeley had been taught by the mystics to associate motion,
cause, and sensation with spirit or mind, and he could not see that
Locke's doctrine of association, so void of conscious life or personal
activity, might at least prove so nearly allied to his own doctrine of
causality that it might be called its external wrapping. And even if
Berkeley had seen this, we may excuse him from acknowledging what he
owed to Locke in this matter, and forcing into prominence, in opposition
to Locke's teaching, his intuition of direct spiritual agency, when we
find how the association theory has not freed us from the abstractions
which Berkeley dreaded, but still gives us such shadowy conceptions as
the 'unconditioned' of Hamilton, or the 'unknown cause' of Mill.
Berkeley admired Locke, and studied him carefully. His great aim was to
keep Locke's results, to retain Locke's philosophy, but to give it new
life. His philosophy was to be Lockianism stript of its notionalism, and
inspired in all its parts by that direct spiritual intuition which was
never absent from his mind. It was to be Locke's philosophy, with these
differences: the starting-point of the system was to be the human
self--the conscious _ego_--the type of all subsistence: and an
association theory producing a second world of abstract ideas was to be
supplanted by the continuous active causality of personal spirits; or,
more shortly, it was to be Locke's philosophy, with living personal
causality put instead of abstract ideas.[224]
If we take this as the fundamental thought in Berkeley's speculation we
find three stages of development in his philosophy. In his 'Common-place
Book,' and in the 'Principles,' he fancies, in his youthful fervour,
that he has only to strip Locke's philosophy of its notionalism and the
true system of metaphysics will appear. Hence his speculation in this
first period is mainly negative. It is a war against abstractions, and
his positive theories are more hinted at than explained. The second
period is revealed in his philosophical letters to Dr. Samuel Johnson.
He begins to find that there is more to be done in philosophy than to
extirpate abstract ideas, and inquires into the archetypes of things.
The third period is given us in 'Siris.' His philosophy has got deeper
and perhaps less dogmatic. He was won to the grand thought of an organic
universe of things, in which their whole is made for all the parts, and
every part for the whole, and for the other parts; so that the virtues
of tar-water are intimately connected by a multiform concatenation
with the constant presence and continual agency of the God in whom we
live and move and have our being. The first period in Berkeley's
speculation is, as we have said, mainly negative. It is a polemic
against abstract ideas in their various forms. The attack is earnest,
eager, but also impatient and inadequate. We have only hints at
construction. It seems as if he thought he had only to deny false modes
of explanation in order to state the right one, and his discussion
throughout bears the stamp of eagerness and impetuosity. It represents
the man who could say of those who doubted the success of his American
enterprise, 'that small-minded persons had a talent for objections.'
This period is represented in the 'New Theory of Vision,' 'The
Principles of Human Knowledge,' and 'The Dialogues between Hylas and
Philonous.' Its negative character may be due to accident. These three
works are confessedly an imperfect sketch of Berkeley's principles. The
'Theory of Vision' is a mere tentative introduction; the 'Principles,'
as we have them, are only the first part of a work which, if we are to
trust 'The Common-place Book,' was meant to include three parts, and was
published as Part I. The 'Dialogues' are only the 'reproduction of the
first part of the 'Principles of Human Knowledge.' They are all of them
imperfect expositions of Berkeley's speculative opinion. Taking them as
they are, however, let us endeavour to discover the fundamental thoughts
in each.
It has been for some time acknowledged that the essay towards A New
Theory of Vision is not to be summed up in the dictum that distance is
invisible. The invisibility of distance is the psychological basis of
the theory.[225] The work is rather the first blow in the attack upon
Locke's 'Doctrine of Abstract Ideas':--
'The treatise is, in short, a professed account count of
the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts, of
which we are visually conscious, as distinguished from
pretended facts and metaphysical abstractions, which
confused thought, an irregular exercise of imagination, or
an abuse of words had substituted for them.'
The question which Berkeley really asks is--How do we universalize our
ideas of sight? The proper objects of sight are light and colours. How,
then, do we see distance, figure, size, situation, magnitude and
solidity? How can the sensation of green colour peculiar to my mind
stand for, not the mere sense-blur of vague green colour, but an oval
leaf fluttering in the wind some twenty feet above me, attached to the
twig of a beech tree! and, moreover, how can this sensation which
belongs to me so far belong to others that the same knowledge conveyed
to me is also given to them? How can the vague subjective sensation be
universalized so that it stands for several things not felt, and more
especially for sensations of touch? What is the link between these
various qualities? What is the bridge by which the mind passes over from
the one to the other? This link is _not_, says Berkeley, an _abstract
idea_ of extension, in which the visible and tangible sensations unite,
for there is no such idea. The sensations of sight and of touch are on
their side quite heterogeneous:--
'The extension, figures, and motions perceived by sight are
specifically distinct from the ideas of touch, called by
the same names; nor is there any such thing as one idea, or
kind of idea, common to both senses.'
Light and colour are the immediate objects of sight, and they constitute
a species entirely distinct from the ideas of touch. No one would think
of adding a visible foot to a tangible foot; and the experience of
persons born blind and recovering their sight points to a certain
confusedness in apprehending the connection between the two sets of
ideas which would not occur if they belonged to one and the same
abstract idea of extension. If we would explain the fact that ideas may
so be universalized that they stand for ideas of touch, we must rather
bring them under the living power of mind which, grasping the two
together, makes the one the sign of the other. When we have the
sensation of the colour greenness, we see a green leaf of a small oval
shape, not because the colour is necessarily connected with the size and
shape, nor because all three inhere as qualities in an abstract idea of
extension, but because:--
'Light and colours, with their several shades and degrees,
all which being infinitely diversified and combined, deform
a language wonderfully adapted to suggest and exhibit to us
the distances, figures, situations, dimensions, and various
qualities of tangible objects--not by similitude, nor yet
by inference of necessary connection, but by the arbitrary
imposition of Providence, just as words suggest the things
signified by them.'
There is no abstract idea which corresponds now to the sensations of
sight, now to the sensations of touch; the connecting link is supplied
by the unifying action of the human mind, which seizes upon the one idea
and makes it the sign of the others, and this one idea is fitted to be
the sign of the others not by any similarity or peculiar fitness on its
side, but because of its position in the flow of phenomena given to it
and preserved for it by the living spiritual causality which creates and
arranges everything. The ideas of sense are universalized, scientific
and objective knowledge is possible, we can go from ideas of sight to
those of touch, and back again from those of touch to those of sight,
because of a double spiritual influence--the active living influence of
mind outside, permeating, creating, and associating all things, and the
partly passive, partly active ingathering influence of the individual
human mind within, interpreting, arranging, according to the
associations imposed upon them and lying undeveloped in them, the vague
_blurs_ of sensation. Berkeley's thought is almost the same as
Schleiermacher's, that all scientific knowledge is the joint product of
an internal and an external factor--organic function and the external
world,--which factors are universally related to each other; only,
according to Berkeley's spiritual intuition, everywhere present; the
living centre of organic function is the partly passive, partly active
influence of the human self, while the living centre of the external
factor is the supreme mind without us continuously creating and
arranging.
The Principles of Human Knowledge follow up the attack on abstract ideas
made in the New Theory of Vision. The introduction, with its attack on
Conceptualism,[226] prepares the way for a more sweeping assault on
abstractions. Now Berkeley almost invariably attacks a general question
by making an assault on one special form which it takes. His method is
borrowed from Locke, who shows that all our ideas may be reduced to
ideas of sensation and reflection by selecting one or two most unlikely
to conform to such a reduction, and proving by analysis that they do.
Berkeley begins to attack the Lockian doctrine of abstract ideas by
showing that there is no abstract extension common to sight and touch;
he proves the providence of God by explaining the beauty and value of
the language of vision; and he exhibits the organism of the universe by
tracing the connection between the virtues of tar-water and the hidden
mysteries of things. He always seeks a concrete instance of the abstract
fact, and assails a particular case of the general principle he wishes
to attack. This method is carried out in the 'Principles.' He does not
assail the doctrine of abstract ideas in general, nor endeavour to strip
Lockianism of all its notionalism. He fastens on one particular abstract
idea, which because of its importance and prevailing influence may be
considered as the champion of the rest, and puts to flight the armies of
the Philistines by slaying their Goliath.
The sum and head of all abstract ideas is the idea of matter, as this
was used in the new philosophy of the seventeenth century. For what is
an abstract idea? It is a connecting link between sensations--something
to which they may be referred, in which they are supposed to inhere, and
which is thought to account for their permanence of objective reality.
For example, 'white' is a single quality or a single sensation felt by
me now and here when I look at a sheet of paper. But 'whiteness' is the
abstract idea to which all these single sensations may be referred, and
in which they may inhere and so have a permanence and objective reality,
so that this sheet of paper, because it has 'whiteness,' is always and
by every one seen to be 'white.' The abstract ideas of extension, of
situation, and of number, are examples which are supposed to be of more
importance, and to include a vastly larger number of individuals. Now
the one idea to which every sense-particular, without exception, may be
referred is the idea of matter or material substance. It gives them
permanence, reality, and objectivity. It is the germ, the centre, the
vital spot of the whole system of abstractions. Destroy it, and the
system perishes. Show that it is an illusion, a mere word,--that it can
give no reality, no permanence,--that it cannot afford a basis for
scientific knowledge nor community of belief, and the whole doctrine
which seeks to build science and reality on such a foundation
disappears, and on the ground thus cleared a more substantial, real, and
living structure of belief and opinion may be erected. This seems to be
the guiding thought in the 'Principles of Human Knowledge' and in the
'Dialogues.' It is mainly negative,--a denial of matter, and therefore
of all abstractions. But amidst the negative or destructive reasonings
there are traces, as there must be, of positive construction. The _one_
positive principle which is always present is that spiritual intuition
which we have already spoken of,--the all-pervading belief inherited
from the mystics, and particularly from Malebranche and Norris, that
mind or spirit is the one reality and the one fount of active agency.
But this intuition, always present, is never adequately expressed nor
applied. Berkeley either meant to reserve its discussion for another
'Part,' or his natural impatience made him overlook the necessity of
explaining the steps in his analysis of all _reality_ into personal
spirit, and all _causality_ into the conscious activity of such personal
spirits. He is always confused, hesitating, and sometimes conflicting in
his statements about the way in which 'mind' becomes the only real
existence, and the 'activity of mind' the only real agency; and it is in
the skill with which he has pierced together the scattered hints into
one really complete and so far adequate explanation of the universe of
things that Professor Fraser's unwearied patient study and just
appreciation of his author is seen to most advantage.
Our experience as given us in the senses is made up 'of sensations,
ideas, or phenomena,--facts of which there is a perception or
consciousness.' These sensations, and nothing else, make the material of
the sensible universe which we see and know and live in,--they are the
material out of which the shifting scenes in this wonderful panorama of
sense-life are formed,--they are the exciting causes of all the various
forms of our mental life, of our joy and sorrow, laughter and tears,
hopes and despairings. When we are conscious of the outward world, it is
of a world of sensations which is _immediately_ present to our minds and
in our minds; for the essence of an idea or sensation is that it is
perceived,--its _esse_ is _percipi_. But this is not the whole of
Berkeley's theory of matter, as many critics would have us believe.
There is along with this 'immediate perception of extended sensible
reality' a 'mediate perception or a presumptive inference of the
existence of sensible things and their relations.' The knowledge we have
of the external world of the senses cannot be reduced to the sensations
of which we are actually conscious for the time being. There are,
besides the sensations immediately present, clustering groups of others
which we do not immediately perceive. Tangible things are signified by
visual sensations, and sounds recall colours and shapes. Every isolated
sensation is significant of more than itself, and _mere_ sensation is
impossible. And this significance of sensations, the reality of their
_relations_ to each other, recognised and insisted upon by Berkeley,
makes his scheme different from any system of merely subjective
idealism, and supplies a basis for objective or scientific knowledge.
'For,' as Professor Fraser says, 'faith in an established or external
association between our sense-phenomena is the basis of the constructive
activity of intellect in all inductive interpretation of sensible
things.' It is this 'external,' or imposed association, which
_universalizes_ and gives objective existence to sensations and the
sense-world, and so far Berkeley's explanation does not differ very much
from that of Mr. Mill or Professor Bain.
But then, what is Berkeley's 'association'? It is, as Professor Fraser
well puts it, 'his religious faith in the constancy of the Divine
constitution of the Cosmos.' The associative relations of things which
give permanence and objective reality and intelligibility to the world
of sense-phenomena are not to be explained by any hap-hazard
one-coming-after-another, as modern psychologists do. They are due to
the active agency of the Supreme Mind which links sensations together in
ways of His own, so that there exists, not a chaos of varying, changing
phenomena, but an orderly intelligible system of sense things,
co-existing and successive, significant of each other, and all together
making the interpretable language of Him whose designs they embody, and
by whose constant activity they are all maintained. 'And thus,' as
Professor Fraser has beautifully expressed it:--
'The only conceivable and practical, and for us the only
possible, substantiality in the material world
is--permanence of co-existence or aggregation among
sensations; and the only conceivable and practical, and for
us the only possible, causality among phenomena
is--permanence or invariableness among their successions.
These two are almost (but not quite) one. The actual or
conscious co-existence of all the sensations which
constitute a particular tree, or a particular mountain,
cannot be simultaneously realized. A few co-existing visible
signs, for instance, lead us to expect that the many other
sensations of which the tree is the virtual co-constituent
would gradually be perceived by us, if the conditions for
our having actual sensations of all the other qualities were
fulfilled. The substantiality and causality of matter thus
resolve into a Universal Sense-symbolism, the interpretation
of which is the office of physical science. The material
world is a system of interpretable signs, dependent for its
actual existence in sense upon the sentient mind of the
interpreter; but significant of guaranteed pains and
pleasures, and the guaranteed means of avoiding and
attaining pains and pleasures: significant too of other
minds, and their thoughts, feelings, and volitions; and
significant above all of Supreme Mind, through whose
Activity the signs are sustained, and whose Archetypal Ideas
are the source of those universal or invariable relations of
theirs which make them both practically and scientifically
significant or objective. The permanence and efficiency
attributed to Matter is in God--in the constitutive
Universals of Supreme Mind: sensations or sense-given
phenomena themselves, and sensible things, so far as they
consist of sensations, can be neither permanent nor
efficient; they are in constant flux. This indeed is from
the beginning the tone of Berkeley himself--much deepened in
"Siris."'
In Berkeley's earlier philosophy, and even in his later, this grand
conception of an orderly universe permeated and ever upheld by mind, is
by no means fully or consistently worked out, as Professor Fraser
himself acknowledges. The starting-point itself is somewhat confused.
Berkeley starts with sensations. But the universe is not a universe of
sensations, but of sensible things, and although the formula _esse est
percipi_ will at once explain the meaning of a sensation, it will not,
without some argument and explanation, account for the meaning of a
sensible thing. Berkeley did not sufficiently recognise the difference,
and he leaped to a conclusion which, however right, should have been
reasoned out. A whole is not the aggregate number of its parts, it is
the sum of the parts _plus_ their being placed together. There is a
difference between a house and a heap of stones. Now Berkeley did not
seem to see this, at least in his earlier philosophy. Tangible distance
was to him a series of _minima tangibilia_, a series of tactual points;
visible distance a series of _visible points_, and that only. Whereas,
distance is really the sensible points _plus_ their arrangement. The
sensible thing is really the complex of sensations _plus_ their
unification. We are not disposed to believe with Professor Ueberweg[227]
that this oversight amounted to a begging of the whole question, we hold
with Professor Fraser that there is only a little confusion in
apprehending the problem aright, and a rashness in leaping to a
conclusion which should rather have been elaborated and proved. Berkeley
thought, as Professor Fraser says, that 'the consciousness of my own
permanence, amid the changes in my senses, is the only archetype, in my
experience, of proper substance or permanence; and apart from this
experience, permanence or substance is an unintelligible word.' His
thought was not substantially distinct from Dr. Ueberweg's own,--who
says[228] 'that individual intuitions gradually arise out of the
original _blur_ of perception, when man first begins to recognise
himself an individual essence in opposition to the external world,' and
who elsewhere[229] makes the notion of self the type of the essence of
things. That unique thing called 'self' or 'I' is the only real
permanent unity known, and is therefore the type of all permanence and
unity elsewhere. The _esse_ or the essence which gives shape and
endurance to fleeting formless sensations is mind--my mind or the
Supreme Mind. It is the _percipi_, _being perceived_, or coming under
the formative influence of mind, which gives to a series of sensations
that unity which we can call 'distance,' that shape and unity to the
cluster of sensations which we call 'leaf' that orderly series
arrangement and permanence which we call the system of things. The
action of mind upon sensations, forming and arranging them, is not
discussed by Berkeley. He contents himself with his vague spiritual
intuition, and leaves his readers to work out his meaning. It does seem
clear to us, however, both from his references to the archetypes of
ideas in the 'Principles of Human Knowledge,' and more especially from
his interesting discussions on the native archetypes of ideas in his
letters to Johnson, that he did not altogether overlook the distinction
between mere complexes of sensations and sensible things; but that he
was sensible of this distinction, and wished to explain that the complex
of sensations was transformed into an orderly stable sensible thing by
the unifying formative mind putting as it were its stamp upon it.[230]
It was undoubtedly a hindrance to the completeness of Berkeley's
thoughts that he had no clear and distinct scheme of ethical relations
before his mind when he was investigating the relations between mind
and phenomena. It is true that, as Professor Fraser says, 'the moral
presumption of our individual free and proper agency is obscurely
involved in Berkeley's philosophy of sense from the first.' But the
ethical relations of the individual human spirit were nowhere clearly
seen, and were not made its leading and peculiar characteristic. It was
reserved for Kant to place the moral relations of these individuals and
their significance in the world of things in due prominence, and it has
been easier for men such as Schleiermacher and Herman Lotze, who have
come after Kant, and who have maintained a doctrine of the spiritual
relations which exist in and give order, cohesion, and permanence to the
universe, not unlike Berkeley's, to develop the doctrine of these
relations so far as the human spirit goes, and give more thoroughness
and completeness to the scheme. We may conceive Berkeley carefully
working out the double relation of human to divine spirit, and finding
in the sensible universe the veil which hangs between, not merely the
orderly and pregnant language of the Creator Spirit to be interpreted
and made intelligible by the creature spirit, but also the shadowy
reflection of the working of the Creator towards the creature, and of
the striving of the creature towards the Creator. Each thing, class,
order, genus, and race, with all its relations to all the other parts of
the vast order of things, filling the place in the organism in which the
Creator placed it, acting, influencing, and ruling, according to its
function and place in the arrangement of the whole; just as the
individual, or class, or nation fulfils, or ought to fulfil, the ethical
duties which its hands find to do, so that the universe, in all its
spheres of animate and inanimate life, of organic and inorganic bodies,
becomes in its mutual action and reaction, as Schleiermacher says, a
'fainter ethic.'
Berkeley approaches this in his greatest metaphysical work, the 'Siris.'
It is here that the thought of organism or development in things and in
the universe, which comes in occasionally in his earlier writings, is
more fully expressed and even elaborated. The very name suggests it, the
book is a _chain_ of philosophical reflections and inquiries. Faithful
to the method of his younger days, Berkeley takes a concrete instance of
the concatenation of nature. He discourses on the virtues of tar-water,
and thoughts on these lead up to the highest mysteries of the universe.
But when we divest the thoughts of this particular form, we have such a
system of the universe as Bacon working with Plotinus might have
conceived. The centre source and light of all is the One Supreme
Spirit--the personal omnipresent God in whom we and all things live and
more and have our being. The universe is his reflection, it represents
his thoughts, it is the revelation of his mind and will, it is his
language. But the old puzzling word 'arbitrary' has disappeared, and
this language of nature is seen to depend upon great laws and to be
capable of interpretation because so dependent. The esse of sensation
and of the sense-world generally, is still _percipi_, but the ambiguity
lying in the word is carefully distinguished. On the one hand all things
are dependent on the creative and upholding influence of the Supreme
Spirit. He it is that, making all things after their _kinds_, sends
forth and sustains the archetypes of things. On the other hand, the
fleeting sense-world is framed and shaped by the individual mind into
the universe of things, in accordance with the divine ideas or
archetypes which lie hidden in it. There is a double meaning in the
phrase, _esse_ is _percipi_. It means both that these ideas are
dependent for the possibility of existence on the divine thoughts, or
archetypes whose sensible shadows they are, and also that all sensible
things are dependent for their particular formation and position on the
formative powers of the human mind, which works in each man by general
laws of human intelligence, in accordance with and for the discovery of
the divine ideas lying immanent in things. And thus human knowledge is a
reproduction, or discovery and representation of the thoughts which the
divine creative thinking has built into things;[231] human science is a
presaging or reading of the letters and words of nature which manifest
its order and harmony, in the faith and expectancy that this same order
and harmony now prevailing, because it depends on the divine ideas of
the Creator, is fixed and enduring;[232] and the 'proper name of this
world is Spirit--free immortal Spirit--Spirit in communication with
Spirit--Spirit in dependence on and in reconciliation, through Christ,
with the one absolute Spirit--God.'[233]
ART. IX.--_The Future of Europe._
(1) _Der Deutschen Volkszahl und Sprachgebiet in den Europaischen
staaten eine statistische untersuchung von Richard Böekh._ Berlin: J.
Guttenay. 1871.
(2.) _France, Alsace and Lorraine._ London: Trübner & Co. 1870.
(3.) _The French Case Truly Stated._ By AUGUSTUS GRANVILLE STAPLETON.
London: E. Stanford. 1871.
(4.) _La France et la Prusse, pendant l'invasion de 1870._ Par ERARD DE
CHOISEUL GOUFFIER. 2me Edition. Luxembourg: Pierre Bruck. 1870.
(5.) _La France devant l'Europe._ By JULES MICHELET. 2me Edition.
Ferrier: Hachette and Cie. 1871.
(6.) _Elsass und Lothringen nachweise wie diese provenzen dem deutschen
Reiche verloren gingen._ VON ADOLF SCHMIDT. Dritte auf. Leipzic: Vert
and Co. 1870.
(7.) _Prussian Aggrandizement and English Policy._ London: Ridgway.
1870.
(8.) _Krieg und Friede._ VON D. F. STRAUSS. Leipzic: S. Herzel. 1870.
(9.) _The Interests of Europe in the Conditions of Peace._ London:
Stanford. 1870.
(10.) _Recueil des Documents sur les Exactions, vols et cruautés des
armées Prussiennes en France._ Bordeaux: Feret et fils. 1871.
(11.) _La République neutre d'Alsace._ Par le COMTE A. DE GASPARIN.
Genève et Bäle. 1871.
(12.) _Who is responsible for the War?_ By SCRUTATOR. London:
Rivingtons. 1871.
(13.) _Europe of the near Future._ By EMERITUS PROFESSOR FRANCIS W.
NEWMAN. Trübner and Co. 1871.
(14.) _Diary of the French Campaign of 1870; with the Decrees,
Telegrams, and Proclamations of his Majesty the King of Prussia._
London: Trübner and Co. 1871.
There are two antagonistic theories which profess to summarise history.
Vico attempted, in the last century, to prove that the course of human
events had, like the planets, an orbit of their own, into which they
returned after a certain number of years. In fact, according to this
philosopher, the tendency of history was to repeat itself, much like a
compound circulating decimal. But the rapid development of physical
science has, of late years, thrown this theory very much into the shade,
by confronting it with the more glittering notion of human
perfectibility. Mankind, instead of gyrating in an ellipse, move along a
line of infinite progression. Scientific men fondly imagined that the
march of intellect was destined to impel society, through stages of
uninterrupted progress, to a fanciful millennium. Knowledge was to be
the spiritual means of redeeming the nations. When mankind came to
understand their relations to the surrounding universe, Astrea would
again visit the earth, and the golden age return. There were not wanting
many minor postulates which seemed to support this splendid vision. All
the wars of Europeans found their root in dynastic interests, and would
vanish, when the wishes of the million became the main-spring of
politics. The knell of standing armies was rung by a citizen soldiery;
and with standing armies vanished all fear of territorial
aggrandisement. Economic inventions and the wide ramifications of
industrial interests were fast binding mankind in a network of harmony
and peace. Under war waged for the spell of these illusions,
philosophers and statesmen had looked back upon the past as the
wilderness of humanity, and, from the heights of Pisgah, sighted the
promised land. Even Gioberti, priest though he was, did not shrink from
avowing in his primato, that if the Jews looked forward to the Messiah
as yet to come, in the light of the golden age, he was as staunch in
that belief as the stoutest Israelite among them. The rationalist
divines have vied with the poets of our own age in announcing the
approach of the dawn of an era of universal peace and happiness. In the
midst of these delightful anticipations a speck appears upon a sunny
sky, no bigger than a man's hand. But it suddenly swells to gigantic
dimensions and sheds disastrous twilight over the fairest regions of the
earth. Without any rational pretext whatever, two of the most
enlightened nations of Europe rush with murderous weapons at each
other's throats. They close with deadly gripe; inflict upon each other
mortal blows, until one sinks through sheer exhaustion. The collapsed
state is then let blood. Heavy gyves are placed upon it, from which
there is little chance of escape for many years to come, and then only
by combination with some other power. Between two races who were, a
little time ago, beginning to forget their old animosity in acts of
amity and goodwill, the flames of hate are anew enkindled with a
vehemence destined to last through all time. Now these phenomena may,
doubtless, be explained by the usual philosophic method of assigning
very simple causes to very complicated effects.
As to which power is humanly responsible for these multiplied disasters,
is discussed at large in the pamphlets before us.[234] The question is
not simply historical, but bears directly upon the reasonableness of
the terms of peace which have been imposed. If Prussia is as blameless
in the transactions which led to the outbreak, as Bismark would make
out, it is obvious he had some reason for his recent severity. But this,
we think, can in no way be sustained. We do not share the bias of the
authors who have written on this subject. It is our opinion, having
heard, with the impartiality of a _nisi prius_ judge, all that can be
said upon the subject, that both parties have been lamentably in the
wrong; that the diplomatic relations between France and Prussia for the
last six years have been conducted upon principles more worthy of
thieves than honest politicians; that each has been attempting to
overreach the other; that Napoleon began these subterranean intrigues
with a view to secure all the prizes of war without fighting for them,
and that Bismark so manipulated events as to cause the Emperor to fight
after all, and left him nothing but defeat for his pains. Each knew that
the mining operations in which both were engaged, had gone so far, that
they must explode somewhere, and each endeavoured to direct the train
from his own territory to that of his neighbour. It is beyond question
that Bismark, if he did not plan the Hohenzollern intrigue with his eyes
open to all the consequences, knew of its existence when his Government
denied all knowledge of it. It is also clear that Baron Von Theile, in a
conference with Benedetti, repudiated, on the part of his Government,
the very suggestion, after Bismark and the King had expressed their
approval of the candidature.[235] From the declarations of the French
ambassador on this occasion, Bismark must have known the irritating
effect the avowal of the scheme must produce on the French Government.
He also refused to advise the King simply to withdraw his consent from
Leopold's acceptance of the Spanish crown, when pressed to do so by the
British Government,[236] though that step would have probably induced
France to give up the quarrel. When the Prince withdrew his claims to
the Spanish throne at the instance of his father, Prussia sullenly
refused to renounce her sanction to those claims, and thus bore a very
conspicuous part in drawing upon Europe the consequences which
followed. Then, there is a great deal of mystery about the telegram from
Ems conveying the falsehood that the King, in a crowded watering-place,
turned upon his heel when accosted by, and refused to speak with, the
French ambassador. Now, it is expressly admitted by Bismark, that he
sent copies of that telegram to all the German representatives abroad;
and either himself or his subordinates must have caused its insertion in
the official Berlin gazette, by which the war excitement in both
countries was roused to fever height.[237] We all know it was that
telegram which impelled the French Government to launch their
declaration of war. It is also upon record that France, in the course of
February, made, through Lord Clarendon, two overtures to Berlin for
mutual disarmament, offering to reduce her various contingents to the
extent of 90,000 men, which was, in fact, one-eighth of her army; but
that Bismark, having churlishly refused to listen to the first proposal,
did so far entertain the second as to forward it to the King, who, under
the counsels of his astute chancellor, declined the proposition on the
ground that the military organization of Prussia was the vital principle
of her constitution, and that she was least of all inclined to modify
it, in front of an aggressive Russia, and with the probability of an
alliance between Austria and the South German States[238]--two pretexts,
the hollowness of which, recent events sufficiently demonstrate. Now,
though the conduct of France is utterly indefensible in provoking the
conflict after the Hohenzollern grievance had been substantively
withdrawn, we cannot acquit Prussia of irritating her adversary, and of
provoking, in a great degree, the blow she seemed anxious to repel. In
point of fact, both parties had their respective interests in the
struggle; both desired to fight; both, like two pugilists, had been in
training for the encounter during the last five years, and both were
determined that so opportune an occasion should not be lost for bringing
it on.
The indulgence of military vanity, and the desire to dominate Europe,
are faults which may be ascribed to France in a larger degree than to
Prussia. But Germany, after having disarmed her antagonist, has indulged
these propensities with a mercenary spirit, and with the manifest
intention of wiping France out of the list of the great powers. The
frankness with which this is avowed is admirable in its simplicity.
France must be hindered from being dangerous in the future. She must,
therefore, be reduced to such a position as to render her alike both
impotent and defenceless. She must be degraded from her state in the
family of nations. She is, therefore, stripped of her armaments: her
artillery, her muskets, her swords, her ammunition, her military stores,
in fact, nearly all her implements and panoply of war, are carted off to
Berlin. That she may not be in an immediate position to supply their
place, she is loaded with a pecuniary indemnity which must exhaust the
energies of another generation. The frontiers of the country are thrown
back to the state in which they were in the middle of the sixteenth
century. The strong chain of fortresses which France has erected or
fortified during the last three hundred years, with two or three minor
exceptions, have been wrenched from her by her enemy. Strasburg,
Bitsche, Phalsburg, Thionville, and Metz, protecting that flank of
France which is most exposed to attack, are now only so many reservoirs,
ready, at a moment's notice, to open the rivers of invasion and deluge
the country. Metz, which is only some 160 miles from Paris, is a naked
rapier laid across the defenceless throat of France. With her greatest
buckler of defence in the hands of Prussia, anything like independent
action on the part of France is manifestly impossible. While Metz is in
the hands of Prussia, she must remain as politically weak as Piedmont,
with Austria in the Quadrilateral. With a bankrupt exchequer, with a
pillaged population, with a disorganized government, with a defenceless
frontier, with a mutilated territory, with civil feud in her capitals,
with all her strongholds in the hands of the enemy, with an imposition
of £200,000,000 sterling as a war indemnity, France is not likely to
recover her physical strength in our day; and when vigour returns to her
shattered frame, it will be only to feel she has lost her place in the
councils of Europe.
There are, of course, many excellent reasons assigned for this sort of
beneficence, which need only be stated to win common assent. Metz and
Alsace belonged to the house of Hapsburg in the fourteenth century. They
ought, therefore, to belong to the house of Hohenzollern in the
nineteenth,--a convincing argument, which no country so consistently as
Prussia could urge with elaborate effect. If every nation which has been
disintegrated during the last two hundred years, should get back its own
to-morrow, we all know how much Prussia would be a gainer by the
transfer. But the inhabitants of Alsace speak a patois of German and
French, which contains something of both, and is not either. They are,
therefore, clearly entitled to be governed from Berlin. This principle
is beautifully illustrated by the Sclave-speaking population of Silesia,
the Polish community of Posen, and the Danes of Schleswig. What more in
keeping with this piebald collection of people, in the name of
nationality, than the French people at Metz? Then, were not Alsace and
Lorraine taken by force and guile from Germany? and what more proper to
retake them by the same openhanded violence? But it is forgotten that
these provinces were first wrenched from France by Germany, so that to
restore the original balance, France will have to scramble for them
again. By this flux and reflux of empire, at least, one principle is
fully assured. Nations are prevented from becoming stagnant. The
standing pool of industrial affairs is defecated. War becomes, not an
exceptional, but the normal condition of the universe. Civilization has
the consolation of knowing that it has no sooner got on its legs, and is
about to gather into its granaries an exuberant harvest, than it is
knocked over again and its fruits are withered.
It is singular that German ideologists, whose views are so sound upon
abstract subjects, should put forth such inconsistent trash, to justify
their newly-adopted policy of territorial aggrandizement. There are,
however, a large number of sentimentalists in the world, who have a
strange hankering for the past, whose sympathies it was necessary to
secure. The German archives have, therefore, been ransacked for every
tittle of evidence to prove that Metz was a German province in the
fourteenth century; and, therefore, if any Frenchmen are found there in
the nineteenth, they ought to be under Prussian rule. But to do Bismark
justice, he has a great contempt for trashy dialectics of this
character. He takes his stand upon the firmer ground of political
expediency. France has invaded Germany some twenty-seven times,
stimulated entirely by her lust for the Rhine provinces. It is,
therefore, necessary to reduce her to such conditions that she is not
likely to offend again. In the case of the German ideologists, we grant
the premise, but deny the inference. They are doubtless sincere in their
unreason. But Bismark's premiss and conclusion are alike vicious, and no
one knows that better than himself.
The earlier wars of France against the Empire arose out of the struggle
for these border possessions when the posterity of Lothaire II., to whom
they belonged, had died out; but in these wars, France, then being
parcelled out among numerous vassals, had the worst of it. A series of
German irruptions, under Henry the Fowler, and the Othos, united these
domains to the Empire. They were, however, held more or less as fiefs of
the crown of France. The French element within, and French intrigue
without, always gave the German emperors great uneasiness; and this,
combined with further schemes of obtaining fresh fiefs in Burgundy and
Flanders, exposed France to two German invasions--one under Henry V.,
and the other under Otho IV., which made Louis the Fat and Philip
Augustus tremble for their suzerainty. But the Germans soon found in
Italy a richer field for their exploits, and France was left to
constitute her unity without much hindrance, until the empire fell into
Spanish hands. Afraid, then, of being bodily eaten up, her monarchs
became aggressive; but their blows were aimed, not against Germany, but
against Spain, unluckily without any great effect; for, the towns of
France were some half dozen times invaded by the Emperor and his allies,
her king captured, and her fortresses demolished. Our share in these
plundering transactions helped us to Tournay and Boulogne. In the next
series of wars, which arose out of the religious and political
dissensions of the empire, if France intermeddled, she was invited to do
so by the Protestant princes of Germany, with whom she was allied, and
whose interests were menaced by the house of Austria. As the price of
her intervention, she got a portion of the disputed frontier; but we
never heard that Germany otherwise than freely conceded the long-coveted
prize to her, or regarded this portion of the Treaty of Munster as a
menace to her liberties. It was not until Louis Quatorze seized Franche
Comté, and sent his legions over the Rhine, that Germany manifested any
uneasiness at the ambition of France--an uneasiness which the league of
Augsburg immediately dispelled, and an ambition which the armies of
Eugene and Marlborough levelled to the ground. Hence, Lorraine soon
afterwards fell as quietly into the hands of France, as if its exchange
for the reversion of Tuscany had been an arrangement of Providence. We
are rather curious, therefore, to know how Count Bismark gets his
twenty-seven instances of French aggression against Germany, and whether
he includes in the list the troops which France lent to Prussia to
enable her to retain her hold upon Silesia, and the counter-support she
gave Maria Theresa to enable the empress to defeat Prussia. It is
evident no parties are responsible for such interventions except those
who invite them; and to ascribe to the ambition of the people of
France, wars which arose out of the rapacity of his own countrymen, is a
phase given to the quarrel which outrages common sense. Even were all
the wars carried on under the Louises, the Richelieus, and the feudal
princes of France, as wantonly aggressive as Bismark would make out, the
French people are no more responsible for them, than the horses which
dragged their artillery to the field. They were waged frequently in
their own despite, purely for dynastic interests, and as often
undertaken to repel aggression, as to make it. Even when the people woke
up to their sovereign rights, in 1789, from whom did the first
deliberate act of aggression come? From mild and peace-loving Prussia.
Scarcely five years ago, we saw both the Saxon and Bavarian palatinate
entirely at the mercy of the first French regiment that might have
ventured to cross the border, without a hand being stretched forth to
snatch the defenceless prize. It is therefore false, in fact, to assign
to the French such an incurable lust after German territory, as to
warrant the necessity of her political servitude. The French have no
specific hatred to the Germans as a people, any more than they have to
the Italians, whose territory they have honoured no less frequently with
their presence. The allegation of Bismark is not, therefore, very
assuring. He revives the memory of these miserable feuds, as a reason
why they should be stopped; and produces a treaty, for that purpose,
which only transmits them to posterity, wrapped in a blaze of undying
vehemence. It is monstrous for the conquerors of a country to assign, as
a pretext for its abasement, the participation of its rulers in those
quarrels which originated with themselves. The great shield of Germany
against French interference is its unity. Had she further insisted upon
the fortresses in Alsace and Lorraine being dismantled, with an adequate
pecuniary indemnity, she would then have been doubly secure. But when,
in addition, she requires the keys of France to be placed in her hands,
and the country, bound hand and foot, to be cast under her feet, it is
idle to say that Prussia is aiming at mere immunity from aggression.
There is a weightier reason behind for the mutilation of France, which
it would be inconvenient to avow, and that is the preservation, if not
the increase, of her own military ascendancy.
Prussia in making peace consulted her own interests. Had her troops
returned to Berlin after concluding with France a wise and durable
treaty, that would have occurred which occurred after the peace of
1815--Germany would have demanded free and liberal institutions. There
would have been no necessity for Prussian Cæsarism. Berlin would have
had to modify her military constitution. There would have been no
necessity for vast armaments. The world would have once more settled
down to pacific ways. But in leaving behind her an exasperated France,
Prussia has the strongest of all motives for inducing Germany to
perpetuate her military dictatorship, and keep the war ferment at high
pressure. But it is impossible that the most pacific country can remain
long under the influence of such a military organization as Prussia
commands, without using it as an instrument for further aggrandizement.
Were it indeed otherwise, a marvel would occur, the like of which would
be unknown in history. Who ever heard of a power suddenly overtopping
Europe, and, amid a handful of weaker states, stopping short in her
career of aggression? Those who believe in the pacific virtues of
Bismark, and the pious sincerity of William, ask us to indulge in
anticipations which have never been realised. Did Rome stop when it
overran the Peninsula, Macedon when it fulminated over Greece, the
Caliphs when they stormed Constantinople, or the Hapsburgs when they
conquered Vienna? There is a momentum in all states, once entered upon a
career of conquest, which hurries them along with a speed proportionate
to the extent of their acquisitions. The law of rising kingdoms may be
formulated almost with the same nicety as that of falling bodies. Nor
are there any circumstances in this instance calculated to modify its
tendency, except such as give it vastly preponderating force and
direction.
It must not be overlooked in this case, that the states under the
hegemony of Prussia are amongst the poorest in Europe. Some three
hundred thousand annually are driven, by fell necessity, to seek that
provision in foreign lands which is denied them at home. The little
wealth possessed by the home population is not in the possession of
their princes and feudal aristocracy, but in the hands of the mercantile
class, to whom war would not be in the least distasteful, if it opened
out new avenues for their trade. The poverty of the German Junker,
however, has been up to the present only equalled by his
pretentiousness. Sheridan advised the last generation of them, to sell
their high-sounding titles, to buy worsted to mend their stockings. Yet
some of our statesmen would have us believe that these gentlemen, long
suffering under a painful sense of impecuniosity, will, on waking up to
the reality of their being masters of the world, continue to go about,
as heretofore, with empty pockets. Can we suppose that a strong state,
steeped up to the ears in poverty, will continue quiescent, surrounded
by weak states who oppose no barriers to her possession of superabundant
wealth? The inference is against everything we know of human nature,
even upon the supposition that Prussia, to whom the people have
entrusted their fortunes, is the most pacific state in the world, and
that they have been attempted to be worried like bleating lambs, in the
recent struggle. The only rational conclusion is that the Junkers of
Germany will, like every other impoverished class, make the most of
their new position. They will sit down to consider what countries
contain the great reservoirs of commerce, and by what accession of
territory the stream of wealth may be diverted to their own land.
Germany is in the condition of the miller who had large mills but no
water. Is it likely, when she has the power, she will refrain from
entering her neighbour's territory, to divert the course of the element
which sweeps by her with such majestic abundance, without rendering any
service to herself? If she did not withhold her hand from a few barren
roods in the case of Denmark, is she likely to do so when the prize is
more tempting, the power to snatch it a thousand degrees more startling,
and the chances of failure so much less? There can be only one reply to
these questions. If the _bourgeoisie_ condemned the movement, their
opposition would be treated with the same indifference as the opposition
of the great commercial class to the war of 1866. But the Minister has
only to show the trading class that the movement is a commercial
venture, and he will convert them into his staunchest adherents.
The German people have acquired of late years a peace-loving character,
which, however, is rather adventitious than real, springing more out of
the helplessness into which they were thrown by the dissensions of the
Diet, than out of any innate disposition to be less quarrelsome than
their neighbours. That they are more phlegmatic, more industrious, and
less easily roused than the French may be readily admitted. But we
should be strangely oblivious of the thirty years' war, of the Silesian
wars, of the Swedish and Italian wars, of the Danish and Austrian wars,
if we came to the conclusion that, if left to themselves, and in
possession of their united strength, they would be the most benignant
people in the world. The Germans have always evinced a conservative
disposition to follow their feudal chiefs, and, by espousing their
quarrels, have kept Europe embroiled for many centuries. In no other
country could a small state like Prussia spring out of a mere society
of Knight Templars, and in less than two hundred years, take her place
among the first powers of the globe. While the smaller states of the
empire followed their indolent habits, and cultivated the _dilettante_
tastes of their rulers, Prussia was perpetually sharpening her sword,
carving out of her neighbours fresh slices of territory, and using one
acquisition as a stepping-stone to another. The acceptance of the
peaceful pursuits to which the inaction of the minor states, and the
jealous rivalries and despotic tendencies of the larger, impelled their
respective populations, as a pledge of the new era of quiet harmony upon
which Europe is about to enter, is only another instance of taking the
forced and exceptional state of a people for its normal and natural
condition. If the German people could be divorced from their feudal
leanings, if they could bind up their unity with free institutions, and
sink the interest of each particular state in that of the entire
community, we should regard their assumption of military supremacy as a
blessing to Europe. But this state of things, so near being accomplished
in 1848, is now further off than ever. Prussia, then, by the free voice
of Germany, was offered the Imperial crown, upon condition of merging
her individual sovereignty in that of the commonwealth. But she refused.
Now she has got it upon her own terms--that of merging the commonwealth
into herself. All the power and might of Germany, instead of being
allied with liberal institutions, is wielded by one despotic hand.
Instead of Germany swallowing up Prussia, Prussia has swallowed up
Germany. Germany in inaugurating her unity, like the young man coming to
his heritage, was surrounded by two candidates for her favours,--free
institutions and military despotism--and, succumbing to the tempter, she
has flung herself into the embraces of military despotism.
Prussia, who first intoxicated Germany with the idea of unity, has
debauched her with the doctrine of nationality. The lure was in the Elbe
Duchies, which she first held out to the Fatherland, and then
appropriated to herself. The overthrow of Austria induced the Northern
states to submit, some out of compulsion, and others out of love, but
all out of a hope that under so puissant a leader, an impoverished state
of independence might be changed for one of wealthy servility. Hence,
the Confederation or Staatenbund of the North, which placed the
armaments and international relationships of all the states on the
Prussian side of the Main completely under the control of Berlin. The
Treaty of Prague guaranteed independent action, as well as a separate
confederation to the German states south of the Main. But while the ink
wherewith that treaty was signed was scarcely dry, and while Napoleon
was congratulating his subjects on having set up two confederations in
Germany instead of one, Bismark signed treaties of offensive and
defensive alliance with each of the Southern States, which made their
confederation an impossibility, by placing all their armaments as
completely in the hands of Prussia as if they belonged to the Northern
Bund. But, in these days, changes take place so rapidly as to exhaust
our breath in recounting them. The goal of Prussian ambition to-day, is
its starting-post to-morrow. The North German Confederation, with their
treaties of defensive and offensive alliance, which have done their work
so effectually in the subjugation of France, has already made room for
another edifice of a more momentous character. The Staatenbund, which
has disappeared, was, as its name imports, a mere confederacy. The union
was effective for federal purposes, but too much individual action was
left to the component bodies. The armies of the Confederacy, though
under the command of the King of Prussia, as President of the Bund, owed
fealty to their respective chiefs. There is something naïve in the
declaration that they should have command of their own troops in time of
peace. But now this poor shadow of sovereignty is taken away, and the
armies of the Northern States, both in peace and war, are handed over to
the King of Prussia, and constitute part and parcel of the Prussian
force. The joints have, therefore, been tightened in proportion as the
area has been extended. In point of fact, the former mediatized states
have been virtually incorporated with Prussia; while the
semi-independent sovereignties of the south have been reduced to the
position of the former mediatized states. They have only one railway and
water communication, one system of post and telegraph, one mercantile
marine, one tariff, one code of civil and criminal judicature, one
consulate, and one army and navy. The states south of the Main now find
themselves bound up in closer ligatures with those of the north than
formerly united these with each other. In other words, the Staatenbund
has been changed into a Bundesstaat, or a confederacy into one allied
State. The whole of Germany, from the Baltic to the Vosges, from the
frontiers of Gallicia to the mouth of the Weser, is now united in a
single commonwealth, with an hereditary emperor, with a central
parliament, and a common capital: we need hardly add that the majority
of that parliament are Prussian subjects, that the Emperor is the
Prussian monarch, and that the capital is Berlin.
It is curious to notice the careful guarantees by which Prussia has
secured the increase of her ascendancy in the new institution, and the
growth of centralization in her hands. No change can be effected in the
charter which is opposed by fourteen votes of the Federal Council. But
as she has seventeen of these, it is clear Germany cannot enter upon a
more liberal regime unless Prussia wishes it. Baden and Hesse have, like
the Northern States, handed over their armies to Prussia, with whose
forces they are henceforth incorporated. The King of Bavaria has the
command of his own troops only in times of peace; in war he is liable to
be superseded by a Federal commander, appointed by the Emperor.
Würtemburg has consented to consign her troops to a Federal commander,
nominated by Prussia, both in peace and war. For this concession the
King has been allowed to appoint his inferior officers, subject to the
approval of the Emperor. Throughout the rest of Germany, the appointment
of all the officers rests entirely with the Emperor. All the citadels
and fortresses of every state, without exception, are surrendered into
his hands. He can give the keys of all the strong places to whom he
chooses. The Emperor alone can make war or conclude peace; though unless
the country be invaded, he has been restricted, at the instance of
Bavaria, from making war without the consent of the Federal Council.
But, as King of Prussia, he can make war when he pleases, which renders
him as practically independent of control as if the restriction did not
exist. The armaments of Germany are, therefore, as practically in the
hands of Prussia, as the armaments of Russia are in those of the Czar.
The concessions in favour of the Kings of Würtemburg and Bavaria are so
trifling, that to call these princelings kings any longer is trifling
with the name. Their sovereignties are virtually absorbed in the crown
of Prussia. Let the phantom monarchs, who have signed their own
death-warrants at Munich and Stuttgart, presume to interfere with the
mandates of Berlin, and they will be dealt with as summarily as any
provincial _maire_ who ventured to disobey imperial decrees under the
Napoleonic _régime_.
These results we ventured to predict some five years ago, but they have
been brought about with a celerity and completeness which even have
surprised ourselves.[239] The fact is, there is a splendour and glitter
about military achievements which the soberest cannot withstand, when
they appear in the shape of victories over those who have been
perpetually disparaging our strength or crowing over our weakness. It
would, indeed, have been a great advantage to German liberty, had the
different states been allowed to consolidate their unity in peace.
Prussia would then have been obliged to make terms with the southern
populations, who would have been alive to the necessity of obtaining
solid pledges from her, that the resources of the German commonwealth
should not be squandered to gratify the ambition of the house of
Hohenzollern. But the astonishing exploits of Prussia, the unparalleled
series of triumphs which have laid France prostrate at her feet, have
carried away the judgments of the populations of the South, and induced
them to call for indiscriminate amalgamation with the conqueror, in
terms which their princes could not withstand. The sovereigns of
Stuttgart and Munich had, therefore, no choice between deposition and
obedience to the popular voice. They therefore made a virtue of
necessity, and were the first to offer the Imperial Crown to the King of
Prussia. In the Salle des Glaces at Versailles, surrounded by the
pictures and medallions which perpetuate the triumphs of Louis XIV. in
Franche Comté and the Netherlands, and beneath the roof of the edifice
dedicated to all the glories of France, King William was solemnly
proclaimed Emperor, on the anniversary of the day when, 170 years ago,
the Elector Frederick first assumed the crown of Prussia. Before all the
representatives of Germany, ranged beneath the banners of their
respective states, at the gates of the French capital, already quivering
in the throes of capitulation, and girt round with all the panoply and
pride of victorious armies, the German cannon thundered out the ominous
title in the ears of dying France. In the power which the title created,
the lofty pinnacle to which it elevated the sovereign upon whom it was
conferred, in the proud circumstances under which the transfer of the
Imperial Crown was accomplished, the imagination is carried back to the
days of Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa in order to find a
parallel. For, the pageant represented the assumption of no mere
primatial dignity, but the extension of direct sovereign power,
absorbing some three kingdoms, with twenty-four principalities, which at
once enables it to become supreme in Europe, both in war and peace. The
nominal federal ties, by which the princes of the Southern States are
allowed to flatter their hereditary vanity, cannot even outlast the
present generation; for the new elections to the Federal Parliament have
returned a large majority, to strengthen the autocratic interests and
centralizing policy of Prussia. The need of simplification in the laws
which bind up the different states into one homogeneous body, will
powerfully contribute to the same end, so that, in a few years, Prussia
will find herself wielding the power of the Cæsars, with a single
national authority.
That Prussia will not use the tremendous force she has thus acquired to
fight for empty name or mere _gloire_, or marshal her battalions for
deadly conflict, simply because some foreign ambassador has refused to
take off his hat to one of her kings' mistresses, may be readily
conceded; and, taking the transfer of military ascendancy from Paris to
Berlin, so much in the interests of peace has doubtless been gained. But
what guarantee have we that Prussia will not use her vast accession of
power to augment her material interests and enrich the populations who
have confided their fortunes to her management? The military and naval
supplies are raised by taxes, over which neither parliament--the
Reichstag, nor the Federal Council--the Bundesrath, has the slightest
control. The chief corner-stone of English liberty is the dependence of
the executive on Parliament. If it cannot get the supplies from the
legislature, down it goes. But in the adroit charter lately manipulated
at Versailles, there is no executive beyond the Prussian monarch and his
chancellor, and the military taxes of the Empire find their way into
their exchequer, without any check or hindrance, quite as if the process
was a law of nature. The great doctrine of ministerial responsibility,
without which not even the shadow of constitutional liberty can be
inaugurated, finds no place in the charter of the new federal Empire. It
is true that any extraordinary levies or augmentation of the armaments
of the Empire would have to receive the sanction of the new German
legislature. But when we remember that the military resources of the
Empire are already developed to the utmost, that the normal military
organization of the Empire enables Bismark to exhaust its last thaler,
employ its last musket, and call out its last man, it would appear a
mockery to hold out this provision as a guarantee of the influence of
the popular element in the new constitution. It does not improve the
situation, when we remember, how resolutely the popular element in the
Prussian Chambers was set at defiance by the King and his Minister, upon
the refusal of the majority to endorse the increased armaments which
they demanded, to enable them to appropriate the Duchies, and
afterwards to fight Austria. Bismark suspended the Prussian Constitution
for four years, to carry out his policy of blood and iron. A despotic
charter, in the hands of Liberal ministers, might be modified in favour
of progress. But with a despotic charter in the hands of a despotic
minister, we see little hope for the future pacification of Europe.
France is under the heel of Germany, and Germany under the heel of
Prussia. That that power will henceforth champion the liberties she has
hitherto done her best to repress; that she will voluntarily renounce
the plundering policy which has been the predominant feature of her
character for a policy of justice and rectitude; that she will hereafter
woo peace with the same ardour with which she has up to the present
wooed the sword, is what we most devoutly wish, but which we cannot
bring ourselves to believe.
In fact, Prussia has by no means fulfilled the destiny which she avows
it is her honest mission to accomplish. She is called by Providence to
unite the whole of Fatherland under her sceptre. But the German kingdom
still remains divided. The edifice of German nationality still requires
the copestone for the completion of the structure. The words which her
sovereign addressed to the German people on the day when he accepted the
imperial crown at Versailles, are strikingly significant of her
pretensions, 'The Empire,' said the king, or rather Bismark, who spoke
in his person, 'has been in abeyance some sixty years. We are summoned
to undertake its re-establishment.' In 1806, the dissolution of the old
Germanic Empire followed as a natural consequence of the Confederation
of the Rhine. The Emperor of Austria, at the dictation of Napoleon, then
renounced the title and regalia of the empire which had fallen to
pieces, but which King William now takes it upon himself to revive.
'Accordingly,' says this monarch, 'we and our successors to the crown of
Prussia henceforth shall use the imperial title in all the relations and
affairs of the German Empire; and we hope to God that it may be
vouchsafed to the German people to lead the Fatherland on to a blessed
future under the auspices of its ancient splendour.'[240] As an earnest
of this intention, Alsace and German-speaking Lorraine, together with a
portion of French-speaking Lorraine, brought under the German flag, is
an important revival of the old kingdom on its western frontier. This is
a rich slice to commence with. But the resuscitation of the Empire with
the western limb of the Austrian monarchy, and nine millions of Germans
left out, is like the resuscitation of Greece without either Athens or
Thermopylæ; or the play of Hamlet, with the part of the Prince excluded
from the programme. The union of Fatherland would be a mockery, and the
revival of the Empire a nullity, without the annexation of those
provinces which constitute the birthplace and cradle of its history.
Accordingly, when the Germanic Confederation was set up in 1815, as a
substitute for the old diet, the German provinces of Austria were deemed
of such importance as to confer upon her the leading voice in its
councils. It is not, therefore, likely that some forty-two millions of
Germans will long remain united, without endeavouring to include, under
the same hegemony, the nine additional millions now clamouring for
admission outside. Already, within the German provinces of Austria,
committees are established, with a view to afford their Northern
brethren a fulcrum for realizing the desired event. In Glatz, Salzburg,
Innsprück, Linz, and Vienna, _fêtes_ were prepared to celebrate the
recent triumphs of their German compatriots, which the Hohenhart
ministry was obliged to suppress by force. But even despite of the
Government, numerous meetings have been held in which the warmest
eagerness for German unity and for federal union with Berlin has been
expressed. Indeed, the Austro-Germans who formerly aspired to lead
Fatherland, now live in subordination to the Sclaves, whose influence in
the Austrian Chambers, by mere force of numbers, is paramount to their
own. They, therefore, seek union with their heroic countrymen, with all
the more ardour, as it would release them from the ascendency of a race
whom they despise. Guided by the aspirations of his countrymen, Bismark
will find a much easier passage across the Inn to the Leitha than across
the Rhine to the Moselle. The work of German nationality has advanced so
far that we must doubt, if Prussia remained indifferent to the prize,
that the fusion would not be accomplished by the very momentum which the
movement has already acquired. But with Prussia, true to the grasping
instincts of her house, clothed with the enormous prestige of her recent
victories, and throwing all her energies into the struggle, Austria can
no more resist the absorption than a wave of the Eider could resist
being swallowed up in a ground swell from the German Ocean.
The limits of the revived Empire on its Southern frontier will,
doubtless, be such as to enclose those provinces in which the Germans
form the principal element. These comprise Upper and Lower Austria,
including Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, and the Tyrol. Some two millions
occupy the north and western frontiers of Bohemia. In the north-east of
Moravia, and the eastern part of Austrian-Silesia, there are some seven
hundred thousand more. But the proportion of the German to the Sclavonic
populations of Bohemia and Moravia is only one-fourth; so that these
provinces cannot be annexed to the German Empire without giving the
doctrine of nationality its _coup de grâce_. But Moravia and Bohemia
constituted integral portions of the old German Empire. They were, also,
reclaimed as such by Austria, on the construction of the Germanic
Confederation in 1815. There are besides strategical reasons. For the
Austrian Archducal province, with its three millions of Germans, would
be blocked up between the Czechs and Magyars, while Bohemia would extend
like a wedge into the bowels of the Empire. We are afraid, that when the
question comes to be settled, both Bohemia and Moravia will find
themselves eaten up, sandwichlike, by the German populations on the
north and south frontiers, and assimilated into the political body which
is already dominating Europe.
But the necessity of increased outlets for German industry, and of
further materials for the expansion of her commerce, will be as powerful
a stimulant for the growth of Prussian Cæsarism as the principle of
nationality. Germany having achieved her national unity, will require
free access to the seaboard of the German Ocean. She will require ships
and colonies. The possession of Holland would place all these
requirements at her disposal, and enable her to fructify her home
commerce a hundredfold. Professor Newman sees such advantage to both
parties in the annexation, that he is anxious the union should be
accomplished; he rather naïvely adds that Prussia will withhold her
hand, because she would not wish to be hampered with Java or Surinam,
and the other possessions which alone impart to Holland its
significancy. Twenty millions of colonial population, however, would be
a prize as glittering to the Germans as the Dutch seaboard at home; and,
therefore, no one was overwhelmed with surprise when its annexation was
mentioned as one of the overtures made by Bismark to the French Emperor
in return for Prussian acquiescence in the French seizure of Belgium.
Nor can it excite wonder that the French Emperor refused as promptly as
his uncle, when the Russian Alexander offered to France both Syria and
Egypt in return for allowing him to seize Constantinople. But now there
is no France to block the way, and Holland is entirely at the mercy of
Berlin. The House of Nassau had its representative in the Germanic
Confederation, to answer for the interests of Luxembourg. Why should it
not have its representative in the Bundesrath at Berlin, and sacrifice
its independence, to bask in the splendour of the new Empire? If the
four millions of Dutchmen do not fall in with these suggestions so
readily as the five millions of Bavarians, they will be found as
incompetent as the Bavarians would have been, to oppose the high behests
and the colossal interests of a race of fifty millions, who threaten to
rule the world. The Netherlands were an important limb of the old
Germanic Empire. The Dutch section of it is identified with Germany by
military traditions. Her language and religion are Teutonic. In resuming
possession of this territory, the revivers of the old imperial
domination would not meet with anything like the difficulties they have
to encounter in incorporating the eastern frontiers of France.
The absorption of Holland, by so powerful a country as Germany, would
deal a heavy blow at our own naval supremacy. But this danger is the
least of those which are ahead. For Prussia does not appear alone upon
the scene of action; and there are prizes for her to seize, which
require the support of an ally who has herself a direct interest in the
spoil, and who is troubled with as few scruples as Prussia herself.
There cannot, we think, be a doubt that Prussia entered upon the recent
campaign with a secret understanding with Russia, of armed intervention
on the part of that power, in case of certain eventualities arising out
of the war, unfavourable to Prussia. The two combatants had not measured
swords at Spicheren, before this treaty was suddenly announced, and as
boldly denied. The cordial greetings of the two courts, moreover, during
the progress of the war; the shout of rapture which every French
disaster drew from the Emperor Alexander; the indiscreet announcement of
the Emperor William, that he would never forget that he owed it to the
attitude of his Imperial nephew that the war did not assume larger
dimensions, and the conferring on each other, at the conclusion of the
campaign, military honours; all these things tend conclusively to prove
that, in league with Prussia, there is a power still more formidable to
the liberties of mankind. Had it not been for this assurance of support
from Russia, it would have been perfect madness for Prussia to leave her
eastern frontier exposed to the inroads of Austria, when that power was
counting her chances as to throwing in her lot with France. Had Austria
moved a musket, Russia would have poured her troops through the defiles
of the Carpathians, and given her another enemy to encounter. Bismark
was, therefore, enabled to leave Saxony as much unprotected, as were the
Rhine Provinces in the war of 1866. When France was prostrate; when she
was expiring under the terrible effects of the blow which she had
recklessly invited, but which the connivance of Russia enabled Germany
with collective force to deal; that power plainly exposed her cards, and
showed the interests she had in the struggle. In the month of November,
Gortschakoff startled London by announcing the intention of Russia to
repudiate the treaty of 1856. Within a little time afterwards, the
Prussian Prince of Roumania declared he could no longer support his
position as Turkish feudatary; but must convert his government into one
of independent sovereignty, or retire from it altogether. About the same
period, as if to bring the repudiation of treaties in fashion, Bismark
announced the resolution of Prussia to withdraw from the guarantee of
1867 protecting the neutrality of Luxembourg. If two of these
difficulties have been transitionally arranged, the compromisers have
only deferred the real solution of the question they involve, to a more
convenient opportunity. It is very ominous for England, that Europe, at
present, is virtually in the hands of two potentates evidently acting in
concert with each other, who can place two millions and a half of
fighting men in the field; and that both have shown a disposition to
complicate affairs in the East, to the spoils of which each possesses
peculiar pretensions, as well as peculiar means of realizing those
pretensions in the amplest manner.
The interest of Russia in driving the Turks out of Europe is
traditional. She believes in it as a mission to which she is called by
divine Providence. It is not merely an affair of conquest, but a matter
of religion. For this she exists as a nation, bound to execute the task
at all hazards, and to intermit no opportunity of bringing it about.
With Prussia it is merely a question of arithmetic. But the gain to her,
were the struggle only partially decided in her favour, is such as to
overpower even an Oriental imagination. The conjoint export and import
trade of Turkey may be set down at forty millions annually. Of this
trade England has, at present, the lion's share. The rest is mainly
divided between Italy, France, Austria, and Russia. Prussia and Northern
Germany enjoy little or next to nothing of it. Turkey, to them, might as
well not be in existence, except for the wealth it pours into the
coffers of their neighbours. Formerly Russia has been prevented from
dealing with the 'sick man' by the protectorate of the Western Powers.
England and France have been repeatedly offered ascendancy on the banks
of the Nile, in return for permitting Russian ascendancy on the shores
of the Bosphorus. But, besides the principle of equity, which no English
minister dare contravene, it would have been an absurd policy, in
exchange for an African or Asiatic province, to place our trade in the
Levant in jeopardy, by allowing Russia to instal herself in
Constantinople. But Russia has now an accomplice who can help her to the
booty, who is troubled with no moral delicacy, and who would gain a
large revenue out of the transaction. Prussia, by laying her hand upon
the north-western limb of European Turkey, would command the navigation
of the Danube, and divert a large stream of Oriental commerce to the
capitals of Germany. Provinces which are at present rich, even in their
uncultivated state, would, colonized by Prussia, become the granaries of
the world. The Italian portions of the Empire are gone from it
irretrievably: but Germany can indemnify herself by expansion in an
eastern direction. If, therefore, no extraneous force intervenes, we
look forward to the establishment of a Prussian sovereignty, extending
from the Euxine to the Adriatic, and owning no limit till it tops the
crests of the Balkan. The scion of her house, who has already converted
the Principalities into a Prussian arsenal, is in an admirable position
to direct her energies towards this object. While Russia operates on the
Asiatic frontier, the Prussian Hospodar, backed by German battalions,
and reinforced with ordnance from Berlin, has only to put out his hand,
and Bosnia and Servia are in his grasp. With the iron and steel of the
Vosges, with the copper, lead, and silver mines of Carinthia and
Carniola, with the silks and carpets of Shumla, and the grain of Servia
and Roumania, Germany would possess a trade with which the commerce of
Italy in the Middle Ages, or the colossal industries of England in the
nineteenth century, would be dwarfed in comparison. Would she resist the
prize within her reach, if the tempter at her ear instigated her to take
it as her share of the spoil? The Ottoman Empire may be said to derive
the very breath of its existence from the jealousy of the great Powers.
The States of the West had an instinctive dread of the great Empire of
the North, besides a mutual mistrust of each other; and, therefore, the
fairest plains of Europe were allowed to remain in possession of those
who had no ambitious instincts to gratify, and no foreign predilections
to indulge. But now the state of affairs is profoundly changed, and
Turkey finds herself at the mercy of two military despots, who are
acting in concert, without any protection from their cupidity, but what
their own mistrust of each other may happen to oppose.
Up to 1866 five great Powers existed in Europe. But we cannot conceal it
from ourselves, that in the interim of a few years, three of these have
either been neutralized or practically effaced. Since the battle of
Koeniggratz it would be idle to say that Austria is of any account in
Europe. The blow she received at Solferino was a prelude to the loss of
Venetia, and the loss of her Italian possessions is only a prelude to
the stroke which will drive her completely out of Germany. When empires
rise, they accomplish the task of expansion with difficulty and labour,
but when they sink, everything appears greased to impel the wheels along
the declivity of descent. Austria has ceased to be an empire, and will
soon find it difficult to maintain an independent sovereignty. When her
Germans imitate her quondam Italian subjects in attaching themselves to
their own nationality, the Magyar and multifarious Sclavonian tribes
will alone remain, whose respective interests are so antagonistic, that
anything like union under one sceptre, without being tempered by the
influence of less excitable races, will be difficult in the extreme. At
present, her possession of nine millions of Germans, is much more a
source of weakness than of strength. Prussia, in any scheme of
annexation she may contemplate, or in any object she may have in view,
has only to show that it is for the interest of Fatherland, and Austrian
Germany is at once alive to the necessity of paralysing the action of
its own Government, and assisting the Prussian project. During the late
war, it was manifestly the interest of Austria to have flung in her lot
with France, but had she done so, the first enemy whom she would have
had to encounter would have been her German subjects. The mode in which
she clung to our garments during the struggle, and like a child with its
nurse, interceded with us to interfere between the combatants, when she
dared not interfere herself, was a glaring instance of the timidity
arising out of her weakness. When we remember the boldness of Metternich
before Napoleon I., and how Maria Theresa, yet bleeding from the loss of
Silesia, confronted the united hostility of France and Prussia, we are
astonished at the pusillanimity which Austria displays, even in her
present stage of decrepitude. In 1866, though backed by nearly all the
military forces of the Confederation, she suffered herself to be
prostrated by Prussia, and her imperial mantle to be stript from her in
a few weeks. It is therefore not from such a Power that any help can
come, when Prussia in the name of Germany finds her way to the seaboard
of the Northern Ocean, or when the Russian Emperor and his ally choose
to realize any little plans they may have concerted, with a view of
bringing Turkey within the sphere of European civilization.
The position of France is much more desperate than that of Austria,
though the compact unity of her race holds out a better prospect of her
recovering some portion of her former strength. This, however, if it
occurs, will not be, at least, in our generation. We must, therefore,
regard the course affairs may take during the next twenty years, as if
she was not in existence, at least as a controlling power. It is not the
effect of the material, so much as of the moral, ruin of the French
nation which has to be feared. Before the German armies passed through
the defiles of the Vosges, the corruption of the Second Empire had done
its work in effeminating the character of a gallant people. The mode in
which the Army of the Rhine left the capital of France for the frontier,
animated with the spirit of conquest, and glittering with all the vain
conceit of anticipated triumph, and the mode in which that proud host
was rolled back, never halting for a moment until fortressed walls
afforded them some respite from their pursuers, can be paralleled only
by the bluster of those armies of old, who under Mardonius and Hippias
came to wreck all the pride of Persia against the gates of Greece. The
spirit of a nation must be entirely emasculated, its prowess gone, when
the flower of its soldiery can surrender in masses of hundreds of
thousands to an enemy in numbers hardly superior; and when the great
body of the army can be allowed to be shut up for nearly two months in a
fortress, without making any decisive attempt to cut through a line of
weaker proportionate strength, and without the country so much as
putting up a finger to relieve them. The capitulations of Sedan and
Metz, consigning the famous Imperial Guard, which so often restored the
fluctuating fortunes of France under Ney and Cambronne, and 300,000
soldiers to the hulks of Germany, there to be employed as beasts of
burden and helots, make us almost blush at the name of Frenchmen. Such
shameful surrenders are hardly equalled by the masses of barbarous
Cossacks under Peter the Great, whom Charles XII. netted like shoals of
fish in the Ukraine. If the Republican armies did not conduct
themselves so ignominiously, it cannot be forgotten that the strategy
of Chanzy and Faidherbe was disconcerted by the Mobiles flinging down
their arms at the critical moment, and exhausting in a panic-flight
energies which ought to have been employed against the enemy. Even in
the Paris sorties, after the tide had spent its strength, more soldiers
surrendered themselves than the Germans cared to make prisoners. It also
speaks volumes for French military degeneracy, that the German armies
were permitted, for four months, to go through the dilatory process of
strangling Paris, by famine, without a single attempt being made to
interrupt their two lines of communication with Germany, except a bold
but abortive one by Ricciotti Garibaldi, when, had the country by
foraging parties constantly directed its energies to this end, they
might have placed the besieging armies in the same plight as the
besieged. If the French justly complain of the physical prostration to
which the plundering and huckstering propensities of the Germans have
reduced France, this mischief is nothing in comparison with the moral
prostration to which their submission to twenty years of a corrupt
despotism has brought the country. The injury inflicted by the
foreigner, they may in a few years partially retrieve, but the evil they
have inflicted on themselves is likely to be of a far more permanent
character. The fact is, France can never show her face in the arena of
foreign diplomacy, much less appear in the front rank again, until she
probes her weaknesses to the bottom, and eliminates the causes which
have so powerfully contributed to cast the nation, like a bleeding and
mangled carcase, under the heel of Prussia. Perhaps the most destructive
of these, is the number of hostile factions into which her population is
split, each clamouring against the other, with a hatred ever ready to
burst out into civil conflict. In France, Republicanism is arrayed
against Monarchy, and each of these parties admits of infinite
subdivisions, arrayed against each other. Legitimist, Constitutionalist,
and Imperialist, represent the monarchical element. But the Bonapartist
entertains not a greater hatred to the Orleanist, than the Socialist
entertains to the Conservative Republican. Then, the priest-party in the
country has a thorough abhorrence of the free-thinking Democrat of the
town. It cannot be denied, that during the late war, these factions did
much to paralyze the energies of the country. The Republican party had
little sympathy for the armies which were overthrown at Woerth, and sent
into captivity at Sedan. The priest-party had as little sympathy for the
raw levies which Gambetta sent to be mown down like unresisting grass,
under Chanzy and Bourbaki. The energy of the nation was constantly
divided against itself. Its heart was never thoroughly enlisted against
Germany in any part of the struggle. The country wanted a common hope, a
united faith, a solidarity of principle to champion it in the struggle.
Until these miserable feuds are terminated, we see little hope for
France. For, they reduce the country to the same state of imbecility,
which rendered Poland, fifty years previous to her extinction, of no
account in Europe. That they will entirely disappear we have little
hope. But that they will be very considerably diminished by the galling
chastisement which Prussia has inflicted, is what we try to believe,
although the events which have transpired in Paris during the last
fortnight, in which the bloodthirsty cruelty and aimless recklessness of
the Paris mob have been met by the miserable irresolution, divided
councils, and practical imbecility of the Versailles government, almost
destroy all reasonable hope. It is just in proportion to the degree in
which hatred of Prussia, and the desire of being revenged for the
punishment she has recently administered, shall diminish the rancour of
political factions and amalgamate all the feelings and strength of the
country into one flood-tide of patriotism, that we must look for the
political regeneration of France. Prussia, by the exorbitant demands she
has imposed, has certainly done her utmost to bring about this result.
She has purchased the triumphs and security of to-day, at the expense of
future ages of misery and retribution. But it is not consolatory to
think that, whatever may be her efforts, so low is the present position
of France, that she must consent to remain a political cypher during the
present century, and that her only means of recovering her position,
even as a first-class power, and of directing her united energies and
resources to that end, is by renewing the struggle with her relentless
enemy.
That France in the school of adversity will unlearn much of the
frivolity and self-glorifying spirit which has distinguished her people
during the Second Empire, is another advantage which may be hoped rather
than expected from her recent disasters--an advantage, indeed, which
would confer as many benefits upon herself as upon the world. France,
ever since the days of Louis Quatorze, has been too much accustomed to
deem herself the arbitress of Europe. She had come to recognise it as
her peculiar mission to open or shut the Temple of Janus, and give peace
or war to the world. It was her boast that not a gun could be fired off
in Europe without her consent. This had been repeated so often, in later
times, that not only Frenchmen but mankind generally came to believe it.
The consequence was, that when any restlessness was exhibited at the
Tuileries, foreign nations began to look at their muskets, increase
their armaments, and prepare for eventualities. Nor will anyone, who
considers the exploits of the First Napoleon, the marvels he
accomplished in the midst of a divided Italy and a dismembered Germany,
regard the belief as having no foundation. But France, while trading on
the splendid reminiscences of the First Empire, during the Second,
completely lost that daring and resolute spirit by which those wonders
had been achieved. While pandering to all the foolish vanities, and
indulging in the hectoring and blustering swagger, generated by the
victories of the First Napoleon, she had sunk in the slough of
effeminacy all that martial dash, that burning ardour, and fearless
courage which enabled her, against overwhelming odds, to nail victory to
her standards at Marengo and Austerlitz. The delusion under which she
laboured, was not surpassed by that of Greece, who, when debauched by
her Asiatic conquests, imagined, in her struggles with the Roman Empire,
that she possessed the prowess of the heroes who made such havoc with
the Persian armies at Marathon and Thermopylæ. The folly, into which
this delusion has betrayed her, can only be measured by the colossal
nature of the task she undertook--a task before which even the
adventurous genius of Napoleon would have quailed, that of defeating
upwards of forty millions of Germans armed to the teeth, and united
against her as one man. The result must open her own eyes to the hollow
nature of her pretensions, quite as much as it has undeceived the world.
She must now learn, if she would not be ridiculous, since she cannot
bring her deeds up to the level of her words, to reduce her words to the
level of her performances. She must for ever renounce all idea of
military ascendancy in Europe--an idea, the realization of which has so
often covered her with wounds, and now has eclipsed all her glory. The
cultivation of a chastened spirit on the part of France, the abandonment
of her levity, the manifestation of a proper sense of the humiliation to
which she is reduced, will doubtless free the world from some
nightmares, and powerfully contribute to the rehabilitation of the
country. But the work is a question of time. The change cannot be
perceptibly felt during the lifetime of the present generation; and in
the interim, before she can exercise any marked influence on the course
of events, the keys of Europe may be fought for, and the world's Empire
given away.
When we contrast the past glories of France, the height of power she
attained, or even the influence she might have exerted under wise rulers
over contemporary events, with her present prostration and political
eclipse, it is impossible to over-estimate the gravity of the crisis to
humanity. A great force has been struck out of the nations. A power upon
which during the last half century we leaned for the enforcement of
order, and the progress of constitutional ideas in Europe, has been
removed. She is, at present, as politically dead as if the Atlantic wave
rolled over Limoges, and crested the Jura. Except England, which it is
the fashion to decry as selfish and sordid, her Crimean and Abyssinian
wars notwithstanding, France was the only nation in Europe that was
chivalrous enough to fight for abstract right, especially when it was
endangered among the Latin nations. It is owing to her that Italy has
become free, united, and independent. The Poles always found in her the
resolute champion of their interests. Russian ambition had nowhere a
more uncompromising enemy than the great people whose political
obsequies are now being celebrated by illuminations in Berlin. It is
true, on a few occasions, led away by a false sense of her own interest,
her Government refused to sanction the policy we recommended for its
adoption; and in the case of the Egyptian suzerainty and the Spanish
marriages, moved exactly in a contrary direction. But it may be safely
affirmed that for the last half-century, under every government France
has possessed, she has co-operated with our own, in resisting
aggression, and promoting the triumph of constitutional principles in
every part of Europe. Under the united flags of both countries, an
independent kingdom was founded in Greece. From 1830 to 1833 she
assisted us to establish Belgium, to promote constitutional government
in Switzerland and Piedmont, and to guard the infancy of the
constitutional monarchy of Spain. In 1839, we united our efforts to
extinguish the feud between Mehemet Ali and the Porte. We also joined
our protests, when Russia suppressed Warsaw, and Prussia and Austria
extinguished Cracow, just as we sent in our united protests when these
two powers made their raid on Denmark. Our forces fought together in
1827 to protect Greece from Turkey, as in 1854 to protect Turkey against
Russia. The two Western nations were, as regards force, the complements
of each other. What the one wanted to be complete, the other had.
Singly, they were impotent to withstand any combination of despots; but
united, they might have defied the world. Now France is a wreck, and we
stand isolated in Europe. The head of the Latin nations lies shattered
in the dust; and the people whose independence we assisted her to build
up, are unable by themselves to lift an arm, or to afford any effectual
barrier against aggression. Their sole resource now is in England, who
stands alone, looking with dismay upon the effacement of the two allies,
upon whom she mainly relied in her difficulties, and upon the alliance
of two military monarchies in Europe who dominate the situation. It
depends entirely upon the attitude of Great Britain during the next few
years whether she surely shall participate in the fate of her allies,
and abandon the world to a retrogressive policy; or whether the _foyers_
of freedom and independence shall be kept alive in Europe; and whether
the spirit of justice and rectitude, instead of that of rapacity and
conquest, shall sway the intercourse of nations.
For our part, it is not without some misgivings that we look forward to
the policy of Great Britain, during the next thirty years. We do not
lose our faith in God, nor in the power of right principles, nor do we
mistrust the indomitable spirit and resources of the country when once
fairly roused, disciplined, and utilized with sagacity and skill. But of
late years there has been a growing party in the State, who would
confine the energies of the Government to its own internal affairs; who
would withdraw it from active intervention in European politics; who
would employ every shilling of our expenditure upon developing the
commercial resources of the country, and who would not even prepare to
resist an enemy until they saw him actually approaching our shores. The
disciples of this school, fortified by the principles of political
economy, refuse to see any other element in our relations with foreign
countries than the mere ledger account of barter and gain; and anything
which suspends the traffic, or withdraws the national energies into
other paths, is denounced by them as suicidal to the national interests.
War shatters the doctrines of political economists. It is, therefore,
only natural they should attempt to relieve us of warlike armaments and
decry military organization. There can be no doubt that the Reform Bills
of 1831 and 1868, by throwing power into the hands of the great trading
classes, have augmented the strength of this party, until it weighs with
preponderating effect on the main-spring of Government. We gladly admit
the beneficial influences of the changes which this party have largely
contributed to bring about, in interior retrenchment and municipal
reforms, in the equalization of political privileges, in the extension
of education, in the partial abolition of University Tests, in the
liberation of commerce from protective duties, and of religion from
State-Church endowments. We heartily accord, moreover, with its
denunciations of the war spirit, as such. But we cannot shut our eyes to
the fact that these benefits have not been unalloyed by some admixture
of evil. For, to the fact of our applying all our energies in this
direction, may be traced the breakdown of our armies before Sebastopol;
the acceptance of the declaration of Paris, which strips England of one
of its most potent weapons in naval warfare; and the shameful
abandonment of Denmark in the affair of the Duchies, which has given
rise to three wars and to the present complicated difficulties which we
have to face.[241] It even now is a question whether, if Russia were to
enter upon a new phase of encroachment in the East, or Prussia were to
annex Holland, we could, or dare, interpose with dignity and effect. Any
joint scheme of conquest pursued by these two military monarchies, we
might certainly as well hope to resist, as a child might venture to
arrest an avalanche; and our individual incompetency would, in the eyes
of the governing class, be a solid reason for not endeavouring to
solicit the aid of a series of disorganized States who are weaker than
ourselves. For the last fifty years, our influence abroad has depended
very much on the martial spirit and the indomitable pluck we displayed
in our struggles with the First Napoleon. But, if we were now to enter
upon a Continental war of only one-fifth of the dimensions of that we
carried on against Napoleon, we should find ourselves, without allies,
as little competent to support our former prestige, as the French have
lately found themselves to support the prestige of the First Empire.
But the weakness of England lies not so much in the ascendancy of the
non-intervention party, as in the hand-to-mouth policy of the English
Executive. Every question of foreign policy is considered exclusively on
its own merits, and solely with relation to the circumstances of the
hour. It is never considered as evolved out of the events of the past,
and linked with the impending events of the future. The Minister,
instead of contemplating the question in its philosophic bearings,
surrounded with all the lights which his lofty position enables him to
command, counts his majorities, feels the pulse of the nation through
the organs of the press, and decides upon adopting that course which
shall most contribute to strengthen his power. In all these questions,
the necessity of preserving a Cabinet is always paramount to that of
saving a nation. At this crisis, it is unfortunate we have to do with
States which pursue an entirely opposite system. The foreign policy of
England fluctuates now in one direction, and then in another, much at
the mercy of vulgar opinion, according to whatever whims the Minister
may have who happens to be in power. But the foreign policy of Russia
and Prussia broadens out like a mighty stream which unceasingly rolls
its current in one direction, and never ceases to return with renewed
effort upon any point where it may have sustained a temporary defeat.
The policy of both Powers is one in act, identical in principle,
substance, and complexion. It is the simple abnegation of justice in the
comity of nations. Since the days of Peter the Great, and the first
Frederic, the policy of these two Powers has been one of continuous
annexation and conquest. Prussia has no more intention of arresting her
course at the foot of the Carpathians, than Russia at the foot of the
Caucasus. It behoves, therefore, the British people to change their
course, and adjust their sails to the altered circumstances of affairs.
Nor is it less incumbent on Ministers to be alive to the fact, that,
though they may receive their home policy from the dictates of the
people, it is their high sphere, on all questions of foreign policy, to
guide, direct, create, and fashion the opinion of the country. There may
be a difference of opinion as to how far the nation is bound to uphold
the principles of abstract justice and right in its dealings with other
Powers; but there can be no difference of opinion upon the obligation of
maintaining these principles with the greatest tenacity, wherever their
violation affects our interests. We would claim the support of the most
rabid economist for the expediency of maintaining our rank as a
first-class Power, if upon no higher principle than with a view to keep
open foreign markets for our goods, and to prevent ourselves from being
cut off from the sources of our commercial prosperity. A policy, which
directed all the energies of the country to its own internal affairs,
might be persisted in without radical injury, while the political
equilibrium was divided between five States, each bent upon neutralizing
its neighbour's power by counter-checks and balances; but the same
policy pursued while Europe is in the hands of two military monarchies,
apparently having only one game in view, would be simple ruin to the
nation.
We therefore regard the present Army Organization Bill as a step in the
right direction: our only objection to it is, that it does not go far
enough. What the nation wants is increased military efficiency, and
diminished expense. The Bill does not secure the one, and only partially
realizes the other. We, however, are content to proceed by steps, if we
are only secure of going in the right direction. Let us hope this
measure is only the prelude to a series of others, which may increase
our military efficiency without increasing the military burdens of the
country. But union is strength. The liberal States of Europe, like the
sticks in the fable, may be weak in themselves, but they can easily
become strong by mutual alliance. The time is not inopportune for a
League among the smaller States, based upon mutual defence from attack,
which, if it could not preserve peace, might afford England, in
conjunction with her crippled allies, a fulcrum of support in time of
need. At all events, it is our duty, besides attending to our military
organizations at home, to enter into closer relationship with the
independent States of Europe, that if the autocrats of the North persist
in indulging their old freak of enriching themselves at their
neighbours' expense, they may not find us unprepared to maintain the
power and greatness of this country.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.
HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TRAVELS.
_The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of
Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria._ By J.
RODERICK O'FLANAGAN, M.R.I.A., Barrister-at-Law. Two vols. Longmans.
These two handsome volumes are the result of twenty-five years' almost
continuous industry, and they bear abundant testimony to the variety and
interest of the author's researches and lucubrations. It was undoubtedly
a bold and happy resolution that led him to follow in Lord Campbell's
path, and attempt to accomplish for the Lord Chancellors of Ireland,
what that successful lawyer and judge had already done with such vigour,
clearness, and liberality for the Lord Chancellors of England. Mr.
O'Flanagan has certainly produced a work which will command public
attention from the specially skilful manner in which he has furnished,
in connection with the personal biography of the great lawyers, an
almost continuous review of Irish events, together with a thousand
traditionary reminiscences and anecdotes, scandalous or praiseworthy,
concerning the Irish bar, from the earliest period. The portraits,
especially in the first volume, may be rather indistinct; but, after
all, the Lord Chancellors of Ireland, for a period of about six hundred
years, stand before us with a remarkable distinctness, in all their
variety of opinion, accomplishment, and character; the arrogant
churchman, the profound politician, the corrupt judge, the staunch
patriot, the fierce fanatic, and the eccentric jester, all playing their
parts variously, and at times in a manner but little consistent with the
character of their sedate and pacific avocations. The first Irish
Chancellor of whom there is any record is John de Worchley, who received
his appointment in 1219, in the reign of Henry III. Nearly all the early
Chancellors were Englishmen, as well as prelates. Their courts were held
in Dublin Castle. Their salaries were originally £40 a year, exclusive
of fees and perquisites; now the income of the office is £8,000 a year,
with a retiring pension of £4,000. The greatest of all the Irish
Chancellors were certainly Lord Clare and Lord Plunket, and Mr.
O'Flanagan not inappropriately devotes to their biographies nearly
two-thirds of the second volume.
It is very evident to the most cursory reader of this work, that the
author is a very staunch Roman Catholic, as well as a most patriotic
Irishman; but we should not on this ground hold him disqualified for his
present task, if he discovered a general candour and impartiality in
those instances in which his religious convictions are concerned.
Unhappily, however, in such cases, _surgit amari aliquid_. It would be
impossible for us to note all the evidences of religious partizanship
observable in the pages of this extensive work; but we prefer to direct
public attention to a very bold though unsuccessful attempt to vindicate
the character of one of the most detestable and unprincipled judges who
ever disgraced the Irish bench. Mr. O'Flanagan has taken extraordinary
pains to wipe the stains from the character of Sir Alexander Fitton, the
Irish Lord Chancellor of James II., who certainly appears in no enviable
light in the pages of Hume and Macaulay. Though compelled to admit that
he may not be 'able to remove the stains altogether,' our author is
still bold enough to say, 'with patience and perseverance, I have
satisfied myself that party prejudice originated or embellished most of
the original accusations.' (Vol. i. p. 467.) The case is one of purely
historical evidence. Hume's reference to Fitton is in these
words:--Tyrconnell was now vested with full authority, and carried over
with him as Chancellor, one Fitton, a man who was taken from a jail, and
who had been convicted of forgery and other crimes, but who compensated
for all his enormities by his headlong zeal for the Catholic religion.
He was even heard to say from the bench, that the Protestants were all
rogues, and that there was not one among forty thousand that was not a
traitor, a rebel, and a villain.' Macaulay's account is substantially
the same; but he adds that Fitton 'often, after hearing a cause in which
the interests of his church were concerned, postponed his decision, for
the purpose, as he avowed, of consulting his spiritual director, a
Spanish priest.' Mr. O'Flanagan disposes of these statements by
affirming that both these historians drew their representations from the
account of Fitton given in his 'State of the Protestants of Ireland
during King James's Government,' by Archbishop King, of Dublin, an
avowed enemy. Burnet, however, in his 'History of his own Times,' speaks
of Tyrconnell and Fitton as 'not only professed but zealous Papists,'
and of Fitton he says, he 'knew no other law but the king's pleasure.'
It is a very remarkable fact that Plowden, the Roman Catholic historian,
in his 'Historical Review,' published long after these works, does not
make the slightest allusion to Fitton, though if he had preserved
anything like the spirit of Mr. O'Flanagan, he would not have allowed
the memory of James's Irish Chancellor to rot under the 'repulsive
reproaches of two centuries.' But we are fully prepared to show that Dr.
King did not speak without book in charging Fitton with forgery.
It is not a matter of much consequence whether Fitton was only 'one
Fitton,' as Hume calls him, or a descendant of one of the most
aristocratic families of Cheshire, as Mr. O'Flanagan, on undoubted
evidence, assures us. Neither does anyone dispute the fact that he was
convicted of the crime of forgery, and lay several years in prison. The
question is, was he guilty of the crime? Our author says--'There is some
doubt whether he was chargeable with the guilt which has been so
unsparingly imputed to him;' but he cannot deny that a jury of twelve
men had no hesitation on their oath in attaching forgery to his name.
What, then, are the facts of the case? These are recounted at some
length by Mr. O'Flanagan, following the admirable and now rare 'County
History of Cheshire,' by Ormerod; but he has not fairly followed his
authority, as his narrative omits passage after passage that bears most
hardly against Fitton. We are also to remember that Ormerod's own
authority was a tract written in Fitton's own justification, under the
following title:--'A True Account of the Proceedings in the several
suits in Law that have been between the Right Honorable Charles Lord
Gerard of Brandon and Alexander Fitton, Esq. Published for general
satisfaction by a lover of truth. Hague: Printed MDCLXIII. Small 4to, 49
pp.' There was also another tract published, which, perhaps, Ormerod
never saw, under the title--'A Reply to a Paper intituled, A New Account
of the Unreasonableness of Mr. Fitton's pretences against the Earl of
Macclesfield.' (British Museum, Parl. Law Cases, vol. v., p. 117.) The
facts of the case as narrated in these tracts by Fitton's friends, may
be briefly described. Sir Edward Fitton, who was childless, resolved in
1641, after paying his debts and bequeathing legacies to his sisters'
children, to restore the ancient entail of the Gawsworth estates, and
sealed it by indenture dated 9th Nov., 17 Car., on William Fitton, his
next male kinsman, the father of Alexander Fitton, the Irish Lord
Chancellor. In this settlement there was a power of revocation. It is
said to have been confirmed by deed-poll, dated April 3, 18 Car., by Sir
Edward Fitton, who died two years after at Bristol. The allegation is
that this deed-poll was forged by Alexander Fitton, or, at his instance,
by Alexander Grainger. After Sir Edward's death, his widow, Lady Fitton,
retained possession of Gawsworth as her jointure; but on her death,
after a series of lawsuits instituted against the sisters of Sir Edward
Fitton, who were determined to retain the estate, William Fitton
succeeded in getting Gawsworth into his possession, and his son,
Alexander, afterwards succeeded upon his marriage in getting hold of all
the property by paying off a number of mortgages against it. But
nineteen years after Sir Edward Fitton's death, as this tract states,
his nephew, Lord Gerard, produced a will bequeathing the estates to
himself, as the son of one of Sir Edward's sisters; though it was
stated, on the other side, that immediately before his death, Sir Edward
said 'he would rather settle his estate on Ned Fitton, the bonny beggar,
than on any one of his sisters' children.' The parties then went to law,
Alexander Fitton relying on the deed-poll, and Lord Gerard maintaining
that it was not genuine. The High Court of Chancery directed a trial at
law to be had at Westminster upon this special issue, whether the
deed-poll was the act of Sir Edward Fitton or not; for it had been
rumoured that Lord Gerard's solicitor had prevailed upon Abraham
Grainger to swear that he had forged Sir Edward's hand to the deed. The
question came on for trial; the deed was substantiated--to use Ormerod's
words--by the evidence of Mr. Richard Davenport, Mr. Edmund Barwick, and
Mr. Thomas Smallwoods, whose deposition was taken on his deathbed by Mr.
Edge, a clergyman; but the forgery was, on the other hand, fully
acknowledged by Grainger himself, corroborated by the evidence of
Gifford and Wheeler; and it was also deposed by Colonel R.
Ashton,--Webb, Esq., Thomas Adams, Thomas Cotton, Captain Holland, and
others, that they had heard Mr. Fitton confess that Grainger had forged
a deed for him for £40. Depositions to Mr. Fitton's character were
taken, and three witnesses not named are said to have sworn they had
seen the deed-poll before the time alleged for the forgery. It was
objected to Fitton that he could not prove where he had the deed, or who
engrossed it; that it had not been mentioned at the former trials or at
Fitton's marriage; and that the witnesses could not remember where it
was executed. The jury found that the deed was forged. Now, let it be
remembered that this narration comes from the Fitton party; and yet Mr.
O'Flanagan holds Fitton guiltless in the teeth of the verdict of an
independent jury in London, who heard both sides of the case. But the
narrative does not end here. Processes were issued commanding several of
Fitton's witnesses to appear before the King's Bench on an information
of perjury. Then, says Mr. O'Flanagan, 'Grainger, conscience-stricken,
declared his prevarication in a written document, stating that he had
not forged the deed; that this document was signed in the presence of
twelve or thirteen gentlemen.' Our author's version of Ormerod's history
is singularly defective and one-sided. Ormerod says that
Grainger--according to the tract--begged earnestly for an opportunity of
acknowledging his guilt to Fitton; and, farther, did so before a citizen
of London, not named, and a kinsman of Fitton's, not named; and then
wrote a narrative which he read before twelve or thirteen gentlemen. But
Ormerod says that these 'gentlemen' 'were all most probably in low
situations, and are in no way identified.' The narration itself relates
the most improbable circumstances, as, for example, that in March, 1661,
Grainger, the narrator, was pulled off his horse, taken before Sir Allen
Aspley, who committed him to the Gatehouse without examination; that he
was in danger of being murdered in his bed by one Rowe; that he was
threatened with hanging, and with getting his hands cut off, if he would
not forge the will. Was there ever such an improbable story? And yet Mr.
O'Flanagan passes over this statement in silence, without referring to
Ormerod's honest judgment, that even the inference from Grainger's facts
is in favour of Lord Gerard, and that the evidence of a perjured witness
was of no value unless corroborated by independent testimony. We have
good reason, then, to believe that not only did Fitton secure the
forgery of the deed in the first instance, but that he induced Grainger
to issue his recantation in the shape of the narration referred to. For
the House of Lords, immediately after its publication, ordered two
copies of it to be burned, one at Westminster and another at Chester,
'at such time as Lord Gerard should appoint,' and inflicted the
following severe punishment on Fitton and three others:--'That Alexander
Fitton should be fined to his Majestie in the summe of £500; and should
be committed close prisoner to the King's Bench Prison until he should
produce Grainger, and should find sureties for his good behaviour during
life; and that Edward Floyd, John Cade, and John Wright (three of the
witnesses), should be committed to the Fleet during the King's pleasure,
and should, before their enlargement, find sureties for their good
behaviour during life.' It is evident from this very stringent
proceeding of the House of Lords that they connected Fitton very
directly with the disappearance of Grainger, and that Grainger was
either unable or unwilling to come forward to stand the ordeal of a
public examination upon the circumstances of his recantation.
We submit, then, that Archbishop King--'with all his hatred of
Catholicity'--was perfectly warranted in saying that Sir Alexander
Fitton was 'a person detected of forgery, not only at Westminster and
Chester, but likewise fined by the House of Lords in Parliament' (p.
65). Mr. O'Flanagan has no evidence to offer against Dr. King's further
statement that he was an inefficient and partial judge, for the mere
negative evidence that the Irish bar did not express any dissatisfaction
with his decisions is not worth the slightest consideration. He admits
that Fitton did consult one Dr. Stafford, a Popish priest, before giving
some of his decisions; but then Stafford was made a Master in Chancery
by the same power that placed Fitton at the head of Irish law; for, as
King remarks, the Chancellor 'was forced to make many needless
references to the Masters in causes that had no difficulty in them.'
Stafford, 'the learned and _loyal_,' Mr. O'Flanagan calls him, may have
been 'an eminent doctor of the civil law,' but the Reverend Master in
Chancery who perished at Aughrim in cheering on the courage of the Irish
troops was not exactly the person best fitted to dispense justice in
such critical times--side by side, be it remembered, with Felix O'Neal,
another Master, son of Turlogh O'Neal, the bloody rebel and murderer of
1641. We do not believe, then, that Mr. O'Flanagan has succeeded in the
slightest degree in 'removing the stain' upon the character of Fitton.
_Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional
History, from the earliest times to the reign of Edward the First_,
arranged and edited by WILLIAM STUBBS, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern
History. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1870. Pp. xii. 531.
This volume is intended to be, primarily, a 'treasury of references; an
easily handled repertory of the _Origines_ of English Constitutional
history; and, secondarily, a manual for teachers and scholars, with a
view to the first purpose.' Professor Stubbs has collected 'in it every
constitutional document of importance during the period which it
covers;' and with a view to the second, he has also 'pointed out the
bearings of the several documents on one another, and on the national
polity,' in his prefatory remarks to each of them, 'supplying in the
introductory sketch, a string of connexion and a continuous theory of
the development of the system.'
As 'the first traces of our national history must be sought for, not in
Britain, but in Germany--in the reports given by Cæsar and Tacitus of
the tribes which they knew;' reports in which we have indeed a 'somewhat
indistinct picture,' yet 'one which when interpreted by the clearer
history of the later stages of the institutions which are common to the
Teutonic race, does give a probable and consistent representation' of
them. The Professor's first extracts are taken from the 'Commentarii' of
one of these authors, and the 'Germania' of the other. These are
followed by others taken from Mr. Thorp's translation of the 'Ancient
Laws and Institutes of the Anglo-Saxons.' The remainder of the volume
consists of 'Select Charters and Excerpts,' illustrated by carefully
selected passages from the chronicles of the several periods, as well as
by other historical documents not easily accessible to any who have not
the command of a public library, and some of which are to be read only
in MS., all bearing upon the 'long struggle of the constitution for
existence,' which terminated only with the reign of Edward I. There are
only two documents of a later date given--the 'Petition of Eight,' of
1628, and the 'Bill of Rights' of 1689; both of which are printed in an
appendix.
Mr. Stubbs thus states his reasons for closing his labours with the
reign of the first Edward. It is 'the period of time at which the nation
may be regarded as reaching its full stature. It has not yet learned its
strength, nor accustomed itself to economise its power. Its first
vagaries are those of a people grown up, but not disciplined. To trace
the process by which it learned the full strength of its organism,--by
which it learned to use its powers and forces with discrimination and
effect,--to act easily, effectually, and economically,--or, to use
another metaphor, to trace the gradual wear of the various parts of the
machinery, until all roughnesses were smoothed, and all that was
superfluous, entangling, and confusing was got rid of, and the balance
of forces adjusted, and their action made manageable and intelligible,
and the power of adaptation to change of circumstances fully realized,
is the story of later politics--of a process that is still going on, and
must go on as the age advances, and men are educated into, wider views
of government, national unity, and political responsibility. We stop,
however, with Edward I., because the machinery is now completed, the
people are at full growth. The system is raw, and untrained, and
awkward, but it is complete. The attaining of this point is to be
attributed to the defining genius, the political wisdom, and the honesty
of Edward I., building on the immemorial foundation of national custom;
fitting together all that Henry I. had planned, Henry II. organized, and
the heroes of the thirteenth century had inspired with fresh life and
energy'--(pp. 50, 51).
The value of the volume is considerably enhanced by a glossary that
might be extended with great advantage, and especially so if made to
include the French and Anglo-Saxon words, as well as the Latin ones,
which are employed in the body of the work. It would also be well if in
some cases the definitions were to be accompanied by references and
quotations after the manner of Ducange. The learned Professor would,
moreover, render good service to students and teachers alike, if he were
to add such explanatory notes to some of his excerpts as he well knows
how to compile. The volume ought to be no stranger in any of our
colleges, and well deserves a place in the 'curricula' of our public
schools. It will not be without its interest and its value also to the
general reader.
_The War Correspondence of the 'Daily News.'_ 2 vols., Macmillan and Co.
_Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris._ Hurst and Blackett.
_Journal of the Siege of Paris._ By the Hon. CAPTAIN BINGHAM. Smith,
Elder, and Co.
_Letters on the War._ By T. MOMMSEN, D.F.
STRAUSS, F. MAX MÜLLER, and T. CARLYLE. Trübner and Co.
_The Great Duel._ By W. R. GREG. Trübner and Co.
When the history of the war of 1870 comes to be written, it will furnish
scope for genius the most various and the most profound. A greater
Jomini will be needed to elucidate the tactics that decided greater
battles than Borodino or Austerlitz; to unweave for us the intricate web
of the great strategist's plans; to solve for us the problem whether he
is a superstition and a fetish, reaping the glory sown by the
organization and _morale_ of his troops, or the silent centre from which
was directed the regulated play of such tremendous forces. But though
the time for the military critic or the philosophical historian has not
yet come, the events and scenes of the war, as they photographed
themselves in the eye of the spectator, are full of immediate interest,
and demand for their adequate description the highest order of
picturesque power. Probably no accounts of the recent campaign so amply
satisfied our modern thirst for the picturesque as the letters written
to the _Daily News_. The moving panorama of the battle-field, the
scientific deploying of vast masses, the heroism of attack or repulse,
were brought close to our eyes. The description of the battle of
Gravelotte reads like a page torn out of Tacitus, and for awful
vividness might stand by the side of Thucydides' narrative of the
plague. So swiftly have events passed out of chronicle into history,
that the accounts of the early battles of the war--Weissenburg, Wörth,
Forbach, will even now bear reperusal, and contain much that in our
hungry desire for the salient facts was omitted at the first reading.
Till a spectator of the entire course of the war shall fuse his
impressions of the moment with his mature reflections, and produce a
continuous living narrative of the whole, these letters will probably
remain the best compendium of the history of the last eight months. We
may add that the republication comprises many of the letters of the
veracious 'Besieged Resident.' They are at least amusing, and give the
proper seasoning of farce to the tragedy.
The 'Besieged Resident' remained in Paris during the siege 'to enjoy a
new sensation.' He had new sensations in abundance; and generously gave
the British public, through the medium of the _Daily News_, the benefit
of his experiences. They were sufficiently varied, for he went in search
of them--grotesque, for fidelity to fact is not his strong point--and
amusing, for he is the liveliest of _persifleurs_. The personal element
in these letters was unquestionably that which gave them their charm;
the siege as it affected the 'Besieged Resident,' rather than the
'Besieged Resident' reporting on the siege, seemed to be the subject of
them. How his clothes were held together by an infinity of pins, how his
boots had burst in half-a-dozen places, and how horse did not assimilate
with his inner man, were facts which made the Philistine's breakfast an
interesting meal during the siege. Now that the letters have been
published in a complete form, these important facts seem less
prominent, and we are able to recognize the real value of the narrative
as a history of opinion--journalistic, Bellevilleite, and _bourgeois_,
during the four months of the investment. The description is not
flattering. The 'Besieged' plays the part of valet to the Parisian
heroes, and sees very little of heroism but a great deal of braggadocio.
A somewhat cynical temper perhaps lends some exaggeration to mere
common-place folly; but it seems certain that the despicable traits and
unworthy actions of which the 'Besieged' is the chronicler will have to
be taken into account in any truthful narrative of the great siege. On
the whole, it does not seem likely that the 'Besieged' will be
superseded in his self-assumed function by any subsequent chronicler.
Captain Bingham is a more prosaic narrator than the 'Besieged Resident,'
but there was so much to be seen that he has many incidents to relate
without touching on ground already occupied. His book is a consecutive
narrative of facts, which are all the more trustworthy that they take no
colouring from the individuality of the writer.
The 'Letters on the War' are of no evanescent interest, but are a
permanent contribution to the literature of the subject. The writers of
them are the Titans of the Teutonic race, whose clear duty it is to
speak out, as the prophets of old spoke out, in a great crisis of
history. Those of Dr. Strauss and Mr. Carlyle are the most important
historically, as they are also the most interesting. Mr. Carlyle's
historic retrospect reaches back to Louis XI., and is meant to show what
a terribly bad neighbour France has been to Germany for the last 400
years. He describes the grand 'plunderings and incendiarisms of Europe'
by the French, and he believes that Germany would be a 'foolish nation
not to think of raising up a secure boundary fence against such a
neighbour.' And why should not Alsace and Lorraine be restored to their
original owners? The only titles of France to them are the 'cunning of
Richelieu and the grandiose long-sword of Louis XIV.' He has pity for
France but no sympathy; acknowledges her services to civilization and
the grandeur of her 'Insurrection against shams,' in 1789; but believes
that the German race is now to be protagonist in the 'immense
world-drama.' Dr. Strauss's argument is, like Mr. Carlyle's, historical,
but with diminished perspective, and from a different point of view. He
traces the history of the movement towards national unity, travailing
towards birth through the obstructions of the reactionary despotisms,
planted by the diplomacy of Vienna, the abortive revolution of 1848, and
the apathy or despair of all but the enthusiasts. He accepts the creed
of Bismark; unity could only be obtained through force, as Hegel saw
seventy years ago.
In Mr. Greg's pamphlet and letters we admire the dexterity of the
practised swordsman, whose convictions are chiefly a matter of logic.
_Her Majesty's Tower._ By WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON. Vols. III. and IV.
Hurst and Blackett.
We might as well surrender at discretion to Mr. Dixon. He is as
confirmed in his ways as we in our critical canons. What the late
lamented George Robins was among auctioneers--what M. Jullien was among
musicians--what Dumas _père_ was among novelists--what the 'besieged
resident' is among newspaper correspondents--Mr. Dixon is among
historians; _what_ it is not easy to say. He alike provokes and
interests us. Our taste is offended; our critical conscience protests.
Murdered Clio, like Banquo's ghost, sits in Mr. Dixon's place and
'shakes his gory locks.' The meretricious style--the superb
magniloquence--the broad statements--the highly coloured pictures--the
irrepressible affinities for what is coarse, make us fume with
impatience and exclaim with anger: but we must read on; in spite of
ourselves we are interested, although with the uneasy pleasure of a sin.
We must, however, be just. Whether it be that our taste has adapted
itself, or that Mr. Dixon has improved, we are bound to say that in
reading these volumes our pleasure has been less alloyed, and has
secured a larger measure of our good conscience than in reading any of
his previous works. Some of his descriptions are well toned in their
brilliancy, there are fewer catapult sentences, good taste is less
frequently violated, extravagances of assertion are less daring, and
altogether he inspires greater historic confidence, and excites more
literary pleasure. Happily, however, we are released from all reasonable
obligation to apply historic tests. Mr. Dixon tells us that he has not
'cared to fret the reader by a dozen references in every page to
pipe-rolls, doquets, warrant-books, and council registers.' Such things,
we admit, are encumbering; they are vulgar, moreover, and altogether
unworthy the dignity of history, and are only temptations to irreverent
readers. It is pleasant to read a well-printed page, undisfigured by a
single reference, to be unable to distinguish too nicely between a
'doquet' and 'the caricatures' which Miss Burdett Coutts has lent him.
We read 'Her Majesty's Tower' as we read 'Kenilworth' or 'Richard III.'
If it be neither history nor fiction, it is something better than
either, and it is well by the absence of all references to be released
from the responsibility of determining which. Mr. Dixon certainly does
possess considerable narrative and descriptive ability. His literary art
is great. He cannot be dull. Whether he also possesses patient power of
historical research, and a judicial faculty of exact presentation, we
have no means of judging; but it is conceivable that with these,
combined with adequate scholarship, he might have trodden not unworthily
in the footsteps of Macaulay. We regret that he has chosen to write
after the fashion of the _Daily Telegraph_--to lay himself out for
sensations--the result of which is a series of volumes which might have
been brilliant history, but which are only sensational articles.
In the range of these volumes Mr. Dixon is essentially a free lance. The
first of the two is almost entirely occupied with George Villiers, Duke
of Buckingham, the infamous favourite of our British Solomon, and with
the base intrigues and dirty scandals of his court,--why it is
impossible to say, inasmuch as, except that some of his victims were
imprisoned in it, Villiers had no more to do with her Majesty's Tower
than Macedon had with Monmouth, nor so much, for Villiers does not begin
with a T. It is, in fact, a romance of Whitehall, of which Villiers is
the hero. And it is by no means a clean one; that under any
circumstances it could hardly be, but, as Mr. Dixon tells it, it is like
a bad dream. Throughout we feel the evil suggestion. Mr. Dixon seems to
delight in keeping us on the verge of nastiness, and to have peculiar
unction in reiterating such offensive epithets as the one he applies to
Dean Williams. We think that the dirty intrigues and unsavoury stories
with which the author of 'Spiritual Wives' has filled this section of
his work might, without much detriment to our knowledge of either
history or social manners, have been left in the obscure records from
which they have been culled. The career of Villiers, the son of a poor
knight, who began life as an amateur comedian, and in that character
pleased the pedantic voluptuary James, and was rapidly elevated through
a succession of offices and dignities until, when he fell beneath
Felton's knife, he was Duke of Buckingham and the most potent courtier
in England, is an inseparable part of the history of England; and the
shameless corruption and profligacy of James's court, of women like the
'parent,' as Mr. Dixon chooses to label the mother of Villiers, and
indeed of almost every circle of fashionable life, are as vitally
connected with the convulsions that followed, as the Courts of Louis
XIV. and XV. are with the French Revolution. But what connection there
is between the details of Buckingham's rascality and of his mad escapade
into Spain with Prince Charles, and the Tower of London, passes our
comprehension. The only pretence of a connection is, that on the safe
arrival at home of Buckingham and the Prince certain prisoners in the
Tower were liberated. Williams, who was first a Welsh curate, and then,
as the reward of being a hateful pander, was exalted to be first Dean of
Westminster, and ultimately Archbishop of York, is a despicable
character, and history will not qualify Mr. Dixon's portrait of him.
'Little Laud' was made use of by 'the parent' as his successful rival.
He was destined to play a part in the tragedy which followed that he
little dreamed of.
In Eliot, Mr. Dixon has a genuine hero of the Tower. His account of him
is almost unexceptionable, only, one remembers that here he had the
advantage of the previous labours of Mr. Forster. Eliot, for his
fearless and incorruptible patriotism, endured a long imprisonment in
the Tower. He died in it--one of its noble army of martyrs. For seven
years after his death, as is well known, no Parliament was called in
England. Mr. Dixon in trying to be magniloquent is almost profane when
he tells us that of this period 'Wentworth was the State, Laud was the
Church, and Charles was God.'
The fourth volume is much more relevant to Mr. Dixon's theme. We could
have spared the catalogue of names with which, after the manner of
Homer's list of ships, it opens, and which is an amusing instance of the
sonorous effects which Mr. Dixon delights to produce; but the volume is,
on the whole, satisfactory. The instances are well selected. The
dramatic skill with which his heroes are presented is great. The
interest is legitimately sustained, and we are really gratified to be
able to speak highly of the whole. We cannot follow him in detail. Our
sympathies are most interested in the visionary politico-philosopher
James Harrington, the author of 'Oceana,' the sorrowful victim of
idiotic fears, whose political prevision, Mr. Forster's Ballot Bill,
after two centuries, is just about to realize. Mr. Dixon rapidly
sketches, as heroes of the Tower, the second Buckingham--the Duke of
Richmond, who was guilty of falling in love and eloping with the king's
mistress--the Earl of Castlemaine, who connived at the unfaithfulness of
his wife, and died a monk--the two Penns--the romantic story of Colonel
Blood--the mysterious tragedy of the Earl of Essex--the martyrdom of
Lord Russell, and of Algernon Sydney--the execution of the Duke of
Monmouth--the lurid tragedy of Judge Jeffreys--the death of Laud--the
fate of the Scottish Jacobites--the romantic escape of Lord
Nithsdale--the imprisonment of Sir Francis Burdett--and the finis to the
prison history of the Tower in the anti-climax of the Cato street
conspirators.
We wish Mr. Dixon had treated his really great epical subject with more
dignity and with better taste. His powers of picturesque narration and
of vivid portraiture are great: is it too late to ask him to employ them
upon better themes, and to subdue them to great purposes?
_Annals of Oxford._ By J. C. JEAFFERSON. 2 vols. Hurst and Blackett.
There is, perhaps, no subject on which a book of pleasanter and more
instructive gossip could be compiled than the English universities.
Their origin and early constitution are excessively vague and uncertain,
and are therefore a source of perpetual interest to the antiquary. It is
known that they came into existence as part of that intellectual revival
which is coupled with such names as Anselm and Abelard, and that the
first notices of their activity represent them as vigorous institutions.
As soon as the colleges, which are special characteristics of English
academical history, are founded, information as to the domestic life of
these ancient corporations begins, and is continued uninterruptedly to
our own time. The materials for the annals of Oxford and Cambridge are
copious, and such annals, were the facts carefully selected and well
arranged, would be an exceedingly valuable addition to the social
history of this country. Few people, for example, are aware of the very
important part which Oxford played in the incipient reformation of
Wyckliffe in the fourteenth, and in the revival of tithes under Erasmus,
More, and Colet at the conclusion of the fifteenth, centuries; or of
the refuge which both Universities, but especially Cambridge, afforded
to the leaders of Puritanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Nor are there many persons who are alive to the fact that the
legislation of the Restoration, which tied both these great institutions
down to a political system, under which the Established Church was made
the slave of the State and the gaoler of the mind, degraded and
demoralized both Oxford and Cambridge.
Mr. C. Jeafferson has some pretensions to the reputation of a good
gossip. He has compiled certain amusing books about the professions of
law, physic, and divinity. In an evil hour he was tempted to risk this
reputation, and to write a book about Oxford. He has succeeded in
producing one of the worst specimens of book-making which has ever been
put before the public. To call these two volumes the 'Annals of Oxford'
is a gross abuse of words, for they are not annals in any sense
whatever. A few facts are culled from very familiar authors, such as
Anthony Wood and Gutch, and are diluted with a prodigality of verbiage
to which no experience of ours can find a parallel. The most important
parts of academical history are omitted, as for example the contest
between the University and the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which Oxford
supported Wyckliffe against prelate and pope, and succumbed only when
she was threatened with the loss of her franchises. The reader is
treated to an account of the origin of the University, for which there
is neither authority nor probability, for throughout the two volumes the
author is utterly without any information of what the University has
been or is, notwithstanding his boast that he 'knows nearly everything
about Oxford in the dark ages.'
But the most serious offence which the book commits is not its omission
of important facts, or its intolerable dilution of unimportant ones, or
its misapprehension of the whole subject, but its incessant vulgarity.
There is hardly a page in the two volumes where we do not find examples
of that slangy familiarity of expression which passes with some people
for wit or humour, and which in pretending to avoid dulness is the
dullest of all sins against good taste. Mr. C. Jeafferson's contribution
to the history of Oxford is wholly without value, and for the sake of
the writer's reputation as a collector of gossip and anecdote, the
kindest wish which a reviewer can make him is that the 'Annals of
Oxford' may be speedily forgotten.
_The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Civil Engineer._ By ISAMBARD
BRUNEL, B.C.L. Longmans. 1870. pp. 568.
Very few men in the history of the world have at the same time said so
little and done so much as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was eminently the
worker as distinguished from the talker. Not that he had, as was the
case with the illustrious Hunter, a difficulty as to expressing his
thoughts in appropriate language. His mode of expression, on the rare
occasions when he did speak, was pointed and happy. His reports and
professional correspondence were models of clear perspicuous terseness.
But he felt that his works were the true witnesses as to his character;
and to their silent and enduring testimony he was content to commit his
fame. Though he was made as often as any public man of his day the
object of frequent and unsparing attack, he rarely offered any verbal
reply, restrained by that proper pride in his own profession which
forbade him to appear before the irresponsible and uneducated tribunal
of the political press.
What those works were on which rests a reputation that will increase
while the fame of many others fades and disappears, his son, in a modest
volume, brings briefly to the notice of the public. There is evidence
that Mr. Isambard Brunel has been a pupil in his father's school. He has
confined his work within limits only too narrow for the actual magnitude
of the subject. Very often, by the simple form of abstracted chronicle
which he uses, as in describing the launch of the _Great Eastern_, he
does more to silence slander and to terminate controversy, than could
have been effected by the most eloquent advocacy. Still, we could wish
he had allowed his pen fuller scope. We should like to have heard more
of the inner life of so remarkable a man, to have had the taste
gratified by illustrations of his refined and graceful fancy, and to
have had the magnitude of his works brought into fuller relief by a more
minute description of his unsleeping toil, his unflagging and audacious
originality, and his conscientious effort to bring all his designs and
every detail of their execution to the sternest test.
It is easy for those who have a mere newspaper acquaintance with Mr.
Brunel to sneer at the education attained by the engineer at the expense
of his shareholders. At the commencement of the railway system in this
country something of the kind was inevitable in the case of every
leading engineer. The great features on which the success of the railway
system mainly hinged were not arrived at by scientific deduction. The
speed which George Stephenson estimated at sixteen miles an hour--viz.,
the velocity attained by some of the most rapid coaches of the
period--was raised to from twenty to thirty miles an hour, in the first
instance, by Captain Ericsson (the inventor of the Monitor), in
conjunction with the late Mr. John Braithwaite. During the experimental
trials on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the Novelty, the engine
built by these engineers, passed by the Rocket, that of the Messrs.
Stephenson, like a shot. The ill-constructed four-wheel engines of Mr.
Bary, with which the London and Birmingham line was opened, were
constructed for a moderate rate of speed. From those which, of his own
design, Mr. Brunel put on the Great Western Railway, he obtained a speed
equal to that of the flight of the swallow--from sixty to seventy miles
an hour. A level portion of line between London and Slough was daily
traversed by the express trains at this high speed.
While the forethought of Mr. Brunel--which added fifty per cent. to the
accommodation afforded by his lines of railway for the future traffic of
the country--doubled the speed of his own trains, it further compelled
the narrow-gauge lines, by the use of the long six-wheeled engines,
materially to increase theirs. The sagacious genius of the engineer was
evinced yet more splendidly in the services he rendered to navigation.
Of oceanic steam traffic Mr. Brunel may justly be called the father. In
July, 1837, the _Great Western_ steamship was launched at Bristol, and
in April of the following year she arrived at New York, after a journey
of nine days, with a fourth of her coal unconsumed. The _Sirius_ was
built by the St. George's Steam Packet Company expressly to anticipate
the _Great Western_, so that by sea as well as by land Mr. Brunel
effected almost as much by the emulation he awoke as by his own energy
and toil. The _Sirius_ arrived at New York a few hours only before the
_Great Western_, having consumed every combustible on board, down to a
child's doll! The measured tonnage of the _Great Western_ was 1,340
tons; that of the _Great Britain_, launched at Bristol in July, 1843,
was 3,443 tons; that of the _Great Eastern_, launched in the Thames on
31st January, 1858, was 13,343 tons. It was thus that the cautious
shipwright felt his way before developing the full magnitude of his
conceptions.
For the account of his further works--his docks and harbours, his
bridges and viaducts, his investigation of projectiles and of screw
propulsion, his admirable military hospital for the Crimean expedition,
his general professional practice--we must refer our readers to the
volume now before us. All those who regard the civil engineer as a sort
of typical or central workman, and who therefore are prepared to measure
our future progress in applied science and industrial art by the scale
afforded by the condition of this profession in England, will do well to
read with care this very interesting book.
_Memoir of George Edward Lynch Cotton, D.D., Bishop of Calcutta; with
Selections from his Journals and Correspondence._ Edited by Mrs. COTTON.
Longmans, Green, and Co. 1871.
In this volume Mrs. Cotton has given to the world a memorial of the late
Bishop of Calcutta, which by those who personally knew him, and also
knew English life in India, will be read with peculiar interest. The
scattered nature of their dioceses, the varieties of claims which they
have to meet, the consecration of churches, and the confirmation of
candidates, compel the dignitaries of the English Church in India to
travel frequently and far; and, as metropolitans over the entire empire,
the Bishops of Calcutta journey more frequently and to greater distances
than their colleagues. A large portion of this memoir is devoted to the
details of such journeys; and the descriptions of places, persons, and
incidents, coming fresh from the ripe, scholarly, and cheerful mind of
one who saw Indian scenes and manners for the first time, give to it a
peculiar charm. The extracts from the Bishop's journals and letters are
numerous, perhaps too numerous and extended; and the connecting links,
now detailing important facts, and at another time discussing the
bearings of some great question, are written with clearness and power.
The vein of humour which ran through Bishop Cotton's mind enabled him to
discern the lively and especially the burlesque aspect of the scenes
through which he passed, whether in school and college days, or amid the
serious labours which closed his life. At Rugby he named the fat denizen
of his sty Vitellius; at Cambridge he would class his personal friends
in an imaginary _tripos_, and award them medals and honours which
expressed his estimate of their worth; and his letters to his children
and old friends are full of the amusing side of native life.
With many things to interest him, the reader cannot but be disappointed
at the book. It is almost entirely confined to the few years of Bishop
Cotton's episcopate. At page 68 he has already left England for his
Eastern diocese at the age of forty-nine; and the story of the next
eight years occupies five hundred pages. All we can learn of the mental
and moral growth of his English life, of his distinguished career as an
educator, and of the remarkable position which he early attained among
the foremost clergy of the English Church, is contained in the first
three chapters of the memoir by Dean Stanley, with the beautiful notices
of his work and influence by Professor Shairp and the late Professor
Conington. Yet his early career deserves to be described as fully as
that of Dr. Arnold, who loved him so well, whom he so greatly resembled,
and to whose position as an educator he practically succeeded. These
early years made him what he was--a careful scholar, a man of active,
earnest piety, an intense lover of truth, a man of large mind and broad
sympathies.
We took occasion, soon after the bishop's death in October, 1866, to
express in these pages our high estimate of his worth and usefulness,
and his views on the important questions with which in his brief
episcopate he had to deal are fully set forth in Mrs. Cotton's
narrative. His long but most interesting travels; his concern for the
isolated English communities in India; his care for the spiritual
interests of the English soldiery; his opening the consecrated Episcopal
Churches to the use of the Presbyterian regiments; his charges to the
clergy; his deep interest in the Episcopal missions, in the raising up
of a native ministry, and in measures for the relief of native converts,
such as their _Re-marriage Act_; his efforts to establish schools for
East Indian children, are fully and carefully discussed. But while
illustrating in many ways Bishop Cotton's large-hearted sympathies and
the broad views which he took of men and things, the memoir fails to
show how in religious matters he looked with deep interest on other
Christian communities than his own, was prepared to do them full
justice, and held the most kindly and unpatronizing intercourse with
prominent members among them. A man of deep, sterling piety, an
evangelical preacher, a faithful minister and bishop of his Church, a
lover of good men, he well deserves the high position now accorded to
his name by the members of the Church of England; and long will he be
remembered with esteem and regard by men of many communions who outside
her own pale are striving to evangelize India.
_Some Memorials of Renn Dickson Hampden, Bishop of Hereford._ Edited by
his daughter, HENRIETTA HAMPDEN. Longmans, Green, and Co.
Time brings its revenges, but not always repentance or wisdom. The
Dissenters are to be admitted to the University, and the intelligence
and good sense of the country--the dogmatic intolerance of such men as
made Dr. Hampden a martyr alone excepted--heartily approve. He is
justified as a man more foresighted and just than many of his
contemporaries, and his persecutors are relegated to that limbo of
conscientious intolerance into which all claimants of arrogant
prerogative and all obstinate conservatives are cast. Dante should have
devised a retribution for non-jurors, or Vathek should have represented
them as melancholy ghosts with their hands upon their hearts and ceasing
not to sigh out their _non possumus_. Opponents of every liberal advance
in Church and State rudely swept into eddies by the stream of time,
their characters are most heterogeneous and their labour very great. The
forty bullet-headed Protectionists of the Free-trade reform, the
Bourbons who 'forgot nothing and learned nothing,' the bereaved patrons
of rotten boroughs--to say nothing of Laud and his school of divine
right, of the good old times of the Star Chamber, of the Five-mile Act,
of the Test and Corporation Acts, of Roman Catholic disabilities, of
Church-rates, and the Irish establishment--must surely bemoan themselves
very bitterly either because they maintained right in vain, or because
they opposed it in vain. And yet inherent Toryism will not learn wisdom.
The opponents of the Test Repeal Act are, in the present Parliament,
repeating as blindly and as fatuously the follies of their predecessors.
Miss Hampden tells the story of her father's noble testimony, for really
while his actual life was much more than this, there is little more
about it to tell. Learned, pious, candid, orthodox, conservative,
reverently, and, as we should now say, almost timidly jealous for
revealed truth, anything but a man of advanced opinions generally,
Bishop Hampden was the object of a virulent and most unscrupulous
persecution, such as must ever be the dark reproach of any Church or
party whose polemical passions can make them capable of it. His sin was
that he was strongly opposed to the Tractarian movement. He was too
honest and honourable to be moved by this hostility from his position,
although his scholarly and benevolent and sensitive life was embittered
by it. He lived to see himself vindicated, and now the public opinion
of England is about to endorse the clear-sightedness, candour, and
justice of his advocacy. Of his great theological learning and catholic
heartedness, there is no need to speak. The memoir, although not very
skilfully put together, is an interesting and touching memoir of a very
noble man.
_The Life and Times of Lord Brougham._ (Written by himself.) Edinburgh:
W. Blackwood and Sons.
Though the space of time covered by this first volume of Lord Brougham's
Memoirs was one of the most interesting in his own life, and one of the
stormiest in European history, the narrative is languid, and contains no
facts that are at once new and important. Indeed, his Lordship had been
already forestalled by notable contemporaries, who had been seized more
or less strongly with the autobiographical passion, and also by the fact
that the earlier portion of his life had long passed into the region of
history. What novelty the volume possesses it derives chiefly from musty
journals of travel and political correspondence of evanescent interest.
To be admitted to the spectacle of Opposition wire-pulling
three-quarters of a century ago, and to be favoured with the rapid
observations on transitory things of a hasty traveller, are benefits
that were perhaps overrated by Lord Brougham. Had he been a
philosophical observer, or possessed the power of picturesque
description, he might have left behind him an enduring record of great
and historical events, _quorum pars magna fuit_, which he had the double
advantage of seeing, as it were, in the making, and also after they were
reduced to their natural proportions by the perspective of many added
years. That, however, we have no right to expect from Lord Brougham. As
it is, there are some minute personal touches in the narrative which are
at least curious. He attributes his enormous energy and success to the
Celtic blood in his veins; very probably it accounts for his
instability. He gives a shocking account of his grandfather's funeral,
as an instance of the barbarous manners of the time, though, unhappily,
it is far from having died out. He redescribes the origin of the
_Edinburgh Review_, declaring that Sydney Smith's account of it is
entirely imaginary, although he substantially confirms it; and he gives
as his own, a satirical tale, which, it has been pointed out, is
translated from the 'Candide' of Voltaire. We shall have more to say
about both the autobiography and the man when the publication is
complete.
_The Life and Travels of George Whitefield, M.A._ By JAMES PATERSON
GLEDSTONE. Longmans and Co.
The character and power of Whitefield must ever be a study of interest
to persons who either as religious men or as historical students attach
importance to the evangelical revival of the last century; and in
proportion as it recedes into the past, as contemporary passions and
their inspirations die out, and especially as the arrogant assumptions
of a dominant Church are discredited, the study will have increased
interest and recognised importance.
Several lives of Whitefield have been attempted, some of which we would
rather not characterize. Mr. J. P. Gledstone is generously reticent
concerning them. He makes no allusion to the labours of his
predecessors, but simply tells his story with all the lights that are
available. Nothing in Whitefield's character or history or work turns
upon the discoveries of the antiquarian. The broad facts are adequately
known, and the work of the biographer is to recite and interpret them.
Mr. J. P. Gledstone has produced what, we think, will prove the standard
life of Whitefield. His sympathies are catholic, and he does justice to
the noble soul of Whitefield, who was the 'brother of all who in every
place, and under every denomination, call upon the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ. I have striven to put the man rather than his creed upon
the pages of this book.' Whitefield was no theologian; he was simply a
great preacher. His Calvinism was passionate rather than dogged, and in
an inappreciable degree influenced his preaching. His great soul yearned
for the salvation of men, and the more arduous the service the more
attractive to him it was.
Into the merit of his great preaching power, however, we cannot now
enter, and yet both now and at all times it is a study of the most vital
moment to the Church. Mr. J. P. Gledstone's book throws upon it all the
light that circumstance and fact can furnish, and intelligently suggests
most of the deeper psychological and spiritual causes. We very cordially
commend this carefully-studied and admirably-written life of the
Chrysostom of England.
_Twenty-two Year's Missionary Experience in Travancore._ By Rev. JOHN
ABBS, of the London Missionary Society. John Snow and Co.
_The Land of Charity; a Descriptive Account of Travancore and its
People, with especial reference to Missionary Labour._ By the Rev.
SAMUEL MATEER, F.L.S., of the London Missionary Society. John Snow and
Co. 1871.
_The Pioneers; a Narrative of Facts connected with early Christian
Missions in Bengal._ By the Rev. GEORGE GOGERLY, late Missionary in
Calcutta. John Snow and Co. 1871.
Here are three more of the numerous and excellent works which in recent
years have sought to illustrate in full detail the course and the fruits
of missionary labour in India. They are valuable additions to the
missionary library, and each will occupy a position of its own. Instead
of dealing with the Indian empire at large, both Mr. Abbs and Mr. Mateer
restrict themselves to the single province of Travancore. The work of
Mr. Abbs recounts the missionary experience of twenty-two years, and is
characterized by sound sense, extreme modesty, and deep religious
feeling. Much valuable information is given on the relations between the
mission in Travancore and the native government, and some fresh light
is thrown on the whole question of caste as encountered by Christian
missionaries in Travancore. In the same region Mr. Mateer spent nine
years, and endeavours to render his little work a complete handbook of
all necessary information respecting that district and its people. This
information has been drawn in part from authoritative records, and in
part embodies the results of the writer's own observation and inquiry
during the period of his daily life within the province. The book is
written in a simple unpretending style, and will amply repay perusal.
Travancore, called by the Brahmins the Land of Charity, or Piety, is a
secluded province in South-western India, peculiarly devoted to
Hinduism. Though occupied to a very large extent by aboriginal tribes,
some of which must be of very ancient origin, many centuries ago it was
religiously conquered by some prominent members of the Brahminical
caste, and they have ever since retained the firmest hold upon its
rulers and its people. All the wealth and prosperity of this
well-watered and fertile corner of India have been poured into their
lap, and the lower castes and aboriginal races have been their devoted
serfs. Closely walled in by mountains and by the sea, it has had
comparatively little intercourse with its immediate neighbours, and
scarcely any with the more distant districts of South India. Its
reigning family has long been seated on the throne; and Mr. Mateer
describes the religious position occupied by its princes, and the
strange ceremonies which both establish their sanctity and secure to the
priests and Brahmins abundant rewards. Mr. Mateer also pictures the
numerous races and classes which make up its million and a half of
inhabitants, and explains the immoral causes and condition of things
under which, in one caste especially, all property is made to descend to
nephews and not to sons.
While describing fully the physical features and productions of the
province, he dwells especially upon its religious aspects, and gives
much information concerning the life and customs of the Shānar and
Ilavar races, who in religion are devil-worshippers. It is amongst them
that Christianity has made special progress during the present century.
While the princes and nobles have been growing in knowledge and
experience of their English rulers, the lower tribes have in great
numbers accepted the Gospel. The story of the mission planted among them
is given at length, and illustrations are presented of the fruits which
they have produced in individual converts, in strong and liberal
churches, and an indigenous native ministry. The Gospel has also
leavened the population generally, and introduced many remarkable
innovations among the hard and cruel customs of former days. The
Brahmins have fought hard for their supremacy, but it is steadily
passing away. 'Sir,' said a Sudra one day to a Brahmin, 'have you
directed your attention to a wonder of the present age? Listen: the
Brahmin has become a dealer in oil and fish, while the Shānar or
pariah goes about as a Brahmin or teacher of the country. The Brahmin
woman spends her day in cooking, eating, and sleeping; while the
Shānar or pariah women are found in the streets with their Scriptures
in their hands, pretending to teach their neighbours. Is not this a
wonder? Verily the world is turning upside down.'
Mr. Gogerly, the well-known missionary of the London Missionary Society,
has given a graphic and most pleasant account of the early leaders of
the missionary enterprise in Bengal and of their work. Mr. Grogerly
quitted the mission of which he was a member thirty years ago, and might
long ere this have presented to the world the striking facts with which
he became acquainted in the course of his Indian career. But he has
reserved the story till the present day, when some of those facts have
been gradually forgotten, and when the younger members of our missionary
societies hear only of the modern aspects of Christian work, and of the
larger fruit of conquered difficulties and converts gathered into the
Church of Christ.
Mr. Gogerly's notices of the pioneers in the Church--Baptist, Free
Church, and American Missions in North India--are brief, but some of
them convey original information drawn from his own experience. He
naturally gives fuller details of the mission to which he himself
belonged, and in which many remarkable events occurred worthy of a
permanent place in our missionary histories. Later residents in Bengal
will read with wonder of a state of things in regard to the manners of
the people, their views of idolatry, the honour rendered to devotees,
and the satisfaction felt with the ancestral religion, which has long
since yielded to the knowledge and light which for forty years have been
changing the Bengal race, and making them a new people. The numerous
anecdotes given by the writer illustrative of former days, of domestic
habits, of village education, of native amusements, and of ancient
customs, are extremely interesting. Some institutions referred to, like
suttee, have disappeared. In regard to others, such as female education,
the position of things has wholly changed.
Mr. Gogerly's book is well illustrated with numerous engravings, and we
heartily commend it to our readers.
_The Duke of Edinburgh in Ceylon. A Book of Elephant and Elk Sport._ By
JOHN CAPPER, _Times_ Correspondent, &c. Provost and Co.
It is Mr. Capper's great merit that as a court chronicler, who of
necessity must magnify the most ordinary incidents, and carefully
chronicle the smallest event in any way connected with the movements of
a Royal Prince, he never violates good taste. He is neither flippant nor
flunkeyish, but does his work in a simple, straightforward way. No one,
we presume, will read his official record of receptions, addresses,
dinners, and balls; but this can be skipped, and bits picked out
descriptive of Cingalese hunting experiences sufficiently novel and
dangerous to be gently exciting. The Prince seems to have borne himself
as a manly, unaffected English gentleman. The volume is a thin imperial
octavo, and is adorned with some six or eight very excellent
chromo-lithographs.
_A Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand; together with
some Account of the South Sea Islands._ Being Extracts from the Journals
and Letters of LIEUT. THE HON. HERBERT MEADE, R.N. Edited by his
Brother. John Murray.
Mr. Meade's untimely death, by a recent explosion at Portsmouth, invests
this volume with special interest. It does not, however, need any
adventitious attractions. It is fresh with information and bright with
genial feeling. It makes light of difficulties and hardships, and is
full of the enterprise and optimism of youth. Whether the author had any
thought of publishing his journals or not, they have the great charm of
simplicity and unaffectedness. The former part of the volume describes a
journey through the disaffected districts of New Zealand. He was
captured by the Kingites, and narrowly escaped with his life, and gives
an exciting account of the Aokatoa or preliminary religious rites, and
of the Rungana, or parley-parley to decide upon his fate; the
executioner with the tomahawk standing close by him during the debate.
He escaped at length only by the wind of his horse. He was the first
white man who had fallen into the hands of the enemy. The second, a
missionary, they hanged, and ate his eyes and brains.
POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND ART.
_The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex._ By _Charles
Darwin_, M.A., F.R.S. John Murray.
The pleasure of reading Mr. Darwin's long-promised volumes, which has
been keenly anticipated, is at length gratified. Both the subject and
the man exercise a strange fascination upon the public mind. As an
experienced naturalist, a speculative philosopher, and a keen logician,
Mr. Darwin would command the attention of men of science under any
circumstances, but he has the secret of personal power and popularity
quite apart from the accomplishments which allow him to be classed with
other naturalists and philosophers. It is not the lucid clearness of his
style, nor his power of collecting, selecting, and grouping facts, nor
the shrewdness and breadth of his generalizations, alone, which give his
readers their exquisite sense of delight as they follow him through his
descriptions, his arguments, and his speculations. Beyond all this, he
has that sensuous delight in the real, the beautiful, and the
truthful--that appreciation of the grandeur of universal law, visible in
the minutest details, and that union of the receptive and active
faculties which constitute the artist and the genius who owes more to
Nature than to culture. If an argument may be derived from what man is,
and from the mental excellence which he is capable of exhibiting, to
rebuff the theory that he is of so humble a parentage as Mr. Darwin
represents, the author himself would be a refutation of his own theory.
In contemplation of his own powers he might say with Hamlet, 'What a
piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In
form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an
angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the
paragon of animals! and yet, what to me is this quintessence of dust!'
The lineal descendant proximately of 'a hairy quadruped, furnished with
a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits and an
inhabitant of the old world; remotely, of an animal more like the larvæ
of existing ascidians (lining sacks), than any other known form!'
Mr. Darwin's volumes treat of two subjects of profound but not of equal
interest. The difference in the interest felt in _man's descent_ and in
_sexual selection_ is well shown in the numerous reviews and notices of
this work which have already appeared. More than two-thirds of the work
is devoted to sexual selection, and this subject is treated, not
exhaustively, it is true, for that is quite impossible in the present
state of our knowledge, but methodically and comprehensively. A vast
number of fresh facts are presented; a great array of old ones are
marshalled in due order; the phenomena are traced as they appear
throughout the whole animal kingdom, and historians and travellers are
adduced in evidence to elucidate problems physical and metaphysical. Yet
reviewers have not taken notice of this, which is really the most
valuable part of the work; guided by a popular instinct they revert to
the subject of man's descent. They do this although there is not nearly
so much freshness, either in the facts or arguments presented in this
portion of his work. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' is a dictum
which men who are no students will readily adopt, because the subject is
not far to seek. That man, the orang, and the gorilla, have a common
ancestor is so fascinating an idea that none can resist its weird
influence. The clergy repeat it from their pulpits in scornful
utterance, as though the simple statement carried its own refutation.
Transcendental philosophers like Vogt assume it as a demonstrated fact.
Wits joke about it. The ears of ladies blush, not at the praise of their
own loveliness, but because of the pointed and telltale evidence these
bear of their own origin. The fascination of this idea was evident from
the first appearance of 'The Origin of Species.' The public insisted on
seeing in it nothing but evidence that man had sprung from a lower form.
Yet in that work it was evident that Mr. Darwin purposely avoided the
discussion of this point. No one will be surprised to learn, from the
introduction of the present work, that during many years the author had
collected notes on the origin and descent of man without any intention
of publishing on the subject--but rather with the determination not to
publish--that he might not add to the prejudice against his views. Yet
the multitudes who talk about the book they have never read, as if they
had done so, have all along supposed and assumed that the one question
thus designedly avoided was the subject of the whole treatise. No doubt
most of the arguments in favour of the derivation and origin of species,
told with equal force as proofs of the like derivation and origin of
man, but there was yet room for a supplemental theory, founded on the
vast elevation of man's moral and mental capacity, which would make man
an exceptional species with an exceptional origin. That such a view was
possible, may be inferred from the concluding chapter in Mr. Wallace's
book on the same subject, in which a peculiar Providence is made to
preside over the evolution of man. There can, however, be no mistake now
about Mr. Darwin's view of the question. His assertions about the origin
of man from a lower form are not only confident, but he has become
dogmatic upon the subject. The attitude of dogmatism is new to him, and
we must say does not become him so well as the cautious candour of his
earlier work. Mr. Darwin writes:--'The main conclusion arrived at in
this work, and now held by many naturalists who are competent to form a
sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly-organized
form. The ground upon which this conclusion rests _will never be
shaken_.... It is incredible that all these facts should speak falsely.
He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of Nature
as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a
separate act of creation.'
In his speculations as to the genealogical descent of man and the way in
which it emerges from the ancestral tree of the animal creation, Mr.
Darwin is almost wholly guided by the rudimentary organs found in man.
Mr. Darwin is quite consistent in this method. No doubt rudimentary
organs which are functionless in our species and have dwindled almost to
nothing, but are developed and have a palpable use in other allied
forms, present the greatest difficulties to those who do not believe in
a derivative origin of species, and also afford the strongest support to
the _selection_ theory. After enumerating the aborted organs, the
transient and foetal structures, and the often-recurring abnormalities
found in man, which are some seventeen or eighteen in number, the author
works out his theory of origin almost strictly in accordance with the
plan of associating the ancestors of man proximately with those species
which possess the most of these analogous structures, and so on to the
larger divisions in which a fewer number of them have a wider
distribution. This plan is, no doubt, philosophical, but it leads the
author into some strange speculations. By similar reasoning it is
demonstrable that our ancestors were hermaphrodite, and thus long after
they had ceased to be so both sexes yielded milk to nourish their young,
and perhaps carried them in marsupial sacks.
A doctrine thus dogmatically stated, of course involves problems and
theories hard to solve and demonstrate, but this arises, in the opinion
of the author, from the fact that the solutions and demonstrations are
hard to find, and not from the doctrines which involve them being in
the least doubtful. The existence of the moral sense in man is one of
these problems, and one of the most interesting chapters in this portion
of the work is devoted to an explanation of the evolution of human
conscience. The moral sense is traced to those social instincts which
man has in common with all gregarious animals. The strengthening and
growth of the memory and judgment would enable man to compare his past
actions, and the mere abiding satisfaction of the process would create
that distinction between the higher and lower law or motive which is all
that modern moralists require. 'Ultimately a highly complex sentiment
having its first origin in the social instincts, largely guided by the
approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in
the latter times by deep religious feeling, confirmed by instruction and
habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense in conscience.'
The second portion of the work is a valuable contribution to science. It
is far more philosophical in its tone. It is a repertory of facts. The
theories to which these facts point are indeed discussed, but the method
is inductive, while the method of the first portion appears to us to be
deductive. Beauty as distinguished from use has always been a
stumbling-block to the disciples of the natural selection school. That
which, in any species, pleases our minds by immediate agency of the
senses, as distinguished from that which is of service to that species
in adapting it to external conditions, is quite unaccounted for by the
survival of the fittest, at least so far as wild and untamed species are
concerned. Some evolutionists would cut the knot by denying the evidence
of beauty apart from fitness. Suitability, symmetry, conspicuousness,
and an imposing appearance are, no doubt, desiderata which natural
selection may seize upon and secure, and these may incidentally and
necessarily involve that which is beautiful in our eyes. But after all
these have been eliminated or satisfied, there yet remains in a large
number of species an element of beauty the contemplation of which brings
pleasure to all human beings, whether educated or uneducated, refined or
unrefined. This is especially the case throughout those large,
numerously represented and dominant classes taken from two separate
sub-kingdoms and called insects and birds. These two classes occupy a
great deal of the attention of Mr. Darwin. If we assume any evolutionary
theory, and abjure the doctrine of final causes, all the varied beauty
of butterflies and humming-birds has but one probable explanation,
namely, that of sexual selection. To make even this explanation
possible, we must assume a keen, discriminating æsthetic faculty in
animals which is like in quality with our own, as that faculty is
possessed by the most refined of our species. Moreover, this faculty
must be intimately connected with the sexual appetency in each species.
Such a connection is, judging from analogy, not improbable. In forming
an opinion how far these views are correct, it is important to isolate
the operation of sexual selection from that of natural selection.
Nature has throughout almost the whole animal kingdom afforded to us
the means of isolation. For, as a general rule, the sexes in species are
not absolutely alike, and often there is great difference between them.
All sexual peculiarities therefore which cannot be explained on the
principle of division of labour, throw light upon the æsthetic faculty
of animals as a selective, and therefore by the theory of a creative
agency. Mr. Darwin has collected a vast mass of facts about sexual
peculiarities, which being in no way connected with the sexual function,
he calls _secondary sexual characters_. Of course, sexual secondary
characters so limited point to a difference in the modification of the
sexual desire by æsthetic appetite in the two sexes. Generally speaking,
the adorned sex is the male. Have, then, the females a greater
appreciation of beauty than their males? Mr. Darwin thinks the ardour of
the male destroys his discrimination. Some facts produced, however, seem
to run directly counter to this supposition. On all hands the peacock is
considered the most splendid of birds, and the difference between the
sexes in this species is carried to an extreme point. Yet, one of Mr.
Darwin's best authenticated facts is, that the pea-hen differs from most
birds in being the ardent wooer.
One of the happiest and most satisfactory episodes in the book is the
account of the genesis of the eye-spot in the plumage of birds, and
specially of that of the ball and socket ornament in the secondary
wing-feathers of the Argus pheasant. The treatment of this subject
reminds us, by its clearness and beauty, of the author's treatises on
coral islands and the fertilization of orchids. How simple a phenomenon
may disclose a world of interest and wonder when in the hands of a man
of genius! It seems to us, however, that that wonderfully faithful
representation of a round ball lying in a hollow socket, expressed on
the flat of the web of a feather, offers a striking example of the
inadequacy of either natural or sexual selections to explain such
phenomena. 'That these ornaments,' says Mr. Darwin, 'should have been
formed through the selection of many successive generations, not one of
which was originally intended to produce the ball and socket effect,
seems as incredible as that one of Raphael's Madonnas should have been
formed by the selection of chance daubs of paint made by a long
succession of artists, not one of whom intended to draw the human
figure.' Exactly so! We must attribute to the hen Argus pheasant the
æsthetic powers of a Raphael in order to account for the decorations of
her mate, or, more properly, we must assign to a succession of
multitudes of generations of birds a correctness of appreciation of the
draughtsman's art, such as is a rare excellence among men. This may be a
fact, but if so, it opens up a new realm to our imagination. It must be
admitted that the tendency of modern thought is to obliterate the fast
line drawn by old authors between reason and instinct, and to assign the
former less exclusively to man, and the latter less exclusively to
animals. This tendency and the incidental light thrown by these
considerations on these interesting questions are well exemplified in
Mr. Darwin's work.
A curious disagreement in opinion between Messrs. Darwin and Wallace is
brought out and treated of lengthily in the chapters on birds. Mr.
Wallace thinks that in the case of splendid cock-birds who have plain
hens, who sit on open nests, the tendency for both sexes to become
brilliant has been checked by natural selection. On the other hand, Mr.
Darwin thinks that secondary sexual splendour was from the first
developed only in the male; and in the converse case, where the female
is also gay, natural selection causes her to build a covered nest for
protection. We think Mr. Darwin has the best of the argument. The
question of whether the standard of beauty among men is uniform in its
essentials or not is ably discussed, but no conclusion is arrived at; so
contradictory is the evidence of travellers and observers.
We heartily endorse Mr. Darwin's dictum that false facts are highly
injurious to the progress of science; but false views, if supported by
some evidence, do little harm. We are therefore content to
'Let him, the wiser man, who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape.'
'But we are born to other things.'
_Thoughts on Health and some of its Conditions._ By JAMES HINTON. Smith,
Elder, and Co.
This volume contains by no means a dry discussion of the conditions of
health. It hardly professes to be methodical or exhaustive in its
treatment of the subject. It is rather the production of a man who is
full of original ideas such as lie around the subject of health and
life, and who has adopted this title in order to give them to the
public. The details of the subject have evidently no charms for the
author; nevertheless, those which are given or referred to show him to
be quite abreast of the foremost file of the army of science. He is
quite poetical in his similes, and is fascinated by sublime ideas, yet
his chapter on 'Nursing as a Profession' shows him to be a practical
reformer. The book will be read with interest by those whose mental bias
leads them in that direction, while it gives vivid conceptions of
abstruse ideas. The one fault of the book is, that the author allows his
imagination to build up speculations upon a basis of known facts, which
fresh facts yet unknown may very possibly show to be mere speculations.
Thus the speculations about the functions of nitrogen, carbon, and
phosphorus, when forming complex compounds in the organism derived and
built up upon our knowledge of their properties as elements, are
doubtless interesting, but they are not backed by chemical knowledge,
and are opposed to the analogies of that science. This fault, however,
is so allied to the virtues of freshness and force of thought which are
everywhere found in the volume, that it ought not to prejudice the
reader against the author, though he certainly ought to be on his guard
against the seduction of that author's enthusiasm.
_The American Colleges and the American Public._ By NOAH PORTER, D.D.,
Professor in Yale College. New Haven, Conn. 1870.
This volume would be invaluable to us if we had a system of high-school
and university education at all corresponding to that of the United
States. No one is more competent than Dr. Noah Porter to describe the
operation of the American system, to detect some of its weaknesses, to
contrast it with English and German tuition, and to point out where
America might learn something from England, and in what respect England
might be benefited by following transatlantic customs. Far away from the
circumstances and experimental innovations which have excited so much
general interest in America, we can hardly enter into any minute
criticism of the old customs or the recent changes. Some of the
discussions--such, for instance, as that on the relative advantage of
college lectures and text-book-recitations, on the system of private
tutoring, on the propriety or otherwise of very frequent examinations,
on the dormitory system, on the advantage of the resident and
non-resident systems, and on the extent to which laws and supervision on
the part of the college authorities should extend--will interest the
supporters and professors of English colleges for the ministry, though
many of the conditions under which we should have to apply them are so
profoundly different that not much light would be attained for our
guidance. The calm, candid, lucid manner in which our author has
investigated the whole subject, and held the balances in all these
discussions, is worthy of all respect. In advocating greater freedom
from clerical influence, and more breadth in the relations between the
authorities and the graduates in the government of the colleges, we
presume that he is treading on delicate ground. In our smaller
institutions we have long since adopted the principle he recommends. Our
national universities will become before long the property of the
nation, and not of a sect, and be governed in deference to law, by their
own _alumni_, without any privilege but that which is earned by
distinguished ability. This, however, is not the place to discuss a
question like this.
_The Ancient Geography of India; the Buddhist Period, including the
Campaigns of Alexander and the Travels of Hwen-Thsang._ By ALEXANDER
CUNNINGHAM, Major-General, Royal Engineers (Bengal, retired). With
thirteen Maps. Trübner and Co. 1871.
The author of 'The Bhilsa Topes' has once more brought his great
learning, and his rare advantages of travel and of residence to bear on
the elucidation of the Buddhist period of Indian history and thought. On
this occasion he has, however, shown his antiquarian, topographical,
and etymological skill in deciphering and harmonizing the geography of
the Greek historians and the Chinese pilgrims. Few things are more
important to the comprehension of any history--sacred, classic, modern,
or contemporary--than a clear exhibition of the physical features of the
country on which the destinies of generations have been determined, and
a sound identification of the sites of famous cities, fortresses,
temples, and battle-fields. When the history of great nations covers
thousands of years, the physical features may be recovered by personal
inspection of sites that are distinctly described by early writers; but
the confusing resemblance of neglected and buried cities to each other
has been the fruitful source of false identifications, and when once on
a wrong scent, the geography of large districts of country has often
been thrown into hopeless entanglement. The geography of India, with its
history, maybe conveniently divided into three periods. The Vedic or
Brahmanic period would cover the entire prehistoric section of the
history, and trace the extension of the Aryan race from their first
occupation of the Punjab to the rise of Buddhism. The Buddhist period
would extend from the era of Buddha--whensoever that may be determined,
say between the fourth and sixth century B.C.--to Mahmoud of Ghizni; and
the Mohammedan period will extend from the rise of the Mohammedan power
to the battle of Plassy. Major-General Cunningham has devoted a volume
of nearly six hundred pages to the investigation of the geography of
India during the Buddhist period, which may be said to cover from
fourteen to sixteen hundred years. He has personally travelled over the
entire country, and carefully scanned its features with a curious,
archæological eye, and has thus succeeded in fixing the line of
Alexander's campaigns, and in bringing into geographical completeness
and unity the itineraries and allusions of the Chinese pilgrims,
Fah-pian, Chung-yun, and Hwen-Thsang. Though the campaigns of Alexander
were confined to the valley of the Indus and its tributaries, yet the
information collected by his companions, and the records of subsequent
embassies between the Seleucidæ and the Maurya and other princes,
include abundant references to the whole valley of the Ganges. We think
we may confidently assert that no student of the works of Rémusat and
Lassen, Stanislas Julien, or Vivien de St. Martin, will now be content
without having General Cunningham's maps and expositions at his side. It
would be difficult to do justice to such a work in a brief notice;
still, some of the identifications are of general interest. The merest
tyro in Buddhist lore knows something of the legend of Kunâla, the
beautiful-eyed son of Asoka, the great Buddhist king, who was sent in
his youth and unsuspecting innocence to quell a revolt in the great city
of _Taxasila_, and who there suffered the loss of his lustrous eyes in
consequence of the malicious designs of his stepmother. Everyone has
heard that in the neighbourhood of this city, Buddha is fabled in a
previous state of existence to have made the sacrifice of his head in
alms, and to have offered himself in another existence to a dying
tigress, having first fed her with his blood that she might be strong
enough to devour him more effectually. The city was admired by Alexander
himself; it was described by Pliny and Arrian; it was visited by
Apollonius of Tyana, and referred to by his celebrated biographer,
Philostratus. It was visited with enthusiasm by Fah-Hian 400 A.D., and
by Hwen-Thsang in 630 and 643 A.D.; and a variety of particulars are
mentioned which have enabled our author by personal inspection to
identify the exact spot, to make out the ruins, the lines of walls and
roads, and the site of the stupa placed by the great King Asoka over the
scene of the act of self-sacrifice to which we have referred.
Our author identifies the celebrated city _Srâvasti_ with the ruined
city of _Sâhet-Mâhet_, where he discovered a colossal figure of Buddha,
with an inscription having on it the name of this city, immortalized by
Buddha's most successful preaching. He has shown that when Hwen-Thsang
visited Srâvasti it must have been in utter decay, and that he mistook
the ruins of the city for those of the palace; but Cunningham has
brought the divergent statements of the Chinese pilgrims as to the
distance of _Srâvasti_ from other points into sufficient accord to be
satisfactory, and he draws by a clever etymological manoeuvre the
modern name _Sâhet-Mâhet_ into harmony with the Pali form _Sâwatthi_ and
the Chinese name She-wei. We have, moreover, in the volume strong
reasons given for fixing the site of Kapilavastu, the birthplace of
Buddha, at _Nagar_, in the northern division of Oude; and the site of
_Nalanda_, the monster Buddhist monastery, at _Baragaon_ near Gaza; and
so with hundreds of other places which are interesting from their
mention in Buddhist legend or authentic Buddhist biography. We heartily
thank General Cunningham for his elaborate work.
_Walks in Rome._ Two vols. By AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE. Strahan and Co.
This is only a guide-book, but it is one of a very superior description.
As Rome is to all cities, so is this guide-book to all other
guide-books. Fully informed with the spirit of the past, and yet not
wanting in the facts of the present, it is at once an historical monitor
and a topographical companion. The poetry and sentiment and delicate
observation of various writers, bred of cultured gazing upon the ruins
which almost make twenty centuries synchronous, have been carefully
gathered together; but the requirements of the mere sightseer have not
been forgotten. The volumes are full of useful information. We should
think that only those to whom Rome is familiar with more than the
familiarity of a natal city could afford to dispense with them.
POETRY, FICTION, AND BELLES LETTRES.
_The Works of Alexander Pope._ New Edition, including several hundred
Unpublished Letters and other new Material, collected in part by the
late Right Honourable JOHN WILSON CROKER. With Introduction and Notes by
Rev. WHITWELL ELWIN. Vols. 1, 2, and 6. Murray. 1871.
Two things are evident on the most cursory inspection of Mr. Elwin's
work; first, that he has spared no pains in probing every corner of a
most complicated story; secondly, that he finds a pleasure in making the
case against Pope look as black as it possibly can be made. In a long
and minute investigation of the circumstances attending the publication
of the successive volumes of Pope's letters, he exposes the petty
trickery and vanity of the poet. We are ashamed of Pope as we read this
merciless exposure. But we are somewhat relieved when we recollect that
after all these frauds and concealments there was nothing to gain by it.
Like the magpie hiding a silver spoon, Pope took nothing by his trickery
but the pleasure of deceiving. He could not help doing as he did.
Whether from his Catholic education, or from whatever cause, he had
contracted a dishonest habit of mind, which came out in all his
dealings. But Mr. Elwin gets so heated with the chase after Pope's
stratagems, that he discovers them even where they do not exist. When he
sets up the theory that the 'Essay on Man' was a treatise of infidelity
palmed off on the public under the disguise of a vindication of
optimism, he overshoots the mark.
So far three volumes of the edition are before us--two of the poems, and
one of the correspondence. We hope in some early number to devote an
article to an examination of Mr. Elwin's editorial work.
_Napoleon Fallen._ A Lyrical Drama. By ROBERT BUCHANAN. Strahan and Co.
Mr. Buchanan is a brilliant _improvisatore_, and could doubtless produce
dramas and epics to order on any subject to which the revolutionary mind
is akin. We do not doubt the genuineness of his lyrical passion; it is
white-hot and screaming, but it seems as if it were easy to kindle, not
quite rational in its foundation, and certainly not classical in its
expression. As a rhymed pamphlet, special-pleading a cause, and echoing
the cries of the hour, 'Napoleon Fallen' is unquestionably powerful; as
a dramatic representation of events in the shape in which they will
descend to history, it is too violent to be true. It was a happy device
to incorporate the Athenian chorus with the modern drama; the expedient
provided expression for the eager feelings with which the world
witnessed the stupendous struggle. But to import into the statuesque
forms of poetry the frantic passion and inarticulate rage of the
vanquished, in their naked amorphous violence, removes the poem out of
the sphere of art. If the representation of a thing is meant to be
permanent, the thing itself must be not only real, but also permanent
in its nature. Lessing laid down this canon, and one would have thought
that it was now established. But if 'Napoleon Fallen' is not perfect as
a poem, there is very much fine poetry in it. The lyrical fire which an
age in travail with revolutions produces is perhaps not rare in our
days; Mr. Buchanan unquestionably possesses it. He also possesses that
belief and faith without which no man has a right to sing at all--belief
in the divine end of human life, and faith in the future. With poetic
indefiniteness it is rather an aspiration than an articulated creed, but
he is at least no emasculated Pagan. His dramatic power is less obvious,
and perhaps it is only the dramatism of the lyrist--the mere modulation
of passion into a different key.
_King Arthur._ By EDWARD BULWER (Lord Lytton.) Tucker.
Lord Lytton's variety and pertinacity of effort must command the
admiration of even those who do not deem him great. Amongst those
churlish critics we fear we must be ranked. He is not _quite_ a poet,
yet we cannot help sympathizing with his firm resolve to place himself
among poets if the thing could be done by endeavour. In that way it
cannot be done. Marsyas shall never equal Apollo. Lord Lytton's place
among novelists is not at this juncture our affair; his place among
versifiers is high, as 'St. Stephen's' shows; but we can give him no
place among poets. His 'King Arthur,' which has now been some years
before the public, is a complete proof of this. Even Mr. Tennyson
himself has not made quite the best of the son of Uther Pendragon. We
prefer the old version of 1460--
'What sawe thou there?' than sayd the Kynge,
'Telle me now, yiff thou can:
'Sertes Syr,' he sayd, 'No thynge,
'But watres depe and waves wanne,'
to the neoteric Sir Bedivere's 'long ripple washing in the reeds.' We
strongly object to the misconception of the wondrously beautiful story
of Vivian. We cannot comprehend why nobody dare tell us how Launcelot of
the Lake killed Agrawayne. If these old myths deserve poetic treatment,
treat them fairly; it is absurd to modify them to suit the indelicate
delicacy of a modern society whose most refined journals are fond of
essays upon questionable topics. This, however, is a slight digression:
let us return to Lord Lytton. He has managed to transform the Arthurean
romance into melodrama. Gawine and his raven remind one of a burlesque
by Burnand or Byron. Indeed, the poem shows poverty of invention, and a
complete want of mastery over rhythm and rhyme and style. Here is a
hexastichon:--
Bright as the moon, when all the pomp of cloud
Reflects its lustre in a rosy ring,
The worthy centre of a glittering crowd
Of youth and beauty, shone the British King:
Above that group, o'erarched from tree to tree,
Thick garlands hung their odorous canopy.
'Pomp of cloud'--'reflects its lustre'--'worthy centre'--'odorous
canopy'; these are just the phrases that nobody would write who took the
trouble to think. And why in the world should poor King Arthur be
compared to the moon? He has been much misrepresented by many poets; he
was a semi-barbarous Welshman, whom our Somersetshire men drove into the
sea down by Tintagel: but he has had a _sacer vates_, and we do not see
why he should be subjected to inferior treatment. Is there anything in
the contemporary Arthurean verse that approaches Sir Ector's lament over
Sir Launcelot of the Lake--Achilles of the Arthurean _Iliad_?... 'Ah Sir
Launcelot, thou wert head of all Christian Knights.... And thou wert the
courteousest knight that ever bore shield. And thou wert the truest
friend to thy lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman. And thou wert
the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And thou wert the goodliest
person that ever came among press of knights. And thou wert the meekest
man and the greatest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou wert
the truest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in rest.' So
says the old poet. Can Lord Lytton or Mr. Alfred Tennyson approach him?
Can Homer beat him? The illustrations of this edition are scarcely
worthy of the poem.
_The Iliad of Homer._ Translated by J. G. CORDERY. Rivingtons.
Englishing Homer has of late been a general occupation with men of
letters, and we should be the last to object to it. We delight in Homer.
We rather dislike the effeminate treatment which some of his myths have
met at the hands of one or two eminent modern poets. We hold that there
is more in the sonorous swing of those demiurgic dactyls than the
contemporary writers of blank verse can quite comprehend. Erratic enough
are we to hold that there was one Homer, not many--that no _purpurei
panni_ of Peisistratus were interwoven with his cloth of gold--that he
was an isolated leader of thought. Certain also are we that his
influence is in these days much needed, and that his Greek ideas are of
great service to modern Englishmen; his strength and simplicity are
things we possess and admire; many an Achilles has led the forlorn hope
for England, and many an Odysseus has been a F.R.G.S. There is nothing
more remarkable in Homer than what we shall venture to call his
_Englishness_. Hence, from one point of view the late Earl of Derby
translated him well; for the Earl was an Englishman every inch, and, as
we have heretofore said in these pages, the Hector of the Tory Troy. But
as the Earl was not a poet, he could not exactly render as he ought to
be rendered the supreme poet of the pagan past. Lord Derby saw in him
the part which is visible to the English legislator and landowner. There
is a good deal more than this in Homer scarcely comprehensible by the
race whose motto is _sans changer_. There are unfathomable depths of
poetic philosophy in those two oceans of thought which we call the
'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' The key-note is struck in Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο
βουλή: throughout Homer we find the will of the supreme
Divinity always manifested.
It is, we believe, this coincidence of English with Hellenic ideas which
causes so many men of different types to find pleasure in Homer. Think
of the chasm between Pope and the "sick vulture," or even between Lord
Derby and the poet Worsley. The theme is tempting, but space avails not;
we must say a word or two on Mr. Cordery's 'Iliad.' He seems, so far as
we have followed him, to know his Greek excellently well; but he
assuredly does not know the power and capacity of English blank verse.
The rhythmic weapon, the most difficult we know, is not within his power
to wield. Thus he commences the 'Iliad'--those lines which, as Lord
Macaulay would say, 'every schoolboy knows'--
'Sing, goddess, of Achilles, Peleus' son
The wrath that rose disastrous, and the cause
Of woes unnumbered to Achaia's host,' &c.
The first few lines suffice. Here is a writer who cannot wield the metre
he has chosen. This being so, we find it undesirable to enter farther
into any discussion of the merits of his version, and shall content
ourselves with giving conscientious praise to his loving and patient
attempt to do a great work which is beyond his height of attainment.
This is not contemptuous nor careless criticism. Not yet has Homer been
done into English. Will any future translator give us Homer's
unutterable music, Homer's unfathomable thought?
_Ierne._ A Tale. By W. STEUART TRENCH. 2 vols. Longmans, Green, and Co.
If Mr. Trench's 'Realities of Irish Life' was something more than a
history, 'Ierne' is something more than a romance. It is full of vivid
pictures of Irish life, and is inlaid with historical information,
political disquisitions, and didactic comment. We are not sure which
presents the truer portraiture, the history or the romance, probably the
latter. It appears, in spite of the extravagance and impossibility of
its incidents, to reproduce with the fidelity which long personal
familiarity enables, various aspects of Western Irish life, its fine
culture, enthusiastic genius, and heroic patriotism in the higher
classes; its wild passions, its half-savage instincts, and its no less
noble patriotism in the lower. The representation is not a very hopeful
one; at least, whatever hope there is in it must be found in the gross
inconsistencies of thought, and in the unaccountable impulses of feeling
which made Ireland such an enigma to Lord Killarney; the blind,
deep-rooted infatuation about the ownership of land, and the notion that
all improvements by Saxon possessors are inimical to its reversion, so
that the better the landlord, the worse the feeling of antagonism
excited, is profoundly perplexing. Mr. Trench has so thorough a
knowledge of Irish feeling that we must accept this representation as
true. Even the excellencies of a Saxon landlord, and his solicitude for
the improvement of his estate and for the comfort of his peasantry, are
specific reasons why he should be shot. Mr. Trench writes in full
sympathy with the people in their sense of wrong. Few nations have been
so oppressed and peeled, and no generous or even just Englishman will
deny that, however unreasonable and fanatical Irish treason is now, when
for nearly a century everything that could be done to redress the
tyranny of the past has been done, it has traditional justification
which almost exalts it to patriotism; and Mr. Trench feels the
difficulty of so adjusting his sympathy as that while he justifies the
national resentment of the past, he may condemn the continued treason of
the present. Of course he sees no possibility in the dreams of
repealers, and wishes every wise friend of Ireland would denounce repeal
as the worst thing that could befall her. He can only, with ourselves,
hope that the measures of redress of the last two Parliaments which
leave Ireland almost literally without a grievance, will gradually
discredit political agitation, and engender loyalty. He does, indeed,
half suggest that a royal residence in Ireland, occasional visits from
the Queen, or the Prince of Wales, would, as an appeal to Irish
sentiment, be more potent than even the disestablishment of the Irish
Church, or the enactment of the Land Bill. If so, it is a pity the
experiment is not tried. As a romance, Mr. Trench's book is scarcely
worthy of criticism. Ierne's personation of the ghost and her marvellous
movements and achievements generally are simply preposterous. We
tolerate the romance for the sake of the pictures of Irish life
interwoven with it. Inveterate novel-readers will get through this,
others will skip the tale, but even then the book will, by its
information concerning national feelings and prejudices, and its
delineation of various scenes of national life, faction fights, midnight
drills, meetings of conspirators, and wakes, and especially by its racy
delineation of national humour, and its careful description of noble
scenery, amply repay persual.
_Véra_. By the Author of 'The Hôtel au Petit St. Jean.' Smith, Elder,
and Co.
The Charm of 'Véra' is twofold; first, it introduces us to the interior
of Russian life, and excites our interest by the delineation of modes of
thought, feeling, and life, very different from our own. Next, it is
written with great literary skill; the author's first work, which
delineated Provençal life, will have prepared its readers for excellent
workmanship in this. It is a story of character rather than of incident.
Véra is a Russian Princess, affianced in marriage to Count Alexis
Yotoff, her cousin, but the contemplated marriage is one of convenience
rather than of affection, and when Alexis falls at Inkermann, he is wept
with tenderness but not with passion. Colonel St. John, the nephew and
heir of Lord Kendal, who lies wounded on the field of Inkermann, is
assailed by some Russian stragglers, Alexis interposes to save him, and
accidentally falls a victim to St. John's pistol, which he is in the act
of discharging. He receives from the dying Alexis some souvenirs which
he engages to convey to Véra and his family. His wounds affect his
memory, and years elapse without his being able to redeem his pledge,
and recall the names of either Alexis or his friends. In the meanwhile
he becomes acquainted with Véra, and, although twenty years her senior,
they are mutually in love. Their love, however, is sadly marred by cross
purposes. At length St. John discovers, under critical circumstances,
that Véra was the intended recipient of the souvenirs, and that his was
the hand that deprived her of her lover. For awhile the discovery is
fatal, but a fortunate railway accident affords an opportunity for
explanation, and all comes right at last. The artistic excellence of the
work is in its delineations, and the undertone of thoughtful sentiment,
if not philosophy, that runs through it. Its text is the inevitableness
of destiny; and the way in which the story illustrates this is as
original as it is clever. It is a very charming novel, one of the very
few which we wish longer.
_Episodes in an Obscure Life._ Three vols. Strahan and Co.
This is one of the few books that leave the critic no alternative but
simply to heap together words of eulogy. Its least and lowest merit is
its literary workmanship, and yet we scarcely know where we could look
for more vivid pictures of accurate observation, of chaste simplicity,
and unpretentious power. The large-hearted geniality, manly piety, and
unwearied benevolence of the anonymous writer inform his eye and guide
his hand, throwing gleams of radiance, aspects of humour, and visions of
hope over the sad conditions of squalid misery which he describes,
without a particle of Dickens's falsetto. He exhibits the noble
kindly-heartedness and heroic self-denial that are often to be found in
combination with rough exteriors and chronic misery. 'Little Creases,'
'Mr. Jones,' 'the Matron of the Refuge,' 'Emily, the crossing-sweeper,'
'Bessie,' 'Sam and his wife,' 'Peter and his wife,' 'Blind Stevens and
his wife,' and half a score others, are illustrations not only of the
kindly and often heroic human nature that there is among the poorest,
but of the benevolent patient optimism in the writer that sees and
exhibits it. It is long since 'Annals of the Poor' were recorded with so
much genial sympathy and unconscious art.
The conditions of life described in these sketches are a humiliation and
a sorrow. Never before have the underlying evils and miseries of our
gilded civilization been so vividly portrayed. Legislators and
philanthropists have a Herculean task before them in the amelioration of
the physical and moral evils of such districts as the East of
London--the overcrowding, the adulterated food, the festering disease,
the moral corruption, the extreme penury, the lawless vice, the wretched
ignorance, the impassable gulfs, not one but many, between the rich and
poor. East-end ministers of religion know them, ragged-school teachers
and City missionaries know them, few else have any conception of them.
Little do travellers who arrive at the terminus of the Great Eastern
Railway know that within a stone's throw of the platform scenes such as
are here described are any day to be witnessed. The good and the evil
both--the good in spite of evil that is simply appalling--conditions of
poverty, lawlessness, vice, and suffering are nowhere in the wide world
to be surpassed. Legislation may do something to remedy this state of
things; commercial prosperity may do something; but it is, we fear,
chiefly the result of an indolence and vice that neither can touch. In
every village there are drunken, idle vagabonds; in great cities this
element is fearfully multiplied and intensified, and it brings misery
upon hundreds who are not of it.
All honour, then, to brave, patient, Christ-like men like the author of
this work, who are content to live their obscure life, if they may but
do something to alleviate it. Theirs is the only influence that can
regenerate vice, or in any way effectually deal with it. We know
something of the district which the writer describes, and happily we can
testify to scores of young men and women of the upper classes who visit
it, and cheerfully give evenings and Sundays to teach ragged children,
instruct their mothers, and, so far as it is wise, afford them
substantial help. No one can doubt that a clergyman, gifted as is the
author of this work, has chosen his lot, abjured the ease and elegance
of refined life which might have been his, that after the example of his
Master he may seek and save the lost. How simply, sincerely, and wisely,
as well as with what unconscious self-sacrifice, he does it, this noble
book will show. With characteristic self-abnegation the author does not
give his name. Every reader will heartily say, 'God bless him;' and if
our recommendation could avail it should carry his book into every rich
man's house and every comfortable home in the land.
_Earl's Dene._ By R. E. FRANCILLON. In Three vols. Edinburgh: W.
Blackwood and Sons.
'Earl's Dene' has too obviously been written for the critics to satisfy
a critic. The course of the narrative is interrupted by appeals _ad
clerum_, which disturb the sense of illusion without convincing the
judgment. The tone of the book is apologetic and explanatory, as if the
author were under terror of the critic's lash, and were conscious that
the movement of the story would seem so capricious as to require
justification. This is a mistake in art, which seldom carries any
compensation with it. The ordinary novel-reader is the most unexacting
of human beings, and has unlimited capacity of digesting
improbabilities; while the cultivated and analytic reader will be too
conscious of the complexity of motives to be scared by superficial
inconsistencies in the delineation of character. Thackeray was guilty of
frequent 'asides,' but they were only outbreaks of cynicism or of
pathos; incessant eruptions of psychology are less pleasing, if not more
inartistic. But in all respects, this very defect included, 'Earl's
Dene' is far above the level of common-place fiction. Though not
strikingly original, it is evidently a transcription of life at first
hand, and as seen through the medium of a refined and delicate
intellect. The atmosphere of the book, though now and again disturbed
by storms, is pure rather than bracing, and is fragrant with the aroma
of refined reflection, which must be the outcome of long and intense
experience. Decidedly feminine, we should say; overflowing with
observations on the sex that look like self-revelations, and with
sketches of the male animal which are inexpressibly grotesque when they
are not weak. If anyone wants to see how Bohemia and its denizens
picture themselves in an alien mind, he should study the portrait of
Dick Barton, a cross between Caliban and Porson, an absurd and utterly
impossible monster. But the characters are for the most part carefully
drawn, by slight repeated touches, however, rather than by bold and
luminous strokes. The dialogue sparkles with French _esprit_. There is
obvious shrinking from common-place, as when the author refuses to
describe first love; and, lastly, the novel is a novel with a purpose.
It shows to men the ways of that great god 'Circumstance,' who seems a
very Moloch, and winds up the tragedy by a general holocaust of his
victims.
_My Little Lady._ Hurst and Blackett.
This charming novel, evidently by a female hand, is written with much
grace and variety. The idea on which it is based has the advantage of
perfect novelty. The 'little lady' is the child of an inveterate
aristocratic gambler called Linders, who lives at Spa and Baden and
other places of the same class, and who has a marvellous capacity for
'breaking the bank.' Whether he has a 'Martingale' we are not told, and
indeed the authoress occasionally shows that she is quite properly
unfamiliar with _rouge et noir_ and _roulette_. But the conception is
that this fellow, though on the whole a scoundrel, loves his little
daughter Madelon, and that she, following him everywhere, becomes
acquainted with the games he plays, and innocently regards gaming as
quite a proper mode of making money. The complications herefrom arising
are manifold, and are told felicitously: but the writer, who is probably
a beginner, is apt to spin out her description and narrative to a rather
wearisome length. Rapidity of narration is becoming one of the rarest
qualities of modern authorship. That authors are paid for quantity
instead of quality sufficiently accounts for this: and the great
novel-manufacturers of the day, who turn out a volume a month and find
readers for them, must, we suppose, be tolerated: but we cannot help
regretting this unsatisfactory prolixity when, as in the present case,
there is a pretty and piquant and original story to be told. However, it
will be largely read, since it is high above the average of tales of the
same order. Of the characters, the best drawn is the great gambler
himself; hardly a possible personage, we suspect, but if possible
curiously interesting. Madelon in her utter simplicity is very lovely;
and she is quite conceivable, since there is no reason why a young girl
should see any harm in gambling. Nine people out of ten would be puzzled
to say on the instant why gambling is wrong: and the state of society
shows that very 'honourable men' (as Mark Antony hath it) can see no
harm in the doings at Tattersall's and the Victoria Club. So that a
little girl whose father was an astute patrician gambler, should
innocently take to _rouge et noir_, is quite intelligible--and a very
pretty story is based upon it, with some strongly dramatic scenes
therein. By the way, the names of flowers should be properly spelt,
especially by lady writers: Westeria (vol. ii. p. 185) ought to be
Wistaria, as it was named after Caspar Wistar, professor of anatomy in
the University of Pennsylvania.
_Harold Erle._ By the Author of "The Story of a Life."
The author of this poem reveals his high and delicate culture, and not
unfrequently a true poetic grace. There are lines, passages, and entire
scenes, which suggest the blank verse of Wordsworth. We are not reminded
of the introspection and subjective might by which Wordsworth brings
under the microscope of his 'inward eye' the beauties of nature and the
mysteries of life, but of his bald simplicity, of his religious use of
common-place, as well as of his partial inability to appreciate the
difficulty which the great majority of the human race experience in
perceiving a poetic side of 'common things.' 'Harold Erle' is a
singularly painful theme, and one which will not readily lend itself to
the Muses. The dangers incident to the marriage of blood relations, and
the Nemesis which hereditary insanity imposes on some who enter into the
lists of love, are not refreshing matters for contemplation. Blighted
affections, the madhouse, and the grave, certainly provide material for
high imaginative treatment, but when these strong colours are used
chiefly with a view of entrapping us into a philosophic generalization
of a universal law of marriage, we are disposed to feel that poetry
itself has here degenerated into social philosophy. 'Harold Erle' is a
powerful story, but the moral and the motive of it seem insufficient,
and the _dénouement_ is decidedly prosaic. The _l'envoie_ of the poem
seems to be: 'Young people, do not marry your first cousins; should your
parents have been so foolish as to have done this, then, by all the nine
Muses, do not marry at all.'
The career of Harold Erle is well told. Certain scenes are portrayed
with pictorial power. There are tender touches of consummate grace, and
emotions, events, and sacrifices are narrated which show how fertile
this unwelcome theme has become in the hand of an accomplished writer.
_Martha._ By WILLIAM GILBERT, Author of 'Lucrezia Borgia,' &c. Hurst and
Blackett. 1871.
In the conduct of this story Mr. Gilbert has not stinted his readers in
the matter of time. We are furnished with the family history and
domestic details of four, if not five, successive generations. Near the
commencement of the story we are introduced to a wealthy young
spendthrift, who is startled by losses on the turf into propriety,
thrift, and marriage. The closing pages of the novel bring us
acquainted with the great-grandchildren of this worthy. An extraordinary
number of prosy and uninteresting characters--many of them mere
dummies--try the patience of the reader. With aggravating minuteness
circumstances which have no bearing on the story are laboriously
detailed. About a dozen different illnesses or accidents are portrayed
at such length as to suggest the notion that a hospital clerk had
nefariously introduced into the author's manuscript some pages from his
medical note-book. The oracular twaddle of the medical adviser who
figures throughout the story is redeemed from common-place only by the
presentation of a rather interesting psychological problem which, we
presume, may be stated thus: Is it possible on purely physical, or at
least subjective, grounds to account for the belief entertained by an
otherwise rational person that the phantoms of her departed relatives
continually visited her in the great crises of a chequered life? We
presume that Mr. Gilbert intends to suggest a strong affirmative. The
subject of these hallucinations, called Martha Thornburg, is the only
character of the story who possesses the minutest tittle of interest.
She is the impersonation of unselfish consecration of life to the good
of others, and on two separate occasions in her long life, at
considerable intervals from each other, she is represented as enduring
the very extremity of human suffering. She becomes a lightning-conductor
of all the accumulated misfortune with which the devil of the piece has
charged the thunder-cloud that spends its fury on this ill-fated family.
There are two villains, at least, among the _dramatis personæ_ so
utterly unredeemed by a single ray of goodness as to despoil them of all
human interest. The one apparently belongs to the genus rattlesnake, the
other to the genus hyæna. Bigamy, fraudulent bankruptcy, forgery,
destitution of natural affection, detestable cowardice, attempted
fratricide and murder, are a few of the peccadilloes of the more refined
devil, who at last dies in his bed; the other, we are thankful to say,
hangs himself. The vigorous, prosperous, generous brother of 'Martha,'
as well as many other characters, are very faintly sketched, and the
principal, if not the sole, interest of the story consists in the
misguided goodness of 'Martha,' who covers herself with the suspicion of
complicity with the miscreant who had been throughout the curse of her
family. However, the mystery is cumbrous in the extreme, and the
solution of it by no means artistic. We certainly cannot congratulate
Mr. Gilbert on a successful use of his undoubted powers; but we are glad
to know that, after all their vicissitudes, Martha Thornbury, her
brother, his nephew, and the wife and family of the latter are all doing
well. Their furniture is excellent, their wardrobe complete, their
bracelets, ornaments, and toys abundant; and we earnestly trust that
should any illness or accident befall them, Dr. Wilson will be at hand,
not only with skilful treatment, but with ample explanations of all the
pathological phenomena.
_Dorothy Fox._ By LOUISA PARR. Strahan and Co.
It is vain to pooh-pooh love stories, so long as the passion itself
rules the world so much as it does; the thing that provokes the protest
of sensible people is, that love stories are-often so ineffably foolish,
as indeed are people who are in love. A thoroughly good love story,
high-minded, true-hearted, and sensible, is about as good a service as a
novelist can render to her generation. To inculcate noble principles,
and inspire noble feelings in the pursuit of the passion upon which the
chief social happiness of the world depends, is a work worthy of the
highest genius, and demanding the gratitude of all who wish well to
mankind. 'Dorothy Fox' is a love story pure and simple. Dorothy is the
daughter of a Quaker of the strictest sort, a wealthy hosier, destined
to marry Josiah Crewdson, also a well-to-do tradesman; but, as even the
primmest and most dutiful Quakeresses will do, she takes it into her
pretty head or heart to fall in love with Captain Charles Verschoyle, a
poor cadet of a good family, whose mother, Lady Laura, is bent upon both
him and his sister making good matches. Charles reciprocates Dorothy's
love, and will not marry Miss Bingham's fifty thousand pounds. While
Audrey, the sister of Charles, instead of marrying as she ought old Mr.
Ford, the millionaire _parvenu_, perversely falls in love against her
own intention with Mr. Dynecourt, a poor barrister of ancient lineage.
How Lady Laura schemed, and old Mr. Fox was scandalized; how wise and
generous old Mr. Ford was, and how noble Josiah Crewdson--his
disagreeable sisters notwithstanding--how charming Patience Fox was, and
Grace, and John Hanbury, and how beautiful and refined Quaker-life may
be, and often is, the authoress has told very charmingly. The characters
of Charles and Audrey, with their glaze of worldly selfishness, which
melts away like hoar frost under the heat of pure love, leaving an
innate and uncorrupted nobleness, are very cleverly delineated; so is
Harry Egerton, the rough old squire, with his kind, manly heart.
The story is a very pleasant and a very wholesome one. We trust that
Miss Parr will again present to us pictures of Quaker interiors, with
which she is so well acquainted. In them her strength lies.
_On the Eve: A Tale by Ivan S. Tourguéneff._ Translated from the Russian
by C. E. TURNER, English Lecturer in the University of St. Petersburg.
Hodder and Stoughton.
Rather more than a couple of years ago (_British Quarterly_, Oct., 1869)
we directed the attention of English readers to the novels of
Tourguéneff, in an article in which a detailed account of 'On the Eve'
was given. We need not, therefore, do more than refer our readers to
what we then said about this very charming little story, which paints
Russian life from the interior with the hand not only of skill, but of
genius. Its social freedom surprises us, and its indications of easy
social vices startle us. Ellen, the heroine, is a very beautiful
creature. The translation reads smoothly and brightly. Mr. Turner seems
to have done his work well. We are glad to possess this work of a great
artist in an English dress.
_Marquis and Merchant._ By MORTIMER COLLINS. Three vols. Hurst and
Blackett.
Mr. Collins in this new novel has aimed to portray two of the great
social classes that constitute England, and the two that are, perhaps,
in more active rivalry, if not antagonism, than any other, and to show
that the prejudice is not chiefly with the higher. The Marquis of
Wraysbury, whose hereditary seat is at Ashbridge, is a favourable
representative of what we are proud to designate our noble aristocracy.
Wealthy, generous, liberal, frank, gentlemanly, he is the _beau ideal_
of his class. His son, Lord Waynflete, the hero of the story, is the
inheritor of his father's virtues, with a freedom from class
conventionalities which is his own, and which permits him, as quite a
thing of course, to marry a poor governess.
Mr. Mowbray, who buys an estate at Ashbridge and builds there a splendid
mansion overpowering in magnitude, luxury, and appendages of garden,
conservatory, &c., and which quite dwarfs the more modest belongings of
Ashbridge Manor, is a Manchester millionaire; also a favourable
representative of his class--keen, clever, generous, but with some
drawbacks of class prejudice and obstinacy, which Mr. Collins paints
with an evident gusto. He is the rival of the Marquis in spite of the
latter; and the story is made up not unpleasantly of the history of
their rivalries, with the issue thereof. Much of the subsidiary
delineation is very good. The interiors at Ashbridge Manor, at Mowbray
Mansion, at the Orphan Institute, at Mrs. Gutch's, and at delicious
Wyvern Grange, are cleverly sketched, in these well-selected contrasts.
The subordinate characters; that clever woman, Miss Pinnock, great in
Johnsonese; the Bohemian lawyer, Terrell; the learned, gentlemanly
recluse, Métivier, full of gipsy and all other lore; and a dozen others,
are also admirably delineated. The novel is deficient as a work of art,
but only a very clever and accomplished man could have written it. It is
somewhat Bohemian in itself, and has an unpleasant vinous
flavour--allusions, characterizations, or eulogies on wines occurring
perpetually, as if the chief good of man were to have a good wine-cellar
and to be a _connoisseur_ of good vintages. The book is, moreover, an
odd _mélange_ of all conceivable things; one chapter is devoted to a
criticism on Tennyson, another to a criticism on Dickens; verses
_apropos_ of everything and nothing abound. Mr. Collins has a marvellous
Ingoldsby facility for running off rhymes, and when prose fails him or
wearies him, he takes to verse. A diagram of a game of chess, an
algebraic equation, and no end of classical quotations, are kneaded like
currants into the dough of Mr. Collins's cookery. Not only has he been
at a feast of languages, and stolen the scraps, he has evidently carved
the dishes for himself. The story is, as we have said, not so well
constructed as it might be. It is not always in good taste; it rumbles
and rollicks along; but it is very clever and very amusing. It is less
melodramatic than Mr. Collins usually is, and is, we think, the best
book he has written.
_The Green-Eyed Monster._ By KAY SPEN. Smith, Elder, and Co.
The title of this little book indicates its character. Hugh Barrington
falls in love in a railway carriage with Adela Gwynne, a blue-eyed Welsh
girl, and marries her. She is of a preposterously jealous disposition,
and perversely interprets countless little incidents as justifying her
jealousy. The story details the working out of these feelings and their
disastrous issues, and the ability of the writer is shown in her
psychological knowledge and skill. It is in this point of view very
clever. Of course incidents occur with preternatural consentaneousness,
and people act and feel in a very infatuated way, setting common sense
at defiance, else how would novels get written? But Kay Spen has managed
her materials well, and has written an interesting story with a very
wholesome moral.
_Jasmine Leigh._ By C. C. FRASER-TYTLER. Strahan and Co.
This is a very dainty little story. It is written in an autobiographical
form, and narrates the history of a young girl blossoming into womanhood
and love, who is abducted by a rough and sordid wooer, whom,
nevertheless, she learns to pity, if not to love. It is written with a
delicate touch, and is full of graceful and refined feeling. If, as we
surmise, it is a first work, it is full of promise.
_Her Own Fault._ By Mrs. J. K. SPENDER. Hurst and Blackett.
Mrs. Spender writes with great care and with considerable strength. Her
story is well constructed, and the characters are marked by strong
individuality. The story is a stormy one. Sara, who is a very fine
creation, is 'a beautiful embodied storm.' Indeed, the defect of Mrs.
Spender is, that her strength is not sufficiently calm. Every character
is wrought up to the agony pitch: Sara, when she has accepted Rosswith
Maxwell--Bryan on the night when he learns his rejection--Lawrence Routh
in his suppressed intensity--Charley in her passionate sisterliness--all
are wrought up to powerful and exaggerated passion. Mrs. Spender might
say with the American young lady after dinner, 'I guess I've piled it
on.' The story, however, is vigorous and original, although it is not a
very pleasant one. Everybody is to be pitied. Poor Bryan is left with a
sentence of death recorded against him.
JUVENILE LITERATURE.
Among children's books of the past Christmas which reached us too late
for notice in our New-Year's Juvenile Section, are two or three,
altogether too remarkable to be passed over. 'At the Back of the North
Wind' (Strahan), and 'Ronald Bannerman's Boyhood,' both by George
Macdonald, are two books almost sufficient by their excellences to mark
an epoch in juvenile literature. Excepting 'Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland,' no recent work that we can remember is worthy of being
compared with the former. In no other of his many books has Mr.
Macdonald shown more strikingly the power and delicacy of his
imaginative genius. The blending of sober history with the most
Puck-like fancies--the underlying thoughtfulness of both--the inlaying
of wise reflections, subtly hinted or delicately touched--the blossoming
into poetical beauty of almost every position and teaching--the light,
graceful hand with which the whole is carried on--the deep, spiritual
meanings that transfigure the lightest incidents--altogether constitute
a fairy tale the like of which we have rarely seen, and which is as
suggestive to the mature as it is amusing to the juvenile. We know
youngsters in the nursery who, if they could not literally recite it by
heart, would infallibly detect the alteration of a single sentence. Mr.
Macdonald has attained to that perfection of excellency which
understands the heart of a child. He has made 'Diamond' immortal.
'Ronald Bannerman's Boyhood' (Strahan), is altogether different in
conception, feeling, and style. Mr. Macdonald's affluence of fancy is,
with perhaps an equal exercise of imagination, subdued to the plain
matter-of-fact, no-nonsense-about-it, autobiography of a school-boy. The
sympathy with boy-nature is as perfect as in the other volume is the
sympathy with child-nature. The narrative is bright, generous, and
true--the exact tone of a noble-hearted boy, who has, however, to speak
of some of the troubles and sorrows of life. Mr. Macdonald, however,
never lacks humour. His description of Mrs. Mitchell, his father's sour
housekeeper, and of the Dame School to which Ronald was sent, as well as
of Kirsty and the experiences at the farm, is rich and racy in a high
degree. Kirsty tells some capital kelpie and other Scotch stories and
legends. It is a beautiful picture of childhood, teaching, by its
impressions and suggestions, all noble things. 'Chamber Dramas for
Children,' by Mrs. George Macdonald (Strahan), are four little plays,
good as Hannah More's Sacred Dramas, and amusing as the stories of
Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, out of which two of them are
constructed. They are cleverly done, and will doubtless do duty in many
an acted charade. The 'Tetterby's' is founded upon Dickens's Haunted
Man. The 'Snowdrop' is new to us. 'The Boy in Grey' (Strahan), by Henry
Kingsley, which appeared in _Good Words for the Young_, together with
the above, was thereby subjected to a severe ordeal. It can ill bear the
comparison. Instead of the translucent fancies of Mr. Macdonald, it is
turgid and confused, and when it would be aërial, produces the effect
that sculptured clouds do. Its allusions are often beyond the range of a
boy's knowledge; its nonsense limps, and its wisdom is ponderous. We
have found it very difficult to understand Mr. Kingsley's meaning.
'Lilliput Lectures,' by the author of 'Lilliput Levée' (Strahan), is
again perfect in its way. The lectures are on all sorts of
things--social and religious, physical and metaphysical, artistic and
commercial. The writer tells us that he writes for no particular age,
but aims generally at a childlike way of putting things. Some of the
things put are high and mysterious; but then youth has wondrous dreams
and speculations, and the happy simplicity of the writer helps youthful
thought to climb. Each lecture winds up with some verses such as only
the author of 'Lilliput Levée' can write. 'Choice Poetry for Children'
(Religious Tract Society), is a small selection of religious and moral
pieces by modern writers--of course, of unequal merit, but wisely and
suitably chosen. 'The Pearl of Story Books' (Nelson) is a collection for
children of Bible narratives in Bible words. 'Mrs. Montmorency's Money,'
by Emma Jane Worboise (Clarke), belongs to minor fiction rather than to
juvenile literature. Its moral is that 'the love of money is the root of
all evil.' As is always the case with Miss Worboise, it is carefully
written, and there are clever descriptions and scenes of pathos in it;
but it is overlaid with moral, and not so successful in its plot as some
of her tales. It is, however, a wholesome and readable story, and its
moral is as timely as it is unexceptional.
_Brevia, Short Essays, and Aphorisms._ By the Author of 'Friends in
Council.' Bell and Daldy.
Most of the writings of Mr. Helps are Brevia. His books are made like
Armstrong guns, of welded pieces; and the process would not be a very
violent or destructive one that resolved them into the shape of these
fragments. We can well imagine them to be not so much chips as prepared
blocks for larger works, which the architecture did not admit of, and
which, therefore, the author has wrought into independent art forms.
They are brimful of thoughtfulness and practical wisdom; always genial,
often humorous, they make up a table book of aphorism and apologue, of
colloquia, and short essay, independently conceived and gracefully
expressed--which among living writers it would be difficult to parallel.
They remind us most of Whately; only Mr. Helps is more terse than he.
Sometimes reams of discussion are gathered into half a page; sometimes a
single sentence contains seeds for reams of discussion. Mr. Helps has
given us a volume of 'Aids for Reflection,' which is worthy the study of
the most desultory. Most of these short essays and aphorisms have
appeared in _Good Words_. We quote one sentence--'Some persons, instead
of making a religion of their God, are content to make a God of their
religion.'
_Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain._
By JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D. Sold only by G. Allen, Heathfield Cottage, Keston,
Kent.
In these letters Mr. Ruskin seeks to teach the workmen and labourers of
Great Britain some political economy which we are commonplace enough to
think fallacious, and some history which we are not Vikings enough to
think otherwise than mischievous. But we are in full accord with him in
his desire to lighten the national distress around us, and to
exterminate the yahoos of civilization; and if he can show us, as he
seems to think he can, some sure method of doing both or either, we will
abandon Mr. Mill, and will take our history from Mr. Carlyle. In the
three letters already published we have not been able to discover any
proposal leading to action, or, indeed, leading to anything at all,
except weariness and vexation of spirit. But we are perhaps even now on
the verge of the promised land. Mr. Ruskin has become so practical of
late years that we are inclined to think he has made a real discovery.
But he seems in no hurry to announce it, and delay is naturally
tantalizing.
THEOLOGY AND PHILOLOGY.
_Essays, Theological and Literary._ By RICHARD HOLT HUTTON, M.A. (Lond.)
Two vols. Strahan and Co.
These volumes are likely to take a high place in English literature, and
to measure and expound the influence which their author has for many
years exerted on the higher thought of our generation, through the
periodical press. He has submitted a selection of his more elaborate
essays to final revision, and has brought them together with much skill
and felicity of arrangement. The two volumes are, in fact, two separate
works of exceeding interest, the one bearing on the highest forms of
modern literature, and the other on the theological and philosophical
speculations of the last twenty years. The polish and finish of the
revision have excised the genial humour and delicate satire which have
characterized some of Mr. Hutton's critical efforts, but they have not
altered the substance or modified the tone of these remarkable papers.
In almost all of them it is easy to trace the hand of the accomplished
publicist, who has acquired the faculty of seizing one main
characteristic of the poetry or philosophy, political career, or moral
tendency he is wishful to examine, and having made himself master of
this, is resolved to establish or illustrate it at his leisure. He
decides on a good working hypothesis to account for the composition of a
great poet, or the spirit of a remarkable book, and leisurely sits down
to transform his hypothesis into a true induction. When Mr. Hutton
brings Wordsworth, or George Eliot, or Ernest Rénan, or Henry Rogers
into his field of view, he seems to say to himself, 'some explanation is
possible of this congeries of spiritual phenomena,' and he forthwith
attacks the problem with the enthusiasm of a naturalist, and often with
the penetration of a true philosopher. He exhibits great insight, and
his speculation is always worthy of attention, but it too much resembles
the bar of sunshine gleaming through an aperture in a shutter, which
throws an intense light on some portions of a painted chamber but leaves
other portions in hazy and dubious shadow. We heartily thank him for the
vivid image he has drawn, and for the key he has often given us to the
intellectual treasures of some of our greatest modern thinkers; but we
do not feel that he has adequately solved all the problem, or has
definitely formulated the mental life or calibre of either the poets or
theologians whom he passes in review. Thus almost all that he says of
Wordsworth is nobly and truly said. There is consummate ability in his
reply to Hazlitt's 'thorny praise,' in his comparison of Wordsworth and
Tennyson, and in his method of proving the thesis with which he starts,
viz., that the charge against Wordsworth, of 'profundity and
transcendentalism,' sprang from the same root as that which declaims
against his 'unintelligible fuss about common feelings and common
things.' Still, in his anxiety to establish this position, Mr. Hutton
appears to us to overstate the frugality of Wordsworth's genius, and to
exaggerate the poet's habit of making a very minute modicum of incident
furnish all the material he needed for the exercise of his imagination
and the development of his vast subjective energies. The entire series
of ecclesiastical sonnets, as well as those which were dedicated to
national independence, cover a prodigious field, and make no
inconsiderable demand upon the reader's knowledge, as well as upon his
sympathy. In the description of the retreat from Moscow, Wordsworth
surely chose a theme big enough for the historic imagination of Scott,
and he dealt with it in an as objective a fashion, with Dryden's fire
and Shelley's pomp of style to boot. Again, in Mr. Hutton's profoundly
interesting paper on the 'Poetry of the Old Testament,' there is a
principle which is full of force, and our author's working hypothesis
will and does explain a great deal. He urges with eloquence and beauty
of illustration, that 'faith in the glorious destiny of the nation, and
the overseeing providence of God as the power which had wrought out that
destiny,' are the two roots of the Hebrew traditionary poems, and he
sees these roots in all the efflorescence of the glorious tree; but
while there is truth in the remark that this double idea underlies and
absorbs the significance of all the Hebrew poet's references to the
beauty of nature, and much also of the tragic human interest of the life
that was being lived by the prophets, there is some niggardliness in
failing to acknowledge how the very fringes of the tabernacle that
enshrined both the nation's destiny and the Divine presence are
glittering with touches of refined gold, and how much nearer an approach
the few Hebrews made to the modern conceptions of the transcendent and
pathetic beauty of nature, than all the Greeks and Romans put together.
If the Hebrews rose to the stupendous idea of the universe being but the
shadow of Jehovah's might, and believed that the light was the skirt of
His raiment, that the heavens, the sun, moon, and stars, were the work
of His fingers, that the 'seven stars and Orion,' the 'sweet influence
of Pleiades,' and 'the morning spread upon the mountains,' were alike
declaring His glory, there is sufficient evidence in the abundance of
their imagery and the sweetness of their song, that they exulted in as
well as beheld the primal beauty. Interesting and demonstrative as Mr.
Hutton's essay is, he leaves a range of facts unaccounted for. The
gorgeous imagery of Ezekiel, when in parabolic fashion he sees the
analogies between nature and national life, the idyllic, perhaps
dramatic grace of the Song of Songs, and the genuine lyrical cry of
large portions of the minor prophets and Psalms, seem to us to
transgress the canon of our author.
One of the volumes before us consists of eighteen theological essays,
admirably classified. They start from the moral and religious
significance of Atheism; they proceed to show the insufficiency of the
scientific and positivistic explanation of our moral relations. The
Pantheistic hypothesis is displayed in its strength and its weakness.
The question, 'What is revelation?' is then handled, and Mr. Maurice is
vindicated and Dean Mansel demolished. In another essay the historic
problems of the fourth Gospel are discussed with great candour and
success. 'The principles of evidence' are illustrated in their
application to the 'Doctrine of Incarnation,' which our author, like Mr.
Baring-Gould, would hold, even if the New Testament should pass out of
existence. Two papers on M. Rénan's recent works, and a vehement attack
upon the evangelical doctrine, under the irritating title of 'The Hard
Church,' are followed by an estimate of the relative position of the
'Romanists, Protestants, and Anglicans.' Several of these papers were
published in the _National Review_, and one of them forms part of a
series of essays entitled 'Tracts for Priests and People.' We
acknowledge great obligation to Mr. Hutton for many of these
dissertations. We sympathise most profoundly in the general estimate he
forms of the position of the Atheist, the Positivist, and the Pantheist;
and we are confident, after again perusing his examination of 'the
historical problems of the fourth Gospel,' that though we differ from
him in many details, and regret that he should find it necessary to
relinquish the Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse, it is the noblest
and most triumphant vindication in the English language of this
stronghold of Christianity. In the graceful preface to the first volume,
in which Mr. Hutton acknowledges his debt of obligation to Mr. Maurice,
he sums up in a sentence the living principle of Mr. Maurice's writings.
There, as elsewhere, too much credit is given to a key; too much of a
jet of light is thrown upon a portion of Mr. Maurice's theology. We do
not believe that this great and suggestive writer can be crushed into a
proposition. Still it does cover much of the speculation associated with
Mr. Maurice's name. It is as follows:--'All beliefs about God are but
inadequate intellectual attempts to justify a belief in Him, which is
never a merely intellectual affirmation, but rather a living act of the
spirit, by no means confined to those who consciously confess His
presence.' The paper entitled 'What is Revelation?' and part of the
argument entitled 'The Hard Church,' are expansions of this principle,
in vehement opposition to the philosophy of Hamilton, as it was applied
by Dean Mansel to theological problems. We think that we may give Mr.
Hutton credit for having made the difference between Dean Mansel and
Professor Maurice more obvious than those distinguished men ever
succeeded in making it appear for themselves; but we imagine that he has
forced them into more irreconcilable antagonism than they are themselves
conscious of, and has effected this by a slight exaggeration of the
position of each disputant. We sympathize with Mr. Hutton far more than
with Dean Mansel, in his general philosophical opinions; but this
vehement scolding and irate horror caught from Mr. Maurice seems to us
perfectly misplaced. Surely, surely the 'living act of the spirit,' by
which man knows the only true God, the intuition of God by the eye of
the soul, the transcendental conclusion or conviction of the whole
intelligence, the bound heavenwards of the sanctified imagination, the
'real assent' to super-sensuous, extra-logical, metaphysical facts, all
of which processes are aided by the facts and words of Scripture, by the
recorded life of Christ, by the sublime utterances and confessions of
the creeds, will not be rejected by Dean Mansel. They are differently
described but thankfully acknowledged. What Mansel seems to us to imply
is that these processes do not solve the contradictions which are
involved in the logical effort to formulate the infinite; the knowledge
they supply is approximate rather than exhaustive, regulative rather
than absolute; a spiritual apprehension rather than scientific
comprehension. The intuitions of Mr. Hutton and Mr. Maurice are far more
numerous and intense than Dean Mansel's. Our author has more confidence
in his direct experiences of truth than Dean Mansel has. The living God
is more visible, more accessible to some minds than others, and these
want less help and fewer manifestations to penetrate the mystery; but we
do not see why Mr. Hutton should be so wrath with Dean Mansel for the
position that 'the faculties in man furnish the conditions of
constructing a philosophical theory of the object presented.' 'The
object presented' is not the living and infinite God, but the finite
manifestation and unveiling of his perfections through a certain series
of human experiences. The criticism of Mr. Hutton shows that he is
attributing to the words 'philosophical theory' more than it is meant by
Mansel to carry. It is just because Dean Mansel cannot form a theory of
the underlying 'infinite' and the 'abysmal deep' of human personality,
that he is content to theorize about that which is presented in the
person and voice and known history and character of a human being. It is
because the infinite baffles and confounds us, and refuses to come under
the formal laws of thought, that Mansel and Hamilton made a virtue and
a science out of the recognition of our nescience, and would confine
their theorizing to that which was manageable and apprehensible; but the
entire philosophy of the unconditioned turns on the presence in our
consciousness of these stupendous factors, unlabelled and untheorized.
It appears to us that the conflict narrows itself to the name to be
given to our personal relations with the transcendental and eternal
realities in which both disputants profoundly believe; and therefore we
do not for one moment think that this summation of Dean Mansel's
position would be accepted by him. Can Mr. Hutton really mean that Dean
Mansel would deny that we can be 'conscious of God's presence with us,
conscious of the life we receive from Him, conscious of what He really
is, and in the same, indeed, even in far higher sense than that in which
we are conscious of what human beings are?' We heartily agree with Mr.
Hutton in his denunciation of the idea that the moral nature of man is
fundamentally different from the moral nature of God, that the goodness
and mercy of God's being must be essentially different from the goodness
and mercy in a human will, and that the 'revelation to us of the very
character and life of the Eternal God' has been made by the
'purification of human vision,' and is 'the history of the awakening,
purifying, and answering of the yearnings of the human spirit for a
direct knowledge of Him. It proceeds from God, and not from man.' He
details with clearness and force the spread of this 'revelation,' the
human condition of it, and the widely diffused material of it, in the
instincts and regrets, and secret hopes and fears of universal man. 'The
revelation through Christ fulfilled ... the desire of all nations, by
revealing the living power in man, by which human nature is wrought into
His likeness.' But in his defence of this position he appears to us
partially, if not utterly, to ignore the new life given to our humanity
in Christ. 'Grace' seems on this theory rather to be a development of
dormant powers than the conference of a new tendency, and 'Christ' to
become rather the name of a sleeping but universal divineness in all
humanity, which is at length realized to the conscience, rather than to
be the personal source of all the life. The 'Father,' in the theology of
Mr. Hutton, is a living God, as against the Pantheistic tendencies of
modern science; but we are not sure--and few things would be farther
from our wish than to misrepresent him--that the Christ and the Spirit
of God are distinguishable from the voice of universal conscience and
the hidden and better nature of the (not fallen but) ever aspiring child
of the living God.
Each of Mr. Hutton's papers deserves careful study; we regret that we
cannot even refer to more than one other, and this, moreover, one to
which we cannot fail to take certain exceptions. It is entitled 'The
Hard Church,' a 'degraded phase of the Church of common sense.' It is
the Church whose logic has been supplied by Whately, whose metaphysic
has been elaborated by Dr. Mansel; one of its most 'merciless and
slashing captains' is seen in Professor Henry Rogers, and Mr. Binney
caught its exact spirit in his lecture addressed to young persons on the
possibility of 'Making the best of both Worlds.' 'Its heroes,' we are
told, are 'latitudinarian but not catholic in the tone of their
theology.' It has no sympathy, no heart, offers 'no divine
reconciliation of contradictory yearnings;' it glories in 'hard sense,'
and 'dismisses from view all those fluctuating elements of human life
which do not seem deeply imbedded in the average notions of average
men.' Its representatives scold away all individuality, denounce the
eccentricities of positive faith, and are, in short, 'the most
mischievous section of Christendom.' All this is introductory to a
tremendous attack on Mr. Rogers for the pitiless severity with which he
introduces a thoroughly sceptical mind, seeing no _intellectual_
standing-place in a 'shallow Deism,' and more consistency in
thoroughfaced Positivism or Pantheism, and more hope too, because he is
sure that at the very bottom of the abyss, the heart will spring upward
and the conscience will rise in rebellion. Mr. Hutton should remember
that 'the real and deep Theism, holding by prayer, near to
Christianity,' was not the intellectual position condemned by the author
of 'The Eclipse of Faith;' it was a Theism that is or was in a fluent
and changeable condition, a Theism that had, in deference to certain
loudly-vaunted principles of reasoning, relinquished Christianity, and
spoken of the moral character of Jesus--to put it mildly--with
disloyalty if not with disrespect; it was a Theism trembling on the
verge of Atheism, yet boasting itself to be a spiritual religion.
Methods of thought may surely be harmless in some regions, and deadly in
other spheres. It is not hardness but goodness which exposes the
worthlessness of the method. This seems to us to have been the work of
Mr. Rogers. We are not called upon to defend Mr. Rogers's strong way of
putting certain things, but we think that Mr. Hutton has not shown him a
more excellent way when he speaks of his 'throttling art,' and would
give you to believe that he is a spiritual garotter, rather perhaps of
the Antæus proportions, who has at last found a Hercules. Mr. Hutton
appears to us to be too angry to see the genuine humour as well as
rather grim pleasantry with which Mr. Rogers has represented the enemies
of the Christianity infinitely dear to him as destroying each other. The
doctrine that 'Christianity is against the grain of human nature,' is
spoken of as demonstrating the truth that 'the Hard Church has a hard
Master.' Nothing surely is more true than this language of Mr. Rogers,
and we are astonished that Mr. Hutton thinks he replies to this estimate
of Christianity by saying that Paul told the Athenians that they were
'seeking the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him.' Our
author is generally quite ready to admit the complexity of human nature,
the multiplicity of the forces that are moving it. The same apostle who
thus spake to Athenians, said to Galatians, 'Brethren, if I yet preach
circumcision, why do I yet suffer persecution? then is the offence of
the Cross ceased.' We can conceive of no more satisfactory response to
the position here assailed than that so often attributed to Lord
Palmerston, 'that all children are born good.' We suppose Mr. Hutton
must endorse it. The paper on 'Romanism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism'
cannot be discussed by us here for want of space. Its delicate insight
into 'root-principles,' and formulated tendencies, is another
illustration of the author's disposition to generalise, and to cast
pencils of coloured light upon the parts of a theme, or of a system of
thought. With the general estimate of _Luther_ we have not much to
contend against, except that no reference is made to the objects or
reasons of his faith. The unlimited, ecstatic, violent confidence in an
unproved, transcendental fact, with nothing but personal intuitions to
guide the triumphant _trust_--itself a Saviour--may be apparently proved
from certain table-talk of Luther, but is a very imperfect exhibition of
Luther's position. Why, by implication, should all whom Mr. Hutton calls
'pseudo-Protestants' be supposed to deny the indispensable necessity of
an entire moral surrender of the whole nature to the will of God? With
some of those whom Mr. Hutton thus denounces, as for example, Bishop
Bull and all who agree with him, faith is identifiable with moral
surrender to the will of God; in the view of others, as proved by almost
all the Protestant confessions, it is inseparably associated with saving
trust. Where, we ask, is 'the bibliolatry which relegates the Holy
Spirit to the province of explaining the Bible,' except in a small
section of Scotch divines, whose hard and artificial lines have long
since shown a tendency to vanish away? Mr. Hutton seems to try to take
from those whose joy and crown it is to speak of trust in a present
Christ their most distinctive feature; because here and there a logical
theologian may use scholastic or forensic phrases in his theorizing, it
is ungenerous to say that 'the passionate faith of Luther is degraded
into the acceptance of an artificial contract,' or that 'the orthodox
theory of substitution excludes the purifying influence of spiritual
union with Christ.' The best reply that we can make to Mr. Hutton's
contemptuous allusion to Dr. Candlish is to call his attention to Dr.
Candlish's sermon on 'His servants shall serve Him,' and to the greater
part of his Commentary on the first Epistle of St. John. Would that our
great thinkers succeeded in learning more of each other's mind! There
are a hundred other questions raised by Mr. Hutton on which it is
tempting but difficult to dilate. We cannot part from him, however,
without assuring him that we believe these volumes will gain what they
richly deserve--a high place in English literature. Our remarks have
been somewhat critical and dissatisfied, but we are anxious to express,
notwithstanding, the exceeding admiration which we feel for these
eloquent and noble essays. It is often most instructive to see how the
position we occupy shapes itself to the intelligence of one who is only
in partial sympathy with us.
_First Principles of Ecclesiastical Truth._ Essays on the Church and
Society. By J. BALDWIN BROWN, B.A. Hodder and Stoughton.
This volume consists of ten essays: the first four are entitled 'The
Doctrine of the Infallible,' and contain Mr. Brown's exposition of the
inquiry--What is truth? a brave and full exhibition of the answer to
that question given by the infallible church; a criticism of the
Protestant dictum that an infallible book is adequate to the solution of
every great moral and spiritual problem; and in the last place a
passionate vindication for the free spirit of the possession of the true
infallibility. Two essays then follow, of considerable speculative
interest, under the titles of 'The Natural History of Antichrist,' and
'The Christian Commonwealth.' The volume is completed by four lecture
essays on the 'Revolution of the last Quarter of a Century,' the
intellectual, social, ecclesiastical and theological revolution which
has unrolled itself during the twenty-five years of Mr. Brown's fruitful
and stimulating ministry. We have said enough to indicate the
comprehensiveness and multifariousness of the theme which our author has
here investigated. It is as though he had taken his stand on some high
promontory which overlooks a boundless sea of thought, and with well
practised, almost prophetic eye, taken in the vast expanse, the rolling
tides, the brooding storms of the great highway of the nations; here a
very maelström of confusion and wreathing agony, where equatorial and
arctic currents blend in driving mist and fierce agitation, and there a
dreamy outlook of serene though glittering colour; now, the breaker and
the wreck and then the ark of refuge, the busy craft, the haven of rest.
Few writers of the present day appear to us to take a larger view of men
and things, and though his senses seem painfully acute to the moan of
distress and the shriek of the torment, yet few appear to hear more
distinctly the sound of the Master's voice, or to see more clearly the
triumphant form of Him who holds that ocean in the hollow of His hand.
We think this volume is unquestionably the noblest production of Mr.
Baldwin Brown's pen. In refinement and elevation of style, in high
sympathy with the good and the noble side of that which he condemns, in
readiness to learn from his opponents, and to see himself and his own
position with their eyes, amounting to what some may deem almost a
dangerous concession to the misconception of the free spirit entertained
by both the Romish doctor and the apostle of science, coupled with
outspoken and brave utterance of unpopular truth, this volume will
hardly find its parallel in modern times.
We cannot attempt more than to touch on a few points. We are inclined to
think that the paper on 'The Natural History of Antichrist' is not only
the most original and suggestive portion of the volume, but that it is,
in fact, the pivot, or the centre of the entire argument. Our author has
drawn a comparison between 'Babel,' 'Babylon,' and 'Babylon the Great,'
and has shown how the hoary legend of man's first endeavour to establish
a worldly and human independence of the Supreme will, found its
counterpart in the subsequent efforts to produce the four world-wide
monarchies of pre-Christian times, and again, in the towering system of
Pontifical rule, the rise, triumph, and fall of which are seen in the
visions of Patmos. He has discussed with consummate eloquence and
brilliancy of touch, the analogies which link these three manifestations
of the spirit of antichrist, and how God's providence has undermined
them one after the other by a like energy of the individual conscience
and the free spirit. The paper on the 'Christian Commonwealth' provides
a delicately-sketched theory of the true relation between the governing
and the Christian spirit. Mr. Brown admits, nay, contends, for the fact
that the Church and the State in their last significance and highest
development are one, and argues with great ingenuity that a supposed
alliance between the Church and the State, as between two contracting
parties, is essentially unchristian; it is, moreover, 'an exceedingly
low and false conception of the true character of the National
Establishment, and is quite unsupported by its early history.' He
acknowledges the difficulty of realizing the Christian idea in any
Christian State, and asserts 'that the Gospel has still a missionary
function in every State in Christendom; men have not only to be helped
to live by it, they have to be persuaded to believe in it;' but 'that
the idea of a National Church whose rulers are clergy, which shall have
the whole spiritual interests of the community in charge, having its own
ordinances, officers, and laws, of which it is the only lawful custodian
and administrator, lending a Christian character to the State by its
alliance, and deriving material countenance and support from the State
in return, is simply anti-Christian. The only National Church is the
whole community which has been redeemed by Christ, and on which, and in
which, He is working as the head of the Church in a thousand ways, of
which theologians of all parties little dream.'
Mr. Brown differs from many Nonconformists in holding the competency of
the public assemblies of a Christian State to deal with spiritual
matters, and would prefer to have such regulation as the British
Parliament might supply to religious belief and life to that of any
'spiritual synod that he is acquainted with;' but he considers that a
body like the British Parliament may and must 'abstain from all attempt
at legislation on certain subjects, because they know that they would
only mar them if they were to touch them with their legal fingers.' He
does not think that domestic sympathies and affections, the higher
intellectual life of the community, or the religious life of the people,
are palpably beyond the sphere of a government, but that they are beyond
'their power. One shudders to think of the costly, wasteful, pompous,
grasping, titled, beneficed, wealthy and bigoted thing which has been
presented during three hundred years to the English people, as the
visible embodiment of His kingdom, who was the incarnation of
tenderness, compassion, purity, patience, gentleness, and love. The
Establishment principle, under the most favourable conditions, seems to
run directly counter to the fundamental principle of the spiritual
government of men as we watch it working through all the ages. It
belongs to the age of stagnancy and deadness, is vested in the old and
decaying order, is doomed, and must die.' The theoretical admission of
competency, coupled with the trenchant disavowal of power to deal with
the higher regions of the social and religious life of the people,
reminds us of the ground taken for some years by a large section of the
free kirk of Scotland. There is no practical difference between the
views held by Mr. Brown and by the bulk of Nonconformists; his
condemnation of the Establishment principle is at least the result of
experience, and appears to be final.
As Christianity and the Church are the form and life of the truth, Mr.
Brown has prepared the way for his discussion of both by his discourses
on the infallible. The first paper, entitled 'What is Truth?' exhibits
with painful intensity the anguish, even the torment that accompanies
the search after this hidden treasure. Expressing, as we suppose, the
feelings of others rather than his own, the signs of the times rather
than his own heart-throbbings, his language almost amounts occasionally
to a wail of despair: nor does he, in the discourse which is entitled
the 'Intellectual Revolution of the last Quarter of a Century,'
exonerate the Christian teachers of the present day from the charge of
augmenting that despair. After clearly expounding the theory of the
Positivist, and showing how in its isolation it fails to satisfy the
need of either the intelligence or the heart of man, he boldly charges
theology and the Church with the sin of giving to science such a
representation of God as to induce it to do without him. In his extreme
anxiety to do justice to the scientific spirit, Mr. Brown appears to us
to do some injustice to the age-long yearning after truth which has
characterized theological science. Perhaps he does not sufficiently take
notice that the mental faculties which are quite adequate to secure the
broadest generalizations of science are insufficient to furnish us with
some of the chief data of theology. He speaks with perfect confidence of
'common ground in our Christian belief for us and the leaders of the
intellectual progress of men.' We believe that this common ground will
be found only when the methods of theology and the methods of science
are alike seen to be incomplete; but a difference of method in the two
regions there must ever be.
In the paper on 'the Infallible Church,' our author frankly admits that
there must be infallibility somewhere. With high courage and honesty he
traces the confidence with which the Catholic Church has entertained a
consciousness of the unerring guidance of the Holy Spirit, and he has
done much to show how reasonable is the expectation of such a guidance
and the truth that underlies the celebrated dictum of St. Vincent of
Lerins; and with distinguished skill he has indicated the way in which
vagueness and uncertainty have forced some of the strongest minds in the
Romish Church to sigh after and ultimately to secure the definition of a
Papal infallibility. Few things are more remarkable than the steady
growth of this yearning in face of the proved forgeries and infinite
gullibility on which the modern dogma conspicuously rests. Mr. Brown
thinks that some deep necessities of human nature must be the
explanation of this mystery. We believe he need not go much deeper than
the ignorance, credulity, laziness, cowardice, and abjectness of the
human mind, and the wide-spread incapacity, independently of the Holy
Spirit, for the spiritual apprehension of transcendental truth. In his
papers on the infallible book and the doctrine of Christ, Mr. Brown has
shown how dependent a man with the Bible in his hand must ever be, on
the spiritual presence and indwelling light of the Comforter. He may
almost be said to have drawn Bossuet's rapier from its scabbard, and
made some vigorous passes at the 'variations of Protestantism;' but it
is not that he may turn back to an infallible Pope for guidance or for
rest, but that he might fight his way past sects and churches, and
dogmas and popes, into the true temple, where all who have received the
fulness of the spirit are worshipping their father. As we have already
said, Mr. Brown opens up so many controversies, and displays such varied
culture and exceeding fairness in his treatment of these high themes,
that we will now content ourselves with urging our readers to peruse the
whole volume.
_The Office and Work of the Christian Ministry._ By JAMES M. HOPPIN,
Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology in Yale College. Second
Edition. New York: Sheldon and Co. 1870.
This elaborate course on homiletics and pastoral theology may be said
almost to exhaust the subject. The history of preaching, the art of
preaching, the analysis of a sermon in all its various parts, from the
text to the peroration, constitute the first part of the homiletical
manual. The second part contains a series of valuable dissertations on
the application of rhetoric to preaching. The pastoral office is then
examined in its divine institution, in its ideal, in the call to its
high functions, and the ordination to the office. The author further
discusses the pastor as a man, the pastor in his relations to society,
and the pastor in his relations to the Church. Here Dr. Hoppin
investigates the conduct of public worship, and under this heading such
details even as church music, marriages, and funerals are included.
Finally the whole question of the care and cure of souls is wisely and
affectionately urged upon the student. We have never seen a more
complete treatise on the question with which the author deals. There is
not much room for originality, and the analytical tone of the discussion
precludes the presence of much enthusiasm or fire. There is an abundance
of wise, godly counsel, and a considerable reference to the literature
of the subject.
SERMONS.
_Sermons Preached in the Temple Church._ By the Rev. ALFRED AINGER,
M.A., Reader at the Temple Church. (Macmillan and Co.) There is about
Mr. Ainger's sermons the great charm of perfect simplicity,
unconventionally, intelligence, and fearlessness. Neither in style nor
in thought are they like any sermons that we can recall. They are not
eloquent; or if so, it is the eloquence of a perfectly transparent
medium of thought. Not a fine word or a rhetorical figure occurs in
them; but neither is there anything commonplace. It is the fresh,
unconventional talk of a clear, independent thinker, addressed to a
congregation of thinkers. The uncultured would have no difficulty in
understanding; but the colourless thought would fail long to interest
such. For popular effect, it wants sensuousness and passion, and,
therefore, rhetoric. Mr. Ainger belongs to the liberal-orthodox school;
but he does not shape his opinions to any school. He speaks right out
what he thinks, and often surprises us with fresh views of familiar
texts. He is not great; but he is unconventional and earnest. In
doctrine he is broad, not however in any sense that is inconsistent with
what are understood by Evangelical views. The moral aspects of the
Atonement--forgiveness of sins, regeneration, and the life to
come--which he exhibits, are the highest truths of the Gospel; but he
exhibits them with such predominance, almost exclusiveness, that he is
apt to forget his own principle that the Atonement of Christ has many
aspects. Thoughtful men will be greatly charmed by this little volume;
they will learn from its perusal how the Gospel of Christ commends
itself to all the mind as well as to all the heart of men. The sermons,
moreover, are preached in the light of the thought of the present day,
and are rich glimpses of great questions now stirring men's
hearts.--_The City Temple Sermons, Preached in the Poultry Chapel,
London,_ 1869-70. By JOSEPH PARKER, D.D. (Hodder and Stoughton.) Dr.
Parker, also, is a City preacher; but, perhaps, the three kingdoms could
not furnish a greater pulpit contrast than between him and Mr. Ainger.
Dr. Parker's sermons are much stronger, but they are far less
thoughtful. They are more rhetorical, but less beautifully clear. They
are abrupt, striking, sensational in style, and abound with rhetorical
devices for catching the ear of the multitude. Sometimes, for instance,
Dr. Parker renounces the idea of a sermon, and tells a story, after the
manner of the Parables. His sermons often offend good taste, and are to
be excused only on the ground that the end justifies the means.
Certainly Mr. Ainger could not do what Dr. Parker is doing at the
Poultry.--_Christ Satisfying the Instincts of Humanity._ Eight Lectures
delivered in the Temple Church. By C. J. VAUGHAN, D.D. (Macmillan.)
_Half-hours in the Temple Church._ By C. J. VAUGHAN, D.D., Master of the
Temple. (Strahan and Co.) _Counsels to Young Students._ Three Sermons
preached before the University of Cambridge at the opening of the
academical year 1870-71. By C. J. VAUGHAN, D.D. (Macmillan and Co.)
Concerning three new books by the author of upwards of twenty volumes of
published sermons, it is almost enough to say that they are his: only
these sermons, while preserving the admirable simplicity and practical
spiritual unction of the parochial sermons, have more of intellectual
fibre. The conception of the first series addresses itself more to
thinking men, and the treatment has a more thoughtful cast. Seven of
these letters were delivered on Wednesday evenings in Lent, the eighth
on a Sunday just after. The instincts which Christ is represented as
satisfying are the instincts of Truth, Reverence, Perfection, Liberty,
Courage, Sympathy, Sacrifice, and Unity. The only text of doubtful
relevancy is that of the sermon on Courage, taken from the Corinthians,
'Quit you like men.' It is matter for devout thankfulness that a
preacher so single-hearted, so practical, so faithful to evangelical
truth, and so spiritual, should address so large a number of the learned
profession on the great themes of the Gospel, and that these qualities
should find such acceptance as they do. The crowds who gather round the
Temple pulpit prove that preachers need have recourse neither to strange
doctrines nor to oddities of manner to make the Gospel attractive. Dr.
Vaughan must preach almost all that he thinks, as he prints almost all
that he preaches. His sermons have the natural, simple strength and
freshness of an intelligent, scholarly, and devout man. They are not
made, they grow; if they may not claim the merit of great originality,
they are in every wise and wholesome sense independent. There is no
reason why his series of little volumes should not go on for ever, and
certainly we have every desire that they should. Dr. Vaughan's devout,
spirit-searching fidelity, and evangelical theology, make his books
almost everything that we could desire them to be for popular religious
reading. There can be no better sign of our times than the favour with
which such books are received. Because Dr. Vaughan's sermons are the
simple, spontaneous outcome of his mind and heart, they always have an
admirable adaptation, whether to the alumni of Cambridge or to the
lawyers of the Temple. He speaks with exact pertinence, and therefore
with power. We are devoutly thankful that both these classes should hear
such faithful, searching, loving words as are addressed to them
respectively in these three volumes.--_The Lost Found, and the Wanderer
Welcomed._ By the Rev. W. M. TAYLOR, M.A., U.P., Liverpool. (Edinburgh:
Oliphant and Co.) A lively series of expository and practical homilies
on the fifteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel. Almost too lively at times,
when the Prodigal Son is represented as departing to the 'El Dorado of
his dreams,' and hopes to return a 'nabob;' but there is a dash, and
force, and sweetness withal, that render the volume impressive and
attractive.--_Tender Herbs; or, Lessons for the Lambs_. By GEORGE W.
CONDER. (Manchester: Tubbs and Brook; London: Kent and Co.) Few more
charming volumes than this have ever been prepared for young Christians.
A 'Little Bunch of Herbs for the Lambs,' the author calls them; but they
have rare fragrance and beauty. Under such titles as 'The Broken Vase,'
'Thistle Gardens,' 'The Coat and the Dream,' 'The Golden Key,' 'The
Shepherd and the Lambs,' Mr. Conder pours forth his affluent treasures
of tender fancy and abounding affection. Underneath the almost playful
tone of some of his addresses, and the genial kindness of all, there is
plenty of strong masculine sense, of vigorous and noble thought, of
original and novel argument.--_A Practical Commentary on the Gospel of
St. John, in Simple and Familiar Language_. By G. B. (Nisbet and Co.)
Evangelical but feeble.--_Life and Truth; or, Bible Thoughts and
Themes_. _The Lesser Epistles._ By HORATIUS BONAR, D.D. (Nisbet and Co.)
In our notice of the two previous volumes of this series we have
sufficiently characterized the sermons of which it consists. Dr. Bonar
seems to have been guided in the selection of passages for texts simply
by his sympathetic fancy. In his treatment he is somewhat
ultra-orthodox, deeply spiritual, not very critical, and not very
original or striking. He is closely textual, and in his frame-work of
divisions, resembles some of the old Puritans, rather than divines of
the present day. Eighty-five discourses, in a small volume, necessitate
brevity; they are, indeed, outlines rather than compositions. Perhaps we
may best convey an idea of their character when we say they resemble
Chalmers' 'Daily Readings;' only they have more of a sermon-plan in
them--sometimes a division or sub-division is dismissed in a sentence.
Their most fitting designation would be 'Sermons in Outline.'--_Symbols
of Christ._ By CHARLES STANFORD. (Hodder and Stoughton.) A second
edition of a little book that has commended itself to devout readers by
its healthy spiritual tone of devout practical religiousness. Mr.
Stanford has just that tinge of mysticism which spiritualises events,
and uses emblems with unction; but he never becomes mawkish or obscure.
His sermons are pure and breezy; emotion is appealed to and excited in
an intelligent, manly way. Hence few more wholesome helps to the
spiritual life could be named. This is a companion volume to the edition
of 'Central Truths,' which we commended on its appearance a few months
ago.--_Sermons on Historical Subjects._ By the Rev. D. ROWLANDS, B.A.
(Hodder & Stoughton.) Mr. Rowlands' sermons are ingenious and effective.
In some of them he is remarkably happy in seizing and condensing into a
paragraph or two the essence of a great lesson; thus the sermon on
Jacob's dream at Bethel treats--1. The 'Duality of Existence;' 2. The
'Unity of Existence.' The treatment is sometimes inadequate, an undue
space being given to mere description with which imagination has a good
deal to do. On the whole, the sermons may be commended as fresh,
sensible, vigorous, and useful.--_Sermons_. By HENRY MELVILLE. Two
volumes. (Rivingtons.) Sermon readers will feel a great obligation to
the publishers for this cheap reprint of the sermons of one of the most
effective preachers of this generation. We are not too old to remember
the electrical way in which, for an hour, the preacher at Camden Chapel
held spell-bound the multitudes that crowded every available corner: A
severe critic might characterise Mr. Melville's preaching as somewhat
artificial, and his sermons as fanciful and sometimes wire-drawn; but
they are full of unction, and contain precious evangelical truth enforced
in a way not to be forgotten. We hope these volumes will be succeeded by
others.--_Beacons and Patterns; or, Lessons for Young Men._ By the Rev.
W. LANDELS, D.D. (Hodder and Stoughton.) These sermons, on some of the
historical characters of Scripture, containing lessons specially adapted
to young men, are reprinted from 'The Bible Student.' They rise to that
level of popular excellence which characterizes all that Dr. Landels
does, and are calculated to be useful.--_The Prophet's Mantle._ Being
Scenes from the Life of Elisha, the Son of Shaphat. By the Rev. JAMES
MURRAY, Minister of Old Cumnoch. (Blackwood & Son.) An exceedingly good
example of the expository preaching to which, much more than ourselves,
our Scottish brethren are given. Mr. Murray, while evidently having a
scholarly acquaintance with critical difficulties, knows how to keep
them subordinate to popular statement and practical uses. Great good
sense characterises all that he says, and regulates every touch. The
sermons are Biblical rather than practical, that is, they simply furnish
a running practical comment upon the Biblical narrative. Really useful
preaching demands somewhat larger and wider uses suited to the practical
life of our own day; the historical instance should not have larger
prominence than its application.--_Sermons._ By CHARLES WADSWORTH. San
Francisco. (R. D. Dickenson.) We welcome this volume of sermons from the
rapidly-growing and vigorous Christian life of San Francisco, where, as
everywhere else throughout the States, religious provision fully keeps
up with the rapid growth of the community. Mr. Wadsworth's sermons have
some of the characteristics of Western life: they are full of vigour,
fire, and fearlessness, but with that defective culture of form which in
its excess is designated pedantry. The thought is cast in a scholastic
form, the scientific illustrations are often in excess, and the style
wants ease and simplicity; hard words and harsh compounds occur, and,
together with this, the practical applications are too ejaculatory and
coercive. Mr. Wadsworth will do better as he mellows, but his volume is
able and has much good stuff in it.--_Foreign Protestant Pulpit._
Sermons by eminent Preachers of France, Germany, Holland, and
Switzerland. Second Series. (R. D. Dickinson). We can only adduce as
vouchers for the great excellency of this volume the names of the
preachers of these six-and-thirty sermons; they are Lange, Grandpierre,
César, Malan, Horace Monod, Tholuck, Bersier, Hocart, Gaussen,
Krummacher, Luthardt, Schwartz, Rothe, Pressensé, and Julius Müller. In
addition to the intrinsic excellence of the sermons, they have the
exciting freshness of modes of religious thought and pulpit presentation
which are different from our own; they seem to be well translated, their
flavour is carefully retained. We cordially commend them to both sermon
preachers and sermon readers.--_The True Vine; or, the Analogies of our
Lord's Allegory._ By Rev. HUGH MACMILLAN. (Macmillan and Co.) Mr.
Macmillan combines the eye of a poet and the knowledge of a _savant_
with the heart of a saint; while he analyses the phenomena of nature on
purely scientific principles, he interprets them on the principles of a
devout Christian theist. He sees in nature the wonderful ways of Him who
made it; 'looks through nature up to nature's God,' and often, in virtue
of his religious insight, invests familiar things with unobserved and
beautiful significance. Beneath the surface of natural symbolism he
discerns the religious and loving ways of a divine Creator and father;
and thus, in a subtle and beautiful way, he knits together the two great
departments of the one kingdom of God. In this volume he is primarily a
theologian, investigating the religious meaning of our Lord's great
allegory of the vine and its branches--perhaps the greatest of his
self-assertions on the one hand, and of his religious assurances on the
other. Mr. Macmillan here, therefore, makes science the handmaid of
theology, and brings his knowledge of natural phenomena to bear upon the
significance of our Lord's similes. He has, we think, a little overdone
this; the religious thought is overlaid, the illustration is more than
the thing illustrated; but he has thrown beautiful light upon many
points of natural symbolism. Readers and preachers who are unscientific
will find many of his illustrations as valuable as they are beautiful.
His wild luxuriance somewhat reminds us of that of James
Hamilton.--_Truth and Trust: Lessons of the War._ Four Advent Sermons.
By HENRY ALFORD, D.D. (Hodder and Stoughton.) These are the last
products of Dean Alford's pen, the last utterances from his lips. The
proof was but partly corrected when he died. We could not subject them
to criticism if we would. They are 'the sound of a voice that is still,'
and love for an honoured and noble-hearted servant of God, and for a
dear personal friend, seals our lips in reverence. Under any
circumstances, we should have only words of eulogy for them. They are,
in spiritual intelligence, strength, and cogency, about the best of the
many sermons that he published.--THE JEWISH TEMPLE AND THE CHRISTIAN
CHURCH; a Series of Discourses on the Epistle to the Hebrews. By R. W.
DALE, M.A. Second Edition. Revised, with additional notes. (Hodder and
Stoughton). We cannot but regret that Mr. Dale has not made this volume
much more than 'discourses, not for scholars, but for ordinary Christian
people to whom learned commentaries are inaccessible or useless.' He has
in them laid the foundations of an exposition of the Epistle to the
Hebrews of great spiritual insight and philosophic breadth, and he
might advantageously have wrought out his plan, even in successive
editions, until the work had become the worthy _magnum opus_ of his
life. It is, however, useless regretting what he has not done; we can
simply commend what he has done, as one of the best popular hand-books
to this great and suggestive epistle that is extant. Pulpit purposes
demand broad treatment and the avoidance of minute exegesis; but the
broad treatment here is always the fruit of careful exegesis, good
scholarship, and sound, vigorous thought. Some of the sermons are not
even wrought out as they were preached; the notes thereof only are
given. It is virtually what Robinson's 'Lectures on the Corinthians'
are, and will scarcely suffer by comparison with them.--_Lights and
Shadows in the Life of King David._ By CHARLES VINCE. (Elliot Stock.) In
ten discourses, Mr. Vince selects certain incidents and points in the
history of David. He makes no pretension to biographical completeness,
or to relative importance. Spiritual, and not biographical, reasons have
guided his selections. Thus one discourse is devoted to the influence of
Rizpah's pathetic fidelity in quickening David's conscience; and two to
the two things which David had never seen--'the righteous forsaken, and
his seed begging their bread.' The volume is a very charming one--full
of delicate spiritual discernment and tender religious sensibility; the
style is simple and chaste; and the quiet, natural way in which the
practical side of everything is presented is very felicitous. Mr. Vince
does not 'strive nor cry;' he has recourse to no feverish rhetoric or
tumultuous passion; his doctrine 'distils as the dew,' and, in a
searching, potent way, finds the soul of every hearer and saturates
it.--_Misread Passages of Scripture._ Second Series. By J. BALDWIN
BROWN, B.A. (Hodder and Stoughton.) Very different is Mr. Brown, who is
urgent with intellectual force and moral earnestness. His thought is
inquisitive, aggressive, and demonstrative; his spiritual zeal takes
cogent forms. He is full of intellectual surprises and unexpected
spiritual motives; very independent, very instructive, very forcible,
fulfilling the great practical religious ends of the ministry in a
masterly, forceful way. His books are full of strong, wise, earnest
words, such as place him among the noblest teachers of our day. Nothing
could be more characteristic of him than these two series of sermons on
'Misread Passages.' In the second, as distinguished from the first which
treats chiefly of textual misinterpretations, Mr. Brown deals with
doctrines and conclusions derived from misinterpreted texts; _e.g._,
'The Principle of Christian Unity,' regarded in the light of the true
reading. 'There shall be one _flock_ and one shepherd,' instead of 'one
_fold_ and one shepherd;' and the true significance of the simile of the
potter and the clay. We commend to special attention the sermon on the
'True Idea of Substitution,' in which, denying the theories of mere
martyrdom and commercial substitution, Mr. Brown insists upon the
substitution which has its character and power in Christ as the
_representative_ of the race--the true theory, as we venture to think.
The volume is full of thoughtfulness, light, and power.--_The Story of
Job, and Meditation on Passages of the Book of Job._ By Rev. ALFRED
CLAYTON THISTLETON. (Nisbet and Co.) There is no distinctive character
either of intelligence or strength in Mr. Thistleton's sermons. They are
devout and practical, but very commonplace, abounding in unctuous words,
and not over careful about exact meanings.--_Sermons for the Christian
Year._ By the Rev. W. H. LEWIS, D.D., Rector of the Church of the Holy
Trinity, Brooklyn. (R. D. Dickinson.) A reprint of a volume of sermons
published twenty years ago. It is a poor criterion of sermons to measure
them by the clock--a poor compliment when the first commendation is of
shortness; but Mr. Lewis's sermons have this merit. This little volume
of 500 pages contains sixty-six. Few of them could have exceeded the
orthodox Episcopal fifteen minutes. We differ from many of the tenets of
Mr. Lewis. Thus, from the text, 'Cease ye from man,' he teaches that we
are from human corruption to expect only ingratitude and wrong, to live
among men as among natural enemies. This is a very doleful and, we
think, an unwarrantable doctrine. Mr. Lewis is an orthodox evangelical.
He discourses in the old mechanical way. He is pious, sincere, and
earnest, but he furnishes no great help for men struggling with the real
difficulties of human darkness and experience. The volume is typical,
and should be very useful to rectors.--_The Measure of Faith and other
Sermons._ By PHILIP COLBORNE, Norwich. With Preface by the Rev. JOHN
STOUGHTON, D.D. (Hodder and Stoughton.) Mr. Colborne's sermons are
thoroughly individual, as if elaborated in some solitary place, with but
little reference either to theologians, critics, or conventional modes
of preaching. They somewhat lack fluency, but they are vigorous and
discerning. The working out of Mr. Colborne's conceptions is not always
so happy as the conceptions themselves; but his little volume contrasts
nobly with the vague vapid stuff that often comes before us under the
guise of sermons, and is a favourable specimen of that strength of the
Nonconformist pulpit which, under God's blessing, has made our churches
what they are. We would specially commend the sermon on 'Christian
Heroism,' and the two sermons on 'The Origin of Christian Life,' and
'God's Principle of Selection,' preached during the meetings in Norwich
of the British Association.--_Christ's Healing Touch, and other Sermons,
preached at Surbiton._ By ALEXANDER MACKENNAL, B.A. (Elliot Stock.) Mr.
Mackennal's sermons combine, in an unusual degree, the freshness of an
independent thinker and the power of a robust one, with the spiritual
penetration of a devout man, the evangelical fervour of a believing man,
and the practical urgency of an earnest man. No one, we think, can read
this unpretending volume without being interested--we might say
fascinated--by its manifold excellencies, or lay it down without a high
estimate of its author's ministerial power. The people who listen to
such a preacher are rarely privileged. The volume is one of the few
that, without qualification or reserve, we can heartily commend. Mr.
Mackennal has a rare faculty for eliciting the latent meanings of things
without obtruding the sense of his ingenuity, or failing in broad,
practical evangelical applications.--_The Wisdom of the King, or Studies
in Ecclesiastes._ By the Rev. JAMES BENNET, St. John's, New Brunswick.
(Edinburgh: William Oliphant.) Mr. Bennet writes with much intelligence
and good sense. In a plain, practical way he shapes the lessons to be
derived from Ecclesiastes into a series of week-day lectures, and his
book may be commended as worthy to take its place in the homiletical
literature of Ecclesiastes. Mr. Bennet still adheres to the almost
exploded notion that it is the veritable religious autobiography of
Solomon.--_Things Above._ By the late F. W. FRENCH, Rector of Newtown,
near Kells, County Meath. (James Nisbet and Co.) Mr. French was, as the
preface tells us, an aged minister, who had entered upon his eighth
decade, and who died before this little book was finished. It is a
series of short chapters or lectures concerning things above--their
reality, locality, character, &c.--written with devout feeling, and
largely illustrated by quotations from a considerable range of
writers.--_Sermons and Lectures._ By the late WILLIAM M'COMBIE.
(Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.) Mr. M'Combie was the editor of the
_Aberdeen Free Press_, and a layman. He was accustomed to preach,
chiefly in the Baptist Church, of which he was a member; and these
discourses were prepared, not for publication, but for preaching. Mr.
M'Combie was one of the most able men in the North of Scotland. He had
much in common with Hugh Miller. His intellectual independence, vigorous
thinking, manifold attainments, and cultured beauty and precision of
expression, were not surpassed by any of his compeers. His 'Hours of
Thought,' and still more, his 'Moral Agency,' proved, in their revolt
from Predestinarianism, as commonly taught by Scotch Calvinism, both his
profound metaphysical thinking and his intellectual independence. These
sermons have not the finish of his own published works, but they are
full of rare thoughtfulness and wisdom, and of rich spiritual feeling
and suggestiveness. Their strong, unwavering faith in the sufficiency
and power of the religion of Jesus to satisfy every necessity of the
individual and social life of men is a fine tonic in these degenerate
days. It is something to hear a man who believes as Mr. M'Combie
believes speak as he speaks.--_Sermons for the Times, preached at the
Independent Chapel, Newbury._ By E. W. SHALDERS, B.A. (Blacket and Son,
Newbury.) Mr. Shalders has done most excellent service to the cause of
spiritual Christianity by the issue of this series of discourses on the
questions at issue between the Ritualist and the Free Churchman. The
topics chosen by our author have been 'Baptismal Regeneration,'
'Apostolic Succession,' 'The Childishness of Ritualism,' 'Exclusiveness
the real Schism.' Scholarship, candour, strength, clearness, and fine
manly tone, pervade each of these discussions. We should be glad to see
them circulated by tens of thousands.--_The Revision of the New
Testament, being a Popular Exposition of its Needs and Limits; a Lecture
delivered before the Norwich Young Men's Christian Association._ By
GEORGE S. BARRETT, B.A. (Hodder and Stoughton.) This lecture is
admirably well done. There is a refined tone in the discussion, and a
thorough grasp of the whole subject. When he was about it, however, Mr.
Barrett might as well have explained a little more fully what is meant
by 'The Text of Scripture.' The class addressed by the lecturer are
singularly hazy on this point. It is not uncommon to meet with pious
folk who, when the rejection, _e.g._, of 1 John v. 7, is made to depend
on its absence from all Greek MSS., are ready to exclaim--'So much the
worse for the MSS!' We heartily thank Mr. Barrett for his timely
publication.--_The Plymouth Pulpit._ Sermons by HENRY WARD BEECHER.
Third Series. (Dickenson.) The third series of Mr. Beecher's sermons
fully sustains the interest excited by the previous volumes. There are
the same high passion and earnest, practical love, the same brilliant
touch, the ring of the same musical metal which have charmed and
instructed us so often. This volume is characterized by more frequent
treatment of great doctrinal themes, when liberal views are guarded by
conservative love. There is a most powerful, practical, and useful
discourse on the fearful theme of 'The Sin against the Holy Ghost.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mr. Peter Walker, of Philadelphia, the late publisher of the
_Princeton Review_, issued last year an index volume, giving brief
biographic notices of each contributor to its pages, since 1825. The
volume is incomplete. We are indebted to it for much of the information
contained in the text.
[2] This _Index Expurgatorious_ puts the ban upon such words as
these:--bogus, authoress, poetess, collided, _debút_, donate, donation,
loafer, located, ovation, predicate, progressing, pants, rowdies,
roughs, secesh, osculate for kiss, endorse for approve, lady for wife,
jubilant for rejoicing, bagging for capturing, loaned for lent, posted
for informed, and realized for obtained.
[3] Report addressed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer by the Master of
the Mint, and Colonel Smith, late Master of the Calcutta Mint, on the
mintage necessary to cover the expenses of establishing and maintaining
the gold currency.
[4] Mr. Hendriks' Evidence before the Royal Commission.
[5] Report from the Royal Commission on International Coinage.
[6] This is shown by the tariff price of the British sovereign at the
Paris Mint, mentioned at p. 21.
[7] Colonel J. T. Smith's Evidence before the Royal Commission.
[8] Mr. Hendriks' Evidence, Royal Commission on International Coinage,
p. 19.
[9] Mrs. Crewe's house was subsequently the resort of Charles Fox and
his party, who took for their motto--
'Buff and Blue,
And Mrs. Crewe.'
[10] _British Quarterly Review._ October, 1867, Article 'Recent
Researches in Palestine.'
[11] Tel Hum--the mound of 'Hum. Capernaum--the village of na-hum.
[12] B. J., iii. x. 8.
[13] Dean Stanley reminds us that as a rule the hill tribes of a country
hold out longest against an invader, but in the case of Canaan the
nations of the plain, possessing horses and chariots, which the
Israelites were destitute of, had the advantage.--_Sin. and Pal._
[14] Jud. Bell. v. iv. i.
[15] 2 Chron. xxxii. 30; I Kings viii. 1.
[16] I Kings ii. 10; xi. 43, &c.
[17] 'Sketch of Jerusalem,' p. 103.
[18] Robinson, Bib. Res. i. 293.
[19] Jos. Ant. xiv. iv. 3.
[20] 'Dictionary of the Bible,' Art. Jerusalem
[21] 'Ancient Jerusalem,' p. 320.
[22] 'Horeb and Jerusalem,' p. 259.
[23] Jud. Bell. vi. iii. 2.
[24] Jud. Bell. vi. iii. 2.
[25] In thus provisionally identifying Zion with a hill north of the
temple, it may be well to call attention to Josephus's description of
the eastern hill. He says it was ἀμφίκυρτος, a word which is
sometimes translated 'gibbous' sometimes 'sloping on both sides,' and
sometimes 'the shape of a moon when horned.' Liddell and Scott say
'_curved on each side_, like the moon in its third quarter, _gibbous_;'
but as κύρτος by itself, is simply 'curved or arched,' and each
side of the moon is carved as much when it is crescent as when gibbous,
we have rendered the term 'crescent-shaped,' being influenced by the
fact that the Tyropoeon valley and that from Herod's gate would really
give a crescent shape to the two eastern hills which in his day were
one.
[26] It seems to us overlooked, that before the Akra was cut down it may
have been higher than the western hill. If so, it would be the upper
city in David's time, and Josephus's statement that David look the lower
city and the Akra would have new light thrown upon it. It would then be
clear that Akra was co-extensive with the city of David, which is Zion,
and the absence of all mention of the upper city at this siege would be
explained.
[27] Jud. Bell. v. iv. 1, 2.
[28] Robinson, Bib. Res. iii. 191. Lewin, 'Sketch of Jerusalem,'
Appendix.
[29] עֹפֶל, _a hill_ from עָפַל _to swell up_. With the
art. הָעֹפֶל. pr.n. of a hill to the east of Mount Zion. Gesenius
Lex. And see Stanley, 'S. and P.,' Appendix.
[30] Jos. Ant. xv. xi. 5; xiv. iv. 2; B. J. i. ii. 5, 2; ii. xvi. 3; vi.
vi. 2; vi. vii. i.
[31] Lewin, Sketch of Jer., pp. 19, 96; Jos. Ant., xiv. iv. 2; B. J. i.
vii. 2.
[32] Ant. xv. xi. 5.
[33] B.7, v.v. 1; L. xxi. 1. Ant. xv. xi. 5.
[34] Williams and Ferguson both ascribe them to Justinian.
[35] See _Athenæum_, June 11th, 1870.
[36] Athenæum, June 11th, 1870.
[37] The Quarterly Statement of Palestine Exploration Fund, No. V.,
following M. Ganneau, whose information was at first deficient,
represents the stone as rounded at the top and squared at the bottom;
and this error is repeated by Professor Rawlinson, in the _Contemporary
Review_, August, 1870.
[38] _Révue Archéologique_, June, 1870.
[39] Gesenius, Rödiger, Bunsen and others maintain this view. Wuttke and
Fürst are against it.
[40] Letter to the _Times_, March 3rd, 1870.
[41] B. J. iii. x. 8. See a paper on the 'Fishes of the Holy Land,' by
Dr. Albert Gunther in the _Student and Intellectual Observer_, July,
1869. The fish was found in the Round Fountain, not the Spring of
Tabigah, identified by Wilson as Capharnaum.
[42] Ἐς τὰν πόλιν = Stamboul.
[43] We need hardly say that the Archbishopric of Paris dates only from
the seventeenth century. Up to that time the Bishop of Paris had been a
suffragan of the Metropolitan of Sens.
[44] Eginh. Ann. 768.--'In ipsâ tamen valetudine Turonos delatus, apud
Sancti Martini memoriam oravit. Inde cum ad Parisios venisset, viii.
Kal. Octobris diem obiit, cujus corpus in basilicâ beati Dionysii
martyris humatum est.' So Vita Karoli, 3, 'Apud Parisius morbo aquae
intercutis diem obiit.' Mark the singular use of _Parisius_ as an
indeclinable noun.
[45] Eginh. Ann. 753, 708.
[46] Ib. 800. The passage is worth quoting, as a specimen of the
constant locomotion of the German kings:--'Redeunte vernâ temperie,
medio fere Martio Rex Aquisgrani digressus, litus Oceani Gallici
perlustravit, et in ipso mari, quod tunc piratis Nordmannicis infestum
erat, classem instituit, præsidia disposuit, pascha in Centulo apud
sanctum Richarium celebravit. Inde iterum per litus maris iter agens,
Ratumagum civitatem venit ibique Sequanâ amne transmisso, Turonos ad
sanctum Martinum orationis causâ profectus est, moratus ibi dies aliquot
propter adversam Liutgardæ conjugis valetudinem, quæ ibidem et defuncta
et humata est; obiit autem diem ii. Non. Jun. Inde per Aurelianos ac
Parisios Aquasgrani reversus est, et mense Augusto inchoante Mogontiacum
veniens, generalem conventum ibidem habuit, et iter in Italiam condixit,
atque inde profectus cum exercitu Ravennam venit, ibique septem nom
amplius dies moratus. Pippinum filium suum cum eodem exercitu in terram
Beneventanorum ire jussit, movensque de Ravennâ simul cum filio, Anconam
usque pervenit, quo ibi dimisso Romam proficiscitur.' This same visit to
Paris seems to be alluded to by the monk of Saint Gallen, Gesta Karoli,
i. 10. (Pertz, ii. 735.) 'Quum vero ingeniosissimus Karolus quodam anno
festivitates nativitatis et apparitionis Domini apud Treverense vel
Metense oppidum celebrasset sequenti vero anno easdem sollemnitates
Parisii vel Turonis ageret.'
[47] Ermoldus Nigellus, ii. 143 (Pertz ii. 481.)
'Inde Parisiacas properant cito visere sedes,
Quo Stephanus martyr culmina summa tenet,
Quo, Germane, tuum colitur, sanctissime corpus,
Quo Genuveffa micat, virgo, dicata Deo.
* * * * *
Nec tua præteriit Dionysi culmina martyr,
Quin adiens tibimet posceret auxilium.'
And again, iii. 269--
'Cæsar iter tutum per propria regna gerebat,
Usque Parisiaca quo loca celsus adit.
Jam tua martyr ovans Dionysi tecta revisit,
Hilthuin abba potens quo sibi dona paras;
Hinc, Germane, tui transivit culmina tecti
Martyris et Stephani, seu, Genuvefa, tui.'
[48] History of Normandy and England, i. 279-281.
[49] Ibid., i. 282.
[50] The fact that Paris was the gathering-place comes out most strongly
in the Annales Bertiniani, 830 (Pertz i. 423.) 'Nam aliqui ex primoribus
mumurationem populi cognoscentes, convocaverunt illum, ut eum a fide,
quam domno Imperatori promissam habebant, averterent; ideoque omnis
populus qui in Britanniam ire debebat ad Parisium se conjunxit, nec non
Hlotharium de Italiâ et Pippinam de Aquitaniâ hostiliter adversum patrem
venire, ut illum de regno ejicerent et novercam suam perderent ac
Bernardum interficerent, compulerunt.'
[51] Vita Hludowici, 45 (Pertz, ii. 633.) 'Quum autem instaret
auctumnalis temperies, ei qui Imperatori contraria sentiebant alicubi in
Franciâ conventum fieri generalem volebant. Imperator autem clanculo
obnitebatur, diffidens quidem Francis magisque se credens Germanis.' One
cannot help talking here about _France_ and _French_, though such is not
the established use of the words till long after. It should, however, be
noticed that the _Francia_ of this writer, while it excludes Germany,
equally excludes Burgundy and Aquitaine. (See c. 49.) The assembly was
held at Neomaga (Nimwegen) and we read that 'omnis Germania eo confluxit
Imperatori auxilio futura.'
[52] Annales Bertiniani, 834. 'Quum hoc Lotharius cognovisset, de Aquis
abscessit, et patrem suum usque ad Parisius sub memoratâ custodiâ
deduxit.' So in the Vita Hludowici. 50, 'Hlotharius patre assumpto per
pagum Hasbaniensem iter arripuit, et Parisius urbem petivit, ubi obviam
fore cunctos sibi fideles præcepit.'
[53] Annales Bertiniani, 834. 'Illo abscedente, venerunt episcopi qui
præsentes aderant, et in ecclesiâ sancti Dionysii domnum Imperatorem
reconciliaverunt, et regalibus vestibus armisque induerunt. Deinde filii
ejus Pippinus et Ludoicus cum ceteris fidelibus ad eum venientes paterno
animo gaudenter suscepti sunt, et plurimas illis ac cuncto populo
gratias egit, quod jam alacriter illi auxilium præbere studuissent.'
[54] See p. 56, ante.
[55] See the Annals of Prudentius of Troyes, 841 (Pertz, i. 437) and the
story in Nithard, ii. 6--8. Palgrave, England and Normandy, i. 313, 314.
Hildwin, Abbot of St. Denis, and Gerard, Count of Paris--the first we
remember bearing that title--had been among the first to break their
oaths to Charles.
[56] See the vivid description of Carolingian Paris and its first
capture in Palgrave, i. 433-439; but Sir Francis has not wholly
withstood the temptation to exaggerate the antiquity of some of the
existing buildings.
[57] Ann. Prud. Trec. 841 (Pertz, i. 437). 'Interea piratæ Danorum ab
Oceano Euripo devecti Rotumam irruentes, rapinis, ferro, ignique
bacchantes, urbem, monachos, reliquumque vulgum et cædibus et
captivitate pessumdederunt, et omnia monasteria seu quæcumque loca
flumini Sequanæ adhærentia aut depopulati sunt aut multis acceptis
pecuniis territa relinquunt.'
[58] Ann. Prud. Trec. 845. 'Nordmannorum naves centum viginti mense
Martio per Sequanam hinc et abinde cuncta vastantes, Loticiam Parisiorum
nullo penitus obsistente pervadunt. Quibus quum Carolus occurrere
moliretur, sed prævalere suos nullatenus posse prospiceret, quibusdam
pactionibus, et munere septem milium librarum eis exhibito, a
progrediendo compescuit, ac redire persuasit.' So in the Annals of
Fulda, 845 (Pertz. i. 364): 'Nordmanni regnum Karoli vastantes, per
Sequanam usque Parisios navigio venerunt, et tam ab ipso quam incolis
terræ acceptâ pecuniâ copiosâ, cum pace discesserunt.'
[59] Ann. Prud. Trec. 857: 'Dani Sequanæ insistentes cuncta libere
vastant, Lutetiamque Parisiorum adgressi, basilicam beati Petri et
sanctæ Genovefæ incendunt et ceteras omnes, præter domum sancti Stephani
et ecclesiam sancti Vincentii atque Germani præterque ecclesiam sancti
Dionysii, pro quibus tantummodo, ne incenderentur, multa solidorum summa
soluta est.' Sir Francis Palgrave (i. 439,464) gives a vivid picture of
this sack of Paris. Of Saint Denis he adds: 'Saint Denis made a bad
bargain. The Northmen did not hold to their contract, or another company
of pirates did not consider it as binding: the Monastery was burnt to a
shell, and a most heavy ransom paid for the liberation of Abbot Lewis,
Charlemagne's grandson, by his daughter Rothaida.' Sir Francis, as
usual, gives no reference; but we may be sure that he could, if he had
pleased, have given one for the burning of the Monastery as well as for
the capture of the Abbot, which the Annals mention under the next year,
though not in connection with the sack of Paris.
[60] Sir Francis Palgrave, i. 462, says: 'Amongst the calamities of the
times, the destruction of the Parisian monasteries seems to have worked
peculiarly on the imagination. Paschasius Radbertus, the biographer of
Wala, expatiates upon this misery when writing his Commentary on
Jeremiah.' Some extracts are given in Pertz, i. 450: 'Quis umquam
crederet, vel quis umquam cogitare potuisset ... ut piratæ, diversis
admodum collecti ex familiis, Parisiorum attingerent fines, ecclesiasque
Christi hinc inde cremarent circa litus?... Fateor enim quod nullus ex
regibus terræ ista cogitaret, neque ullus habitator orbis nostri audire
potuisset quod Parisium nostrum hostis intraret.'
[61] It is worth notice, that Charles the Bald, as well as his soldiers,
could speak the 'lingua Romana,' or Romance tongue. See the Capitularies
put forth by the Kings Lewis, Charles, and Lothar at Coblentz in 860.
Lewis speaks 'lingua Theothisca,' and Charles, 'lingua Romana,' (Pertz,
Leges, i. 472.) Yet Charles, in his own Capitularies, speaks of 'lingua
Theodisca' as the language of the country, exactly as Lewis does, (i,
482, 497.)
[62] Regino 861: 'Carolus Rex placitum habuit in Compendio ibique cum
optimatum consilio Roberto Comiti Ducatum inter Ligerim et Sequanam
adversum Brittones commendavit, quem cum ingenti industriâ per aliquod
tempus rexit.' Dr. Kalckstein's monograph, _Robert der Tapfere_, has
reached us since this article was written, and we have scarcely had time
to glance at it. We can see that he has gone into the matter with hearty
thoroughness, but we are not able to avail ourselves at all largely of
his researches in detail. We can, however, refer to his clear
investigations of Robert's origin, and of the extent of his grant.
[63] Regino 867: 'Ruotbertus qui _marcam_ tenebat.' So Hincmar, Ann.
865. _Marchio_, in Andegaro.
[64] Richer i. 5: 'Odo patrem habuit ex equestri ordine Rotbertum, avum
vero paternum Witichinum, advenam Germanum.' He appears to have been of
Saxon origin. See Kalckstein, p. 9, and the first 'Excursus.'
[65] The monk of Saint Gallen (Gesta Karoli, i. 10) gives us a
definition of Francia, in the widest sense. 'Franciam vero interdum quum
nominavero, omnes Cisalpinas provincias significo ... in illo tempore
propter excellentiam gloriosissimi Karoli et Galli, et Aquitani, Ædui et
Hispani, Alamanni et Baioarii, non parum se insignitos gloriabantur, si
vel nomine Francorum servorum censeri mererentur.'
[66] Richer i. 14, twice speaks of the Duchy of France, as 'Celtica' and
'Gallia Celtica.' 'Rex [Karolus] Celticæ [Rotbertum] Ducem præficit.'
These are Charles the Simple, and the second Robert, afterwards King.
[67] 'Ann. Fuld.,' 867 (Pertz i., 380). 'Ruodbertus Karoli Regis Comes
apud Ligerim fluvium contra Nordmannos fortiter dimicans occiditur,
alter quodammodo nostris temporibus Machabæus, cujus proelia quæ cum
Brittonibus et Nordmannis gessit, si per omnia scripta fuissent,
Machabæi gestis æquiparari potuissent.' See the details in Regino, 867.
Hincmar, Ann. 866. The battle of Brissarthe is well described in M.
Mourin's 'Comtes de Paris,' a book whose name we have placed at the head
of this article. The volume forms a careful and spirited history of the
rise of the Parisian Kingdom; but it is strongly coloured by Parisian
dreams about the frontier of the Rhine.
[68] Odo did not succeed at once. On account of his youth, and, that of
his brother Robert, the Duchy was granted to Hugh the Abbot. Ann. Met.
867. (See Kalckstein, p. 109.) Odo did not succeed to the whole Duchy
till the death of Hugh in 887 in the middle of the siege, 'Ducatus quem
[Hugo] tenuerat et strenue rexerat Odoni filio Rodberti ab Imperatore
traditur, qui eâ tempestate Parisiorum Comes erat.' (Regius, 887.) We
are not told what was the exact extent of the county.
[69] See especially the entries in the 'Annales Vedastini' (Pertz, ii.
200), under 874 and several following years. Take, above all, the
general picture under 884. 'Nortmanni vero non cessant captivari atque
interfici populum Christianum, atque ecclesias subrui, destructis
moeniis et villis crematis. Per omnes enim plateas jacebant cadavera
clericorum, laicorum, nobilium atque aliorum, mulierum, juvenum, et
lactentium: non enim erat via vel locus quo non jacerent mortui; et erat
tribulatio omnibus et dolor, videntes populum Christianum usque ad
internecionem devastari.'
[70] The Ludwigslied is printed in Max Müller's German Classics, also in
the second volume of Schilter's Thesaurus.
[71] A full account of the battle is given in the Annales Vedastini,
881.
[72] Annales Vedastini, 882. 'Australes Franci (that is, Eastern,
Austrasian, not Southern) congregant exercitum contra Nortmannos, sed
statim terga vertunt, ibique Walo, Mettensis episcopus, corruit, Dani
vero famosissimum Aquisgrani palatium igne cremant et monasteria atque
civitates, Treveris nobilissimam et Coloniam Agrippinam, palatia quoque
regum et villas, cum habitatoribus terræ interfectis, igne cremaverunt.'
[73] Annales Fuldenses (Pertz, i. 390), 876. 'Karolus vero, Hludowici
morte compertâ, regnum illius, cupiditate ductus, invasit, et suæ
ditioni subjugare studuit; existimans se, ut fama vulgabat, non solum
partem regni Hlotharii, quam Hludowicus tenuit et filiis suis utendam
dereliquit, per tyrannidem posse obtinere, verum etiam cunctas civitates
regni Hludowici in occidentali litore Rheni fluminis positas suo regno
addere, id est Mogontiam, Wormatiam, et Nemetum, filiosque fratris per
potentiam opprimere, ita ut nullus ei resistere vel contradicere
auderet.' One is inclined to ask whether there may not be something
prophetic under the first entry under the next year; 'Hludowicus rex
mense Januario, generali conventa habito apud Franconofurt, quos de
regno Karoli tenuit captivos remisit in Galliam.'
[74] Ann. Fuld. 876. The way in which Charles' Imperial dignity is
recorded is remarkable. After a satirical description of the Imperial
costume, the Annal goes on, 'Omnem enim consuetudinem regum Francorum
contemnens, Græcas glorias optimas arbitrabatur, et ut majorem suæ
mentis elationem ostenderet, ablato Regis nomine, se Imperatorem et
Augustum omnium regum cis mare consistentium appellare præcepit.' The
phrase 'cis mare' is remarkable, when we think of the English claims to
Empire, and of the constant use of the word 'transmarinus' to express
England and English things. The common name for diaries in these Annals
is 'Galliæ Tyrannus.'
[75] Abbo, i. 48 (Pertz, ii. 780),--
Urbs mandata fuit Karolo nobis basileo,
Imperio cujus regitur totus prope kosmas
Post Dominum, regem dominatoremque potentum,
Excidium per eam regnum non quod patiatur,
Sed quod salvetur per eam sedeatque serenum.'
[76] Regino 887. (Pertz, i. 596). 'Heinricus cum exercitibus utriusque
regni Parisius venit.' 'Utrumque regnum' means of course the East and
the West Franks. The same Annals, in the next year, speak of Charles as
reigning over 'omnia regna Francorum.'
[77] See especially the Annales Vedastini, 885-890; other details come
from the Chronicle of Regino, 887-890.
[78] Let us take one out of several passages where he describes his own
exploits (ii. 800-302):--
'Nemo stetit supra speculam, solus nisi sæpe
Jam sancti famulus dicti, lignum crucis almæ
In flammas retinens, oculis hæc vidit et inquit.'
[79] The book is printed in the second volume of Pertz, 776-805. The
Third Book has a sort of _Interpretatio_ throughout. We give a few lines
(15-18) as a specimen:--
_laicorum_
_'Tapete undique villose populorum lectus in itinere._
Amphytappa laon extat, badanola necnon;
_Ornamentum decorum valde amant vestem putam vel gumfun claram
potionem per linteum._
Effipiam diamant, strangulam pariterque propomam.
_lenocinatio fugat paleam_
Agagula celebs aginat pecudes nec ablundam.'
But the narrative portions of the poem, though often obscure enough, are
not altogether in this style.
[80] i. 10:--
'Nam medio Sequanae recubans, culti quoque regni
Francigenum, temet statuis per celsa canendo:
Sum polis, ut regina micans omnes super urbes!
Quae statione nites cunctis venerabiliori,
Quisque cupiscit opes Francorum, te veneratur.'
[81] i-15:--
'Insula te gaudet, fluvius sua fert tibi giro
Brachia, complexo muros mulcentia circum
Dextra tui pontes habitant tentoria limfæ
Lævaque claudentes; horum hinc inde tutrices
Cis urbem speculare falas, citra quoque flumen.'
[82] i. 45:--
'Hic Consul venerabatur, Rex atque futurus,
Urbis erat tutor, regni venturus et altor.'
[83] i. 66:--
'Hic Comites Odo fraterque suus radiabant
Rotbertus, pariterque Comes Ragenarius; illic
Pontificisque nepos Ebolus, fortissimus Abba.'
[84] Ann. Ved. 885;--'Nortmanni, patratâ victoriâ valde elati, Parisius
adeunt turrimque statim aggressi, valide oppugnant; et quia necdum
perfecte firmata fuerat, eam se capi sine morâ existimant.'
[85] Regino, 887:--'Erant, ut ferunt triginta, et eo amplius
adversariorum millia, omnes pene robusti bellatores.'
[86] See Freeman's History of the Norman Conquest, i. 270, ed. ii.
[87] i. 38:--'Solo Rex verbo, sociis tamen imperitabat.'
[88] j.--107:
'Fortis Odo innumeros tutudit. Sed quis fuit alter?
Alter Ebolus huic socius fuit æquiperansque;
Septenos unâ potuit terebrare sagittâ,
Quos ludens alios jussit præbere quoquinæ.'
[89] Ann. Ved. 885:--'Dani, multis suorum amissis, rediere ad naves;
indeque sibi castrum statuunt adversus civitatem, eamque obsidione
vallant, machinas construunt, ignem supponunt, et omne ingenium suum
apponunt ad captionem civitatis; sed Christiani adversus eos fortiter
dimicando, in omnibus exstitere superiores.'
[90] Let us take Abbo's description (i. 205) of an engine which may have
been only a sow or a tortoise, but which certainly suggests the Trojan
horse,
'Ergo bis octonis faciunt mirabile visu,
Monstra rotis ignara; modi compacta triadi,
Roboris ingentis, super argete quodque cubante
Domate sublimi cooperto. Nam capiebant
Claustra sinûs arcana uteri penetralia ventris
Sexaginta viros, ut adest rumor, galeatos.'
[91] Ann. Ved. 886. 'Octavo Idus Februarii contigit grave discrimen
infra civitatem habitantibus; nam ex gravissimâ inundatione fluminis
minor pons disruptus est.' It is called 'pictus pons' by Abbo, i. 250.
[92] Ib. 'Illis vero qui intra turrim erant acriter resistentibus, fit
clamor multitudinis usque in coelum; Episcopus desuper muro civitatis
cum omnibus qui in civitate erant nimis flentibus, eo quod suis
subvenire non possent, et quia nil aliud agere poterat, Christo eos
commendabat.'
[93] Ib. 'Nortmanni cum impetu portam ipsius turris adeunt ignemque
subponunt. Et hi qui intra erant, fracti vulneribus et incendio
capiuntur, atque ad opprobrium Christianorum diversis interficiuntur
modis, atque in flumine præcipitantur.'
[94] Ann. Ved, 886. 'Herkengerus [the messenger sent by the Bishop,
described as _Comes_] ... Henricum cum exercitu Parisius venire fecit;
sed nil ibi profecit ... atque in suam rediit regionem.'
Regino (887) makes the same confession. 'Imperator Heinricum ducem cum
exercitu vernali tempore dirigit sed minime prævaluit.' The Fulda Annals
alone (886) seem to make out something of a case for Henry. His army 'in
itinere propter imbrium inundationem et frigus imminens non modicum
equorum suorum perpessi sunt damnum.' The Annalist then adds, 'Quum
illuc pervenissent, Nordmanni rerum omnium abundantiam in munitionibus
suis habentes, manum cum eis conserere nec voluerunt, nec ausi sunt.' He
goes on to say that they spent the whole of Lent and up to the Rogation
days in vain labours (inani labore consumptis). They then went home,
having done nothing except kill some Danes whom they found outside their
camp, and carry off a large number of horses and oxen.
[95] Abbo, ii. 3.
'Saxoniâ vir Ainricus fortisque potensque
Venit in auxilium Gozlini præsulis urbis,
At tribuit victus illi letumque cruentis
Heu paucis auxit vitam nostris, tulit amplam
His prædam. Sub nocte igitur quâdam penetravit
Castra Danûm, multos et equos illic sibi cepit.'
After some further description he adds:
'Sic et Ainricus postremum castra reliquit,
Culpa tamen, fugiente morâ, defertur ad arcem.'
[96] Ann. Ved. 886. 'Gauzlinus vero, dum omnibus modis populo Christiano
juvare vellet, cum Sigfrido, Rege Danorum, amicitiam fecit, ut per hoc
civitas ab obsidione liberaretur. Dum hæc aguntur, Episcopus gravi
corruit in infirmitate, diem clausit extremum, et in loculo positus est
in ipsâ civitate. Cujus obitus Nortmannis non latuit; et antequam
civibus ejus obitus nuntiaretur, a Nortmannis de foris prædicatur
Episcopum esse mortuum.'
[97] Ann. Ved. 886. 'Dehinc vulgus pertæsi una cum morte patris
obsidione, irremediabiliter contristantur; quos Odo, illustris Comes,
suis adhortationibus roborabat. Nortmanni tamen quotidie non cessant
oppugnare civitatem; et ex utrâque parto multi interficiuntur, pluresque
vulneribus debilitantur, escæ etiam coeperunt minui in civitate.'
[98] Ib. 'Odo videns affligi populum, clam exiit de civitate, a
principibus regni requirens auxilium, et ut Imperatori innotesceret
velocius perituram civitatem, nisi ei auxilium detur.'
[99] Ib. 'Dehinc regressus, ipsam civitatem de ejus absentiâ nimis
repperit moerentem; non tamen in eam sine admiratione introiit.
Nortmanni ejus reditum præscientes, accurrerunt ei ante portam turris;
sed ille, omisso equo, a dextris et sinistris adversarios cædens,
civitatem ingressus, tristem populum reddidit lætum.'
[100] 'Æstivo tempore, antequam segetes in manipulos redigerentur,' says
Regino (887) of the coming of Henry, and adds, 'Post hæc Imperator ...
venit.' This does not practically contradict the Annales Vedastini
(886): 'Circa auctumni tempora Imperator Carisiacum veniens cum ingenti
exercitu, præmisit Heinricum, dictum Ducem Austrasiorum, Parisius.'
[101] Regino 887. 'Idem Heinricus cum exercitibus utriusque regni
Parisius venit.'
[102] Ann. Ved. 886: 'Qui quum advenisset illuc cum exercitu prope
civitatem, cum paucis inconsulte coepit equitare circa castra Danorum,
volens invisere qualiter exercitus castra eorum posset attingere, vel
quo ipsi castra figere deberent.' To which Regino (887) adds: 'Situm
loci contemplatur aditumque perquirit, quo exercitui cum hostibus minus
periculosus pateret congressus.'
[103] This is told most fully by Regino (887): 'Porro Nordmanni
audientes appropinquare exercitum, foderant foveas, latitudinis unius
pedis et profunditatis trium, in circuitu castrorum, easque quisquiliis
et stipulâ operuerant, semitas tantum discursui necessarias intactas
reservantes.'
[104] Ib. 'Aspiciente universo exercitu, absque morâ trucidant, arma
auferunt, et spolia ex parte diripiunt.'
[105] The exploit of Count Ragnar comes only from the Annales Vedastini:
'Quum nudâssent illum armis suis, supervenit quidam e Francis, Ragnerus
nomine Comes, ejusque corpus non absque vulneribus illis tulit; quod
statim Imperatori nuntiatum est.' Regino says only, 'Agminibus impetum
facientibus, vix cadaver exanime eruitur.' He adds, 'Exercitus, amisso
duce ad propria revertitur.'
[106] Abbo ii. 217:
'En et Ainricus, superis crebro vocitatus,
Obsidione volens illos vallare, necatur.
Inque suos, nitens Sequanam transire, Danorum
Rex Sinric, geminis ratibus spretis, penetravit
Cum sociis ter nam quinquagenis, patiturque
Naufragium medio fluvii, fundum petiturus,
Quo fixit, comitesque simul, tentoria morti.
Hic sua castra prius Sequanæ contingere fundum
Quo surgens oritur, dixit, quam linquere regnum
Francorum, fecit Domino tribuente quod inquit.'
[107] Regino, 887. 'Post hæc Imperator, Galliarum populos perlustrans,
Parisius cum immenso exercitu venit, ibique adversos hostes castra
posuit, sed nil dignum Imperatoriâ majestate in eodem loco gessit.' So
Ann. Ved. 886: 'Ille vero audito multum doluit; accepto tamen consilio,
Parisius venit cum manu validâ; sed quia Dux periit, ipse nil utile
gessit.' So the Annals of Fulda, 886: 'Imperator per Burgundiam obviam
Nortmannos in Galliam, qui tunc Parisios erant, usque pervenit. Occiso
ibi Heinrico, Marchensi Francorum, qui in id tempus Niustriam tenuit,
Rex, parum prospere actis rebus, revertitur in sua.'
[108] Ann. Ved. 886. 'Factum est vere consilium miserum; nam utrumque,
et civitatis redemptio illis promissa est, et data est via sine
impedimento, ut Burgundiam hieme deprædarent. So Ann. Fuld. 886:
'Imperator perterritus, quibusdam per Burgundiam vagandi licentiam
dedit, quibusdam plurimam promisit pecuniam, si a regno ejus statute
inter eos tempore discederent.'
[109] Regino, 887. 'Ad extremum, concessis terris et regionibus quæ
ultra Sequanam erant Nordmannis ad deprædandum, eo quod incolæ illarum
sibi obtemperare nollent, recessit.'
[110] The details follow immediately after in Regino.
[111] See above, p. 59. So Ann. Ved. 886. 'Terrâ patris sui Rothberti
Odoni Comiti concessâ, Imperator castra movit.'
[112] Ann. Ved. 888.
[113] Ib. 'Odo vero Rex Remis civitatem contra missos Arnulfi perrexit,
qui ei coronam, ut fertur, misit, quam in ecclesiâ Dei genitricis in
natali sancti Briccii capiti impositam, ab omni populo Rex adclamatur.'
Cf. Ann. Fuld., 888-895. Regino 895. Arnulf was not crowned Emperor till
806.
[114] Regino, 888. 'Nordmanni, qui Parisiorum urbem obsidebant, miram et
inauditam rem, non solum nostrâ, sed etiam superiore ætate fecerunt.'
[115] Ib. 'Quum civitatem inexpugnabilem esse persensissent, omni
virtute omnique ingenio laborare coeperunt, quatenus urbe post tergum
relictâ, classem cum omnibus copiis per Sequanam sursum possent evehere,
et sic Hionnam fluvium ingredientes, Burgundiæ fines absque obstaculo
penetrarent.'
[116] Ann. Ved. 886.
[117] Ib.
[118] Ib.
[119] Regino, 889. 'Nordmanni a Senonicâ urbe recedentes, denuo Parisius
cum omnibus copiis devenerunt. Et quum illis descensus fluminis a
civibus omnino inhiberetur, rursus castra ponunt, civitatem totis
viribus oppugnant, sed, Deo opem ferente, nihil prævalent.'
[120] Ann. Ved. 888. 'Circa auctumni vero tempora Odo Rex, adunato
exercitu, Parisius venit; ibique castra metatus est prope civitatem, ne
iterum ipsa obsideretur.'
[121] Regino, 890. 'Civibus qui continuis operum ac vigiliarum laboribus
induruerant, et assiduis bellorum conflictibus exercitati erant,
audaciter reluctantibus, Nordmanni, desperatis rebus, naves per terram
cum magno sudore trahunt, et sic alveum repetentes, Britanniæ finibus
classem trajiciunt. Quoddam castellum in Constantiensi territorio, quod
ad sanctum Loth dicebatur, obsident.' The action of Odo comes from Ann.
Ved. 889. 'Contra quos Odo [Danos] Rex venit; et nuntiis
intercurrentibus, munerati ab eo regressi a Parisius, relictâque
Sequanâ, per mare navale iter atque per terram pedestre et equestre
agentes in territorio Constantiæ civitatis circa castrum sancti Laudi
sedem sibi faciunt, ipsumque castrum oppugnare non cessant.'
[122] Widukind, iii. 4. 'Exinde, collectâ ex omni exercitu electorum
militum manu, Rothun Danorum urbem adiit, sed difficultate locorum,
asperiorique hieme ingruente, plagâ eos quidem magnâ percussit; incolumi
exercitu, infecto negotio, post tres menses Saxoniam regressus est.'
[123] See Dudo's account in Duchesne, Rer. Norm. Scriptt., 130-134; or
Palgrave, ii. 562-578.
[124] Richer, ii. 54. 'Tres itaque Reges, in unum collecti, primi
certaminis laborem Lauduno inferendum decernunt. Et sine morâ, illo
exercitum ducunt. Quum ergo ex adverso montis eminentiam viderent, et
omni parte urbis situm explorarent, cognito incassum sese ibi
certaturos, ab eâ urbe discedunt et Remos adoriuntur.' He then goes on
to describe the taking of Rheims. This is confirmed by Widukind, iii. 3.
'Rex cum exercitu Lugdunum adiit, eamque armis tentavit.' He places the
taking of Rheims after the attack on Paris, and afterwards, perhaps
inadvertently, speaks of Laon as if it had been taken. _Lugdunum_ is of
course a mistake for _Laudunum_.
[125] Flodoard, 946 (Pertz, iii. 393). 'Sicque trans Sequanam
contendentes, loca quæque præter civitates gravibus atterunt
deprædationibus.'
[126] Widukind (iii. 2) records Otto's answer to a boastful message of
Hugh. 'Ad quod Rex famosum satis reddit responsum; sibi vero fore tantam
multitudinem pileorum ex culmis contextorum, quos ei præsentari
oporteret, quantam nec ipse nec pater suus umquam videret. Et revera,
quum esset magnus valde exercitus, triginta scilicet duarum legionum,
non est inventus, qui hujusmodi non uteretur tegumento, nisi rarissimus
quisque.' On these straw hats see Pertz's note.
[127] Widukind (iii. 3.), immediately after the attempt on Rouen, adds,
'Inde Parisius perrexit, Hugonemque ibi obsedit, memoriam quoque
Dionysii martyris digne honorans veneratus est.'
[128] Richer, ii. 57. 'Decem numero juvenes quibus constanti mente fixum
erat omne periculum subire.' He then describes their pilgrim's garb.
[129] Richer, ii. 57. 'Ille farinarium sese memorat, at illi prosecuti,
siquid amplius possit interrogant. Ille etiam piscatorum Ducis magistrum
se asserit, et ex navium accommodatione questum aliquem sibi adesse.'
This miller of the Seine appears also in a story of Geoffrey
Grisegonelle in the Gesta Consulum Andegavensium, vi. (D'Achery,
Spicilegium, iii. 247). 'In crastino Consul furtivus viator, egreditur,
non longe a Parisiacâ urbe burgum sancti Germani devitans, a
molendinario qui molendinos Secanæ custodiebat, dato ei suo habitu,
navigium sibi parari impetravit.'
[130] All that Richer (ii. 58,) tells us is that Otto's troops, after
crossing the river, 'terrâ recepti incendiis prædisque vehementibus
totam regionem usque Ligerim depopulati sunt. Post hæc feruntur in
terram piratarum ac solo tenus devastant. Sicque Regis injuriam
atrociter ulti; iter ad sua retorquent.' The 'terra piratarum' is of
course Normandy.
[131] Lothar was the son of Lewis and Gerberga, the sister of Otto the
Great; Lothar and the younger Otto were therefore cousins.
[132] Richer iii. 71. 'Æream aquilam quæ in vertice palatii a Karolo
Magno acsi volans fixa erat, in vulturnum converterunt. Nam Germani eam
in favonium converterant, subtiliter signicantes Gallos suo equitatu
quandoque posse devinci.' So Thietmar of Merseburg, iii. 6 (Pertz. iii.
761), records the turning of the eagle and adds, 'Hæc stat in orientali
parte domûs, morisque fuit omnium hunc locum possidentium, ad sua eam
vertere regna.' The raid on Aachen is also described by Baldric in the
Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium i. 96 (Pertz. vii. 440). He always
speaks of Lothar as 'Rex Karlensium,' and of his kingdom as 'partes
Karlensium.' In Thietmar he is 'Rex Karolingorum.'
[133] Richer iii. 74, 'Sic etiam versâ vice, Lotharium adurgens, eo quod
militum copiam non haberet fluvium Sequanam transire compulit, et
gemebundum ad Ducem ire coegit.'
[134] Gest. Ep. Cam. i. 97, 'Paternis moribus instructus, ecclesias
observavit immo etiam opulentis muneribus ditare potius æstimavit.'
[135] Richer iii. 74, 'Per fines urbis Remorum transiens sancto Remigio
multum honorem exhibuit.'
[136] This story comes from Baldric, Gest. Ep, Cam. i. 97. 'Deinde vero
ad pompandam victoriæ suæ gloriam Hugoni, qui Parisius residebat, per
legationem denuntians, quod in tantam sublimitatem Alleluia faceret ei
decantari in quanta non audierit, accitis quam pluribus clericis
_Alleluia te Martyrum_ in loco qui dicitur Mons Martyrum, in tantum
elatis vocibus decantari præcepit, ut attonitis auribus ipse Hugo et
omnis Parisiorum plebs miraretur.' The 'Mons Martyrum' is, we need
scarcely say, Montmartre.
[137] Gest. Cons. Andeg. vi. 2. Very little can be made of a story in
which the invasion of Otto is placed in the reign of Robert, the son of
Hugh Capet, who is represented as King, his father being still only
Duke. The expedition of Otto is thus described. 'Otto siquidem Rex
Alemannorum cum universis copiis suis Saxonum et _Danorum_ Montem
Morentiaci obsederat, et urbi Parisius multos assultus ignominiose
faciebat.' Geoffrey Grisegonelle comes to the rescue with three thousand
men.
[138] Richer iii. 77. The name of the French champion is Ivo.
[139] Ib. iii. 77. 'Otto Gallorum exercitum sensim colligi non ignorans,
suum etiam tam longo itinere quam hostium incursu posse minui sciens,
redire disponit, et datis signis castra amoverunt.'
[140] Rudolf Glaber i. 3. His way of telling the whole story should be
noticed. 'Lotharius ... ut erat agilis corpore, et validus, sensuque
integer, tentavit redintegrare regnum, ut olim fuerat.' This is
explained in the next sentence. 'Nam partem ipsius regni superiorem, quæ
etiam Lotharii Regnum cognominatur, Otto Rex Saxonum, immo Imperator
Romanorum, [this means Otto the Great, "primus ac maximus Otto"] ad
suum, id est Saxonum, inclinaverat regnum.' The retreat is thus
described. 'Lotharius ex omni Franciâ atque Burgundiâ militari manu in
unum coactâ, persecutus est Ottonis exercitum usque in fluvium Mosam,
multosque ex ipsis fugientibus in eodem flumine contigit interire.'
[141] Richer iii. 77. 'Axonæ fluvii vada festinantes alii transmiserant,
alii vero ingrediebantur quum exercitus a Rege missus a tergo
festinantibus affuit. Qui reperti fuere mox gladiis hostium fusi sunt,
plures quidem at nullo nomine clari.'
[142] Ib. iii. 80, 81. 'Belgicæ pars quæ in lite fuerat in jus Ottonis
transiit.' Rudolf Glaber clearly means the same thing when he says,
'Dehinc vero uterque cessavit, Lothario minus explente quod cupiit.'
[143] Gest. Ep. Cam. i. 98. 'Qui [Otto] quum satis exhaustâ ultione
congruam vicissitudinem se rependisse putarat, ad hiberna oportere se
concedere ratus; inde simul revocato equitatu, circa festivitatem sancti
Andreæ, jam hieme subeunte, reditum disposuit; remensoque itinere, bono
successu gestarum rerum gaudens super Axonam fluvium castra metari
præcepit.'
[144] Ib. 'Paucis tamen famulorum remanentibus, qui retrogradientes--nam
sarcinas bellicæ supellectilis convectabant--præ fatigatione oneris,
tenebris siquidem jam noctis incumbentibus, transitum in crastino
differe arbitrati sunt.'
[145] Gest. Ep. Cam. i. 98. 'Ipsâ etenim nocte in tantum excrevit
alveolus, ut difficultate importuosi littoris neuter alteri manum
conferre potuerit; hoc ita sane, credo, Dei voluntate disposito, ne
strages innumerabilis ederetur utrimque.'
[146] Ib. The prize was to be, 'Commissâ invicem pugnâ, cui Deus
annueret laureatus regni imperio potiretur.' This challenge again
reminds us of Brihtnoth. Compare the references in Freeman, Norman
Conquest, i. 271, Note 1.
[147] Ib. i. 98. 'Quid tot ab utrâque parte cædentur? Veniant ambo Reges
in unum tantummodo, nobisque procul spectantibus, summi periculi soli
subeuntes una conferantur, unoque fuso cæteri reservati victori
subjiciantur.'
[148] Ib. Semper vestrum Regem vobis vilem haberi audivimus non
credentes; nunc autem vobismetipsis fatentibus, credere fas est. Numquam
nobis quiescentibus noster Imperator pugnabit, numquam nobis sospitibus
in proelio periclitabitur.' Compare the proposal of the Argeians for a
judicial combat to decide the right to the disputed land of Thyrea;
Thuc. v. 41, τοῖς δὲ Λακεδαιμονίοις τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ἐδόκει μωρία εἶναι
ταῦτα, much as it seemed to Count Godfrey.
[149] His comment (Gest. Ep. Cam. i. 99) is, 'Hoc igitur modo Regibus
inter se discordantibus, jam dictu difficile est quot procellis
factionum intonantibus ab ipsis suis vassallis afficitur Tethdo
episcopus.'
[150] Richer iii. 78. Lothar debates whether he shall oppose Otto or
make friends with him. 'Si staret contra, cogitabat possibile esse Ducem
opibus corrumpi, et in amicitiam Ottonis relabi. Si reconciliaretur
hosti, id esse accelerandum, ne Dux præsentiret, et ne ipse quoque
vellet reconciliari. Talibus in dies afficiebatur, et exinde his duobus
Ducem suspectum habuit.' See also the story of Hugh's dealings with Otto
(82-85).
[151] So Thietmar of Merseburg, iii. 6. 'Reversus inde Imperator
triumphali gloriâ, tantum hostibus incussit terrorem ut numquam post
talia incipere auderent; recompensatumque est iis quicquid dedecoris
prius intulere nostris.'
[152] That is, simply kinswomen; _parentes_ in the French sense.
[153] Thierry's 'History of the Norman Conquest,' book i.
[154] Quod idem _nostram ignaviam et segnitiem_ simul prodit, quod nec
tam gravi necessitate moveri, nec tam commoda lege cogi potuerimus; quin
tam dies res tanta (qua majoris esse momenti nihil unquam potuerit)
intacta pene remanserit.
[155] Biblius in plurisque apud nos Ecclesiis, aut deficientibus aut
tritis; et nemine, quantum ego audire potui, de excudenis novis
cogitante; id pro irriti conatus sum in Britannica Bibliorum versione,
quod foeliciter factum est in Anglicana.
[156] Nephew of Sir Hugh Middleton, who brought the New River to London.
[157] Vol. iv., pp. 293-4; and Appendix to vol. iv., p. 63.
[158]
'Mae dy ffeiriaid hwyntau'n cysgu,
Ac yn gado'r bobol bechu
Ac i fyw y modd y mynnon
Heb na cherydd na chynghorion.'
[159] 'Llyfryddiaeth y Cymry,' p. 211.
[160] Mr. Gladstone, to his great honour, has had the courage to break
through this practice, by his recent appointment of a thorough Welshman
to the diocese of St. Asaph.
[161] 'Justice to Wales: Report of the Association of Welsh Clergy in
the West Riding of the County of York,' p. 8.
[162] Morgan's 'Life and Times of H. Harris,' p. 41.
[163] 'The Christian Leaders of the Last Century,' by the Rev. J. C.
Ryle, p. 192.
[164] 'Johnes,' p. 63.
[165] This calculation does not include Monmouthshire.
[166] The instructions given as to the mode of collecting the returns
are these: 'In order to fill this schedule correctly, it will be
necessary to appoint persons in whom confidence can be placed, to count
every congregation and school in the parish, and that on the same
Sunday; not taking one place on one Sunday and another place on another
Sunday. Care should be taken not to give account of any place in the
schedule that is not within the limits of the parish. On the other side
of the schedule let all the persons who have been engaged in counting
write their names, as an attestation of the correctness of the returns.'
[167] Of late years, however, the Nonconformists have taken up the
question of Day school education very strenuously and successfully, so
that there are at this time more than 400 British or neutral schools in
Wales.
[168] Minutes of Council, 1854-5, p. 602.
[169] Report of the Committee of Council on Education, 1868-9, p. 179.
[170] 'Considerations on the Revision of the English New Testament.'
[171] _British Quarterly Review_, April, 1868.
[172] The valuable earlier Auchinleck MS. is written by five or six
hands.
[173] 'Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises of the 12th and 13th
centuries.' Edited by Richard Morris. First series, 2 parts, 8vo.
London: 1867-68.
[174] The 'Story of Genesis and Exodus,' an Early English Song, about
A.D. 1250; now first edited from an unique MS. by Richard Morris. 8vo.
London: 1865.
[175] Father, God of all things, Almighty Lord, highest king, give thou
me a propitious season, to show this world's beginning, Thee, Lord God,
to honour, whetherso I read or sing.
[176] First.
[177] Unnatural.
[178] Trouble.
[179] 'Seinte Marherete,' the Maiden and Martyr, in Old English. Edited
by Oswald Cockayne, M.A. London: 1866.
[180] 'Hali Meidenhad.' An Alliterative Homily of the thirteenth
century. Edited by Oswald Cockayne. London: 1866.
[181] The 'Lay of Havelok the Dane;' composed in the reign of Edward I.,
about A.D. 1280. Formerly edited by Sir F. Madden, and now re-edited by
the Rev. Walter W. Skeat. _Extra Series._ London: 1868.
[182] 'King Horn,' with fragments of 'Floriz and Blauncheflour,' and the
'Assumption of our Lady.' Edited, with Notes and Glossary, by J. Rowson
Lumby. London: 1866.
[183] Parallel Extracts from Twenty-nine MSS. of 'Piers Plowman,' with
comments, and a proposal for the Society's Three-text edition of this
poem, by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat. London. 1866. The 'Vision of William
concerning Piers Plowman.' By William Langland (A.D. 1362), edited from
the Vernon MS., by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat. London: 1867.
[184] 'Pierce the Ploughman's Crede' (about 1394 A.D.), transcribed and
edited from MS. Trin. Coll. Cam. R. 3, 15, collated with MS. Bibl. Reg.
18 B. xvii. in the British Museum, and with the old printed text of
1553, by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat. London: 1867.
[185] Dan Michel's 'Ayenbite of Inwyt; or, Remorse of Conscience,' in
the Kentish dialect. 1340 A.D. Edited by Richard Morris. London: 1866.
[186] 'English Gilds.' The original ordinances of more than one hundred
Early English Gilds, from original MSS. of the 14th and 15th centuries.
Edited, with Notes, by the late Toulmin Smith; with an Introduction and
Glossary, &c., by his daughter, Lucy Toulmin Smith, London: 1870.
[187] 'Early English Alliterative Poems,' in the West Midland dialect of
the 14th century. Edited by Richard Morris. London: 1864.
[188] 'The Romance of William of Palerne' (otherwise known as the
Romance of William and the Werwolf). Edited by Rev. Walter W. Skeat.
London: 1867.
[189] 'Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight.' An Alliterative Romance-Poem.
About 1320-30 A.D. By the Author of Early English Alliterative Poems.
Re-edited by Richard Morris. London: 1864.
[190] 'Lancelot of the Laik.' A Scottish Metrical Romance. About
1490-1500. Re-edited by the Rev. W. W. Skeat. 8vo. London: 1865.
[191] 'Arthur:' a short Sketch of his Life and History, in English
Verse, of the first half of the 15th century. Edited by F. J. Furnivall.
London: 1864.
[192] 'Morte Arthure.' Edited from Robert Thornton's MS. (about 1440
A.D.), in the Library of Lincoln Cathedral, by George G. Perry. London:
1865.
[193] One of Arthur's grand achievements is the capture, after a severe
siege, of the city of Metz. The Duke of Lorraine is sent to Dover, and
the government of the country is otherwise provided for by Arthur.
[194] Looks.
[195] Is frightened.
[196] Visor.
[197] Face.
[198] Health.
[199] 'Merlin; or, the Early History of King Arthur.' A prose Romance
(about 1450-1460 A.D.) Edited from the unique MS. in the University
Library, Cambridge, by Henry B. Wheatley. Parts I.--III. London:
1865-69.
[200] 'The Romance of the Chevalere Assigne.' Re-edited by Henry H.
Gibbs. London: 1868.
[201] 'The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry.' Compiled for the
instruction of his daughters. Translated from the original French, in
the reign of Henry VI., and edited by Thomas Wright. London: 1868.
[202] 'The Wright's Chaste Wife.' A merry tale. By Adam of Cobsam. About
1462. Edited by F. J. Furnivall. 1865.
[203] 'Political, Religious, and Love Poems.' Edited by F. J. Furnivall.
London: 1866.
[204] 'The Babees Book, &c. Manners and Meals in Olden Time.' Edited by
F. J. Furnivall. London: 1868.
[205] 'The Book of Quinte Essence, or the Fifth Being; that is to say,
Man's Heaven.' Edited by F. J. Furnivall. London: 1866.
[206] 'English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle de Hampole.' Edited from
Robert Thornton's MS., cir. 1440. By George G. Perry. London: 1866.
[207] 'Religious Pieces in Prose and Vers.' Edited from Robert
Thornton's MS., cir. 1440. By George G. Perry. London: 1867.
[208] 'Instructions for Parish Priests.' By John Myrc. Edited from
Cotton MS., Claudius A II. By Edward Peacock. London: 1868.
[209] 'Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, the Parliament of Devils, and
other Religious Poems.' Edited by F. J. Furnivall. London: 1867.
[210] We should be glad to have an exposition of the 'Catholic' view
relative to the use of capitals, what special sanctity is supposed to
reside in them, and what rule governs their employment. They form a
marked feature in 'Catholic' literature, and certainly sometimes puzzle
us. Why, for example, should 'Party' have a capital here?
[211] The ex-Emperor's selfishness is proved by his never having tried
to introduce anything answering to our Poor Law, with the working of
which he must have been thoroughly acquainted. Our system is far from
perfect; but it saves us from those terrible food revolutions, one of
which has so lately made Paris such a pitiable sight. Louis Napoleon
preferred the French voluntary system, because he always hoped to get
the _ouvriers_ in hand (as he had got the peasants), and to use them,
too, against any rising of the more intelligent classes.
[212] Benjamin Constant is a notable instance of the want of staunchness
of too many French writers. At first strongly against the Empire, he was
won over by the uncle far more easily than poor Prévost-Paradol was by
the nephew.
[213] Witness the cruel exactions, at Compiègne (_Pall Mall Gazette_,
11th March) and elsewhere, during the armistice and after the conclusion
of peace.
[214] The hatred is reciprocated. Germany does not forget French
occupation. An eminent German remarked to us the other day that more
than a dozen Prussian towns are still paying the interest of the money
borrowed to pay the first Napoleon's exactions. He remarked, too, on the
cruelties which the French practised; and said that Germany remembers
Davoust at Hamburg, and his turning out 26,000 people on New Year's-day
to perish in the cold, because they could not show that they had a
sufficient stock of siege provisions.
[215] Yet the clergy, as might be predicted from the fulsomeness of
their homage, only flattered Napoleon for their own ends. They soon
showed their ingratitude. Pradt, Archbishop of Mechlin, invented the
epithet, _Jupiter-Scapin_. Talleyrand did his best to pull down the
falling Empire. The peasantry whom they had taught were less fickle.
[216] A curiosity in the history of Catechisms is that in use in Spain
while Napoleon was extolled as God's image on earth in the neighbouring
country. Therein young Spaniards were taught as follows: 'Tell me, my
child, who are you?'--'A Spaniard, by the grace of God.' 'Who is the
enemy of our happiness?'--'The Emperor of the French.' 'How many natures
hath he?'--'Two; the human and the diabolical.'--Mignet, vol. ii. 336.
[217] Scrutator has tried to prove that it was really _Prussia_, and not
_France_, which made war inevitable.
[218] Of the sad civil war in the capital we would only say that it is
partly due to the want of a proper Poor Law, partly to the justly bitter
feeling caused by the hard terms of peace--terms so different from those
of 1815, which secured fifty years' peace, and eventually made France
and England friends.
[219] It is needless to enumerate the number of English essays and books
upon Berkeley and his philosophy which have recently appeared. It may
not be so well known to our readers that Berkeley's doctrines are at
present very widely discussed in Germany. A great deal of this
discussion is doubtless due to the exertions of that fervid Berkeleian,
Dr. T. Collyns Simon, who, according to a German critic, 'reist in
Deutschland umher, um mit allen Mitteln des Worts und der Schrift,
propaganda für seinen Meister zu machen;' but the interest shown on the
subject must rest on a deeper basis. Of German dissertations on Berkeley
we have seen the following:--R. Hoppe in _Bergman's Zeitschrift_, v.
Heft. 2. 1870; Freiherr v. Reichlin-Meldegg, in _Fichte's Zeitschrift_,
lvi. Heft. 2, 1870; T. Collyns Simon and H. Ulrici, in _Fichte's
Zeitschrift_, lvii. Heft. 1; and F. Friederich's _Ueber Berkeley's
Idealismus_, 1870. To these must be added, as the most important of all,
Prof. F. Ueberweg's translation of Berkeley's 'Principles of Human
Knowledge,' with a short preface and some very valuable notes, published
in Heimann's cheap series of philosophical works, Berlin, 1869. The
growing interest felt in Berkeley is also to be seen in the larger
amount of space given to the criticism of his doctrines in the more
recent work on the history of philosophy, such as Freiherr v.
Reichlin-Meldegg's _Einleitung zur Philosophie_, Wien, 1870.
[220] We use the word 'Idealist' in the modern German sense. It is the
technical term to denote that tendency in human speculation which is
embodied in Plato's Dialectic, Schelling's Natur-Philosophie, Hegel's
metaphysical logic, or Ferrier's scorn for Psychology, and is opposed to
'Realist,' which is applied to Herbart's Metaphysic, Mill's Ethics, or
Buckle's History of Civilization; cf. Dr. F. Ueberweg on 'Idealism,
Realism, and Ideal-Realism,' in Fichte's _Zeitschrift_, vol. 34.
[221] The writer of an article on the Idealism of Berkeley and Collier,
in the _North British Review_, January, 1871, summarizes forcibly the
arguments against Berkeley which have been urged by the so-called school
of Natural Realists. It is evidently an attempt to show that the
theories of Berkeley and Collier are incompatible with the doctrine of
the Incarnation, and therefore, the writer thinks, with that of
Transubstantiation also.
[222] Professor Hermann Ulrici, of Halle, in Fichte's _Zeitschrift_,
vol. lvii. Pt. 1, 1870, pp. 171-4.
[223] As Freiherr v. Reichlin-Meldegg does, _Enleit. für Philosophie_,
p. 122.
[224] The advance which Berkeley made from the stand-point of Locke may
not have been made very clear by this abstract statement; but the
difference of conception was just the difference between the Baconian
and modern induction. Bacon endeavoured to explain everything by
referring it to its _form_; and this form was a contemporaneous cause,
corresponding very much to the abstract ideas of Locke, or rather to
those abstract ideas which are supposed to be the more important, viz.,
the primary qualities (cf. Ellis and Spedding's Ed. of Bacon, I., p.
29). Modern induction explains by referring a consequent to its
invariable antecedent. It introduces the idea of motion, succession, or
flow, and explains a thing by showing its place in the flow of
phenomena. It is interesting to note that while Berkeley was thus
substituting a living causality for the abstract ideas of Locke, and
explaining the construction and objective knowledge of things by their
position in the successive moments of a personal agency, other
philosophers were endeavouring to solve the same metaphysical and
psychological problem in somewhat the same way. Leibnitz's 'Monadologie'
was really an attempt to explain the existence of universals and
objective principles of knowledge by the thought of growth or
development or flow; but Leibnitz's explanation differs from Berkeley's
in this, that he kept chiefly the thought of the development itself
before his mind, and conceived a gradual progression through impersonal
existences up to the conscious self, while Berkeley, keeping to his
direct spiritual intuition, ever looks at this flow as manifesting the
presence and action of a free personal spirit. The same general thought
is also at the basis of Wolff's hint that the _causal-nexus_, not
abstract ideas, enables us to explain how universal judgments are formed
out of individual experiences (_logica_, § 706). It has developed since
then into the conception of _organic development_, which plays such an
important part in Kant's 'Kritik der Urtheilskraft,' is the fundamental
thought in such post Kantian metaphysics as the 'Natur-Philosophie' of
Schelling, and the 'Mikrokosmos' of Herman Lotze, and may be called the
metaphysical foundation for the scientific method which has led to the
theories of Darwin in natural history, of Aug. Schleicher in philology,
and of the Leyden School in the history of religions.
[225] In proof of this, we need only refer to the admirable preface of
Professor Fraser, especially pp. 3, 5, 7, 9.
[226] Berkeley is usually esteemed the foremost of modern Nominalists,
but we question if his Nominalism was more than a denial of
Conceptualism. It was not a positive doctrine. There are several
assertions in his 'Common-place Book' which show that even in his
earlier days he was not a Nominalist in the proper sense of the term. He
denies once and again Locke's statement that we know particulars only;
he believes in the real existence of classes or kinds; and he says that
genera and species are not abstractions. In his later writings he
probably found that in his eagerness to attack the conceptualist
doctrine of abstract conceptions, he had probably been carried too far,
for in his third edition of 'Alciphron' he curiously omits those
chapters which treat of Nominalism, and in 'Siris' the reality of
universals is assumed throughout.
[227] Berkeley's 'Abhandlung über die Principien der menschlichen
Erkenntniss. In's Deutsch übersetzt,' &c., von Dr. Fr. Ueberweg, pp.
110-112.
[228] Ueberweg's 'Logik,' § 46.
[229] 'Logik,' § 57.
[230] There is undoubtedly one difficulty to this hypothesis, and that
difficulty arises from Berkeley's mathematical opinions; for the whole
question between Berkeley and Newton in the 'Analyst' may be resolved to
this one particular,--in Berkeley's view a line is a series of points,
in Newton's the line is not the series of separate points, but these
points coalescing and arranging themselves in length. Newton says,
'Lineæ describuntur ac describendo generantur non per appositiones
partium sed per motum continuum punctorum.' The difference between them
was just the difference between Nominalism and Realism, and Berkeley
takes the Nominalist side. This may have been due to his ignorance of
mathematics.
[231] Ueberweg, 'Logik,' § 1.
[232] Plotinus Enn. III. iii.; c. 6.
[233] Dr. J. H. Stirling on Sir W. Hamilton, being the 'Philosophy of
Perception,' p. 124.
[234] The best of these is decidedly that by 'Scrutator.' If we could
unmask the writer, we believe we should find Mr. Otway, for he writes
with a full knowledge of the facts, and his views are laid down with
geometrical precision.
[235] Despatch of Benedetti to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs,
dated March 31, 1869.
[236] Despatch of Earl Granville to Lord Loftus, dated July 15, 1870.
[237] Despatch of Bismark to Count Bernstoff, July 18, 1870.
[238] Letters of Count Daru, dated February 1, and M. de Lavalette,
dated February 16.
[239] Vide _British Quarterly Review_ for October, 1866, p. 524-6.
[240] Proclamation of the King of Prussia from Versailles to the German
people, dated January 18, 1871.
[241] Sir Alexander Malet shows conclusively that Austria was not a
voluntary agent in the dismemberment of Denmark, and that, had we
actively interposed, _she would_ have been very glad to back out of the
partnership with Prussia.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII - January and April, 1871" ***
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