SM82t Cornell University Library PR 5473.S6A82 1903 Some early impressions.Journalism. Editi 3 1924 013 553 320 Some Early Impressions. 305 Pilgrim-desired Assisi is there ; Spoleto proud Witli Rome's imperial arches, with hanging woods divine : Monte Falco hovers above the hazy vale Of sweet Clltumnus loitering under poplars pale ; O'er Foligno, Trevi clings upon Apennine. And over this Umbrian earth — from whei'e with bright snow spread Towers abrupt Lernessa, huge, like a dragon's chine. To western Ammiata's mist-appareled head, Ammiata that sailors watch on wide Tyrrhenian waves — Lie in the jealous gloom of cold and secret shrine Or Gorgon-sculptured chamber hewn in old rock caves. Hiding their dreams from the light, the austere Etruscan dead. O lone forests of oak and little cyclamens red Flowering under shadowy silent boughs benign ! Streams that wander beneath us over a pebbly bed ! Hedges of dewy hawthorn and wild woodbine ! Now as the eastern ranges flush and the high air chills Blurring meadowy vale, blackening heaths of pine. Now as in distant Todi, loftily towered — a sign To wearying travelers — lights o'er hollow Tiber gleam, Now our voices are stilled and our eyes are given to a As Night, upbringing o'er us the ancient stars anew, Stars that triumphing Caesar and tender Francis knew, With fancied voices mild, august, immortal, fills Umbria dim with valleys, dark with a hundred hills. Laurence Binyon. PR A''//-''?'T> dream, SOME EAELY IMPRESSIONS I I. I HAVE been asked occasionally to join the great army of reminiscence writers : and I have indisputably one qualification for the function. I have passed the line at which retrospection has to take the place once filled by an- ticipation. If I can expect little from the future, I must remind myself that, as the poet undeniably observes : — *' Not heayen itself upon the past has power ; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour." Old happiness remembered is still an inestimable treasure; it may, even if forgotten, have left us the happier by softening and mellowing our characters : VOL. xcii. — NO. 551. 20 but alas, if heaven cannot destroy the fact, heaven — or some other power — has a turn for obliterating the mem- ory. Any one who, like me, has had much to do with biography must have been painfully impressed by the singu- lar rapidity with which its materials vanish. Again and again I have had to lament the fact. Not long ago it became my duty to collect anecdotes of a friend who died young enough to leave many surviving contemporaries deeply attached to his memory. He had been famous, among other things, for his conversational charm ; for a rare power of embodying subtle thought in quaint humor which made his good sayings part of the intellectual currency of his ac- 306 Some Early Impressions. quaintance. But when one tried to col- lect the phrases, the process was like trying to speak to a friend seen dis- tinctly but through a closed window. And the experience, though painful, was normal. A vague general impres- sion remains of some brilliant passages of talk,; but the specific instances are forgotten ; or even if remembered, have lost the context which gave them point. Boswell is still unique. No one has in- herited his capacity for the dexterous touches which reproduce the dramatic effect as well as the bare words. I must confess too that my memory for facts is treacherous. I can picture vividly a certain passage in my own life which, I may add, was of a distinctly credit- able kind. The discovery of a contem- porary document not long ago proved to me that my motives had been materially different from what I imagined — and decidedly less admirable. The authen- tic history which I supposed myself to remember ^vas a pretty little romance which I had unconsciously composed by a judicious manipulation of partial re- collections. The disillusioning docu- ment has itself disappeared, and I have forgotten its contents. All that I know is that my own storjf of my own con- duct is a misrepresentation. Clearly I am not qualified for autobiography, nor, to say the truth, do I regret the circumstance. I have no reason to think that the story of my "inner life " would be in the least interesting and, were it interesting, I should still prefer to keep it to myself. When, therefore, I sum- mon up remembrance of things past, I am forced to confess that my little pan- orama is full of gaps, often blurred and faded and too probably distorted in de- tail. Yet I preserve a good many tol- erably vivid impressions of the people among whom I have lived and of the influences they have exerted upon me. Some of these may be worth a record. If my confession implies that they must be taken with a certain reserve, an im- pression is in its way a fact. Among the most distinct are those left by fourteen years' residence at Cam- bridge. To me, as I suppose to most men who as weakly children were cut off from much active share in school life, the period in which I first culled myself a man and became conscious of an independent individuality stands out with especial vividness. The world was so interesting then. Perhaps it is for that reason that I cherish a strong af- fection for the University and even for its material surroundings. I love the sleepy river — "canal" or even ditch as scofEers may call it — which slides past the old cottage gardens on its way to wriggle through the broad level of the fens and to girdle the venerable pile of Ely. Have I not run along its banks exhorting our college boat for as many miles as would have taken me- to the Mississippi and back ? Not even the Alpine scenery is dearer to me. The local sentiment is somehow bound up with the superstitions ^^•hich thrive in , the region; and I absorbed them pretty thoroughly. I lielieved in the Cambridge ideals. To me, for example, "senior wrangler " is still a title exciting an al- most superstitious veneration. I have, in later days, been able to speak to poets and philosophers, to statesmen and even to bishojis without actual collapse. But when in cijm])an\- with a senior wrangler I am conscious of being formed of in- ferior clay. Had I belonged to the Sis- ter University, a similar fusion of senti- ment would perhaps be more generally intelligible. I need only appeal to Mat- thew Arnold. A man must be dull indeed who could be insensible to the charm of the ^i oup of toilers which rises above the Isis and of the scenery \\-hose spirit informs the inimitable Scholar Gipsy. Every one must admit that the region is a fitting shrine for the gen- ius of the place, — for that devotion to "lost causes " and "impossible loyal- ties " upon which Arnold dwelt with such loving elo(iuence. As the Isis to the Cam, so, it may be held, is Oxford Some Early Impressions. 307 to Cambridge. It is the contrast be- tween romance and the picturesque on one side and liumdruni jirose and nio- notonous levels on the other. We boast, indeed, of our poets at Cambridge ; but if, for some mysterious reason, we have been more proliiic in poets than Oxford, it is hardly because we have provided them with a more congenial atmosphere. I They throve, perhaps, in a bracing cli- ■mate. A Cambridge career induced Coleridge to become a. heavy dragoon ; Byron kept a bear to set a model of man- ners to the dons of his day; and the one service which the place did for Words- worth was to enable him for once in his life to drink a little more than was con- sistent with perfect command of his legs. Cambridge has for the last three centuries inclined to the less romantic side of things. It was for Puritans against the Cavaliers, for Whigs against Jacobites, and down to my time was fa- vored by "Evangelicals " and the good " high and dry " school which shuddered at the development of the "Oxford Movement." We could boast of no Newman, nor of men who, like Froude and Pattison, submitted for a time to the fascination of his genius and only broke from it with a wrench which per- manently affected their mental equili- brium. "I have never known a Cam- bridge man, " as a reverent disciple of the prophet lately said to me, "who could appreciate Newman." Our ver- sion of the remark was slightly differ- ent. We held that our common sense enabled us to appreciate him thoroughly but by the dry light of reason, and resist the illusions of romantic sentiment. That indeed was the merit of Cambridge in the eyes of those who were responsi- ble for my education. To have sent me to Oxford would have been to risk the contamination of what was then called "Puseyism." I escaped that danger pretty completely. My family — as this indicates — belonged to the second generation of the so-called "Clapham Sect;" the "Saints" as they were called by way of insult ; the men who swore by Wilberforce, and fancied tliat they had accumulated a capital of merit! by the anti-slavery crusade which en- titled them fur the future to live upon credit. They were, said their enemies, ' effete Puritans, as morose as their ancestors, but without the dignity of still militant fanaticism ; Pharisees who hated innocent and artistic pleasure but found consolation in solid material com- fort, blinded adherents of a dogmatic system, which had long ceased to re- present intellectual advance. I will not argue as to the justice of this accusa- tion against the sect in general. I am content to say that though my childish reverence for certain members of the sect was necessarily of the instinctive variety, it does not seem misplaced to my later judgment. I have met no men in later years who seem to me to have ' had a higher sense of duty or deeper domestic affections. If they had obvi- ous limitations, believed too implicitly in Noah's ark, and used language about the "scheme of Salvation " which does not commend itself to me, they im- pressed me (very unintentionally) with the conviction that a man may be incom- parably better than the creed which he honestly takes himself to believe. The essential Puritan may survive, as the case of Carlyle sufficiently showed, when all his dogmas have evaporated; and I confess that, rightly or wrongly, he is a person for whom I have pro- found respect and much sympathy. At Cambridge, however, by my time the epithet "Evangelical" generally con- noted contempt. The Oxford Move- ment might be altogether mistaken, but we agreed with it that the old "low church " position had become untenable. At Cambridge we rather shrank from all vagaries high or low. Our state, an adversary might say, was not the more gracious. If the Ox- ford school represented "reaction," it was at least, as Arnold put it, not of Philistine variety. A mistaken or im- 308 Some Early Impres&ions. ' i)()ssible idealism is better than the mere stoliil iiidiit'ei-enee which chokes all spec- ulative activity. To the radical mean- while tliL' two universities represented two slightly different forms of obstruc- tiveness. They were simply Anglican seminaries ; bulwarks of the establish- ment which was an essential part of the great conservative fortress ; mediEeval in their constitution and altogether be- hind the age in their teaching. My undergraduate career fell at a period when such criticisms were about to lead to a practical result. A parliamentary commission began to overhaul us soon afterwards and initiated a process of reconstruction which has been going on ever since. Stanch conservatives at that time prophesied fearful results. The English were to sink to the level of foreign universities : an awful de- scent ! They were to be "Germanized, " — to be contaminated by "neology," whatever these appalling phrases might mean, generally to be trimmed and clipped in conformity with the fads of "damned intellectuals." In fact, the universities had somehow worked out a system which had become so thoroughly familiar to their own members and so consistently elaborated as to have the character of a natural organism while to the outsider it appeared to be radically illogical and grotesque. The essential point was, one may say broadly, that Oxford and Cambridge were, properly speaking, not universi- ties at all but federated groups of col- leges. Each of the seventeen colleges on the banks of the Cam was an indepen- dent corporation, governed by statutes imposed by the founders, perhaps, as in the case of my own college, by a founder who had died five hundred years before. /Corporations, it is known, have no souls I and very little conscience. The reformer might prove with the help of Adam Smith that they domore harm than good. It is a plausible opinion that Henry VIII. would have done a service to edu- cation if he had swept them away with the monasteries. To the stanch Tory, however, the modern reformer was as sacrilegious as the old king. His theory embodied what may seem to be an odd inversion of ideas. The colleges had been founded in order to promote edu- cation. The practice which had grown up would rather correspond to the theory that education was useful to promote the welfare of the colleges. A main and often the sole aim of a clever stu- dent was to become a fellow of a college, and if he acquired some intellectual training in the process, that was rather an incidental advantage than the ulti- mate justification of the system. The so - called university meant simply a loose federation such as was consistent with the acceptance of a thoroughgoing doctrine of "state-rights." Its main function was to provide boards of ex- aminers, which tested the fitness of candidates for fellowships. It followed, again, that the colleges were not coop- erative so much as competitive bodies. They did not distribute among them- selves different educational functions, but each accepted the same test for admission to its privileges. In Cam- bridge, we were content with the two old "triposes " by which alone intellec- tual excellence was measured. We were, it might seem, so dominated by the great names of Newton and Bentley ' that any branch of study except mathe- matics or classical scholarship seemed inconceivable. To teach a youth phi- losophy would be to train him in talking humbug; and history or the physical sciences meant more cramming with facts. The outsider might urge that the course was strangely narrow, and that the university was nothing but a continued high school. Perhaps he might fancy that a little Germanizing would do no harm. Certainly we needed reform ; and if change means reform, ns I hope it does in this case, we have certainly got it. But the question occurs, AVhy did I love the place in spite of its admitted short- Some Karlij Imjiressions. 309 comings ? Was my conscience seared ? Were not the colleges mere nests of abuses? The name "don" may sug- gest visions of the indolent bigoted dul- lards who disgusted Gray and Gibbon and Adam Smith, or the pedants whose ignorance of the world provoked the scorn of Chesterfield in the eighteenth century. Skill in writing Latin verses and solving mathematical conundrums may be compatible with intellectual torpor and devotion to port wine. When I search my memory, I can turn out a story or two to suggest that the type was not quite extinct. The pecu- liar position of a college fellow, for ex- ample, had its temptations. He held his post during celibacy, and after a time naturally began to feel yearnings for a domestic hearth of his own. That meant that he could not adopt teaching as a career for life, but as a stepping- stone to something else. The "some- thing else " was normally a college liv- ing. After a few years spent in lectur- ing, he could become a country parson and try how far his knowledge of the Greek drama or the planetary theory would qualify him to edify the agricul- tural laborer. Meanwhile waiting for a vacancy was at times demoralizing. The best living of one of the colleges was held by an old gentleman, who had been described in a book of reminis- cences as a specimen of the low moral standard prevalent at the end of the eighteenth century. He had the con- science to be still alive when the book appeared in the middle of the nine- teenth. Meanwhile expectant succes- sors would pay him visits, and find the old cynic smoking in his kitchen and unblushingly proclaiming his intention of prolonging his existence indefinitely. They could not bear it ; and the last of them, a man whom I remember, sought consolation in the resources of the col- lege cellar. A catastrophe followed. One day the fellow came to the college hall, not only in a state of partial so- briety, but with a disreputable compan- ion who had hung about Cambridge levying contributions on some vague pretense of being a political refugee. Finding himself in respectable society, the disreputable person suddenly arose and proposed the health of the great , John Bright. In those days he might as well have proposed Beelzebub. An explosion followed. The scandal was beyond concealment ; the fellow was re- quested to leave Cambridge, and soon afterwards fell into a canal after dinner and was drowned. A week or two later, the living for which he had been wait- ing became vacant, by the death of the old incumbent, and had the fellow held out a week or two longer he might have succeeded to the pastoral guidance of that bit of Arcadia. This anecdote, I must add emphatically, represents the rare exception; very few of us took to drink ; though now and then a man might be soured and become a crabbed, eccentric cynic of the ancient type. The normal result, however, was that the official tutors were not troubled by any excess of zeal or hankering after the ideal ends of a university. They often did their duty honestly enough, but with a sense that it was not the duty of a life. As teachers, they were therefore eclipsed by the private tutors or "coaches " who did the real work of preparing for ex- aminations. The university professori- ate had become still more emphatically a superfluity. It included, indeed, several men of real distinction, but they could rarely gather an audience. Nobody, for example, cared to study modern history. Professor Smythe, who died just before my time, though chiefly remembered as the tutor of Sheridan's son, wrote some very able lectures upon the French Revolution. One of them (they were repeated an- nually) always drew an audience because it was known from previous experience that in the course of it he would burst into tears upon mentioning the melan- choly fate of Marie Antoinette. That was a phenomenon worth observation. 310 Some Eiirhj Impressions. But speaking generally, if all the pro- fessorships had been abolished, no dif- ference would have been perceived by the ordinary student. If the ideal uni- versity supposes a body of professors devoted to the extension of knovi'ledge and of students accepting them as guides into the promised land of science and philosophy, we were certainly far enough from its realism. The most striking illustration of another peculiarity of the system of those days is given in the curious Memoirs of Mark Pattison, — a man whose devotion to thorough schol- arship and the cause of rational inquiry fully redeemed certain obvious weak- nesses. He was fretting at this time under the oppressive spirit of the old Oxford atmosphere. He had come to hold that Newman, who had for a time attracted him, represented mere obscur- antism and obsolete theological dogma ; and was hoping that the reaction which followed Newman's secession would favor his own ambition to carry out de- sirable reforms. Election to the head- ship of his college would enable him to initiate a change for the better. The catastrophe which followed not only vexed him but, by his own account, al- together demoralized him for years. The headship of a college was then a most delightful position ; it meant a good income, a comfortable house, and, if desired, a wife ; and, moreover, it depended solely on the conscience of the holder whether it should or should not be treated as a sinecure. In Cambridge, more, I believe, than in Oxford, it was taken to be a kind of haven of dignified repose ; and the fellows who were elected to it sometimes found the trial too much for their virtue. Pattison, who sin- cerely desii-ed the post with a view to active reform, found that the other elec- tors were not only totally indifferent or rather hostile to his schemes, bxit capa- ble of ojjposing him by the meanest in- trigues. They detached one of his sup- porters, in spite of an explicit promise, by treachery worthy of the most corrupt political wire-pulling : and he thought himself justified, as he explains, in tak- ing revenge by a counterplot. He pun- ished his opponents by securing the elec- tion of a man whom he describes as a "ruffian" and a "satyr." The moral- ity of the proceeding seems questionable in spite of Pattison 's casuistry, but if certain scandals current in my time were well founded the case was not excep- tional ; or exceptional only as far as an election to a mastership rarely involved any question about reform. It was frankly decided, as a rule, by personal interests, and though I do not think that any of our masters could be described as "satyrs, " they were men whose chief merit might be that their election va- cated a college living, and who were fully content to be mildly respectable rulers of the King Log variety. Their juniors often regarded them as contemp- tible old fogies. "Our master," I re- member a fellow saying, "is intellec- tually an idiot, socially a snob, and physically dirty ; but otherwise unob- jectionable. " But the post was so com- fortable that even reformers scarcely proposed to spoil it by imposing active duties on the holders. We despised them, but could not deny that it would be very pleasant to succeed them in our own days of fogydom. Perhaps I have said enough to con- firm the suggestion that we were a nest of abuses. I must disavow the conclu- sion. The system implied a distorted conception of the true function of a uni- versity, but given the concejition it was carried out with a fair amount of ener- gy and public spirit. The mischief was the " topsy-turvy " theor)- which subor- dinated education or the promotion of intellectual activity to the interests of the corporate bodies. The pivot of the whole system had come to be the distri- bution of fellowships as the prizes for competition. That was carried out with perfect honesty. The elections were invariably conducted with absolute fair- ness. I never heard even a suspicion Some Early Impressions. 311 that the successful candidate was not the best man, or elected for any rea- son but his merits. The endowments intended to help students had become the prizes for which study was pur- sued. Education was expensive because (among other causes) the competition led to the substitution of private for of- ficial tutors. The complex machinery was worked for ends which ought to have been subordinate. Still its work- ing implied a thorough spirit of fair play and hearty respect for really ener- getic labor ; and these are not bad things in their way. I can best illustrate the point by an instance or two. I have spoken of my veneration for senior wranglers. The concrete embodiment of the genus for me was Isaac Tod- hunter. He was a striking case of a man designing a scheme of life and car- rying it out systematically. When I was his pupil he was beginning to exe- cute it by living the life of an ascetic recluse. His chief room in St. John's College was devoted to his pupils, and furnished only with benches and tables at which we were always scribbling our lucubrations. Two little closets opened out of it, one his bedroom, the other the den where he examined our work. A table and a couple of chairs were the only furniture, and the walls were cov- ered with books, each in a brown paper cover inscribed in exquisite handwriting with the title. The little man with his large head and delicate little hands al- ways reminded me of a mouse, dressed in superlatively neat though certainly not fashionable costume. He labored from morning till night, taking indeed an hour's constitutional round the so- called "parallelogram " of footpaths — an essential part of our Cambridge hab- its — and spending another hour or so upon his dinner in the college hall at four. The rest of the day was devoted to the unremitting labors of teaching andof writing very successful text-books. Some fifteen years of such work enabled him to carry out the plan of life upon which he had resolved. He had saved money enough to give up the drudgery of leaclung, married, and wrote books for the learned upon the history of mathematics. Of their merits I can- not speak; but the man impressed me mightily. I came to know in later days that, besides being of most amiable and simple character, he had many accom- plishments outside his special branch of knowledge. But to me he represented the stern deity Mathesis ; an embodied, categorical imperative, appealing to my conscience. I can still hear his regular adjuration, "Push on, " which showed, I fear, too great a superiority to the frailty of the average youth. The flesh resisted, and to this day I have a jDer- sonal dislike to the harvest moon, — one of the phenomena which he jjressed upon my attention, and which I found hope- lessly uninteresting. It was no fault of his if I gave three years to a study for which I had a very moderate apti- tude. Perhaps it did me some good, — at least by teaching me respect for abil- ities and energies to which I could make no pretense. One may fancy one's self to be a philosopher or a poet without much ground for it, but a mathematician gives with such palpable proofs of his supe- riority that one can have no illusions as to one's own talent. Cambridge too, though the senior wrangler element was dominant, included other influences. Our most conspicuous representative in those days was the great Whewell — then Master of Trinity — " Science his forte and omniscience his foible " — ac- cording to Sydney Smith's phrase, which has perhaps become his most lasting monument. There were indeed no lim- its to his intellectual appetite. His writings treat of philosophy, ethics, po- litical economy, mathematics, and the inductive sciences in general, besides church architecture and German litera- ture, and even include respectable ex- periments in English verse. He was our greatest man, — the one resident whose fame was understood to have 312 Some Early Imiyressions. spread through England and even Eu- rope. He looked the I'liaractjpr. He was a man of splendid physique ; tall, powerful, and with a brow worthy of an intellectual gladiator. He was the son of a Lancashire tradesman, and might have been taken as a promising champion had he stepped into the ring at a north country wrestling match. I recall him as I once saw him stalking through a howling mob at an election and apparently capable of knocking half a dozen of their heads together. He was said, not without some ground, to be rough and overbearing ; and his early training had not given him the urbanity which makes a, man to assume dignity without stiffness bordering on insolence. There is, I fancy, a slight reminiscence of him in Thackeray's Dr. Crumjj in the Snob Papers But he was thoroughly magnanimous, a fair fighter, and inca- pable of petty spite ; not only, as I have good reason for knowing, a man of very warm affections, but also capable of most generous consideration for his sub- oi'dinates. By my time we had for- given the roughness, and were heartily proud of the man. For over fifty years he had been identified with.Trinity. On his deathbed he had himself raised to take a last look at the great court, the most imposing of college quadrangles. Since Bentley had stalked in stately predominance through the same court, no one had been so impressive a ruler. His love for the place was shown by munificent benefactions and the founda- tion of a professorship, which was to be specially devoted to the cause of pro- moting international peace. Eminent men have held it, — and it is hardly their fault if that cause has not been very perceptibly advanced by their la- bors. Whewell, though a Conservative, did more than any one to introduce new studies to the university. His fame has declined, partly because the advance of science has inevitably made his chief book antiquated ; while philosophy, if it has not advanced, has at least deserted his position. A philosoisher who would lead youth must clothe his doctrine in the last new fashion. Whewell had not that charm ; and the shortcoming, if it were one, made him the more repre- sentative of Cambridge. At this point I feel that I may natu- rally be exjoeoted to speak of some spir- itual guide who pointed to the promised land. I should acknowledge a debt of gratitude to some Carlyle or Emerson or Newman, who roused my slumbering intellect and convinced me that I had a soul. It was, however, one of the great advantages of Cambridge that there was no such person in the place. Spiritual guides are very impressive but sometimes very mischievous persons. Prostration before a prophet is enfee- bling. Bagehot points out the evil re- sults upon his friend Clough of that most admirable person Dr. Arnold. Arnold's pupils suffered from an excess of moral earnestness : they were liable to a hypertrophy of the conscience, and took life too seriously at starting. They became prigs, or the very enthusiasms gave way to cynicism as their illusions came into rough conflict with later ex- perience. Our prosaic Cambridge spirit was free from that evil. Our teachers preached common sense, and common sense said. Stick to your triposes, grind at your mill, and don't set the universe in order till you have taken your bache- lor's degree. The advantage, I admit, would have been questionable had it meant simple suppression of thought, — ■ a rigid confinement of the intellectual vision within the blinkers imposed by the ambition for success in examina- tions. But the practical working was different. Clever young men will be interested in the questions of the day. We talked what we took for philoso- phy and politics and literature eagerly enough; and our discussions had the additional zest of being more or less trespassing into forbidden ground, and often involving a certain neglect of our Some Early Impressions. 313 duties. We made orations at the Union Debating Society ; but admitted to our- selves, though we did not perhaps state in public, that we were very young and not competent to instruct the nation at large. A society to which I looked up I with special reverence was the so-called "Apostles," — of which Maurice and Tennyson and Arthur Hallam with other brilliant contemporaries had been the founders and first members. In my day, its most famous member was j Clerk - Maxwell, the great physicist, whose mathematical genius was already recognized. He was a fascinating ob- ject to me : propounding quaint para- doxes in a broad Scottish accent ; capa- ble of writing humorous lampoons upon the dons ; and turning his knowledge of dynamics to account by contriving new varieties of " headers '' into the Cam. I had not the honor of any close acquaintance, and felt myself unworthy of so high a distinction. Dimly, how- ever, I understood, for the society shrouded itself in mystery, that he and a small knot of geniuses (there was an- other member or two whom, in those days, we took to be specimens of the class) met weekly to discuss the pro- foundest problems. Henry Sidgwick, who became a member a little later, has declared that to such discussions he owed a greater intellectual debt than to any other of the influences of his youth. I even once fostered, though not too presumptuously, the hope that I might myself become a member. My claims, alas, if they were considered, were not considered to be sufficient ; and I only felt elevated by the consciousness that I was at least a contemporary of great rising luminaries. My own intellectual ambition was satisfied by an effort or two before the more popular audience / of the Union. There I can only remem- ber that • — for some mysterious reason, perhaps because my father had been in the Colonial Office — I delivered an ora- tion upon the affairs of Cape Colony, — I do not remember that my hearers were deeply moved, though my views, if adopted, would have prevented the Boer war. There, too, I heard the present Sir William Harcourt indulge in a scath- ing impeachment of some unfortunate official. When one of my elders asked me soon afterwards who was the coming man among the young men of the day, I replied emphatically that Harcourt was the man; but what crimes tliat of- ficial had committed, or whether he was permanently crushed, or, like Warren Hastings, survived the exposure, is more than I can tell. I mention these shadowy memories to show that our intellects were not con- fined within the prescribed studies. Sir Walter Besant, in his Autobiography, describes his own experience during my time, and seems to me to exaggerate our backwardness. Besant says, for exam- ple, that he heard nothing of Browning or Thackeray. I certainly heard of both; and one of the most thorough Thackerayans of my acquaintance was a fellow of Besant's own college, — ■ which shows that one man's experiences are not conclusive. Yet in Christ's College, to which he belonged, he was a friend of Seeley and Calverley, — cer- tainly among the most brilliant writers of their generation ; and the famous ex- amination in Pickwick set by Calverley proves that their enthusiasm was not confined to classical literature. Hap- pily for us, the doctrine that English language and literature should be made a part of our education had not yet been proclaimed. We read what we liked and because we liked it, — the only kind of reading that is of much use according to my experience. An examination in Pickwick might now, I fear, be taken seriously, and compulsory cramming might conceivably make even Pickwick more or less repulsive. We had our en- thusiasts for Dickens, who had fierce en- counters with the partisans of Thacke- ray. Vanity Fair was the first book I ; ever bought for myself, and it had dev- otees who could say in how many places 314 Some Early Imjwessions. Sedley was misprinted for Osborne. There was another sect professing Bronte mania ; Tennyson of course was known by heart up to date ; and Brown- ing was just dawning upon us. I read Pippa Passes at least and felt its charm, though not without some bewilderment, and happily did not break my shins over iSordello. There was no want of liter- ary interest among our seniors. At Trinity, beneath the majestic Whewell, there was a group of able scholars. Among them was the dignified Thomp- son (Whewell's successor), great onPlato and the appreciative friend and college contemporary of Tennyson and Thacke- ray and Edward FitzGerald, who once a term elaborated some stinging epigram to sharpen our wits ; and Munro, the editor of Lucretius, lover of Old English authors and the embodiment of simple good fellowship ; and W. G. Clark, one of the editors of the Cambridge Shake- speare, who left a permanent record of his tastes by founding a lectureship in English literature ; and the librarian Brimley, who died premattrrely after writing (among other things) an article of which Tennyson was reported to have said, "That is the way in which I like to be criticised." The criticism, it is superfluous to say, was the reverse of the "this-will-never-do " variety. It appeared in the short-lived Cambridge Essays, — an attem];t to found a new Quarterly in conjunction with a similar volume fiom Oxford ; which, if I am not mistaken, failed like some other pe- riodicals chiefly because it counted upon too high a standard of public taste. There was another literary centre at Cambridge which had its influences. Daniel Macmillan (whom I just remem- ber) and his brother Alexander were al- ready conducting the business which rose to eminence under Alexander's later management. In the modest shop of those days, and still more in a smoking- room at the back, I felt that I was really entering the inner shrine of a literary workshop. There I was thrilled by meeting a live lady novelist and an ac- tual editor, to whom I ought to have been grateful — perhaps I was — ■ for re- jecting my first attempt at an article. Alexander Macmillan himself was one of the publishers to whom I owe it that I have never been tempted to adopt the conventional author's view of his ene- my. It is needless to say that he was a, very shrewd man of business ; and he had one (among many other excellent) qualities which 1 have noticed in others of the craft. He believed implicitly in his authors. He had the most genuine enthusiasm for Maurice and Kingsley and "Tom " Hughes, whose works he was then publishing. I had heard some of Maurice's lectures at King's College, London, and they had, I may here briefly say, impressed me with a boyish sense of reverence. Kingsley became professor of history at Cambridge in my time, and then and afterwards I saw a good deal of him. The appointment was in some ways an unlucky one. The critics of the Freeman School fell upon him ; he could, they admitted, perhaps write a. spirited historical novel, but was quite incompetent for scientific his- tory ; and Kingsley was modest enough to agree with his critics ; — a creditable but an unpleasant frame of mind. He was in truth a vei-y attractive but far from a very strong man ; I have ah\ ays delighted in his books, and I lielieve in his genius. But a change had come over him. As a young man he had de- nounced the existing order as a disciple of Carlyle, and as a "Christian Social- ist " had ajiparentlj' sympathized with the revolutionary spirit. The fiery zeal of Yeast and Alton Locke had now strangely cooled. In Two Years Ago he discovered that the Crimean war had worked a great moral change on the country, — this queer doctrine, one must remember, was accepted by Tennyson in IMaud, — and the poet who had in the Poacher's Widow in Yeast denounced the British squire for his callous indif- ference to the laborer now discovered Some Early Impressions. 315 that the squire was a reformed charac- ter and a mainstay of social r(^form generally. Perhaps Kingsley's uarly vehemence meant the feverish and over-excitable temjjerament which leads to premature exhaustion. Perhaps his hearty sympathies and power of social enjoyment made it impossible for him to preserve an attitude of antagonism to his own class. Anyhow he had "ral- lied " or been reconciled, and his later works lost the old fire and ceased — a poor compensation — to offend the re- spectable. Kingsley was a man of most quick and generous sympathies, not of very deeply rooted convictions, or, as he showed too clearly in the Newman con- troversy, of any logical closeness. If his intellect, however, had its weak- nesses, it was impossible not to feel the charm of his character. His biography naturally exhibits him as always in his professional robes, and sinks the delight- ful companion full of graphic discourse upon literature or art or sport, who used to escape from the graver donnish cir- cles and smoke as steadily as Amyas Leigh in Macmillan's den or the rooms of some young college fellow. I always remember Macmillan listening respect- fully but uncomfortably while Kingsley was wrestling with his stammer to de- nounce another object of his hearers' respect, as "a d — -d — damned 1 — 1 — liar." My memory, I have said, is not happy in the choice of fragments to be preserved. With Kingsley I associate an occasional visitor, Tom Hughes, most genuine and simple of mankind. I had the good fortune to be tutor to Hughes's younger brother, — a lad who might have stepped straight out of Tom Brown's School Days. Though, like his elder, he was not specially strong in the department of brains, — Euclid, I fear, was an almost impenetrable mystery to him, — he was of so sweet and pure a nature as to exercise a quite abnormal charm upon his companions. My relations to Kingsley and Hughes rested, I fear, to a considerable extent upon a basis of non-intellectual sympa- thy. Tom Brown was taken then as a manifesto of Muscular Christianity. The theory of that sect was that a man should fear God, and walk a thousand miles in a thousand hom'S. How the athletic doctrine came to be associated with the religious views of Maurice's disciples is a problem which I need not examine. It may perhaps be soluble by readers of Kingsley's Hypatia, who no- tice how clearly he prefers the heathen Goths to the ascetic monks of Alex- andria. According to Kingsley, true Christianity was opposed to all asceti- cism, and meant therefore, among other things, a due regard for the corpus sa- nuni. An3'how, Tom Brown's zeal for a combination of football and Arnold's sermons struck us in those days as mak- ing a happy ideal. Modern education- alists tell me that the passion for athletic sports has become a nuisance. What ought to be a permitted recreation al- most becomes a duty, or even a profes- sion. In those early days the athletic zeal was still spontaneous and sincere. I really believed that I was acting from a high sense of duty when I encouraged my pupils in rowing, and I enjoyed the su- preme triumph of seeing our boat at the head of the river as much as the great vic- tory in the mathematical tripos, when, for once, we turned out a senior wran- gler. Though (perhaps because) Nature has not qualified me for athletic excel- lence, I caught the contagion of enthu- siasm. It is a natural sentiment for an author. Hazlitt gives one defense of the creed in his essay upon the Indian Jug- glers. The perfection of their perform- ance excites the admiration of the author who admitted that even his own essays — and presumably other people's — - fell short in many ways of absolute faultless- ness. Whether the ethical advantages of athletics are as great as I fancied is another question. I preached that part of the Kingsley- Hughes creed with a zeal of which perhaps I ought to be ashamed. So far indeed as I am per- 316 Some Early Impressions. sonally concerned, I have nothing but satisfaction in recalling my monomania. The one pin-.suit in which I am not c(ni- temptible is walking , and 1 still think with complacency oi the hot day in which I did my fifty miles from Cam- bridge to London in twelve hours to at- tend a dinner of the Alpine Club. That admirable institution was just started at that time, chiefly by Cambridge men ; and I am still a loyal though decayed member. To it I owe many of the plea- santest little pictures preserved in my memory ; not merely of exciting climbs and sublime views, which are all very well in their way, but of delightful as- sociation with like-minded chums in Al- pine valleys, not yet too tourist-ridden, where companionship in little adventures might be congenial to more intellectual intercourse and help the formation of permanent friendships. The athleti- cism of Cambridge in those days had the same merit. The college boat club was a bond of union which enabled me to be on friendly terms with young gentlemen whose muscles were more developed than their brains, and so far favorable to the development of the wider human sym- pathies. Interest in such pursuits is at any rate antagonistic to the intellectual vice of priggishness. Though in those days the cult, having still the charm of novelty, was preaclied with indiscriminating fervor, I see that my reminiscences have led me to diverge to rather undignified topics. The liter- ature of athletics is abundant and pop- ular, and I can always study itwitli more satisfaction than would become a digni- fied man of letters. Even the records of the prize ring have a charm for me, and I have a lurking regard for Tom Sayers. But it is not my purpose to record the achievements of old heroes on tlie river or the cricket field, or of those who sought glory on the snows of Mont Blanc or the crags of the Matter- horn. We — the Society of which I am thinking — were a set of young men not far removed on either side from thirty, and undoubtedly we had both legs and stomachs. Anything might serve for a pretext for social gatherings. We were certainly not above enjoying the •'gaudy " orcollege feast ; performances which I recall with a certain shudder, when we could sit, like the proverl)ial al- derman, trying our digestions with sub- stantial eating and drinking for longer hours than I like to rememljer, and yet deriving a certain sanction to the pro- ceeding from drinking to the pious memory of the founder in the grace cup which he had bequeathed. It seemed to be not prosaic gorging, but celebrating a <|ua.si-religious ceremony. But what- ever the pretext, there was no want of really intellectual intercourse. It nuiy be a natural illusion, but it seems to nie that I have never listened to better con- versation than I heard on such oc<-asions. At that time of life one still believes in arguing. One has a touching faith in one's power of putting one's own ideas into other people's minds, a fact which seems to become more impossible the longer one lives. The demon lias not yet whispered that nothing can be said which has not already been said and said much better, or thai arguing means only airing your own strongest prejudices. In polite circles, a man who really ar- gues is suspected of rudeness; he lie- comes afraid of treading upon his neigh- bor 's toes if he says what he really thinks . He talks from the lips outwards, or confines himself to the anecdotic va- riety of conversation. But in those days on« could enjoy conversation in the true Johnsonian spirit, considered as a strenuous game of intellectual gymnas- tics, where you honored the nuxn who fairly set his mind to yours and could give and take a "swashing lilow " with thoroughly good temper. If you did not really convert, at least you got your own opinions proj)eiiy marshaled and arranged, and received a valuable stimu- lus in elaborating your own scheme of things in general. The arguments in detail have long vanished from my mem- Wild Justice, 317 oiy, but I remember occasions on which they were prolonged for periods which show how deeply we were interested. I urn afraid that sucli discussions would now send me to sleep in a few min- utes. The question remains, What did we talk about, and in what direction were the minds of my contemporaries tending? Of that I shall have to speak. Leslie Stephen. (To be continued.) WILD JUSTICE. A STOEY IN TWO PARTS. PART ONE. I. WEIGHING ANCHOR. It was in the dark, before dawn of a December morning, that Harden Se- bright woke. Some vague sound below, a stirring about somewhere downstairs, had called him out of troubled sleep to a still more troubled waking. For an in- stant he lay staring at the faint blur of the window, aware only of that and of a world of unhappiness. Then he remem- bered. It was the last morning at home. His mother was up and about. He rose, ashamed, groped round in the dark, broke the ice in the tin basin on the stand, dashed the cold water over his hands, face, and head, fumbled into his clothes, and felt his way slowly down the narrow stairs that led between lath walls from the loft rooms to the kitchen. " Good-morning, dear,'' said his mo- ther's voice, as the door shut clinking be- hind him. The room was lighted by one kerosene lamp that burned pale and strangely yel- low on the bare table near the window. In the white frost on the pane it had melted watery circles, through which shone the winter dawn, — the deep, sad, mysterious blue that is neither darkness nor daylight. " Good-morning, mother," said Mar- den quietly. With his hand still on the latch of the little deal door, he stood looking at her. She had just taken a lid from the stove, and through the open circle below thin tongues of flame quiv- ered upward, showing her plainly, — this little woman in black, with gray hair and gray eyes, who stood in the flickering light and smiled at him. She looked very beautiful to him then. And she must have looked so to others once ; years ago, she must have been an Eng- lish " hawk blonde " of the gentler type, — a type that appeared with a difference in Marden's thin, fine features and bright gray eyes. Now, as he stood looking at her, her eyes were large and shining. " Why, mother," he said before he thought, " you have n't been crying, have you ? " She put the lid slowly back. Like all the other pieces in the top of the stove, it was bent and warped with age. It fell into place clattering. The fire crackled, and shone through the gaps and chinks in the uneven surface. Then came a silence, so long that while mother and son stood there looking at each other it seemed to Marden as if his words still sounded in the quiet room, and as if they had not been said gently enough. When she spoke, her voice was quite steady, a sweet and level voice. 318 Wild Justice. "Yes, Harden, I have been, a little." "Oh" — he broke oat, then stopped blankly, and turned to another question. '' What did you come down and build the fire and do all these things for? You might have let me, this — this " — " I wanted to do it for once," she said simply. He crossed the room at a stride, and they kissed each other. There were no further words between them, and no fur- ther glances. But as they moved about the bare little room, bringing the knives and spoons and the cheap, heavy dishes from the shelves to the table, they stayed very close together. It was meagre diet on the pine table, — a few slices of bread, two bowls of steaming oatmeal, and cold water in the clumsy cups that were meant to hold coffee. As they sat down, Mrs. Sebright thrift- ily blew out the lamp, and left the room in dusk. " The sun 's rising already," she said. And indeed it was : through the wa- tery circlt's in the panes they could see that the mysterious deep blue had gone, and that a gray light was slowly turning into day. They both sat peering through the frosty window. " Can you see her ? " asked his mother. Marden winced. " No," he answered. " Not yet. But of course she 's still there." Silence fell once more, while both made a pretense of eating. His mother was tlie first to speak again. " It 's ten days to Christmas," she said, then paused, and then went on timidly, " Sicily 's a long voyage. Remember about writing to me, won't you ? " " Yes, mother." said he, " I '11 write on board, and mail it the first time we land." " Lee said he would," she continued sadly, " and it 's been ten years now without a word beyond hearsay. But, you 're not like Lee, dear." ''Lee ! " cried the younger son in a hard voice, " Lee ! Oh mother, if ever I meet him ! — No, no, o' course I must n't — I would n't " — "No, dear, you mustn't. Lee meant — but he 's different. He 's more like — Some men don't think much about such things ! " She paused and sighed. " When a boy goes out into the world, and to sea — Dear, you must never, never forget what I warned you against. It was so hard to tell you — but your father — poor John, I 'm afraid he was n't always a good man." " Always ! " cried Marden, his cheeks glowing and his gray eyes flashing in the twilight. " Good ! See where we are now, through him and Lee. Poor, and half-starved, and ragged, and shivering, in this mean little dead town ; and me having to go to sea to keep us both alive, and leaving you alone in winter ! " " Hush, Marden, hush," his mother said, and there were tears in her voice. " We must n't be bitter — this morning of all others. We ought to be glad, too, that Captain Harlow is so good to us, for if it was n't for him I don't know how we 'd weather through till spring." Marden made some inarticulate sound. Then he fell to eating, as a lad of twenty must, in spite of sorrow. Slowly through the frosty panes came the first of the sunlight, and shone faintly upon the old shotgun and the powder-horn hung liigh on the wall behind the stove, and upon the picture below, — a picture stiffly daubed in blue, black, and white of " the Bark Gilderoy, off Tristan da Cunha." Over these and a hanging bunch of last year's red rowan berries the light stole softly. " Sunlight ! " said his mother. " See now if she 's there." They turned eagerly to the window, pressing their thumbs against the pane to make peep-holes in the frost that al- ready had gathered white again. Out- side, the snow -fields and the stringy, shivering larch by the door were plain in the low-slanting light ; then the ice and black open water of the bay, the Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Missing Page Some Early TmpreKnons. 527 it would have been hard to live as I must have lived, — and I can't help being glad that the matter got beyond us, — and you must try to see that this sort of dying is grandly better — than any sort of living." He held to her hand, the warm strength of his love surging toward her mightily, as the strength of his body ebbed ; then his eyes closed softly for a moment. When they opened again they fell upon the man beside him. "Henderson? " "I am here, Hard. But, oh, God! if I were not here ! If I could have died for you! " "Ah, you show that this is a great fate, — by envying me, old man, — but don't begrudge me my destiny," — -his voice weakened and stopjjed, liis eyes roaming beyond the window, where the yellow I'oad rose out of his childhood to the top of the hill and lost itself on the other side. In the swales the tough grass dijjped and rose; on the bills the trees went like flails ; overhead was the roar of an unseen surf. The sun went down trail- ing glory as Hardin Shore turned his illumined face toward it. " How much better " — they heard him say again, a final Praise-God in his tone — " that a man lay down his life for his friends, — it 's the way bf the strong. " B. E. Younfj. SOME EARLY IMPRESSIONS. II. I HAVE said that we were not with- out intellectual interests at Cambiid^^e. In truth, when one looks back from a distance of forty years, it seems that all but the very dullest of men must have been profoundly interested in the ques- tions then coming to the front. We were in one of the periods at which a crust of conventional dogma has formed, like the palseocrystic ice of the polar sea, upon the surface of opinion. The ac- cepted formulas are being complacently repeated in all good faith by the respec- table authorities. And yet new currents are everywhere moving beneath, and the superincumbent layer of official dogma is no longer conformable to the substra- ,tum of genuine belief. Then a sudden cataclysm begins to break up the crust and to sweep away the temporary bridg- ing of the abyss whicli superficial ob- servers had mistaken for solid earth. ~ The alarm caused by the collapse of the ancient dogmas mayperhaps be exagger- ated. In time we come to see that the change is mainly in the open manifes- tations of the old, rather than in the intrusion of the really new modes of thought; and somehow or other as the new doctrines lose their strangeness we are sagacious enough to discover that we always believed them in substance. However that may be, old-fashioned people had to bear some severe shocks. In 1857 Buckle appeared as a devil's advocate of extraordinary abilities and knowledge. A certain percentage of us, he was supposed to argue, had got to be murderers whether we liked it or not. Two years later Darwin's Origin of Species showed that we were a kind of monkey, though innocent lookers-on flattered themselves that he could be triumphantly confuted by the versa- tile Bishop Wilberforce. Mr. Herbert Spencer had already propounded his es- sential theories ; and in 1860 announced tliat he was elaborating the system of philosophy upon which he was to labor so heroically for a generation to come. " Evolution, " in short, was revealing itself as a demon horned and hoofed. 528 Some Early Religious dogmas were melting in new currents of thought. In 1860 the cleri- cal world of England was alarmed by Essays and Reviews. Anglican divines, it appeared, had admitted that the Bi- ble should be criticised "like any other book ; " and had serious qualms about Noah's ark. Two years later the good Bishop Colenso explained with a touch- ing simplicity how an intelligent Zulu had refused to believe that Noah ever built an ark, and how he had come to agree with the Zulu. The story is fa- miliar, and requires no comment ; only when I remember the thrill of indigna- tion which then ran tlrrough the respec- table world, the clerical manifestoes which I was adjured to sign, the masses of polemical literature, the prosecutions for heresy, and the vehement assertions that the very foundations of religion and morality were being assailed, and then remind myself that we are all now evo- lutionists, and that orthodox divines ac- cept the most startling doctrines of Es- says and Reviews, I feel as though I must have lived through more than one generation. I recall the facts because it has become difificult to realize the greatness of the shock to the equanim- ity of the orthodox and respectable; but, for the present, my only purpose is to note the effect upon our little world at Cambridge. Not long after leaving the university I wrote certain articles descriptive of Cambridge life, and if any one should say that they were a bit of flippant jour- nalism, I shall not dispute his opinion. I fancied, however, that they had long been forgotten when I heard that they had been denounced by a distinguished professor in a university sermon. What excited his wrath was luy statement (substantially) tliat at Cambridge we were careless Gallioa. I had said that though we could lose ouv temper ovei- political discussions, we became calm when conversation was turned to the controversies which divided the religious world. My critic took me to insinuate Impressions. that we were covert unbelievers, and confuted me by mentioning the eminent orthodox authorities who were then lights of the university. I shall not ar- gue the point . Of one thing I am cer- tain : the Cambridge of those days was not an arena for struggles between church-parties. Individuals might be- long to what were then called the "high," "low," or "broad" parties; but their differences did not form the ground for any division in university politics. We left such matters to Oxford. There, too, a comparative calm had followed the catastrophe of Newman's conver- sion. But at Oxford Jowett and Stan- ley were becoming known as leaders of the broad church. The orthodox were showing their bitterness by refusing to grant Jowett the emoluments of his Greek professorship, and a band of dis- ciples was taking him and his friends as spiritual guides. Six of the "seven against Christ, " as the authors of Essays and Reviews were pleasantly called, were distinguished Oxford men. JoH'ett and Pattison were, I suppose, the most distinguished teachers in the place. Younger Oxford men, especially T. H. Green, were beginning to read Hegel, and preparing to introduce the next philosophical fashion. Others were revolting from all theology. Dr. Con- greve was planting the jiositivist church in England, and finding his chief prose- lytes at Oxford. Cambridge looked on witli a comparative indifEerence and congratulated itself upon the intellec- tual calm. Our interest in such matters took a characteristic form. Colenso was a man ot noble character as well as a good Cambridge mathematician. The matlieraatician appeared in his argmnent tliat the autliors of the Pentateuch were disgracefully ignorant of his text-book on arithmetic. Otherwise they would not have made statements from whicli it followed that every priest had to eat over eighty-eight pigeons daily. That no doubt brought the question to a good tangible definite issue; but it was a Some Early Impressions. 529 trifle narrow, and could be plausibly de- scribed as a cavil. A similar proclivity to stick to matter oi' fact was charatv teristic, I fancy, of our orthodox di- vines. The ablest, I suppose, was Light- foot, afterwards Bisliop 'of Durham, who in my time became a professor of divinity and at a later period, with his friends Westcott and Hort, did admira- ble work in criticism of the early Chris- tian writings. The method, however, suggests wider questions. Lightfoot, as his friend Hort tells us, was person- ally shy, and, though enthusiastically appreciated by a few congenial pupils, "shrank from what seemed to him ab- stract speculation." Hort 's remark is suggested by his reply to the author of Supernatural Religion. I turned, I re- member, with great interest to his ar- ticles to see what reply so learned and able an apologist would make to a crit- icism of the evidences. I learnt from them that he had a very poor opinion of his antagonist's scholarship, and could apparently point out many errors of detail. But I was disappointed to find that he expressly declined to argue the general question. What are the essen- tial canons of historical criticism ? Can you be at once historical and accept the supernatural? What proofs, if any, will establish the truth of a miraculous narrative? Lightfoot might be fully justified in not discussing that question ; but till it was decided in his favor he could not convert one of the opposite way of thinking. One man accepts as sufficient evidence a statement which to his opponent is intrinsically incred- ible. There is no common ground for argument. You may fix the dates or authorship of documents, but you can- not say what weight is to be attached to them. Our Cambridge authorities, in short, put aside the discussion of gen- eral principles, or assumed the truth of principles which to me seemed errone- ous. They liked to keep their feet on solid ground of fact, and had no love of "abstract speculation." That meant VOL. xcii. — NO. 552. 34 that they had still a strong admixtuie of the old Paley leaven, which implied the reduction of the problem to a mere question of historical evidence. Their hatred for the abstract in the "Serbo- nian bog " of metaphysics inclined them to shrink from discussing questions which are, after all, strictly relevant and essential. Our teachers had of course a philosophy of religion, but they did not often expound or defend their views on the vital question. Tliey were generally content to assume them. This shrinking from the " abstract " implies no indifEerence to the great issues ; but it certainly was congenial to those who were indifferent. We know pretty well what is the "religion of all sensible' men, " careful as sensible men may be not to reveal it. Any man whose reli- gion was of that type was safe at Cam- bridge from impertinent curiosity — nobody would ask what he thought. His creed was certainly not without adher- ents. According to a very comfortable "Erastian" doctrine, the Church of England is simply a department of the state. The articles lay clown the for- mulas which its members are forbidden to conti-adict. If in performing the ser- vices they have to affirm, as well as to refrain from denying certain doctrines, their personal convictions do not mat- ter : they are merely acting in their offi- cial capacity, performing a ceremony considered by the authorities to be edi- fying, not stating what they believe to i be true. That is not a theory which I hold myself ; and I agree that it is open to some objections from the ethical point of view. Still I have known respect- able persons who have accepted and act- ed upon it with apparently comfortable consciences. I do not believe nor mean to insinuate that such men were other- wise than exceptional. If I were to de- scribe what was the average state of be- lief among my acquaintances, — and any such description must, of course, be highly conjectural, — I should be in- clined to guess, in the first place, that 530 Some Early Impressions. the great majority might fairly call themselves sincere believers. They held that some religious belief was not only supremely useful, but must somehow or other be true. They held also that the lieliefs demanded from members of the Churcli of England were the least dog- matic, the easiest of acceptance, and capable of the widest interpretation. They might be aware that critics and scientific people had raised difficulties ; and did not know very clearly what was the proper answer. They assumed that there was an answer somewhere or other, and meanwhile left the question to ex- jierts, avoided raising awkward ques- tions, and went on the old lines com- fortably and quietly. That was not a solution to satisfy everybody, and it did not satisfy me. We had, I have said, no spiritual guides among the Cambridge residents. AVe had, of course, our favorite teachers in the world of speculative thought. The greatest of English writers who could assume such a position was Car- lyle. Carlylism had its zealots, and Froude has told us how he and others ()s<'illated between the opposite poles of Carlyle and Newman. To most of us, however, Carlyle passed for an eccentric, Diogenes or, as he called himself, a St. John the Baptist, denouncing not only the wearers of purple and fine linen, but everybody who had a decent coat to his back. Sartor Resartus called upon us to throw aside the old (dothes of or- thodoxy — "to come out of Hounds- ditch, " as he put it. The prophet was fulminating outrageous denunciations against things in general, and yet offer- ing no tangible alternative. His Latter- Day Piunphlets had shocked not only the good British Tciry, but the sound Liberal, who was scandalized by any apology for slavery. His theology, what- ever that might precisely be, was too vague for practical purposes. Young- men who were not prepared to ''swallow all formulas " and, like Herr Teufels- drockh, strip themselves stark naked, read Coleridge, and found the most at- tractive contemporary leader in the admirable F. D. Maurice. He, they thought, might be taken as a guide to the promised land where orthodox dogma in alliance with philosophy could also be reconciled with science and criticism. Maurice undenialily was one of the most attractive and saint-like of men. He was (dearly sincere even to an excess of scrupulosity. His very weaknesses and excess of sensibility gave to his friends the sense that they were the bodyguard of an unworldly teacher, whom they could relieve from practical difiiculties, and screen from the harsh censures of the ordinary controversialist and the re- ligious newspaper. I always remember a photograph in which he appeared tak- ing the arm of Tom Hughes. Hughes was turning a reverential glance to his master and at the same time looking from the corner of his eye with an ob- vious wish that some caviler would try to punch the prophet's head and require a lesson from a practical expert in the art of fisticuffs. The loyalty of the dis- ciples was most natural and intelligible. Maurice in the pulpit was the very in- carnation of earnestness, reverence, and deep human feeling. But he did not strike me as an incarnation of cdear- headedness. No one could denounce more impressively the coarse theology which dealt in threats of hell-fire and hopes that a wrathful deity might be appeased )>y transferring the penalty to perfect innocence. The true gospel re- vealed a loving father, not an ai'l.)itrary tyrant. But then came a difficulty. The coarse version, he held, had lieen someliow read into the dogmatic system : it was not properly there. The plain meaning of the gospels more or less em- bodied in the Tliirty-Nine Articles was the very reverse, and, moreover, « as as clear as daylight to the vmso)jhisticated reader. Formulas repulsive to the hu- man heart and conscience, if interpreted in the vulgar plan, became infinitely beautiful and edifying in the natural Some Early Impressions. 531 meaning. So far, therefore, from re- jecting, you were to accept them as unconditionally true. To the ordinary mind this feat seemed to require con- siderable ingenuity and a kind of spir- itualization uncongenial to conunon sense. It was easier to say that hell was a figment than to make hell a mani- festation of mercy ; and the statement that all who denied certain metaphysi- cal dogmas should without doubt perish everlastingly was somehow an awkward way of asserting the universality of di- vine love. "Eternal," said IVIaurice, "has nothing to do with time; " which was a more satisfactory than intelligible conclusion. I once ventured in an ar- ticle some years later to express my dif- ficulty in understanding how the Thirty- Nine Articles came to express a man's "deepest convictions in the most un- equivocal language." Maurice accept- ed the phrase, though adding an expla- nation. A "more spiritual theology " was required than would have satisfied our ancestors ; but "the groundwork " of such a theology was " laid bare " in the Thirty-Nine Articles. We should re- tain the groundwork instead of frit- tering it away with the broad church rationalists. Somehow or other the groundwork appeared to me to be made of crumbling materials. I never doubted his sincerity or felt "contempt " for him personally; but I could not believe in his perspicacity. Perhaps that was because I was not a born Platonist, and could not breathe in the semi-mythical region where Maurice was at home, and where this transfigu- ration of dogmas may be perfectly natu- 'ral. I found it easier simply to ad- mit that the dogmas simply meant what the dogmatist supposed them to mean and to reject them "in a lump." I could admire the loyal enthusiasm of Kingsley and Hughes, but found the teaching of their prophet to be no help for my difficulties. It only seemed to lead into beautiful rose-colored mists of illusions, where anything might turn out to bear the reverse of its plain, every- day sense. I had taken orders, rashly, though not, I trust, with conscious in- sincerity, on a sort of tacit understand- ing that Maurice or his like would act as an interpreter ui the true facts. The difficulty which finally upset me was commonplace and prosaic enough. I had to take part in services where the story of the flood or of Joshua's staying the sun to massacre the Amorites were sol- emnly read as if they were authentic and edifying narratives — as true as the stories of the Lisbon earthquake or of the battle of Waterloo, besides being creditable to the morality of Jehovah. It may be easy to read any meaning into a dogma, but since allegorizing has gone out of fashion historical narratives are not so malleable. They were, it seemed to me, true or false, and could not be both at once. Divines, since that day, have discovered that it is possible to give up tlie history without dropping a belief in revelation. I could not then, as I cannot now, take that view. I had to give up my profession. I once heard an anecdote of Maurice which proves, I think, that he was not without humor. He was lecturing a class of young men upon the Old Testament, and came to the story of .Jacob's questionable behav- ior to Esau. After noticing the usual apologies, he added: "After all, my brethren, this story illustrates the ten- dency of the spiritual man in all ages to be a liar and a sneak." Nobody, it is superfluous to add, was less of a liar or a sneak than Maurice. But the " ten- dency " may lead the spiritual man to do quite innocently what in other men can only be done by deliberate self-mys- tification. I, not being a spiritual man, must have deserved one or both of these epithets had I continued to set forth as solemn truths narratives which I could not spiritualize, and which seemed to me to be exploded legends implying a crude and revolting morality — I gave up the attempt to reconcile the task to my con- science. 532 Some Early Impressions. By degrees I gave up a good deal more ; and here I must make a further confession. Many admirable people have spoken of the aj^ony caused by tlie abandonment of their old creed. Truth has forced them to admit that the veiy l)illars uj^on which their whole super- structures of faith rested were unsound. The shock has caused them exquisite pain, and even if they have gained a fresh basis for a theory of life, they still look l)ack fondly at their previous state of untroubled belief. I have no such story to tell. In truth, I did not feel that the solid ground was giving way beneath my feet, but rather that I was being relieved of a cumbrous burden. I was not discovering that my creed was false, but that I had never really be- lieved it. I had unconsciously imbibed the current phraseology ; but the for- mulas belonged to the superficial stratum of my thought instead of to the funda- mental convictions. I will not inquire what is the inference as to my intellec- tual development. I fear that it would be rather humiliating, or at least imply that the working of "what I pleased to call my mind " had been of a very easy- going and perfunctory character. But the ease of the change was probably due to another part of my intellectual "en- vironment. " In fact, the ordinary state of opinion among my Cambridge friends, as elsewhere, was permeated by an influ- ence of which I have not yet spoken. We cared little for Carlyle and less for Newman ; but we \\'ere thoroughly at- tracted by one man whom they both de- nounced. John Stuart jMill was then at the height of his influence. His books on Logic and on Political Economy had given him an established position. His Liberty, publishedin lSri9, was accepted as a noble utterance of the truth, even by many men (Kingsley, for example) who belonged to a hostile school of thought. Mill was living in seclusion at that period ; he had few personal re- lations with members of the political or social world ; and we used to listen with reverential <-uriosity to the few anec- dotes which might percolate through the two or three intimates admitted tn the presence. No personal attraction, there- fore, stimulated our loyalty; we read the books as we might treatises of phy- sical or of mathenjatical science, and judged them as we might judge New- ton's Principia without reference to the personality of the author. In later days I had a few glimpses of Mill him- self, and was startled by the contrast be- tween the reality and my preconceived image. I heard him speak in the House of Commons. Instead of an impassive philosopher, I saw a slight, frail fig- ure, trembling with nervous irritability. He poured out a series of perfectly formed sentences with an extraordinary rapidity suggestive of learning by heart ; and, when he lost the thread of his dis- course, closed his eyes for two or three minutes, till, after regaining his compo- sure, he could again take up his parable. Although his oratory was defective, he was clearly speaking with intense feel- ing, and Avas exceedingly sensitive to the reception liy his audience. Some of his doctrines were sjiecialh' irritating to the rows of stolid country gentlemen who began by listening curiously to so strange an animal as a philosopher, and discov- ered before long that the animal's hide could be pierced by scornful laughter. To Mill they represented crass stupidity, and he became unable either to conceal his contempt or keep his temper. Nei- ther his philosophy nor his official expe- rience had taught lilm to wear a mask of insensibility, especially when his friendships were touched. I once met him at a small gathering where some doubts were hinted as to the merits of a youthful disciple. Mill took the re- flections as though they had been a per- sonal attack upon himself. We were taken aback by the indignant zeal with which he proclaimed that the youth — a singularly fine specimen of the offen- sive prig in general estimation — pos- sessed one of the clearest and most cul- Some Early Impressions. 533 tivated intellects of the day. On such occasions he showed glinipsus of the ex- cessive sensibility which was so marked in his devotion to his wife. The Mill of the treatises, as we read them, was the very reverse — the embodiment of pure passionless reason. They possessed the merits which we most admired, — good, downright, hard logic, with a minimum of sentimentalism. Mill was, " in short, utilitarianism, and classical Political Economy incarnate. It is common to speak now as if the supremacy of the school of which he was the mouthpiece was then universally admitted. Ruskin, according to the legend which has grown up, was the first man to challenge this wicked monster generally called laissez faire. In one sense, this is absurd. Ruskin, as he al- ways himself declared, was only apply- ing the teachini^ of his master Carlyle, and aiming new darts at the "pig-phi- losophy." The orthodox utilitarians had always been a small and an essen- tially unpopular sect. The "'Christian Socialist " movement of Maurice and his friends was only one symptom of a discontent with the adequacy of their teaching which had been uttered by many others. Kingsley had run his head against Political Economy most emphat- ically in Yeast and Alton Locke. But it is no doubt quite true that Mill's dis- ciples claimed with complete confidence to be in possession of a definite and sci- entific system of economical, political, and ethical truth. They were calmly convinced that all objectors, from Car- lyle downwards, were opposed to him as dreamers to logicians : and the recent 1 \ triumph of free trade had given special ' plausibility to their claims. The claims j exactly suited our Cambridge notions. The study of mathematical sciences pre- disposes, no doubt, to a sympathy with good hard reasoning, and our favorite an- tipathy was the "impostor," that is, the ! ! man given, in another favorite phrase of ' ours, to " gushing, " and to allowing his I feelings to override his common sense. My most intimate friend of those days was Henry Fawcett, afterwards the blind~Postmaster General, and then a fellow of my college. No more gener- ous or warm-hearted man has ever been known to me ; not the less conspicuous- ly because intellectually he belonged to that shrewd, hard-headed, north country type, which was so conspicuous at Cam- bridge ; and which, it must be confessed, was apt to be as narrow as it was vigor- ous intellectually. Fawcett knew Mill's Political Economy as a Puritan knew the Bible. His own brief treatise was virtually a short summary of Mill with shrewd practical applications. In our little circle the summary answer to all hesitating proselytes was "read Mill." In those argumentations of which I have spoken, hour after hour was given to discussing points raised by Mill as keen- ly as mediaeval commentators used to discuss the doctrines of Aristotle. The application of Mill's logic to religious orthodoxy is of course obvious. A thor- ough-going disciple must be an Agnos- tic. Indeed, he would probably come to regard the master himself as show- ing a questionable tenderness for the old creed. Mill, however, like the rest of his school, had preserved a rather singular reticence upon that side of his teaching. When his political opponents wished to prove his infidelity, the one sentence they could discover in his works was the assertion that he would rather go to hell than worship an immoral deity. His religious (or anti-religious) influence was therefore, one may say, latent. The inference was obvious if you chose to draw inferences. But that was needless for the Gallios who I'ared nothing for such inquiries ; or who imi- tated Mill's own reticence. Undoubt- edly many of us drifted in this direction, and my own admiration for JMill, though it was never quite unqualified, helped to alienate me from orthodoxy. But this meant an undercurrent of opinion which affected individuals, but did not rouse attention . Political questions were 534 more generally exciting. Our little world was, as I have said, agitated by the first step of universitj' reform. The Fellows, as governing bodies of the va- rious colleges, had to arrange schemes in combination with the parliamentary commission. The topics over which we argued are too obsolete to be worth ex- position. I need only say that the chief aim of reformers showed no very revo- lutionary principles. The driving wheel of tlie university machinery was still to be competition for prize fellowships ; and though some people were beginning to talk about "endowment of reseai'ch, " and Pattison wrote a very able book upon academical reorganization, such speculations had little affected our pro- jects. One point may be worth a word. One of the chief changes which strikes an old student on returning to the scenes of his youth is the presence of woman. In my day we were a society of bache- lors. I do not remember during my career to have spoken to a single woman at Cambridge except my bedmaker and the wives of one or two heads of houses. Those exalted ladies belonged to the upper sphere of severe dignity which formed a separate section of society. We were beginning to propose some modification of the absurd system of celibacy which meant in practice that every official teacher of youth should speedily become discontented with his position. Yet proposals to alter it ex- cited horror. Fathers of families, it was known, were capable of everything ; and married fellows, it was thought, would use the college endowments as patronage for their sons. I remember a pathetic sermon preached upon that sub- ject by a gentleman, who, as soon as the law was altered, took advantage of 'the change by marrying himself and bec(m:i- ing, I may add, a most useful official, and the more useful for his charming wife. But to admit women to lectures was regarded as outside all practi- cal possibilities. An American gentle- man, Mr. Moncure Conway, I think, Some Early Imj^ressions. who came to Cambridge about 1S63, told Fawcett in my hearing that we should admit female students within a generation. Fawcett, a most ardent advocate of woman's rights, replied that such a revolution miglit happen in a cen- tury. Within ten years Girton and Newnham u'ere beginning their success- ful careers. Fawcett would have Ijeen startled could he have foreseen that his daughter was to be the first female sen- ior wrangler. In that and in other di- rections we have moved fast. Mean- while, university reform was merely a corollary from more general principles. Fawcett was my leader in the little war- ; fare which introduced reform into our , college. From very early days he had been stirred by political ambition ; and I need not dwell upon the splendid au- dacity which enabled him not only to persevere when he was struck with blind- ness, but to make the accident a step- ping-stone to success. Fawcett had a double share, I might say, of the true Cambridge sjiirit ; where his heart}-, downright ways maile him universally popular, and where he found plenty of most congenial comrades. He got into some trouble a little later with his con- stituents for forming a "republican club, " which counted among other mem- bers that most charming genius W. K. Clitt'ord. Men should be no more ashamed of having been republicans in their youth, said Southey, than of hav- ing had the measles. Rather, one could say, a man should be ashamed of not having felt in his youth the generous imjjulses which make him sympathize with whatever appears to be the cause of progress. Enthusiasm, it is true, is apt to generate arrogance. The epithet "cocksure " lias been aj)plied to the Liberals of those days, and we probably deserved it. We held ourselves to be in the very van of the army of the faithful : and were comfortably con- vinced of the extreme stupidity of all our opponents. Looking back with the experience of later years, I feel some Some Early Impressions. 535 bewilderment. It is often said that the radicalism of those days, with its faith in laissez f aire and "Individualism," is hopelessly ett'ete. Yet tlie modern Lib- eral still claims to represent the old re- formers, and to inlierit their happy pe- culiarity of being on the right side of every question. The old simple issues, in truth, have been perplexed by later development. The Radical takes credit for having transferred political power to the democracy, though the democracy sets at defiance the old Radical's hatred of government interference and of all socialistic legislation. The Tory boasts that the prejudice against state inter- ference has vanished, though the rulers of the state have now to interfere as the servants and not as the masters of the democracy. Both sides have modified their creeds in course of their flirtation with Socialism, till it is difficult to as- sign the true principle of either, or trace the affiliation of ideas. In those days tendencies which have produced diver- gence of different wings of the Liberal party were still so far latent as to be comportable with apparent unity. The immediate issue was that which led to what Carlyle called the "shooting of Niagara." The question was whether the democracy was to be content with the position assigned to it by the reform bill of 1832. The Tory and the good old Whig of the Macaulay type were contented with the existing order. The extraordinary pojiularity of Palmerston during his last six years (1859—65) meant the good old British patriotism stimulated by the Crimean war or the Indian Mutiny and indifference or de- cided dislike to further political changes . On his death, the discontent which had been accumulating became manifest and patent. Cobden and Bright had won the battle of free trade against the squires, and had been the objects of the bitterest aversion among the ruling classes for their supposed want of patriotic feeling. People were now beginning to suspect that the Crimean war had been a stu- pendous blunder ; and the success of the free trade gave credit to the cliampions who liad forced it upon the old aristo- cratic class. Mill was the interpreter of the economic and political doctrine of which free trade had been a practical application. That doctrine is now con- demned as "individualistic " and as sanctioning the selfishness of wicked capitalists. But to Mill and his disci- ples it showed a different face. In the first place, it meant for them justice to the poor, abolition of the tax on food, and full liberty to combine and cooper- ate. There could be no more energetic advocate than Mill of every measure which could strengthen the independence and improve the outlook of the laboring classes. The political economists in- deed held, and, as I believe, held most truly, that no reform could be perma- nent which did not stimulate the sense of individualresponsibility. Thelaborer must recognize his duties as well as his rights. If in asserting that side of the question too unconditionally they ap- proved of "Individualism" in a bad sense, they were also assuring a funda- mental truth which is now too often ig- nored or treated with contempt. I say so much to exclude the assumption that even implicit belief in the old economic doctrine meant cynicism orhard-hearted indifference to the interests of the poor. We held, it is true, that Ruskin when he attacked Mill was a sentimentalist, who could neither look facts In the face nor reason coherently. We could not believe in extemporizing Utopia or in hysterical denunciations of the whole industrial structure. Real improvement must condescend to be guided by scien- tific method. Mill and his closest fol- lowers were as keenly desirous as men could be of promoting the welfare of all classes, and as sensitive to the existing evils, however rashly they might have accepted certain nostrums as all-suffi- cient. Mill's generous aims appealed to Fawcett, and must be realized by accepting his principles. Though the 536 prophet was still in seclusion, one or two of his lieutenants reached us at Cam- bridge : especially W. T. Thornton, who \\'as to convert Mill himself on an im- portant point, and Hare, whose scheme of voting was to solve the great difficulty and make democracy supreme without being tyrannical. Fawcett himself was becoming known at that (I must con- fess) dreariest of all bodies, the Social Science Association, and as a candidate for a seat in Parliament. I was a hum- ble satellite to my friend in that capa- city, and for a period held myself to be a keen politician. I wrote a campaign newspaper started to support Fawcett 's candidature on one occasion : I remem- ber with a shudder addressing a mob from the A\inibjws of an inn at election time, and being cruelly chaffed for my well-meant elocjuence ; and I sat through a social science meeting, where I remem- ber chiefly the painfully pathetic sjiec- tacle of Brougham, in his stage of senile decay, delivering a perfectly inaudible address to a, pitying audience which tried to maintain a dumb .show of re- spectful attention. Fawcett's Radical friends at Cam- bridge were a small minority, but were numerous enough to give abundant ani- mation to our discussions. One of the topics which then evoked the keenest interest was the civil war in the United States. It had incidentally a special interest for me. Mr. C F. Adams has lately discussed in a veiy interesting paper the change which has come over English opinion upon American affairs. One remark which must, I think, he sug- gested to every reader of such discus- sions is the utter worthlessness from any logical point of view of any judg- ment passed by one nation upon another. I have lived many years in England, and still feel myself totally incompetent to form any trustwortliy estimate of the moral value even of my own countrymen. I know intimately only a small section, and in regard to it I am jirejudiced and in many ways ignorant. I am justified Some Early Impressions. at most in rough conjectures about the great majority, \vhom I know only from second-hand sources. 'Whut right have I to speak with any confidence about the millions of another nation of which I am far more ignorant? The conventional picture made by one nation of another is a mere random putting together of hasty guesses and rash assumptions. International prejudices must be ex- plained as irrational instincts, not as results of any intelligent oljservation. Fifty years ago the view taken of Amer- icans by the English upper chisses was the product of blind antipathies. Our national pride had suffered from the separation, and we naturally liked to believe that the separation had led to political deterioration on the other side. Meanwhile the unpatriotic Radical had never been tired of holding up the United States as the ideal of true democracy. There, said those wicked people, }ou have a standing proof that a great peo- ple can dis])ense with a monarchy, a House of Lords, and an established church. They represented the good old frugal republican simplicity and free- dom from corruption. Such panegyrics only strengthened the Tory prejudice against republicans by the prejudices whicli made Cobden and Bright hateful to the right-minded believer in British institutions. For that, and many otlier reasons, the supposed collapse of the Union was. I fear, a sweet morsel to the average well - to - do Englishman. Spite of his pride in our own alioli- tion of slavery, he was glad to see the democratic bubble burst, and persuaded himself by a 'smart article or two that slavery had nothing to do with the ques- tion. The ignorance displayed was gi- gantic, hut not more gigantic than is usual. Meanwhile, to us young Radi- cals the sentiment seemed to be alto- gether mean and higoted. "\Ve sympa- thized cordially with the Union, and the sense that we were in a minority in our own class gave sjiecial zest to our advo- cacy. IMany a college feast was rrsolved Some Early Impresislont 537 into a vehement debating society, and passions ran high. At that time I had given up Noah's ark and my old calling. It struck me that I should gain new power to my el- bow if I could say, " I have been on the spot." In 1863, accordingly, I crossed the Atlantic, and on reaching Boston heard of tlie battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg. I returned rich with three months' experience, and could lay down the law in Cambridge circles with unanswerable authority. I am afraid, indeed, that certain anecdotes, especially of some of Lincoln's humor- ous sayings, had more success than my political observations. To that journey I owe an advantage for which I am now most grateful. At the American Cam- bridge I had the good fortune to make friendships which have been invaluable. I can never forget the hours which I passed in Lowell's study at Elmwood. It was the beginning of cordial relations which lasted till his death, and only grew warmer with years — but of that I have spoken elsewhere. I remember telling him as a joke that I had thought of mak- ing a book of my travels when I got home. I was startled when he took me to he in earnest. I was too conscious of my ignorance to contemplate such a performance seriously, and I still looked upon bookmaking with the awful rever- ence of Gibbon contemplating his great work. My highest ambition was to qualify myself to write a newspaper ar- ticle or two. I was aspiring, indeed, to a character for which I came to recognize my incompetence. I was, for once, trav- elinglike the British member of Parlia- ment who visits India in his endeavors to become a fountain of political infor- mation. Fawcett had obtained for me a letter of introduction to Seward from the great John Bright. Seward received me with the courtesy due to a friend of the chief English sympathizer, told me with a frankness which amazed my no- tions of official reticence that if England did not stop the " rams " then building the United States would go to war with us, and gave me the opportunity, for which I havu always been grateful, of shaking hands with Abraham Lincoln. I felt myself to be a terrible impostor. I had, I fear, to exaggerate slightly as to the degree of my acquaintance with Bright, — whom I had never seen, — - and felt painfully my incapacity to be even a political journalist. I had, in- deed, sufficient zeal. Certain letters of the time enable me to recall my state of mind. They show how innocently I had accepted the Liberal platform of the day. I have not abandoned the opinions then expressed ; I still think that I was sub- stantially right ; though I could not now be so much impressed by the truisms and commonplaces which I then took to be the best results of political wisdom. No doubt one's state is in sonif respects the more rrj-acious when such moral plat- itudes as strike a popular audience and appeal to the gallery arouse one's own enthusiasm, and are announced with the fervor of a proselyte as new and star- tling truths. To be disposed to take tlieni for granted, and to think rather of the limitations than of the positive sig- nificance of sounding moral generalities, is, it may be, a, proof of sophistication if not of downright cynicism. I was then in my virtuous stage, I could heart- ily join in the applause which welcomes an oration denouncing slavery or cruel- ty to woman, as if nobody had ever de- nounced them before. Now, perhajjs, I should be inclined to mutter with Brougham listening to a popular preach- er-, "the court is with you," and wish that he would expose the fallacies rather than assert the general truths embodied, in edifying pliilanthropy. I had, so to speak, swallowed the orthodox political dogma whole, and had not yet begun to chew and digest. It was a virtuous and certainly an agreeable state of mind. I could follow my Mill or Bright unhesi- tatingly, and share the zeal with which Fawcett was enlisting in behalf of ad- vanced reformers without a doubt that 538 Some Early we were in the van of progress, and that we were advancing not only the truth, but the whole truth. Before many years were over, I am afraid that my friends regarded me not, indeed, ax a backslid- er, but as one whose zeal had grown ra- ther tepid. A friend of mine used to tell a story of mi^ upon which I vainly sought to cast a doubt. It was that I called upon him during the P^ranco- Prussian war, when I happened to have heard the news, of which he was still ignorant, of the catastrophe of Sedan. After a couple of hours' talk, about books, I imparted this startling intelli- gence incidentally as I was taking leave. My friend declares that he told this anecdote an creditg,ble to me. He only meant to show that I was absorbed in literary interests, and so far resembled the immortal Goethe when he held the P^rench Revolution of IS.Slt to be of in- significance compared with a declaration of Cuvier about the homologies of the skull. I must admit that my politi- cal zeal cooled down pretty rapidly. The refrigeration was due partly to a justifialile modesty. I most sincerely adniireil and envied the vigor with which Fawcett and others could throw them- selves heart and soul into the thick of the struggle. Political warfare is a most fascinating and absorbing pursuit which gives full play to the highest in- tellectual faculties. But success in it, even in the capacity of journalist, — the only one open to me, — requires the shreAvd eye for affairs which makes the practical man of business. I have al- ways felt myself to lie a. child in such matters. I have my political opinions ; but when it is a question of interpreting them into the dialect of tbc dav, uf ap- preciating the uieiits of a particular platform, or choosing the best method of giving effect to a ]iolicy, I am as help- less as a country parson on the Stock Exchange. Thoughl can'twrite verses, ( To hi' CI) Impressions. I am for such purposes as bad as the merest poet, and, therefore, I must con- fess that the society of active politicians is often uncongenial to me. They strike me as painfully self-righteous. They hold fidelity to a party to be among the highest of human virtues ; and to me it generally Seems to mean that a man at- taches an absurd sanctity to some for- mula which lie only half understands and is just as likely to apply in the wrong place as in the right. Consist- ency — a doubtful virtue at the best — comes to mean that you follow your leader in a confused struggle till you have lost your general bearings and may be heading in the wrong direction. As friends of mine came to be altogether absorbed in the vortex, I fully agreed that it was because they possessed fac- ulties to which I could make no claim. But I felt also that it was at a certain cost. A friend who had succeeded in a political career was early good enough to administer consolation to me. It was not true, he said, that men who had made a nuirk as statesmen were necessarily superior to men of letters. That, of c'ourse, was the presumption, but cases might be mentioned of minis- ters of state not intrinsi<'ally superior to the best writers of the day. I tried to look as if the remark was as novel as, of ciiurse, it was gratifying. Still I bad occasionally thought so myself; and I might liave referred him to the famous ]iassage in which Plato iioiiits out that Tliales, though lie fell into a well while looking at the stars, had really chosen .i. lot higher in sonu- respects than that of the men \vho ridiculed his shoc])ish awkwardness. I ilo not profess to be a Thales or a Plato, but I speedily came to admit that I was less incapable of diverting myself in the world to which they belong than of playing a part in the rough and tumble of political warfare. Leslie Stephen. ntlniieiJ.) Journalism. 611 JOURNALISM. [For the first two installments of Sir Leslie Stephen's reminiscent papers, see the Atlantic for September and October. — The Editoks.] III. My Cambridge life was cut short by my inability, unfortunate or other- wise, to come to terms with the Thirty- Nine Articles. I was not, indeed, cast out by the orthodox indignation of my colleagues. At Cambridge, I have said, there was no bigotry ; I was treated with all possible kindness ; and for a time continued to reside in college and to take part in the work. But I had to re- sign the tutorship which involved spe- cifically clerical functions, and at that time a university career offered few pros- pects to a layman. A Fellow, who was also a clergyman, might soar upwards toward the episcopal bench ; and I am often tempted to regret that I did not swallow my scruples and aim at some modest ecclesiastical preferment. Bish- ops indeed have fallen upon evil days : they no longer enjoy the charming re- pose of the comfortable dignitaries of the eighteenth century. But I should dearly like a deanery. To hold such a \ position as Milman or Stanley seems to me the very ideal aim for a man of any literary taste ; and, what with the broad church and the " higher criticism " of later days, it does not seem that it need have been very hard to follow old Hobbes's advice and swallow your pill without chewing it. However it was not to be ; and I had to accept the only practicable alternative, and exchange the pulpit for the press. I therefore cannot boast that I took to the literary profession from an overpow- ering love of letters. I had to scribble for the sufficient but not elevated reason that no other honest profession was open to me. Possibly I do not think so highly of the calling as some men whom I envy and admire, because in adopting it they are obeying their spontaneous vocation. A friend, only too partial a friend, lately attributed to me the opinion, that, on the whole, books ought not to be written. I do not accept that rather sweeping theory as an accurate interpretation of my view. I should have been glad to write some books ■ — ■ a new Paradise Lost, for ex- ample, or, say a Wealth of Nations — if I had seen my way to such achieve- ments ; but I rather doubt whether the familiar condemnation of mediocre po- etry should not be extended to medi- ocrity in every branch of literature. In other walks of life a man may be doing something useful even if his walk be of the humblest. The world is the better, no doubt, even for an honest crossing sweeper. But I often think that the value of second-rate literature is — not small, bat — simply zero. I would not, said the promising young painter, Clive Newcome, give a straw to be a Caracci or Caravaggio. Original genius is invalu- able ; but echoes — and few can hope to be more than echoes — - are worthless. Why swell the multitudinous chorus of " words, words, words " which rather tend to drown the few voices that have a right to be heard ? If one does not profess to be a genius, is it not best to console one's self with the doctrine that silence is golden, and take, if possible, to the spade or the pickaxe, leaving the pen to one's betters ? Such doubts, I confess, did not trouble me at the time ; perhaps they only impress one at the age when illusions vanish. I joined the great army of literature, because I was forced into the ranks, but also with no little pride in my being ac- cepted as a recruit. I took up the trade at a time when the leaders of the profes- 612 Journalism. sion were worthy of their position. There were giants in those days, as we have been recently told. Sir Edward Clarke hurt the susceptibilities of modern au- thors by proclaiming their inferiority to the men of forty or fifty years ago. He gave a long list of the masterpieces pub- lished in the decade 1850-1860 ; by Ten- nyson and Browning and Arnold, by Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot and Bulwer and Kingsley, by Carlyle and Macaulay and Ruskin and Froude and Buckle ; and declared that they had left no worthy successors to-day. We have not, he declared, one great poet or novelist or historian. I should be afraid to express an opinion on so delicate a point : it might seem ungracious if I were to condemn my junior comrades ; and it may be that fifty years hence the reputations of some of them will have developed, and our successors be mar- veling at our failure to recognize the great writers who are now with us. It is, however, undeniable that we could not now make out such a list of established and acknowledged reputations. That seems to those who can remember it to have been like a period when every morning brought a noble chance and every chance brought out a noble knight. In the following decade, most of those mentioned were still alive and active ; though Macaulay and Thackeray had died before I came to London, and Car- lyle had finished his life's work. The literary profession gained honor from its leaders. I could, of course, have no thought of treading in the footsteps of the poets or novelists. I have always had the difficulty which Jonathan Old- buck tells us prevented him from being a poet : I could not write verses. I never, even in my boyhood, composed an epic upon King Arthur or a tragedy with Mary, Queen of Scots, for a heroine. If my schoolfellows had compelled me, as they apparently compel all sucking novelists, to act as Scheherezade, they would not have prolonged my existence in order to hear my stories finished. Preaching perhaps was more in my line, and I had my dreams of helping to set the world right upon various philosophi- cal, political, and economic problems. A good many young men of those days were enthusiastically expecting the speedy ad- vent of a democratic millennium. I was, as I have said, sitting like most of my friends at the feet of J. S. Mill, then be- ginning his brief parliamentary career. But I saw more personally of the pro- phet who was at the opposite pole of thought. Carlyle was still to be seen tramping sturdily enough the Chelsea and Kensington region with an admirer or two — Froude or the charming Irish poet Allingham — forming a little bodyguard to the "grand old Diogenes," as Hux- ley called him. Certainly he looked the character. His love of portraits fortu- nately included a love of his own ; and, though they were apt to remind him ra- ther of a "flayed horsehead " than of the original features, they seemed to others to give a vivid enough impression. The grand brow overhanging the keen eyes and the worn features told sufficiently that his long pilgrimage had led through regions of gloom and sorrow and the many hard struggles by which he had won his way to fame. I was then, like most people, very slightly acquainted with his personal history ; but for me he was the object of fascination tempered by no little alarm. I saw him occasionally in the little house in Cheyne Row, now con- secrated to his memory, in the sad and solitary years which succeeded the loss of his wife. My alarm was due partly, let us hope, to the natural modesty of a young author in the presence of a great veteran ; and partly to a lurking fear of probable disapproval. I might at some rash moment let out that I had leanings toward the pig-philosophy and even some belief in the " dismal science " ! I felt something like the editor of some Saddu- eees' Gazette interviewing St. John the Baptist. I was not less impressed than Journalism. 613 a true disciple by the personal dignity of the man. When indeed the old gentle- man got on to his high horse of declama- tion and insisted upon the vitality and the ubiquity of the devil in modern times, one could only " lie low " and let the thunder pass over one's head. No man above seventy — as I now hold still more strongly — should ever be contra- dicted. It was pleasant, too, as many hearers have remarked, to hear the rare but hearty laugh — reminding one of Johnson's " rhinoceros " explosion — which showed that the humorist could be conscious of his own extravagances. But he was more attractive in the vein represented by the inimitable Life of Sterling and the pathetic passages in the Reminiscences. The unequaled power of graphic portraiture and the profound ten- derness for the old days were not marred — so far as I ever heard — by those pet- ulant outbreaks which would have been excised from the posthumous book if his directions had been obeyed, and which gave to the respectable world an impres- sion of sardonic misanthropy. One can- not, indeed, expect a John the Baptist to adopt the orthodox tone about the popu- lar idols whom it was his special function to denounce. He did in all seriousness think many people fools, though when he asserted that Newman had the brains of a moderate-sized rabbit, he was not pro- nouncing a reasoned judgment. But one went to Carlyle to be roused, — not to get cool scientific formulas, and so rare a phenomenon as a prophet-humorist must be taken on his own ground. Of that, however, enough has been said, and I will only add that I never had to complain of roughness, even such as Johnson be- stowed upon Boswell. Age, I suppose, had diminished the old overbearing manner, and I always found him thor- oughly courteous. I may be excused if I correct an anecdote for which I am responsible. When I asked leave to in- troduce Stevenson to his famous country- man, the old man, it is said, refused to let another interviewer come to look upon his " wretched old carcass." That is true, but there is an appendix to the story. I had refused to introduce an- other admirer on the ground that I was not sufficiently acquainted with the great man. By a blunder, however, this per- son was presented to him as coming from me. Carlyle received him civilly, but found him to be a full-blown specimen of the bore, — not one of the many mil- lions of that species whom he took to inhabit the United States. I happened to meet Carlyle a day or two later, when he intimated to me the nature of the infliction. Idiotically enough, instead of disavowing the responsibility, I there- upon proposed to introduce the then un- known young gentleman who has since become famous. It was, I suppose, the usual case of shyness blundering into impudence ; and I feel that I deserved a rather testy reply. Anyhow it was the one bit of irritability which I ever had to notice; though I felt, as I have said, that I was a rather questionable intruder upon the inner circle. I have diverged a little because Car- lyle remains to me the most interesting of all the eminent men whom I have seen, and because his career points a moral. He once remarked to me — as one stating a plain matter of fact — that the newspaper articles of the day were so much " ditchwater," not, I suppose, springs of living thought, but stagnant canals of vapid platitudes. No one had a better right to condemn the weaknesses of journalists, for his early life had been a stern struggle against the temptations that most easily beset those who have to make a living by the trade. He had never condescended in his worst straits to scamp his work : he always wrote his very best ; and instead of courting the taste of popular readers, gradually ex- torted recognition of his peculiar powers, — at the price, it is true, of exaggerated mannerism. He was, on this occasion, re- peating the opinion which he had formed 614 Journalism. from his early impressions of the literary circles of London. Those impressions were severe enough. When Jeffrey, the greatest light among journalists, com- plained of him for being so desperately in earnest, he was only sajdng what the average literary hack was pretty certain to feel. Mill has rather quaintly com- pared the Hebrew prophets to the news- paper press ; but the comparison can hardly be inverted. There are not many modern journalists who impress one by their likeness to a Jeremiah or a John the Baptist. The man who comes to denounce the world is not likely to find favor with the class which lives by pleas- ing it ; and except to one or two ingenu- ous young gentlemen, like Sterling and Mill, Carlyle appeared as an eccentric, mystical, and unintelligible fanatic. I can understand, on the other side, why Charles Lamb seemed to him the most futile of idols, making puns and drink- ing gin and water, and not prepared to listen to a Scottish sermon. The cock- neys were lamentably given to chaff and levity : their earnestness, when they had any, was apt to take the form of savage personality ; of smashing an unfortunate poet who belonged to the other side, or pouring out voluminous abuse like the stalwart but often foul-mouthed Cobbett. There were some able and honest writers in the newspapers ; but too many were of the Bohemian free lance variety, ready to take service on either side, and to re- commend their services by reckless abuse. The profession, in fact, had not yet shak- en off the vices generateil in the old Grub Street days, when a writer had often to choose between selling himself and starv- ing. A great change had followed the Re- form Bill, and the newspaper had im- proved as it became the organ of the middle class which then rose to power. Delane of the Times had to be courted by the statesmen who had professed sim- ple contempt for his predecessors ; and in the fifties the influence of the paper had culminated till it was taken to be the authentic incarnation of public opinion. Kinglake gives a graphic (I do not say an authentic) account of the secret of the authority which enabled it to order the siege of Sebastopol. It employed, he de- clares, a shrewd, idle clergyman to fre- quent places of common resort and dis- cover what was the obvious thought that was finding acceptance with the aver- age man. The thought was then put as though it were the suggestion of ripe po- litical philosophy ; while the public so delicately flattered wondered at its own wisdom. That, no doubt, is a very tell- ing method. There is an instructive com- ment in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection upon a passage of Leighton. He begins by saying that Leighton speaks so well that he could believe him to be divinely inspired, and he ends by remarking that he agrees with the passage so fully that he could think that he had written it himself. The two observations are ex- actly identical in meaning. Other jour- nals, I fancy, act on the same principle. The difference was that they generally represent a party, whereas the Times seemed to utter the voice of the nation at large. By my time, however, it had no longer the old authority. Cheap news- papers had sprung into existence upon the abolition of the stamp duty and in- terpreted the sentiments of the classes which were gaining political power. Another less noticeable change was taking place. The profession of journal- ism was becoming respectable. Thack- eray gives in Pendennis a portrait of the newspaper world, with which nobody was better acquainted in the years which suc- ceeded the Reform Bill. Captain Shan- don is supposed to represent the brilliant and reckless Maginn, one of the most typ- ical figures of the class. No doubt there were other originals for the minor con- tributors to the fictitious Pall Mall Ga- zette. The scholar and gentleman War- rington associates with them, but as it were under protest. He is supposed to Journalism. 615 write in the best paper of his day, but he only admits the fact to Pendennis in confidence, and confesses that he is half ashamed of writing for money. Peri- odical literature is hardly considered to give fitting employment for a gentleman. Then, and previously of course, it was a feather in a man's cap to have contribut- ed to one of the great quarterlies. At first, indeed, Jeffrey had been afraid to let it be known that he was editing the Edinburgh lest it should injure his pro- fessional prospects. But in the days of Macaulay, there could be no thought of derogation. Yet even Macaulay when collecting his essays (in 1843) apologizes for apparently claiming a permanent place in literature for mere review arti- cles which presumably belonged to the ephemeral class. He protests that he was forced to take the step by American re- prints. Sydney Smith, I think, was the only Edinburgh reviewer who had antici- pated him in collecting his articles. There was still, I take it, a lingering impression that periodicals were the proper sphere for the inferior caste, and that a serious author was rather condescending if he co- operated with the regular literary hack. At the present day we seem to be re- versing the order, and the presumption is coming to be that an author publishes in book shape because he cannot get admis- sion to a magazine. One symptom of the change was the success of the Saturday Review, started in 1855. Like the Edinburgh Review, or, indeed, like Addison's Spectator, it meant that as the reading class multi- plied, there was a growing movement of literary talent toward the periodical press. In each case, the cultivated crit- ics found that there was a new audience prepared to accept their authority. The Saturday Reviewers, like Jeffrey and his friends, laid on the lash with a will : they showed themselves to be superior persons by exposing the pretenders of the day. When their victims shrieked like the vic- tims of the Dunciad, and called them cyn- ical, superfine, and so forth, they felt that they were doing a service to mankind. They accepted complacently the name of Saturday " Revilers." The outcry proved that they were smiting the Philistines under the fifth rib ; and they specially rejoiced in trampling upon the idols of , the less cultivated classes, who wept over Dickens's sentimentalism, or believed in the old-fashioned Puritanism which Dick- ens detested. Few journals, as Mr. Bryce has lately remarked, have ever had so brilliant a staff as the Saturday Review in its early period. When I was accepted a little later, I felt like a schoolboy promoted to the Sixth Form, which he has been regarding with awful reverence. Many of them were men, young enough to be still surrounded with the halo of brilliant achievements at the University, — and, therefore, as we confidently believed, about to astonish the universe at large. While waiting to blaze out in the polit- ical or legal world, they could turn an honest penny, and raise the general stan- dard of enlightenment, though shining as under a bushel in the anonymous state. They formed, indeed, a very miscellane- ous body. The proprietor of the paper, Mr. Beresford Hope, was, I believe, a very amiable and cultivated man. He professed an Anglicanism of the type which suits the refined country gentle- man. He converted the remains of an old monastery into a missionary college. He built churches supposed to represent the highwater mark of the ecclesiastical revival of the time, and he was a fitting representative in Parliament of the Uni- versity of Cambridge, where the country clergy were then the dominant constitu- ents. Its editor, John Douglas Cook, was an amusing contrast. The details of his career, as narrated by himself, were supposed to owe something to his creative imagination. He had been in India, and stated, I think, that he had re- turned on foot. Afterwards he had made himself useful to great men in the world 616 Journalism. of journalism and politics ; and had ed- ited the Morning Chronicle, then the organ of the party which adhered to Peel after the abolition of the corn laws. He had never acquired the university polish, and, indeed, seemed to know little of any literature outside of newspapers. His manners rather suggested that he was a survivor of the old Shandon or Maginn creed. I know nothing of his religious opinions, but I can hardly im- agine that he was for Mr. Beresford Hope's creed, or ambitious of suffering martyrdom, or even injuring the paper for that or any other creed. But he was a most successful and meritorious editor. He had a keen scent for pro- mising talent, even when he had little knowledge of the subject matter. He could give good-natured encouragement, and let one know gently when one was straying from the right path. Anyhow he managed to collect most of the pro- mising young men, some of whom, as for example the late Lord Salisbury and Sir. Morley, have become famous, while oth- ers devoted to the paper talents which might have made them famous. Of those who chose to remain obscure, the most remarkable, I suppose, was G. S. Venables. Few people, it is probable, know his name, though some have heard it as that of the schoolfellow who broke Thackeray's nose at the Charterhouse. His own nose happily escaped : for he was a man of very noble presence, and the hostile encounter was succeeded by an enduring friendship with his opponent. They were contemporaries at Cambridge, where Venables became a friend of Ten- nyson and of the Tennysonian circle. He claimed to have been one of the first who recognized Tennyson's genius, and long afterwards was again among the first to hail ]\Ir. Swinburne, the next worthy suc- cessor, as he held, to the poetic throne. He had qualities other than literary cul- ture which endeared him to a small circle of friends. One of them, the least given to gushing, declared that Venables had been to him a second father ; and he was, I have every reason to believe, a man of most chivalrous and affectionate nature. Venables obtained a leading practice at the parliamentary bar, a position which does not lead to popular fame or profes- sional advancement. He was reserved in manner, and, like other shy men, taken by outsiders to be supercihous and sar- castic. Perhaps it was natural to one of that temperament to be content with anonymous work. He was, for many years, the chief political writer in the Saturday Review, and did, I fancy, more than any one to strike the keynote of the general style. His friends used to tell stories of the singular felicity with which he could extemporize, highly polished and dignified articles. One of his fan- cies was a prejudice against the editorial " we ; " and his remarks would take the form of a series of political aphorisms, not so much expressing personal senti- ment, as emanating from Wisdom in the abstract. They seemed to be judicial utterances from the loftiest regions of culture ; balanced, dignified, and authori- tative, though, of course, edged by a sufficient infusion of scorn for the charla- tan or the demagogue. I do not mean to suggest that he was often or generally on the right side ; that is an irrelevant question in journalism, nor do I suppose that it would be worth while to search the files of the Saturday Review in the hope of finding, as in Burke's writings, maxims of deep philosophical value, even when enlisted in the service of error. What Venables's articles really did, I take it, was to embody, in finished and scholarlike style, the opinions prevalent among the most intelligent circles of the London society of which Holland House had been the centre in the pre- ceding generation. The aristocratic pa- tron was now less conspicuous, but the class represented the fine flower of the universities, the leaders of the great pro- fessions and in the civil service, the men who are familiar with cabinet ministers Journalism. 617 on the one side, and with the great liter- ary and scientific lights on the other. The popular view personified them vaguely as " the Clubs," — institutions in which cyn- ics sneer at all enthusiasm and are dead to the great impulses which " stir the great heart of the people." To me, I confess, they appear to be a valuable social stratum, though more likely to supply negative criticism than to give an impulse to reform. Zealots should per- haps be more grateful than they are to those whose function it should be to pu- rify zeal from the alloy of demagogue humbug. In fact, they irritated rather than influenced. The Saturday Review doctrine was embodied in Parliament at this time by the brilliant speeches in which Robert j Lowe denounced the extension of the suf-, frage, carried by Disraeli. The result attributed to his agitation was that the measure actually carried was more de- cisively democratic. It may be held that such opponents only acted like the pica- dor who worries the bull into a more sav- age and blindfolded charge. Yet on the whole I think that they contributed a use- ful element to the contemporary discus- sions. In another sphere, I take it, the Saturday Review did a less questionable service. It enlisted the great Freeman, who brought down his sledge-hammer upon poor Froude and upon all whom he took to be historical charlatans. That Freeman was a bit of a pedant, and had a rough and uncouth surface, is, I suppose, undeniable. I came in contact with him only once, and at a later period. He wrote a life of Alfred for the Dictionary of National Biography under my editor- ship, but declined to do more because we had a difference of opinion as to whether Athelstane should be spelled with an A. That was, I confess, a question to which I was culpably indifferent; but I had taken competent advice, and my system (I forget what it was !) had been else- where sanctioned by the great historian Stubbs. Now as Freeman was never tired of asserting the infallibility of Stubbs, I innocently thought that I might take refuge behind so eminent an authority. The result was that for once Freeman blasphemed Stubbs, and refused to co- operate any longer in an unscholarlike enterprise. In the Saturday Review Freeman's pet crotchets became rather tiresome. One did not want to be reminded every week that Charlemagne was not a Frenchman, and that there was no such thing as an " Anglo-Saxon " nation. I felt a certain malicious pleasure when Freeman tripped for once in correcting Froude, and de- clared it impossible that a ship should have been named the Ark Raleigh. As it happened, it was. Freeman's insist- ence upon such punctilios was, however, a symptom of most commendable thirst for thorough workmanship. Freeman tried to raise the English standard of his- torical research to a level with the Ger- man. Whether that has been done, I can- not say ; but the conscience of the Brit- ish student has certainly been screwed up to a much higher pitch, and Free- man's articles — as well as his volumi- nous books — must be counted as one of I the most effective stimulants in the cause. Pretenders became afraid of being ex- posed on so conspicuous a pillory. If Freeman's wrath against Froude burnt a little too fiercely and frequently, he was making an example of a leading offender ; and he showed fully equal warmth in " blowing the trumpet " of good workers. He was delighted to come across young men of promise such as J. R. Green, and did his best to spread their reputation. His biography shows sufficiently that, besides his stupendous industry, he had a warm heart and real tenderness under the rough outside. His politics, right or wrong, were those of a generous lover of justice, and he left the Saturday Review, giving up an important source of income, when it supported the Beaconsfield gov- ernment in what he thought an immoral policy. 618 Journalism. There were other contributors who did a similar service. Mark Pattison, for example, as the Life of Casaubon sug- gests, had the veneration for the giants of learning which religious zealots keep for the saints. Scholarship, one almost fancied, was his religion : a fastidious and, in some respects, morbid tempera- ment prevented him doing justice to a singularly fine intellect, and perhaps with an infusion of Freeman's robustness he might have done more work, and assailed successfully defects in the academic sys- tem which he pointed out with a rather pessimistic despair. He certainly would not have given up a favorite literary task because he had been anticipated by a learned German. His friends, I think, regretted that his want of self-confidence led him to waste talent upon anonymous journalism. I do not know how much he actually wrote ; but he was one of the accomplished writers who could make the Saturday Review a really efEective literary tribunal. When he had, among others, such collaborators as Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Goldwin Smith, there could be no lack of scholarship or grace of style. One other element in the paper was the so-called " middle " or lay sermon upon things in general. The most fre- quent occupants of the pulpit at the early period were T. C. Sandars and my bro- ther FitzJames. Sandars, like Vena- bles, remained in obscurity and turned his talents to business. He was a burly, broad-shouldered man, full of witty and genial talk, and obviously running over with good nature. He could, however, lay on the lash with singular dexterity. I happened to hear one day how one of his victims, author of a highly popular and sentimental work, had written to the editor complaining that his prospects in life had been ruined by one of San- dars's critiques. I happened to meet the author about the same time, who told me what a hearty laugh he had enjoyed over the treatment of his work. He was, I thought, stretching excusable hypocri- sy a little too far ; but of course, far from being ruined, he succeeded well enough to regain, I fancy, a comfortable self-complacency. My brother, if less incisive, could be at least equally vig- orous. Some of his articles were repub- lished in a volume called Essays by a Barrister, a test to which few newspaper articles are worth exposing. They could not have been popular, for they were di- rectly deficient in the sentimental opti- mism which attracts a virtuous public. Strong realistic common sense of the Johnson variety implies contempt for the unctuous phrases by which a popular preacher passes over ugly facts, and sus- picion of the ostentatious philanthropy in which he indulges. The devil, it holds, is not yet dead, and we will not be subdued by sprinkling of rosewater. The epithet cynical applied to the Sat- urday Review is entirely inappropriate to that attitude of mind. Most readers, I fancy, will be more inclined to con- demn it, as Jeffrey condemned Carlyle, for an excess of earnestness. It sa- vored of the pulpit. In the case of other articles there was levity enough to give rise to the charge of cynicism. The paper had its established butts : unlucky victims kept like the bag fox of hunts- men, such as Tupper the poet, or that Dr. Gumming who was daily expecting the battle of Armageddon, who could be turned out for a day's sport whenever game was scarce. The fun was perhaps occasionally cruel and apt to be one-sid- ed. You might ridicule the evangelicism which was gone out of fashion, but in the organ of a sound Anglican you could not attack the foibles (I suppose they had foibles) of the high church party. It was, indeed, only necessary to read be- tween the lines to see that much of the polemic might receive a wider applica- tion. Most of the contributors, I suspect, had little enough orthodoxy, though they could not be avowedly skeptical. But the public does not read between the lines. Journalism. 619 The journalist who is anxious about his soul ought, I suppose, to have an en- thusiastic belief in the causes which he advocates. There are, of course, many such men. At this time, for example, the admirable R. H. Hutton, who had in 1861 taken command of the Spectator and impressed upon it his own personal- ity. If his enthusiasms a little outran his discretion, he atoned for such weak- ness by thorough candor to his antag- onists. The late Mr. Godkin devoted a sturdier intellect to his self-imposed duty as censor of the morals of Amer- ican politicians. Such men, expressing strong personal convictions, deserve the highest respect, and may justify Mill's theory about the prophetic office. But that singular entity, called a newspaper, when not dominated by an individual mind, always presents some problems in casuistry to a conscientious contributor. It may be the organ of the party to which you belong, but you must be very fortu- nate if you can really believe that your party represents the whole truth or does not demand uncomfortable sacrifices of fair play. I certainly did not believe in the creed, so far as it had any, of the Saturday Review. I disapproved of its political tendencies ; and many of its best contributors, keener politicians and certainly not less honest men than I, must have quite agreed with me. I do not know whether we took the trouble to frame any theory in self- justification. We might have urged that the opinions were such as had a good right to be uttered, and possibly have added the Machiavelian suggestion that the utterance was not likely to propagate them. It was Heine, I think, who said that he believed in atheism till he came to know atheists : and I have generally found that nothing alienates one from a creed so much as the writings of its apol- ogists. That, however, is a refinement. It would be a better argument that the Review represented a real attempt to raise the intellectual level of journalism and claimed to be an organ of what is now called culture. Anyhow, I am im- penitent as regards my share in it. I was never, so far as I can remember, dishonest in the sense of ever defending what I took to be the wrong side. I am afraid that I may have been guilty of some over-confidence in my own infalli- bility. I wrote with a certain happy ' audacity ; I gave my view of things in general. I had nothing to do with poli- tics or theology, but it seems to me that I ranged over most branches of human knowledge, from popular metaphysics to the history of the last university boat- race. I reviewed countless books, poems, novels, travels, economic treatises, and ! literary history. I fancy that I was pretty harmless. I have some reason to think that I saved one gentleman from adding an indefinite series of cantos to a poem ; and I may have indulged in a flout or two at well-meaning people, which I should now be hardly prepared to justify. My chief impression, how- ever, is different. I had not long ago to turn over the files of the paper for another purpose. Incidentally I looked for my own contributions, and was startled to find that I could rarely distinguish them by internal evidence. I had unconscious- ly adopted the tone of my colleagues, and, like some inferior organisms, taken the coloring of my " environment." That, I suppose, is the common experience. The contributor occasionally assimilates ; he sinks his owp individuality, and is a small wheel in a big machine. If he be- lieves in an honest wheel, neither lying nor scamping, he may be satisfied. The newspaper press is anyhow a necessity even if the " public opinion " which it utters has not that transcendental wis- dom and infallibility which enthusiasts claim for it; and a man who helps to maintain a wholesome tone is doing good service. Perhaps he may give thanks that his anonymity saves him from some of the temptations which have weakened the moral fibre and injured the work of 620 Journalism. so many men of letters who do not wear the mask. The Saturday Review, meanwhile, was not the only medium through which I en- deavored to illuminate the world. The Pall Mall Gazette was started just as I was becoming a journalist, and it was in some ways a more congenial organ. The first editor, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, who had suggested the scheme to its pro- prietor, Mr. George Smith, was a man under whom it was a pleasure to serve. He encouraged me with a cordiality for which 1 shall always be grateful, and had a cheering confidence in his contributors and a belief in the goodness of their work. The paper was supposed to re- present in the daily press the same social stratum which had the Saturday for its weekly organ. It did not, however, meet with the same success for some time ; and, rather oddly, gained its first start by a famous article in which a gentle- man described his experiences in the " casual ward " of a workhouse. That, however, called attention to the writing of a more ambitious kind. My brother threw himself into the work with amaz- ing energy. He could express his view upon ecclesiastical matters without the reticence enforced in the Saturday : and I venture to think that he had few equals in good downright sledge-hammer con- troversy. He was less interested in the purely political questions of that time, but he wrote with a sturdy common sense which gave a characteristic flavor to the paper. He had able cooperators, spe- cially the gigantic Higgins, or " Jacob Omnium," who was unrivaled for his skill in composing " occasional notes," — then a novelty, — the miniature articles which condense into a sentence or two the pith of a couple of columns. That, to say the truth, must often be easy enough. A long Hst of other eminent contributors is given in the Life of George Smith pre- fixed to the supplementary volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography. Fol- lowing in the wake of such leaders, I felt that I was under less restraint than in the Saturday. But I had certain ambitions to make a few remarks in my own per- son, and felt that the kind of superficial omniscience demanded from the jour- nalist becomes in the long run rather distracting. A newspaper article, too, can be written in a, very short time, but it seems to exhaust a disproportionate amount of energy, and excellence in the craft requires that a man should be more inclined to act the part of Kinglake's shrewd clergyman — absorbing the var rious manifestations of public opinion. My work in the Pall Mall Gazette had made me acquainted with George Smith, and the acquaintance soon ripened into one of the most valuable friendships of my life. He had in the highest degree some of the qualities which one desires in a friend. He was the stanchest, most straightforward, and heartiest of men ; pugnacious enough to be a " good hater," but the best of backers to those whom he really loved. Plunged into business at the age of fourteen, he had little chance for literary education, and he was ever afterwards engaged in a variety of com- mercial enterprises which might wellhave absorbed his energies. But he had from the first a keen interest in literature, and became the publisher and friend of a remarkable number of eminent writers. His earliest connections of the kind were with Leigh Huntand "Orion "Home, and one of the last, with Mrs. Humphry Ward. Few of his authors failed to become his personal friends. Miss Brontg (who, I need hardly say, was discovered by Smith and his reader Mr. Williams) drew his portrait in the Dr. John of Villette. It has not the minute fidelity of some of her sketches, but gives a characteristic sketch of the impression made upon her by the masterful and chivalrous young man. He is so genuine that the poor governess, herself in the shade, is cheered instead of depressed by the sunlight of success which seems appropriate to him. In later years, Smith won the warmest Journalism. 621 regards of such men as Browning, Mat- thew Arnold, and Tom Hughes, and on more than one occasion justified their affection by solid proofs of good will. With no one had he more cordial re- lations than with Thackeray during the last ten years of the novelist's life ; and Thackeray's children then and after- wards felt Smith's friendship to be a most valuable possession. The founda- tion of the Cornhill Magazine, with Thackeray as editor and chief contribu- tor, was one of the literary landmarks of the period. Thackeray's reputation gave it a special stamp, and he was able to secure the cooperation of many of the ablest writers. It had the advantage of a remarkable set of illustrations by such men as Millais, Leighton, Fred- erick Walker, and Du Maurier. It was an unprecedented shillings - worth, and achieved a brilliant success. Macmil- lan's Magazine, of less dazzling preten- sions, had been launched a month earlier ; and their example was soon followed by the earlier of the great swarm of more or less smaller periodicals which now flour- ish so luxuriantly. The Cornhill was strictly limited to the inoffensive, — it was to contain nothing which could be unsuitable reading for the daughters of country parsons whom TroUope was de- scribing in its pages. Thackeray was forced, with many twinges, to decline a poem of Mrs. Browning because it re- ferred to facts supposed to be unknown to that interesting class of the popula- tion. Ruskin's fierce assault upon the economists of the day had to be rejected, not because Thackeray or Smith them- selves objected, but as calculated to make the hair of their public stand on end. The rejection of Ruskin by Eraser's Magazine, then edited by Froude, was more remarkable. They were friends besides being fellow disciples of Carlyle, and Froude could certainly not condemn Ruskin's teaching on his own score. The case was significant of the two most fa- mous of the older magazines of those days. Blackwood was, of course, of the Tory faith ; and Fraser, in spite of its dis- tinguished editor, was beginning to lose its position. Froude, one would have thought, should be a model editor. No- body could write more charming periodi- cal essays, as he showed in his Short Studies ; no one could be more charm- ing personally, or have a finer literary taste. He had, I think, one weakness as editor. He had not discovered, what I take to be true, that in judging our article, first thoughts are quite as likely to be right as second or third. It is best to decide at once and put your con- tributors out of pain, — whereas Froude would oscillate long between yes and no, from conscientiousness or, perhaps, from a certain timidity. In any case he was hardly the man to attract eager young Liberal writers. Carlylism appeared to them to be simply reactionary and cyni- cal, as indeed Carlyle was never tired of expressing contempt for modern progress and its favorite shibboleths. His disci- ples agreed with him in that ; but while Ruskin was stung to the passionate and stinging outbursts which gave him an in- fluence comparable to Rousseau's, Froude had rather the intellectual temperament which we associate with Hamlet. The world was out of joint ; and he did not feel competent to set it right. In any case, not much could have been made of his organ. It is an uphill task to in- fuse new life into a decaying periodical. Eraser's had become thoroughly respect- able since the days of Maginn ; and in public would, no doubt, have resented the Ruskinian vein. Froude, indeed, allowed some of us (I felt honored in being one) to attack cer- tain common enemies. When Kingsley, for example, got into his unlucky con- troversy with Newman, Froude and my brother tried to bring out what Kingsley ought to have said. I was permitted to preach a sermon or two upon a text from Carlyle, who had said that Arthur Stan- ley was going about boring holes in the 622 Journalism. bottom of the Church of England ; and to argue that that process would not succeed in keeping the ship afloat. I remember, too, undertaking to give a judicial ac- count of Comte's philosophy, — a daring undertaking, for, according to the believ- ers in that creed, no outsider can ever speak of it without grievous misunder- standing. I do not know how far I suc- ceeded. I had been greatly impressed by Comte's books, and have always thought that they were inadequately appreciated by men of science as well as by theolo- gians. I have valued friends among the members of his church, and fancy that if I had been at Oxford, I might have be- come a convert. StiU I fear that they had too much reason for thinking that I sat in the seat of the scorner. A new religion always has a comic side to the wicked. The expectations of the found- er have not as yet been verified, but I am convinced that they did some good work and enforced important truths. I see from the Life of Bishop Westcott that he was much of the same opinion. One positive doctrine, I believe, for- bids anonymous writing. The Fortnight- ly Review, started in 1865, was the first English periodical in which the principle was adopted. After a rather unsuccess- ful start it took a high position when Mr. Morley became editor. It illustrates the change of which I have spoken. The im- pression that there was any condescen- sion in contributing to a periodical had finally disappeared. The best writers of the day were not only willing to write, but anxious to let the fact be known. The man who writes under his own name takes the main responsibility. He is not hampered by the platform of the party to whose organ he is contributing. His editor only vouches for the readability of the article, not for the correctness of the opinions expressed. The Fortnightly writers were chiefly Liberals ; but the Contemporary which followed was itself colorless. It was understood to be more or less the representative of that curious body, the Metaphysical Society, in which Catholics, Anglicans, Unitarians, Posi- tivists, and Agnostics met for unreserved discussion of fundamental questions. Such discussions had, as I have said, be- come the order of the day when men's minds were agitated by Darwinism and biblical criticism, and by the advent of great political and social questions. Un- doubtedly, the change has been in many ways beneficial. When you encounter an individual human being, you have to be decently civil. I do not know whether we agree any better, but we certainly do not damn each other so savagely ; we dis- tinguish between the man and the ab- stract principle which he defends, and have to admit that our enemy is after all made of flesh and blood. Periodicals, too, have had the advantage of receiving contributions into which the best writers have put their best work. Perhaps we may regret that some men of ability have been tempted to such utterances when they ought to have been composing solid masterpieces in several octavo volumes. I will not argue the point. Hawthorne, I think, argues somewhere that civilized men should live in tents instead of in houses, to be free from the bondage to the ancestral conditions. So, one may conjecture, the author of the future will give up bothering himself about posterity and be content with writing for his con- temporaries and the immediate present. Perhaps his work will not in the result be tlie less lasting. At any rate, there came to be a good deal more journalism, which was better than " ditchwater ; " which contained serious and powerful dealing with important problems. I do not apply these epithets to my own con- tributions, but, at least, I had sufficient opportunity of taking some part in the work. I had, however, before long to take up other functions. Leslie Stephen. {To be continued.) Santa Clans at Lonelij Cove. 749 Prompt Exterminator is to cure, Sam- my ? " was the question asked. " Ah, is that where it hurts you ? Right on the point of the bone, there ? And was there no fall on the rock, at all ? Oh, there was a fall. And the bruise was just there — where it hurts so much ? And it 's very hard to bear, is n't it ? That 's too bad, — that "s very sad, in- deed. But, perhaps, — perhaps, Sammy, — I can fix it for you, if you 're brave. And are you brave ? No ? Oh, I think you are ! And you '11 try to be, at any rate, won't you ? Of course. That's a good boy." And so the stranger mended Sammy Jutt's knee, with sharp knives and strips of cotton, while the lad lay white and still on the kitchen table and a queer smell spread all over the house. " Doctor, zur," said Matilda Jutt, when the children were put to bed, with Martha to watch by Sammy, who was very sick, " has you really got a bottle o' Pine's Prompt Exterminator ? " " I 've an empty bottle, ma'am, sure enough — picked it up at Poverty Cove yesterday — label and all — thought it might come useful. I '11 put Sammy's medicine in that — they '11 not know the difference, and they '11 be content with one bottle, I 'm sure — and you '11 treat the knee with it as I 've told you. That 's all. I 'm off to bed now ; for I must be gone before the children wake in the morning." " Oh, ay, zur ; and " — She hesitat- ed, much embarrassed. " Well, ma'am ? " " Would you mind puttin' some queer lookin' stuff in one o' they bottles o' yours ? " " Not at all," in surprise. "An' writin' something on a bit o' paper," she went on, pulling at her apron and looking down, " an' gluin' it t' the bottle ? " " Not in the least. But what shall I write ? " She flushed. " ' Magic Egyptian Beautifier,' zur," she whispered ; " for I 'm thinkin' 't would please little Sam- my t' think that Sandy Claws left — something — for me — too." Now, if you think that the three little Jutts found nothing but bottles of medi- cine in their stockings, when they got down stairs on Christmas morning, you are very much mistaken. Indeed, there was more than that, — a great deal more than that. I will not tell you what it was ; for you might sniff, and say, " Huh ! That 's nothing." But there was more than medicine. No man — rich man, poor man, beggar man nor thief, doctor, law- yer nor merchant chief — ever yet left a Hudson Bay Company's post, stared in the face by the chance of having to seek hospitality of a Christmas Eve, — no right-feeling man, I say, ever yet left a Hudson Bay Company's post, under such circumstances, without put- ting something more than medicine in his pack. I am in a position to say, at any rate, that the Labrador Mission Doctor who mended Sammy Jutt's knee never once did in his long life. And I know, too, — you may be interested to learn it, — that as he floundered through the deep snow on the way to the bedside of James Luff at Back Harbor, soon after dawn the next day, he was mighty glad that he did n't, though not one of the merry shouts came over the white miles to his ears. But he shouted merrily for himself, for he was very happy ; and that 's the way you 'd feel, too, if you spent your life hunting good deeds to do. It only remains to say that you may tell Sammy Jutt as often as you like that there is no Santa Claus. He will not believe you. ZTe knows better. Santa Claus mended his knee ! Norman Duncan. 750 Knighted. — Editing. KNIGHTED. Only a word — but I knew ! Merely a touch — but I grew Healfed and whole and blest, Strong for the Quest ! Only a word — but I went Into my banishment, Singing your name and glad — New Galahad! And you — did you know or guess How your face leaned to bless ; How of your faith was made God's accolade ? Artliur Ketchum. EDITING. [The fourth of Sir Leslie Stephen's reminiscent papers.] In 1871 I became editor of the Corn- hill Magazine, and ceased to do much in the way of journalism. My editorial duties gave me leisure to write a book or two (of which I need say nothing). Meanwhile one great advantage of the Cornhill was that George Smith, already a valued friend, was the most considerate of proprietors, and treated me with, if anything, an excess of confidence. Other- wise, perhaps, I might have been less content to stick in the old ruts. The brilliant youth of the periodical was over ; it had rivals, and as we kept pretty much to our traditions, we did not daz- zle the world by any new sensation. I found the duties pleasant enough. My great predecessor, Thackeray, has left a record of the " thorns in his cushion." His kindly and sensitive nature suffered from the necessity of rejecting would-be contributors who had no other qualiiica- tion than pressing need for remuneration. No man indeed, who is not a brute, can fail to be pained by some of the facts that come to his notice, — the hopeless struggles of the waifs and strays who are trying to keep themselves afloat by such a very inadequate life-buoy as un- salable articles. I could comfort my- self sufficiently by a very simple consid- eration. I had only a fixed number of pages at my disposal, and to accept one writer was, therefore, to reject another. It was clearly my duty to take the best article offered, and not to distribute charity at the cost of the magazine and its proi)rietor. In other respects, I had no cause for complaining of my contribu- tors. They were (except, of course, the poets) more reasonable than I expected. I had (also of course) one or two of the typical forms of perversity. There was the young man (he might have come straight out of the Dunciad) who was aggrieved because I could not advise him to give up a partnership in a good busi- ness in order to adopt a literary career, Editing. 751 and attributed my rejection of his five- act tragedy to my jealousy of his antici- pated success. I liad a difficulty or two of that kind from a rather curious cause. Gladstone, in the midst of his multitudi- nous occupations, found time to read minor poets, and to applaud them with characteristic warmth. One or two of these came to me with heads turned by such praises, and thought me painfully cold in comparison. I might have re- minded them of Blackwood's very sensi- ble remark, when Lewes complained of strictures upon George Eliot's first story, that critics who had to act upon their judgment were naturally more guarded than irresponsible eulogists who need only consult their good nature. An editor, though authors sometimes forget the fact, is always in a state of eagerness for the discovery of the coming man (or woman). In spite of many dis- appointments, I would take up manu- script after manuscript with a vague flutter of hope that it might be a new Jane Eyre or Scenes of Clerical Life, destined to lift some obscure name to the heights of celebrity. That delight never presented itself ; and yet I do not know that I ever rejected an angel un- awares. Had I done so, I should only have been treading in the steps of men more sagacious in gauging aptitude for success. I do not fancy myself to be a good judge of the public taste. I have never clearly discovered what it is that attracts the average reader. Many pop- ular authors would suffer considerably, and at least one obscure writer would gain, if everybody took my view of their merits. I believe, not the less, in the ; vox populi. Books succeed, I hold, be- cause they ought to succeed. A critic has no business to assume that taste is bad because he does not share it. His business is to accept the fact and try to discover the qualities to which it is due. Sometimes, of course, an ephemeral suc- cess may be won by rubbish ; the preacher may please the audience, as Charles II. shrewdly observed, because his nonsense suits their nonsense ; but it is idle to condemn lasting popularity. It is too late to set down Shakespeare as simply barbarous : though I admit that it is tempting to try to clear away some of the stupendous rubbish heaps of eulogy which accumulate over the great men when admiration has become obligatory on pain of literary excommunication. Even blasphemy in such cases is better than idolatry. But anticipation, not ex- planation, of the ultimate verdict is the difficult problem which an editor has to solve; and, if I am not conscious of having nipped any genius in the bud, I dare say that I owe more to good luck than to discrimination. If, on the other hand, I cannot claim to have discovered any new star of the first magnitude, I may plead that the chances were small. The regular contributors to reviews seemed to me to be a small class, like the proverbial stage army which is multiplied by walking round and round. Any one who could reach the regular standard could get admission to the ranks, and so many editors were lying in wait that one's chance of first catching the early worm was small. I inherited some ad- mirable contributors. Matthew Arnold had to part company after a time, to my great regret, because he wished to dis- course upon topics to which we had to give a wide berth. Another old and welcome contributor was John Adding- ton Symonds. I had the good fortune to see him more than once in his retreat at Davos, and the sight was impressive. Shut up in the snow-bound valley, sur- rounded by patients in the advanced stages of the malady with which he was himself carrying on a precarious strug- gle, he astonished one by the amazing courage and cheerfulness which turned to account every hour of comparative health. He was keenly interested in all manner of literary and philosophical questions, and ready to discuss them with unflagging vivacity. He was on cordial 752 Editing. terms with the natives, delighted in dis- cussing their affairs with them over a pipe and a glass of wine, and not only thoroughly enjoyed Alpine scenery aes- thetically, but delighted in the athletic exercise of tobogganing. Far from libra- ries, he turned out a surprising quantity of work involving very wide reading as well as distinguished by an admirable lit- erary style. His weakness was perhaps his excessive facility ; but no man ever encountered such heavy disadvantages with greater gallantry. His remarkable biography contains some revelations of an inner life which would not suggest this side of him. Readers would hardly expect to find that the aesthetic philoso- pher had the masculine vigor which made him the most buoyant of invalids. The most widely popular of my con- tributors was R. L. Stevenson, and though I did not discover him, I may venture to say that I was the. fortunate recipient of most of the early articles which I think contain some of the best examples of his literary skill. I may therefore hope that I did not show obtuseness to his merits. I was specially struck by Will of the Mill, which I had the honor of publishing. I take it to be one of his most characteristic bits of delicate work. It reminds me of another charming story, — Mr. Henry James's Daisy Miller, which, I hope, did something to estab- lish the author's reputation here. And that again reminds me that Mr. Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd — a most delightful book of the kind in which he is unrivaled — appeared in the Cornbill, and, I hope, did the same kind of service for him. But I cannot claim the honors of first discovery in any of these cases. I was greatly pleased to see lately, in Mr. Clodd's life of Grant Allen, encourage- ment that I had in one case given gener- ously acknowledged. Grant Allen was a man of so versatile and ingenious an in- tellect that one might have predicted for him a great success in periodical writing. He declared, however, I have heard. that he would rather bring up a son to crossing-sweeping than to literature. He had, I fear, a hard task. He sent some articles upon popular science, which I thought singularly good of their kind, and the kind is to me very attractive. They did not receive, I suppose, the no- tice which they deserved ; he had to strug- gle with ill health, and he was forced to take to the more profitable occupation of writing novels. Clever as they were, they hardly corresponded to his best func- tion. Meanwhile he was at work for twenty years, as he tells us, in preparing the book upon the evolution of theology, which, perhaps because his conclusions were unwelcome, scarcely had the success deserved by its brightness and candor. It shows at least that an enthusiastic dis- ciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer could im- part vivacity to a philosophy to which, as a rule, one can hardly attribute that par- ticular quality. I will speak of no other contributors. To some still living I have a debt of gratitude for their tenderness to that am- biguous personage, the editor, who, like the bat in the fable, holds an equivocal position between the winged and the pe- destrian races of author and publisher. I left the Cornbill in order to take up editorial duties of a much more laborious nature. The Dictionary of National Biography has been received with a gen- eral chorus of praise which I should be the last person to call excessive. It has, however, like other human productions, certain faults. I leave them to be pointed out by others. Their existence suggests a few words upon the conditions under which it was produced. The general scheme had been conceived by my friend Smith. He had indeed been ambitious enough to contemplate a dictionary of gen- eral biography to rival the great French dictionaries. The same thing had been attempted by the old Society for the Dif- fusion of Useful Knowledge, and, so far as it went, was very well done. But after completing the letter A in seven Editing. 753 volumes, the dictionary broke down, and the Society, I believe, died of the too gi- gantic effort. The mouse was trying to give birth to a mountain. Smith agreed therefore to my suggestion to limit the enterprise to British lives. I do not think that either he or I quite realized the weight of the burden even so restricted. That it was ever carried to a conclusion was due to Smith's public spirit, and to the pride which he took in a work costly enough to have ruined most publishers. Smith was thoroughly generous, but he was too good a man of business to pay authors, as a rule, more than their work was really worth. No author, it seems to me, ought to desire to be treated as an object of charity; and a publisher has done quite enough if he is thoroughly honorable in his dealings, without incur- ring loss for the benefit of authors or of mankind at large. The case is very rare, in which the world would be benefited by the appearance of books unable to pay their expenses ; and there is no obligation upon a publisher to bestow such gifts upon the public. Smith soon became aware, if he was not aware at first, that the book would not pay commercially, and that his reward must be the consciousness of hav- ing done a real service to the national literature. One point was evident to me. If an intelligent government had ap- pointed such a work, and promised me a comfortable salary till it was finished, I might have taken my time about it. Probably in that case the dictionary might by this time have reached the mid- dle of the alphabet. But as it was after all to be done by private enterprise, I had to take care that the self-imposed sacri- fice should not be made more than even a generous proprietor could be expected to stand. I made up my mind in the first place that the book should be fin- ished, if possible, within the lifetime of Smith and myself. I am glad that I succeeded. I have a certain regard for posterity, but something is gained for the present generation by making sure of a VOL. xcn. — NO. 654. 48 relatively imperfect book instead of aim- ing at an ideal standard which wUl only benefit their children. However that may be, I thought that it was plainly due to Smith that he should be able to reckon upon the completion of his pro- ject. For the same reason, it was de- sirable to convince the public that the work would not, like many of its prede- cessors, come to a premature end, or be finished in a perfunctory spirit. We pro- mised four volumes annually, and the promise was kept. In spite of a good many forebodings every volume, includ- ing the sixty-third and last, appeared up to time. I had begun by calculating the whole at fifty volumes : and the excess was due to the more elaborate scale on which the lives came to be written. I say so much to explain the conditions of the most troublesome undertaking in which I was ever involved. I was not, and I have never become, an antiquary. I fear that I rather sympathized with Carlyle's lamentations at having to take service under Dr. Dryasdust and spend years in exploring the rubbish heaps ac- cumulated by former specimens of the genus. The old-fashioned antiquary was what used to be called a " humourist ; " a man with a quaint and perfectly un- reasonable hobby ; loving to collect obso- lete knowledge the more because it was utterly uninteresting to anybody else. The consciousness of outside contempt often made him sour and crusty, and his love of antiquities went with a devotion to outworn creeds. But the labors un- dertaken by such men have gained a value which they did not anticipate. Dryasdust has found himself in sympa- thy with the modern scientific tenden- cies. Darwin has taught us how much can be learnt even from earthworms ; and a modern entomologist, I am told, spent a lifetime upon the history of the house-fly. In the same way Dryasdust, by preserving records, mainly because they were antiquated, has provided ma- terials from which the modern historian 754 undertakes to reconstruct a picture of the past, and to lay the foundations of social science. History, we are told, has to be rewritten by a minute examination of in- numerable documents, by ransacking ar- chives, and studying ancient deeds and charters. History has, no doubt, thus become more scientific in method ; but one can hardly say how it has gained in a literary sense. We sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees ; and lose the broad outlines in the multiplicity of de- tail. Anyhow we have gut to make the best of the position; and that considera- tion prescribed the functions of such a book as the dictionary. We intended, I said at starting, to supply a useful man- ual for all serious students of British his- tory and literature. We were to achieve that end by bringing together as con- cisely as possible all that was so far known about every person who might conceivably be interesting to such stu- dents, and to indicate clearly the sources from which the narrative was derived. We were to treat of all manner of peo- ple, — statesmen, divines, philosophers, poets, soldiers, sailors, artists, musicians, men of scientific and literary mark ; and not only men of mark, but every one about whom the question might arise in the course of general reading, who was he ? Some people thought eminent mur- derers unworthy of record ; but, surely, to the social inquirer the crime of any period is fuU of instruction. The high- wayman is often more interesting to the historian of society than the dignified judge who hangs him. Without going further, I may say that the first condition was to get competent contributors ; from the grave historian who could speak with authority upon great constitutional events to the special- ist who had rummaged up some of the obscure provinces of antiquarian inves- tigation. Above all, it was desirable to get men who would take an interest in the work for its own sake, and discharge minds already full of the required knovv- Editing. ledge, instead of cramming up the topic for the immediate purpose. There were, of course, plenty of people who would be willing to undertake such tasks and write about anybody, from Shakespeare to Tupper, in a mechanical fashion. Some men have to make a living (I can only pity them, and wish that their employ- ment was better paid) by laboring in the reading-room of the British Museum, with more or less intelligence, to collect raw material for others, or by work- ing as humble artificers at the trade of " bookmaking." We required more en- thusiasm, as well as more historical know- ledge and literary skill, than such worthy persons could generally supply. We aimed at finding men each of whom would be competent to take charge of some special department, and write both with zeal and authority. To get a fairly or- ganized body of contributors was not at first an easy task. Some men of eminence were fully occupied with labors of their own ; Professor Rawson Gardiner, for ex- ample, was good enough to give us many admirable lives of the early seventeenth centui'y, but had far too much on his hands to deal with the smaller charac- ters. Then some men of the antiquarian variety had their little crotchets, and would be unreasonable, so at least I thought, if I would not give as much space to some twopenny halfpenny scribbler, whose only merit was that no- body had ferreted him out before, as to his most eminent contemporaries. Some- how, or other, we gradually got the thing into order ; and I owe special gratitude both to distinguished writers whose con- tributions gave credit to the undertaking and to younger enthusiasts, undeterred by minute drudgery, whom we were for- tunate enough to enlist. I have said " we " rather than " I " for a sufficient reason. My greatest piece of good fortune, perhaps, was that from the first I had the cooperation of Mr. Sidney Lee as my sub-editor. Always calm and confident when I was tearing my hair Editing. 755 over the delay of some article urgently required for the timely production of our next volume ; always ready to undertake any amount of thankless drudgery, and, most thoroughly conscientious in his work, he was an invaluable helpmate. When he succeeded to my post, after a third of the task was done, I felt assured that the dictionary would at least not lose by the exchange. He had, moreover, more aptitude for many parts of the work than I can boast of ; for there were moments at which my gorge rose against the un- appetizing but, I sorrowfully admit, the desirable masses of minute information which I had to insert. I improved a little under the antiquarian critics who cried for more concessions to Dryasdust ; but Mr. Lee had no such defect of sympathy to overcome. Having caught our con- tributors, the main duties were to keep them up to time, to correct, and to con- dense. We kept them up to time by steady and remorseless dunning. The correction was of necessity inadequate : I am not omniscient, and the vast sphere of my ignorance includes innumerable matters discussed in the dictionary. A book of which it is the essence that every page should bristle with facts and dates is certain to have errors by the thousand ; unless it should be supervised by a staff of inspectors beyond all possibilities. We made, no doubt, slips enough, and I had in the main to depend upon getting trust- worthy contributors and thinning out those in whom I detected inaccuracy. I remember the horror with which I dis- covered the misdoings of a writer (long since dead) who had the highest recom- mendations, and in some sense deserved them. He was a man of really wide learning, but demoralized by impecuni- osity. He saved trouble, as I discovered, by copying modern and still copyright books, and made a " bogus " list of au- thorities which had no reference to the statements supposed to be established. When I informed him that I no longer required his services he wrote a reply which I remember as a model of episto- lary dignity. I was oppressing hitn, it appeared, because he was a poor man ; and might as well have struck a woman or a child ; but the saddest part, he con- cluded, of all this sad business was that it destroyed the ideal which he had formed for himself of Mr. Leslie Stephen. I did not see my way to apologizing, and hope that I escaped pretty completely from his like. The more serious diffi- culty was condensing. If the book was ever to be completed, wordiness must be sternly excised, and that is a fault which has many varieties. Some early aspir- ants, whose articles I had stewed down, were simple enough to be more difBuse next time, in order to allow for probable shrinkage. I parted company with them pretty quickly. But some otherwise valu- able contributors had to be trained to submission. One of them, whom I shall always remember with gratitude, wrote to thank me for having reduced an ar- ticle by at least two thirds, and admitted the great improvement of his style. I believe that he was perfectly sincere ; for he continued to give valuable help. But he was unique. Others kept their grati- tude for such services, if they felt it, to themselves. The " sweating " of arti- cles was certainly the most trying of my duties. One mystery always puzzled me. It is easy enough to cut out superfluities, sentiment, and rhetoric, and flowers of speech in general. As Canon Ainger put it, we might adopt the phrase of obitu- ary notices: "No flowers, by request." Though a thoughtless critic might com- plain of a life for being " unsympathetic," it was clearly our business to be sternly concise, and to confine comments or criti- cism to a brief indication of a man's place in history. My puzzle was that writers who fully appreciated the necessity could yet manage to be long winded. One man will tell a story without introducing any clearly irrelevant remark or asser- tion, and manage to be twice as long as another who yet omits nothing. The 756 only remedy would, I suppose, be to re- write the whole on a different scheme. I had work enough on hand without doing that service as systematically as I could have wished. But I learnt to think that the whole art of writing consists in mak- ing one word suffice where ordinary men use two. I wish that it were a little more practiced. Meanwhile, I had to take my share in writing lives, and at moments I caught the contagion of the antiquarian fever. There was a certain sense of lux- ury in sitting in the reading-room of the British Museum, conscious that vast mul- titudes of books and MSS. were waiting your pleasure, ready to come when you called. Then came the excitement of the chase ; the conjectures as to the most probable place to find your needle in that stupendous bundle of hay ; and now and then, the triumphant conviction that you had run the game to ground and settled some fact, infinitesimal as it might be, which had baffled your predecessors. One such success would compensate for many of the disappointments which were of course more numerous. My enthusiasm, I think, culminated when I had to con- sider whether Sir Philip Francis was Ju- nius. Many predecessors, of course, had beaten the bush so thoroughly that there was little chance of any new discovery. Still there was a fascination in turning now to old newspapers and pamphlets, verifying or disproving, but always fancy- ing that the next page might contain some pregnant hint hitherto unnoticed. The inquiry, however, ended by rather damp- ing my zeal. In the first place, it per- manently lowered my estimate of human intelligence. Some forty-nine of the fifty hypotheses said to have been suggested are really worthless. Many of the so- called arguments are on a level with the proofs that Bacon wrote Shakespeare : that is, they proceed on the assumption that you conclusively establish a propo- sition by showing that it does not involve a physical impossibility. The only real question is whether the authorship of Editing. B^ancis can be proved. I think that it can, and there was some amusement in bringing together the converging proba- bilities. But it was also borne in upon me very strongly that it matters not a straw to any human being whether Francis was or was not the author. Considered as a puzzle, the inquiry might be an amusing game, like the solution of a chess problem. But the toil of going through the old docu- ments was more than the pleasure could repay. I need hardly speak of other ne- cessary drudgery; the terrible question of bibliography, for example ; the duty of making an accurate list of all the works of some voluminous person, all now se- curely sunk into tenfold oblivion, and of all the forms in whicli they have ap- peared. When some admirable person has done for an author what Professor Masson did for Milton, one could hardly do more than condense and verify. But I have hardly the qualifications of a pi- oneer. Anyhow my health broke down, partly, at any rate, from the strain of such labors, and though I continued to write lives I handed over the reins to my friend Lee — not without a sense of relief. The dictionary had one advantage, that is, I could feel that I was employed in a really useful undertaking. I may be al- lowed to assume that the facilitation of historical inquiry is useful. Contributors could feel themselves to be coOperators, interested in the reputation of the whole work as well as in their own articles. I am specially grateful to many who put an amount of research into the smaller arti- cles which generally pass without notice, but which are perhaps the most valuable part of the book. The popular critic nat- urally confined his attention to the longer articles upon famous names ; but the real value of the book depends mainly upon less conspicuous people, who are not to be found in easily accessible places. The dictionary thus brought me into contact with a class of writers with whom I had previously had comparatively little to do. Editing. I admirejhe study of history and the stu- far, perhaps, 757 dents. Professor Gardiner, of whom I have spoken, had in some respects an ideal career. I do not mean that he was a man of most lovable qualities personal- ly, though that would, I believe, be per- fectly true. But a man is surely envi- able who can devote a lifetime to a sin- gle task, learning all that is to be known about a definite period, patiently record- ing in each year of his life the events which had taken a year to happen, and giving his results with admirable impar- tiality and with the certainty of turning out a work of permanent value. The average author by profession, who can only reflect at the end of his career, that if he had stuck to one aim, he might have done something worth the labor, is hu- miliated by thinking of such a calm and honorable self-devotion. The age, we are constantly told, is one of excessive tension and excitement ; and the author who has to meet the whims of the world becomes demoralized. I am not about to contradict the many moralists who dwell upon that theme, but I will also say that, somehow or other, I seem to have known a great many authors, who, though subject to such temptation, ap- peared to me to be very decent fellows in their way. My old friend, James Payn, one of the simplest, most affec- tionate, and most sociable of men, took to literature from spontaneous enthusiasm ; and he declares, if I remember rightly, in his Reminiscences, after long experi- ence, that the literary profession is the best of all ; that its members are the freest from jealousy, and from all the bad passions of which, no doubt, they have a share, but which are developed more abundantly (so it seems to be implied) in clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and men of business. Few authors would have spoken so well of their employment in any previous generation. The lives of authors, authors used to say, are the sad- dest of all reading except the lives of criminals in the Newgate Calendar. So Payn's judgment gives some presumption that things have im- proved ; but I cannot quote him as an authority, because I have a strong sus- picion that, among whatever class of men he had had to live, he would have dis- covered that they were the best and most charming set of people in the world. Authors, it seems to me, like the pro- verbial Lord Mayor, are, after all, men. They are made of the same raw mate- rial as other men, and if the author and the politician are, as some think, the worst of men, it must be that they have the strongest temptations. Both classes are tempted to overestimate the value of popularity. Even if he is independent of the sale of his work, the author at least writes in the hope of being read. He has not the same temptation as the politician for the grosser kinds of dema- gogism. Indeed, on the whole, the easi- est way to popularity is to take a high moral tone. Edifying moralizing is as easy as lying. But, being in his study, he does not get the case hardening which the politician acquires in the rough and tumble of active life ; and is apt to be- come morbidly sensitive. He seldom learns to take abuse as all in the day's work, and like Johnson to regard it as a proof that he has hit hard. Criticism stings him to the last, and one generally fancies at the moment that the hostile critic has found one's weak points with singular subtlety, whereas the compli- mentary critic has a horrid tendency to praise in just the wrong place. Whatever the temptations, however, I have, on the whole, thought that authors, as I have known them in a pretty wide experience, are an enviable race. They have the advantage, if, at least, they are authors by nature, that their work has some spice of intellectual interest and a smaller proportion than most occupations of mere humdrum drudgery, and that they have more liberty to work out their own scheme of activity. I have had the good fortune to know some very emi- 758 Editing. nent authors, and can give them a very decent character. If they sufEer a little from the author's disease, — self-con- sciousness and vanity, — ■ they often take it in a mild form ; Tennyson was, per- haps, an instance. Many years ago I paid some visits to Freshwater, then — for alas ! it has been grievously injured by the growth of the usual watering- place surroundings — the ideal place for the poet of In Memoriam. It is still " close to the edge of a noble down," and the old girdle of woods, round which cockneys used to wander in hopes of a glimpse of the bard, still incloses the picturesque lawn and gardens to which the fortunate few found admission and might listen to Maud or an Idyll, gain- ing new force from the lips of the au- thor. In my day, a little group of rev- erent admirers was generally gathered there to render acceptable homage. It was impossible for the cynic not to catch a certain comic side to the proceedings, — though, of course, it was very wrong. I remember a dinner from which I fled precipitately in company with a man highly distinguished in official life and solid literature. We confided to each other that it was perfectly right for the ladies of the party to show a certain pre- ference for the man of genius ; but that it was too much to be treated as pariahs, outside of the pale of social equality. " Stay ! Stay ! Dr. Johnson is going to speak,'' would have been fairly resented by Goldsmith even had he not been Goldsmith. Such a steam of incense cre- ates a rather unwholesome atmosphere for a man of specially sensitive nature. Tennyson perhaps suffered a little. He had a right to complain if a certain arti- cle in a popular newspaper contained, as he told us, three lies about him in one column ; but I did not want to hear the statement repeated daily for a week. He might, too, have been a little less shocked by the apparition on the " noble down " of a distant figure — a harmless local laborer — whom he at once assumed to be one of the circumambient cockneys who were always prowling round the protective circle of woods. But I apolo- gize for mentioning these petty foibles. Tennyson was so transparently simple, one might say childlike, in his little vani- ty, that one only felt something piquant in its combination with the massive frame and the expressive countenance worthy of an intellectual monarch. He was obviously all that one could expect from the poems including the Northern Farmer, which, almost a solitary case in his writings, shows the strong humor that occasionally came up in his talk. There was one lady in the Freshwater circle who could be very outspoken as to the little infirmity at which I have glanced, and he took it as kindly as it was meant. The lady was Mrs. Cameron, who showed real genius in the photographic portraits which, I think, give the best impression of Tennyson and of other eminent men. Mrs. Cameron was unique in her way ; the most warm-hearted and enthusiastic of women ; impulsive to a degree which often startled solid British convention- ality, and doing things which nobody else would have done ; but generally because nobody else gave such free play to gener- ous sentiments. She had, therefore, the rare power of giving the heartiest praise without flattery, — at least of the con- scious and intentional kind, — and could administer a bit of wholesome advice without a touch of venom. Her enthu- siasms included Wordsworth and Car- lyle as well as Tennyson : but her closest friendship was for Henry Taylor. Phil- ip van Artevelde, the work from which Taylor took his literary title, is not, I fear, often read in these days. Dramatic in form, it is rather to be classed with the po- etry of reflection, full of weighty gnomic utterances, though often really poetical, and always in admirable English. Taylor himself looked the poetic sage. Mrs. Cameron's portrait justified a remark of his closest friend. " My infantile idea of the Deity," said Spedding, "was Henry Editing. 759 Taylor sitting on the sofa in his dressing- gown." Most of Taylor's long life was devoted to his official work at the Colo- nial Office, where he was my father's col- league and warm friend. I naturally looked up to him as to one dwelling in serene regions of wisdom and ripe expe- rience ; and I do not think that I was wrong. I have certainly never seen a more imposing figure ; and believe that he fully deserved Mrs. Cameron's devo- tion. With him, I associate Spedding, beloved by him and Carlyle and Edward FitzGerald ; wasting thirty years, as Fitz- Gerald complained, in whitewashing Ba- con when he might have been the ideal editor of Shakespeare ; but, at any rate, absolutely contented with his self-im- posed task, going about it " without haste and without rest," and too free from van- ity to fancy that he could be wasting his powers. Taylor said that every family should have a Bible, a Shakespeare, and a James Spedding ; and his slow and sure judgment, with a substratum of humor and genuine appreciation of literature, made him a critic after FitzGerald's own heart. Another friend of all the circle was the most amiable poet Aubrey de Vere. I do not read his poetry ; I fear that it might stir me the wrong way ; but the man himself was among the most lovable of human beings ; gentle, courte- ous, and chivalrous, — clinging to his old friends the more when his conversion to Catholicism made some intellectual sep- aration. Whatever his merits as a poet, to me he suggested the type of saint. — I mean to refer only to the better qualities connoted by that name. The malicious and censorious instincts seemed to have been omitted from his composi- tion. De Vere was of course an enthu- siastic Wordsworthian, — and although that name could not be applied to Ten- nyson, there was this much of affinity that one charm of his poetry is due to the pure and lofty moral sentiment. The men of whom I have been speaking seem to breathe in a wholesome social atmos- phere, and, in spite of a foible or two, were lovable human beings as well as men of genius. The moral might be en- forced by speaking of the other most fa- mous poets whom I have known, Mat- thew Arnold and Browning. Arnold had | no doubt a touch of the intellectual cox- comb. He preached to the Philistine with a certain air of superiority, and repeated his pet maxims too often and too confi- , dently. If he showed, like Tennyson, a simple-minded delight in receiving com- pliments, his vanity was equally harm- less. He was so full of good nature that even the Philistine and the dissenter or the barbarian in flesh and blood appealed to him at once, and he could drop his magisterial robes to talk in the friendliest terms. The impression which he made , was that he was too kindly to be able really to despise even the objects of his theoreti- cal contempt. If Browning had at bot- tom, as one suspects that he had, a touch of excessive sensitiveness, he concealed it under the reserve which made him pass with superficial observers for no- thing but a brilliant conversationalist. He was so anxious not to wear his heart upon his sleeve, that he could conceal even his tender and noble nature from dull eyes; and never condescended to acknowledge a craving for praise or shrinking from blame. Such characteristics may be of doubt- ful value in the eyes of some people. The morals of these poets were not disturbed by the daemonic passions which drive the Byronic race outside the pale of re- spectability. Wordsworth would not have been so irreproachable a person if the prosaic element had not mastered his higher moods. The " leader " would not have been " lost " though the man might have got into scrapes. Undoubtedly the poetic fire may often be an unruly ele- ment of character, and aesthetic sensi- bility be galled b}' the chains of common- place good sense. The most conspicuous and melancholy illustrations might, be taken from Ruskin. I saw him fre- 760 Editing. quently during two summer vacations I which I spent at Coniston. The English Lakes, though but a miniature edition of mountain scenery, have always had a special though unanalyzable charm for me ; and Ruskin's home at Brantwood seemed to me to give its very essence. Had I been Ahab he would have been my Naboth, and I dare say that even in that Arcadia I could have found the ne- cessary men of Belial. The house was of the modest dimensions which do not exclude thorough comfort ; and I could fancy myself settling there into a sufficien- cy of books, with a lovely and soothing scenery courting me for a stroll when- ever I wished for relaxation. There, certainly, Ruskin had every advantage, in the happiest domestic environment; and when he exhibited his treasures, — a manuscript of Scott or a drawing by Turner, — one could fancy him to be a calm connoisseur with hobbies enough to secure ample and delightful occupation. He received one with the courtesy of a polished gentleman of the old school, and talked delightfully without the least as- sumption of superiority. I remember how, on my first visit, he gave me a re- cent number of Fors, in which, he said, I should be interested because it spoke of Alpine traveling. So it did. But he had quite forgotten that he had taken an unfortunate article of mine for a text to illustrate the vulgarity of modern scram- blers. He remarked that I thought the Alps improved by the odor of my tobacco smoke. I adhere to that heresy ; they were greatly improved for me. I might have claimed to be a disciple and told him that their beauty had been inter- preted to me by Modern Painters, though increased by my tobacco, but I thought it better to drop the subject. I remem- ber him, too, entering the room rubbing his hands with no small glee. Somebody, it seemed, had remonstrated with him for one of his slightly extravagant denunci- ations of the English bishops, — or some such respectable class. Ruskin had re- plied to the effect that, though he was always scrupulously accurate in the use of language, he had never said anything more carefully measured or more pre- cisely just than in the offending passage. His complacency in making this retort suggested to me at the time that some of his petulant outbreaks did not imply fierceness or loss of temper, but only the delight of a master of logical fence in administering a skillful thrust at the joints of his opponent's armor. Perhaps that was so, but undoubtedly his wrath was often genuine and painful enough. At the time of which I am speaking, he was beginning to suffer from the excessive nervous tension which upset his powers. He told me, if I remember rightly, that he was correcting eight sets of proofs at once : and the strain showed itself in occasional irritability. Ruskin some- where compares his state of mind to Swift's. He was like Swift in that the sight of the misery and corruption of the world stung him to ungovernable indig- nation. He could not find comfort in art or literature, while the whole world was turning brutal and selfish and sweeping away the old beliefs and institutions, and therefore becoming incapable of appre- ciating or creating genuine beauty. I don't ask whether the world is so bad, but the man wlio would reform it ought, I fancy, to keep his head. He should take time to reflect and coordinate his ideas. For that, Ruskin's intense sensi- bility and impetuosity was a disqualifica- tion. He could never work at any defi- nite line of thought; and his writings became a mass of more or less incoher- ent denunciations and exhortations, most amazingly keen and telling at a number of particular points, but leading to un- satisfactory and inconsistent conclusions. We should perhaps be the more thankful for the genius, which struggles through so many infirmities; and Ruskin's feel- ing is always so deep and genuine, and is uttered with such singular keenness, that most people forgive the want of in- Editing. 761 tellectual self-control. He is at least a proof that there is some truth in the un- comfortable doctrine that the most effec- tive utterance is only to be won at the cost of the utterer. He is tortured for our benefit, and we admire the man who cannot see wrong without wrath, while we manage to take things more easily ourselves. That suggests a contrast. Among the objects of Ruskin's denunciations was the modern man of science. When his mind was losing its balance, he used to speak of a mysterious cloud, such as he had never seen in the days of his youth, wliich had taken to overshadowing the mountains. It might be a symbol of the scientific materialism which was darkening the intellectual sky. Carlyle had preached the same doctrine ; and in a milder form the revolt against some scientific tendencies was most felicitous- ly expressed by Tennyson. Perhaps it might turn out that he had not an im- mortal soul. Nobody, Huxley is re- ported to have said, had a clearer view of the issues involved. I, certainly, should have no wish to belittle them, or to deny that Tennyson and his brother poets were uttering emotions which no one can afford to despise. But, I only speak of the fact as reminding me that whatever the goodness or badness of their cause, the leaders of the scientific world were personally as attractive as those who regarded their principles with horror. I had the privilege of seeing something of Darwin in his later years. To me, and my opinion was not excep- tional, he appeared to be simply the most lovable person whom I ever en- countered. A little party of us used at one time to take long Sunday tramps in the neighborhood of London. Those were days to be marked with a white stone when Darwin received us at the famous house at Down. It is in the quiet region of chalk downs, which had been left untouched in the gaps of the network of railways ; and still looked as rural as it had a century earlier. One could expect to meet the old smugglers whose paths from the coast to London were laid through the unfrequented dis- trict. There Darwin found an admirable retreat for contemplating flowers and bees and worms, and for slowly elaborat- ing the thoughts which had revolutionized science. He was as free from preten- sions as if his investigations had no more claims to respect than those of a com- monplace pigeon-fancier. The simplicity of the man was evident in the delight- fully easy terms in which he lived with a family which was worthy of his affec- tion. I could sympathize with the young German who burst into tears on leaving the house, touched by the contrast be- tween the famous thinker and the sweet- natured, quiet country gentleman, so free from the pedantry which sometimes haunts the professor's chair. I remem- ber my quaint sense of humiUation when he asked me quite seriously for my views about the correct definition of instinct. I felt as I once did when a doctor of divinity asked me to explain the origin of evil. It was not a question for me. I will not speak further of qualities sufficiently obvious to every reader of his life. I have only one moral to draw. Darwin himself insists upon his literary shortcomings. He lost a taste for poetry in his old age, and ascribes the loss to his absorption in science. I have observed the same phenomenon in many men who were absolutely unscientific. At all times, he found the labor of expressing his thoughts on paper very trying ; and Huxley declared that he was like an in- spired dog, at once inarticulate and full of the most valuable thoughts. Yet I know no pleasanter book of travels than the Voyage of the Beagle, and his let- ters, though mainly upon topics beyond my knowledge, have a peculiar fascina- tion. They have not the qualities of Mrs. Carlyle's or of Edward Fitz- Gerald's, but they have the quality, what- ever it may be, which makes even a 762 JiJditi?iff. botanical discussion interesting to one who scarcely knows a poppy from a tulip. The most obvious are the intellectual vivacity, which makes the whole of ex- ternal nature a collection of fascinating problems, and the generous enthusiasm with which he accepts the help of his fellow workers. Men of science, I fear, are not always free from jealousy ; but when Darwin welcomes a friend's sug- gestion with his favorite " By Jove ! " it suggests the unqualified glee of a schoolboy when a good blow is struck on his side of the game. Darwin, of course, suggests his " bulldog " Huxley : the best wrestler in the intellectual ring. I never had the treat, said to have been delightful, of looking on at one of his rounds with W. G. Ward at the Meta- physical Society ; but I saw enough of his contests with other antagonists to ap- preciate his singular alertness and vigor. Huxley, as I have good reason to know, was not less remarkable for warmth of heart than for keenness in controversy, and sufficiently proved that thorough amiability does not necessarily prescribe a gentle handling of humbug or equivo- cation. Huxley's essays are among our very best specimens of one variety of literature. Few controversialists ever hit so hard and so straight and avoided so rigidly the temptation to stray into irrelevant issues. To concentrate your whole force upon the critical point is the great art of intellectual as of physical warfare. Huxley's style has in the high- est degree the merit due to nerer think- ing of the style at all, but simply of the clearest utterance of your thought. In those days the orthodox generally de- scribed their adversaries as " the Hux- leys and the Tyndalls,'' the complimen- tary plural. My first contact with Tyn- dallwas not altogether satisfactory. He had joined the Alpine Club and was elected Vice President. He made us an after-dinner speech, eloquent I have no doubt, which somehow suggested an un- lucky reply to my youthful impertinence. I asserted that true Alpine travelers loved the mountains for their own sake, and considered scientific intruders with their barometers and their theorizing to be a simple nuisance. When shortly afterwards Tyndall broke off for a time his connection with the club I was ac- cused of having given the offense. How that may be I know not, but I do know that when I met him afterwards, he re- ceived me in the friendliest way. Our tramps led us occasionally to Hindhead, the nearest approach to a mountain within reach of London, on the summit of which Tyndall had built a house in late years. He was a delightful host, overflowing with the heartiest talk. Tyn- dall had some of the characteristics claimed, though I hope not monopolized, by Irishmen. He was easily roused to enthusiastic rhetoric, very different from Huxley's terse cut and thrust, but show- ing a poetic imagination stirred by sci- ence. One marked quality was the en- thusiasm with which he took up the cause of men whom he considered to have been ill treated by their superiors, or to have failed to receive due recognition. He was among the most chivalrous and warm-hearted of men. From Tyndall and Huxley, I might make a natural transition to Mr. Herbert Spencer. It is needless to speak of his heroic devotion of a lifetime to the highest intellectual purposes. What always impressed me most forcibly was the admirable simpli- city and candor of the man. I am not quite so convinced as he appears to be that he has found the last word in re- gard to the great problems of philoso- phy. But there is something impressive in the sight of a man giving liimself up so unreservedly to the guidance of what he takes to be the voice of pure reason, and so absolutely indifferent to any other authority. When he calmly sets aside all other philosophies as so much blun- dering, he does not, like Carlyle, suggest personal arrogance, but simply his sur- render to obviously self-evident truth. '■'■Nature Study." 763 Acquaintance with such men might well convince me that if they were, as Carlyle and Euskin seemed to think, in- struments of the devil, the devil deserves much credit for enlisting good men in his service. I must rather hope that the time will come of true reconcili- ation between faith and science, or the imagination and the reason, or whatever the right phrase may be which has been the topic of so many controversies. I am only thinking of a much smaller question. The merit of a scientific work depends upon its contents, not its form. The force of Darwin's arguments was the question, and not his skill in expound- ing them. If many men of science have written admirably, their literary power was an accident or a subordinate and secondary virtue. They have literary intelligence while aiming at something better or at least less egotistical. The imaginative writer is bound to be emo- tional and personal ; he has to work up his inmost emotions for exhibition, and is thin-skinned and self-conscious. He is apt to quarrel with facts in general ; and is tempted either to give up his in- terest in the brutal outside world and even to become " aesthetic," or to knock his head passionately against the world at large and find that the world is the harder. Let us hope that he has his re- ward in the raptures of creation, and be thankful that we are spared his tempta- tions. The quiet man of letters by pro- fession need not bother himself about soul problems, if he is wise enough not to mistake himself for a genius. He may go on like the admirable Trollope, content to provide his fellows with harm- less and healthy amusement, and feel that it is well worth while to have in- creased the stock of innocent pleasure for the moment. Or he may be content with honestly spreading knowledge and interpreting the thoughts of the original minds. It will no doubt occur to him that the world will lose nothing by com- mitting all his works, as it is sure to do, to the newspaper basket. But meanwhile, he will feel, unless indeed he has been face to face with starvation, that he has had very satisfactory employment, with less of worry and responsibility than falls to the lot of most men. Leslie Stephen. 'NATURE STUDY." It is the fashion, and society is out of doors with book and glass. Modes and fabrics are not more contagious. Thus the world moves : we have changed our hand-shake and our calling-cards, we give our brides showers, and we study Nature. Sometimes we forget our man- ners, claiming vulgar and imperti- nent acquaintance with the wood-gods. There are stories of an authentic young woman who thought Nature nice : and all the rest of us capitalize Nature as we used to rubricate art ; we patronize our thrushes, we chaperon the lady's slip- per. Some of us are earnest seekers: among whom the long bow is drawn, insomuch that the profane scofE at us, and the fabulists of gun and rod are put to school. "You bird men are all liars, " said my friend the Philistine the other day. " One of you says, ' I heard the bow-legged sandpiper this morning, ' and the other answers, ' Oh, I heard him day before yesterday. ' " The next development should be personally con- ducted excursions. If we have books to tell us how to listen to Liszt, we may expect How to Believe the Bobolink; 764 '■'■Nature Study." and they that tell us how to look at pic- tures, except the late Mr. Whistler, will help us to attain the right Mongolian of a seeing eye in the wildwood. Mean- while, if Pan in reality be not dead, he must experience the novel sensation of blushing. It does not matter much what chil- dren play, so they play in the sun : and I submit that all this is good. For if it does not serve science, it serves art, a service by no means less. We shall never be done, one must suppose, with these quarrels of our own making be- tween art and science. Gods of life, they do not quarrel. We cry, "War, war ! " but there is no war. To say that the artist may exceed Nature is the confusion of tongues. "The light that never was on sea or land, " we have all seen it, or God pity the blind ! Our Rosalinds are high as our hearts : five feet, ten feet, no man can measure her forme. "Overdrawn" and "too high- ly colored " are words which signify nothing : a thing may be drawn wrong, but not overdrawn ; the color may be wrong, but it cannot be too pure and clear, it cannot surpass the right. To use the words argues against one's self. I once saw a scarlet tanager flash across the very faces of three young gossips in a maple-path ; they did not see it. I once saw a scholar trample calmly through a heavenly acre of bluebells. "Look at the posies ! " he said : he did not see them. Even with the elect the incidents are frequent. One had a long list of spring arrivals, among which was the Louisiana water-thrush. "Was he sing- ing ? " I asked, and he answered with a naive surprise, "Why, yes, he was doing some twittering." It is of course the very whimper of sentiment to object to the collector's gun: I have seen without remorse the ruby-crowned kinglet fall from his fairy madrigal, crimson not only at the brow; but once I was near homicide over a similar incident. The bird was a Wilson's snipe, and we ap- proached him incredibly near, where he probed with his long bill in the autum- nal marsh- edges, so near that we could see every embroidery of his rich fabrics. "Ah, I understand! " said my comrade, and then he shot him ; the bird was blind of one eye. And let me tell another story of a tanager, that upon the full pomp of May-day returned, not in his wonted manner. Fire of the treetops,! all but touched him, finding him in the last least thicket of the budding copses, a foot from earth, in exile, silent, mo- tionless, hardly avoiding my hand. In the afternoon he was found dead on the slope ; there was no mark upon him ; a perfect specimen, said the ornithologist who gathered him in. Well, I height- ened nature; I committed Raskin's pa- thetic fallacy; I made him to myself more beautiful than he appeared to the other man. He has homed here to die, I thought, a broken heart. Harken one pronouncing, therefore! Literature is reducible to this, a projec- tion of inner upon external life, for the purpose of expression. What science makes an end, art uses as a means: vocabulary, imagery, by which a human mood may be spoken. The real thing for literature, the wearer of the cos- tume, is this latter, the human emotion. If I see in the closed gentian a bud that will not blossom, a maid that will not marry, my fancy, not the flower, is the motive of art. If I see the resurrection in the first mourning-cloak of March, the butterfly that breaks from a derided winter after the long months of sleep in his folded purple wings, my fancy, not Vanessa antiopa, is the stuff of which literature is made. When the violet blooms in October, 'tis memory; when the witch-hazel hangs its light of stars in the fall of leaves, like the evening star outlasting the afterglow, 't is hope ; when the trilliums from their maiden white begin to burn and blush, till they are like red tulips through the wood, 't is love, and fatal. When you find in the vireo's nest three white eggs and a different fourth, freckled with brown.