THE QUARTERLIES.
THE falling off in our Quarterlies, which to those familiar with their earlier numbers is so painfully apparent, is, we imagine, only partly real. It is natural that, as the tide of life rushes faster and faster every day till the flood threatens to drown reflection, periodicals pub- lished at so long an interval should occasionally seem stale. It is only by mere good luck that periodicals like the Edinburgh or the National can touch on subjects the interest of which is as vividly fresh as that of to-day's Times, or can treat exhaustively of any range of facts without the risk of finding their reflections superseded on the eve of publication by another and more striking series. What, for example, is the British Quarterly to say of the American struggle when the day of publication may bring news of a compromise or a victory decisive of the contest? When the telegraph cannot keep pace with the march of events, Quarterlies must seem stale. Their old recommendation, too, that of extreme boldness of opinion, has been lost in the consequences of the victory that boldness gained.. The truths Sydney Smith was thought an incendiary for asserting are to-day the bases of society, and any penny paper dare overstep the line which in 1800 was the limit even of his audacity. To see how the world has changed for the Quarterlies we must compare them not with each other, but with the few journals still worked under their old conditions. The Revue des Deux ltondes, for example, occupies at this moment in France much the position once assumed by the Edinburgh Review. Published fortnightly, it is as much up to events as the Edinburgh was in a less hurried age, while, like the Edinburgh, it is the only representative left of the freer intellect of France. It is not under the press law, is exceedingly dear, and is managed with admirable tact. It is therefore, for the hour, the one periodical in which Frenchmen of the first class can shadow out, however vaguely, their real thoughts and aspirations, and is consequently for the hour the most interesting journal in Europe, It is expected as well as read ; a distinction no English Review of equal pretensions can any longer claim. M. Forcade's paper on Re presentation, or M. Perier's analysis of Imperial Finance, rises to the importance of a state paper, not because M. Forcade is a statesman, or M. Perier likely to oust M. Magne, but because they, and they alone, are left to represent an opinion other than the one Imperial wisdom seeks to impose on France. The English Reviews cannot hope to make themselves thus felt in politics, and deprived of all adventitious aid, and left behind by the rushing current of events, they seem inevitably dull beside the remembrance of their former selves. They have, however, one great function still left them to perform : they can :md do still act as mediums between the public and the men who, either from position, or taste, or intellectual specialty, decline the arena of more ephemeral controversy. Lord Robert Cecil can still express in the Quarterly the thoughts which, though influencing one-half of a great party, find no expression in its daily or weekly organs. Sir C. Lewis can still contribute to the Edinburgh the results of a reflective scholarship for which nothing save such a Review would afford fitting scope. Isaac Taylor can still circulate through the North British ideas which, in their coherence and slow evolution, are unfitted for any vehicle but one which can carry them to its readers as a whole. This function, that of enabling the highest cultivation of the day to deal exhaustively with its most important topics, is still the monopoly of the Reviews, and is still on the average very fairly performed. Single numbers differ greatly in value, and the list before us is unusually deficient, but the Quarterly still remains an institution the absence of which would be gravely regretted by all that is most thoughtful in the country. This is not the month for the two elder Reviews ; but we have before us a long list, each with some special claim to attention. The National, though not perhaps above the average, is still full of papers, each of which twenty years ago would have sufficed to keep up the credit of a Review. Three, on the "Eastern Church," the " Civil War in America," and " William Pitt," are exhaustive essays, presenting almost as much of information as the books they profess to review, and really supersede. We can agree with none of the three ; but they are none the less complete from their writers' point of view. The article on the "Eastern Church," is a real history of its rise and specialty of teaching, though we do not believe with the reviewer that it is possible for the mass of mankind ever to separate a creed from its positive or dogmatic instruction. So the "Civil War in America " is a singularly exhaustive account of the rise of that great struggle, though the deduction that the only possible end of the war is a compromise, seems to us at variance alike with the facts of the hour and the principles which will outlast them. " William Pitt" is a warm eulogy on a statesman of whom we can believe anything, save that he was, as the reviewer holds, a great financier. We may quote the reviewer's argument : "The exposure of this financial juggle, for though not intended to be so, such in fret it was, has reacted very unfavourably .upon Dlr. Pitt's deserved fame. It was so long said that he was a great financier because he invented the Sinking Fund,' that it came at last to be believed that he could not be a great financier inasmuch as he had invented it. So much merit had been claimed for something bad, that no search was made for anything good. But an accurate study of these times will prove that Pitt was really one of the greatest financiers in our his- tory, that he repaired the great disorders of the American war, that he restored a surplus revenue, that he understood the true principles of taxation, that he even knew that the best way to increase a revenue from the consumption of the masses is to lower the rate of duty and develop their consuming power."
What does it signify to the question what Pitt knew P The great financier is the man who applies correct principles to the financial necessities of the day, and the first of these principles is thrift. Pitt was recklessly extravagant, and left us for sole result of his ad- mirable finance a doubled debt, contracted chiefly to buy us allies, who, if he had not bought them, must have fought on their own ac- count. Half the money paid to induce the Continent to defend itself would have enabled England, with hired troops under her own com- mand, to have conquered France, and dictated the European peace. Vague ideas of a wise finance, no doubt, flitted often before that d imagination, but they did not prevent Pitt from believing Dr. ice, and acting for years on the theory that it was possible, by compound interest, to .get more hay out of a field than there was grass in it. The following, however, is as just as it is original, and is, we are persuaded, the true key. to much of Pitt's success : " Nor was this all. The opportunity was not only a great opportunity, but was an opportunity in the hands of a young man. Half of our greatest statesmen would have been wholly unprepared for it. When Lord Palmerston was in office in the spring of 1857 with a large majority, a shrewd observer, now no longer among us, said, Well, it is a large majority; but what is he to do with it?' He did not know himself; by paltry errors and frivolous haughtiness he frittered it
away ,
immediately. An old man of the world has no great objects, no telling en- thusiasm, no large proposals, no noble reforms; his advice is that of the old banker, 'Live, sir, from day to day, and don't trouble yourself!' Years of ac- quiescing in proposals as to which he has not been consulted, of voting for measures which he did not frame, and in the wisdom of which he often did not believe, of arguing for proposals from half of which he dissents,—usually de- intellectualize a parliamentary statesman before he comes to half his power. From all this Pitt was exempt. He came to great power with a fresh mind. And not only so. He came into power with the cultivated thought of a new generation. Too many of us scarcely remember how young a man he was. He was born in 1759, and he might have well been in the vigour of life in 1830. Lord Sidmouth, his contemporary, did not die until after 1840; he was younger than his cousin, Mr. Thomas Grenville, who long represented in London society the traditions of the past, and who died in 1846. He governed men of the gene- ration before him. Alone among English statesmen, while yet a youth he was governing middle-aged men. He had the power of applying the eager thought of five-and-twenty, of making it rule over the petty knowledge and trained acqui- escence of five-and-fifty. Alone as yet, and alone perhaps for ever in our par- liamentary history, while his own mind was still original, while his own spirit MU still unbroken, he was able to impcee an absolute yoke on acquiescent spirits whom the world had broken for him.'
If a young Premier were possible to-day, his ideas would probably seem as wide to this generation as those of Pitt did to his own. The paper on "Old London" is a gem, full of that quaint Elia-like humour the comic school have so nearly abolished from among us. The following account of the hostility which once existed between the City and Southwark is the more curious because there is a trace of the same feeling remaining to this hour, though the dislike to "the Borough" is now a social rather than a municipal impulse.
" The jealousy and animosity displayed by the City in all its ordinances and quarter seems to have disturbed the imaginations of the civic dignitaries to such an extent that they went far towards rendering the borough an actual nuisance, by the measures which they adopted for branding it and all belonging to it with the stigma of a lower caste. All dealers who came from Southwark were treated as presumptive rogues and cozeners, and every obstacle seems to have been put in the way of intercourse between the two sides of the River. The boatmen were forbidden to stay on that side after depositing their fares ; and it is evident that a visit in that quarter was considered a very ambiguous proceeding, which required explanation on the part of any respectable citizen. And there was some reason for this suspicion, inasmuch as the City authorities expressly hunted to Southwark all such social nuisances as were insupportable under their own im- mediate eyes. This antagonism between the City and Southwark was, we gather from other sources, quite mutual; as, on not a few occasions, the citizens found, to their cost, when a hostile force obtained entrance and a ready welcome to their very portals." The Westminster Review is unusually heavy, though the papers are thoughtful and exhaustive. There is a tendency to discuss used-up subjects in this Review, which, though it has the occasional effect of a judicial, because final, summing up, is sometimes not a littlewean- some. The articles on Schleiermacher and the Salmon Fisheries are both open to this remark, though the latter is a most conscientious analysis of the mass of information recently poured forth to increase the certainty of the extinction of the finest of fish. The reviewer is as unable as his rivals to meet the real difficulty, which is, that civilization and salmon cannot as yet co-exist. His recommenda- tions are : " That a free passage shall be permitted to the fish through or over all weirs, dams, dykes, or other obstructions placed in the course of the rivers for industrial, public, or private purposes; that under penalties no refuse from mines, mills, or manufactories shall be permitted to go into Me rivers; that stake-nets, putcher, putt, or butt stages, together with all other fixed engines for the taking of salmon, be prohibited ; that the annual close time be throughout the kingdom from the 1st of September to the 1st of February ; and that no salmon shall be offered for sale in any place in England or Wales after the 10th of September, although rod-fishing may continue until the 15th of October; that a weekly close time of not less than thirty-six hours be enforced ; that illegal fishing or waching be made punishable by fine and imprisonment." The one we have italicized contains the gist of the matter, and is simply impracticable. We cannot stop all smelting works, gas works, tanneries, dyeing factories, and all other establishments which pro- duce refuse, in order to save a fish which the poor, if they got it at a penny a pound would no more eat than they will the fishes they can already obtain. Salmon must betake itself to the unpolluted rivers of the north, and become an article of import only. The paper on M. Taine is full of information, its subject being a critic who is ex- citing some attention in France, but is still wholly unknown in Eng- land. He is to criticism what Mr. Buckle is to history, a man who hopes by vast erudition to prove that criticism is an exact science. The reviewer whose notice, intended to be eulogistic, has the effect of depreciation, proves that M. Taine is a man of singularly wide knowledge, and very original thought, but of his theory he leaves no definite impression. From scattered notices we can gather that M. Taine holds the mind to be a thing, acted upon, like other things, by external forces, and that the province of cnticisin is not to examine the mind, but the working of these forces upon the mind subjected to them Even "genius is nothing more than a developed force ; a force which cannot be developed except in a country wherein it is natural and common, where it is nourished by education, strengthened by example, sustained by character, and elicited by the public taste." Thus events moulded Livy into an oratorical historian, and it is only in that light that M. Taine will consent to regard him. Of course under a dominant theory of this kind he produces a very striking analysis of Livy, but it is also a very ; one-sided one. Thinness, an inability to cover the, whole of the object before him, is, we imagine, 11. Taiue's marked defect, as it is Mr. Buckle's. They are both men who see with wonderful clearness, and forget that that which the eye sees, is, and can be, only the surface which gives back the light. The "Countess of Albany" is a readable, but far too favourable biography of the unfortunate woman, who, married at nineteen to the Pretender, then fifty-two, found solace with Alfieri, and, after the death of the Pretender, preferred living with the poet as his mistress, because she retained her titular rank, to a marriage which would have reduced her to a simple " countess." She seems to have been a woman of some ability and accomplishments, do- minated by a puerile vanity, and without a vestige of principle. She accepted her husband to gain a meaningless title, site deceived him for Alfieri, and then, after expressing unbearable regret for her para- mour, took in eight months another of infinitely lower intellectual rank. Absurdly vain of her pretension to a throne, she had herself presented at the British Court, in utter contempt for her husband's
claims, and is then styled by her reviewer a woman who, "by virtue of her gifts and education, her affability and gracious demeanour, the Countess of Albany was better qualified for sitting on a throne titan the majority of those who have occupied that position." " Equa- torial Africa" is a paper on the topic of the day, favourable to Mr. du Chaffin, and the paper on Mr. Buckle is, of course, an appreciative defence of his view of " Spanish and Scottish History." The re- viewer not agreeing with Mr. Buckle's conclusions, still asks for a patient hearing for his uncompleted work.
We honour the courage of the Editor of the British Quarterly, who devotes an entire paper to Schleswig-Holstein, the most utterly
unreadable of political discussions. The reviewer is strong on the Danish side, even going the length of the assertion that for Prussia to possess a great navy would derange the balance of power. If England has a political interest in the aggrandizement of any power it is in that of Prussia, whose absorption of Denmark, were that possible with the consent of the Danes, would secure the permanent freedom of the Baltic. Perhaps the most interesting article in the
regulations with respect to the neighbouring borough of Southwark is very amus- number is the paper on "Helps's Spanish Conquest in America," a mg and instructive. The fact that an independent jurisdiction existed, in this :temperate but most just account of that awful chapter in the history
of human misery and crime. The reviewer estimates the destruction of life at twenty millions, and we hellfire the statement is by no means overcharged. It is pleasant to read a strong denunciation of this gigantic crime at a time when an overstrained tolerance makes light even of extermination, for ends, and by means, such as those the Spaniards sought and employed. Even Mr. Helps, though he relates the facts, leaves too much the impression that the Spaniards were not voluntary agents. This tolerance is the more inexplicable be- cause though mere slaughter, from the difficulty of realizing it, has never excited very general horror, the worst of men will acknowledge the infamy of a scene like this :
"Recurring to Higuey, we find that the Spaniards continued to indulge themselves in these parts in all the licence of the utmost tyranny combined with the utmost barbarity. They loved to provoke the natives to resentment, because they loved to quench resentment in blood. There was no diabolical wickedness and no impiety which they did not practise, and in which they did not take pains even to appear to delight. Upon many they wreaked such ex- travagance of cruelty that suicide became common and popular. The cutting off of their captives' hands, and then sending them home mutilated and helpless, continued to be a favourite mode of spreading terror. But the •Spaniards were devout as well as bloody, zealous no less than devilish. On one occasion, ac- cordingly, they hung up, 'in reverence of Christ our Lord and His twelve Apos- tles,' thirteen captured Indians at such a height that their feet could but just touch the ground, and they then used them as dumb figures to try their swords upon ; which, lest any gentle reader should happen not to know its i meaning, we must inform her, is a shorter way of saying that these thirteen Indians, banged in honour of Christ our Lord and His twelve Apostles,' were hewed to pieces by the Spaniards with the several strokes, seven in number, prac- tised in the exercise of the broadsword. All this,' exclaims Las Cases, I saw with my bodily mortal eyes."
Higuey is part of the dominion the Spaniards have just reacquired in San Domingo. The only other Review at which we have space this month to glance is the London Review, a publication less known, we fancy, than it deserves to be. There is a curious vein of English Noncon- formist opinion running through the different papers which gives them, amidst the negative tone assumed by most periodical literature, a flavour of originality. The article on novels and novelists, for example, which commences the number, is a curiously good essay from that point of view, and it is so odd to ordinary readers to hear "Adam Bede," for example, condemned as an irreligious book, that the grave and very clever argument to that end has all the effect of really original thought. Even the London Review, however, gives up the Index Expurgatorius, the wretched old theory that the way to keep the young from evil is never to let them read except under external direction; that, in short, the way to be safe in the water is never to learn to swim. The true theory is herein carefully expressed, though clothed in words somewhat too suggestive of the pulpit :
"It is useless to place around the young restrictions which are not sanctioned by the tone and temper of the age; and we might as well bar our doors against the spring-tide as against the torrent of stories, serials, and green and yellow literature, which inundates us on all sides. Each one must bar his own mind, making conscience to himself of the time he devotes to reading, of the nature of the books he reads, and of the effect they have on his mind. But this would carry us far beyond novels. 0, studious young men, who scorn light literature, do you never undermine your principles by wild speculations a thousand times more dangerous? 0, respectable fathers, who frown at Dumas, do you never read the Times' reports of the Divorce dourt, a thousand times more defiling? When the press gives such publicity to every kind of vice and error, there can be no effectual barrier against evil but that which is placed within. Curious youth turns towards forbidden knowledge ere it rightly apprehends the extent of the stain ; and it is in that age of departing innocence and advancing temptation that we should most seek to inculcate the great duty of self-restraint. The oise son of Sirach tells us that 'the knowledge of wickedness is not wisdom.' Wha is there that, in sober manhood, has never had cause to mourn over the dark corners of his mind, where dangerous or defiling knowledge has been stored (drawn frau, other sources than novels), and to wish that, in the mercy of GA it had been posaitile to blot out the memory with the guilt of sin? Our stained thoughts remain to trouble or to tempt us, like dry-rot that has crept into the hidden timbers of a house, which, kept by great care from spreading, oozes out in damp spots on the wall,—an incurable evil, only to be met by a rough remedy, when the architect shall take down the house, and build it all anew.' "
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