THE BEST PAPERS IN THE MAGAZINES.
EVERYBODY is talking about the first paper in Blackwood for this month, and everybody is quite right. We do not know that we ever saw anything better in any Magazine, or any better example of the vraisemblance which a skilled artist can produce by a variety of minute touches. If the writer is, as reported, Colonel Hamley, then Colonel Hamley, when he wrote the charming story of "Lady Lee's Widowhood," misconceived as a novelist the nature of his own powers. He should rival Defoe, not Anthony Trollope. The writer of this paper, living about 1925, gives his son an ac- count of his adventures as a Volunteer during the invasion of Eng- land fifty years before, and so powerful is the narrative, so intensely real the impression it produces, that the coolest disbeliever irs panics cannot read it without a flush of annoyance, or close it without the thought that after all, as the world now stands, some such day of humiliation for England is at least possible. The sug- gested condition precedent of invasion, the destruction of the fleet- by torpedoes attached by a new invention to our ships, has attracted many minds, and with the destruction of the regulars, the helpless- ness of the brave but half-organized Volunteers, and the absence of arrangement, make up a picture which, fanciful as it is, we seem as we read it almost to have seen. It describes so exactly what we all feel that under the circumstances, Englishmen, if refused time to organize, would probably do. It is impossible to make extracts such as would give an idea of the paper, for its effect depends upon a thousand minute touches, which would be unintelligible without the context, but we must give the writer's account of the destruction of the fleet. The German Government has found means of transport by laying an embargo on every vessel in the northern ports of Europe ; but England, though unready, had still a fleet which, visited by the Queen, and calmly complimented by the Times, steamed out to destroy the advancing armada. A. cable was laid down as it advanced :- "I had just come up to town by train as usual, and was walking to my office, when the newsboys began to cry, New edition—enemy's fleet in Bight!' You may imagine the scene in London ! Business still went on at the banks, for bills matured although the independence of the coun- try was being fought out under our own eyes, so to say; and the specula- tors were active enough. But even with the people who were making and losing their fortunes, the interest in the fleet overcame everything else ; men who went to pay in or draw out their money stopped to show the last bulletin to the cashier. As for the street, you could hardly get along for the crowd stopping to buy and read the papers ; while at every house or office the members sat restlessly in the common room, as if to keep together for company, sending out some of their number every few minutes to get the latest edition. At least this is what happened at our office ; but to sit still was as impossible as to do anything, and most of us went out and wandered about among the crowd, under a sort of feeling that the news was got quicker at in this way. Bad as were the times coming, I think the sickening suspense of that day, and the shock which followed, was almost the worst that we underwent. It was about ten o'clock that the first telegram came ; an hour later the wire announced that the admiral had signalled to form line of battle, and shortly after- wards that the order was given to bear down on the enemy and engage. At twelve came the announcement, 'Fleet opened fire about three miles to leeward of us,'—that is, the ship with the cable. So far all had been expectancy, then came the first token of calamity. Au ironclad has been blown up the enemy's torpedoes are doing great damage '—
'the flagship is laid aboard the enemy '—' the flagship appears to be sinking '—'the vice-admiral has signalled '—there the cable became ailent, and, as you know, we heard no more till two days afterwards. The solitary ironclad which escaped the disaster steamed into Portsmouth. Then the whole story came cut—how our sailors, gallant as ever, had tried to close with the enemy ; how the latter had evaded the conflict at close quarters, and, sheering off, left behind them the fatal engines which sent our ships, one after the other, to the bottom; how all this happened almost in a few minutes. The Governments it appears, had received warnings of this invention ; but to the nation this stunning blow was utterly unexpected."
That scene will happen some day, though the means of destruction will probably be the fall of barrels of nitro-glycerine, or some similar compound, thrown from catapults on to the decks of our ironclads, and exploding downwards, —so as to avoid all danger to the assailants,—and we can only hope that the second line of defence may then be in better order. If it is not, the rest of the picture may yet be realized :— "We had heard of generosity in war ; we found none : the war was made by us, it was said, and we must take the consequences. London and our only arsenal captured, we were at the mercy of our captors, and right heavily did they tread on our necks. Need I tell you the rest ?— of the ransom we had to pay, and the taxes raised to cover it, which keep us paupers to this day ?—the brutal frankness that announced we must give place to a new naval Power and be made harmless for revenge ? —the victorious troops living at free quarters, the yoke they put on us made the more galling that their requisitions had a semblance of method and legality ? Better have been robbed at first hand by the soldiery themselves, than through our own magistrates made the instruments for extortion. How we lived through the degradation we daily and hourly underwent, I hardly even now understand. And what was there left to us to live for ? Stripped of our colonies ; Canada and the West Indies gone to America; Australia forced to separate; India lost for ever, after the English there had all been destroyed, vainly trying to hold the country when out off from aid by their countrymen ; Gibraltar and Malta ceded to the new naval Power ; Ireland independent and in perpetual anarchy and revolution. When I look at my country as it is now—its trade gone, its factories silent, its harbours empty, a prey to pauperism and decay—when I see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live."
It is said this paper is to be published separately. If its author will add one page explaining why a new army could not be raised in the North, and a second displaying the helplessness of a people like that of London without weapons or the habit of using them, and then sell his pamphlet in the fashion of Dame Europa's School, he will produce an effect of which he little dreams, perhaps do snore to arm England than Mr. Cardwell, with his sixteen millions, will be able to accomplish.
There are good papers in Fraser, one on "Tendencies in Aus- tralia " in particular, but the most readable is one with a mislead- ing title, "The Original Merry Andrew," a most entertaining analysis of a book written by Andrew Boorde, a physician and ecclesiastic, who in the beginning of the sixteenth century wandered over Europe, and whose "Introduction of Knowledge" has recently been reprinted. Boorde gives his impression of each people among whom he sojourns in a curiously cynical fashion, his highest approval being reserved for Aquitaine, where he says he found equity such as was nowhere else, and bought six cakes for a penny, each of them big enough to keep a man for a day. Here, for instance, is his account of Ireland :- "Frieze, hobby-hawks (such as Strafford in later days sent over to his friends), 'aqua-vile,' dice, are Irish exports. There are no magpies (now they are almost as plentiful as in France) nor snakes, &c. ; and English merchants carry away Irish earth to caste in their gardens, to kepe out and to kyll venimous wormea.' The Irish are slothful, not caring for riches but for meat and drink ; 'flesh sufficient they haue, but little bread or wine, and none ale.' It is their melancoly complexion' (Mr. Disraeli says it is the nearness of the melancholy sea) which causes them to be testy without a cause. Nevertheless Boorde adds: did neuer find more amyte and lone than I hane found of Iryshe men the whyche was borne within the English pale ; yea, even among the wylde Iryshe there be vertuous creatures whom grace worketh shone nature.' So Stanihurst (1577): These Irishe beyng vertuoualy bred up or reformed are such myrors of holynes and austeritio, that other nations retains but a shadow of deuotion in comparison of them." " ' Drunk as a rat' is the proverb of the buttermouth Flemings; ' but the Dutch are worse, drinking till it runs out of them. Brabant is rich and pleasant, and Handwarp ' has a curious spire and a 'Bourse' for the merchants. Cleves and Gueldres are poor, because so fond of war. In Juliers the geese are plucked naked every year. So ranch for the base Doche men.' In hyghe Hoch lend' we are astonished to find the Junker ' already known by name, wearing a feather in his cap :—
" 'Be it of goose or capon, it is right good gere.'
One High Dutch custom which disgusted Boorde has made its way over here, possibly along with the Georges : 'they will eats magotts as fast as we wyll eat comfits. They haue a way to bredo them in chese.' The snowy Alps impressed our author much a man may see them fyftene myle of, at a cyte called Ulmes.' " And this account of Spain shows how little has changed in the Peninsula :-
"The rest of Spain is as bad, except by the sea-side, where, like Portugal, it is enriched by trade. Elsewhere the oountrey is baryn of wine and come, and skarse of vitals ; a man shal not get mete in many places for no mony ; other whyle you shal get kyd, and mesell bakyn, and salt sardyns, which is a lytle fysh as byg as a pylcherd, and they be
rosty. al your wyne shal be kept() and caryed in gots skyns whan you go to dyner and to supper you must fetch your bread in one place, and your wyne in a nether place, and your meato in a nether place ; and hogges in many places shal he vnder yovr feete at the table, and lice in your bed. . . . the best fare is in prestos houses, for they do kepe typlinge houses.'" Boorde was an early hygeist, preached on the virtues of pure air, which " doth comfort the braine," hated "standing waters, stynk- ing mists and marshes," believed content to be a health-giver, declared the east wind the best, because it is "temperate, fryske, and fraugrant," held that "the cook is half a physician," and filled his book with a world of good sense and shrewdness, which his reviewer in Fraser has boiled down for us into a marvellously eatable pemmican of quaintne.sses. If people want sensual luxury, let them lie on grass under a big tree and read the "First Merry Andrew" slowly.
The editor of the Contemporary is making a great mistake. Any one of the five or six metaphysical articles he has given us may be good, one certainly is, but the whole of them in one number are absolutely indigestible. Readers even when interested in meta- physics do not want such a quantity of them all at once, and feel when it is presented in a magazine as the Yorluthireman did when asked to eat a whole cheese, "There'd be no room for the yale." The number is, to speak honestly, unreadable, though it contains an interesting paper on the Catholic crisis in Bavaria, with a somewhat depreciatory estimate of lliillioger, and an unusually neat account of the main difficulty in his path :— "Hollinger wishes only to fight with the Vatican Council and the new dogma, leaving all other things in the Catholic Church untouched. He is only, his followers say, defending the Catholic Church against novelty and illegality. His party therefore call themselves the old Catholic Church as against the 'new Catholics,' or those who receive the in- fallibility dogma. Dcillinger wishes to avoid the fight for principles, to confine his opposition to one point, to isolate, or, so to speak, to localize the war, and entirely to maintain the Catholic Church stand-point. It is here, in our judgment, that he is deceived, just because what he professes to do is impossible. It is the peculiarity of the principle of authority, that every opposition to any fancy, any doctrine, or prescrip- tion of authority must ever become a question of principles. If one single demand of authority is not fulfilled, then it must follow that the principle of authority is renounced, and the original question at issue becomes subordinate to the question of authority. In the present case this is doubly true, where the question touches the fundamental prin- ciple of Roman Catholicism. This is declared with sufficient distinct- ness in the latest pastoral Of the Archbishop of Munich to the faithful, 'It is now,' the Archbishop says, 'no longer a mere question of an article of faith determined by the Church concerning the teaching office of the Pope, but mainly a question of fidelity to the Catholic Church itself.' In the hierarchical Catholic system, it can be nothing else. Whoever opposes the teaching office of the Church, the Pope and the Episcopate, denies the foundation principle of tho Roman Catholic Church ; and whoever raises and maintains an opposition on scientific grounds has adopted another principle, even that with which opponent* incessantly reproach Frohschaminer, and designate 'rationalistic' or naturalistic.'"
In other words, the great doctor must either submit to the new dogma or cease to be a Catholic, the precise truth which he and his followers as yet refuse to comprehend. One penn'orth of meat among all that sawdust is, however, too little, and we warn the editor that if he makes the mistake again he will find his audience much more limited than we presume he desires. Meta- physicians are wiser men, may be, than ordinary folk ; but they give only the same price for a serial, and they are very few. To us the best paper in the Fortnightly is Mr. Harrison's on the Commune, an eloquent though exaggerated defence of that most disastrous but most misunderstood movement. In particular, the
writer brings out with rare force the general political motive of the Parisians, their distrust and dread of the Assembly, which as, they believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, intends to abolish the Republic in favour of the system which is of all others the most abhorrent to the citizens of the great towns :—
"What were their first acts ? They ratified the treaty which they were called to sanction, and then the task committed to them was done. But they set up a claim to sovereign power. At least five hundred of their number were avowed Monarchists. If they did not proclaim the monarchy, it was simply because they could not agree on the monarch. They silenced Garibaldi with insult; they hooted the Republican minority ; they suppressed the deputies of Paris ; they proclaimed their antipathy to Paris, insisting on transferring the capital ; they openly plotted the revival of the monarchy. They put at the head of the Government (avowedly provisional) the most shifty of French politicians. He called to his side the known adherents of the Orleanist dynasty—men whom Paris, the principal cities, and half France repudiate. By every act and word they showed their purpose of restoring the Imperial system, and of governing the great towns by force. Finally, they resolved to sit and to govern away from Paris. Troops of the line were ostentatiously ordered up from tho provinces to overawe the city, just as Napoleon drew round him his Imperial Guard. A known Orleanist was put at the head of the National Guard; another was made Commander-in-Chief. The two chief leaders of the people were sentenced to death for an old political offence. It was not concealed that the purpose of the Govern- ment was first to disarm the people of Paris, next to restore substan- tially the old Imperial tyranny under some monarchic form, and then to govern France away from the intelligence, the influence, and the phy- sical resistance of Paris, the natural capital. In a word, Paris was to be a conquered city."
The mistake in this paragraph seems to us to be the implication that Paris could resist the conquest only by force, whereas she might under a Monarchy of the Parliamentary kind, as well as under a Republic, have won for herself and the other cities an adequate measure of influence in the politics of the country, and complete municipal liberty. It is not the fear of her ideas so much as the dread of her incessant risings which makes the provinces so bitter against the capital, and compels them to ask whether, with Paris unchained, government of any sort is possible in France. The entire paper, however, will interest all that class, now, we hope, growing numerous, which can bear to hear the ideas they dislike stated with the strength with which men state ideas already dominant.
Previous page
