NOTES ON ME MAGAZINES.

Fraser is very cross with the Spectator this month. The editor is offended with our notes on his magazine, questions the Fight of a weekly periodical to review a monthly one or

criticise its management, and after denouncing Messrs. Jerkey and Wigblock as themselves contributors, " perhaps disappointed con- tributors," to magazines, and insinuating that they do not write in good-faith, asks what we should say if Fraser remarked,— " These snipt paragraphs which occupy the first pages of the Spectator hold out to the eye a promise of brevity, pregnant or pointed, but are in reality only discontinuous dullness, small- beer served in liqueur-glasses." Well, we should say that was an unfounded but perfectly legitimate criticism, expressed in enjoy- able, because bright and sarcastic, literary form. It takes a blow to get sparks out of Fraser, but still they come. There is no more reason against Fraser criticising the Spectator than against a playwright criticising his audience, or against the Spectator criticising Fraser than against the stall occupants of Her Majesty's Theatre criticising Mr. Mapleson's management. The object and the justification in all three cases is the interest of the public and of art. Fraser's accusation of personal motives against the Spectator is, we suppose, merely an outburst of spleen, not intended to be taken seriously, but it may be worth while to say that it is comically ill-founded, the writer

who has so excited his wrath being entirely innocent of the habit of writing in magazines, a most excellent way of addressing the public, but not, as it happens, his way. As to the criticism itself which has excited such indignation in Epping Forest, he is obliged in conscience to repeat it. The defect of Fraser's Magazine among magazines is snippetiness, a habit of publishing so many articles that they are none of them exhaustive, and many of them comparatively poor. We have, for example, tried diligently in this number of Fraser to find articles for praise, and have found none, except what seems to us a very lucid and striking account of Celsus's argument against Christianity. We would gladly be pleased with "Ivy-leaves," rather appreciating literary pemmican, but though we decidedly enjoy such deliverances as " Sceptics are often Radicals, Unbelievers are always Conservatives," as expressing in a crude form a suggestive truth, we are unable to profess to appreciate this kind of thing,—" In a Palace of Dreams, or at worst, a Hut of Illusions, poor Man strives to shelter him- self while he may amid the dreadful Desert of the Universe." That is rubbish, surely, only worthy of Bulwer.

The most interesting article in rather a dull number of the Nine- teenth Century, though Mr. Gladstone is a contributor, is a very temperate but decisive article by M. de Beaufort, Member of the States-General, upon the differences between Holland and Germany, and the probabilities of the absorption of the smaller country. He does not believe in them, holding the idea rather to be born of Dutch anxiety than of German ambition. The Dutch have been trained to anxiety by their history and their circumstances, watching a change in the politics of a great neighbour as they would watch a hole in one of their own dykes. As for willing absorption, there is a natural antipathy between the Dutch and Germans, such as often exists between relations, for example, between the Spaniards

and the Portuguese, or the French and Italians. The Dutch feel keenly the degree to which they have fallen in the world, as compared with their German cousins—a thesis illus- trated by M. de Beaufort in a passage of great eloquence—and the social characteristics of the people have become, in the pro- cess of years and history, profoundly different, Germany retain- ing always the aristocratic, Holland tending towards the democratic type :—

" Any one who goes into a post or telegraph-office in Germany, or enters a public office or a school, will feel at once that he is among a people accustomed from its youth to military discipline, a people which has learned alternately to command and to obey. There is little talking, and what there is, is abrupt ; people do exactly what they are told, and no one thinks of contradicting. Hence it is that all matters in which the accurate and prompt carrying-out of orders is the chief thing— such as traffic, for instance—are so admirably organised in Germany, better than in any other country in the world. The same institutions in Holland present quite a different appearance,—no military tone, no low bows to the head of a department, no unconditional submission to what is decreed. Here it is seen that the people possess in a high de- gree the sense of independence, are accustomed to discuss all things together, and are averse to blind obedience."

The army, in Germany, is the first object of the State, but in Hol- land it is a tolerated evil. In Germany, philosophers are almost as numerous as Socialists ; in Holland, you could not find a Social- ist with a lantern, and she has produced no philosopher, Spinoza having been a Southern Jew. The social life, the personal tastes, the political tendencies of the two races are different, and Dutchmen would be as unwilling to become Germans as to become French. As to forcible annexation, Bismarck does not desire to include non-Germanic races in the Empire ; the dynasties have been for centuries united by close ties of fellow- ship, and for years to come, at all events, Germany will desire nothing less than the presence within her borders of a compact mass of three millions of Particularists, always on the brink of rebellion. We do not much care about the paper on " The Value of India to England," thinking the value of England to India indisputable and sufficient, but Colonel G. Chesney certainly proves that India is no burden on the military strength of this country, while it yields her a large tribute, partly direct, but chiefly the profit of a com- merce which, were the peninsula surrendered to anarchy, must again be lost. The Abbe Martin, in a plea for Catholic charity towards Ritualism, admits the fact that conversions to Rome in England have recently been checked, and ascribes that hi part to Ritualism, but still argues that " if Ritualism has any power, it is against Protestantism ; it has nothing but weakness in its relations to Catholicism, and its weakness is that of Protestantism, with some additions peculiar to itself,"—a curious confession, for which Ritualists will not love the Abbe Martin. The article of the number to which ordinary readers will turn is, however, " The Peace to Come," by Mr. Gladstone, in which he sketches out his idea of the immediate future of Turkey. It is in the main that her unenfranchised Christian Provinces should buy their freedom by heavy tributes, until strong enough and organ- ised enough to need no protection from abroad. He sees no hardship in this arrangement :—" It was especially the duty of Bulgaria to rise and to fight, aided or unaided, for property, for liberty, for life ; above all, for their women, and for their manhood, well-nigh eaten out of the mass, as it seems, by servile acquiescence. It is now worth her while to pay on a large scale in tribute, rather than to admit on a small scale the action of Turkey in the local administration." For the rest, he would grant the independence demanded for Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro, give Bosnia to Austria, though most reluctantly, and reduce Turkey altogether to a humbler but safer position. He is, in fact, most "moderate," and forgets altogether that a Christian State held in vassalage by the Moslem rises as readily against them as individual Christian subjects, and that Turkey thus reduced, but not destroyed, could be only a Power as subordinate to St. Petersburg as Bavaria is to Berlin. Mr. Gladstone objects altogether to give Russia or restore to Russia any territory on the Danube, and would open the Straits to all nations alike. At least he says :—" One point only I press, that it is an European, not an English question ; that Europe, not England, must decide it ; and that to set up a separate title for England to decide it against Europe is to lead England into the position of a public offender ; of what Earl Russell in 1854 truly declared the Emperor Nicholas to be, a wanton disturber of the peace." Of the remaining papers, the most interesting is, we think, Mr. F. Pollock's account of Spinoza as a man, which needs only to be supplemented by a similar article on Spinoza's teaching to form a highly valuable popular biography of the man whom Mr. Disraeli declares in 4‘ Coningsby " to have been the originator of all modern sceptical thought.

Moat people will think that Lord Houghton's paper on Lord Melbourne, the last Gentleman Premier of England—the last one, that is, who had no special claim to lead except the posi- tion and the capacity to do it—is the readable essay of this number of the Fortnightly, as Mr. Huxley's paper on " Harvey," though deformed by the half-comic regrets for the extinction of an age when liberty of vivisection was valued, on which we have previously descanted, is undoubtedly the ablest ; but the one that interests us for the moment is Mr. A. Trollope's, on " Kafirland." Mr. Trollope has just been making a tour, presumably on official duty, in South Africa, and has a book in the press upon the Colonies there, and this paper is the first result of his experience. The general results of his observation are that the Kafir is far from being an irreclaimable Savage, or a " noble " one either ; that in some dim way be is aware that the British Government is a better ruler than his own chief, and that if he can but have regular work and wages, he will be a quiet and perhaps contented subject, though possibly a feeble one. He hungers, first of all, for regu- lar wages, and is, in Mr. Trollope's opinion, far easier to manage when "annexed "—that is, controlled by European

magistrates—than when " independent,"—that is, left to the government of his own chiefs. Mr. Trollope is in favour, there- fore, of annexing Galekaland—which, after all, is only a county, occupied by a tribe not numbering above 66,000 souls, or 11,000 fighting-men—and generally of assulning the direct control of the

native tribes. The Fingoes, who are sure to stand by us against the Galekas, for else they will be " eaten up "—i.e., reduced to

utter slavery—number 7,000 fighting-men, and a very few guns and whites will make the forces equal. Mr. Trollope, therefore, does not anticipate serious trouble, and doubts whether, when it comes to the final decision, even the Zulus will fight. They have no alliance with any Kafirs, and will much rather, he thinks, accept the terms which Sir T. Shepstone—of whom be speaks very highly—will have to offer. Mr. Trollope evidently believes that the South African will work, if fairly treated, though at present lie is not the equal of the European ; that the white man can govern him ; and that this portion of our dominions needs to be governed rather on Indian than on colonial principles. That is sound, we believe, but he has not touched on the difficulty which we have created for our- selves in leaving native questions to the Colonies, instead of strictly reserving them for the Imperial Government. We have in part parted with the power of securing to the dark races the justice and the tolerance which will make of them con- tented subjects, and must, if we are to succeed, rear up on the

spot a Government strong enough to feel as well as bear its native responsibilities. The remaining papers of the Fortnightly are all worth attention, particularly one by Emile de Laveleye, in which he advises England to occupy Egypt, and bind to herself the Christian States which must supplant Turkey ; but there is no paper of the first importance, and the lightest, Mr. Saintabury's criticism of Victor Cherbuliez as novelist, is not equal to his sketch last month of Jules Sandeau. We do not gain so clear an idea of his subject, and the writing drags a little.

The Contemporary contains several bright papers, though the whole number is not perhaps one of striking excellence. The one which will be first read is Mr. Goldwin Smith's eloquent out- burst, in which he declares that England has abandoned Turkey, that Turkey is dead, and that the result is good ; but its force

will be greatly injured by his inability to foresee the events which have recently occurred, and which will probably shake his firm conclusion that England is for peace. The originality of the article is increased by a furious tirade against the Jews, whom Mr. Goldwin Smith considers a danger to civilisation, and whom he would willingly see relegated to Palestine, about the last place they will think of going to :—

4, Cosmopolitans they could not be, as they were still in the gall of tribalism ; plutopolitans they of necessity became, and learned to sur- pass all races in the art of handling money with profit, and in whatever is akin to that art. Pursuits, to which they were at first driven by circumstances, but which they have now carried on for eighteen cen- turies, have of course profoundly modified the character of the race which once dwelt in Sion. As a rule, they do not till the soil, they do not manufacture, they do not produce, but by their financial skill they draw to themselves the produce of the labour of others. Remorseful Christendom has taken wholly upon itself the blame of the persecutions which they endured in the Middle Ages, but they were oppressors as well as oppressed ; they were cruel usurers, eating the people as it were bread, and at once agents and partners of royal and feudal extortion. They have now been everywhere made voters ; to make them patriots, while they remain genuine Jews, is beyond the legislator's power. Bene- volent and munificent they often are in the highest degree, patriots they cannot be ; their only country is their race, which is one with their religion."

That the Jews have shown a bad spirit in this Eastern Question, an undue sympathy with the Asiatic world and toleration for its oppression, is true, but the way to improve the political morals of a race is not to persecute, but to protect. No legislation short of laws authorising massacre or expulsion

could now deprive the Jews of the power which flows from their wealth, and disabilities would certainly not teach them to use either wealth or influence for nobler ends. One of the most striking papers in the number is Professor Max Miiller's upon the " Origin of Reason," which is really an account of the system of Professor Ludwig Noire, a philosopher whose works are little known in England, who considers that reason springs from language, and that language has its beginning in the utterance of certain cries by toiling groups of men. He is a thorough evolutionist, holding that " a thought is a secretion of the brain, as other secretions come from the kidneys," and judging from the Professor's sketch of him, a most thorough- paced pessimist besides. Sensation with him is " conscious motion or reaction," and he places the original impulse in what Schopenhauer called Will, but which in Noire becomes force, and

exists even in that which is unconscious as regards language, and he points out,—

" That whenever our senses are excited and the muscles bard at work, we feel a kind of relief in uttering sounds. He remarks that particularly when people work together, when peasants dig or thresh, when sailors row, when women spin, when soldiers march, they are inclined to accompany their occupation with certain more or less vibratory or rhythmical utterances. These utterances, noises, shouts, hummings, songs, are a kind of reaction against the inward disturb- ance caused by muscular effort. These sounds, he thinks, possess two great advantages. They are from the beginning signs of repeated acts, acts performed by ourselves and perceived by ourselves, but standing before us and continuing in our memory as concepts only. Secondly, as being uttered not by one solitary man, but by men associated in the same work, these sounds have another great advantage of being at once intelligible. It cannot be denied that Noird's arguments in sup- port of his theory are very strong, nor can there be any doubt that, as most of our modern tools find their primitive types in cave-dwellings and lacustrian huts, a very large portion of our vocabulary can be derived and has been derived from roots expressive of such primitive acts as digging, cutting, rubbing, pulling, striking, weaving, rowing, marching, &c. My only doubt is whether we should restrict ourselves to this one explanation, and whether a river so large, so broad, so deep as language may not have had more than one source."

The first difficulty of that theory, as it seems to us, is that man is the single animal who from these sounds has developed lan- guage. Monkeys and crows, when acting in concert, utter sounds which are " concepts " to other monkeys and crows, and are obeyed, but they never develope the talking habit. The • monkeys are not younger than man, and they do certain things in association, for instance, make bridges,—and so do beavers, and why do they not talk ? Mr. Owen's paper on "The Stability of Our Indian Empire" is in the main intended to advocate our retirement from the Empire, not to Europe, but to the coast, leaving the Native States, to which we have taught government, to manage for themselves. He confesses that India is not ready for this policy, which, how- ever, he thinks, might be forced on us by financial distress, and intermediately pleads for the opening of more and higher careers for the natives generally. The article does not strike us as a wise one, but there is a curiously suggestive picture of the way in which an able native, another Hyder Ali, favoured by circum- stances, might embarrass, or rather destroy, our finance. Henri Taine's " France Before the Outbreak of the Revolution " is commenced with a chapter on the " State of the Provinces," which will not add much to the knowledge of those who have read de Tocqueville ; and Canon Curteis argues strongly for a transformation of Convocation into a really repre- sentative body, as the one reform which can enable Englishmen to retain their Establishment. The papers on contemporary life and thought in foreign countries are continued, that on France being as readable and instructive as ever, while that on Russia is thin and poor. We want to know, of course, which periodicals represent which schools, but we want a great deal more,—a care- ful and above all an unprejudiced account of the thoughts now governing Russia, and this we do not find. There is an effort to give it, but the result, to us at least, is fog, the writer having apparently discovered only what Russians dislike, not what they approve. He says, for instance, of the Socialists :-

" Socialism is held in great honour in Russia, and that it has two monthly reviews for its organs, viz., the Annals of the Country and the Dielo. It is in these journals that we are able to find the opinions of our advanced parties explained as far as the conditions of the censor- ship will allow them. The tone which predominates in them is raillery and satire, and the most serious questions are treated in them from this point of view, or else enveloped with such abstruse generalities that the reader no longer knows whether he still inhabits our planet or is trans- ported to the moon. The public, accustomed from an early date to the stratagems employed in order to circumvent the censorship, know how to read between the lines ; and what would appear incomprehensible to a foreigner, not accustomed to the precautions necessary to cheat the censor, is perfectly clear to a Russian desirous of tasting the forbidden fruit. Nevertheless this clear-obscurity and these shifts, so useful in their way, hardly allow us to explain the ideas which are expounded in these journals. All that we can say is that this party is thoroughly disgusted with the actual state of things, that the accomplished and

proposed reforms do not satisfy it, and that its towards the workmen and the moderate party does not much differ from that of the reactionists."

Blackwood contains little for notice beyond a most spirited and spirit-stirring account of a " Ride for Life," in the Indian Mutiny, a paper of a kind which one only finds in Blackwood, written as if a living man were talking and literature not invented ; and two more of those very curious papers, on "The Storm in the East " and " The Meeting of Parliament," which must so affront the fire-eaters of the Tory party. Their writers hate

Russia with a quite holy hatred, and are sufficiently fond of the Turks, but they surrender Turkey, and think England should

now be intent on securing her own interests in Conference :— "We must not allow sentiment to overpower judgment ; we must not by premature action spoil the denouement towards which things axe working. Nullum nwnen abest, si sit prudentia. We never undertook to champion Turkey, and we cannot think of undertaking to do so now. We did undertake to hold every legitimate British interest inviolate ; and we have full confidence that our Government will fulfil their &noir in that regard to the letter. The mad assailants of the Ministry have been silenced, because the ground on which they rested their accusa- tions has been cut from under them. Let not the well-wishers of our rulers inflict, by their impatience, an injury as great as our enemies would gladly have wrought by their calumnies and popular agitationp. We predict nothing. Bat we see that there is a grand diplomatic game on the cards. And we think that we have got an adept at the table, who knows how to play it.

'Fools may deride our awkward pace, But stow and steady wins the race:"

That seems to be the idea dominant at Knowsley.

The padding in the Cornhill consists of a very instructive paper on " Tibet," or " Bod," as its own people call it, the varit chilly and nearly treeless plateau stretching between India and China, and inhabited, the Chinese say, by the aboriginal people whom they expelled from the more fertile lands of. China, but who ultimately adopted much of their conquerors' civilisation. We do not think anybody who reads it will care much whether the mission which is shortly to proceed to Lhassa opens the country or not, but the sketch is interesting because, though it contains no new facts, it brings home to the reader the tree bearing of those he has vaguely known. There is also a lively account and criticism of Colley Cibber, the forgotten Laureate and playwright, who, the critic says, was " no dullard," but who- " when he was sentimental was odious," when he was tragical raved, and when he was comic was at best very silly. Take this as a specimen of Cibber's notion of a lover's address :—" Oh,

stop this vast effusion of my transported thoughts, ere my offend- ing wishes break their prison through my eyes, and surfeit col

forbidden hopes again ! Or, if my fears are false, if your relent- ing heart is touched at last in pity of my enduring love, be kind at once, speak on, and awake me to the joy while I have sense to hear you." He was made Laureate by Court influence, Pope, Gay, Thomson, and Allan Ramsay being passed over ; and Dr. Johnson's epigram summed up the opinion of the town :— "Augustus still survives in Mare's strain, And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign ; Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing, For Nature formed the Poet for the King!"

The author of the essay on " Pessimism and Poetry " rather begs the data for his argument. He says that condolence is far more delightful to us than felicitation, and that we turn to poetry more readily in grief than in pleasure,—and therefore expects to find a more pessimistic than gladsome note in poetry. But are those statements true ? We should have said they were not, and that condolence was very seldom delightful ; that poetry delighted us most in a dreamy, but not in a grieving mood, and that the pessimistic note of poets arose mainly from the fact that the organisation which enables them to sing is singularly sensitive to pain.

The moat readable paper in Macmillan by far is the sketch of Dr. William Stokes, the great physician of Dublin, and one of the most genial, laughter-loving, witty men who ever lived, and one, too, who on occasion dared play the fool. He had a habit of attention which, by degrees, made his skill in diagnosis proverbial, but his real greatness was in his character, which seems to have been deformed by only one defect,—a hatred and intolerance of

stupidity, the commonest of the faults of the quick-witted. They never will see that stupid people are wanted by the world just-as inorganic matter is wanted by the stomach, and wish to be always swallowing pure nutriment. Tories are creatures of God, just as earth is. Naturally Dr. Stokes despised Englishmen, who always appeared to him, as to many other Irishmen, the stupidest of mankind, and he once expressed the feeling in this perfectly epigrammatic form :—" If a charming English girl married vulgar, forward Irishman (a frequent occurrence), and we won- dered at it, he would say, ' My dear fellow, you are stumbling upon a great truth. The Saxon has no power of diagnosis." .1t was thoroughly characteristic of the mixture of kindliness and scorn in his character that he was instinctively a jobber, always wanting to use his influence for "poor devils" too feeble to gst along without it.