MAURICE'S "FRIENDSHIP OF BOOKS." SHAKESPEARE, whoknew everything, saw how near
the springs of action lie to those of thought, and how really the man of thought is akin to the man of action ; and, therefore, he closes the life of Hamlet, in whom more than in any other of his characters he has brought before us the philosopher and man of thought, with the entry of Fortinbras, the soldier and simple man of action on the stage, and his directing a soldier's funeral for Ham- let, as that most fitting for one who "was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally." And we are reminded of this by the volume now before us, in which Mr. Hughes, a work- ing lawyer and member of Parliament, in his well-argued and elo- quent preface, maintains that the late Mr. Maurice was essentially and characteristically a practical man, who was by long experience found to be "almost always right, even upon such questions as the best method of manufacturing stout shoes by associated labour." Those who knew him only through his books, published in his life-time, may think of him chiefly as a philosopher and theologian, though they, if they have a personal and practical interest in the knowledge of themselves, of their fellow-men, and of God, find him to be the most practical of teachers ; but those who knew him in his life, know how well he was acquainted with all subjects, Whether of permanent or passing interest, which come before men in daily intercourse and conversation. There was no matter of human interest, great or small, which he had not read and thought of, and of which he could not so talk as to give those he talked with some new light upon it, and some new pleasure from it. He has unconsciously drawn a picture of what he himself was in society, in a passage in the first of these Lectures—on the "Friend- ship of Books "—in which he is speaking of Shakespeare :—" Have you not met with some men who very rarely spoke about their own impressions and thoughts, who seldom laid down the law, and yet who you were sure had a. fund of wisdom within, and who made you partakers of it by the light which they threw on the earth in which they were dwelling, especially by the kindly, humorous, pathetic way in which they interested you about your fellow-men, and made you acquainted with them ?" Unconscious, we may be sure he was : how perfectly these words describe his own demean- our, for no man was more humble than he ; but he gives in theta his ideal of what a man should be in society ; and those who knew him know, and can never forget, how well he did realise that ideal in his own daily life. And something may be seen of what manner of man Mr. Maurice was in this daily intercourse, in these lectures—on Books, Newspapers, Words, History, Civilisa- tion, Spencer, Milton, Burke, on the Acquisition of Knowledge, and on Criticism—which "are taken as samples, almost at hazard, from a vast number which he delivered in all parts of the country to all kinds of audiences." We say, something of what he then was may be seen in these lectures, for it must not be forgotten that if lectures are nearer to conversation than books are, yet the differences are, after all, very great.
Whether as an author, a teacher, or a talker, Mr. Maurice was eminently Socratic in his moral and intellectual temper and method. He had the intense, insatiable love of truth for its own sake which characterised Socrates ; the like habit of seeking for the truth by exhaustive questioning and cross-questioning of re- ceived opinions, which he sifted to the bottom before be would either accept or reject what he found in them ; and the like faith that a divine impulse was urging him on in this search. He was like Socrates, too, in his deep and hearty sympathy with the political and social interests of his own time and country. Mr. Maurice was, no doubt, a theologian—in the highest sense of the word— above all things. While always seeking to make out the relations of men and things among themselves, he did not cease to ))elieve and maintain that (in his own words), "Relation, in its primitive meaning, has the sense of carrying back, and this leading thought pervades all its other uses ; each relationship is always a reference a carrying-back, a looking to some head, some unity-point, acknowledging it as its own necessary ground." And this unity point he found in, or through, theology. But, as Mr. Hughes
• The Frtendship of Books, and other Leei ure s. By the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Edited with a Preface by T. Hughes, M.P.London:n: Macmillan and Co. 1874.
says, "while these lectures illustrate how completely his theology underlay all his thoughts, they will show how fresh and vigorous, above all, how intensely national and human, that theology is; how it enables him, always using the same method, to put men and periods before us with a distinctness, a vividness, and a sympathy which few writers have ever equalled." We have before us a letter written by Mr. Maurice to a young friend in 1837, the whole of which we hope may one day be printed, and from which we here give a few sentences, in illustration of how his theology was then, as always, "intensely national and human ":—
" Yon will not have much hesitation in deciding that all our minds have more or less a political bias ; that we cannot thwart it altogether, try as hard as we will, and that every attempt to thwart it generally does us great mischief. I have come to these conclusions gradually and reluctantly, for I do not think I was born a politician, and there are times in my life in which I have resolved that it was better to be any- thing than this. But I never could succeed in overcoming the mighty impulse which seemed unceasingly to urge me forwards in this direction, and I never was happier than when I discovered that God did not design me to overcome it, and that, on the contrary, my personal and spiritual life was deeply interested in my yielding to it. I am quite convinced that if you propose to yourself the science of politics (in its highest sense) as your business, you will compass three great ends:- 1st. Your social life, the ordinary conversational, after-dinner life, I mean, will acquire something of the lofty tone of the study and the oratory, without its being needful that you should deviate from common topics, or that you should seem to force your companions out of their customary materialism. 2nd. You will acquire a feeling of the reality of the Bible, and will feel how its application to the universe and to every-day events consists with, and is sustained by, its transcendental meaning. In fact, the one will reveal itself in the other. 3rd. You will be delivered from the fetters of party and the care about confedera- cies, and will find that we must sanctify the Lord God in our hearts, and make Him our fear and Him our dread. I regret deeply that I have not more sedulously pursued this study, and cultivated the habits which, I am sure if rightly pursued, it will engender. For you I have no question of the expediency of making it your prominent pursuit. If you should spend your life as a country gentleman, it will be the fitting course, even in the judgment of the world; if you become a clergyman, you will find that it is that which makes you the most faithful and useful servant of the Church."
In the days in which this letter was written there was in most men's minds a hard line of separation between God and the world ; some men, like Hugh Miller or James Forbes, might be able to retain their Christian faith while keeping it apart from all their human science, but for the greater number—in fact, for all whose science was not merely physical—this was no longer possible ; and unless some way of bringing the two into harmony and union had been found, every really thoughtful man in our generation would have been obliged to join the ranks of those who have abandoned the knowledge of God as a matter in which they have no interest, because no possibility of attaining to it. And though we may not attribute all the change that has taken place in this respect in men's minds to the teaching and in- fluence of Mr. Maurice, yet we can have no doubt that to him it has been mainly due. He taught us, with more moral earnestness than Mr. Mill did, that we should throw aside our most cherished beliefs, if upon examination we found that they were only" a worth- less heap of received opinions ;" but he taught us also that we mast arrive at our conclusions after and not before such examina- tion; and he aided us in that examination with a subtlety and clearness of intellect, as well as with a moral earnestness, which we could not have brought to the task ourselves. We are far from asserting or supposing that the great problem of the rela- tions of God and man has been solved for our generation, and by the help of Mr. Maurice. We are but just beginning to see some- thing of the form in which it is presenting itself in our day, so different from that which it took at the time of the Reformation, or, before then, at other great crises of history. But we do say that in the teaching of Mr. Maurice is contained the clearest promise and hope that such a solution will be one day reached. And the volume before us has an interest and value as showing us his method in its application to what we might call some of the forms of common life, and bow he could, "without deviating from common topics," infuse into them "something of the lofty tone of the study and the oratory." Here, for instance, is an account of Addison, Steele, and Johnson :—
"If you take up the Spectator or the Guardian, your first feeling is, that the writers in it wish to cultivate your friendship. They have
. thrown off the stiff manners of those who reckon it their chief business -to write books; at the same time, they do not affect to be men of the world despising books. Their object is to bring books and people of the world into a good understanding with each other; to make fine ladies and gentlemen somewhat wiser and better behaved by feeding them with good and wholesome literature ; to show the student what things are going on about him, that he may not be a mere pedant and recluse. I do not mean that this was the deliberate purpose of Addi- son and Steele. It was the natural effect of their position that they took this course. They had been educated as scholars; they entered
into civil life, and became members of Parliament The two characters were mixed in them, and when they wrote books they could not help showing that they knew something of men. The two men were well fitted to work together. Addison had the calmer and clearer intellect; he had inherited a respect for English faith and morality. Steele, with a more wavering conduct, had perhaps even more reverence in his inmost heart for goodness. Between them, they appeared just formed to give a turn to the mind of their age ; not presenting to society a very heroical standard, but raising it far above the level to which it had sunk and is apt to sink. The Spectator and the Guardian have sometimes been called the beginning of our periodical literature. Perhaps they are, but they are -very unlike what we describe by that name in our day. There is no We in them. Though the papers have letters of the alphabet, and not names, put to them, and though they profess to be members of a club, each writer calls himself I. You can hardly conceive what a difference it would make in the pleasure with which you read any paper, if the singular pronoun were changed for the plural. The good-humour of the writing would evaporate immediately. You would no longer find that you were in the presence of a kindly, friendly observer, who was going about with you, and pointing out to you this folly of the town, and that pleasant characteristic of a country gentleman's life. All would be the dry, hard criticism of some distant being, who did not take you into his counsels at all, but merely told you what you were to think or not to think. And with the good-humour, what we call the humour when we do not prefix the adjective to it, would also disappear. Mr. Thaekeray, the most competent person pos- sible for such a task, has introduced Addison and Steele among the Humourists of England, and has shown very clearly both how the humour of the one differed from that of the other, and how unlike both were to Dean Swift, who is the best and most perfect specimen of ill-humour,- that is to say, of a man of the keenest intellect and the most exquisite clearness of expression, who is utterly out of sorts with the world and with himself. Addison is on good terms with both. He amuses him- self with people, not because he dislikes them, but because he likes them, and is not discomposed by their absurdities. He does not go down very far into the hearts of them ; he never discovers any of the deeper necessities which there are in human beings. But everything that is upon the surface of their lives, and all the little cross-currents whieh disturb them, no one sees so accurately, or describes so gracefully. In certain moods of our mind, therefore, we have here a most agreeable friend, one who tasks us to no great effort, who does not set us on encountering any terrible evils, or carrying forward any high purpose, but whom one must always admire for his quietness and composure; who can teach us to observe a multitude of things that we should else pass by, and remind us that in man's life, as in nature, there are days of calm and sunshine as well as of storm."
After some more remarks to the like effect, proving how much Mr. Maurice himself had of that gentle temper which he admires in Addison,—that "melancholia gaie que lea Anglais um:lament humour," as a Frenchman has described it,—he goes on to contrast
with him-
" Another friend, far less happy and genial than Addison, often ye/7 rough and cross-grained with rude inward affection. Old Samuel Johnson had none of Addison's soft training. He had nothing to do with the House of Commons, except as a contraband reporter • he had not the remotest chance of being a Secretary of State, even if he had not been a fierce Tory, and in the reign of George H. all but a Jacobite. With only booksellers for his patrons, obliged to seek his bread from hand to mouth by writing for them what they prescribed, with a bad digestion, a temper anything but serene a faith certainly as earnest as Addison's, but which contemplated its Objects on the dark and not on the sunny side, he offers the greatest contrast one can cohceive to the happy, well-conditioned man of whom I have just been speaking. The opposition between them is the more remarkable, because the Itaxabier was formed on the model of the Spectator, and because Johnson as much as Addison belongs to what ought to be called the Club Period of English literature.- I do not suppose any one will be bold enough to vindicate that name, be it good or evil, for our day, merely because gentlemen are now able to eat solitary dinners, hear news, and sleep over newspapers and magazines, in very magnificent houses in Pall Mall. The genuine Club, though its localitymight be in some dark alley out of Fleet Street, was surely that in which men of different occupations after the toil of the day met to exchange thoughts. In that world Johnson flourished even more than Addison. The latter is accused by Pope of giving his little senate laws, but Johnson's senate contained many great men who yet listened to his oracles with reverence. And those oracle were not delivered in sen- tences of three clauses ending in a long word in like those papers in the Rambler which are so well parodied in the 'Rejected Addresses.' But I cannot admit that Johnson's most inflated sentences contain mere wind. He had something to put into them ; they did express what he felt, and what he was, better than simpler, more English, more agreeable ones would have done. H3 adopted them naturally ; they are part of himself; if we want to be acquainted with him, we must not find fault with them. And when he is describing scones, as in Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, he is often quite free and picturesque; when he is writing about business, as in his Falkland Island, he does not let his eloquence, which in that book is often very splendid, hinder him from being pointed and direct in his blows."
Writing with a We," we cannot but feel that some of Mr. Maurice's gentle irony, in the passages we have quoted, falls upon us. If we were to give extracts from his Lecture on the "Use and Abuse of Newspapers," our readers might find even more severe censures implied ; and others, again, in the Lecture on "Critics." Yet we wish we had space to give some extracts from the last of these at least, on Style, and the true criticism of Style, and give our readers glimpses from Mr. Maurice's point of
view of the Edinburgh Reviewers, and then of Milton and Burke, of Mrs. Browning and Bentley, and of "the impartial man" who has "attained a sky of undisturbed inhumanity." But we hope we have said enough to induce our readers to go to the book itself. And we must add that they will find the Editor's Pre- face to he in itself well worth their attention as an able estimate of Mr. Maurice's character and mind.
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