CON AMORE.*

Tills is a collection of masterly sketches, any one of which will repay study. Published originally in the Westminster and other magazines as separate articles, we think Mr. McCarthy has done well to gather these essays together and present them in a durable form. His range of subject is sugiciently wide. Between Voltaire and Victor Hugo lies the Red Sea, through which the latter has walked as on dry land, though it has brought him no further than the Wilderness. We can but briefly present to our readers the forms and faces brought before us in this volume. We advise them to study it for themselves, and we thick they will agree with us that often as it may be necessary to differ from Mr. McCarthy's conclusions, it is scarcely possible to do so without a sense that he contributes by much impartial criticism to form the judgment which in the end may differ from his own. The first essay is on Voltaire, and he shows a very keen insight into the character of a man whose fate it has been to be extravagantly over-praised or over-blamed, the vehemence in either case proceeding from an over-estimate of the subject of it. He was never a great philo- sopher, " he was what Condorcet correctly termed au impatient spirit," and the two things are incompatible. As a satirist few men have .wielded a weapon with a keener edge, but its blade was of no choice metal. He could expose to ridicule and contempt, as no other man could, says Mr. McCarthy, and "he was gifted with the most powerful weapon in the world." Scarcely ; Voltaire's wit dealt with the surface, the crust of human life; it touched no vital part ; much of it could not live beyond the hour that called it forth. Extravagant caricature is often wit committing suicide. The spring which would prove perennial must have its source deep down in the heart of the earth. Voltaire's wit had no such spring, his genius no such roots ; his touch crumbled the cave of many giants, and left them shivering to the blast, but it was all it could do. He could perceive the results, but not the roots of human systems; the prejudices, fears, fallacies, doubts, and vices of poor human nature, but not the point where they " all touch upon nobleness." One of the commonest errors, says Mr. McCarthy, "is to ascribe to a man profound in- sight into human nature because he is quick in ferreting out certain special foibles or vices." No reputation is purchased more * Con Amore. By Justin McCarthy. London: Tinsley Brothers. 1868.

cheaply or is really more superficial. " He concentrated his gaze on the peculiar object he wished to satirize, till at length its pro- portions became magnified to his vision :" and we may add, his sense of its proportion to the whole was lost. It is good to have a microscopic eye, but when we fix our thoughts on the abscess in the back of an aphis, it is well to let the world know it is an aphis we are dissecting. Mr. McCarthy is fully alive to Voltaire's merits. " His ideas," he observes, " may be extravagant, but his style never is ;" or again, " What an admirable pamphleteer Voltaire would have made, had he been but an Englishman ! What inextinguishable ridicule he would have scattered over a Ministry or an Opposition ! How irresistibly people would have been forced to think anything he laughed at deserving of laughter !" A man's true nature, he adds, quoting Goethe, is best divined by observing what he ridicules ; and judged by this standard, he thinks posterity has dealt hardly by Voltaire, and proceeds to a careful criticism of some of his lighter works, in which he used his weapon most unsparingly, maintaining that,

"Few of the leading satirists of literature ever so consistently and, all things considered, so boldly turned their points against that which deserved to be wounded. Religious intolerance and religious hypocrisy, the crying sins of France in Voltaire's day, were the steady objects of his satire. Where, in these stories at least, does he attempt to satirize religion ? Where does he make a gibe of gennine human affection ? Where does he sneer at an honest effort to serve humanity ? Where does he wilfully turn his face from the truth? Calmly surveying those marvellous satirical novels, the unprejudiced reader will search in vain for the blasphemy and impiety with which so many well-meaning people have charged the fictions of Voltaire."

The next essay is a sketch of Goethe, admirable in the entire sympathy with which the author enters into the poet's artistic nature.

Whatever came from Goethe's hands was to be perfect of its kind ; no matter that the work in hand was a trifle, a mere curiosity, its setting should be absolute in its beauty. He has taught us to what a point of polish, to what an exquisite fitness and adaptability he could bring the German language, and Mr. McCarthy requires of us that if we would judge the works of this great master at all we should consider them as strictly and literally works of art, and remarks, " We do not ask that the marble Apollo shall fulfil any end but that of mere beauty. All we ask of the lapidary is to bring out every beam of the diamond, every flashing tint of the opal ; the painter who has done nothing but produce fine landscapes or beautiful faces, we admit to have• on the whole led no useless or ignoble existence ; and no one feels disposed to arraign the public decree which sets him in a higher rank among the labourers of the earth, than his practical brother who combines painting with glazing." Assuredly, but it is impossible to forget that the bringing- out of the beam of the diamond, the tint of the opal, has use in its highest form; all beauty is a•revelation, and every fresh reve- lation is in its turn the fertilizing element in fresh thought, the ulti- mate outcome of which, let the free play of it last never so long, is action. Nor do we for a moment imagine Mr. McCarthy wishes us to forget this. No one knows more fully how far Goethe's master-pieces have influenced the whole mind and literature of Germany, shoot- ing bright rays of light, unconscious of its intensity, over the mental condition of the whole of our own generation. He has thoroughly analyzed the attitude in which Goethe stood to his work, having " recourse to the strength of his intellect to counterbalance the weakness of his character and the sensitiveness of his nerves. He dramatized his emotions : made them stand out objectively from him, and thus removed them away from himself. When grief became painful, he worked it off into a poem, and contemplating it artistically, no longer felt it as belonging to his own being."

" Every emotion is crystallized into a stanza." In this essay Mr. McCarthy does not occupy himself with the graver works of Goethe, but with his minor poems and ballads, believing them to be the true revelation of the man himself. " He had no living confidant, and could only express his soul through his genius fully to himself." True, perhaps, of the inner nature of every great poet or artist, it comes out at times in Tennyson, as in Goethe, even to the injury of dramatic force, or the intense heightening of its power, as when Goethe, makes Tasso say of Antonio

Er besitzt, Ich mag wohl sagen, Riles, was mir fehlt, Doch haben she Dotter Bich versammelt, Geschenke seiner Wiege darzu bringen, Die Grazien sind leider ausgeblieben !"

—which Miss Swanwick has so aptly translated:— "He possesses, I may truly say,

All that in me is wanting. But, alas! When round his cradle all the gods assembled, To bring their gifts, the Graces were not there."

description not alone or primarily to Antonio, but to the whole class whose mental calibre must have made them scourges to him and offences in his eyes.

Mr. McCarthy complains bitterly of the translation through which English readers are made familiar with Goethe's minor poems, and perhaps the attempt to render Goethe popular has not been without distinct injury to both author and reader. Cer- tainly, if an Anglicized Homer be an anomaly, an Anglicized Goethe is worse. It is possible to present action in a new dress and not destroy its force, but Goethe plunges all thought into his own crucible, to reproduce it crystallized, and the process is vitiated and all coherence of the particles lost by the admixture of one foreign element. We have before us iu these pages many instances of this dissolving process, but a short and simple instance must suffice, where— "Da stehet von schbnen Blumon Die ganze Wiese so TOM Ich breche sie, ohne zu wissen, Wem ich sie geben sell."

—is thus translated:— "The meadow it is pretty,

With flowers so fair to see; I gather them, but no one Will take the flowers from me."

We have only to transfer such gross misinterpretations to verses of deeper meaning, and the result is not far to seek ; but the popular- izing mania, the determination to make knowledge or a counter- feit of knowledge cheap, is the canker at the very heart of our English system of education. 'There are, as Mr. McCarthy justly observes, distinct intellectual reasons why Goethe should never attain English popularity. "You must have mastered a certain amount of knowledge before you can understand him. Simplicity of style is a key-note of popularity, but not simplicity of style combined with intense subtlety of thought, and this combination is the characteristic of all save the most trivial of Goethe's poems." Even as it might be truly urged to be the characteristic of all great genius, it is equally true that all real greatness has in it a magnetic power to attract and draw up to itself, but the mind brought under its influence must bear the painful steps of the ascent.

We wish it were within the power of our limited space to do justice to the essay which follows. In the brief space of seventy pages Mr. McCarthy has contrived to give us a far better insight into the mental growth of Germany's much loved poet Schiller than we could obtain in fifty volumes of mere detail. He watches Schiller as he gradually emerges from the stormy protest of his youth, when he startled Germany and more than Germany by The Robbers ; traces his calm appreciation of his own error when, finding the world a wider place to live in than his youthful imagi- nation had pictured, " he comes to study men and women more closely, as he withdraws from his eyes the veil which his own personality drew around them. Here lay the secret of his strength— his intense sympathy with humanity in all its phases, in its darkest forms resembling still the "plants in mines that struggle toward the sun." Schiller's works are not the mere offspring of his brain dissevered from himself, but the revealings of a spiritual nature, which fed not upon itself, but on every form of human life and thought with which it was brought into contact. The student of Schiller while reading this essay will probably find his own often misty conclusions placed before him with exceeding clearness, and an insight into the poet's meaning not too commonly to be met with.

Mr. McCarthy's study of Victor Hugo is a brilliant piece of criticism, open, we think, to some objections. With perfect appreciation of the great Frenchman's genius, he is not blind to his faults, to the over-elaboration with which at times, even in his most graphic sketches, he wearies the reader; or to the licentiousness in art which, allowing no limit to its proper province, revels in monstrosities of horror. It is chiefly in his estimate of Les Miserables that, while acknowledging the weight of argument on his side, we are compelled to differ from him. "The examination," he says, " of the character of Jean Valjean is the analysis of the whole scheme of philosophy, heart, and moral of the book," and he asserts that in criticizing this effort of Victor Hugo's genius and patient art we must see that it satisfies three requirements if it is to be pronounced a complete success :"—

"First, is the character in itself, regarded simply as the ideal hero of Victor Hugo's story, a consistent, artistic, and impressive figure as the central form of the romance? Second, is it a successful picture of a probable, or at least possible, human being? Third—and from this final test we cannot release the creator of Jean Valjean—is it trite as We know instinctively that Goethe was applying the inimitable regards the practical moral which it professes to inculcate ?"

As concerning the first of these requirements, Mr. McCarthy says, " I do not hesitate to pronounce the character of Jean Valjeau absolutely perfect." To the second he has a distinct negative ; Jean Valjean is not, in his estimation, a possible human being :—

" But admitting that the soul of Jean Valjeau might have been thus miraculously regenerated, are we to believe that the habits and the manners stamped by half a lifetime of the prison and the galleys, of association with the rudest, the basest, and most brutal of human creatures, could have dropped off in a moment as the rags of the beggar girl in the pantomime give place at the touch of a wand to the lustrous garment and spangles and flowers of the Columbine ? The transforma- tion of Jean Valjean is absolutely not less miraculous and complete than that by which Byron's Deformed puts on in a moment the beautiful form and noble lineaments of Achilles."

We think it is just at this point Victor Hugo has been true to himself and to the highest art. " No trace," urges Mr. McCarthy, " of the habits of the hovel, the dungeon, or the hulks betrays the Jean Valjean who sits by the bed of the dying Fantine ; who nurtures, trains, and loves Cosette." But Victor Hugo knew that such manners and such habits, inevitable though they might be, would be but the rough clothes disguising the man ; that it was truer to the heart and brain of his hero if he revealed the work- ing of the higher inner nature, even at the sacrifice of the man's very skin. The weight and thickness of convict manners would have concealed, not destroyed, exactly that which we conceive it was Victor Hugo's most intense desire to reveal.

"The coarsest reed that trembles in the marsh, If Heaven select it for an instrument, May shed celestial music on the breeze."

As to the third count, Mr. McCarthy asks, "Judged as its author has insisted that it shall be judged, as a moral and philosophical lesson, does the warmest admirer of Les Illise'rables pretend that it has helped us in the least towards a wiser and truer blending of justice and mercy than that which socially and judicially we strive to carry out ?" We honestly believe it has; that from the story of Bishop Myriel in all its impractical and half immoral beauty has been distilled the very essence of much sober-minded move- ment. The story itself has its roots in a truth which is eternal, but Victor Hugo would be untrue to himself could he leave us in the light which only flashes over his own mind ; and much of the criticism of the pages before us is invaluable in the unerring accuracy with which it gauges the height and depth, and more especially the breadth, of as great a genius as France this day can boast. But the volume before us has lighter subjects. "The Bohemia of Henri Miirger" is very good. Miirger has tried to classify the shades, degrees, and classes of Bohemia. The great section of artists unknown to fame,— the men who have been called, but through some fatal mistake, ignorance of practical life, or what not, not chosen—he dubs " ignored Bohemia," and says, " it is not a road, but a eel de sac." While graphically describing the London Bohemia, Mr. McCarthy gives sufficient reasons for his belief that Bohemia, in its English phase at least, is an ephemeral institution ; but if he be sanguine as to the short-lived duration of a phase of social life just now telling very distinctly upon us, he is less hopeful concerning the tone of society in general. There is, he says, a decided decadence of conversation. " They were a grand old race," the extinct professors of the art of talk, the John- sons and Burkes, and Coleridges and Goetbes ;" but he admits that " human life has grown too active for their brilliant mono- logues, while complaining that we have in no way supplied their places. He believes neither the nonsense nor the pedantry of the preceding generation was "so barren, so utterly empty, as the kind of thing which constitutes the staple converse of at least three- fourths of the ordinary drawing-rooms of the present days. We cannot believe our author's own experience has been so unfortu- nate, for he avers his disbelief in the axiom that " talents are nurtured best in solitude ;" yet he asks, " Is there any one who has to meet many people and mix in general society who is not frequently forced to observe that in whatever else we are rising, the tone of our ordinary conversation is falling?" Is it ? We doubt this much. The kings of society are, it is true (we think encouragingly true), beating their swords into ploughshares and pickaxes, and the keen edge of them is possibly somewhat blunted in the process, but the subjects of conversation are surely growingin wider, higher interest. The mere diffusion of scientific knowledge has of itself acted beneficially in this respect. To choose some passing year of an individual existence as a testing-point in a nation's growth would, we are confident, be deemed an unworthy argument by our author. Yet is it quite fair to put a Goethe or a Coleridge amongst the lights of a day that is dead ? And letting our range extend over even the short space of some twenty years, will any oneotenture to assert that Sydney Smith was as a talker inferior to any but Johnson? Are Whately, Browning, and Thackeray to be passed by utterly ? There is an epigrammatic sound in saying that " The bringing one's mind down to the proper level of ordinary conversational imbe- cility, and keeping it there, is a dreadful task ;" but it is, at least, one which no rational human being need undertake. Sydney Smith, says our author, used to say that he had lived twenty-five years in the country and never met a bore, but he would have met nothing else had be set about "bringing his mind down to the proper level of conversational imbecility." There are, at least, two sides to this shield. Mr. McCarthy's judgment is no light one, but it is beyond the range of our more feeble imagination to conjure up the picture of an assembly "of men and women of intelligence and education " in which " for hours no intelligent thought is expressed." And yet, differ from him here and there as we may, as we glance back over the list of subjects we are quitting, we rejoice that he has written for a generation which, if it cannot talk, can at least read.