THE MAGAZINES.
THE return of the publishing season freshens up the new Maga- zines, and both the Cornhill and Macmillan are making efforts to catch the public ear. The former begins two new stories, " Margaret Denzil's History," to be a tale of the Wilkie Collins kind, and " Cousin Phillis," which promises very unusually well. The latter, though it has not quite got rid of " Vincenzo," that melancholy tragedy of henpecking, which at once depresses and wearies as only the bores we pity can do, has a new tale by Henry Kingsley, in which we rejoice to see he takes us back to Australia, and lets his appreciation of nature have the fair play it had in the last two volumes of " Geoffrey Hamlyu," and another called a" Son of the Soil," which promises to be a real tale with human beings in it, and not a mere medley of semi-impossible incidents. The padding, too, is considerably better than usual, though the Coral/ill publishes a tour in Holland worthy only of "Household Words," and a chapter on " Unctuous Memories" not worthy even of that, and Macmillan begins a series called " Dead Men I Have Known," sketches of local Scotchmen which always interest their countrymen so keenly, but which not even Mr. Masson can tempt Englishmen to read. But the Corn- hill has an account of the Mhow Court-Martial such as only Jacob Omnium can write, and which, if it be as Mr. Hughes argues in another place, only special pleading, is of the sort which usually secures a verdict, and Macmillan gives us the best letter Edward Dicey has over written. It is a most curious illustration of the faculty which is his first literary merit, yet of which his writings show him to be unconscious, that of writing a narrative full of the smallest details and to appearance cynically impartial, yet leaving an unmistakable and a large impression. We are not sure that tiny one of the " special correspondents " now wandering over earth possess this same shade of ability, unless, indeed, it be Captain Burton, and he is apt to insert descriptions in his narra- tive which suggest another, probably higher, but still jarring faculty. Nobody reading this "Week in Russian Poland" would pronounce its author an enthusiast for Poland, yet the secret of that unhappy land, that it is governed by man of inferior ability, who are deliberately and consciously hostile to its people and its prosperity, was never more clearly revealed. Poland looks in this picture as some stately church must have looked when Puritan horsemen had taken it for a stable, the outline remaining because indestructible, but every picture wilfully smudged, every tomb carefully violated, every ornament sarcastically mutilated, every sanctity designedly bemired. The general impression can be found only in the whole article ; but we must quote one scene which of itself might make comfortable Englishmen understand why a Polish heart can fester till it approves assassi- nation :- "' A few more stops,' my friend said to me, 'and you will be in the midst of Asia.' Wondering what his words meant, I followed him, and passing to the opposite shore, and then crossing a low hillock, we found our- selves in the heart of a Cossack camp. The scene, indeed, was more like a great gipsy encampment than anything I could liken it to. A number of coarse, ragged tents wore pitched haphazard upon the field ; little, sturdy, shaggy ponies were browsing on the scant, trodden-down grass, fastened with ropes by their hind legs to stakes stuck in the ground ; a score or so of carts filled with pots, and pans, and old harness, were drawn up in a sort of rough circle ; kettles, suspended on throe sticks leaning against each other, were simmering over fires made up of broken palings ; and lying round these fires were swarms of wild-looking soldiers, whose worn grey coats were almost the colour of the earth on which they were stretched. A troop of mounted Cossacks, with lances longer than themselves and their horses put together, wore just riding in from a foraging expedition, with great bundles of hay piled upon their horses' backs ; in one corner a filo of soldiers were bringing in great iron cauldrons filled with some most unsavoury mixture of soup and moat; in another, a lot of half-drunken Cossacks were quarrelling in some rough horse-play ; but the great mass of the troops were crouch- ing upon the ground. Between men and officers there was little apparent difference. Possibly the former were a shade less grimy, but that was all. Their low foreheads, high cheeks, broad mouths, lank hair, and copperliko skin, seemed to belong to a different race from those of western Europe. As soon as my friend spoke to them in Russian, the men crowded round us, and stared at us with a childish, but good-natured wonder. They wore mostly peasant farmers from the Don, who had been forced to leave their homes and families to come and serve for three years. The one idea they seemed to have was, that this was the fault of the Poles, who ought to bo punished, not only as the enemies of the Czar, but as having inflicted a personal injury upon themselves. As soldiers, I should doubt their having discipline enough to be of much service, but as marauders they must be very terrible when their blood is up. Just by their camp we mot a Galician peasant, who had taken a raft down to Danzig, and was walking home barefooted, with a great loaf of black bread beneath his arm. The man was crying like a child, and, on my friend asking. him what was the matter, he said that these Cossacks—these " wtcked foreigners," as he called them—had fallen upon him and beaten him with their sticks as ho was walking past. Thousands of such cases doubtless occur daily ; and it is easy to understand what the state of Warsaw must be, with a score of Cossack regiments encamped in every open space near the city. The Russian Government is not directly to blame for those acts of brutality ; but the Poles, reasonably enough, detest a rule under which such acts can be perpetrated with impunity." Imagine Hottentots allowed to whip Englishmen in London ad libitum, at the merest caprice, to insult women and rifle
houses, and we have some idea of the present condition of Warsaw—a condition aggravated by the fact that a Pole, like a Frenchman, holds a blow, even if inflicted by law, an unspeakable insult.
In the Cornhill Mr. Thackeray refutes a very absurd piece of club scandal. It seems that the codicil to Lord Clyde's will was written on paper bearing the Athenaeum Club mark, and the club men, with the charity common to that gregarious and gossippy class, accused Lord Clyde of a practice not absolutely unique, of carrying home club paper. The assertion seems, from Mr. Thackerny's account, to have been really believed, and to have affected subscriptions to a me- morial proposed to the old Chief. So the great novelist ex- plains that the codicil was a draft written by the Field- Marshal's solicitor at the Club, and sent like any other letter to Chatham, and being approved, was signed as it stood. The story is a curious illustration at once of the malignity into which the habit of anecdotage degenerates, and of the rooted English dislike to Scotch ways. We doubt greatly if Lord Clyde was a mean man, at least there must be plenty in India who can prove that he had the heart to give, but he was innately a Scotch peasant, and as such frugal of small expenditures, hated paying for a cab if lie could walk, and though about as likely to annex club paper as to steal spoons, quite capable of postponing a note till be could write it in the club. Englishmen never can un- derstand that persistent thought about pennies, and it is well they cannot, for if they could the whole nation would be in a generation unbearably purse-proud.
Mr. Matthew Arnold contributes to the Victoria a very striking sketch of Marcus Aurelius, whom he believes to have been the best man of Pagan times, led thereto, we suspect, by the singular resemblance between the Emperor's character and his own. Take this sentence which, to our minds, sums up the Imperial philosophy :—" Look down from above on the count less herds of men and their countless solemnities, and the infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms, and the dif- ferences among those who are born, who live together, and die. And consider, too, the life lived by others in olden time, and the life now lived among barbarous nations, and how many know not even thy name, and how many will soon forget it, and how they who perhaps now are praising thee will very soon blame thee, and that neither a posthumous name is of any value, nor repu- tation, nor anything else." Mr. Arnold might have added the last three words. The paper is marked by that rare felicity of quota- tion which is the so frequent evidence of Mr. Arnold's critical power, and we cannot refrain from extracting this exquisitely beautiful thought, expressing, perhaps in its highest form, the Pagan idea of goodness as opposed to that over-consciousness by which Calvinism has deteriorated the higher faith :— "One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it down to his account as a favour conferred. Another is not ready to do this, but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit. As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has caught the game, a bee when it has made its honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season. Must a man, then, be one of these, who in a manner acts thus without observing it ? Yes."
Mr. Arnold believes that Marcus Aurelius, with all his philo- sophy, was still a persecutor, and olFers for his conduct a pro- found and subtle apology:— "A kind of Mormonism, constituted as a vast secret society, with obscure aims of political and social subversion, was what Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius believed themselves to be repressing when they punished Christians. The inner and moving cause of the misrepresentation lay, no doubt, in this ;—that Christianity was a new spirit in the Roman world, destined to act in that world as its dissolvent ; and it was inevitable that Christianity in the Roman world, like democracy in the modern world, like every new spirit with a similar mission assigned to it, should at its first appearance occasion an instinctive shrinking and repugnance in the world which it was to dissolve. The outer and palpable causes of the misrepresentation were, for the Roman public at large, the confounding of the Christians with the Jews, that isolated, fierce, and stubborn race, whose stubbornness, fierceness, and isolation, real as they were, the fancy of a civilized Roman yet further exaggerated ; the atmosphere of mystery and novelty which surrounded the Christian rites; the very simplicity of Christian theism ; for the Roman states- man, the character of secret assemblages which the meetings of the Christian community wore, under a State system as jealous of unauthorized associations as the Code Napoleon."
Would it not also be true to say that every Emperor, Roman or otherwise, gradually acquires two minds, one which he applies to subjects of thought in general, and the other to those subjects of thought which necessitate action, and that the latter acts without the relation which the former keeps up with conscience ?
Blackwood is rather poor, though " Tony Butler" is still full of impudent cleverness which is pleasant to read, and there is an excellent, though bitter paper on the recent history of Greece, full of instructive facts, but permeated by that great source of modern misery,—the theories of race which literary men, and even statesmen, seem to absorb into their very blood. What on earth does the fact that the three leading Ministers of Otho's last ad- ministration were Skipetars, Albanians, that is, without Greek blood, signify any more than that the Plantagenets were French- men with scarcely a trace of the true Norman strain ? Is Lord Eversley less an Englishman because his fathers came from South France, or Burke useless to England because be was a Kelt? All races have been despised in their turn, and only ten years ago half the world held the Italians to be effeminate mongrels, who could sing pretty music and use the dagger with- out a motive but hire.
Fraser is two days late.
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