FOOTNOTES:

Selection from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, Esq.Edited by his son,Macvey Napier. London: Macmillan & Co.

Mr. Macvey Napier, who succeeded Francis Jeffrey in the editorship of the great Whig Review, had, of course, a perfect right to preserve the letters which are published in this volume, and to study them in private as much as he pleased. Indeed, for anything that appears to the contrary in the “Introduction” by his son, the present Mr. Macvey Napier, they may have been bequeathed by the original recipient with instructions that they should some day be published. An edition, privately circulated a short time ago, led to “representations that a correspondence of so much interest ought to be made more accessible,” and the present volume is the result; but it might be maintained that the writers of such letters would, if they could have been consulted, have objected to their publication; and that to send them forth to the world in all their nakedness was, at all events, not a delicate or magnanimous thing to do. “Much might be said on both sides.” Paley, in his chapter on the original character of the Christian Morality, remarked that though a thousand cases might be supposed in which the use of the golden rule might mislead a person, it was impossible in fact to light on such a case. That was a hazardous observation, for the truth is that when we once get beyond elementary conditions of being and doing, we find human beings differ so very widely, and in such utterly incalculable ways, that it is in vain to poll the monitor in the breast on questions that do in fact arise daily—five hundred in a thousand will vote one way, and five hundred in another. “How would you like it yourself?” is a question that elicits the most discordant replies. I have a very positive feeling that I should have left many of these letters in the portfolio, or put them into the fire; but when I look about me for a standard which I could take in my hand to Mr. Napier, I am baffled—he might produce one of his ownthat would silence me on the spot. And when one has taken up a book to comment upon it with as little reserve as may be, it seems idle, if not Irish, to begin by saying that the most amusing or most fertile things in it ought never to have seen the light.

This point may recur before we have done; and in the meantime it should be remarked that nothing very momentous, either to the honour or the disgrace of human nature in general, or literary human nature in particular, can be extracted from this correspondence. A late essayist used to tell a true anecdote of a distinguished statesman who had lived many years and seen as many changes as Ulysses. A friend asked him something like this: “Well, now, you have had a great deal to do with mankind, and you have outlived the heats and prejudices of youth; what do you think of men in general?” And the veteran replied: “Oh, I like them—very good fellows; but”—and here we shall mollify his language a little—“but condemnably vain, you know.” And really that is about the worst thing you can find it in your heart to say of literary men after running through these letters—“very good fellows, but very vain, you know.”

Another point which lies less near the surface, and has at least the look of novelty, would perhaps be this. It is the most frequent and most voluminous of the writers who unconsciously tell us the most about themselves; and who, with the pleasing exception of Jeffrey, show us the most of their unamiable sides. But there is comfort for impulsive people in the fact that it is not always the most self-controlled and inoffensive of the writers who win upon us. The Brougham-Macaulay feud runs sprawling through these pages till we are tired of it; and some of poor Brougham’s letters are downright venomous. But the total absence of disguise and the blundering boyish inconsistency disarm us. Taking the letters one by one, the moral superiority is with Macaulay on Brougham as against Brougham on Macaulay, but taking the correspondence in the lump, it is something like Charles Surface against Joseph Surface, in another line—only, of course, there is no hypocrisy. While you come to feel for Brougham in his spluttering rages, you feel also that Macaulay, in his too-admirable self-continence, can do very well without your compassion, whatever he may have to complain of. It is easy to discern that Brougham honestly believed in his own superiority to the young rival who outshone him, and yet that he was inwardly tormented. Macaulay’s forbearance was of the kindqui coûte si peu au gens heureux. The editor, Mr. Napier, was, we may conjecture, the greatest sufferer of the three. Much was owed to Brougham as a man of enormous intellectual force; to which, apart from his past services, great respect was due: but Macaulay was by far the best writer, and (to employ a bull which is common enough) incomparably the most attractive contributor. The strength of his hold upon the Review and its editor is apparent on every tenth page of the book, and comes out forcibly enough in a letter from Sir James Stephento Mr. Napier. Mr. Napier had written to Sir James, expressing some delicate surprise that no article from his pen had reached the Review for a long time. Sir James excuses himself in this fashion:—

“I know that many of your contributors must be importunate for a place; that you must be fencing and compromising at a weary rate; that there are many interests of the passing day which you could not overlook; and that we should all have growled like so many fasting bears if denied the regular return of the Macaulay diet, to which we have been so long accustomed.”

Sir James was an exceedingly busy man, and he was not professedly a man of letters like Macaulay; but we may, if we like, read between the lines in these excuses and find a little pique there, as well as a just sense of an editor’s difficulties.

Another point which lies broadly and prominently upon the surface in these letters is a very unpleasant one. It is scarcely credible how much dull conceit and sheer ignorant arbitrariness there often is in the minds of able and cultivated men. It does not seem even to occur to them that their own range may be limited, and their judgments upon many (or even a few) topics not worth ink or breath. It should hardly be offensive to an ordinary man to be told, or at least to find it tacitly assumed, that he could not have invented fluxions, painted like Rembrandt, or sung like Pindar. Why, then, should it be difficult for any cultivated specialist, of more than ordinary faculties, to make the reflection that he must be deficient in some direction or other? Yet we find in practice that it is not only difficult, but impossible, in the majority of cases. Mr. Napier seems to have invited, or at all events not to have repelled, free criticisms on his Review from the contributors in general, and the outcome is little short of appalling. If ever there was an able man it was Mr. Senior, yet these are the terms in which he allows himself to speak of an article on Christopher North—or rather of Christopher North himself:—“The article on Christopher North is my abomination. I think him one of the very worst of the clever bad writers who infest modern literature; full of bombast, affectation, conceit, in short, of all thevitia,tristia, as well asdulcia. I had almost as soon try to read Carlyle or Coleridge.” Now Mr. Senior was, of course, entitled to dislike Christopher North, and there is plenty to be said against him in the way of criticism; but the charge of “affectation” is foolish, and the whole passage pitched in the most detestable of all literary key-notes. John Wilson was a man of genius, whose personal likings and rampant animal spirits led him most mournfully astray. He was wanting also in love of truth for its own sake; but he was as much superior to Mr. Senior as Shakspeare was tohim. And the addition about Carlyle or Coleridge—orColeridge!—is just the gratuitous insolence of one-eyed dulness. There is enough and to spare of blame ready in any balanced mind for either of these great writers, but they can do without the admiration of wooden-headed prigs, however able. The point, however, is that it never dawns uponthe mind of even so clever and cultivated a man as Mr. Senior, that his head may have gaps in it.

Another instance to the same purport may be selected from a letter from Mr. Edwin Atherstone, the poet—for it would perhaps be hard and grudging to deny him the title, since he found an audience, and I have a vague recollection of having once read verses of his about Nineveh or Babylon which had in them power of the picturesque-meditative order. Now, this is the way in which Mr. Edwin Atherstone speaks of Dr. Thomas Brown, the metaphysician:—“For myself, I know not a writer, with the exception of Shakspeare, Milton, Homer, and Scott, from whom I have derived such high delight as from Dr. Brown.”

Was ever such a category put on paper before? It is as if a man should say his favourite musical instruments were the organ, the harp, the trumpet, the violin, and the sewing-machine. Brown was one of the most readable of metaphysicians; he made some acute hits, and he wrote elegant verses; but his position in Mr. Atherstone’s list is as inexplicably quaint as that of “Burke, commonly called the Sublime,” in the epitaph on the lady who “painted in water-colours,” and “was first cousin to Lady Jones.”

The worst examples of all, however, come from the letters of Francis Jeffrey himself. Jeffrey has been underrated, and he was a most amiable man; but some of the verdicts he thought fit to pronounce upon articles in theEdinburgh, when edited by Mr. Napier, aresaugrenus. In one case he is about suggesting a contributor, to deal with a certain topic, and is so polite as to say that the name of Mr. John Stuart Mill had struck him:—“I once thought of John Mill, but there are reasons against him too, independent of his great unreadable book and its elaborate demonstrations of axioms and truisms.”

There might be weighty “reasons against” Mr. Mill, but what his “Logic” could have to do with the question is not clear. It never seems to have crossed Jeffrey’s mind that hemightbe totally disqualified for forming an opinion of a book like that; and, having called it “unreadable” (though to a reader with any natural bent towards such matters it is deeply interesting), he actually puts forward the fact that Mill had written it as a reason against his being entrusted with the treatment of a political topic in a Whig Review. Editors are human, and the editorial position is a very troublesome one. An editor may lose his head, as an overworked wine-taster may lose his palate. In a word, allowances must be made; but, after a disclosure or two like this, it is difficult not to conclude that the Review owed no more of its success to its former editor than it might have owed to any intelligent clerk. But we cannot let Jeffrey go yet. The following passage relates to an article on Victor Cousin:—

“Cousin I pronounce beyond all doubt the most unreadable thing that ever appeared in theReview. The only chance is, that gentle readers may take it tobe very profound, and conclude that the fault is in their want of understanding. But I am not disposed to agree with them. It is ten times moremysticalthan anything my friend Carlyle ever wrote, and not half so agreeably written. It is nothing to the purpose that he does not agree with the worst part of the mysticism, for he affects to understand it, and to explain it, and to think it very ingenious and respectable, and it is mere gibberish. He may possibly be a clever man. There are even indications of that in his paper, but he is not averyclever man, nor of much power; and beyond all question he is not a good writer on such subjects. If you ever admit such a disquisition again, order your operator to instance and illustrate all his propositions by cases or examples, and to reason and explain with reference to these. This is a sure test of sheer nonsense, and moreover an infinite resource for the explication of obscure truth, if there be any such thing.”

Now, the writer of the article in question was Sir William Hamilton. “He may possibly be a clever man, but beyond all question he is not a good writer on such subjects.” So much for Jeffrey.

“Nec sibi cœnarum quivis temere arroget artem,Non prius exacta tenui ratione saporum.”

Poor Mr. Carlyle is again dragged in, and Sir William is pronounced “ten times moremystical” than he—“mystical” in italics. When a writer, using the word mystical opprobriously, prints it in italics, it is usually safe to decide that he knows nothing of metaphysics. The concluding sentences are instructive examples of editorial self-confidence: “If ever you admit such a disquisition again,order your operator to” do so-and-so. Thus, the treatment of Mill and Hamilton being equally ignorant and inept, there is no escape for the ex-editor. Both verdicts were after the too-celebrated “this-will-never-do” manner, and that is all.

In the communications from literary men there are some fine instances of just self-consciousness. Tom Campbell writes, with great warmth and alertness, to promise an article upon a new work about the Nerves; but shortly afterwards writes again, candidly confessing that he had found, upon looking again at the work, that his aptitude for scientific detail was not great enough to enable him to do justice to the subject. A letter from William Hazlitt is so striking, both for its truthfulness and its clear-headedness, as to deserve quoting in full. He had been written to by Mr. Napier for some contributions to theEncyclopædia Britannica, and he replies, from his well-known retreat at Winterslow Hut, in these terms:—

“I am sorry to be obliged, from want of health and a number of other engagements, which I am little able to perform, to decline the flattering offer you make me. I am also afraid that I should not be able to do the article in question, or yourself, justice, for I am not only without books, but without knowledge of what books are necessary to be consulted on the subject. To get up an article in a Review on any subject of general literature is quite as much as I can do without exposing myself. The object of an Encyclopædia is, I take it, to condense and combine all the facts relating to a subject, and all the theories of any consequence already known or advanced. Now, where the business of such a work ends, is just where I begin—that is, I might perhaps throw in an idle speculation or two of my own, not contained in former accounts of the subject,and which would have very little pretensions to rank as scientific. I know something about Congreve, but nothing at all of Aristophanes, and yet I conceive that the writer of an article on the Drama ought to be as well acquainted with the one as the other.”

The honesty of this is quite refreshing. There is one more letter, of a similar order, which deserves to be signalized. In August, 1843, Macaulay, being pressed for more frequent contributions, writes from the Albany that he can promise, at the very utmost, no more than two articles in a year:—

“I ought to give my whole leisure to my History; and I fear that if I suffer myself to be diverted from that design as I have done, I shall, like poor Mackintosh, leave behind me the character of a man who would have done something if he had concentrated his powers instead of frittering them away. There are people who can carry on twenty works at a time. Southey would write the history of Brazil before breakfast, an ode after breakfast, then the history of the Peninsular War till dinner, and an article for theQuarterly Reviewin the evening. But I am of a different temper. I never write so as to please myself until my subject has for the time driven away every other out of my head. When I turn from one work to another a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition. I must not go on dawdling and reproaching myself all my life.”

There is something melancholy in this, admirable as it is. Macaulay had begun to watch the shadow on the dial too closely to permit him to do much miscellaneous work with an easy mind. There is an important lesson for men of letters in the sentence,—“When I turn from one work to another, a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition.” Here lies the great difference between serious literary work and that of ordinary business, where the mind is solicited by one thing after another in rapid succession. In the first case, time and energy have to be expended in evolving from within a fresh impulse for every topic. The most readable writings of Southey are those which he produced fragment by fragment, on topics for which little renewal of impulse was required. To write a great poem in scraps, all by the clock, was a task which only a very conceited and rather wooden man would have attempted; and the result we know, though there are fine things in Southey’s longer poems. A powerful passage by Cardinal Newman on the difficulties of literary work is almost too well known to bear quoting, but a living poet, Mrs. Augusta Webster, has put the case so fairly that Macaulay’s shade—which is, of course, a shade that reads everything—may be gratified by seeing in a handy way a few of her sentences:—

“Occupations of study, scientific research, literary production—of brain-work of any kind that is carried on in the worker’s private home with no visible reminder of customer or client—are taken to be such as can lightly be done at one time as well as another, and resumed after no matter what interruptions, like a lady’s embroidery, which she can take up again at the very stitch she left her needle in. Professions of this sort not only admit, but in many instances require, considerable variation in the amount of daily time directly bestowed on them,—directly, for the true student is not at his work only when he is ostensibly employed, but whenever and wherever he may have his head to himself,—and there is no measure of visible quantity for the more or less results ofapplication.... The literary man probably fares the worst of all. He is not merely not protected by the manual part of his processes, but it is his danger. It is so easy—what anybody can do at any time!... Of course the simple fact is that it is more difficult for this class of persons to practise their vocations under the drawback of perpetual breaks, actual and (what comes to nearly the same thing) expected, than it is for ‘business men.’ Let the attention of the solicitor, for instance, busied on the points of an intricate case, be perforce diverted to another matter, there is lost from that case just the time diverted, and a little extra to allow for the mind which returns to any interrupted course of thought, never returning to it exactly at the point at which it was forced to leave it. But there are the recorded facts; the direct conclusions to be drawn remain unaltered; nothing has disappeared, nothing has lost its identity. But suppose, let us say, a dramatist, devising his crisis after hours, perhaps days, of gradual growth, to the moment when he sees it before him as a reality.... Force his attention away, and he has lost, not merely the time he needed to complete a spell of works, with something over for the difficulty of resuming, but thepowerof resuming. All has faded into a haze; and the fruit of days, may be, has been thrown away at the ripening, for such moments do not come twice.”

There are but few of Mr. Napier’s own letters in this volume, so that we have only indirect means of measuring his idea of his editorial rights or duties as against contributors. There is one case in which Macaulay complains strongly of certain excisions, and there is another in which he defends certain phrases of his own which appear to have offended the taste of Mr. Napier, who found them undignified, if not slightly vulgar. He submits of course—all the mutilated ones submit—and he says he submits “willingly;” but all the while we can too plainly see the wry faces he is making. Mr. Napier was, apparently, a purist in the matter of style; but there is something almost grotesque in the spectacle of a man of his quality correcting Macaulay. It reminds one ofcet imbécile Buloz.[37]The case of Leigh Hunt was very different, for he sometimes went to the extreme verge of decorum—quarterly review decorum, that is—and beyond it. But we may safely conclude that Macaulay knew much better than his editor how to turn a sentence, or when the use of a French locution was desirable for ends of literary effect. Upon this subject of imported phrases Mr. Napier was, it seems, very punctilious, for with Mr. G. H. Lewes he must have had a brisk correspondence about it. Mr. Lewes, who was then a young writer, anxious to get his feet well planted, submits, with every possible expression of acquiescence, one might almost say, of abject agreement; but it is easy to see that his compliance was forced. Macaulay in his discussion of this little matter with Napier, easily and decisively lays down the true guiding principle:—“The first rule of all writing,—that rule to which every other rule is subordinate,—is that the words used by the writer shall be such as most fully and precisely convey his meaning to the great body of his readers. All considerations about the purity and dignity of style ought to bend to this consideration.”

This, indeed, exhausts the subject; and leaves the editor only one question to solve—namely, whether the writer whom he employs has presumably a meaning fit to be conveyed to the readers of his periodical. Upon that point he must use his own judgment; but it was idle for a man like Mr. Napier to criticize the phrasing of a man like Macaulay, who had ten thousand times his reading. For it is upon the “reading” that the matter very largely turns. The force of a quotation or a phrase imported from a foreign tongue depends, not upon the bare meaning of the words, but upon the suggestiveness of certain associations. This does not necessarily imply that the precise context is recalled, or certain hackneyed trifles from Lucretius and Horace, and a score of such chips in porridge, would be indecent. If it be said that all this implies that an editor should be omniscient, or at lowest an omnivorous reader, the reply is, that it certainly does—unless the principle adopted in the conduct of the periodical be the more recent one of choosing contributors largely on account of their names, and then leaving them to answer for their own sins, if any. One thing is clear, that if a man like Jeffrey—or like Napier—could be shown the number of blunders he made in mutilating the writings of his contributors, he would feel very much humiliated. Thackeray complains very bitterly of the suppression of some of his touches of humour, and his sufferings at the hands of a critic like Mr. Napier (able man as he was) must have been terrible indeed.

The system recently adopted of having every article signed, has not yielded the results which were predicted or expected by those who so long struggled to get it introduced. It has led to “starring” more outrageous and more audacious than any that was ever seen upon the stage, and to mischief far more serious. The worst of these is the substitution of a spurious sort of authority for the natural influence or weight of the writing, even upon some of the most important topics which can engage the human mind. The opinion, for example, of a versatile politician, or traveller, or physicist, on a question of religion or morals may be of no more value than that of the first man you meet on passing into the streets. But it will attract attention in proportion to the notoriety of the author, and though wise men may know that it is weak or foolish, they may wait a long while for the chance of saying so from any pulpit worth preaching in, because the platforms are pre-engaged; and also because, the “organs of opinion” being bound to live by keeping up a succession of attractive names in their pages, it will not do to offend the owners of such names. One other result of the recent system (not everywhere and always, of course, but generally and most frequently) is a want of freshness in periodical literature. This evil our American friends manage to escape; only they are much bolder than we are, and do not stand in terror of the charge of levity. But, as a rule, writers who are fit for starring purposes lose freshness in a very short time; and then they do a still farther mischiefby striking that key-note of second-hand thought which is so prevalent, or at least so common in even our better literature.

It is amusing enough to recall the superstition of secrecy which inspired the policy of the first Edinburgh Reviewers. Lord Jeffrey has told us how the conspirators, Brougham, Sydney Smith, Horner, and himself, used to meet by night in the back room of a printing-office, and steal to their work by winding paths and back stairs, like assassins. This was folly, though not inexcusably without rational ground or motive, and one cannot resist the belief that the more modern plan will work well some day, if it does not now. But the difference in the results is not so great as might have been hoped for. Men of letters do not now openly insult each other for differences of opinion in politics or theology; but it is not any variation of mechanism which has made the change, and, though less brutality of phrasing is now permitted, it would be difficult to surpass in bitterness or unfairness some of the signed and accredited criticism of our own day. On the whole, it comes to this,—you can get no more out of given moral conditions than there is in them. If public writers are clique-ish (a word to disturb Mr. Napier in his grave, and certainly an ugly one) and unjust to each other, it is because you cannot change the spots of the leopard. A man who loves the truth will employ his pen conscientiously and kindly, whether he writes anonymously or otherwise. To this it may be added that there is something extremely quaint in one thing that we may see taking place every week—the greater part of our newspaper writing is still unsigned, and, considering what a hastily got-up miscellany a newspaper necessarily is, it can hardly be otherwise. A column of reviews in a newspaper is sometimes the work of as many hands as there are books reviewed in it. But it might certainly have been expected beforehand that reviewers who write without signature should be both careful and moderate in attacking writers who sign, and who, presumably, take more time over their work than contributors to newspapers can generally do. Yet the newspaper columns in which quarterly and monthly periodicals are reviewed are “too often” (we must round the corner with the help of that commonplace) models of flippancy and dogmatism.

On the whole, it is not from any mechanical changes of method that we must expect improvement in Review literature. Of course, in largeness, fulness, richness, and versatility the Review-writing of to-day is immeasurably superior to that of the days when Macaulay and Brougham fought for precedence in theEdinburgh. But so is the literature reviewed—one is a big “rolling miscellany,” and so is the other. It does not seem to some of us that,other things being made equal, the literature of our modern Reviews (using the word widely) is either superior or inferior to that of theEdinburgh, for example. The growth, however, of literature generally in force, colour, range, and effectiveness, is something astounding. We note this, or rather it overwhelms us, inturning over such a book as the Memoirs of Harriet Martineau; and there is more than the insolence of new-fangled tastes in putting such a question as—where would Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope” be if it were published to-morrow? One day when Brougham had just left (for London) a country-house where he had been staying, Rogers, who was a fellow-guest with him, made some such remark as this—“In that post-chaise went away this morning, Bacon, Newton, Demosthenes, and Solon.” It is not recorded that Rogers meant this as a joke; but where would Brougham be after a little manipulation by Mr. Jevons or Mr. Goldwin Smith? It would be tiresome to dwell upon this, and wrong to suggest that the men were smaller because the outlook was less; but this view, if anything, helps us to see the direction in which one of our best hopes for literature must lie—namely, in its ever-increasing volume. There will always be hostile camps, and there will always be warriors of lowmorale, but as each camp enlarges, theaveragepain of those who suffer from injustice or neglect will be lessened. And this observation is by no means addressed to mere questions of reviewing in the minor sense, but rather to literature in the mass as representing the culture of the time.

Since the time when Jeffrey ruled theEdinburgh Review, and even since the death of Mr. Napier, “the advertising element,” and commercial elements in general, have played a great and new part, an increasing part, too, in the fortunes, and thus in regulating the quality and tendency, of current literature. One result of this state of things is an ever-increasing tendency to compromise in the expression of opinion. In spite of the spirit of tolerance of which we hear so much, there was perhaps never a time in which the expression of opinion was so much emasculated in the higher periodical literature, or in which so much trickery of accommodated phraseology was going forward. This will last for a long time yet—as long as periodical literature is a matter of commercial speculation. It is an evil omen that the greatest amount of freedom now displayed is in political and scientific discussion. It is difficult to see where the remedy is to come from in discussions of another kind. Probably we shall have a lesson by the cataclysmic method before very long. There is in this volume a letter from Brougham to Napier, in which Brougham is very angry about an indirect disclosure of Romilly’s heterodoxy, and he goes off at a tangent to express a doubt whether Macaulay was any better than Romilly, but is very anxious that conventional conformity should be strictly maintained in the Review, even to the length of concealing from the general reader as far as possible such facts as that a man so good and “religious” as Romilly could be a disbeliever in this, that, or the other. We have now got beyond that; the accredited policy is in a vague way to trump the cards of the dangerous people, and then nobody shows his hand fairly and freely. Meanwhile, everybody feels uneasy, from a latent sense of insincerity; and, when once the excitement is off, the natural perception that out of nothing nothing can come,reassumes its sway. The game cannot go on in this way for ever, though no one can foresee by what accident the lights will be blown out, the tables thrown over, and the stakes roughly dealt with at last.

A great difference, as might be expected, arises from the incredible widening of what might be called the constituencies of opinion. Political articles of the “inspired” order do not count as they did, or were supposed to do, in the days of “Coningsby” even, much less as they did a decade or two sooner. The effective currents of thought are far too numerous and far too massive to be guided—nay, too numerous and too massive for even the most conceited of propagandists or prophets to fancy he could calculate them. What sort of figure as a publicist or “inspired” political writer would a man like Croker cut at this end of the century? It must have been a dolorous day for such as he when they first felt sure the tides were coming up which were to sweep them and their works into oblivion, or at least into limbo, and make successors to their function impossible in future. We do not affirm that the present phase of change is for the best; no theory of progress will justify statements of that kind. In fact, things are quite bad enough; but some security against certain evils there must be, in the fact that these are days in which it is difficult to hide a wrong, or an error, which has an immediate sinister bearing upon ends cherished by any school of opinion. Who on earth would now think of calling theTimesthe Thunderer? Just when middle-aged men of to-day were babies it was thought finely argumentative, if not conclusive, to call the London University “Stinkomalee”—in the interest of Church and King; but the “hard hitting” of our own time is done in other fashion. Even if the Marquis of Salisbury were to edit a paper he would not be able to make much out of Titus Oates. But the allusion to that episode in another sphere of action may remind us of the late Lord Derby, who might almost be called the last of the old school of politicians. The mere mention of his name seems to flash light upon the gulf we have traversed since the days when the world was divided between a Whig organ and a Tory organ.

Simultaneously with the incalculable increase of devotion to science, we have had an increase of devotion to ends held to be practical, and this has largely governed our literature. The subject now barely hinted at is well worth extended treatment. It is, however, no more than the truth that there has been recently a great diminution of speculative enthusiasm of all kinds, with a largely increased tendency to make things pleasant for all parties. Convenience, in fact, becomes more and more the governing factor of life; this tells upon our better literature; and until the wind sets again from the old quarters—as it certainly will some day—we shall feel the want of certain elements of freshness, individuality, and moral impulse which touch us more closely than we at first recognize in reading the old Edinburgh Reviewers.

Matthew Browne.

FOOTNOTES:[37]One, at least, of the contributors whom Buloz tortured (Georges Sand wrote that she wished him “au diable” ten times a day, only he held her purse-strings) used to date his letters in this style:—“A vingt-cinq lieues de cet imbécile Buloz.”

[37]One, at least, of the contributors whom Buloz tortured (Georges Sand wrote that she wished him “au diable” ten times a day, only he held her purse-strings) used to date his letters in this style:—“A vingt-cinq lieues de cet imbécile Buloz.”

Towards the end of the last century the men of letters of Europe were astonished to hear that in Asia, on the banks of the Ganges, a more ancient and richer language had been found than that of Homer. It offered in its words and forms striking analogies with the languages of Rome and Athens. Interest once roused, systematic comparisons were made, and comparative grammar was founded. The sphere of comparisons widened and the group of Aryan languages was established.

It was thus ascertained that the languages of the Romans, of the Greeks, of the Gauls, of the Germans, of the Lithuanians, and of the Slavs in Europe, of the Hindoos and Persians in Asia, are made out of the same materials and cast in the same mould; that they are only varieties of one primitive type. The precise laws which regulated the formation of each of these varieties were discovered, so that it is both possible to proceed from one of these languages to the other, and to trace all of them to the original type whence they come, to the lost type which they reproduce. This lost type, the source of all the idioms of nearly the whole of Europe and of a third of Asia, science has reconstructed: with an almost absolute certainty, it has described the grammar, drawn up the lexicon of that language, of which no direct echo remains, not the fragment of an inscription on a broken stone, of that language of which the life and the death are pre-historic, and which was spoken at a period when there were as yet neither Romans, nor Hindoos, nor Greeks, nor Persians, nor Germans, nor Celts, and when the ancestors of all those nations were still wandering as one tribe, one knows not where, one knows not when.

Closely following comparative grammar, almost at the same time rose up comparative mythology, and with the ancient words awoke the gods that they had sung, the beliefs that they had fostered. It was recognized that if the Indo-Europeans spoke essentially the same language, they also worshipped essentially the same gods and believed in the same things. As comparative grammar, on hearing the sister-tongues, caught up the echo of the mother, whose voice they repeat, so comparative mythology, in its turn, on looking at the sister religions, has tried to see through them the original image which they reflect. As the one restored the words and forms of the language which lived on the lips of the Aryans at the moment of the breaking up of the Aryan unity, the other endeavoured to restore the gods and beliefs which lived in their souls at the moment when, with the unity of the race, the identity of language and belief passed away. This restoration of the pre-historic gods and of the pre-historic beliefs is the final object of comparative mythology, just as the reconstruction of words and forms is the final object of comparative grammar. The object was analogous and so was the method. It is the comparative method, which by comparing kindred divinities and kindred beliefs, finds the original divinity and the original belief which gave birth to them, and which are reproduced in them. To sketch the picture of the original mythology, it is sufficient to separate from the various derivative mythologies the essential characteristics common to them. Every characteristic common to the secondary religions will be legitimately referred to the primitive one, whenever it is essential—that is to say neither borrowed from one of the kindred religions nor due to an identical, but quite independent development. If, for instance, the various Indo-European mythologies agree in naming the godsDaiva, “the shining ones,” it follows that in the primitive mythology, in the religion of the period of unity, they were known already as beings of light and called thus. It is a great deal easier to admit that the seven derived religions have faithfully repeated what has been handed down to them from their common source, than to imagine that once separated they have created the same conception, each one on its side, and have clothed it with the same expression: the former hypothesis is a simple and natural induction: the second is in reality made up of seven hypotheses, and implies seven chances agreeing together, seven miracles.

Our object in the following pages is to give a sketch of one of the chapters of the Aryan mythology. We try to show that the religion of the Indo-European unity recognized a Supreme God, and we try to find the most ancient form and the earliest origin of that conception among the Aryans, and to follow out the transformations it has undergone in the course of ages.

The Aryan Gods are not organized as a Republic: they have a king. There is over the gods a Supreme God.

Four of the Aryan mythologies have preserved a clear and precise notion of this conception: they are those of Greece, of Italy, of ancient India, and of ancient Persia. This Supreme God is called Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Italy, Varuna in ancient India, Ahura Mazda in ancient Persia. Let us then listen to Zeus, to Jupiter, to Varuna, and to Ahura Mazda each in his turn.

Zeus and Jupiter.[39]—About three centuries before our era a Greek poet thus addressed Zeus:—

“Oh! Thou most glorious of immortals, whose names are many, for ever Almighty, Zeus, Thou who rulest nature, directing all things according to a law, hail! To Thee all this universe moving round the earth yields obedience, following whither thou leadest, and submits itself to Thy rule.... So great in Thy nature, King Supreme above all things, no work is achieved without Thee, neither on the earth, nor in the celestial regions of ether, nor on the sea, but those which the wicked accomplish in their folly.”

This is the Zeus of the philosophers, of the Stoics, of Cleanthes: but he was already the Zeus of the ancient poets. Powerful, omniscient, and just is the god of Æschylus, as that of Cleanthes: he is the king of kings, the blessed of the blessed, the sovereign power among all powers, the only one who is free among the gods, who is the master of the mightiest, who is subservient to no one’s rule; above whom no one sits, no one to whom from below he looks with awe; every word of his is absolute; he is the God of deep thoughts, whose heart has dark and hidden ways, impenetrable to the eye, and no scheme formed within his mind has ever miscarried. Finally, he is the Father of Justice, Dike, “the terrible virgin who breathes out on crime anger and death,” it is he who from hell raises vengeance with its slow chastisement against the bold wayward mortal. Terpander proclaims in Zeus the essence of all things, the god who rules over everything. Archilochus sings Zeus father, as the God who rules the heavens, who watches the guilty and unjust actions of men, who administers chastisements to monsters, the God who created heaven and earth. The old man of Ascra knows that Zeus is the father of gods and of men, that his eye sees and comprehends all things and reaches all that he wishes. In short, as far back as the Greek Pantheon appears in the light of history, even from Homer, Zeus towers above the nation of gods which surrounds him. He himself proclaims, and the other gods proclaim after him, that, unrivalled in power and strength, he is the greatest of all; the gods, at his behest, silently bow down before him; he would hurl into the gloomy depths of Tartarus whomsoever should dare to disobey him: he would hurl him down into the uttermost depths of the subterranean abyss: alone against them all, he would master them. Should they let fall from the sky a golden chain on which all the gods and goddesses might be suspended, they still would be powerless, however hard they might strain to drag him from the heavens to the earth; and if it pleased him, he could draw them up even with the earth, even with the sea,and he would then fix the chain on the ridge of Olympus, and suspend on it the whole universe; so much is he above mankind, above the gods. Not only is he the most powerful, but also he is the wisest—theμητιέτης; he is all wisdom and he is likewise all justice. It is from him that the judges of the sons of the Achæans have received their laws: very good, very great, he holds learned conversations with Themis (the law) who sits at his side; prayers are his daughters, whom he avenges for all the insults of the wicked.

Thus, power, wisdom, justice, belonged from all time to Zeus, to the Zeus of Homer as well as to the Zeus of Cleanthes; to the Zeus of the poets as to him of the philosophers, in the remotest period of paganism as at the approach of the religion of Christ. A providential god rules the Pantheon of the Hellenes.

What Zeus is in Greece, Jupiter is in Italy: the God who is above all the gods. The identity of the two deities is so striking that the ancients themselves, forestalling comparative mythology, recognized it from the very first. He is the God, great and good amongst them all:Jupiter, optimus, maximus.

Varuna.—The most ancient of the religions of India, which the Vedas have made known to us, has also a Zeus, whose name is Varuna.[40]

“Truly admirable for grandeur are the works of Him who has separated the two worlds and fixed their vast extent: of Him who has set in motion the high and sublime firmament, who has spread out the heavens above and the earth beneath.“These heavens and this earth which reach so far, flowing with milk, so beautiful in form, it is by the law of Varuna that they remain fixed, facing each other, immortal beings with fertile seed.“This Asura,[41]who is acquainted with all things, has propped up these heavens, he has fixed the boundaries of the earth. He is enthroned above all the worlds, universal king; all the laws of the world are the laws of Varuna.“In the bottomless abyss the king Varuna has lifted up the summit of the celestial tree.[42]It is the king Varuna who has traced out to the sun the broad path he is to follow: to footless creatures he has given feet so that they may run.“Those stars, which illumine the night, where were they during the day? Infallible are the laws of Varuna: the moon kindles itself and walks through the night.“Varuna has traced out paths for the sun: he has thrown forwards the fluctuating torrent of rivers. He has dug out the wide and rapid beds where the waves of the days, let loose, unroll themselves in their order.“He has put strength into the horse, milk into the cow, intellect into the heart, Agni[43]into the waters, the sun in the sky, soma[44]into the stone.“The wind is thy breath, O Varuna! which roars in the atmosphere, like the ox in the meadow. Between this earth and the sublime heaven above, all things, O Varuna, are of thy creation.”

“These heavens and this earth which reach so far, flowing with milk, so beautiful in form, it is by the law of Varuna that they remain fixed, facing each other, immortal beings with fertile seed.

“This Asura,[41]who is acquainted with all things, has propped up these heavens, he has fixed the boundaries of the earth. He is enthroned above all the worlds, universal king; all the laws of the world are the laws of Varuna.

“In the bottomless abyss the king Varuna has lifted up the summit of the celestial tree.[42]It is the king Varuna who has traced out to the sun the broad path he is to follow: to footless creatures he has given feet so that they may run.

“Those stars, which illumine the night, where were they during the day? Infallible are the laws of Varuna: the moon kindles itself and walks through the night.

“Varuna has traced out paths for the sun: he has thrown forwards the fluctuating torrent of rivers. He has dug out the wide and rapid beds where the waves of the days, let loose, unroll themselves in their order.

“He has put strength into the horse, milk into the cow, intellect into the heart, Agni[43]into the waters, the sun in the sky, soma[44]into the stone.

“The wind is thy breath, O Varuna! which roars in the atmosphere, like the ox in the meadow. Between this earth and the sublime heaven above, all things, O Varuna, are of thy creation.”

There is an order in nature, there is a law, a habit, a rule,a Rita.This law, thisRita, it is Varuna who has established it. He is the god of the Rita, the god of Order, the guardian of the Rita; he is the god of efficient and stable laws; in him rest as in a rock the fixed immovable laws.

Organizer of the world, he is its master. He is the first of the Asuras, “of the lords;” he isthe Asura, “the Lord;” he is the sovereign of the whole world, the king of all beings, the universal king, the independent king; no one amongst the gods dares to infringe his laws; “it is thou, Varuna, who art the king of all.”

As he has omnipotence, he has omniscience too, he is “the Lord who knows all things,” theAsura viçva-vedas. He is the sage who has supreme wisdom, in whom all sciences have their centre; when the poet wishes to praise the learning of a god, he compares it to that of Varuna. “He knows the place of the birds which fly in the air, he knows the ships which are sailing on the ocean, he knows the twelve months and what they will bring forth, he knows every creature that is born. He knows the path of the sublime wind in the heights, he knows who sits at the sacrifice. The God of stable laws, Varuna, has taken his place in his palace to be the universal king, the god with the wondrous intellect. Hence, following in his mind all these marvels, he looks around him at what has happened and what will happen.”

As he is the universal witness, he is also the universal judge, the infallible judge whom nothing escapes: none can deceive him, and from above he sees the evil done below and strikes it: he has sevenfold bands to clasp thrice round the liar by the upper, by the middle, and by the lower part of the body. The man, smitten by misfortune, implores his pity, and feels that he has sinned, and that the hand which strikes is also the hand that punishes:

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