The Press. — London, England, 1858-01-30 00:00:00

114 tion, is not only to import a wholly foreign element into the dispute, but is doing the very thing which Butler has warned us against. He merely, ho tells us, deals with things as they are—with the facts of nature—with the scriptures of revelation Those who busy themselves with what might have been done in either, must look out for a different disputant. There may or may not be separate difficulties in each. He is only concerned with those they share in common. In the essay on the character of Sir Robert Peel we have again to qualify our praise of its real ability by strictures on the tone of wanton impertinence sometimes adopted. Of Sir Robert Peel's intellect, and the causes of his political success, this is the best account we know ; but why spoil it by little petty snarls like the following?— We remember Peel as the proper head of a moderate. intelligent, half-comtvercial community ; we forget that he onoe was the chosen representative of a gentry untrained to great affairs, absorbed in a great war, only just recovering from the horror of a great revolution. Wily, these same " gentry" had, on Mr. Bage hot's own showing, been governing the country for a century and a half. But he cannot resist the opportunity of a spiteful sneer, how over unfounded, or however subversive of pre vious statements. Again, of the Dean of York, who had made several applications to Sir Robert for prefer ment for his family, and comments on his relative's refusal as follows : These letters show the noble principle on which Sir Robert's public life was founded. I am quite sure that he had a great regard for my sons. He invited them to his shooting-quarters, was pleased to find them amuse ment, and made them many handsome presents ; but he steadily refused to enrich them out of the public purse merely because they were his nephews. Many Prime Ministers have not been so scrupulous. Mr. Bagehot remarks,—" And clearly one " divine wishes Sir Robert had not been so." Now, where is the necessity for this stroke of illnature 9 If the Dean of York did not shrink from confessing his own weakness in order to protect the reputation of another, we think Mr. Bagehot might at least have left him alone, if he could not bring himself to approve. But we must say the virtue of can dour seems to have no charms for this gentle man. His portrait of Canning evinces an intellec tual deficiency of almost equal magnitude. He cannot take in the idea of the old classic statesman. He turns him over and over, and cannot understand him. This is shown quite as much by his remarks on the House of Com mons as by those on particular men. He is evidently tainted by that mental vulgarity which cannot believe in the coincidence of fineness and force. This fineness of mind is produced by early and assiduous education ; and persons thus trained are familiarised with many conclusions which are understood with more difficulty later in life, and do undoubtedly require a good deal of " tough thinking.' Hence arise the i well-known dogmatism and conceit of self-made men. They will never believe that an) one can understand a subject whom it has not cost as much labour as it, has themselves. Now, the race of statesmen of whom Canning was the last were generally men of high literary culture. They set before themselves great models of conduct. Their notions were larger, freer, and more genial than those of our contemporaries. They breathed a healthier atmosphere. Their posi tion was a genuine position. Their oratory was genuine oratory—not spoken essays adapted to the newspapers. In one word, they were governors, not administrators—a trued of which Mr Bagehot sees the one half clearly enough, but there he stops short. He knows that the crowd is dirty, but he is not tall enough to look over their heads, and eatches only broken glimpses of the stately iprocession beyond. The best piece of pure criticism in the volume is the article on Macaulay. It is cer tainly by far the best thing which has been written of him. His great peculiarity, says Mr. Bagehot. is " the union of a flowing fancy " with an insensible organisation." All _ Ma and merits are summed up in Elsewhere it is am- eatilay's defeets a that admirable se plified : THE PRESS, JANUARY 80, 1858. It [i.e., his style, though we should rather have called it his method] is too omniscient. Every thing is too plain. All is clear; nothing is doubtful. Instead of pro bability being, as the great thinker expressed it, " the very guide of life," it has become a rare exception—an uncom mon phenomenon. You rarely come across any thing which is not decided ; and when you do come across it, you seem to wonder that the positiveness, which has accomplished so much, should have been unwilling to decide any thing. This is hardly the style for history. The data of historical narratives, especially of modern histories, are a heap of confusion. No one can tell where they lie, or where they do not lie; what is in them, or what is not in them. Literature is called the " fragment of fragments ;" little has been written, and but little of that little has been preserved. So history is a vestige of vestiges ; few facts leave any trace of themselves, any witness of their occurrence ; of fewer still is that witness preserved; a slight track is all any thing leaves, and the confusion of life, the tumult of change sweep even that away in a moment. It is not possible that these data can be very fertile in certainties. Few people would make any thing of them : a memoir here, a M.S. there—two letters in a magazine—an assertion by a person whose veracity is denied,—these are the sort of evidence out of which a flowing narrative is to be educed—of course it ought not to be too flowing. "If you please, sir, to tell me what you do nol know," was the inquiry of a humble pupil addressed to a great man of science. It would have been a relief to the readers of Macaulay if he had shown a little the out- side of uncertainties, which there must be—the gradations of doubt, which there ought to be—the singular accumu lation of difficulties, which must beset tho extraction of a very easy narrative from very confused materials. This defect in style is, indeed, indicative of a defect in understanding. Mr. Macaulay's mind is eminently gifted, but there is a want of graduation in it. He has a fine eye for probabilities, a clear perception of evidence, a shrewd guess at missing links of fact ; but each probability seems to him a certainty, each piece of evidence conclusive, each analogy exact. The heavy Scotch intellect is a little prone to this : one figures it as a heap of formulae, and if fact b is reducible to formulae s, that is all which it regards ; the mathematical mill grinds with equal energy at flour perfect and imperfect—at matter which is quite certain, and at matter which is only a little probable. This is capital. Yet even Macaulay is made fun of for what is in our opinion one of his leading merits. Atter quoting that well-known passage on our friendships with the dead, Mr. Bagehot proceeds:— Bat Bonnet is dead ; and Cicero was a Roman ; and Plato wrote in Greek. Years and manners separate ns from the great. After dinner, Demosthenes may come unseasonably ; Dante might stay too long. We are alienated fr..)rr. ;he politician, and have a horror of the theologian. Dreadful idea, having Demosthenes for an intimate friend! He had pebbles in his month; he was always urging action ; he spoke such good Greek; we cannot dwell on it,—it is too much. Only a mind impas sive to our daily life, unalive to bores and evils, to joys and sorrows, incapable of the deepest sympathies, a prey to print, could imagine it. The mass of men have stronger ties and warmer hopes. The exclusive devotion to books tires. We require to love and hate, to act and live. This language is unworthy of Mr. Bagehot's understanding. It is indescribably trivial. But we do not wish to part from him in wrath. Such blots on his excellence are few and far between. He has pleased us much. It is only natural we should point out to him how for the future he may annoy us less. And now, in conclusion, we would recom mend everybody to read the two essays we have not criticised—on Shakespeare and on Shelley. Taken all in all, they are the two best. The first especially is redolent of that peculiar quality which wo call alternately common sense and humour according to the form it takes. And we are sure our readers will be both the wiser and the merrier for a knowledge of it. The Eighteen Christian Centuries. By the Rev. James White. London : Blackwoods. PHYSIOLOGISTS tell us that the constitution of our digestive apparatus is such as to require in the food submitted to it not only the pre sence of specifically nutritive properties, but over and above these a certain amount of bulk, to enable the organs to take effective cogni sance of that which is brought before them. The savages who are occasionally reduced to live upon substances, such us train oil, or honey, which would appear to possess the constituents chemically necessary for support ing life, are nevertheless obliged to mix with them it quantity of earth or sawdust, in order to prevent their reception in too concentrated a form, and obviate the too rapid action of the separative and assimilative processes. ',lke many of the truths relative to our bodily structure, this doctrine finds a parallel in the laws of our mental organisation. There is an inevitable though not always a very definite limit to the quantity of ideas or facts which can in a given time be seized by the apprehen sion or stored up by the memory ; and we are compelled by experience to acknowledge that truths must sometimes he held in solu tion instead of being precipitated, and that the book which contains the fewest words is not always the one which it takes the shortest time to master. The mind must have time to dwell upon its information in order to grasp it in its full extent. This is perhaps even more true of history than of science or metaphysics. The principles of mechanics or geometry, the formulae of mathematics, or the few great laws of psychology, may, when once rightly appre hended, be retained in the mind to wait the arrival of the constantly recurring facts which exemplify them. That two straight lines can not inclose a space, and that it is much more difficult to retrace the links of our ideas in their reverse order than in the order in which they arose, are truths which we see or feel illustrated every day of our lives. But the order and connection of long past events have no such hold upon us. The sequences and. interdependences of historical phenomena, stript of their local colours and illustrative circumstances, overwhelm the mind by their individual importance while they confuse it with their aggregate number, and an epitome which pretends to embrace them all can leave nothing but the most vague impression. To use the language of Gibbon in speaking of the By zantine empire," in a composition of some days, " in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years " have rolled away, and the duration of a life "or reign is contracted to a fleeting mo " ment : and our immortal reason survives " and disdains the phantoms of kings who have " passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell on " our remembrance. ' If the work at the head of this article had been like the common historical abridgments to whose faults we have alluded, and which, after having tormented schoolboys, subside into mere books of occasional refereace, we should not have troubled ourselves to review it at all. But Mr. %Vhite's epitome is of an excep tional character. He has his faults, which we shall not scruple to mention ; but there is nothing about him of the literary hack who painfully photographs an enormous landscape into the diameter of a half-crown, and wearies you with the micro scopic examination of its almost undiscerniblo features. Mr. White is a literary artist, whose sketch, however incomplete in minute detail, gives a faithful idea of the great outlines, the light and shade, and the general colour of the locality it professes to represent. To revert to our former illustration, ho gives bulk to the more important events by taking them alone, and treating them at sufficient length to insure their retention in the memory. Conceiving that every century has had its own characteristics, whichas we knoware already in several instances universally acknowledged, his plan is to place under a similar light the whole eighteen. This task he has accomplished in the manner which might have been expected from the author of that spirited little book, " Landmarks of History of Eng land "—with much lucidity of arrangement, much felicity of language, and a just degree of historical perspective. He has evidently studied with great care the best and most recent writers, and his eclecticism from Gibbon, Hallam, Guizot, Michelet, and others is for the most part sound and trustworthy. His style is neither uugracefully stiff nor gau dily magniloquent, but is generally spirited and pleasing, and carries the reader on with out any sense of weariness or effort. We are bound to say, however, that, though good as a whole, it is disfigured by a few blemishes which the author will do well to remove when he prepares his second edition. He is usually quiet and gentlemanly enough, but occasion ally he seems to be seized with a fancy for undignified witticisms, which have always a strong flavour of the provincial lecture-room, and occasionally descend to positive vulgarity. Thus, at page 214, he drags in by head and shoulders a joke about the recent attempt to introduce horseflesh at table, and alludes at page 239, apropos of the pretensions of the Church of Rome, to an equally disagreeable article of diet!— 1 , I