Chapter VII: Part 7

Then, it is asked by persons of another and still more rigorous temper, whether, as the world goes, the subject, or its treatment either, justifies us in reading some twenty-one thousand and seventy-five lines, which do not seem to have any direct tendency to make us better or to improve mankind. This objection is an old enemy with a new face, and need not detain us, though perhaps the crude and incessant application of a narrow moral standard, thoroughly misunderstood, is one of the intellectual dangers of our time. You may now and again hear a man of really masculine character confess that though he loves Shakespeare and takes habitual delight in his works, he cannot see that he was a particularly moral writer. That is to say, Shakespeare is never directly didactic; you can no more get a system of morals out of his writings than you can get such a system out of the writings of the ever-searching Plato. But, if we must be quantitative, one great creative poet probably exerts a nobler, deeper, more permanent ethical influence than a dozen generations of professed moral teachers. It is a commonplace to the wise, and an everlasting puzzle to the foolish, that direct inculcation of morals should invariably prove so powerless an instrument, so futile a method. The truth is that nothing can be more powerfully efficacious from the moral point of view than the exercise of an exalted creative art, stirring within the intelligence of the spectator active thought and curiosity about many types of character and many changeful issues of conduct and fortune, at once enlarging and elevating the range of his reflections on mankind, ever kindling his sympathies into the warm and continuous glow which purifies and strengthens nature, and fills men with that love of humanity which is the best inspirer of virtue. Is not this why music, too, is to be counted supreme among moral agents, soothing disorderly passion by diving down into the hidden deeps of character where there is no disorder, and touching the diviner mind? Given a certain rectitude as well as vigour of intelligence, then whatever stimulates the fancy, expands the imagination, enlivens meditation upon the great human drama, is essentially moral. Shakespeare does all this, as if sent Iris-like from the immortal gods, and _The Ring and the Book_ has a measure of the same incomparable quality.

A profound and moving irony subsists in the very structure of the poem. Any other human transaction that ever was, tragic or comic or plain prosaic, may be looked at in a like spirit, As the world's talk bubbled around the dumb anguish of Pompilia, or the cruelty and hate of Guido, so it does around the hourly tragedies of all times and places.

"The instinctive theorizing whence a fact
Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look."--
"Vibrations in the general mind
At depth of deed already out of reach."--
"Live fact deadened down,
Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away:"--

if we reflect that these are the conditions which have marked the formation of all the judgments that we hold by, and which are vivid in operation and effect at this hour, the deep irony and the impressive meaning of the poem are both obvious:--

"So learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach,
This lesson that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind" (iv. 234).

It is characteristic of Mr. Browning that he thus casts the moral of his piece in an essentially intellectual rather than an emotional form, appealing to hard judgment rather than to imaginative sensibility. Another living poet of original genius, of whom we have much right to complain that he gives us so little, ends a poem in two or three lines which are worth quoting here for the illustration they afford of what has just been said about Mr. Browning:--

"Ah, what dusty answer gets the soul,
When hot for certainties in this our life!--
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore?"[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. George Meredith's _Modern Love_.]

This is imaginative and sympathetic in thought as well as expression, and the truth and the image enter the writer's mind together, the one by the other. The lines convey poetic sentiment rather than reasoned truth; while Mr. Browning's close would be no unfit epilogue to a scientific essay on history, or a treatise on the errors of the human understanding and the inaccuracy of human opinion and judgment. This is the common note of his highest work; hard thought and reason illustrating themselves in dramatic circumstance, and the thought and reason are not wholly fused, they exist apart and irradiate with far-shooting beams the moral confusion of the tragedy. This is, at any rate, emphatically true of _The Ring and the Book_. The fulness and variety of creation, the amplitude of the play and shifting of characters and motive and mood, are absolutely unforced, absolutely uninterfered with by the artificial exigencies of ethical or philosophic purpose. There is the purpose, full-grown, clear in outline, unmistakeable in significance. But the just proprieties of place and season are rigorously observed, because Mr. Browning, like every other poet of his quality, has exuberant and adequate delight in mere creation, simple presentment, and returns to bethink him of the meaning of it all only by-and-by. The pictures of Guido, of Pompilia, of Caponsacchi, of Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, of Pope Innocent, are each of them full and adequate, as conceptions of character in active manifestation apart from the truth which the whole composition is meant to illustrate, and which clothes itself in this most excellent drama.

The scientific attitude of the intelligence is almost as markedly visible in Mr. Browning as the strength of his creative power. The lesson of _The Ring and the Book_ is perhaps as nearly positive as anything poetic can be. It is true that ultimately the drama ends in a vindication of what are called the ways of God to man, if indeed people are willing to put themselves off with a form of omnipotent justice which is simply a partial retribution inflicted on the monster, while torture and butchery fall upon victims more or less absolutely blameless. As if the fact of punishment at length overtaking the guilty Franceschini were any vindication of the justice of that assumed Providence, which had for so long a time awarded punishment far more harsh to the innocent Pompilia. So far as you can be content with the vindication of a justice of this less than equivocal quality, the sight of the monster brought to the

"Close fetid cell,
Where the hot vapour of an agony,
Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down
Horrible worms made out of sweat and tears,"--

may in a sense prove satisfactory enough. But a man must be very dull who in reading the poem does not perceive that the very spirit of it points to the thousand hazards which even this fragment of justice had to run in saving itself, and bringing about such partially righteous consummation as destiny permits. True opinion fares yet more perilously. _Half-Rome_, the _Other Half-Rome_, the _Tertium Quid_, which is perhaps most masterly and finished of the three, show us how ill truth sifts itself, to how many it never comes at all, how blurred, confused, next door to false, it is figured even to those who seize it by the hem of the garment. We may, perhaps, yawn over the intermingled Latin and law of Arcangeli, in spite of the humour of parts of it, as well as over the vapid floweriness of his rival; but for all that, we are touched keenly by the irony of the methods by which the two professional truth-sifters darken counsel with words, and make skilful sport of life and fact. The whole poem is a parable of the feeble and half-hopeless struggle which truth has to make against the ways of the world. That in this particular case truth and justice did win some pale sort of victory does not weaken the force of the lesson. The victory was such and so won as to stir in us awful thoughts of fatal risks and certain defeats, of falsehood a thousand times clasped for truth, of fact a thousand times banished for fancy:--

"Because Pompilia's purity prevails,
Conclude you, all truth triumphs in the end?
So might those old inhabitants of the ark,
Witnessing haply their dove's safe return,
Pronounce there was no danger all the while
O' the deluge, to the creature's counterparts,
Aught that beat wing i' the world, was white or soft,
And that the lark, the thrush, the culver too,
Might equally have traversed air, found earth,
And brought back olive-branch In unharmed bill.
Methinks I hear the Patriarch's warning voice--
'Though this one breast, by miracle, return,
No wave rolls by, in all the waste, but bears
Within it some dead dove-like thing as dear,
Beauty made blank and harmlessness destroyed!'"

(iv. 218).

Or, to take another simile from the same magnificent passage, in which the fine dignity of the verse fitly matches the deep truth of the preacher's monitions:--

"Romans! An elder race possessed your land
Long ago, and a false faith lingered still,
As shades do, though the morning-star be out.
Doubtless, some pagan of the twilight day
Has often pointed to a cavern-mouth,
Obnoxious to beholders, hard by Rome,
And said,--nor he a bad man, no, nor fool,--
Only a man, so, blind like all his mates,--
'Here skulk in safety, lurk, defying law,
The devotees to execrable creed,
Adoring--with what culture ... Jove, avert
Thy vengeance from us worshippers of thee!...
What rites obscene--their idol-god, an Ass!'
So went the word forth, so acceptance found,
So century re-echoed century,
Cursed the accursed,--and so, from sire to son,
You Romans cried, 'The offscourings of our race
Corrupt within the depths there: fitly, fiends
Perform a temple-service o'er the dead:
Child, gather garment round thee, pass nor pry!'
So groaned your generations: till the time
Grew ripe, and lightning hath revealed, belike,--
Thro' crevice peeped into by curious fear,--
Some object even fear could recognise
I' the place of spectres; on the illumined wall,
To-wit, some nook, tradition talks about,
Narrow and short, a corpse's length, no more:
And by it, in the due receptacle,
The little rude brown lamp of earthenware,
The cruse, was meant for flowers, but held the blood,
The rough-scratched palm-branch, and the legend left
_Pro Christo_. Then the mystery lay clear:
The abhorred one was a martyr all the time,
A saint whereof earth was not worthy. What?
Do you continue in the old belief?
Where blackness bides unbroke, must devils be?
Is it so certain, not another cell
O' the myriad that make up the catacomb,
Contains some saint a second flash would show?
Will you ascend into the light of day
And, having recognised a martyr's shrine,
Go join the votaries that gape around
Each vulgar god that awes the market-place?"
(iv. 219).

With less impetuosity and a more weightily reasoned argument the Pope confronts the long perplexity and entanglement of circumstances with the fatuous optimism which insists that somehow justice and virtue do rule in the world. Consider all the doings at Arezzo, before and after the consummation of the tragedy. What of the Aretine archbishop, to whom Pompilia cried "Protect me from the fiend!"--

"No, for thy Guido is one heady, strong,
Dangerous to disquiet; let him bide!
He needs some bone to mumble, help amuse
The darkness of his den with; so, the fawn
Which limps up bleeding to my foot and lies,
--Come to me, daughter,--thus I throw him back!"

Then the monk to whom she went, imploring him to write to Rome:--

"He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world
And shudders to the marrow, 'Save this child?
Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop here!
Who was it dared lay hand upon the ark
His betters saw fall nor put finger forth?'"

Worst of all, the Convent of the Convertites, women to whom she was consigned for help,

"They do help; they are prompt to testify
To her pure life and saintly dying days.
She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich!
What does the body that lives through helpfulness
To women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite,
The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge!
'Seeing that this our Convent claims of right
What goods belong to those we succour, be
The same proved women of dishonest life,--
And seeing that this Trial made appear
Pompilia was in such predicament,--
The Convent hereupon pretends to said
Succession of Pompilia, issues writ,
And takes possession by the Fisc's advice.'
Such is their attestation to the cause
Of Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped:
But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpse
To slander, and an infant-heir to cheat?
Christ must give up his gains then! They unsay
All the fine speeches,--who was saint is whore."

It is not wonderful if his review of all the mean and dolorous circumstance of this cycle of wrong brings the Pope face to face with the unconquerable problem for the Christian believer, the keystone of the grim arch of religious doubt and despair, through which the courageous soul must needs pass to creeds of reason and life. Where is "the gloriously decisive change, the immeasurable metamorphosis" in human worth that should in some sort justify the consummate price that had been paid for man these seventeen hundred years before?

"Had a mere adept of the Rosy Cross
Spent his life to consummate the Great Work,
Would not we start to see the stuff it touched
Yield not a grain more than the vulgar got
By the old smelting-process years ago?
If this were sad to see in just the sage
Who should profess so much, perform no more,
What is it when suspected in that Power
Who undertook to make and made the world,
Devised and did effect man, body and soul,
Ordained salvation for them both, and yet ...
Well, is the thing we see, salvation?"

It is certain that by whatever other deficiencies it may be marked _The Ring and the Book_ is blameless for the most characteristic of all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of thought. And why? Because sterility of thought is the blight struck into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself, by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty of poetic vision over the whole field; and because Mr. Browning's intelligence, on the other hand, is masculine and courageous, moving cheerfully on the solid earth of an articulate and defined conviction, and careful not to omit realities from the conception of the great drama, merely for being unsightly to the too fastidious eye, or jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to faith or understanding. It is this resolute feeling after and grip of fact which is at the root of his distinguishing fruitfulness of thought, and it is exuberance of thought, spontaneous, well-marked, and sapid, that keeps him out of poetical preaching, on the one hand, and mere making of music, on the other. Regret as we may the fantastic rudeness and unscrupulous barbarisms into which Mr. Browning's art too often falls, and find what fault we may with his method, let us ever remember how much he has to say, and how effectively he communicates the shock of new thought which was first imparted to him by the vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing stimulus to the interest of the appreciative reader.

At first sight _The Ring and the Book_ appears to be absolutely wanting in that grandeur which, in a composition of such enormous length, criticism must pronounce to be a fundamental and indispensable element. In an ordinary way this effect of grandeur is produced either by some heroic action surrounded by circumstances of worthy stateliness, as in the finest of the Greek plays; or as in _Paradise Lost_ by the presence of personages of majestic sublimity of bearing and association; or as in _Faust_ or _Hamlet_ by the stupendous moral abysses which the poet discloses fitfully on this side and that. None of these things are to be found in _The Ring and the Book_ The action of Caponsacchi, though noble and disinterested, is hardly heroic in the highest dramatic sense, for it is not much more than the lofty defiance of a conventionality, the contemplated penalty being only small; not, for example, as if life or ascertained happiness had been the fixed or even probable price of his magnanimous enterprise. There was no marching to the stake, no deliberate encountering of the mightier risks, no voluntary submission to a lifelong endurance. True, this came in the end, but it was an end unforeseen, and one, therefore, not to be associated with the first conception of the original act. Besides, Guido is so saturated with hateful and ignoble motive as to fill the surrounding air with influences that preclude heroic association. It has been said of the great men to whom the Byzantine Empire once or twice gave birth, that even their fame has a curiously tarnished air, as if that too had been touched by the evil breath of the times. And in like manner we may say of Guido Franceschini that even to have touched him in the way of resistance detracts from pure heroism. Perhaps the same consideration explains the comparative disappointment which most people seem to have felt with _Pompilia_ in the third volume. Again, there is nothing which can be rightly called majesty of character visible in one personage or another. There is high devotion in Caponsacchi, a large-minded and free sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around Pompilia the tragic pathos of an incurable woe, which by its intensity might raise her to grandeur if it sprang from some more solemn source than the mere malignity and baseness of an unworthy oppressor. Lastly, there is nothing in _The Ring and the Book_ of that "certain incommensurableness" which Goethe found in his own _Faust_. The poem is kept closely concrete and strictly commensurable by the very framework of its story:--

"pure crude fact,
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since."

It moves from none of the supernatural agencies which give the impulse to our interest in _Faust_, nor from the sublimer passions and yearning after things unspeakable alike in _Faust_ and in _Hamlet._

Yet, notwithstanding its lack of the accustomed elements of grandeur, there is a profound impressiveness about _The Ring and the Book_ which must arise from the presence of some other fine compensating or equivalent quality. Perhaps one may say that this equivalent for grandeur is a certain simple touching of our sense of human kinship, of the large identity of the conditions of the human lot, of the piteous fatalities which bring the lives of the great multitude of men to be little more than "grains of sand to be blown by the wind." This old woe, the poet says, now in the fulness of the days again lives,

"_If precious be the soul of man to man_."

This is the deeply implanted sentiment to which his poem makes successful appeal. Nor is it mocked by mere outpouring of scorn on the blind and fortuitous groping of men and societies of men after truth and justice and traces of the watchfulness of "the unlidded eye of God." Rather it is this inability to see beyond the facts of our condition to some diviner, ever-present law, which helps to knit us to our kind, our brethren "whom we have seen."

"Clouds obscure--
But for which obscuration all were bright?
Too hastily concluded! Sun-suffused,
A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,--
Better the very clarity of heaven:
The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear.
What but the weakness in a faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible, comports?
How can man love but what he yearns to help
And that which men think weakness within strength
But angels know for strength and stronger get--
What were it else but the first things made new,
But repetition of the miracle,
The divine instance of self-sacrifice
That never ends and aye begins for man?"

MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS.

What are the qualities of a good contributor? What makes a good Review? Is the best literature produced by the writer who does nothing else but write, or by the man who tempers literature by affairs? What are the different recommendations of the rival systems of anonymity and signature? What kind of change, if any, has passed over periodical literature since those two great periodicals, the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, held sway? These and a number of other questions in the same matter--some of them obviously not to be opened with propriety in these pages--must naturally be often present to the mind of any one who is concerned in the control of a Review, and a volume has just been printed which sets such musings once more astir. Mr. Macvey Napier was the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ from 1829--when Jeffrey, after a reign of seven-and-twenty years, resigned it into his hands--until his death in 1847. A portion of the correspondence addressed to Mr. Napier during this period is full of personal interest both to the man of letters and to that more singular being, the Editor, the impresario of men of letters, the _entrepreneur_ of the spiritual power.

To manage an opera-house is usually supposed to tax human powers more urgently than any position save that of a general in the very heat and stress of battle. The orchestra, the chorus, the subscribers, the first tenor, a pair of rival prima donnas, the newspapers, the box-agents in Bond Street, the army of hangers-on in the flies--all combine to demand such gifts of tact, resolution, patience, foresight, tenacity, flexibility, as are only expected from the great ruler or the great soldier. The editor of a periodical of public consideration--and the _Edinburgh Review_ in the hands of Mr. Napier was the avowed organ of the ruling Whig powers--is sorely tested in the same way. The rival house may bribe his stars. His popular epigrammatist is sometimes as full of humours as a spoiled soprano. The favourite pyrotechnist is systematically late and procrastinatory, or is piqued because his punctuation or his paragraphs have been meddled with. The contributor whose article would be in excellent time if it did not appear before the close of the century, or never appeared at all, pesters you with warnings that a month's delay is a deadly blow to progress, and stays the great procession of the ages. The contributor who could profitably fill a sheet, insists on sending a treatise. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who had charge of the _Edinburgh_ for a short space, truly described prolixity as the _bête noire_ of an editor. "Every contributor," he said, "has some special reason for wishing to write at length on his own subject."

_Ah, que de choses dans un menuet!_ cried Marcel, the great dancing-master, and ah, what things in the type and [Greek: idea] of an article, cries an editor with the enthusiasm of his calling; such proportion, measure, comprehension, variety of topics, pithiness of treatment, all within a space appointed with Procrustean rigour. This is what the soul of the volunteer contributor is dull to. Of the minor vexations who can tell? There is one single tribulation dire enough to poison life--even if there were no other--and this is disorderly manuscript. Empson, Mr. Napier's well-known contributor, was one of the worst offenders; he would never even take the trouble to mark his paragraphs. It is my misfortune to have a manuscript before me at this moment that would fill thirty of these pages, and yet from beginning to end there is no indication that it is not to be read at a single breath. The paragraph ought to be, and in all good writers it is, as real and as sensible a division as the sentence. It is an organic member in prose composition, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, just as a stanza is an organic and definite member in the composition of an ode, "I fear my manuscript is rather disorderly," says another, "but I will correct carefully in print." Just so. Because he is too heedless to do his work in a workmanlike way, he first inflicts fatigue and vexation on the editor whom he expects to read his paper; second, he inflicts considerable and quite needless expense on the publisher; and thirdly, he inflicts a great deal of tedious and thankless labour on the printers, who are for the most part far more meritorious persons than fifth-rate authors. It is true that Burke returned such disordered proofs that the printer usually found it least troublesome to set the whole afresh, and Miss Martineau tells a story of a Scotch compositor who fled from Edinburgh to avoid Carlyle's manuscript, and to his horror was presently confronted with a piece of the too familiar copy which made him cry, "Lord, have mercy! Have _you_ got that man to print for!" But most editors will cheerfully forgive such transgressions to all contributors who will guarantee that they write as well as Burke or Carlyle. Alas! it is usually the case that those who have least excuse are the worst offenders. The slovenliest manuscripts come from persons to whom the difference between an hour and a minute is of the very smallest importance. This, however, is a digression, only to be excused partly by the natural desire to say a word against one's persecutors, and partly by a hope that some persons of sensitive conscience may be led to ponder whether there may not be after all some moral obligations even towards editors and printers.

Mr. Napier had one famous contributor, who stands out alone in the history of editors. Lord Brougham's traditional connection with the Review,--he had begun to write either in its first or third number, and had written in it ever since--his encyclopaedic ignorance, his power, his great fame in the country, and the prestige which his connection reflected on the Review, all made him a personage with whom it would have been most imprudent to quarrel. Yet the position in which Mr. Napier was placed after Brougham's breach with the Whigs, was one of the most difficult in which the conductor of a great organ could possibly be placed. The Review was the representative, the champion, and the mouthpiece of the Whig party, and of the Whigs who were in office. Before William IV. dismissed the Whigs in 1834 as arbitrarily as his father had dismissed the Whigs in 1784, Brougham had covered himself with disrepute among his party by a thousand pranks, and after the dismissal he disgusted them by asking the new Chancellor to make him Chief Baron of the Exchequer. When Lord Melbourne returned to power in the following year, this and other escapades were remembered against him. "If left out," said Lord Melbourne, "he would indeed be dangerous; but if taken in, he would simply be destructive." So Brougham was left out, Pepys was made Chancellor, and the Premier compared himself to a man who has broken with a termagant mistress and married the best of cooks. Mr. Napier was not so happy. The termagant was left on his hands. He had to keep terms with a contributor who hated with deadly hatred the very government that the Review existed to support. No editor ever had such a contributor as Brougham in the long history of editorial torment since the world began. He scolds, he storms, he hectors, he lectures; he is for ever threatening desertion and prophesying ruin; he exhausts the vocabulary of opprobrium against his correspondent's best friends; they are silly slaves, base traitors, a vile clique "whose treatment of me has been the very _ne plus ultra_ of ingratitude, baseness, and treachery." He got the Review and its editor into a scrape which shook the world at the time (1834), by betraying Cabinet secrets to spite Lord Durham. His cries against his adversaries are as violent as the threats of Ajax in his tent, and as loud as the bellowings of Philoctetes at the mouth of his cave. Here is one instance out of a hundred:--

"That is a trifle, and I only mention it to beg of you to pluck up
a little courage, and not be alarmed every time any of the little
knot of threateners annoy you. _They want to break off all kind of
connection between me and the Edinburgh Review_. I have long seen
it. Their fury against the article in the last number knows no
bounds, and they will never cease till they worry you out of your
connection with me, and get the whole control of the Review into
their own hands, by forcing you to resign it yourself. A _party
and a personal_ engine is all they want to make it. What possible
right can any of these silly slaves have to object to my opinion
being--what it truly is--against the Holland House theory of Lord
Chatham's madness? I _know_ that Lord Grenville treated it with
contempt. I know others now living who did so too, and I know that
so stout a Whig as Sir P. Francis was clearly of that opinion, and
he knew Lord Chatham personally. I had every ground to believe
that Horace Walpole, a vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch,
though a very clever writer of Letters, was nine-tenths of the
Holland House authority for the tale. I knew that a baser man in
character, or a meaner in capacity than the first Lord Holland
existed not, even in those days of job and mediocrity. Why, then,
was I bound to take a false view because Lord Holland's family
have inherited his hatred of a great rival?"

Another instance is as follows:--

"I solicit your best attention to the fate which seems hastening
upon the _Edinburgh Review_. The having always been free from the
least control of booksellers is one of its principal distinctions,
and long was peculiarly so--perhaps it still has it _nearly_ to
itself. But if it shall become a _Treasury_ journal, I hardly see
any great advantage in one kind of independence without the
rest. Nay, I doubt if its _literary_ freedom, any more than its
political, will long survive. Books will be treated according as
the Treasury, or their under-strappers, regard the authors....
But, is it after all possible that the Review should be suffered
to sink into such a state of subserviency that it dares not insert
any discussion upon a general question of politics because it
might give umbrage to the Government of the day? I pass over the
undeniable fact that it is _underlings_ only whom you are scared
by, and that the Ministers themselves have no such inordinate
pretension as to dream of interfering. I say nothing of those
underlings generally, except this, that I well know the race, and
a more despicable, above all, in point of judgment, exists not.
Never mind their threats, they _can_ do no harm. Even if any of
them are contributors, be assured they never will withdraw because
you choose to keep your course free and independent."

Mr. Napier, who seems to have been one of the most considerate and high-minded of men, was moved to energetic remonstrance on this occasion. Lord Brougham explained his strong language away, but he was incapable of really controlling himself, and the strain was never lessened until 1843, when the correspondence ceases, and we learn that there had been a quarrel between him and his too long-suffering correspondent. Yet John Allen,--that able scholar and conspicuous figure in the annals of Holland House--wrote of Brougham to Mr. Napier:--"He is not a malignant or bad-hearted man, but he is an unscrupulous one, and where his passions are concerned or his vanity irritated, there is no excess of which he is not capable." Of Brougham's strong and manly sense, when passion or vanity did not cloud it, and even of a sort of careful justice, these letters give more than one instance. The _Quarterly Review_, for instance, had an article on Romilly's Memoirs, which to Romilly's friends seemed to do him less than justice. Brougham took a more sensible view.

"Surely we had no right whatever to expect that they whom Romilly
had all his life so stoutly opposed, and who were treated by him
with great harshness, should treat him as his friends would do,
and at the very moment when a most injudicious act of his family
was bringing out all his secret thoughts against them. Only place
yourself in the same position, and suppose that Canning's private
journals had been published,--the journals he may have kept while
the bitterest enemy of the Whigs, and in every page of which there
must have been some passage offensive to the feelings of the
living and of the friends of the dead. Would any mercy have been
shown to Canning's character and memory by any of the Whig party,
either in society or in Reviews? Would the line have been drawn of
only attacking Canning's executors, who published the papers, and
leaving Canning himself untouched? Clearly and certainly not,
and yet I am putting a very much weaker case, for we had joined
Canning, and all political enmity was at an end: whereas the
Tories and Romilly never had for an hour laid aside their mutual
hostility."

And if he was capable of equity, Brougham was also capable of hearty admiration, even of an old friend who had on later occasions gone into a line which he intensely disliked. It is a relief in the pages of blusterous anger and raging censure to come upon what he says of Jeffrey.

"I can truly say that there never in all my life crossed my mind
one single unkind feeling respecting him, or indeed any feeling
but that of the warmest affection and the most unmingled
admiration of his character, believing and knowing him to be as
excellent and amiable as he is great in the ordinary, and, as I
think, the far less important sense of the word."

Of the value of Brougham's contributions we cannot now judge. They will not, in spite of their energy and force, bear re-reading to-day, and perhaps the same may be said of three-fourths of Jeffrey's once famous essays. Brougham's self-confidence is heroic. He believed that he could make a speech for Bolingbroke, but by-and-by he had sense enough to see that, in order to attempt this, he ought to read Bolingbroke for a year, and then practise for another year. In 1838 he thought nothing of undertaking, amid all the demands of active life, such a bagatelle as a History of the French Revolution. "I have some little knack of narrative," he says, "the most difficult by far of all styles, and never yet attained in perfection but by Hume and Livy; and I bring as much oratory and science to the task as most of my predecessors." But what sort of science? And what has oratory to do with it? And how could he deceive himself into thinking that he could retire to write a history? Nobody that ever lived would have more speedily found out the truth of Voltaire's saying, "_Le repos est une bonne chose, mais l'ennui est son frère_." The truth is that one learns, after a certain observation of the world, to divide one's amazement pretty equally between the literary voluptuary or over-fastidious collegian, on the one hand, who is so impressed by the size of his subject that he never does more than collect material and make notes, and the presumptuous politician, on the other hand, who thinks that he can write a history or settle the issues of philosophy and theology in odd half-hours. The one is so enfeebled in will and literary energy after his _viginti annorum lucubrationes_; the other is so accustomed to be content with the hurry, the unfinishedness, the rough-and-ready methods of practical affairs, and they both in different ways measure the worth and seriousness of literature so wrongly in relation to the rest of human interests.

The relations between Lord Brougham and Mr. Napier naturally suggest a good many reflections on the vexed question of the comparative advantages of the old and the new theory of a periodical. The new theory is that a periodical should not be an organ but an open pulpit, and that each writer should sign his name. Without disrespect to ably conducted and eminent contemporaries of long standing, it may be said that the tide of opinion and favour is setting in this direction. Yet, on the whole, experience perhaps leads to a doubt whether the gains of the system of signature are so very considerable as some of us once expected. An editor on the new system is no doubt relieved of a certain measure of responsibility. Lord Cockburn's panegyric on the first great editor may show what was expected from a man in such a position as Jeffrey's. "He had to discover, and to train, authors; to discern what truth and the public mind required; to suggest subjects; to reject, and, more offensive still, to improve, contributions; to keep down absurdities; to infuse spirit; to excite the timid; to repress violence; to soothe jealousies; to quell mutinies; to watch times; and all this in the morning of the reviewing day, before experience had taught editors conciliatory firmness, and contributors reasonable submission. He directed and controlled the elements he presided over with a master's judgment. There was not one of his associates who could have even held these elements together for a single year.... Inferior to these excellences, but still important, was his dexterity in revising the writings of others. Without altering the general tone or character of the composition, he had great skill in leaving out defective ideas or words, and in so aiding the original by lively or graceful touches, that reasonable authors were surprised and charmed on seeing how much better they looked than they thought they would" (Cockburn's _Life of Jeffrey_, i. 301).

From such toils and dangers as these the editor of a Review with signed articles is in the main happily free. He has usually suggestions to make, for his experience has probably given him points of view as to the effectiveness of this or that feature of an article for its own purpose, which would not occur to a writer. The writer is absorbed in his subject, and has been less accustomed to think of the public. But this exercise of a claim to a general acquiescence in the judgment and experience of a man who has the best reasons for trying to judge rightly, is a very different thing from the duty of drilling contributors and dressing contributions as they were dressed and drilled by Jeffrey. As Southey said, when groaning under the mutilations inflicted by Gifford on Iris contributions to the _Quarterly_, "there must be a power expurgatory in the hands of the editor; and the misfortune is that editors frequently think it incumbent on them to use that power merely because they have it" (Southey's Life, iv. 18). This is probably true on the anonymous system, where the editor is answerable for every word, and for the literary form no less than for the substantial soundness or interest of an article. In a man of weakish literary vanity--Jeffrey was evidently full of it--there may well be a constant itch to set his betters right in trifles, as Gifford thought that he could mend Southey's adjectives. To a vain editor, or a too masterful editor, the temptation under the anonymous system is no doubt strong. M. Buloz, it is true, the renowned conductor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, is said to have insisted on, and to have freely practised, the fullest editorial prerogative over articles that were openly signed by the most eminent names in France. But M. Buloz had no competitor, and those who did not choose to submit to his Sultanic despotism were shut out from the only pulpit whence they were sure of addressing the congregation that they wanted. In England contributors are better off; and no editor of a signed periodical would feel either bound or permitted to take such trouble about mere wording of sentences as Gifford and Jeffrey were in the habit of taking.

There is, however, another side to this, from an editor's point of view. With responsibility--not merely for commas and niceties and literary kickshaws, but in its old sense--disappears also a portion of the interest of editorial labour. One would suppose it must be more interesting to command a man-of-war than a trading vessel; it would be more interesting to lead a regiment than to keep a tilting-yard. But the times are not ripe for such enterprises. Of literary ability of a good and serviceable kind there is a hundred or five hundred times more in the country than there was when Jeffrey, Smith, Brougham, and Horner devised their Review in a ninth storey in Edinburgh seventy-six years ago. It is the cohesion of a political creed that is gone, and the strength and fervour of a political school. The principles that inspired that group of strong men have been worked out. After their reforms had been achieved, the next great school was economic, and though it produced one fine orator, its work was at no time literary. The Manchester school with all their shortcomings had at least the signal distinction of attaching their views on special political questions to a general and presiding conception of the modern phase of civilisation, as industrial and pacific. The next party of advance, when it is formed, will certainly borrow from Cobden and Bright their hatred of war and their hatred of imperialism. After the sagacity and enlightenment of this school came the school of persiflage. A knot of vigorous and brilliant men towards 1856 rallied round the late editor of the _Saturday Review_,--and a strange chief he was for such a group,--but their flag was that of the Red Rover. They gave Philistinism many a shrewd blow, but perhaps at the same time helped to some degree--with other far deeper and stronger forces--to produce that sceptical and centrifugal state of mind, which now tends to nullify organised liberalism and paralyse the spirit of improvement. The Benthamites, led first by James Mill, and afterwards in a secondary degree by John Mill, had pushed a number of political improvements in the radical and democratic direction during the time when the _Edinburgh_ so powerfully represented more orthodox liberalism. They were the last important group of men who started together from a set of common principles, accepted a common programme of practical applications, and set to work in earnest and with due order and distribution of parts to advocate the common cause.

At present [1878] there is no similar agreement either among the younger men in parliament, or among a sufficiently numerous group of writers outside of parliament. The Edinburgh Reviewers were most of them students of the university of that city. The Westminster Reviewers had all sat at the feet of Bentham. Each group had thus a common doctrine and a positive doctrine. In practical politics it does not much matter by what different roads men have travelled to a given position. But in an organ intended to lead public opinion towards certain changes, or to hold it steadfast against wayward gusts of passion, its strength would be increased a hundredfold if all the writers in it were inspired by that thorough unity of conviction which comes from sincerely accepting a common set of principles to start from, and reaching practical conclusions by the same route. We are probably not very far from a time when such a group might form itself, and its work would for some years lie in the formation of a general body of opinion, rather than in practical realisation of this or that measure. The success of the French Republic, the peaceful order of the United States, perhaps some trouble within our own borders, will lead men with open minds to such a conception of a high and stable type of national life as will unite a sufficient number of them in a common project for pressing with systematic iteration for a complete set of organic changes. A country with such a land-system, such an electoral system, such a monarchy, as ours, has a trying time before it. Those will be doing good service who shall unite to prepare opinion for the inevitable changes. At the present moment the only motto that can be inscribed on the flag of a liberal Review is the general device of Progress, each writer interpreting it in his own sense, and within such limits as he may set for himself. For such a state of things signature is the natural condition, and an editor, even of a signed Review, would hardly decline to accept the account of his function which we find Jeffrey giving to Mr. Napier:--"There are three legitimate considerations by which you should be guided in your conduct as editor generally, and particularly as to the admission or rejection of important articles of a political sort. 1. The effect of your decision on the other contributors upon whom you mainly rely; 2. its effect on the sale and circulation, and on the just authority of the work with the great body of its readers; and, 3. your own deliberate opinion as to the safety or danger of the doctrines maintained in the article under consideration, and its tendency either to promote or retard the practical adoption of those liberal principles to which, and _their practical advancement_, you must always consider the journal as devoted."

As for discovering and training authors, the editor under the new system has inducements that lie entirely the other way; namely, to find as many authors as possible whom the public has already discovered and accepted for itself. Young unknown writers certainly have not gained anything by the new system. Neither perhaps can they be said to have lost, for though of two articles of equal merit an editor would naturally choose the one which should carry the additional recommendation of a name of recognised authority, yet any marked superiority in literary brilliance or effective argument or originality of view would be only too eagerly welcomed in any Review in England. So much public interest is now taken in periodical literature, and the honourable competition in securing variety, weight, and attractiveness is so active, that there is no risk of a literary candle remaining long under a bushel. Miss Martineau says:--"I have always been anxious to extend to young or struggling authors the sort of aid which would have been so precious to me in that winter of 1829-30, and I know that, in above twenty years, I have never succeeded but once." One of the most distinguished editors in London, who had charge of a periodical for many years, told the present writer what comes to the same thing, namely, that in no single case during all these years did a volunteer contributor of real quality, or with any promise of eminence, present himself or herself. So many hundreds think themselves called, so few are chosen. It used to be argued that the writer under the anonymous system was hidden behind a screen and robbed of his well-earned distinction. In truth, however, it is impossible for a writer of real distinction to remain anonymous. If a writer in a periodical interests the public, they are sure to find out who he is.

Again, there is folly unfathomable in a periodical affecting an eternal consistency, and giving itself the airs of continuous individuality, and being careful not to talk sense on a given question to-day because its founders talked nonsense upon it fifty years ago. This is quite true. There is a monstrous charlatanry about the old editorial We, but perhaps there are some tolerably obvious openings for charlatanry of a different kind under our own system. The man who writes in his own name may sometimes be tempted to say what he knows he is expected from his position or character to say, rather than what he would have said if his personality were not concerned. As far as honesty goes, signature perhaps offers as many inducements to one kind of insincerity, as anonymity offers to another kind. And on the public it might perhaps be contended that there is an effect of a rather similar sort. They are in some cases tempted away from serious discussion of the matter, into frivolous curiosity and gossip about the man. All this criticism of the principle of which the _Fortnightly Review_ was the earliest English adherent, will not be taken as the result in the present writer of Chamfort's _maladie des désabusés_; that would be both extremely ungrateful and without excuse or reason. It is merely a fragment of disinterested contribution to the study of a remarkable change that is passing over a not unimportant department of literature. One gain alone counterbalances all the drawbacks, and that is a gain that could hardly have been foreseen or expected; I mean the freedom with which the great controversies of religion and theology have been discussed in the new Reviews. The removal of the mask has led to an outburst of plain speaking on these subjects, which to Mr. Napier's generation would have seemed simply incredible. The frank avowal of unpopular beliefs or non-beliefs has raised the whole level of the discussion, and perhaps has been even more advantageous to the orthodox in teaching them more humility, than to the heterodox in teaching them more courage and honesty.

Let us return to Mr. Napier's volume. We have said that it is impossible for a great writer to be anonymous. No reader will need to be told who among Mr. Napier's correspondents is the writer of the following:--

"I have been thinking sometimes, likewise, of a paper on Napoleon,
a man whom, though handled to the extreme of triteness, it will be
long years before we understand. Hitherto in the English tongue,
there is next to nothing that betokens insight into him, or even
sincere belief of such, on the part of the writer. I should like
to study the man with what heartiness I could, and form to myself
some intelligible picture of him, both as a biographical and as
a historical figure, in both of which senses he is our chief
contemporary wonder, and in some sort the epitome of his age.
This, however, were a task of far more difficulty than Byron, and
perhaps not so promising at present."

And if there is any difficulty in recognising the same hand in the next proposal, it arises only from the circumstance that it is this writer above all others who has made Benthamism a term of reproach on the lips of men less wise than himself:--

"A far finer essay were a faithful, loving, and yet critical, and
in part condemnatory, delineation of Jeremy Bentham, and his place
and working in this section of the world's history. Bentham will
not be put down by logic, and should not be put down, for we need
him greatly as a backwoodsman: neither can reconciliation be
effected till the one party understands and is just to the other.
Bentham is a denyer; he denies with a loud and universally
convincing voice; his fault is that he can _affirm_ nothing,
except that money is pleasant in the purse, and food in the
stomach, and that by this simplest of all beliefs he can
reorganise society. He can shatter it in pieces--no thanks to him,
for its old fastenings are quite rotten--but he cannot reorganise
it; this is work for quite others than he. Such an essay on
Bentham, however, were a great task for any one; for me a very
great one, and perhaps rather out of my road."