mR .i\ jJ,-L?. , V/IiIh-. s ■>•'. - mitntriff -f [**T" ■- GIFT OF MICHAEL REESE n L> IRISH ESSAYS ETC. IRISH ESSAYS AND OTHERS BY MATTHEW ARNOLD TJ>~ LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1882 All rights reserved 3 coercion to a country in Ireland's present state ; perhaps even to apply a- coercion far more stringent and effectual than that which we apply- now. It would be a revolutionary measure to have the bad landlords of Ireland scheduled in three classes by a Commission, and, taking twenty-five years' purchase as the 46 THE INCOMPATIBLES. ordinary selling-price of an Irish estate, to expropriate the least bad of the three classes of scheduled landlords at twenty years' purchase, the next class at fifteen years' pur- chase, the worst at ten years' purchase. But it would be an act justified by the revolutionary state into which the misdoing of landlords of this sort, preventing prescription and a secure settlement of things from arising, has brought Ireland. It would fall upon those who represent the ill- doers of the past, and who are actually ill-doers them- selves. And finally, it would be a moral reparation and satisfaction, made for a great and passionately felt moral wrong, and would, as such, undoubtedly have its full effect upon the heart and imagination of the Irish people. To have commuted the partial ownership, which the Irish tenant has in equity acquired by his improvements of the land cultivated by him, for absolute ownership of a certain portion of the land, as Stein commuted the peasant's par- tial ownership in Prussia ; to have given facilities, as is now proposed, for emigration, and for the purchase of land and its distribution amongst a greater number of pro- prietors than at present ; — this, joined to the expropria- tion of bad landlords, is what might naturally occur to one as the simple and direct way of remedying Irish agrarian discontent, and as likely to have been effective and sufficient for the purpose. THE INCOMPATIBLES. 47 The Land Bill of the Government has provisions for furthering emigration, and provisions to facilitate the purchase of land. But the moral grievance of the Irish occupier it does not deal with at all ; it gives no satis- faction to it and attempts to give none. It directs itself exclusively to his material grievance. It makes no dis- tinction between good and bad landlords, — it treats them all as alike. But to the partial ownership which the occu- pier has in equity acquired in the land by his improve- ments, it gives the force of law, establishes a tribunal for regulating and enforcing it, and does its best to make this sort of partial ownership perpetual. The desirable thing, if it could but be done, is, on the contrary, as every one who weighs the matter calmly must surely admit, to sweep away this partial ownership, — to sweep away tenant-right altogether. It is said that tenant-right is an Irish in- vention, a remedy by which the Irish people themselves have in some degree met the wants of their own case, and that it is dear to them on that account. In legislating for them we ought studiously to adopt, we are told, their inventions, and not to impose upon them ours. Such reasoners forget that tenant-right was a mere palliative, used in a state of things where thorough relief was out of the question. Tenant-right was better than nothing, but ownership is better still. The absolute ownership of a 4 3 THE INC0MPAT1BLES. part, by a process of commutation like Stein's in Prussia, engages .a man's affections far more than any tenant-right, or divided and disputable ownership in a whole. Such absolute ownership was out of the question when the Irish occupier invented tenant-right ; but it would in itself please him better than tenant-right, and commuta- tion might have now given it to him. The Land Bill, on the other hand, adopts, legalises, formulates tenant-right, a description of ownership un- familiar to countries of our sort of civilisation, and very inconvenient. It establishes it throughout Ireland, and, by a scheme which is a miracle of intricacy and compli- cation, it invites the most contentious and litigious L people in the world to try conclusions with their land- lords as to the ownership divided between them. I cannot think such a measure naturally healing. A divided ownership of this kind will probably, however, no more be able to establish itself permanently in Ireland than it has established itself in France or Prussia. One has the comfort of thinking that the many and new pro- prietors who will, it is to be hoped, be called into being by the Purchase Clauses, will indubitably find the plan . of divided ownership intolerable, and will sooner or later get rid of it. I had recourse to Burke in "the early part of these THE INCOMPATIBLES. 49 remarks, and I wish to keep him with me, as far as pos- sible, to the end. Burke writes to Windham : ' Our politics want directness and simplicity. A spirit of chicane predominates in all that is done ; we proceed more like lawyers than statesmen. All our misfortunes have arisen from this intricacy and ambiguity of our politics.' It is wonderful how great men agree. For really Burke is here telling us, in another way, only what we found Goethe telling when we began to discuss these Irish matters : the English are peda?its. The pedant, the man of routine, loves the movement and bustle of politics, but by no means wants to have to rummage and plough up his mind ; he shrinks from simplicity, therefore, he abhors it ; simplicity cannot be had without thinking, without considerable searchings of spirit. He abhors simplicity, and therefore of course his governments do not often give it to him. He has his formula, his catchword, which saves him from thinking, and which he is always ready to apply ; and anything simple is, from its very simplicity, more likely to give him an opening to apply his formula. If you propose to him the expropriation of bad landlords, he has his formula ready, that the Englishman has a re- spect for the eighth commandme?it. If you propose to him to do justice to the Irish Catholics, he has his formula, at one time, that the sovereign must not violate his corona- E 5 o THE JNCOMPATJBLES. tion oath, at another, that the Protestants of Great Britain arc implacably hostile to the endowment of Catholicism in any shape or form, or else, that the Liberal party has em- phatically condemned religious endowment. A complicated intricate measure is the very thing for governments to offer him, because, while it gives him the gratifying sense of taking in hand something considerable, it does not bring him face to face with a principle, does not provoke him to the exhibition of one of those formulas which, in presence of a principle, he has always at hand in order to save himself the trouble of thinking. And having this personage to deal with, governments are not much to be blamed, perhaps, for approaching their object in an in- direct manner, for eschewing simplicity and for choosing complication. The Irish Land Bill, then, does not meet the moral grievance of the Irish occupier at all, and it meets his material grievance in a roundabout, complicated manner, and by means that are somewhat hard upon good land- lords. But it does meet it after a fashion. And, in meeting it, it does not challenge the exhibition of any of the pedantic Englishman's stock formulas ; while it effects, at the same time, some very useful things by the way. And, certainly, governments which see£ to compass their THE LXCOMPATIBLES. 51 ends in this kind of manner do not incur that severe con- demnation which Burke passes upon ministers who make it their business s still further to contract the narrowness of men's ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities.' Xo, not by any means do they deserve this formidable blame. But when Burke writes to the Duke of Richmond of that day, that, without censuring his political friends, he must say that he perceives in them no regular or steady endeavour of any kind to bestow the same pains which they bestow on carrying a measure, or winning an election, or keeping up family interest in a county, 'on that which is the end and object of all elections, namely, the disposing our people to a better sense of their condition] — when Burke says this, then he says what does touch, it seems to me, both the present govern- ment, and almost all governments which come and go in this country \ — touches them very nearly. Governments acquiesce too easily in the mass of us English people being, as Goethe says, pedants ; they are too apprehensive of coming into conflict with our pedantry ; they show too much respect to its formulas and catchwords. They make no regular or sustained endeavours of any kind to dispose us poor creatures to a better sense of our condi- tion. If they acquiesce so submissively in our being e 2 5 2 THE INCOMPATIBLES. pedants in politics, pedants we shall always be. We want guidance from those who are placed in a condition to see. ' God and nature never made them/ says Burke of all the pedantic rank and file of us in politics, ' to think or to act without guidance or direction.' But we hardly ever get it from our government. And I suppose it was despair at this sort of thing, in his own time and commonwealth, which made Socrates say, when he was reproached for standing aloof from politics, that in his own opinion, by taking the line he did, he was the only true politician of men then living. Socrates saw that the thing most needful was ' to dispose the people to a bette?' sense of their conditio?!,' and that the actual politicians never did it. And serious people at the present day may well be inclined, though they have no Socrates to help them, at any rate to stand aside, as he did, from the movement of our prominent politicians and journalists, and of the rank and file who appear to follow, but who really do oftenest direct them ; — to stand aside, and to try whether they cannot bring themselves, at all events, to a better sense of their own condition and of the condition of the people and things around them. The problem is, to get Ireland to acquiesce in the English connexion as cordially as Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall acquiesce in it. We quiet people pretend to THE INCOMPATIBLES. S3 no lights which are not at the disposal of all the world. Possibly, if we were mixed up in the game of politics, we should play it much as other people do, according to the laws of that routine. Meanwhile, not playing it, and being in the safe and easy position of lookers-on and critics, we ought assuredly to be very careful to treat the practical endeavours and plans of other people without pedantry and without prejudice only remembering that our one business is to see things as they really are. Ireland, then, is to be brought, if possible, to acquiesce cordially in the English connexion ; and to this end our measures must be healing. Now, the Land Bill of the Government does not seem to deserve thoroughly the name of a healing measure. We have given our reasons for thinking so. But the question is, whether that Bill proposes so defective a settlement as to make, of itself, Ireland's cordial acquiescence in the English connexion impossible, and to compel us to resign ourselves a prey to the alarmists. One cannot without unfairness and exaggeration say this of it. It is offered with the best intentions, it deals with the material grievance of the Irish occupier if not with his moral grievance, and it proposes to do certain unquestionably good and useful things, besides redressing this grievance. It will not of itself make the Irish acquiesce cordially in 54 THE INCOMPATIBLES. the English connexion. But then neither would a tho- roughly good Land Bill suffice to do this. The partisans of the Government are fond of saying, indeed : ' A good Land Bill will take the political bread out of Mr. Par- nell's mouth.' Mr. Parnell maintains, that he and his friends 'have the forces of nature, the forces of nationality, and the forces of patriotism,' working for the separation of Ireland from England : and so they have, up to the present time. Now, a good Land Bill will not suffice to stay and annul the working of these forces, though poli- ticians who are busy over a Land Bill will always be prone to talk as if it would suffice to do whatever may be required. But it will not. Much more than a good Land Bill is necessary in order to annul the forces which are working for separation. The best Land Bill will not reduce to impotence the partisans of separation, unless other things are accomplished too. On the other hand, the present Land Bill is not so defective as that it need prevent cordial union, if these other things are accom- plished. One of them has been mentioned already in the former part of these remarks. I mean the equitable treat- ment of Catholicism. To many of the Liberal party it is a great deal easier to offer to Ireland a fair Land Bill, than to offer to her a fair treatment of Catholicism. You may THE INCOMPATIBLES. 55 offer as fair a Land Bill as you please ; but nevertheless if, presently, when the Irish ask to have public schools and universities suited to Catholics, as England has public schools and universities suited to Anglicans, and Scotland such as are suited to Presbyterians, you fall back in embarrassment upon your formula of pedants, The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious endowment, then you give to the advocates of separation a new lease of power and influence. You enable them still to keep saying with truth, that they have { the forces of nature, the forces of nationality, and the forces of patriotism,' on their side. 1 Our measures must be healing,' and it is not only as to Irish land that healing measures are necessary ; they are necessary as to the Irish people's religion also. If this were in any good measure accomplished, if. even, we offered the Land Bill which Mr. Gladstone brings forward now, and if we offered a treatment of Catholicism as well intentioned and as fair in its way. then indeed things would have a look of cheerful promise, and politicians would probably think that the grand con- summation had been reached, and that the millennium was going to begin. But a quiet bystander might still be cool-headed enough to suspect, that for winning and attaching a people so alienated from us as the Irish, something more, even, is required than fair measures in / 56 THE INCOMPATIBLES. redress of actual mis-usage and wrong. 'Their temper, loo, must be managed, and their good affections cultivated.' Many of us talk as if the mere calculation of their interest, of the advantage to their commerce, industry, and security from the English connexion, must induce the Irish to blend readily with us, if they were but treated justly. But with a people such as the Irish, and when once such a feeling of repulsion has been excited in them as we have managed to excite, the mere redress of injustice and the calculation of their interest is not alone sufficient to win them. They must find in us some- l thing that in general suits them and attracts them ; they must feel an attractive force, drawing and binding them to us, in what is called our civilisation. This is what blends Scotland and Wales with us ; not alone their interest, but that our civilisation in general suits them and they like it. This is what so strongly attached to France the Germanic Alsace, and keeps it attached in spirit to France still : the wonderfully attractive power of French civilisation. Some say, that what we have in Ireland is a lower civilisation, hating the advent of a higher civilisation from England, and rebelling against it. And it is quite true, that certain obvious merits of the English, and by which they have much prospered, — such as their exact- THE INCOMPATIBLES. 57 ness and neatness, for instance (to say no more than what everybody must admit), — are disagreeable to Irish laxity and slovenliness, and are resisted by them. Still, a high civilisation is naturally attractive. The turn and habits of the French have much that is irksome and provoking to Germans, yet French civilisation attracted Alsace powerfully. It behoves us to make quite sure, before we talk of Ireland's lower civilisation resisting the higher civilisation of England, that our civilisation is/ really high, — high enough to exercise attraction. Business is civilisation, think many of us ; it creates and implies it. The general diffusion of material well- being is civilisation, thought Mr. Cobden, as that eminent man's biographer has just informed us ; it creates and implies it. Not always. And for fear we should forget what business and what material well-being have to create, before they do really imply civilisation, let us, at the risk of being thought tiresome, repeat here what we have said often of old. Business and material well-being 1 are signs of expansion and parts of it ; but civilisation, that great and complex force, includes much more than even that power of expansion of which they are parts. It includes also the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners. To the building up of human life all 58 THE INCOMPATIBLES. these powers belong. If business is civilisation, then business must manage to evolve all these powers j if a widely spread material well-being is civilisation, then that well-being must manage to evolve all of them. It is written : Man doth not live by bread alone. Now, one of the above-mentioned factors of civilisation is, without doubt, singularly absent from ours, — the power | of social life and manners. ' The English are just, but not amiable,' was a sentence which, as we know, even those who had benefited by our rule felt themselves moved to pass on us. We underrate the strength of this particular element of civilisation, underrate its attractive influence, its power. Mansueti possidebunt terrain; — the gentle shall possess the earth. We are apt to account amiability weak and hardness strong. But, even if it were so, 'there are forces,' as George Sand says truly and beautifully, 1 there are forces of weakness, of docility, of attractive- ness, or of suavity, which are quite as real as the forces of vigour, of encroachment, of violence, or of brutality.' And to those softer but not less real forces the Irish people are peculiarly susceptible. They are full of sen- timent. They have by nature excellent manners themselves, and they feel the charm of manners in- stinctively. 1 Courtesy,' says Vauvenargues, c is the bond of all THE IXCOMPATIBLES. 59 society, and there is no society which can last without it.' 1 But if courtesv is required to cement society, no wonder / the Irish are estranged from us. For we must remember who it is of us that they mostly see, who and what it is that in the main represent our ciyilisation to them. The power of social life and manners, so far as we haye it, is in Great Britain displayed aboye all in our aristocratic class. Mr. Carlyle's tribute to the manners and merits of this class will be fresh in our minds. ' With due limitation of the grossly worthless, I should yote at present that, of classes known to me in England, the aristocracy (with its perfection of human politeness, its continual grace of bearing and of acting, steadfast "honour," light address, and cheery stoicism), if you see well into it, is actually yet the best of English classes.' But our aristocracy, who haye, on Mr. Carlyle's showing, this power of manners so attractiye to the Irish nature, and who in England fill so large a place, and do really produce so much effect upon people's minds and imaginations, the Irish see almust nothing of. Their members who are connected with Ireland are generally absentees. Mr. Lecky is disposed to regret very much this want in Ireland of a resident aristocracy, and says that the Irish people are by nature profoundly aristc- cratical. At any rate, the Irish people are capable of 60 THE INCOMPATIBLES. feeling strongly the attraction of the power of manners in an aristocracy ; and, with an aristocracy filling the place there which it fills in Great Britain, Ireland would no doubt have been something very different from what it is now. While I admit, however, the merits of our aristocracy, while I admit the effect it produces in England and the important place it fills, while I admit that if a good body of it were resident in Ireland we should probably have Ire- land in another and a more settled state, yet I do not think that a real solution would have been thus reached there any more than it has been reached, I think, here. I mean, if Ireland had had the same social system as we have, she would have been different from her present self indeed, but sooner or later she would have found herself confronting the same difficulty which we in England are beginning to feel now : the difficulty, namely, that the social system in question ends by landing modern com- munities in the possessorship of an upper class material- ised, a middle class vulgarised, a lower class brutalised. But I am not going to discuss these matters now. What 1 want now to point out is, that the Irish do not much come across our aristocracy, exhibiting that factor of civilisation, the pow r er of manners, which has undoubtedly a strong attraction for them. W T hat they do come across, THE INCOMPATIBLES. 61 and what gives them the idea they have of our civilisation and of its promise, is our middle class. I have said so much about this class at divers times, and what I have said about it has made me so many enemies, that I prefer to take the words of anybody rather than myself for showing the impression which this class is likely to make, and which it does make, upon the Irish, and the sort of idea which the Irish and others may be apt to form of the attractions of its civilisation for themselves, or for mankind in general, or for any one except us natives of Great Britain. There is a book familiar to us all, and the more familiar now, pro- bably, to many of us, because Mr. Gladstone solaced himself with it after his illness, and so set all good Liberals (of whom I wish to be considered one) upon reading it over again. I mean David Copperfield. Much as I have published, I do not think it has ever yet happened to me to comment in print upon any production of Charles Dickens. What a pleasure to have the opportunity of praising a work so sound, a work so rich in merit, as David Copperfield! 'Man lese nicht die mit-strebende, mit-wirkende 1' says Goethe : ' do not read your fellow-strivers, your fellow. workers ! ' Of the contemporary rubbish which is shot so plentifully all around us, we can, indeed, hardly read 62 THE INCOMPATIBLE.?. too little. But to contemporary work so good as David Copperficld, we are in danger of perhaps not paying respect enough, of reading it (for who could help reading it?) too hastily, and then putting it aside for something else and forgetting it. What treasures of gaiety, invention, life, are in that book ! what alertness and resource ! what a soul of good nature and kindness governing the whole ! Such is the admirable work which I am now going to call in evidence. Intimately, indeed, did Dickens know the middle class ; he was bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. Intimately he knew its bringing up. With the hand of a master he has drawn for us a type of the teachers and trainers of its youth, a type of its places of education. Mr. Creakle and Salem House are immortal. The type itself, it is to be hoped, will perish ; but the drawing of it which Dickens has given cannot die. Mr. Creakle, the stout gentleman with a bunch of watch-chain and seals, in an arm chair, with the fiery face and the thick veins in his forehead ; Mr. Creakle sitting at his breakfast with the cane, and a newspaper, and the buttered toast before him, will sit on, like Theseus, for ever. For ever will last the recollection of Salem House, and of ' the daily strife and struggle ' there ; the recollection 1 of the frosty mornings when we were rung out of bed, and THE INCOMPATIBLES. 63 the cold, cold smell of the dark nights when we were rung into bed again ; of the evening schoolroom dimly lighted and indifferently warmed, and the morning schoolroom which was nothing but a great shivering machine ; of the alternation of boiled beef with roast beef, and boiled mutton with roast mutton ; of clods of bread and butter, dog's-eared lesson- books, cracked slates, tear-blotted copy-books, canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, suet-puddings, and a dirty atmosphere of ink surrounding all.' A man of much knowledge and much intelligence, Mr. Baring Gould, published not long ago a book about Ger- many, in which he adduced testimony which, in a curious manner, proves how true and to the life this picture of Salem House and of Mr. Creakle is. The public schools of Germany come to be spoken of in that book, and the training which the whole middle class of Germans gets in them ; and Mr. Gould mentions what is reported by young Germans trained in their own German schools, who have afterwards served as teachers of foreign languages and ushers in the ordinary private schools for the middle class in England. With one voice they tell us of establishments like Salem House and principals like Mr. Creakle. They are astonished, disgusted. They cannot understand how such things can be, and how a great and well-to-do class can be content with such an ignoble bringing up. But so things are, and they report their experience of them, and 64 THE 1NC0MPATIBLES. their experience brings before us, over and over again, Mr. Creakle and Salem House. A critic in the World newspaper says, what is very true, that in this country the middle class has no naturally denned limits, that it is difficult to say who properly belong to it and who do not, and that the term, itiiddle class, is taken in different senses by different people. This is most true. And therefore, for my part, to prevent ambiguity and confusion, I always have adopted an educational test, and by the middle class I understand those who are brought up at establishments which are more or less like Salem House, and by educators who are more or less like Mr. Creakle. And the great mass of the middle part of our community, the part which comes between those who labour with their hands, on the one side, and people of fortune, on the other, is brought up at establishments of the kind, although there is a certain portion broken off at the top which is educated at better. But the great mass are both badly taught, and are also brought up on a lower plane than is right, brought up ignobly. And this deteriorates their standard of life, their civilisation. True, they have at the same time great merits, of which they are fully conscious themselves, and of which all who are in any way akin to them, and disposed to judge them fairly and kindly, cannot but be conscious also. THE INCOMPATIBLES. 65 True, too, there are exceptions to the common rule among the establishments and educators that bring them up ; there are good schools and good schoolmasters scattered among them. True, moreover, amongst the thousands who undergo Salem House and Mr. Creakle there are some born lovers of the humane life, who emerge from the training with natures unscathed, or who at any rate recover from it. But, on the mass, the training produces with fatal sureness the effect of lowering their standard of life and impairing their civilisation. It helps to produce in them, and it perpetuates, a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and know- ledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners. And this is what those who are not akin to them, who are not at all disposed to be friendly observers of them, this is what such people see in them ; — this, and nothing more. This is what the Celtic and Catholic Irish see in them. The Scotch, the Scotch of the Lowlands, of by far the most populous and powerful part of Scotland, are men of just the same stock as ourselves, they breed the same sort of middle class as we do, and naturally do not see their own faults. Wales is Celtic, but the Welsh have adopted with ardour our middle-class religion, and this at once puts them in sympathy with our middle-class F 66 THE INCOMPATIBLES. civilisation. With the Irish it is different. English civil- isation means to the Irish the civilisation of our middle class ; and few indeed are the attractions which to the Irish, with their quickness, sentiment, fine manners, and indisposition to be pleased with things English, that civil- isation seems, or can seem, to have. They do not see the exceptions in our middle class; they do not see the good which is present even in the mis-trained mass of it. All its members seem of one type of civilisation to an Irish eye, and that type a repulsive one. They are all tarred with one brush, and that brush is Creakle's. We may even go further still in our use of that charm- ing and instructive book, the History of David Copper - field. We may lay our finger there on the very types in adult life which are the natural product of Salem House and of Mr. Creakle ; the very types of our middle class, nay of Englishmen and the English nature in general, as to the Irish imagination they appear. We have only to recall, on the one hand, Mr. Murdstone. Mr. Murdstone may be called the natural product of a course of Salem House and of Mr. Creakle, acting upon hard, stern, and narrow natures. Let us recall, then, Mr. Murdstone ; Mr. Murdstone with his firmness and severity, with his austere religion and his tremendous visage in church ; with his view of the world as ' a place for action, and not THE INCOMPATIBLES. 67 for moping and droning in ; ' his view of young Copper- field's disposition as ' requiring a great deal of correcting, and to which no greater service can be done than to force it to conform to the ways of the working world, and to bend it and break it.' We may recall, too, Miss Murd- stone, his sister, with the same religion, the same tre- mendous visage in church, the same firmness ; Miss Murdstone with her 'hard steel purse,' and her 'uncom- promising hard black boxes with her initials on the lids in hard black nails ; ' severe and formidable like her brother, 1 whom she greatly resembled in face and voice.' These two people, with their hardness, their narrowness, their want of consideration for other people's- feelings, their in- ability to^nter into them, are just the type of the English- man and his civilisation as he presents himself to the Irish mind by his serious side. His energy, firmness, industry, religion, exhibit themselves with these unpleasant features ; his bad qualities exhibit themselves without mitigation or relief. Now, a disposition to hardness is perhaps the special fault and danger of our English race in general, going along with our merits of energy and honesty. It is apt even to appear in all kinds and classes of us, when the circumstances are such as to call it forth. One can un- derstand Cromwell himself, whom we earnest English f 2 63 THE 1NC0MPATIBLES. Liberals reverentially name ' the great Puritan leader,' standing before the Irish imagination as a glorified Murd- stone ; and the late Lord Leitrim, again, as an aristocra- tical Murdstone. Mr. Bence Jones, again, improver and benefactor as he undoubtedly is, yet takes a tone with the Irish which may not unnaturally, perhaps, affect them much as Murdstone's tone affected little Copperfield. But the genuine, unmitigated Murdstone is the common middle-class Englishman, who has come forth from Salem House and Mr. Creakle. He is seen in full force, of course, in the Protestant north ; but throughout Ireland he is a prominent figure of the English garrison. Him the Irish see, see him only too much and too often. And he repre- sents to them the promise of English civilisation on its serious side ; what this civilisation accomplishes for that great middle part of the community towards which the masses below are to look up and to ascend, what it invites those who blend themselves with us to become and to be. The thing has no power of attraction. The Irish (iuick-wittedness, sentiment, keen feeling for social life and manners, demand something which this hard and imperfect civilisation cannot give them. Its social form seems to them unpleasant, its energy and industry to lead to no happiness, its religion to be false and repulsive. A friend of mine who lately had to pursue his avocations THE IXCOMPATIBLES. 69 in Lancashire, in the parts about St. Helens, and who has lately been transferred to the west of Ireland, writes to me that he finds with astonishment, how ' even in the farthest ultima Thule of the west, amongst literally the most abjectly poverty-stricken cottiers, life appears to be more enjoyed than by a Lancashire factory- hand and family who are in the receipt of five pounds a week, father, mother, and children together, from the mill.' He writes that he finds ' all the country people here so full of courtesy and graciousness ! ' That is just why our civilisation has no attractions for them. So far as it is possessed by any great body in our own community, and capable of being imparted to any great body in another V .... community, our civilisation has no courtesy and gracious- ness, it has no enjoyment of life, it has the curse of hardness upon it. The penalty nature makes us pay for hardness is dull- ness. If we are hard, our life becomes dull and dismal. Our hardness grows at last weary of itself. In Ireland, where we have been so hard, this has been strikingly exem- plified. Again and again, upon the English conqueror in his hardness and harshness, the ways and nature of the down- trodden, hated, despised Irish, came to exercise a strange, an irresistible magnetism. ' Is it possible,' asks Eudoxus, in Spenser's View of the State of Ireland, ' is it possible 70 THE TNC0MPAT1BLES. that an Englishman, brought up in such sweet civility as England affords, should find such liking in that barbarous rudeness that he should forget his own nature and forgo his own nation?' And Spenser, speaking under the name of Irenceus, answers that unhappily it did, indeed, often happen so. The Protestant Archbishop Boulter tells us, in like manner, that under the iron sway of the penal laws against Popery, and in the time of their severest exercise, the conversions from Protestantism to Popery were nevertheless a good deal more numerous than the conversions from Popery to Protestantism. Such, I say, is nature's penalty upon hardness. Hardness grows irk- some to its very own self, it ends by wearying those who have it. If our hardness is capable of wearying ourselves, can we wonder that a civilisation stamped with it has no attractions for the Irish ; that Murdstone, the product of Salem House and of Mr. Creakle, is a type of humanity which repels them, and that they do not at all wish to be like him ? But in Murdstone we see English middle-class civi- lisation by its severe and serious side only. That civi- lisation has undoubtedly also its gayer and lighter side. And this gayer and lighter side, as well as the other, we shall find, wonderful to relate, in that all-containing treasure-house of ours, the History of David Copperfield. THE INCOMPATIBLES. 7 i Mr. Quinion, with his gaiety, his chaff, his rough coat, his incessant smoking, his brandy and water, is the jovial, genial man of our middle-class civilisation, prepared by Salem House and Mr. Creakle, as Mr. Murdstone is its severe man. Quinion, we are told in our History, was the manager of Murdstone's business, and he is truly his pendant. He is the answer of our middle-class civilisation to the demand in man for beauty and enjoyment, as Murdstone is its answer to the demand for temper and manners. But to a quick, sentimental race, Quinion can be hardly more attractive than Murdstone. Quinion pro- duces our towns considered as seats of pleasure, as Murd- stone produces them considered as seats of business and religion. As it is Murdstone, the serious man, whose view of life and demands on life have made our Hell-holes, as Cobbett calls our manufacturing towns, have made the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion, and the refusal to let Irish Catholics have schools and universities suited to them because their religion is a lie and heathenish superstition, so it is Quinion, the jovial man, whose view of life and demands on it have made our popular songs, comedy, art, pleasure, — made the City Companies and their feasts, made the London streets, made the Griffin. Xay, Quinion has been busy in Dublin too, for have we not conquered Ireland ? 72 THE /^COMPATIBLES. The streets and buildings of Dublin are full of traces of him ; his sense of beauty governed the erection of Dublin Castle itself. As the civilisation of the French middle class is the maker of the streets and buildings of modern Paris, so the civilisation of the English middle class is the maker of the streets and buildings of modern London and Dublin. Once more. Logic and lucidity in the organising and administering of public business are attractive to many ; they are satisfactions to that instinct of intelli- gence in man which is one of the great powers in his civilisation. The immense, homogeneous, and (com- paratively with ours) clear-thinking French middle class prides itself on logic and lucidity in its public business. In our public business logic and lucidity are conspicuous by their absence. Our public business is governed by the wants of our middle class, and is in the hands of public men who anxiously watch those wants. Now, our middle class cares for liberty ; it does not care for logic and lucidity. Murdstone and Quinion do not care for logic and lucidity. Salem House and Mr. Creakle have not pre- pared them for it. Accordingly, we see the proceedings of our chief seat of public business, the House of Commons, governed by rules of which one may, I hope, at least say, without risk of being committed for contempt, that logic THE INCOMPATIBLES. and lucidity have nothing to do with them. Mr. Chamber- lain, again, was telling us only the other day, that' England, the greatest commercial nation in the world, has in its bank- ruptcy law the worst commercial legislation of any civilised country/ To be sure, Mr. Chamberlain has also said, that ' if in England we fall behind other nations in the intelligent appreciation of art, we minister to a hundred wants of which the other nations have no suspicion.' As we are a commercial people, one would have thought that logic and lucidity in commercial legislation was one of these wants to which we minister ; however, it seems that we do not. But, outside our own immediate circle, logic and lucidity are felt by many people to be attrac- tive; they inspire respect, their absence provokes ridicule. It is a plea for Home Rule if we inflict the privation of them, in public concerns, upon people of quicker minds, who would by nature be disposed to relish them. Pro- bably the Irish themselves, though they are gainers by the thing, yet laugh in their sleeves at the pedantries and formalities with which our love of liberty, Murdstone and Quinion's love of liberty, and our total want of instinct for logic and lucidity, embarrass our attempts to coerce them. Certainly they must have laughed outright, being people with a keen sense of the ridiculous, when in the information to which the traversers had to plead at the 74 THE INCOMPATIBLES. late trials, it was set forth that the traversers 'did con- spire, combine, confederate, and agree together, to solicit, incite, and procure,' and so on. We must be Englishmen, countrymen of Murdstone and Quinion, loving liberty and a ' freedom broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent,' — not fastidious about modern and rational forms of speech, about logic and lucidity, or much com- prehending how other people can be fastidious about them, — to take such a jargon with proper seriousness. The dislike of Ireland for England the resistance of a lower civilisation to a higher one ! Why, everywhere the attractions of this middle-class civilisation of ours, which is what we have really to offer in the way of civilisation, seem to fail of their effect. ' The puzzle seems to be,' says the Times mournfully, ' where we are to look for our friends.' But there is no great puzzle in the matter if we will consider it without pedantry. Our civilisation, as it looks to outsiders, and in so far as it is a thing broadly communicable, seems to consist very much in the Murd- stonian drive in business and the Murdstonian religion, on the one hand, and in the Quinionian joviality and geniality, on the other. Wherever we go, we put forward Murdstone and Quinion, and call their ways civili- sation. Our governing class nervously watch the ways and wishes of Murdstone and Quinion, and back up THE IXCOMPATIBLES. j$ their civilisation all they can. But do what we will, this civilisation does not prove attractive. The English in South Africa ' w T ill all be commercial gentlemen,' says Lady Barker, — commercial gentlemen like Murdstone and Quinion. Their wives will be the ladies of commercial gentlemen, they will not even tend poultry. The English in the Transvaal, we hear again, contain a wonderful proportion of attorneys, speculators, land-jobbers, and persons whose antecedents will not well beat inspection. Their recent antecedents we will not meddle with, but one thing is certain : their early ante- cedents were those of the English middle class in general, those of Murdstone and Quinion. They have almost all, we may be very sure, passed through the halls of a Salem House and the hands of a Mr. Creakle. They have the stamp of either Murdstone or Quinion. Indeed we are so prolific, so enterprising, so world-covering, and our middle class and its civilisation so entirely take the lead wherever we go, that there is now, one may say, a kind of odour of Salem House all round the globe. It is almost in- evitable that Mr. Sprigg should have been reared in some such establishment : it is ten to one that Mr. Berry is an old pupil of Mr. Creakle. And when they visit Europe, no doubt they go and see Mr. Creakle, where he is passing the evening cf his days in honourable retirement, — a 76 THE IXCOMPATIBLES. Middlesex magistrate, a philanthropist, and a member of the Society of Arts. And Mr. Berry can tell his old master of a happy country all peopled by ourselves, where the Murdstone and Quinion civilisation seems to men the most natural thing in the world and the only right civilisation, and where it gives entire satisfaction. But poor Mr. Sprigg has to report of a land plagued with a large intermixture of foreigners, to whom our unique middle-class civilisation does not seem attractive at all, but they find it entirely disagreeable. And so, too, to come back much nearer home, do the Irish. So that if we, who are in consternation at the dismal prophecies we hear concerning what is in store for Ireland and England, if we determine, as I say, to perish in the light at any rate, to abjure all self-deception, and to see things as they really are, we shall see that our civilisation, in its present state, will not help us much with the Irish. Now, even though we gave them really healing measures, yet still, estranged as the Irish at present are, it would be further necessary to manage their tempers and cultivate their good affections by the gift of a common civilisation congenial to them. But pur civilisation is not congenial to them. To talk of it, therefore, as a substitute for perfectly healing measures is ridiculous. Indeed, the pedantry, bigotry, and narrowness of our middle class, THE IXCOMPATIBLES. 77 which disfigure the civilisation we have to offer, are also the chief obstacle to our offering measures perfectly heal- ing. And the conclusion is, that our middle class and its civilisation require to be transformed. With all their merits, which I have not here much insisted upon, because the question was, how their demerits make them to be judged by unfriendly observers, — with all their merits, they require, as I have so often said, to be transformed. And for my part I see no way so promising for setting- about it as the abolishment of Salem House and ot Mr. Creakle. This initiatory stage governs for them in a great degree all the rest, and with this initiatory stage we should above all deal. I think I hear people saying : There ! he has got on his old hobby again! Really, people ought rather to commend the strictly and humbly practical character of my writings. It was very well for Mr. Carlyle to bid us have recourse, in our doubts and miseries, to earnestness and reality, and veracity and the everlasting yea, and generalities of that kind; Mr. Carlyle was a man of genius. But when one is not a man of genius, and yet attempts to give counsel in times of difficulty, one should be above all things practical. Now, our relations with Ireland will not in any case be easily and soon made satisfactory ; but while our middle class is 7 S THE INC0MPAT1BLES. what it is now, they never will. And our middle class, again, will not be easily and soon transformed ; but while it gets its initiation to life through Salem House and Mr. Creakle, it never will. The great thing is to initiate it to life by means of public schools. Public schools for the middle classes are not a panacea for our ills. No, but they are the indis- pensable preliminary to our real improvement on almost all the lines where as a nation we now move with embar- rassment. If the consideration of our difficulties with Ireland had not, like so much else, brought me at last full upon this want, — which is capital, but far too little re- marked, — I should probably not have ventured to intrude into the discussion of them. However terrified and de- jected by the alarmists, I should have been inclined to bear my burden silently in that upper chamber in Grub Street, where I have borne in silence so many sorrows. I know that the professional people find the intervention of outsiders very trying in politics, and I have no wish to provoke their resentment. But when the discussion of any matter tends inevitably to show the crying need which there is for transforming our middle-class educa- tion, I cannot forbear from striking in ; for if I do not speak of the need shown, nobody else will. Yet the need is, certainly, great and urgent enough THE INCOMPATIBLES. 79 to attract notice. But then our middle class is very strong and self-satisfied, and every one flatters it. It is like that strong and enormous creature described by Plato, surrounded by obsequious people seeking to understand what its noises mean, and to make in their turn the noises which may please it. At best, palliatives are now and then attempted ; as there is a company, I believe, at th4s moment projected to provide better schools for the middle classes. Alas, I should not be astonished to find presently Mr. Creakle himself among the directors of a company to provide better schools for the middle classes, and the guiding spirit of its proceed- ings ! so far, at least, as his magisterial functions, and his duties on philanthropical committees, and on committees of the Society of Arts, permit him to take part in them. But oftener our chief people take the bull by the horns, and actually congratulate the middle class on the character and conditions of its education. And so they play the part of a sort of spiritual pander to its defects and weaknesses, and do what in them lies to perpetuate them. Lord Frederick Cavendish goes down to Sheffield, to address an audience almost entirely trained by Salem House and by Mr. Creakle, and the most suitable thing he can find to say to them is, he thinks, to congratulate them on their energy and self-reliance in being so So THE INCOMPATIBLES. trained, and to give them to understand that he himself, if he were not Lord Frederick Cavendish, brought up at Cambridge, would gladly be Murdstone or Quinion, brought up by Mr. Creakle. But this is an old story, a familiar proceeding, for which the formula has long since been given : namely, that the upper class do not want to be disturbed in their preponderance, nor the middle class in their vulgarity. But if we wish cordially to attach Ireland to the English connexion, not only must we offer healing political measures, we must also, and that as speedily as we can, transform our middle class and its social civilisation. I perceive that I have said little of faults on the side of the Irish, as I have said little of the merits which accompany, in our middle class, their failure in social civilisation. And for the same reason, — because the matter in hand was the failure on our part to do all in our power to attach Ireland, and how to set about remedying that failure. But as I have spoken with so much frankness of my own people and kindred, the Irish will allow me, per- haps, to end with quoting three queries of Bishop Berke- ley's, and with recommending these to their attention : — 1 1. Whether it be not the true interest of both nations to become one people, and whether either be sufficiently apprised of this ? THE INCOMPATIBLE S. 81 1 2. Whether Ireland can propose to thrive so long as she entertains a wrong-headed distrust of Eng- land? 1 3. Whether in every instance by which the Irish pre- judice England, they do not in a greater degree prejudice themselves ? ; Perhaps, our Irish friends might do well also to perpend the good bishop's caution against ' a general parturiency in Ireland with respect to politics and public counsel ; ' a parturiency which in clever young Irishmen does often, certainly, seem to be excessive. But, after all, my present business is not with the Irish but with the English ; — to exhort my countrymen to healing measures and an attractive form of civilisation. And if one's countrymen insist upon it, that found to be sweet and attractive their form of civilisation is, or, if not, ought to be, then we who think differently must labour diligently to follow Burke's injunctions, and to ' dispose people to a better sense of their condition.' 82 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. In 1796, the very year before his death, when the political prospect for the people of Ireland seemed desperate, and all political struggle on their part useless and impotent, Burke wrote to an Irishman as follows : — I should recommend to the middle ranks, in which I in- clude not only all merchants, but all farmers and tradesmen, that they wouldchange as much as possible those expensive modes of living and that dissipation to which our country- men in general are so much addicted. It does not at all become men in a state of persecution. They ought to con- form themselves to the circumstances of a people whom Government is resolved not to consider as upon a par with their fellow-subjects. Favour they will have none. They must aim at other resources, and to make themselves inde- pendent in fact before they aim at a nominal independence. Depend upon it, that with half the privileges of the others, joined to a different system of manners, they would grow to a degree of importance to which, without it, no privileges could raise them, much less any intrigues or factious prac- tices. I know very well that such a discipline, among so AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 83 numerous a people, is not easily introduced, but I am sure it is not impossible. If I had youth and strength, I would ^0 myself over to Ireland to work on that plan ; so certain I am that the well-being of all descriptions in the kingdom, as well as of themselves, depends upon a reformation amongst the Catholics. The work will be sure and slow in its operation, but it is certain in its effect. There is nothing which will not yield to perseverance and method. "Whether a sumptuary reform in the habits of the middle classes in Ireland is a crying need of the present hour, I have no sufficient means of judging. If it is, it is not a reform which we can well isolate from other needs, can well pursue by itself alone, and directly. It is a reform which must depend upon enlarging the minds and raising the aims of those classes ; upon humanising and civilising them. Expense in living, dissipation, are the first and nearest dangers, perhaps, to the Irish middle class, while its civilisation is low, because they are its first and nearest pleasures. They can only cease to be its first and nearest pleasures, if now they are so, by a rise in its standard of life, by an extending and deepening of its civilisation. True, this greatly needs to be done. True, the improvement of Ireland, the self-government of Ireland, must come mainly through the middle class, and yet this class, defective in civilisation as it now is, is not ripe for the functions required of it. Its members have indeed to g 2 84 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. learn, as Burke says, ' to make themselves independent in fact before they aim at a no??iinal independence.' But not Ireland alone needs, alas, the lesson ; we in England need it too. In England, too, power is passing away from the now governing class. The part to be taken in English life by the middle class is different from the part which the middle class has had to take hitherto, — different, more public, more important. Other and greater func- tions devolve upon this class than of old ; but its defective civilisation makes it unfit to discharge them. It comes to the new time and to its new duties, it comes to them, as its flatterers will never tell it, but as it must nevertheless bear to be told and well to consider, — it comes to them with a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intel- lect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners. The characters of defective civilisation in the Irish middle class are not precisely the same as in the English. But for the faults of the middle class in Ireland, as in England, the same remedy presents itself to start with ; not a panacea by any means, not all-sufficient, not capable of working miracles of change in a moment, but yet a remedy sure to do good ; the first and simplest and most natural remedy to apply, although it is left singularly out of sight, and thought, and mention. The middle class in AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 85 both England and Ireland is the worst schooled middle class in Western Europe. Surely this may well have something to do with defects of civilisation ! Surely it must make a difference to the civilisation of a middle class, whether it is brought up in ignoble schools where the instruction is nearly worthless, or in schools of high standing where the boy is carried through a well-chosen course of the best that has been known and said in the world ! I, at any rate, have long been of opinion that the most beneficent reform possible in England, at present, is a reform about which hardly anybody seems to think or care, — the establishment of good public schools for the middle classes. Most salutary for Ireland also would be the establish- ment of such schools there. In what state is the actual supply of schools for the middle classes in Ireland, we learn from a report lately published by a very acute observer, Professor MaharTy, of Trinity College, Dublin. I propose to give here a short account of what he tells us, and to add a few thoughts which suggest themselves after reading him. Professor Mahaffy was appointed by the Endowed Schools Commission in 1879 t0 V1S ^ anc ^ report upon the Grammar Schools of Ireland. He injected the buildings and accommodations, attended the classes, examined the 86 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. pupils ; and he also visited some of the principal Grammar Schools in England, such as Winchester, Marl- borough, Uppingham, and the City of London School, to provide himself with a definite standard of comparison. Professor Mahafty is a man, as is well known, of brilliant attainments ; he has had, also, great practical experience in teaching, and he writes with a freshness, plainness, and point which make his report very easy and agreeable reading. The secondary schools of Ireland are classified by Professor Mahaffy as follows : the Royal Schools, the lesser schools managed by the Commissioners of Educa- tion, the Erasmus Smith's schools, the Incorporated Society's schools, the Protestant diocesan schools, the schools with private endowments, the Roman Catholic colleges, and the unendowed schools. He visited schools of each class. In all or almost all of them he found the instruction profoundly affected by the rules of the Intermediate Schools Commissioners. His report is full of remarks on the evil working of the examinations of this Intermediate Board, and he appears to consider the most important part of his business, as reporter, to be the delivering of his testimony against them. The Board arose, as is well known, out of the desire to do something for intermediate education in Ireland without Ujva- vAM^TOL^^rna^J JR*^ } ^&pjjufli AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 87 encountering what is called the religious difficulty. ' The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious en- dowment ; the Protestants of Great Britain are emphati- cally hostile to the endowment of Catholicism in any shape or form.' We have all heard these parrot cries till one is sick of them. Schools, therefore, were not to be founded or directly aided, because this might be an endowment of Catholicism ; but a system of examinations and prizes was established, whereby Catholic schools may be indeed aided indirectly, but so indirectly, it seems, as to sutfer the consciences of the Protestants of Great Britain to remain at peace. Only this system of examinations and prizes, while good for the consciences of the Protestants of Great Britain, is very bad, in Professor Mahaffy's opinion, for the Irish schools. He insists on its evil effects in the very first page of his report, in speaking of the Royal School of Armagh, the chief of the Royal Schools, and the school with which he begins. He says : — Under the rules of the Intermediate Commissioners it is found more advantageous to answer in a number of unim- portant subjects, of which a hastily learned smattering suffices, than to study with earnestness the great subjects of education, - — classics and mathematics. Hence, boys s^end every leisure moment, and even part of their proper school-time, in learn- ing little text-books on natural science, music, and even Irish, to the detriment of their solid progress. This is not all. rJ a .W 88 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. Owing to the appointing of fixed texts in classics and the paucity of new passages in the examination, the boys are merely crammed in the appointed texts without being taught real scholarship. When examining a senior division in clas- sics, I observed that they all brought up annotated texts, in fact so fully annotated that every second clause was trans- lated for them ; and upon observing this to the master, he replied that he knew the evil, but that he could not get them through the intermediate course in any other way. All through the report this is Professor Mahaffy's great and ever-recurring complaint : ' The multiplication of subjects supported by the Intermediate Board ! which suit inaccurate and ill- taught pupils far better than those who learn the great subjects thoroughly.' Everywhere it struck him, that ' the boys, even when not over-worked, were addled with a quantity of subjects. They are taught a great many valuable truths ; but they have not assimilated them, and only answer by accident. I have found this mental condition all over the country.' He calls the intermediate examinations 'the lowest and poorest of all public competitions.' The more intelligent of the schoolmasters, he says, condemn them :— The principal (of the French college at Blackrock) has very large and independent views about education, which are well worthy of serious attention. He objects altogether to the intermediate examinations, and says that his profession AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 89 is ruined by the complete subjugation of all school-work to the fixed programme, which is quite insufficient to occupy the beiter boys for a year, and which thus seriously impairs their progress. He also protests against the variety of unimpor- tant subjects which produce fees for results, and thinks that a minimum of at least thirty-five per cent, should be struck off the answering, if these subjects are retained. However, ' the false stimulus now supplied in the sys- tem of intermediate examinations established by Govern- ment ' is too strong to be resisted : — So strong a mercenary spirit has been excited both in masters and parents by this system, that all the schools in Ireland with one exception (the Friends' School in Water- ford; have been forced into the competition ; every boy is being taught the intermediate course, every error in the management of that course is affecting the whole country, and the best educator is unable to stem the tide, or do more than protest against any of the defects. Professor Mahaffy is a hearty admirer of the great English public schools. He is of opinion, ' that what distinguishes the Englishman, all over the world, above men of equal breeding and fortune in other nations, is the training of those peculiar commonwealths, in which boys lorm a sort of constitution, and govern themselves under the direction of a higher authority.' But he thinks that the over-use of prize-competitions and examinations is 90 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. doing harm in the great English schools too, though they are not yet enslaved by it as the Irish schools are : — I find that by the spirit of the age, and the various requirements of many competitions, both English and Irish Schools have been driven into the great vice of multiplying subjects of instruction, and so crowding together hours of diverse teaching that the worst results must inevitably ensue. There is, in the first place, that enervating mental fatigue and consequent ill-health which is beginning to attract attention. When I visited Winchester it was easy to distinguish in a large class the boys who had won their way into the founda- tion by competition ; they were remarkable for their worn and unhealthy looks. This evil, however, the evil of over- work at examination-courses, has already excited public atten- tion, and is, I trust, in a fair way of being remedied. Nor did it strike me as at all so frequent, in Irish schools, as another mischief arising from the same cause. It rather appeared to me all over Ireland, and England also, that the majority of boys, without being over-worked, were addled by the multi- plicity of their subjects, and instead of increasing their know- ledge had utterly confused it. Whenever I asked the masters to point me out a brilliant boy, they replied that the race had died out. Is it conceivable that this arises from any inherent failing of the stock, and not rather from some great blundering in the system of our education ? The great majority of thoughtful educators with whom I conferred agreed that it was due to this constant addition of new sub- jects ; — to the cry after English grammar and English litera- ture, and French and German, and natural science ; to the AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 91 subdivision of the wretched boys' time into two hours in the week for this, two hours for that, alternate days for this, alternate days for that ; in fact, to an injurious system of so teaching him everything that he can reason intelligently in nothing. I cannot speak too strongly of the melancholy im- pression forced upon me by the examination of many hun- dred boys in various schools through England and Ireland. I sought in vain for bright promise, for quick intelligence, for keen sympathy with their studies. It was not, I am sure, the boys' fault nor the masters'. It is the result of the present boa-constrictor system of competitive examination which is strangling our youth in its fatal embrace. Professor Mahafiy finds fault with the Irish secondary- schools as too often dirty and untidy, and ill-provided with proper accommodations. ' Whitewashing, painting, and scouring of floors are urgently needed ; indeed an additional supply of soap to the boys wx>uld not come amiss.' He notices the Jesuit College of St. Stanislaus, and a school at Portarlington, as signal exceptions. In general ' the floors are so filthy as to give a grimy and disgusting appearance to the whole room : people are so accustomed to this in all Irish schools that they wonder at my remarking it.' At the chief of the Erasmus Smith's Schools, the high school in Dublin, ' I was detained,' he tells us, ' some time at the door, owing to the deafness of the porter, and thus having ample leisure to inspect the 92 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. front of the house, found that the exceeding dirt of the windows made it pre-eminent, even among its shabbiest neighbours. I learned, on inquiry, that most of the window-sashes are not moveable. It is surprising that the members of the Board are not offended by this aspect of squalor and decay. I found the playground a mass of mud, which was carried on the boys' boots all through the stairs and school-rooms, thus making the inside of the house correspond with the outside.' Professor Mahaffy finds fault with the 'wretched system of manage- ment ' which prevails in the Endowed Schools, — a system which prevents needful reforms, which perpetuates in- efficient arrangements and perpetuates the employment of incompetent teachers, 'old and wearied men.' Those who elect the master, he says of the Clonmel School, ' are two absent lords ; and I suppose a more unlikely Board to select a good schoolmaster could not easily be found. In the present case a rule has been followed the very opposite of that which prevails in England. There a schoolmaster retires upon a living ; here a clergyman has retired from a living upon a school.' In another school, where the head-master is well qualified, Professor Mahaffy finds the assistant-master stopping the way : — But when we come to the assistant-master we find things in a deplorable condition. He holds his place by appoint- AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 9 ; ment of the patron, and is not removable by the head-master or Commissioners, or perhaps by anyone. The present usher is a man of about eighty or ninety years of age, indeed he may possibly be one hundred ; he is so dull and shrivelled with age that he only comes in late and is unable to teach anything. I do not think he comprehended who I was or what I wanted. His appointment dates from the remote past, and when I asked what his qualifications were or had once been, I could learn nothing but some vague legends about his great severity in early youth ; in fact, I was told he had once putt the ear off a boy. But these were venerable tra- ditions. Finally, Professor MahafTy finds fault with that which is our signal deficiency in England also, the want of all general organisation of the service of secondary instruc- tion, of all co-ordination of the existing resources scat- tered over the country : — The general impression produced by a survey of the Irish Grammar Schools is this, that while there are many earnest and able men engaged in teaching and in improving the con- dition of education, all these efforts are individual efforts or scattered efforts, and the results produced are vastly inferior to those which might be expected from the existing national endowments both of money and of talent. For the Irish nation, with all its patent faults, is a clever nation ; Irish bo> s are above the average in smartness and versatility. If the system of education were at all perfect, great intellectual re- sults might fairly be expected. 94 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. Still, the tyranny of the intermediate course, and the bad effects it is producing on the Irish schools, are so completely the governing idea in our reporter's mind, that after enumerating all other hindrances to secondary in- struction in Ireland, he cannot but return to this chief hindrance and conclude with it. He laments that the better endowed schools, at any rate, were not excluded by the Act from competing, and from ruining their school- course accordingly : — For my own part, I feel constrained to recommend (to Irish parents for their sons) schools in England or elsewhere, where this enslaving system has not penetrated. It may no doubt act as a great stimulus to bad schools, and to a low type of scholars, who had otherwise been subject to no test whatever. To all higher schools, and to the higher class of boys who desire and deserve a real education in literature and science, this competition is an almost unmixed evil. To the real schoolmaster, who desires to develop the nature of his boys after his own fashion and by his own methods, such a system is a death-blow. The day will yet come, when men will look back on the mania in our legislation for competition as the anxious blundering of honest reformers, who tried to cure the occasional abuses of favouritism by substituting universal hardships, and to raise the tone of lower education by levelling down the higher, by substituting diversity for depth, and by destroying all that freedom and leisure in learning which are the true conditions of solid and lasting culture. AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 95 Professor Mahaffy admires, as I have said, the public schools in England, and envies us them greatly. 'The English public school/ he says, ' remains and will remain a kind of training place to which no nation in Europe, not to say the Irish, can show a parallel.' I agree with him in admiring our great public schools; still, the capital failure of Ireland, in regard to secondary instruction, is exhibited by us also. We have indeed good schools in England, expensive but good, for the boys of the aristo- cratic and landed class, and of the higher professional classes, and for the sons of wealthy merchants and manufacturers. But it is not difficult to provide good schools for people who can and will, in considerable numbers, pay highly for them. Irish parents who belong to the aristocratic and landed class, or to the higher pro- fessional classes, or to the class of wealthy merchants and manufacturers, can and do send their sons to our English public schools, and get them well trained and taught there. Professor Mahaffy approves of their doing so. ' It is not in the least surprising, that Irish parents who can afford it should choose this system for the edu- cation of their boys. No foolish talk about patriotism, no idle rant about absenteeism, can turn any conscientious parent from studying, above all, his children's welfare, and if he visits the great public schools of England he 96 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. will certainly be impressed with their enormous supe- riority.' I cannot myself see any disadvantage, or anything bu advantage, to an Irish boy in being trained at one of the English public schools. If, therefore, the middle class in Ireland could as a whole afford to use these schools, I should not bemoan its condition, or busy my- self about reforming the state of secondary instruction in Ireland. But it cannot. The bulk of the middle class in Ireland cannot, and the bulk of the middle class in England cannot either. The real weak point in the secondary instruction of both countries is the same. M. Gambetta is the son, I am told, of a tradesman at Cahors, and he was brought up in the lycee of Cahors ; a school not so delightful and historic as Eton, certainly, but with a status as honourable as that of Eton, and with a teaching on the whole as good. In what kind of schools are the sons of tradesmen in England and Ireland brought up ? They are brought up in the worst and most ignoble secondary schools in Western Europe. Ireland has nothing to envy us here. For the great bulk of our middle class, no less than for the great bulk of hers, the school-provision is miserably inadequate. It can only become adequate by being treated as a public service, as a service for which the State, the AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 97 nation in its collective and corporate character, is re- sponsible. This proposition I have often advanced and sufficiently expounded. To me its truth seems self-evi- dent, and the practice of other countries is present, besides, to speak for it. I am not going to enlarge upon this theme now. I want rather to point out how it comes to pass, that in England and Ireland the truth is not accepted and acted upon, and what difference there is, in this respect, between the case of England and that of Ireland. In England, secondary instruction is not a public service, popular politicians and speakers at public meetings would tell us, because of the individual energy and self-reliance of the Englishman, and his dislike to State-interference. No doubt, there is in the English- man a repugnance to being meddled with, a desire to be let alone. No doubt, he likes to act individually when- ever he can, and not to have recourse to action of a col- lective and corporate character. To make even popular education a public service was very difficult. It is only a few years since one might hear State-aided elementary schools described, as schools with the State-taint upon them. However, the expediency and necessity of making popular education a public service grew to appear so manifest, that the repugnance was overcome. So far as H 98 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. our popular education is concerned, the reproach of State-taint has disappeared from people's mouths and minds. Now, to make middle-class education a public service is only less expedient and necessary than to make popu- lar education a public service. But, as to popular education, the light has dawned upon the community here in England; as to middle-class education, it has not. To talk of the State-taint in this case, is still popu- lar ; and a prominent member of the governing class, such as Lord Frederick Cavendish, will go and extol a middle-class audience, composed of people with a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners,— he will positively go and extol them for their energy and self-reliance in not adopting the means most naturally and directly fitted to lift them out of this im- perfect state of civilisation, and will win their delighted applause by doing so. This is a phenomenon of our social politics which receives its explanation, as I have often said, only when we consider that the upper class amongst us does not wish to be disturbed in its preponderance, or the middle class in its vulgarity. Not that Lord Frederick Cavendish does not speak in perfect good faith. He takes as a AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 99 general rule the native English conviction that to act in- dividually is a wholesome thing, and thinks that he cannot be wrong in applying it in any novel case that may arise, Still, at the bottom of the mind of our governing class is an instinct, on this matter of education, telling it that a really good and public education of the middle class is the surest means of removing, in the end, those inferi- orities which at present make our middle class impossible as a governing class, and our upper class indispensable ; — and this removal it is not every one in a governing class who can desire, though every one ought to desire it, That the middle class should seek not to be dis- turbed in its vulgarity may seem more strange. But here, too, is at bottom the native English instinct for following one's individual course, for not being meddled with. Then, also, what most strongly moves and attaches, or has most strongly moved and attached hitherto, the strongest part of our middle class, the Puritan part, is the type of religion to which their nature and circumstances have since the Reformation led them. Now, to this type of religion, the State, or the nation acting as a whole in its collective and corporate character, has in general not been favourable. They are apprehensive, then, that to their religion a training in the schools of the State might not be favourable. Indeed, to the whole narrow system of h 2 too AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. life, arising out of the peculiar conjunction of the second great interest of their lives, business, with the first great interest of their lives, religion, — a system of life now be- come a second nature to them and greatly endeared to their hearts, — they are apprehensive that the wider idea5 and larger habits of public schools might not be favour- able. And so they are, on their part, as little forward to make middle-class education a public service, as the governing class, on their part, are little forward to do so, And although the necessities of the future, and a pressing sense of the defects of its actual civilisation, will in the end force the middle class to change its line and to demand what it now shrinks from, yet this has not hap- pened yet, and perhaps may not happen for some years to come, may not happen in our life-time. If, therefore, secondary instruction remains in a very faulty and incoherent state in England, at least it is by the English nation's own doing that it remains so. The governing class here is not seriously concerned to make it adequate and coherent; it is, on the contrary, indisposed to do so. That governing class will do what is actually desired and demanded of it by the middle class, by the class on whose favour political power depends ; but it will do no more. The middle class, again, the class immediately concerned, has not yet acquired sufficient AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. lot iucidity of mind to desire public schools, and to demand the resolute investigation and appliance or the best means for making them good. It has no such simple and logical aims governing its mind in this matter. A coherent system of public middle-class schools it does not at pre- sent want at all Aims of quite another sort govern our middle class, whenever anything has to be done in regard to education. Its Protestant feelings must be respected, openings must be provided as far as possible for its child- ren, and whatever is done must be plausible. And the governing class will always take good care to meet its wishes. Professor Mahaffy will find that the things which so disturb his peace as a lover of education are all due to this cause : that the English middle class has aims quite other than the direct aim of making education efficient, and that the governing class, in whatever it does, respects and consults these aims of the middle class. He com- plains of the Intermediate Board and its system of prizes and examinations. But what would he have ? Something had to be done for Irish secondary instruction. But the English public was by no means simply bent on doing what was best for this ; alas, it is not even bent on doing what is best for its own ! Something, I say, had to be done in Ireland for secondary instruction; bnt s in doing it, the Protestant feelings of the public of io2 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. Great Britain must before all things be respected. ' The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious endowment ; the Protestants of Great Britain are implac- ably hostile to the endowment of Catholicism in any shape or form.' And the Government paid all due respect to these Liberal and Protestant feelings. Hence the Intermediate Board. The whole system of perpetual competitive examina- tions everywhere, which Professor MaharTy thinks so fatal, and which he attributes to the anxious blundering of honest reformers trying to cure the occasional abuses of favouritism, is he right in so attributing it ? Surely not ; there was no such blundering as he speaks of, because there was no desire to discover and do what was positively best in the matter. But the great British middle-class public had a desire to procure as many openings as possible for its children, and the Government could gratify this desire, and also relieve itself of responsibility. Hence our competitive examinations. The composition of the Boards and Commissions for Education, again, on which so much depends when studies have to be organised and programmes laid down, Professor MaharTy is dissatisfied with them. He wants, he says, ' one responsible body, not made up altogether of lords and bishops and judges who give their spare moments to such duties, but mainly AX UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 103 of practical educators. No one is so likely to be led away by novelties as the elderly amateur in education, who knows nothing of its practical working, and legislates on specious theories. So long as Boards in Ireland arc chiefly made up of people of social or political importance only, education will not prosper.' But does Professor MaharTy imagine that the British public has a fancy for a lucid and logical-minded Board, simply bent on per- fecting education ? Not at all ! it wants a Board that is plausible ; and the Government, whenever it institutes a Board, at least does its best to make a plausible one. Hence the 'lords and bishops and judges;' hence the 1 elderly amateur.' Professor MaharTy anticipates that the new Irish University will probably be arranged like the Intermediate Board, and not as a lover of education would desire. On that point I will give no opinion ; all I am sure of is that it will be arranged plausibly. That is what our middle-class public want, and the Government will certainly accomplish it. No, the great English middle-class public is at pre- sent by no means bent seriously on making education efficient all round. It prefers its routine and its claptrap to even its own education. It is and must be free to do 50, if it likes. We who lament its doing so, we who see what it loses by doing so, we can only resolve not to be 104 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. dupes of its claptrap ourselves, and not to help in duping others with it, but to work with patience and perseverance for the evocation of that better spirit which will surely arise in this great class at last. Meanwhile, however, the English middle-class sacri- fices to its routine and claptrap not only its own educa- tion, but the education of the Irish middle-class also. And this is certainly hard. It is hard, that is, if the Irish middle-class is not of one mind with it in the matter, does not share in its routine and claptrap, and prefer them to its own education. I suppose no one will dispute that the type of secondary instruction in the Intermediate Board, the type of superior instruction in the new Irish University, is determined by that maxim regnant, as we are told, in the middle-class electorate of Great Britain : ' The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious endowment.' And this when we have, in Great Britain, Oxford and Cambridge, and Eton and Winchester, and the Scotch universities ! And one of the organs of the British Philistine expresses astonishment at my thinking it worth while at the present day to collect Burke's Irish writings, — says that the state of things with which Burke had to deal is now utterly gone, that he had to deal with Protestant ascendency, and that ' the Catholics have now not a single cause of complaint.' As if the AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 105 Intermediate Board, as if the new Irish University, de- termined in the manner they are, and from the motives they are, were not in themselves evidences of the con- tinued reign of Protestant ascendency ! But not only has Ireland a just claim not to have her education determined by the 'Protestant feelings' of Great Britain. She has a just claim not to have it de- termined by other feelings, also, of our British public, which go to determine it now. She has a just claim, in short, to have it determined as she herself likes. It is a plea, as I have elsewhere said, for Home Rule, if the way of dealing with education, and with other like things, which satisfies our Murdstones and Quinions, but does not satisfy people of quicker minds, is imposed on these people when they desire something better, because it is the way which our Murdstones and Quinions know and like. The Murdstones and Quinions of our middle class, with their strong individuality and their peculiar habits of life, do not want things instituted by the State, by the nation acting in its collective and corporate character. They do not want State schools, or State festivals, or State theatres. They prefer their Salem House, and their meeting, and their music-hall, and to be congratulated by Lord Frederick Cavendish upon their energy and self- reliance. And this is all very well for the Murdstones 106 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. and Quinions, since they like to have it so. But it is hard that they should insist on the Irishman, too, acting as if he had the same peculiar taste, if he have not. With other nations, the idea of the State, of the nation in its collective and corporate character, instituting means for developing and dignifying the national life, has great power. Such a disposition of mind is also more con- genial, perhaps, to the Irish people likewise, than the disposition of mind of our middle class in Great Britain. The executive Government in Ireland is a very different thing from the executive Government in England, and has a much more stringent operation. But it does little, nevertheless, in this sense of giving effect to aspirations of the national life for developing and raising itself. Dublin Castle is rather a bureau of management for governing the country in compliance, as far as possible, with English ideas. If the Irish desire to make the State do otherwise and better in Ireland than it does in England, if they wish their middle-class education, for instance, to be a public service with the organisation and guarantees of a public service, they may fairly claim to have these wishes listened to. And listened to, if they are clearly formed, rationally conceived, and steadily persisted in, such wishes ultimately must be. It would be too monstrous AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. 107 that Ireland should be refused an advantage which she desires, and which all our civilised neighbours on the Continent find indispensable, because the middle class in England does not care to claim for itself the advantage in question. The great thing is for the Irish to make up their own minds clearly on the matter. Do they earnestly desire to make their middle-class education adequate and efficient ; to leave it no longer dependent on ' individual efforts, scattered efforts ; ' to rescue it from its dirt and dilapidation, and from such functionaries as the aged assistant who once putt the ear off a boy ? Then let them make it a public service. Does Professor Mahaffy wish to relieve Irish boys from the unintelligent tyranny of endless examinations and competitions, and from being ' stupefied by a multiplicity of subjects ' ? Let him, then, get his countrymen to demand that their secondary instruction shall be made a public service, with the honest, single-minded, logically pursued aim of efficiency. Then these questions as to studies, competitions, and examinations will come, — as with us at present, whether in England or in Ireland, they never come, — under re- sponsible review by a competent mind ; and this is what is wanted. The ' personages of high social standing,' the * lords and bishops and judges/ the ' elderly amateur,' of io8 AN UNREGARDED IRISH GRIEVANCE. whom Professor Mahaffy complains, will cease to potter ; and we shall have, instead, the responsible review of a competent mind. Ireland will not only be doing good to herself by demanding this, by obtaining this ; she will also be teaching England and the English middle class how to live. ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 109 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GE1VTES. 1 I cannot help asking myself how I come to be standing here to-night. It not unfrequently happens to me, indeed, to be invited to make addresses and to take part in public meetings, — above all in meetings where the matter of interest is education ; probably because I was sent, in former days, to acquaint myself with the schools and education of the Continent, and have published reports and books about them. But I make it a general rule to decline the invitation. I am a school-inspector under the Committee of Council on Education, and the Department which I serve would object, and very properly object, to have its inspectors starring it about the country, making speeches on education. An inspector must naturally be prone to speak of that education of which he has particular cognisance, the education which is administered by his own Department, and he might be supposed to let out the views and policy of his Depart- 1 An Address delivered to the Ipswich Working Men's College. no ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. ment. Whether the inspectors really knew and gave the Department's views or not, their speeches might equally be a cause of embarrassment to their official superiors. However, I have no intention of compromising my official superiors by talking to you about that branch of education which they are concerned in administering, — elementary education. And if I express a desire that they should come to occupy themselves with other branches of education too, branches with which they have at present no concern, you may be quite sure that this is a private wish of my own, not at all prompted by my Department. You may rely upon it, that the very last thing desired by that Department itself, is to invade the provinces of education which are now independent of it. Nobody will ever be able to accuse the Committee of Council of carrying an Afghanistan war into those provinces, when it might have remained quietly within its own borders. There is a Latin law-maxim which tells us that it is the business of a good judge to seek to extend his jurisdiction : — Botii judicis est ampliare juris- dictionein. That may be characteristic of a good judge, but it is not characteristic of a British Government in domestic affairs generally, certainly not in the concerns of education. And for this reason : because the British Government ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. in is an aristocratic government. Such a government is entirely free from the faults of what is commonly called a bureaucracy. It is not meddlesome, not fussy, not prone to seek importance for itself by meddling with everybody and everything ; it is by nature disposed to leave individuals and localities to settle their own affairs for themselves as much as possible. The action of indi- viduals and of localities, left to themselves, proves insuffi- cient in this point and in that ; then the State is forced to intervene. But what I say is, that in all those domestic matters, such as the regulation of workhouses, or of factories, or of schools, where the State has, with us, been forced to intervene, it is not our aristocratic executive which has sought the right of intervention, it is public opinion which has imposed the duty of intervention upon our aristocratic executive. Our aristocratic system may have its faults, but the mania for State -interference every- where is not one of them, Above all, in regard to edu- cation this has been conspicuously the case. Govern- ment did not move in the matter while it could avoid moving. Of course, even when it was at last obliged to move, there were some people to be found who cried out against it for moving. In the early days of the Committee of Council, one clergyman wrote that he was not going to H2 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. suffer Lord John Russell, 'or any other Turkish Bashaw/ to send an inspector into his schools ; and Archdeacon Denison threatened, as is well known, to have the poor inspector drowned in a horsepond. But these were eccentric men, living in a fantastic world of their own. To men who inhabit the real world, it was abundantly apparent that our Government moved in the matter of public education as late as it could, that it moved as slowly as it could, as inoffensively as it could ; and that throughout, instead of stimulating public opinion to give it additional powers, it has confined itself to cautiously accepting and discharging the functions which public opinion has insisted on laying upon it. You may be sure that this will continue to be the case ; that if more part in public education comes to be assigned to the Government in this country, it is not that the Government seeks it, it is that the growth of opinion will compel the Government to undertake it. So that if I speak of the desirableness of extending to a further class of schools the action of the State, it is well under- stood that I am not, as in bureaucratic Prussia I might be, revealing the secret aims and ambitions of the Edu- cation Department. All the aims of that Department have been clearly manifested to be the other way. Well, but why am I here ? I am here, in the first ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 113 place, because I heard that your Working Men's College, which holds its annual meeting to night, and which I was asked to address, is the largest body of the kind in England. Bodies of this kind, with their classes, their lectures, their libraries, their aspirations, are a testimony, however poor and imperfect may be the use often made of them, they are, as it seems to me, a testimony, they are a profession of faith, which is both affecting and valuable. They are a profession of belief in the saving power of light and intelligence, a profession of belief in the use and in the practicability of trying to know oneself and the world, to follow ', as Dante says, virtue and knowledge. No one can accuse us English, as a nation, of being too forward with such professions of faith in the things of the mind. No one can accuse us of not showing our- selves enough aware, how little good may in many cases come from professions of this sort, how much they may disappoint us, what a contrast their performance often is to their promise, how much they often bring with them which is hollow and nonsensical. We are very shy, as every one knows, of all public homage to the power of science and letters. We have no National Institute. In a short time there will be held in Paris a reception, as it is called, of one of the most famous men of letters in France, or indeed in all Europe, — M. Renan, — at the French 1 ii 4 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. Academy. That reception, and the discourse of the new member, will be for our neighbours over in France one of the very foremost events of the year. Hardly any parliamentary field-day will call forth greater interest and excitement. Every one will want to be present, every one will be eager to know what is said, every one will discuss what is said. We English keenly feel the un- reality, as we call it, which attends displays of this kind. We prefer that our own celebrations should be for incidents of a more practical character ; should be such as the dinner and speechifying, for instance, at the opening of the annual season for the Buckhounds. But above all, we are on our guard against expecting too much from institutions like this Working Men's College. We are reminded what grand expectations Lord Brougham and the other friends of knowledge cheap and popular, the founders of the Mechanics' Institutes, held out ; what tall talk they indulged in ; and we are told to look and see how little has come of it all. Nature herself fights against them and their designs, we are told. At the end of his day, tired with his labour, the working man in general cannot well have the power, even if he have the will, to make any very serious and fruitful efforts in the pursuit of knowledge. Whatever high professions these institutions may start with, inevitably their members ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 115 will come, it is said, to decline upon a lower range of claim and endeavour. They will come to content them- selves with seeking mere amusement and relaxation from their Institute. They will visit its reading-rooms merely to read the newspapers, to read novels ; and they are not to be blamed for it. No, perhaps they are not to be blamed for it, even if this does happen. And yet the original, lofty aspiration, the aspiration after the satisfactions, solace, and power which are only to be got from true knowledge, may have been right after all. In spite of the frequent disappoint- ment, the constant difficulty, it may have been right. For to arrive at a full and right conception of things, to know one's self and the world, — which is knowledge ; then to act firmly and manfully on that knowledge, — which is virtue ; this is the native, the indestructible impulse of the spirit of man. All the high-flown com- monplaces about the power of knowledge, and about the mind's instinctive desire of it, have their great use, when- ever we can so put them as to feel them animating and inspiring to us. For they are true in themselves ; only they are discredited by being so often used insincerely. The profession of faith of institutes like your College, that knowledge is power, that there is an intelligible law of things, that the human mind seeks to arrive at it, and 1 2 n6 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. that our welfare depends on our arriving at it and obeying it, this profession of faith, I say, is sound in itself, it is precious, and we do well to insist upon it. It puts in due prominence a quality which does not always get enough regard in this country, — intelligence. Goethe, the great poet of Germany, and the greatest critic, perhaps, that has ever lived, went so far as to say boldly of our nation (which, notwithstanding, he highly esteemed and admired) : Der E7iglander ist eigentlich ohne Intellige?iz — ' The Englishman is, properly speaking, without intelligence.' Goethe by no means meant to say that the Englishman was stupid. All he meant was, that the Englishman is singularly without a keen sense of there being an intelligible law of things, and of its being our urgent business to ascertain it and to make our doings conform to it. He meant that the Englishman is parti- cularly apt to take as the rule of things what is customary, or what falls in with his prepossessions and prejudices, and to act upon this stoutly and without any misgiving, as if it were the real natural rule of things. He meant that the Englishman does not much like to be told that there is a real natural rule of things, presenting itself to the intelligence ; to be told that our action, however energetic, is not safe unless it complies with this real and intelligible rule. And I think Goethe was right here, ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 117 and that the Englishman, from his insularity, and from his strength, and from some want of suppleness in his mind, does often answer to the description which Goethe gives of him. Now it is a grave thing, this indifference to the real natural and rational rule of things, because it renders us very liable to be found fighting against nature, and that is always calamitous. And so I come at last to the entire reason for my being here to-night There is a point, in which our action, as a community, seems to me quite at variance with what the rational rule of things would pre- scribe, and where we all suffer by its being thus at variance, I have tried in vain for twenty years to make the parties most directly concerned see the mischief of the present state of things. I want to interest you in the matter. I speak to you as a Working Men's College, the largest in England, representing the profession of faith that what we need is intelligence, the power to see things as they really are, and to shape our action accordingly. I look upon you, I say, as representing that profession of faith, and representing it as entertained by the class of working men. You, too, are concerned in the failure which I want to remedy, though not directly concerned in it. But you are concerned in it, and that gravely ; we are all gravely concerned in it u8 ECCE, C0NVERT1MUR AD GENTES. You will, I am sure, suffer me to speak to you with perfect frankness, even though what I say should offend some of those who hear me. My address is to the class of working men ; but there are present before me to- night, I know, hearers from other classes too. However, the only possible use of my coming here would be lost if I did not speak to you with perfect frankness. I am no politician. I have no designs upon your borough, or upon any borough, or upon parliamentary honours at all. Indeed, I. have no very ardent interest, — if you will allow me to speak for a moment of myself and of what interests me, — in politics in their present state in this country. What interests me is English civilisation ; and our politics in their present state do not seem to me to have much bearing upon that. English civilisation, — the humanising, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society, — that is what interests me. I try to be a disinterested observer of all which really helps and hinders that. Certain hindrances seem to me to be present with us, and certain helps to be wanting to us. An isolated observer may easily be mistaken, and his observations greatly require the test which other minds can exert upon them. If I fail to carry you with me in what seems to me to be perfectly clear, that is against ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GEN7ES, 119 the soundness of my observations and conclusions. But that I may have the chance of carrying you with me, it is necessary that I should speak to you with entire frankness. Then it will appear whether your aid, or the aid of any among you, is to be had for removing what seems to me one great hindrance, and for providing what seems to me one great help, to our civilisation. For twenty years, then, — ever since I had to go about the Continent to learn what the schools were like there, and observed at the same time the people for whom the schools existed and the conditions of their life, and com- pared it with what was to be found at home, — ever since that time, I have felt convinced that for the progress of our civilisation, here in England, three things were above all necessary : — a reduction of those immense inequalities of condition and property amongst us, of which our land- system is the base ; a genuine municipal system ; and public schools for the middle classes. I do not add popular education. Even so long as twenty years ago, popular education was already launched. I was myself continually a witness of the progress it was making ; I could see that the cause of popular education was safe. The three points, then, were reduction of our immense inequalities of condition and property, a municipal system extended all through the country, and public schools for 120 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. the middle classes. These points are hardly dreamed of in our present politics, any one of them. Take the first of the three. Mr. Gladstone, who ought to know, ridicules the very notion of a cry for equality in this country ; he says that the idea of equality has never had the slightest influence upon English politics ; nay, that, on the contrary, we have the religion of inequality. There is, indeed, a little bill brought forward in Parliament year after year, — the Real Estates Intestacy Bill, — which proposes that there should be equality in the division of a man's land amongst his children after his death, in case he happens to die without a will. It is answered, that if a man wants his land to go thus equally amongst his children, he has only just to take the trouble of making a will to that effect ; and that, in the absence of a will, his land had better follow the rule of the present general system of landed inheritance in this country, a system which works well. And nothing more is said, except, perhaps, that one hears a few timid words of complaint about the hardship inflicted upon younger children by this system. But, for my part, I am not so much concerned about the younger children. My objection to the present system is not on their account ; but because I think that, putting their supposed natural rights quite out of the question, the present system does not work well now at ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 121 all, but works altogether badly. I think that now, how- ever it may have worked formerly, the system tends to materialise our upper class, vulgarise our middle class, brutalise our lower class. If it does not do that, I have no other objection to make to it. I do not believe in any natural rights ; I do not believe in a natural right, in each of a man's children, to his or her equal share of the father's property. I have no objection to the eldest son taking all the land, or the youngest son, or the middle daughter, on one condition : that this state of things shall really work well, that it shall be for the public advantage. Once our present system of landed inheritance had its real reason and justification, — it worked well. When the modern nations of Europe were slowly building them- selves up out of the chaos left by the dissolution of the Roman empire, a number of local centres were needed for the process, with a strong hereditary head-man over each; and this natural need the feudal land-system met. It seems to me, it has long seemed to me, that, the circumstances being now quite changed, our system of immense inequalities of condition and property works not well but badly, has the natural reason of things not for it but against it. It seems to me that the natural function is gone, for which an aristocratic class with great landed 122 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. estates was required j and that when the function is gone, and the great estates with an infinitely multiplied power of ministering to mere pleasure and indulgence remain, the class owning them inevitably comes to be materialised, and the more so the more the development of industry and ingenuity augments the means of luxury. The action of such a class materialises all the class of newly enriched people as they rise. The middle class, having above them this materialised upper class, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of their reach, with a standard of social life and manners, the offspring of that wealth and luxury, seeming utterly out of their reach also, are inevitably thrown back too much upon themselves, and upon a defective type of civilisation. The lower class, with the upper class and its standard of life still further out of their reach, and finding nothing to attract them or to elevate them in the standard of life of the middle classes, are inevitably, in their turn, thrown back upon themselves, and upon a defective type of civilisation. I speak of classes. In all classes, there are individuals with a happy nature and an instinct for the humanities of life, who stand out from their class, and who form ex- ceptions. Now, the word vulgarised as applied to the middle class, and brutalised as applied to the lower class, may seem to ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 123 you very hard words. And yet some of you, at any rate, will feel that there is a foundation for them. And whether you feel it or not, the most competent, the most dispassionate observers feel it, and use words about it much more contemptuous and harsher than mine. The question is not, whether you or I may feel the truth of a thing of this kind ; the question is, whether the thing is really so. I believe that it is so ; that with splendid qualities in this nation at large, that with admirable ex- ceptions to be found in all classes, we at present do tend to have our higher class in general materialised, our middle class vulgarised, and our lower class brutalised ; and that this tendency we owe to what Mr. Gladstone calls our religion of inequality. True, no one here in England combines the fact of the defects in our civilisation with the fact of our enor- mous inequality. People may admit the facts separately ; the inequality, indeed, they cannot well deny ; but they are not accustomed to combine them. But I saw, when I began to think about these matters, that elsewhere the best judges combined this fact of great social imperfec- tion with the fact of great inequality. I saw that Turgot, the best and wisest statesman whom France has ever had, himself one of the governing and fortunate class, made inequality answerable for much of the misery of the 124 ECCE, CONVERT! MUR AD GENTES. modern nations of Europe. ' Everywhere,' says Turgot, ' the laws have favoured that inequality of fortunes which corrupts a certain number, to doom the rest to degrad- ation and misery.' Vehement as this language sounds, I saw that the spectacle France is described as presenting, under the old system, was enough to account for it. I saw that the French peasants, under that system, were described by a sober and grave authority as presenting the appearance of a number of puny, dingy, miserable creatures, half clad and half articulate, creeping about on the surface of the ground and feebly scratching it. I saw that Tocqueville, coming after the French Revolution, and a severe judge of its faults and of the faults of de- mocracy, spoke of inequality much as Turgot spoke of it. ' The common people is more uncivilised in aristocratic countries,' says Tocqueville, ' than in any others, because there, where persons so powerful and so rich are met with, the weak and the poor feel themselves overwhelmed, as it were, with the weight of their own inferiority ; not finding any point by which they may recover equality, they despair of themselves altogether, and suffer them- selves to fall into degradation.' And then I saw the French peasant of the present day, who has been made by equality. There is a chorus of voices from all sides in praise of his condition. First ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 125 let us take, as in duty bound, your principal, Mr. Barham Zincke, who has been staying in a French peasant's home this last summer, and has published in the Fortnightly Review, in two delightful articles which ought to be re- printed in a cheap form, an account of what he beheld. } Your principal says that ' the dense peasant population of the Limagne/ — the region where he was staying, in the heart of France, — ' are, speaking of them as a body, honest, contented, hard-working, hardy, self-respecting, thrifty, and self-supporting.' He gives a charming account of their manners and courtesy, as well as of their prosperity ; and he pronounces such a population to be a State's greatest wealth. Prince Bismarck appears to agree with your principal, for he declares that the social condition of France seems to have greater elements of soundness, — this well-being of the French peasant counting foremost among them all, — than the social condition of any other nation of Europe. A learned Belgian economist, M. de Laveleye, chimes in with Prince Bismarck and with your principal, and declares that France, being the country of Europe where the soil is more divided than anywhere else except in Switzerland and Norway, is, at the same time, the country where material well-being is most widely- spread, where wealth has of late years increased most, 1 See Fortnightly Review for November and December, 1878, 126 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. and where population is least outrunning those limits which, for the comfort and progress of the working classes themselves, seem necessary. Finally, I come back again to another countryman of our own, Mr. Hamerton, who lives in France. He speaks of the French peasant just as your principal speaks of him, and he ends by saying : 1 The interval between him and a Kentish labourer is enormous.' What, that black little half-human creature of the times before the Revolution, feebly scratching the earth's surface, and sunk far below the point which any English peasantry ever sank to, has now risen to this, that the interval between him and a Kentish labourer,— no such bad specimen of our labourers either,— is enormous ! And this has been brought about by equality. Therefore, both the natural reason of the thing and also the proof from practical experience seem to me to show the same thing : that for modern civilisation some approach to equality is necessary, and that an enormous inequality like ours is a hindrance to our civilisation. This to me appears so certain, that twenty years since, in a preface to a book about schools, I said that I thought so. I said the same thing more at length quite lately, in a lecture l at the Royal Institution, an institution which 1 Published in the Fortnightly Review for March, 1878 ; and reprinted in Mixed Essays, with the title Equality. ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 127 has been stigmatised by a working man as being ' the most aristocratic place in England.' I repeat it here because it is a thing to be thought over and examined in all its bearings, not pushed away out of sight. If our inequality is really unfavourable to our civilisation, sooner or later this will be perceived generally, and our inequality will be abated. It will be abated by some measure far beyond the scope of our present politics, whether by the adoption of the French law of bequest, which now prevails so widely upon the Continent, or, as Mr. Mill thought preferable, by fixing the maximum of property which any one individual may take by bequest or inheritance, or in some other manner. But this is not likely to come in our time, nor is it to be desired that such a change should come while we are yet ill prepared for it. It is a matter to which I greatly wish to direct your thoughts, and to direct the thoughts of all who think se- riously. I enlarge upon it to-night, because it renders so very necessary a reform in another line, to which I shall come finally. But it is not itself a matter where I want to enlist your help for a positive present measure of reform. Neither is the matter which I am next going to men- tion a matter of this kind. My second point, you remember, was the extension of municipal organisation 128 ECCE, CONVERT! MUR AD GENTES. throughout the whole country. No one in England seems to imagine that municipal government is applicable except in towns. All the country districts are supposed to require nothing more than the parish vestry, answering to that sort of mass-meeting of the parishioners in the churchyard, under the presidency of the parson, after service on Sundays, which Turgot describes in the country districts of France before the Revolution. Nothing, as I have frequently said, struck me more, both in France and elsewhere on the Continent, than the working of the municipality and municipal council as established every- where, and to observe how it was the basis of all local affairs, and the right basis. For elementary schools, for instance, the municipal basis is undoubtedly the natural and right one ; and we are embarrassed, and must be embarrassed, so long as we have not the municipal basis to use for them in the rural districts of this country. For the peasant, moreover, for the agricultural labourer, municipal life is a first and invaluable stage in political education ; more helpful by far, because so much more constant, than the exercise of the parliamentary franchise. So this is my second point to which I should like members of institutions like yours to turn their thoughts, as a thing very conducive to that general civilisation which it is the object of all cultivating of our intelligence ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 129 to bring about. But this, too, — the establishment of a genuine municipal system for the whole country, — will hardly, perhaps, come in our time ; men's minds have not yet been sufficiently turned to it for that. I am content to leave this also as a matter for thought with you. Not so with my third point, where I hope we may actually get something done in our time. I am sure, at all events, we need to get something actually done towards it in our time. I want to enlist your interest and help towards this object, — towards the actual establishment of public schools for the middle classes. The topics which suggest themselves to me in recom- mendation of this object are so numerous that I hardly know which of them to begin with ; and yet I have occu- pied your attention a good while already, and I must before long come to an end of my discourse. As I am speaking to a Working Men's College, I will begin with what is supposed to have most weight with people ; I will begin with the direct interests in this matter of yourselves and your class. By the establishment of public schools for the middle classes I mean an establishment of the same kind as we now have for popular education. I mean the provision by law, throughout the country, of a supply of properly guaranteed schools, in due proportion to the K 130 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. estimated number of the population requiring them j schools giving secondary instruction, as it is called, — that fuller and higher instruction which comes after elementary instruction, — and giving it at a cost not exceeding a certain rate. Now for your direct interest in the matter. You have a direct interest in having facilities to rise given to what M. Gambetta, that famous popular leader in France, calls the new social strata. This rise is chiefly to be effected by education. Promising subjects come to the front in their own class, and they pass then, by a second and higher stage of education, into the class above them, to the great advantage of society. It is hardly too much to say that you and your class have in England no schools by which you can accomplish this rise if you are worthy of it. In France they exist everywhere. Your principal tells us, that' he found in the village where he was staying in the Limagne, six village lads, peasants' children, who were attending the secondary schools in Clermont. After all their losses, after all the milliards they have had to pay to Germany, the French have been laying out more and more in the last few years on their public secondary schools ; and they do not seem so much worse off in their pecuniary condition, at this moment, than practical nations ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 131 which make no such expenditure. At this very time a commission is sitting in France, to consider whether secondary instruction may net be brought into closer con- nexion with elementary instruction than it is at present, by establishing schools more perfectly fitted than the present secondary schools to meet the wants of the best subjects who rise from the schools below. Now, you often see the School Boards, here in this country, doing what is in my opinion an unwise thing, making the programme of their elementary schools too ambitious. The programme of the elementary school should be strictly limited. Those who are capable and desirous of going higher should do it either by means of evening classes such as you have here, or by means of secondary schools. But why do the School Boards make this mistake ?• — for a mistake I think it is, and it gives occasion to the enemies of popular education to represent it as an unpractical and pretentious thing. But why do they make the mistake? They make it because, in the total absence in this country of public secondary schools, and in the inconvenience arising from this state of things, they are driven to make some attempt to supply the deficiency. Discourage, then, the School Boards in their attempt to make the elementary school what it can- not well be ; but make them join with you in calling for k 2 132 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. public secondary schools, which will accomplish properly what they are aiming at. But all this is socialism, we are told. An excellent man, Professor Fawcett, tells us that the most marked characteristic of modern socialism is belief in the State. He tells us that socialism and recourse to the action of the State go always together. The argument is an un- fortunate one just at this moment, when the most judicious of French newspapers, the Journal des Debats, informs us that in France, which we all consider a hotbed of State-action and of centralisation, socialism has quite disappeared. However, this may perhaps turn out not to be true. At any rate, Professor Fawcett says that the working men of this country cannot be too much cautioned against resort to the State, centralisation, bureaucracy, and the loss of individual liberty ; that the working class cannot be too much exhorted to self-reliance and self-help. Well, I should have thought that there had been no lack of cautions and exhortations in this sense to us English, whether we are working men or whatever we may be. Why, we have heard nothing else ever since I can remember ! And ever since I was capable of reflexion I have thought that such cautions and exhortations might be wanted elsewhere, but that giving them perpetually in ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 133 England was indeed carrying coals to Newcastle, The inutility, the profound inutility, of too many of our Liberal politicians, comes from their habit of for ever repeating, like parrots, phrases of this kind. In some countries the action of the State is insufficient, in others it is excessive. In France it is excessive. But hear a real Liberal leader, M. Gambetta, in reply to the invec- tives of doctrinaires against the State and its action. * I am not for the abuses of centralisation,' said M. Gambetta at Romans, ' but these attacks on the State, which is France, often make me impatient. I am a defender of the State. I will not use the word centralisation ; but I am a defender of the national centrality, which has made the French nation what it now is, and which is essential to our progress.' Englishmen are not likely, you may be sure, to let the State encroach too much ; they are not likely to be not lovers enough of individual liberty and of individual self-assertion. Our dangers are all the other way. Our dangers are in exaggerating the blessings of self-will and self-assertion, in not being ready enough to sink our imperfectly informed self-will in view of a large general result. Do not suffer yourselves, then, to be misled by de- clamations against the State, against bureaucracy, cen- tralisation, socialism, and all the rest of it. The State is i 3 4 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. just what Burke very well called it, long before M. Gambetta : the nation in its collective and corporate charac- ter. To use the State is simply to use co-operation of a superior kind. All you have to ask yourselves is whether the object for which it is proposed to use this co-opera- tion is a rational and useful one, and one likely to be best reached in this manner. Professor Fawcett says that socialism's first lesson is, that the working man can acquire capital without saving, through having capital supplied to him by the State, which is to serve as a foun- tain of wealth perennially flowing without human effort, Well, to desire to use the State for that object is irra- tional, vain, and mischievous. Why? Because the object itself is irrational and impossible. But to use the State in order to get, through that high form of co-operation, better schools and better guaranteed schools than you could get without it, is rational, because the object is rational. The schools may be self-supporting if you like, The point is, whether by their being public schools, State schools, they are or are not likely to be better schools, and better guaranteed, than you could get in any other way. Indisputably they are likely to be better, and to give better guarantees. Well, then, this use of the State is a use of co-operation of a very powerful kind for a good and practicable purpose ; and co-operation in itself is ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 135 peculiarly of advantage, as I need not tell you, to the middling and ill off. Rely upon it that we English can use the State without danger ; and that for ycu to be deceived by the cry against State-interference is to play the game of your adversaries, and to prolong for your- selves a condition of certain inferiority. But I will ask you to do more than to consider your own direct interest in the establishment of public schools for the middle classes. I will ask you to consider the general interest of the community. The friends and flatterers of the middle-classes, — and they have many friends and flatterers, — have been in the habit of assuring us, that the predominance of the middle classes was all that we required for our well-doing. Mr. Bright, a man of genius, and who has been a great power in this country, has always seemed to think that to insure the rule of the middle clssses in this country would be to bring about the millennium. Perhaps the working class has not been without its flatterers too, who have assured it that it ought to rule becuase it was so admirable. But you will observe, that my great objec- tion to our enormous inequality, and to our aristocratic system, is not that it keeps out from power worthier claimants of it, but that it so grievously mars and stunts both our middle class and our lower class, so keeps 136 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. them in imperfection. It is not the faults and imperfec- tions of our present ruling class itself which strike me so much. Its members have plenty of faults and imperfec- tions, but as a whole they are the best, the most energetic, the most capable, the honestest upper class which the world has ever seen. What strikes me is the bad effect of their rule upon others. The middle classes cannot assume rule as they are at present,— it is impossible. And yet in the rule of this immense class, this class with so many correspondences, communications, and openings into the lower class, lies our future. There I a^ree with Mr. Bright. But our middle class, as it is at present, cannot take the lead which belongs to it. It has not the qualifications. Seriousness it has, the better part of it ; it may even be said to have sacrificed everything to seriousness. And of the serious- ness and of the sense for conduct in this nation, which are an invaluable treasure to it, and a treasure most dangerously wanting elsewhere, the middle classes are the stronghold. But they have lived in a narrow world of their own, without openness and flexibility of mind, without any notion of the variety of powers and possi- bilities in human life. They know neither man nor the world ; and on all the arduous questions presenting themselves to our age, — political questions, social ques- ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. 137 tions, the labour question, the religious question, — they have at present no light, and can give none. I say, then, they cannot fill their right place as they are now ; but you, and I, and every man in this country, are interested in their being able to fill it. How are they to be made able ? Well, schools are something. Schools are not everything; and even public schools, when you get them, may be far from perfect. Our public elementary schools are far from perfect. But they throw into circulation year by year among the work- ing classes, — and here is the great merit of Mr. Forster's Act, — a number of young minds trained and intelligent, such as you never got previously ; and this must tell in the long run. Our public secondary schools, when we get them, may be far from perfect. But they will throw into circulation year by year, among the middle classes, a number of young people with minds instructed and enlarged as they never are now, when their schools are, both socially and intellectually, the most inadequate that fall to the lot of any middle class among the civilised nations of Europe. And the improvement so wrought must tell in the end, and will gradually fit the middle classes to understand better themselves and the world, and to take their proper place, and to grasp and treat real politics, — politics far other than their politics of 138 ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES. Dissent, which seem to me quite played out. This will be a work of time. Do not suppose that a great change of this kind is to be effected off hand. But we may make a beginning for it at once, and a good beginning, by public schools for the middle classes. For twenty years I have been vainly urging this upon the middle classes themselves. Now I urge it upon you. Comprehend, that middle-class education is a great demo- cratic reform, of the truest, surest, safest kind. Chris- tianity itself was such a reform. The kingdom of God, the grand object of Jesus Christ, the grand object of Christianity, is mankind raised, as a whole, into harmony with the true and abiding law of man's being, living as we were meant to live. Those of old who had to for- ward this work found the Jewish community, — to whom they went first, — narrow, rigid, sectarian, unintelligent, of impracticable temper, their heads full of some impossible politics of their own. Then they looked around, and they saw an immense world outside the Jewish community, a world with a thousand faults, no doubt, but with open- ness and flexibility of mind, new and elastic, full of possi- bilities ; — and they said : We turn to the Gentiles ! Do not be affronted at being compared to the Gentiles ; the Gentiles were the human race, the Gentiles were the future. Mankind are called in one body to the peace of ECCE, CONVERT IMUR AD GENTES. 139 God; that is the Christian phrase for civilisation. We have by no means reached that consummation yet ; but that, for eighteen centuries, we have been making way towards it, we owe to the Gentiles and to those who turned to them. The work, I say, is not nearly done yet ; and our Judaic and unelastic middle, class in this country is of no present service, it seems, for carrying it forward. Do you, then, carry it forward yourselves, and insist on taking the middle class with you. You will be amply repaid for the effort, in your own fuller powers of life and joy, in any event. We may get in our time none of the great reforms which we have been talking about ; we may not even get public schools for the middle classes. But we are always the better, all of us, for having aimed high, for having striven to see and know things as they really are, for having set ourselves to walk in the light of that know- ledge, to help forward great designs, and to do good. 1 Consider whereunto ye are born ! ye were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.' i4o THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. A public man, whose word was once of great power and is now too much forgotten by us, William Cobbett, had a humorous way of expressing his contempt for the two great political parties that between them govern our country, the Whigs and Tories, or Liberals and Conser- vatives, and who, as we all know, are fond of invoking their principles. Cobbett used to call these principles, contemptously, the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke. Instead of taking, in the orthodox style, the divinised heroes of each party, and saying the principles of Mr. Pitt, the principles of Mr. Fox, he took a Whig and a Tory Chancellor, Lord Camden and Lord Hard- wicke, who were more of lawyers than of politicians, and upon them he fathered the principles of the two great parties in the State. It is as if a man were now to talk of Liberals and Conservatives adhering, not to the prin- ciples of Mr. Gladstone, the principles of Lord Beaconsfield, but to the prificiples of Ronndcll Palmer, the pri?iciples of THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. 141 Cairns. Eminent as are these personages, the effect of the profession of faith would be somewhat attenuated ; and this is just what Cobbett intended. He meant to throw scorn on both of the rival parties in the State, and on their profession of principles ; and so this great master of effect took a couple of lawyers, whose names lent themselves happily to his purpose, and called the principles contending for mastery in Parliament, the pri?icip!es of Pratt, the pri?iciples of Yorke ! Cobbett's politics were at bottom always governed by one master-thought, — the thought of the evil condition of the English labourer. He saw the two great parties in the State inattentive, as he thought, to that evil con- dition of the labourer, — inattentive to it, or ignorantly aggravating it by mismanagement. Hence his contempt for Whigs and Tories alike. And perhaps I may be allowed to compare myself with Cobbett so far as this : that whereas his politics were governed by a master- thought, the thought of the bad condition of the English labourer, so mine, too, are governed by a master-thought, but by a different one from Cobbett's. The master- thought by which my politics are governed is rather this, — the thought of the bad civilisation of the English middle class. But to this object of my concern I see the two great parties in the State as inattentive as, in Cobbett's 142 THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. regard, they were to the object of his. I see them inat- tentive to it, or ignorantly aggravating its ill state by mismanagement. And if one were of Cobbett's temper, one might be induced, perhaps, under the circumstances, to speak of our two great political parties as scornfully as he did ; and instead of speaking with reverence of the body of Liberal principles which recommend themselves by Mr. Gladstone's name, or of the body of Conservative principles which recommend themselves by Lord Beacons- field's, to call them gruffly the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke. Cobbett's talent any one might well desire to have, but Cobbett's temper is far indeed from being a temper of mildness and sweet reason, and must be eschewed by whoever makes it his study ' to liberate,' as Plato bids us, ' the gentler element in himself.' And therefore I will most willingly consent to call the principles of the Liberal and Conservative parties by their regular and handsome title of the principles of Mr. Gladstone, the principles of Lord Beaconsficld, instead of disparagingly styling them the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke. Only, while conceding with all imaginable willingness to Liberals and Conservatives the use of the handsomest title for their principles, I have never been able to see that these principles of theirs, at any rate as they succeed in exhibiting THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. 143 them, have quite the value or solidity which their pro- fessors themselves suppose. It is but the other day that I was remarking to confident Conservatives, at the very most prosperous hour of Conservative rule, how, underneath all external appearances, the country was yet profoundly Liberal. And eight or ten years ago, long before their disaster of 1874 came, I kept assuring confident Liberals that the mind of the country was grown a little weary of their stock performances upon the political stage, and exhorting my young Liberal friends not to be for rushing impetuously upon this stage, but to keep aloof from it for awhile, to cultivate a disinterested play of mind upon the stock notions and habits of their party, and to endeavour to promote, with me, an inward working. Without attend- ing to me in the least, they pushed on towards the arena of politics, not at that time very successfully. But they have, I own, been much more fortunate since ; and now they stand in the arena of politics, not quite so young as in those days when I last exhorted them, but full of vigour still, and in good numbers. Me they have left staying outside as of old ; unconvinced, even yet, of the wisdom of their choice, a Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present, disposed to think that by its actual present wor^s and works the Liberal party, however prosperous it 144 7 HE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. may seem, cannot really succeed, that its practice wan's more of simple and sincere thought to direct it, and that our young friends are not taking the surest way to amend this state of things when they cast in their lot with it, but rather are likely to be carried away by the stream themselves. However, politicians we all of us here in England are and must be, and I too cannot help being a politician ; but a politician of that commonwealth of which the pattern, as the philosopher says, exists perhaps somewhere in heaven, but certainly is at present found nowhere on earth, — a Liberal, as I have said, of the future. Still, from time to time Liberals of the future cannot but be stirred up to look and see how their politics relate them- selves to the Liberalism which now is, and to test by them the semblances and promises and endeavours of this, — especially at its moments of resurrection and cul- mination, — and to forecast what its fortunes are likely to be. And this one does for one's own sake first and fore- most, and for the sake of the very few who may happen to be likeminded with oneself, to satisfy a natural and irresistible bent for seeing things as they really are, for not being made a dupe of, not being taken in. But partly, also, a Liberal of the future may do it for the sake of his young Liberal friends, who, though they have com- mitted themselves to the stream of the Liberalism which THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. 145 now is, are yet aware, many of them, of a great need for finding the passage from this Liberalism to the Liberalism of the future. And, although the passage is not easy to find, yet some of them perhaps, as they are men of admirable parts and energy, if only they see clearly the matters with which they have to deal, by a happy and divine inspiration may find it. Let me begin by making myself as pleasant as I can to our Liberal friends, and by conceding to them that their recent triumph over their adversaries was natural and salutary. They reproach me, sometimes, with having drawn the picture of the Radical and Dissent- ing Bottles, but left the Tory Bottles unportrayed. Yet he exists, they urge, and is very baneful ; and his ignoble Toryism it is, the shoddy Toryism of the City and of the Stock-Exchange, and not, as pompous leading-articles say, the intelligence and sober judgment of the educated classes and of mercantile sagacity, which carried the elections in the City of London and in the metropolitan counties for the Conservatives. Profoundly congenial to this shoddy Toryism, — so my Liberal reprovers go on to declare,— ^ere the fashions and policy of Lord Beaconsfield, a policy flashy, insincere, immoral, worship- ping material success above everything ; profoundly con- genial and profoundly demoralising. Now, I will not say L 146 THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. that I adopt all these forcible and picturesque expressions of my Liberal friends, but I fully concede to them that although it is with the Radical and Dissenting Bottles that I have occupied myself, — for indeed he interests me far more than the other, — yet the Tory Bottles exists too, exists in great numbers and great force, particularly in London and its neighbourhood ; and that, for him, Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Beaconsneld's style of government were at once very attractive and very demoralising. This, however, is but a detail of a great question. \ In general, the mind of the country is, as I have already said, profoundly Liberal ; and it is Liberal by a just instinct. It feels that the Tories have not the secret of life and of the future for us, and it is right in so thinking. It turns to the Tories from time to time, in dissatisfaction at the shortcomings of Liberal statesman- ship ; but its reaction and recoil from them, after it has tried them for a little, is natural and salutary. For they cannot really profit the nation, or give it what it needs. Moreover, we will concede, likewise, that what seems to many people the most dubious part of the Liberal pro- gramme, what is blamed as revolutionar^nd a leap in the dark, what is deprecated even by some of the most intelligent of Liberal statesmen as unnecessary and dangerous, — the proposal to give a vote to the agricul- THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM. 147 tural labourer, — we will concede that this, too, is a thing not to be lamented and blamed, but natural and salutary. Not that there is either any natural right in every man to the possession of a vote, or any gift of wisdom and virtue conferred by such possession. But if experience has established any one thing in this world, it has estab- lished this : l8 75> J ust after Michel Levy's death, Madame Sand wrote a letter in which she renders a tribute of praise and gratitude to the memory of that enterprising, sagacious, and successful man. She describes his character, his habits, his treat- ment of his authors, his way of doing business, his con- ception of the book-trade and of its prospects. It was by this conception and by the line which he boldly took in pursuance of it that he was original and remarkable ; a main creator, says Madame Sand, of our new modus vivendi in literature ; one whose disappearance is not the disappearance of a rich man merely, but of an intellectual force. The industrial and literary revolution, for which Michel Le'vy did so much, may be summed up in two words : cheap books. But by cheap books we are not to understand the hideous and ignoble things with which, COPYRIGHT. 245 under this name, England and America have made us familiar. Cheap books in the revolution of Michel Levy, were books in the format Charpetitier or the format Levy, books in duodecimo instead of octavo ; and costing, in general, two-and-sixpence or three shillings a volume instead of eight shillings or nine shillings. But they were still books of such an outward form and fashion as to satisfy a decent taste, not to revolt it ; books shapely, well printed, well margined ; agreeable to look upon and clear to read. Such as it was, however, the cheapening of their books threw, at first, French authors into alarm. They thought that it threatened their interests. ' I remember the time, not so very long ago,' says Madame Sand, 1 when we replied to the publishers who were demon- strating to us what the results of the future would be : " Yes, if you succeed, it will be all very well ; but if you fail, if, after an immense issue of books, you do not diffuse the taste for reading, then you are lost, and we along with you." And I urged upon Michel Levy,' she continues, ' this objection among others, that frivo- lous or unhealthy books attracted the masses, to the exclusion of works which are useful and conscientious. He replied to me with that practical intelligence which he possessed in so eminent a degree: "Possibly, and 246 COPYRIGHT. even probably, it may be so at first. But consider this : that the reading of bad books has inevitably one good result. It inspires a man with the curiosity to read, it gives him the habit of reading, and the habit becomes a necessity. I intend, that, before ten years are over, people shall ask for their book as impatiently as if it were a question of dinner when one is hungry. Food and books, we have to create a state of things when both shall alike be felt as needs ; and you will confess then, you writers and artists, that we have solved your problem : Man does not live by bread a /one." ' The ten years were not ended before Michel Le'vy's authors had to own, says Madame Sand, that their pub- lisher was right. Madame Sand adds that this led her to reflect on the value of the mediocre in art and litera- ture. Illustrious friends and fellow-authors of hers had been in despair at seeing works of the third order obtain a success far beyond any that they could expect for their own works, and they were disposed to think that with cheap books an era of literary decadence was opening. You are misled, she tells them, by the passing disturbance which important innovations always create at first. It was thought, when railways came, that we had seen the last of conveyance by horses and carriages, and that the providers of it must all be ruined \ but it turns out that COPYRIGHT. 247 railways have created a business for horses and carriages greater than there ever was before. In the same way, the abundant consumption of middling literature has stimulated the appetite for trying to know and to judge books. Second-rate, commonplace literature is what the ignorant require for catching the first desire for books, the first gleam of light ; the day will presently dawn for them as it does for the child, who by degrees, as he learns to read, learns to understand also ; and, in fifty years from this time, the bad and the middling in litera- ture will be unable to find a publisher, because they will be unable to find a market. So prophesied George Sand, and the prophecy was certainly a bold one. May we really hope, that towards the year 1930 the bad and the middling in literature will, either in Paris or in London, be unable to find a pub- lisher because it will be unable to find a market ? Let us all do our best to bring about such a consummation, without, however, too confidently counting upon it. But that on which I at present wish to dwell, in this relation by Madame Sand of her debate with her energetic publisher and of her own reflexions on it, is the view presented of the book-trade and of its future. That view I believe to be in the main sound, and to show the course which things do naturally and properly tend to 248 COPYRIGHT. take, in England as well as in France. I do not say that I quite adopt the theory offered by Michel Levy, and accepted by George Sand, to explain the course which things are thus taking. I do not think it safe to say, that the consumption of the bad and middling in literature does of itself necessarily engender a taste for the good, and that out of the multiplication of second- rate books for the million the multiplication of first-rate books does as a natural consequence spring. But the facts themselves, I think, are as Michel Levy laid them down, though one may dispute his explanation and filiation for the facts. It is a fact that there is a need for cheaper books, and that authors and publishers may comply with it and yet not be losers. It is a fact that the masses, when they first take to reading, will probably read a great deal of rubbish, and yet that the victory will be with good books in the end. In part we can see that this is the course which things are actually taking ; in part we can predict, from knowing the deepest and strongest instincts which govern mankind in its develop- ment, — the instinct of expansion, the instinct of self- preservation, — that it is the course which things will take in the future. The practical mode by which Michel Levy revolution- ised the book-trade was this. He brought out in the COPYRIGHT. 249 format Lfoy, at three francs or three francs and a half a volume, new works such as, for example, those of George Sand herself, which formerly would have come out at seven francs and a half a volume. Nay, such works would very often have taken two volumes, costing fifteen francs, to give no more than what is given in one volume of the format Levy for three francs and a half. New books in octavo were cheapened likewise. The two octavo volumes, in French, of Prince Metternich's Memoirs and Correspondence, which have lately come out in Paris, cost but eighteen francs. The two octavo volumes of the English version of Prince Metternich's Memoirs and Correspondence cost thirty-six shillings. But in general we may say that the important reform accomplished in the French book-trade by Michel Le'vy and by other publishers of like mind with him was this : to give to the public, in the format Levy, new books at half-a- crown or three shillings, instead of at from six to twelve shillings. And now to apply this, where it seems to me to be of very useful application, to various points which emerge in discussing the copyright of English authors and the conditions of the English book-trade. I leave on one side all questions of copyright in acted plays, music, and pictures. I confine myself to copyright in books, and to 250 COPYRIGHT. the chief questions raised on it. My point of view will be neither an author's point of view, nor a publisher's point of view, nor yet the point of view of one contending against authors or publishers, but the point of view of one whose sole wish is to let things appear to him fairly and naturally, and as they really are. A Royal Commission on Copyright has lately been sitting, and has made its report. ' We have arrived at a conclusion,' the report declares, ' that copyright should continue to be treated by law as a proprietary right, and that it is not expedient to substitute for this a right to a royalty, or any other of a similar kind.' This opening sentence of the report refers to a great battle. The Commissioners have come, they say, to a conclusion that 'copyright should continue to be treated as a proprietary right.' Here has been the point of conflict, — as to the proprietary right of the author, as to his right of property in his production. Never perhaps do men show themselves so earnest, so pertinacious, so untiringly ingenious, as when they have under discussion the right and idea of property. One is reminded of Pascal : 'This dog is mine, said these poor children ; behold my place in the sun ! ' It is disputed whether an author has the right of property in his production after he has once COPYRIGHT. 251 published it. Professor Huxley and Mr. Herbert Spencer contended with indefatigable ingenuity before the Roval Commission on Copyright that he has ; and Mr. Farrer, of the Board of Trade, and Sir Louis Mallet maintained resolutely that he has not. There is no question that a man can have a right of property in his productions so far as the law may choose to create one for him. But the first point at issue between many distinguished and powerful disputants is, whether he has a natural right. Now, for me the matter is simplified by my believing that men, if they go down into their own minds and deal quite freely with their own consciousness, will find that they have not any natural rights at all. And as it so often happens with a difficult matter of dispute, so it happens here \ the difficulty, the embarrassment, the need for drawing subtle distinctions and for devising subtle means of escape from them, when the right of property is under discussion, arises from one's having first built up the idea of natural right as a wall to run one's head against. An author has no natural right to a property in his production. But then neither has he a natural right to anything whatever which he may produce or acquire. What is true is, that a man has a strong instinct making him seek to possess what he has produced or acquired, to have it at his own disposal ; that he finds 252 COPYRIGHT. pleasure in so having it, and finds profit. The instinct is natural and salutary, although it may be over-stimulated and indulged to excess. One of the first objects of men, in combining themselves in society, has been to afford to the individual, in his pursuit of this instinct, the sanction and assistance of the laws, so far as may be con- sistent with the general advantage of the community. The author, like other people, seeks the pleasure and the profit of having at his own disposal what he produces. Literary production, wherever it is sound, is its own exceeding great reward. But that does not destroy or diminish the author's desire and claim to be allowed to have at his disposal, like other people, that which he produces, and to be free to turn it to account. It hap- pens that the thing which he produces is a thing hard for him to keep at his own disposal, easy for other people to appropriate. But then, on the other hand, he is an inte- resting producer, giving often a great deal of pleasure by what he produces, and not provoking Nemesis by any huge and immoderate profits on his production, even when it is suffered to be at his own disposal. So society has taken the author under its protection, and has sanctioned, to a certain extent, his property in his work, and enabled him to have it at his own disposal. In England our laws give him the property in his work COPYRIGHT. 253 for forty-two years, or for his own life and seven years afterwards, whichever period is longest. In France, the law gives him the property in his work for his own life, and his widow's life, and for twenty years afterwards if he leave children ; for ten years if he have other heirs. In Germany, the property in his work is for his life and thirty years afterwards. In Italy, for his life and forty years afterwards, with a further period during which a royalty has to be "paid upon it to his heirs. In the United States, the author's property in his work is guaranteed for twenty-eight years from publication, with the right of renewal to himself, his wife, or his children, for fourteen years more. And this, though the author's production is a thing confessedly difficult to protect, and easy to appropriate. But it is possible to protect it ; and so the author is suffered to enjoy the property in his production, to have it at his own disposal. But is the author's production really property, ask some people ; has he any natural right to it? Mr. Farrer, like so many other people, seems to be haunted by a metaphysical conception of propeiiy in itself, — a concep- tion distinguishing between certain things, as belonging to the class of that which is property in itself, and certain other things, as belonging to the class of that which is not property in itself. Mr. Farrer's dog, his place in the sun at. 254 COPYRIGHT. Abinger, are of the class of property in itself ; his book, if he produces one, is of the class of that which is not pro- perty in itself. Sir Louis Mallet is in the same order of ideas, when he insists that ' property arises from limita- tion of supply.' Property according to its essential nature, Sir Louis Mallet means, property in itself. Let us beware of this metaphysical phantom of property in itself, which, like other metaphysical phantoms, is hollow and leads us to delusion. Property is the crea- tion of law. It is effect given, by society and its laws, to that natural instinct in man which makes him seek to enjoy ownership in what he produces, acquires, or has. The effect is given because the instinct is natural, and because society, which makes the laws, is itself composed of men who feel the instinct. The instinct is natural, and in general society will comply with it. But there are certain cases in which society will not comply with it, or will comply with it in a very limited degree only. And what has determined society, in these cases, to refuse or greatly limit its compliance with the instinct of ownership, is the difficulty of giving effect to it, the disadvantage of trying to give effect to it in spite of such difficulty. There is no property, people often say, in ideas uttered in conversation, in spoken words ; and it is inferred that there ought to be no property in ideas and words when COPYRIGHT. 255 they are embodied in a book. But why is there no property in ideas uttered in conversation, and in spoken words, while there is property in ideas and words when they come in a book ? A brilliant talker may very well have the instinct of ownership in his good sayings, and all the more if he must and can only talk them and not write them. He might be glad of power to prevent the appro- priation of them by other people, to fix the conditions on which alone the appropriation should be allowed, and to derive profit from allowing it. Society, again, may well feel sympathy with his instinct of ownership, feel a dispo- sition to assist and favour a production which gives it so much pleasure. But we are met by the difficulty, the insuperable difficulty, of giving effect to the producer's instinct of ownership in this case, of securing to him the disposal of his spoken ideas and words. Accordingly, effect is not given to it, and in such spoken ideas and words there is no property. In other cases there is a partial and limited property given, and from the same reason, — from the difficulty of giving complete ownership. Game is an instance in point. A man breeds pheasants, rears them and feeds them, and he has a natural instinct to keep them in his entire possession, and at his own disposal. But the law will allow but a partial satisfaction to this instinct of his, 256 COPYRIGHT. and the moment his pheasants leave his land they may be taken by the person to whose ground they go. Of his chickens, meanwhile, a man retains ownership, even though they may pass over to his neighbour's field. Yet very likely he has bought the eggs of the pheasants and of the chickens alike, reared them both, fed them both, and feels the instinct and desire to claim them both alike as his property. But the law gives effect to this desire fully as regards the chickens, only partially as regards the phea- sants. Why ? Because of the far greater difficulty of giving full effect to it as regards the pheasants, and of the disad- vantage which may arise from persisting in giving effect to it in spite of the difficulty. The law denies to a man the complete ownership of his pheasants, because they are difficult to keep at his own disposal, easy for other people to appropriate. And other people are more prone to appropriate them than the chickens, and more inclined to dispute his ownership of them, because of this very difficulty in maintaining it and facility in violating it. Even the partial ownership of his pheasants which the law does allow to a man, it has to fortify by special measures for its support ; by making trespass in pursuit of game a different and more serious offence than common trespass. To gratify his instinct of ownership fully, to let a man have his pheasants at his entire disposal, the law would COPYRIGHT. 257 have to take more stringent and exceptional measures in his favour than it takes now j and this every one feels to be out of the question. The law will certainly not do more for him than it does now ; the only question is, whether it ought to do so much. To give even as much ownership in game as a man enjoys now, special measures in his favour are required, because his ownership meets with such great natural difficulties. So great are these difficulties, that the special measures to counteract them are far less likely to be reinforced than to be with- drawn. And now to apply this to the question of copyright. The instinct of an author to desire ownership in his pro- duction, and advantage from that ownership, is natural. The author is an interesting person, and society may, and probably will, be even more ready, rather than less ready, to aid in giving effect to the instinct in his case than in the case of others, if it can be done without grave inconvenience. But there is difficulty in securing his ownership. The author's production is a production difficult to keep at his own disposal, easy for others to appropriate. His claim to some benefit of ownership, however, is generally admitted, and he has ownership given to him for a limited term of years. He finds a publisher, and in concert with him he exercises his owner- s 2 $8 COPYRIGHT. ship ; and the result in England of this concert between author and publisher is, that English books are exceed- ingly dear. A strong desire for cheaper books begins to be felt. Here is the real importance of Sir Louis Mallet's contention and of Mr. Farrer's. ' To Englishmen/ says Sir Louis Mallet, ' easy access to the contemporary literature of their own language is only possible on the condition of exile ; England is the only country in which English books are scarce or dear.' 'Nothing can be more intolerable,' says Mr. Fairer, 'than a system of copyright-law under which the inhabitants of the mother- country, in which the books are produced, are the only persons in the world who are prevented from obtaining cheap editions of them.' An impatience, to which Mr. Farrer and Sir Louis Mallet here give utterance, an im- patience at the dearness of English books, a desire to have them cheaper, has therefore to be added to the original difficulty of securing the author's ownership in a kind of production which is by nature hard to keep at his disposal, easy for others to appropriate. An increased difficulty of securing his ownership is the result. The ingenious reasoning of many advocates of the rights of authors, and even the line taken by Mr. Froude in that instructive and interesting article on Copyright which he published in the Edinburgh Review, fail, it COPYRIGHT. 259 seems to me, to touch the point where the strength of their adversaries' case lies. Like their adversaries, they lodge themselves, stark and stiff, in the idea of ' property in itself Only, for them, an author's work is ' property in itself just as much as his horse or his field ; while, for their adversaries, his horse or his field is ' property in it- self,' but his work is not. Let us grant that the adver- saries are wrong, and that an author's work is £ property in itself (whatever that may mean), just as much as his horse or his field. He has at any rate, we will suppose, the same instinct making him seek to have the ownership and profit of his work, as to have the ownership and profit of his horse or field. But what makes the law give him such full ownership as it does of his horse or field, is not, that the horse or field is •' property in itself ; ' it is, that to comply with his natural desire, and to secure him in his ownership, is in the case of the horse or field com- paratively easy. And what makes the law give him a more limited ownership of his literary work, is not, that this work fails to prove its claim to be considered ' property in itself ; ' it is, that, in the case of his literary work, to secure him in his ownership is much more diffi- cult. And suppose we add sufficiently to the difficulty, by the rise of a general impatience at the dearness of new books in England ; of general irritation, at seeing s z6o COPYRIGHT. that a work like Lord Macaulay's Life comes out at thirty-six shillings in England, while in France it would come out at eighteen francs, that a new novel by George Eliot costs a guinea and a half, while a new novel by George Sand costs three shillings ; of general complaints that ' the inhabitants of the mother-country, in which the books are produced, are the only persons in the world who are prevented from obtaining cheap editions of them,' — suppose we add, I say, to the difficulty by all this, and you endanger the retention of even the right of ownership which the law secures to the author now. The advantage of complying with the author's instinct of ownership might be outweighed by the disadvantage of complying with it under such accumulated and immense difficulty. But yet to secure, so far as without intolerable incon- venience it can be done, the benefits of ownership in his production to the author, every one, or almost every one, professes to desire. And in general, those who profess to desire this do really mean, I think, what they say ; and there is no disposition in their minds to put the author off with benefits which are illusory. But Mr. Farrer and others propose, — no doubt without intending the poor author any harm, — a mode of benefit to him from his pro- ductions which does seem quite illusory. The proposal is COPYRIGHT. 26 r to set all the world free to print and sell his work as soon as it appears, on condition of paying him a royalty of ten per cent. But both authors and publishers, and all who have the most experience in the matter, and the nearest in- terest, unite in saying that the author's benefit under this plan would be precarious and illusory. The poor man pursuing his ten per cent, over Great Britain and Ireland would be pitiable enough. But what shall we say of him pursuing his ten per cent, over all the British Dominions ; what shall we say of him pursuing it, under an inter- national copyright on this plan between all English- speaking people, over the United States of America? There are many objections to this plan of a royalty ; but the decisive objection is, that whereas every one professes the wish not to take away from the author all substantial benefit from the sale of his work, this plan, in the opinion of those best able to judge, would take it away entirely. The Royal Commission reported against this plan of a royalty 7 , and in favour of continuing the present plan of securing by law to the author an ownership in his work for a limited term of years. The Commissioners have proposed what would, in my opinion, be a very great im- provement upon the present arrangement. Instead of a copyright for forty- two years, or for life and seven years after, whichever period is longest, they propose to give, 262 COPYRIGHT. as in Germany, a copyright for the author's life and for thirty years after. But the principle is the same as in the arrangement of 1842, and there is no danger at present, in spite of Mr. Farrer's efforts, of the principle being departed from. Mr. Froude says truly that the course recommended by Mr. Farrer, — the withdrawal from the author, in effect, of the benefits of ownership in his work, — is a course which every single person practically connected with literature consents in condemning. He says truly that there is no agitation for it. He says truly that the press is silent about it, and that no complaints are heard from the public. And yet the natural facts, in England as in France, are as Michel Levy states them in his conversation with Madame Sand : there is a need for cheaper books the need will have to be satisfied, and it may be satisfied without loss to either author or publisher. What gives gravity to the dissatisfaction of Sir Louis Mallet and of Mr. Farrer with the actual course of the book-trade in England is, that the course of our book-trade goes counter to those natural facts. Sooner or later it will have to adjust itself to them, or there will be an explosion of discontent likely enough to sweep away copyright, and to destroy the author's benefit from his work by reducing it to some such illusory benefit as that offered by the COPYRIGHT. 263 royalty plan of Mr. Farrer. As our nation grows more civilised, as a real love of reading comes to prevail more widely, the system which keeps up the present exorbitant price of new books in England, the system of lending- libraries from which books are hired, will be seen to be, as it is, eccentric, artificial, and unsatisfactory in the highest degree. It is a machinery for the multiplication and protection of bad literature, and for keeping good books dear. In general, a book which is worth a man's reading is worth his possessing. The plan of having one's books from a lending-library leads to reading im- perfectly and without discrimination, to glancing at books and not going through them, or rather to going through, for the most part, a quantity of the least profitable sort of books only, — novels, — and of but glancing at what- ever is more serious. Every genuine reader will feel that the book he cares to read he cares to possess, and the number of genuine readers amongst us, in spite of all our shortcomings, is on the increase. Mr. Froude, indeed, says, having the experience of an editor's shelves before his eyes, that instead of desiring the possession of more books than one has, one might rather desire not to possess half of those which one has now. But the books he means are just those which a genuine reader would never think of buying, and which 264 COPYRIGHT. yet are shot upon us now in profusion by the lending- libraries. Mr. Froude says, again, that new books are not the best books, and that old books, which are best, are to be bought cheap. True, old books of surpassing value are to be bought cheap ; but there are good new books, too, and good new books have a stimulus and an interest peculiar to themselves, and the reader will not be content to forego them. Mr. Herbert Spencer may tell him, that to desire the possession of good new books, when he is not rich, is merely the common case of the poor desiring to possess what is accessible to the rich only ; that it is as if he wanted fine horses, and the best champagne, and hothouse flowers, and strawberries at Christmas. But the answer is that the good new books, unlike the horses and champagne, may be brought within his reach without loss to the vendor, and that it is only the eccentric, artificial, and highly unsatisfactory system of our book-trade which prevents it. The three-shilling book is our great want, — the book at three shillings or half-a-crown, like the books of the format Levy, shapely and seemly, and as acceptable to the eye as the far dearer books which we have now. The price proposed will perfectly allow of this. The French books of the format Levy, and the French books in octavo, are as shapely and seemly, as acceptable to COPYRIGHT. 265 the eye, as the corresponding English books at double and treble their price. The two octavo volumes of Madame de Re'musat's Memoirs, in French, cost but twelve shillings, yet they make a handsomer book than the two octavo volumes of the same work in English, which cost thirty-two. A cheap literature hideous and ignoble of aspect, like the tawdry novels which flare in the book- shelves of our railway-stations, and which seem de- signed, as so much else that is produced for the use of our middle-class seems designed, for people with a low standard of life, is not what is wanted. A sense of beauty and fitness ought to be satisfied in the form and aspect of the books we read, as well as by their contents. To have the contents offered one for next to nothing, but in hideous and ignoble form and aspect, is not what one desires. A man would willingly pay higher, but in the measure of his means, for what he values, in order to have it in worthy form. But our present prices are pro- hibitive. The taste for beautiful books is a charming and humane taste for a rich man, though really, as has been already said, our ordinary dear books gratify this taste not a bit better than the French cheaper ones. However, the taste for beautiful books requires expense, no doubt, to be fully gratified ; and in large paper copies and exquisite bindings the rich man may gratify it still, 266 COPYRIGHT. as he still gratifies it in France, even when we have re- formed our book-trade as the French have reformed theirs. For reforming ours, the signal innovation neces- sary, as in France, is the three-shilling book ; although, of course, the price of our new works in octavo at sixteen or eighteen shillings a volume would also have to be reduced in proportion. If nothing of this kind is done, if the system of our book- trade remains as it is, dissatis- faction, not loud and active at present, — I grant that to Mr. Froude, — will grow and stir more and more, and will certainly end by menacing, in spite of whatever con- clusion the Royal Commission may now adopt and pro- claim, the proprietary right of the author. The doctrine of M. Michel Levy respecting the book- trade, and what I have been now saying about our book- trade at home, have their application in America also, and I must end with a few words concerning the book- trade of the United States. Indeed, one is invited by the Americans themselves to do so, for the famous publishers in New York, the Messrs. Harper, have addressed to the authors and publishers of this country a proposal for an -International Conference on Copyright. Mr. Conant, who is understood to be connected with the publishing house of the Messrs. Harper, has given in an English magazine an exposition of American opinion on the COPYRIGHT. 267 matter ; and an Englishman of legal training and great acuteness, who signs himself 'C.,' but whom we may, I believe, without indiscretion, name as Mr. Leonard Courtney, has commented on Air. Conant's exposition. The Americans, as is well known, have at present (to quote the words of an American, Mr. George Putnam, who has published on this question of copyright a pam- phlet very temperate and, in general, very judicious) ' no regulation to prevent the use, without remuneration, of the literary property of foreign authors/ Mr. Putnam adds : ' The United States is, therefore, at present the only country, itself possessing a literature of importance, and making a large use of the literature of the world, which has done nothing to recognise and protect by law the rights of foreign authors of whose property it is enjoy- ing the benefit, or to obtain a similar recognition and pro- tection for its own authors abroad.' The Americans, some of them, as is also well known, defend this state of things by adopting the cry of ' free books for free men.' A Conference held at Philadelphia, in 1872, passed resolutions declaring that, 'thought, when given to the world, is, as light, free to all ; ' and, moreover, that ' the good of our whole people, and the safety of our republican institutions, demand that books shall not be made too costly for the multitude by giving 263 COPYRIGHT. the power to foreign authors to fix their price here as well as abroad.' Mr. Conant, in his representation to the English public of the case of the American public, adopts these Philadelphian ideas in principle. But he maintains that in practice the American publishers have generously waived their right to act on them, and he carries the war into the enemy's country. He says for himself and his country- men : ' We are keenly alive to the necessity of the gene- ral diffusion of intelligence. Upon it depends the per- petuity of our republican form of government. Europe is constantly pouring upon our shores a mighty deluge of ignorance and superstition. We welcome here the poor, the outcasts of every land. There is a wide-spread feeling that the Old World, which contributes this mass of ignorance and superstition to our population, should also contribute to the alleviation of the resulting ills.' Mr. Conant alleges that the concession in past times of a copy- right to English authors ' would have retarded the progress of American culture at least half a century, and delayed that wide-spread intellectual development from which English authors reap so large a benefit.' And yet nevertheless, says this good Mr. Conant, ' the course of American publishers, pursued for many years, towards foreign men of letters, shows that they have no COPYRIGHT. 269 disposition to take advantage of the absence of inter- national copyright.' He declares : 'As for English authors, they have already learned that their interests are quite safe in the hands of " Yankee pirates," as some of your writers still persist in calling the men who for years have conducted the publishing business of this country with the most scrupulous regard for the rights of foreign authors. Few English people, I think, have any notion of the amount of money paid to British authors by American publishers. Those authors whose books have been reprinted here without compensation to the author, may rest assured that this was owing to the fact that the sale was not remunerative here, and that international copyright will not make it larger.' On the other hand : 'While for twenty-five years past British authors have enjoyed all the material advantages of copyright in this country, American books have been reprinted in England by the thousand, without compensation to the authors.' And therefore, adds Mr. Con ant, ' in view of these facts, an American may be pardoned for indulging in a quiet laugh at the lofty tone which the Royal Commissioners on Copyright assume in their solemn arraignment of the United States for refusing to grant protection to English authors.' And so the tables are fairly turned upon us. Not only 27 o COPYRIGHT. have English authors no reason to complain of America, but American authors have great reason to complain of England. An English author, as he reads Mr. Conant, will by turns be inclined to laugh and to be indignant. Mr. Leonard Courtney handles Mr. Conant's statement very scornfully and severely. For myself, I am of a gentle disposition, and I am disposed, in reading Mr. Conant in Macmittaris Magazine, to ask him before all things Figaro's question : Qui est-ce qu'on trompe id? — Who is it that is being taken in here? At the Philadelphia Conference, Mr. Conant's statement would have been quite in place ; but why he should address it to the British public passes my comprehension. Our British middle class, no doubt, like the great middle-class public of the United States, likes to have its defective practice covered by an exhibition of fine sentiments. But it is our own defective practice that we seek to cover by the exhibition of fine sentiments ; — as, for instance, when we left Denmark in the lurch after all our admonitions and threatenings to Germany, we assured one another that the whole world admired our moral attitude. But it gives us no pleasure or comfort to see other people's defective practice, by which we are smarting, covered with an exhibition of fine sentiments. And so, as I peruse Mr. COPYRIGHT, 771 Conant, with Figaro I inquire in bewilderment : 'Who is it that is being taken in here?' We know perfectly well the real facts of the case, and that they are not as Mr. Conant puts them ; and we have no interest in getting them dressed up to look otherwise than as they are. Our interest is to see them as they really are ; for as they really are, they are in our favour. If American authors have not copyright here in Eng- land, whose fault is that ? It is the fault of America her- self, who again and again has refused to entertain the question of international copyright. Again and again, in Mr. Conant's own statement of facts, appears the proposal, on the part of England, of an international copyright ; and again and again the end of it is, 'the report was ad- verse,' 'no action was taken,' 'shelved,' 'more pressing matters crowded it out of sight.' If Englishmen suffer by having no copyright in America, they have the American government and people to thank for it. If Americans suffer by having no copyright in England, they have only to thank themselves. But is it true that American authors have no copyright in England ? It is so far from being true, that an Ameri- can has only to visit England when he publishes his book here, — or even, I believe, has only to cross the border into Canada, — in order to have copyright in his work in 272 COPYRIGHT. England. Mr. Motley told me himself that in this way he had acquired copyright in England for his valuable histories. Mr. Henry James gets it in the same way at this moment for those charming novels of his which we are all reading. But no English author can acquire copyright in the United States. As to the liberal payment given at present, without copyright, by American publishers to English authors, it is more difficult to speak securely. Certainly it is far too much to say of British authors in general, that they ' for at least twenty-five years past have enjoyed all the material advantages of copyright in America;' or that they ' have learned that their interests are quite safe in the hands of American publishers.' Considerable sums have, no doubt, been paid. Men of science, such as Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall, are especially mentioned as satisfied with the remuneration voluntarily accorded to them by the American publishers ; and indeed, to judge by the success of their American dealings, it seems that these inheritors of the future, the men of science, besides having their hold upon the world which is to come, have their hold likewise, lucky fellows, upon the world which now is ! Men of letters have not been so fortunate ; and the list, given by Mr. Conant, of those to whom a surprising amount of money COPYRIGHT. 273 is paid from America, is to be received with caution. Mr. Tennyson is mentioned ; but I hear from the best authority that in truth Mr. Tennyson has received little or nothing from the sale of his works in America. One can at least speak for oneself; and certainly I have never received, from first to last, a hundred pounds from America, though my books have been, I believe, much reprinted there. Mr. Conant will probably say that I am one of those authors 'whose sale is not remunerative.' and does not come to much either there or here. And perhaps according to the grand scale by which he weighs things, this may very well be true. Only, if I had not re- ceived more than a hundred pounds here or in America either, during the quarter of a century that I have gone up and down, as the mockers say, preaching sweetness and light, one could never have managed to drag on, even in Grub Street, for all these years. The truth is, the interests of British authors in general cannot well be safe in America, so long as the publishers there are free to reprint whom they please, and to pay, of the authors they reprint, whom they please, and at what rate they please. The interests of English authors will never be safe in America until the community, as a community, gets the sense, in a higher degree than it has it now, for acting with delicacy. It is the sense of T 274 COPYRIGHT. delicacy which has to be appealed to, not the sense of honesty. Englishmen are fond of making the American appropriation of their books a question of honesty. They call the appropriation stealing. If an English author drops his handkerchief in Massachusetts, they say, the natives may not go off with it j but if he drops his poem, they may. This style of talking is exaggerated and false. There is a breach of delicacy in reprinting the foreigner's poem without his consent, there is no breach of honesty. But a finely touched nature, in men or nations, will respect in itself the sense of delicacy not less than the sense of honesty. The Latin nations, the French and Italians, have that instinctive recognition of the charm of art and letters, which disposes them, as a community, to care for the interests of artists and authors, and to treat them with delicacy. In Germany learning is very highly esteemed, and both the government and the community are inclined to treat the interests of authors considerately and delicately. Aristocracies, again, are brought up in elegance and refinement, and are taught to believe that art and letters go for much in making the beauty and grace of human life, and perhaps they do believe it. At any rate, they feel bound to show the dis- position to treat the interests- of artists and authors with delicacy \ and shown it the aristocratic government an^ COPYRIGHT. 275 parliament of England have. We must not indeed ex- pect them to take the trouble for art and letters which the government of France will take. We must not ex- pect of them the zeal that procured for French authors the Belgian Copyright Treaty of 1854, and stopped those Brussels reprints which drove poor Balzac to despair. Neither in India, nor in Canada, nor yet in the United States, has our aristocratic government interposed on behalf of the author with this energy. They do not think him and his concerns of importance enough to deserve it. Still, they feel a disposition to treat his interests with consideration and with delicacy ; and, so far as the thing depends on themselves, they show them. The United States are a great middle-class community of our own race, — free from many obstructions which cramp the middle class in our own country, and with a supply of humane individuals sown over the land, who keep increasing their numbers and gaining in courage and in strength, and more and more make themselves felt in the press and periodical literature of America. Still, on the whole, the spirit of the American community and government is the spirit, I suppose, of a middle-class society of our race ; and this is not a spirit of delicaty. One could not say that in their public acts the United t 2 276 COPYRIGHT. States showed, in general, a spirit of delicacy. Certainly they have not shown that spirit in dealing with authors, — even with their own. They deal with authors, domestic and foreign, much as Manchester, perhaps, might be dis- posed, if left to itself, to deal with them ; as if, provided a sharp bargain was made, and a good thing, as the phrase is, was got out of it, that was all which could be desired, and the community might exult. The worship of sharp bargains is fatal to delicacy. Nor is the missing grace restored by accompanying the sharp bargain with an ex- hibition of fine sentiments. As the great American community becomes more truly and thoroughly civilised, it will certainly learn to add to its many and great virtues the spirit of delicacy. And English authors will be gainers by it. At present they are gainers from another cause. It appears that till lately there was an understanding amongst American publishers, that, when one publisher had made terms with an English author for the republication of his work in America, the rest should respect the agreement, and should leave their colleague in possession of the work. But about two years and a half ago, says Mr. Conant, certain parties began to set at naught this law of trade- courtesy. Certain firms 'began to republish the works of foreign authors, paying nothing for the privilege, and bring- COPYRIGHT. 277 ing out absurdly cheap editions right on the heels of the authorised reprint, which had cost a large outlay for priority and expense of publication.' The ruinous com- petition thus produced has had the effect, Mr. Putnam tells us in his pamphlet, of ' pointing out the absurdity of the present condition of literary property, and emphasi- sing the need of an international copyright.' It has had the effect, he says, of ' influencing a material modification of opinion on the part of publishers who have in years past opposed an international copyright as either inex- pedient or unnecessary, but who are now quoted as ready to give their support to any practicable and equitable measure that may be proposed.' Nothing could be more satisfactory. Accordingly, it is now suggested from America that an international copyright treaty should be proposed by the United States to Great Britain, and, as a first step, that ' a Commission or Conference of American citizens and British subjects, in which the United States and Great Britain shall be equally represented, be appointed respectively by the American Secretary of State and by the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who shall be invited jointly to consider and present the de- tails of a treaty.' The details are reserved for the Conference \ but it is 278 COPYRIGHT. no secret what the main lines of such a treaty, if it is to be accepted in America, must be. The American author will be allowed, on registering his work, to have copyright in England, and the English author to have copyright in the United States. But the foreigner's work must be manufactured and published in the country, and by a subject or citizen of the country, in which it is registered. The English author's book, therefore, to be protected in Americi, must be manufactured and pub- lished in America as well as in England. He will not be allowed to print and publish his book in England only, and to send his copies over to the United States for sale. The main object, I think, of Mr. Conant's exposition, is to make it clear to us on the English side of the water that from this condition the Americans will not suffer themselves to be moved. English publishers and authors seem inclined to cry out that such a condition is an interference with the author's ' freedom of contract.' But then they take their stand on the ground that an author's production is 1 property in itself,' and that one of the incidents of ' property in itself ' is to confer on its possessor the right to ' freedom of contract ' respecting it. I, however, who recognise natural difficulty as setting bounds to ownership, must ask whether, supposing the English author's need COPYRIGHT. 279 for copyright in America to be pressing, he can reason- ably expect to be admitted to copyright there without this condition. Mr. Froude and Mr. Leonard Courtney both of them seem to think that the question of international copyright is not at all pressing. They say that opinion in America is slowly ripening for some better and more favourable settlement of copyright than any settlement which America is now likely to accept ; and that, meanwhile, English authors may be well enough content with their present receipts from American publishers, and had better let things stay as they are. A few English authors may, perhaps, be content enough with their present receipts from America, but to suppose that English authors in general may well be so content, is, I think, a very hazardous supposition. That, however, is of little importance. The important question is, whether American opinion, if we give it time, is likely to cease insisting on the condition that English books, in order to acquire copyright in America, must be manu- factured and published there ; is likely to recognise the English author and publisher as Siamese twins, one of whom is not to be imported without importing the other. Is there any chance, in short, of the Americans, ac- customed to cheap English books, submitting to that 2 So COPYRIGHT. dearness of English books which is brought about in England by what, in spite of all my attachment to certain English publishers, I must call our highly eccentric, artificial, and unsatisfactory system of book-trade? I confess I see no chance of it whatever. There is a mountain of natural difficulty in the way, there is the irresistible opposition of things. Here, then, where lies the real gist of his contention, I am after all at one with Mr. Conant. The Americans ought not to submit to our absurd system of dear books. I am sure they will not ; and, as a lover of civilisation, I should be sorry, though I am an author, if they did. I hope the Americans will give us copyright. But I hope also, that they will stick to Michel Levy's excellent doctrine : ' Cheap books are a necessity, and a necessity which need bring, moreover, no loss to either authors or publishers.' PREFACES TO POEMS. 281 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION OF POEMS. (1853O In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the other in 1852, many of the poems which compose the present volume have already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time. I have, in the present collection, omitted the poem from which the volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus, having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to 282 PREFACES TO POEMS. change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern ; how much, the frag- ments of Empedocles himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared ; the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared ; the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced ; modern problems have ] presented themselves ; we hear already the doubts, we L witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust. The representation of such a man's feelings must be interesting, if consistently drawn. We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in any imitation or representa- tion whatever ; this is the basis of our love of poetry ; and we take pleasure in them, he adds, because all knowledge is naturally agreeable to us ; not to the philosopher only, but to mankind at large. Every representation, therefore, which is consistently drawn may be supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it gratifies this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds. What is ?wt interesting, is that which does not add to our knowledge of any kind ; that which is vaguely con- PREFACES TO POEMS. 283 ceived and loosely drawn ; a representation which is general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of being par- ticular, precise, and firm. Any accurate representation may therefore be expected^ to be interesting ; but, if the representation be a poetical one, more than this is demanded. It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader; that it shall convey a charm, and_J infuse delight. For the Muses, as Hesiod says, were born that they might be ' a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce from cares : ' and it is not enough that the poet should add to the knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to their happiness. ' All art,' says Schiller, ' is dedicated to Joy, and there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men happy. The right art is that alone, which creates the highest enjoyment.' A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been shown to be an accurate, and therefore interesting representation ; it has to be shown also that it is a representation from which men can derive enjoyment. In presence of the most tragic circumstances, represented in a work of art, the feeling of enjoyment, as is well known, may still subsist ; the representation of the most utter calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to 284 PREFACES TO POEMS. destroy it ; the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment ; and the situation is more tragic in proportion as it becomes more terrible. What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived ? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action ; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance ; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic ; the representation of them in poetry is painful also. To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me, that of Empedocles, as I have endeavoured to represent him, belongs j and I have therefore excluded the poem from the present collection. And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation respecting a matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of the poem in question ? I have done so, because I was anxious to avow that the sole reason for its exclusion was that which has been stated above ; and that it has not been excluded in deference to the opinion which many critics of the present PREFACES TO POEMS. 285 day appear to entertain against subjects chosen from distant times and countries : against the choice, in short, of any subjects but modern ones. 'The poet/ it is said, 1 and by an intelligent critic, 'the poet who would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past, and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and therefore both of interest and novelty.' Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining, inasmuch as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta everywhere current at the present day, having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact ; and which are calculated to vitiate the judgment of readers of poetry, while they exert, so far as they are adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of those who make it. What are the eternal objects of poetry, among all nations, and at all times ? They are actions ; human actions ; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the poet. Vainly will the latter imagine that he has everything in his own power ; that he can make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful 1 In the Spectator of April 2, 1853. The words quoted were not used with reference to poems of mine. 286 PREFACES TO POEMS. with a more excellent one by his treatment of it. He may indeed compel us to admire his skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect. The poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action ; and what actions are the most excellent ? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections : to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same ; that which interests them is permanent and the same also. The modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has nothing to do with its fitness for poetical representation ; this depends upon its inherent qualities. To the elementary part of our nature, to our passions, that which is great and passionate is eternally interesting; and interesting solely in proportion to its greatness and to its passion. A great human action of a thousand years ago is more interesting to it than a smaller human action of to-day, even though upon the represen- tation of this last the most consummate skill may have been expended, and though it lias the advantage of appealing by its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no right to demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them ; their claims PREFACES TO POEMS. 2S7 are to be directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the domain of our permanent passions ; let them interest these, and the voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced. Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido. — what modern poem presents personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of an ' exhausted past?' We have the domestic epic dealing with the details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes ; we have poems representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral, intellectual, and social j these works have been produced by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time ; yet I fear- lessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, the Excursion, leave the reader cold in com- parison w r ith the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido. And why is this ? Simply because in the three last-named cases the action is greater, the personages nobler, the situations more intense : and this is the true basis of the interest in a poetical work, and this alone. It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in themselves, but that they are not to be adopted by the modern poet, because it is impossible for him to have them clearly present to his own mind, and 2S3 PREFACES TO POEMS. he cannot therefore feel them deeply, nor represent them forcibly. But this is not necessarily the case. The ex- T ternals of a past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a contemporary ; but his business is with its ^ essentials. The outward man of CEdipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself ; but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with their inward man ; with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic situations, which engage their passions as men ; these have in them nothing local and casual ; they are as accessible to the modern poet as to a con- temporary. The date of an action, then, signifies nothing ; the action itself, its selection and construction, this is what is all-important. This the Greeks understood far more clearly than we do. The radical difference between their poetical theory and ours consists, as it appears to me, in this : that, with them, the poetical character of the action in itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consideration ; with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and images which occur in the treat- ment of an action. They regarded the whole ; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the expression of it ; with us, the expression predominates PREFACES TO POEMS. 289 over the action. Not that they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it ; on the contrary, they are the highest models of expression, the unapproached masters of the grand style. But their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of prominence ; because it is so simple and so well sub- ordinated ; because it draws its force directlv from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a range of subjects ? Because there are so few actions which unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of excellence : and it was not thought that on any but an excellent subject could an excellent poem be constructed. A few actions, therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive possession of the Greek tragic stage. Their significance appeared in- exhaustible ; they were as permanent problems, perpetu- ally offered to the genius of every fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears to us moderns a certain baldness of expression m Greek tragedy ; of the triviality with which we often reproach the remarks of the chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue : that the action itself, the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmseon, was to stand the central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal ; that no accessories were for a moment to u 290 PREFACES TO POEMS. distract the spectator's attention from this ; that the tone of the parts was to be perpetually kept down, in order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole. The terrible old mythic story on which the drama was founded stood, before he entered the theatre, traced in its bare outlines upon the spectator's mind ; it stood in his memory, as a group of statuary, faintly seen, at the end of a long and dark vista : then came the poet, embodying outlines, developing situations, not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown in : stroke upon stroke, the drama proceeded : the light deepened upon the group ; more and more it revealed itself to the riveted gaze of the spectator : until at last, when the final words were spoken, it stood before him in broad sunlight, a model of immortal beauty. This was what a Greek critic demanded ; this was what a Greek poet endeavoured to effect. It signified nothing to what time an action belonged. We do not find that the Persre occupied a particularly high rank among the dramas of /Eschylus, because it represented a matter of contemporary interest ; this was not what a cultivated Athenian required. He required that the per- manent elements of his nature should be moved ; and dramas of which the action, though taken from a long- distant mythic time, yet was calculated to accomplish PREFACES TO POEMS. 291 this in a higher degree than that of the Persae, stood higher in his estimation accordingly. The Greeks felt, no doubt, with their exquisite sagacity of taste, that an action of present times was too near them, too much mixed up with what was accidental and passing, to form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a tragic poem. Such objects belonged to the domain of the comic poet, and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more serious kinds, for pragmatic poetry, to use an excellent expression of Polybius, they were more difficult and severe in the range of subjects which they permitted. Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of Aristotle, and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues — 'All depends upon the subject ; choose a fitting action, penetrate your- self with the feeling of its situations ; this done, every- thing else will follow.' But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one point on which they were rigidly exacting ; the adaptability of the subject to the kind of poetry selected, and the careful construction of the poem. How different a way of thinking from this is ours ! We can hardly at the present day understand what Menander meant, when he told a man who enquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not u 2 292 PREFACES TO POEMS. having yet written a single line, because he had con- structed the action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose under his pen as he went along. We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages ; ' not for the sake of producing any total impression. We » have critics who seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about the action, not to the action itself. I verily think that the majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such I a thing as a total impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be demanded from a poet ; they think the \ term a commonplace of metaphysical criticism. They will permit the poet to select any action he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to leave their poetical sense ungratified, pro- vided that he gratifies their rhetorical sense and their curiosity. Of his neglecting to gratify these, there is little danger. He needs rather to be warned against the danger of attempting to gratify these alone ; he needs rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything else ; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences PREFACES TO POEMS. 293 to develope themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his personal peculiarities ; most fortunate, when he most entirely succeeds in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it did in nature. But the modern critic not only permits a false prac- tice ; he absolutely prescribes false aims. — ' A true allegory of the state of one's own mind in a representative history,' the poet is told, ' is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.' And ac- cordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions ! No assuredly, it is not, it never can be so : no great poetical work has ever been produced with such an aim. Faust itself, in which something of the kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it contains, and in spite of the unsurpassed beauty of the scenes which relate to Margaret, Faust itself, judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a poetical work, is defective : its illustrious author, the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of all times, would have been the first to acknowledge it ; he only defended his work, indeed, by asserting it to be ' something incommensurable.' The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices counselling different things bewilder- 294 PREFACES TO POEMS. ing, the number of existing works capable of attracting a young writer's attention and of becoming his models, immense. What he wants is a hand to guide him through the confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of helping him forward on his road towards this aim. Such a guide the English writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing this, all that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his attention should be fixed on excellent models ; that he may reproduce, at any rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself with their works and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught to produce what is excellent independently. Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare : a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names ; a name never to be mentioned without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a doubt, whether the influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for the readers of poetry, for the great majority, has been of unmixed advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare indeed chose excellent subjects ; the world could afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet, or Othello ; he had no theory respecting the necessity of choosing PREFACES TO POEMS. 295 subjects of present import, or the paramount interest attaching to allegories of the state of one's own mind ; like all great poets, he knew well what constituted a poetical action ; like them, wherever he found such an action, he took it ; like them, too, he found his best in past times. But to these general characteristics of all great poets he added a special one of his own ; a gift, namely, of happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unrivalled : so eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him, and even to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet. Here has been the mischief. These other excellences were his fundamental excellences as a poet ; what distinguishes ] the artist from the mere amateur, says Goethe, is Archi- tedonice in the highest sense ; that power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes : not the profound- ness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the abundance of illustration. But these attractive ac- cessories of a poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole, and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power, these, and these alone. Of 296 PREFACES TO POEMS. this preponderating quality of Shakespeare's genius, ac- cordingly, almost the whole of modern English poetry has, it appears tome, felt the influence. To the exclusive attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree owing, that of the majority of modern poetical works the details alone are valuable, the composition worthless. In reading them one is perpetually reminded of that terrible sentence on a modern French poet : — // dit tout ce qu'il veut, mats malhenreusement il iia rien a dire. Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works of the very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the school of Shakespeare : of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him for ever interesting. I will take the poem of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, by Keats. I choose this rather than the Endymion, because the latter work, (which a modern critic has classed with the Fairy Queen !) although un- doubtedly there blows through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The poem of Isabella, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous words and images : almost in every stanza there occurs one of those vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which the object is made to flash upon the eye of the PREFACES TO POEMS. 297 mind, and which thrill the reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps, a greater ninnber of happy single expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story ? The action in itself is an excellent one ; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely con- structed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the Decameron : he will then feel how pregnant and inte- resting the same action has become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things delineates his object ; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express. I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention on his wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to this, neglecting his other ex- cellences. These excellences, the fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt possessed them, — possessed many of them in a splendid degree; but it may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes give scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a higher poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great poet he is from his skill in discerning and hrmly conceiving an excellent 298 PREFACES TO POEMS. action, from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of intimately associating himself with a character ; not from his gift of expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest • y language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how extremely and faultily difficult Shakespeare's language often is. It is so : you may find main scenes in some of his greatest tragedies, King Lear for instance, where the language is so artificial, so curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This over-curiousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment of a wonderful gift, — of the power of saying a thing in a happier way than any other man ; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of simplicity. ~~He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the ancients, partly no doubt, because he had a far less PREFACES TO POEMS. 299 cultivated and exacting audience. He has indeed a far^, wider range than they had, a far richer fertility of thought ; in this respect he rises above them. In his strong con- ception of his subject, in the genuine way in which he is penetrated with it, he resembles them, and is unlike the moderns. But in the accurate limitation of it, the con- scientious rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous development of it from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them, and comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has of his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients ; he has their important action and their large and broad manner; but he has not their purity of method. He is therefore a less safe model ; for what he has of his own is personal, and inseparable from his own rich nature ; it may be imitated and exaggerated, it cannot be learned or applied as an art. He is above all suggestive ; more valuable, therefore, to young writers as men than as artists. But clearness of arrangement, rigour of develop- ment, simplicity of style, — these may to a certain extent be learned ; and these may, I am convinced, be learned best from the ancients, who, although infinitely less suggestive than Shakespeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive. What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be •n 3 oo PREFACES TO POEMS. our sole models ? the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sym- pathise. An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am speaking too, it will be remembered, not of the best sources of intel- lectual stimulus for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients, better than any- where else, three things which it is vitally important for him to know : — the all-importance of the choice of a subject; the necessity of accurate construction ; and the subordinate character of expression. He will learn from them how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense significance, their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will be convinced that it is this effect, unity and profoundness of moral impression, at PREFACES TO POEMS. 301 which the ancient poets aimed ; that it is this which constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which makes them immortal. He will desire to direct his own efforts towards producing the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its transitoriness. The present age makes great claims upon us ; we owe it service, it will not be satisfied without our admir- ation. I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and impressive experience ; they are more truly than others under the empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile their age ; they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well ; they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in them- selves ; they know, too, that this is no easy task — yaX^hv, as Pittacus said, x a ^ C7r ° v e(r0Xoiv efi/xeycu — and they ask PREFACES TO POEMS. themselves sincerely whether their age and its literature can assist them in the attempt. If they are endeavouring to practise any art, they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves with a belief in the preeminent importance and greatness of their own times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor of the coming poet ; all this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity ; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of feeling. If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn from the age itself, they ask what special fitness the present age has for supplying them. They are told that it is an era of progress, an age commissioned to x carry out the great ideas of industrial development and social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do nothing; that the elements they need for the exercise of their art are great actions, calculated power- fully and delightfully to affect what is permanent in the ( human soul ; that so far as the present age can supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them ; but that an age wanting in moral grandeur can with diffi- culty supply such, and an age of spiritual discomfort PREFACES TO POEMS. 303 with difficulty be powerfully and delightfully affected by them. A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is inferior to the past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual health. He who possesses the discipline I speak of will content himself with remembering the judgments passed upon the present age, in this re- spect, by the men of strongest head and widest culture whom it has produced ; by Goethe and by Niebuhr. It will be sufficient for him that he knows the opinions held by these two great men respecting the present age and its literature ; and that he feels assured in his own mind that their aims and demands upon life were such as he would wish, at any rate, his own to be ; and their judgment as to what is impeding and disabling such as he may safely follow. He will not, however, maintain a hostile attitude towards the false pretensions of his age ; he will content himself with not being overwhelmed by them. He will esteem himself fortunate if he can succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and irritation, and impatience ; in order to delight himself with the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also. I am far indeed from making any claim, for myself 3 o4 PREFACES TO POEMS. that I possess this discipline ; or for the following poems, that they breathe its spirit. But I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, v the only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what they wanted in art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty which is disheartening, and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt this when reading words of disparagement or of cavil : that it is the uncertainty as to what is really to be aimed at which makes our difficulty, not the dissatisfaction of the critic, who himself suffers from the same uncertainty ! Non me Uia fervida terrent Dicta ; . . . Dii me terrent, el Jupiter Jwstis. Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry : he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spiritu- ality and feeling ; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that the first does most harm to art, and the last to himself. If we must be dilettanti : if it is im- possible for us, under the circumstances amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate PREFACES TO POEMS. 30$ firmly : if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists ;— let us, at least, have so much respect for our art as to prefer it to ourselves. Let us not bewilder our successors ; let us transmit to them the practice of poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again, perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, caprice. 3o6 PREFACES TO POEMS. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION OF POEMS. (1854.) I have allowed the Preface to the former edition of these Poems to stand almost without change, because I still believe it to be, in the main, true. I must not, however, be supposed insensible to the force of much that has been alleged against portions of it, or unaware that it contains many things incompletely stated, many things which need limitation. It leaves, too, untouched the question, how far and in what manner the opinions there expressed respecting the choice of subjects apply to lyric poetry, — that region of the poetical field which is chiefly cultivated at present. But neither do I propose at the present time to supply these deficiencies, nor, indeed, would this be the proper place for attempting it. On one or two points alone I wish to offer, in the briefest pos- sible way, some explanation. An objection has been warmly urged to the classing together, as subjects equally belonging to a past time, CEdipus and Macbeth. And it is no doubt true that to PREFACES TO POEMS. 307 Shakespeare, standing on the verge of the middle ages, the epoch of Macbeth was more familiar than that of CEdipus. But I was speaking of actions as they presented themselves to us moderns : and it will hardly be said that the European mind, in our day, has much more affinity with the times of Macbeth than with those of CEdipus. As moderns, it seems to me, we have no longer any direct affinity with the circumstances and feelings of either. As individuals, we are attracted towards this or that personage, we have a capacity for imagining him, irrespective of his times, solely according to a law of personal sympathy; and those subjects for which we feel this personal attraction most strongly, we may hope to treat successfully. Prometheus or Joan of Arc, Charle- magne or Agamemnon, — one of these is not really nearer to us now than another. Each can be made present only by an act of poetic imagination ; but this man's ima- gination has an affinity for one of them, and that man's for another. It has been said that I wish to limit the poet, in his choice of subjects, to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity : but it is not so. I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without regarding to what time they belong. Nor do I deny that the poetic faculty can and does manifest itself in treating the most trifling 3o8 PREFACES TO POEMS. action, the most hopeless subject. But it is a pity that power should be wasted ; and that the poet should be compelled to impart interest and force to his subject, instead of receiving them from it, and thereby doubling his impressiveness. There is, it has been excellently said, an immortal strength in the stories of great actions ; the most gifted poet, then, may well be glad to supple- ment with it that mortal weakness, which, in presence of the vast spectacle of life and the world, he must for ever feel to be his individual portion. Again, with respect to the study of the classical writers of antiquity; it has been said that we should emulate rather than imitate them. I make no objection ; all I say is, let us study them. They can help to cure us of what is, it seems to me, the great vice of our intel- lect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in literature, in art, in religion, in morals : namely, that it is fantastic, and wants sanity. Sanity, — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature ; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of all its variety and power. It is impossible to read carefully the great ancients, without losing something of our caprice and eccentricity ; and to emulate them we must at least read them. 3 Spottiswoode &-" Co., Printers, Nexu-street Square, London <£iY-cl^ CAi a 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. *MV 1 J 1QRQ CE1VFD flfll ®^*® LOAM Due end of FALL Quart pue end of rALL Quarter N a V «> ft ,-« - AubfeU te ggQij af ie£l , NOV 2 9 72 $ -rr BFC'D I.D nF Cl 4 72 - ;> P .V> 8 & 11 1998 JUi 12 2004 LD 21A-45m-9,'67 (H5067sl0)476B General Library University of California Berkeley C05^3t,7M 5 Vt ^M: ■ • UNIVKRSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY • >**t«i 'V "