Chapter 17

"My more immediate object in writing is to remind you of John Mill's book [System of Logic], of which I have lately been reading a considerable part, and I have done so with the conviction that it is one of the most remarkable productions of this nineteenth century. Exceedingly debatable indeed, but most worthy of debate, are many of his favourite tenets, especially those of the last two or three chapters. No man is fit to encounter him who is not thoroughly conversant with the moral sciences which he handles; and remembering what you told me of your own studies under Dugald Stewart, I cannot but recommend the affair to your own personal attention. You will find very few men fit to be trusted with it. You ought to be aware that, although with great circumspection, not to say timidity, Mill is an opponent of Religion in the abstract, not of any particular form of it. That is, he evidently maintains that superhuman influences on the mind of man are but a dream, whence the inevitable conclusion that all acts of devotion and prayer are but a superstition. That such is his real meaning, however darkly conveyed, is indisputable. You are well aware that it is in direct conflict with my own deepest and most cherished convictions. Yet to condemn him for holding, and for calmly publishing such views, is but to add to the difficulties of fair and full discussion, and to render truth (or supposed truth), less certain and valuable than if it had invited, and encountered, and triumphed over every assault of every honest antagonist. I, therefore, wish Mill to be treated respectfully and handsomely."

Few of Mr. Napier's correspondents seem to have been more considerate. At one period (1844) a long time had passed without any contribution from Sir James Stephen's pen appearing in the Review. Mr. Senior wrote a hint on the subject to the editor, and Napier seems to have communicated with Sir James Stephen, who replied in a model strain.

"Have you any offer of a paper or papers from my friend John Austin? If you have, and if you are not aware what manner of man he is, it may not be amiss that you should be apprised that in these parts he enjoys, and deservedly, a very high and yet a peculiar reputation. I have a great attachment to him. He is, in the best sense of the word, a philosopher, an earnest and humble lover of wisdom. I know not anywhere a larger minded man, and yet, eloquent as he is in speech, there is, in his written style, an involution and a lack of vivacity which renders his writings a sealed book to almost every one. Whether he will be able to assume an easier and a lighter manner, I do not know. If not, I rather fear for him when he stands at your bar. All I ask is, that you would convey your judgment in measured and (as far as you can honestly) in courteous terms; for he is, for so considerable a man, strangely sensitive. You must have an odd story to tell of your intercourse with the knights of the Order of the Quill."

And the letter closed with what an editor values more even than decently Christian treatment, namely the suggestion of a fine subject. This became the admirable essay on the Clapham Sect.

The author of one of the two or three most delightful biographies in all literature has published the letter to Mr. Napier in which Macaulay speaks pretty plainly what he thought about Brougham and the extent of his services to the Review. Brougham in turn hated Macaulay, whom he calls the third or greatest bore in society that he has ever known. He is furious--and here Brougham was certainly not wrong--over the "most profligate political morality" of Macaulay's essay on Clive.

"In my eyes, his defence of Clive, and the audacious ground of it, merit execration. It is a most serious, and, to me, a painful subject. No--no--all the sentences a man can turn, even if he made them in pure taste, and not in Tom's snip-snap taste of the lower empire,--all won't avail against a rotten morality. The first and most sacred duty of a public man, and, above all, an author, is to keep by honest and true doctrine--never to relax--never to countenance vice--ever to hold fast by virtue. What? Are we gravely to be told, at this time of day, that a set-off may be allowed for public, and, therefore, atrocious crimes, though he admits that a common felon pleads it in vain? Gracious God, where is this to end! What horrors will it not excuse! Tiberius's great capacity, his first-rate wit, that which made him the charm of society, will next, I suppose, be set up to give a splendour to the inhabitants of Capreae. Why, Olive's address, and his skill, and his courage are not at all more certain, nor are they qualities of a different cast. Every great ruffian, who has filled the world with blood and tears, will be sure of an acquittal, because of his talents and his success. After I had, and chiefly in the _Edinburgh Review_, been trying to restore a better, a purer, a higher standard of morals, and to wean men from the silly love of military glory, for which they are the first to pay, I find the _Edinburgh Review_ preaching, not merely the old and common heresies, but ten thousand times worse, adopting a vile principle never yet avowed in terms, though too often and too much taken for a guide, unknown to those who followed it, in forming their judgments of great and successful criminals."

Of the essay on Warren Hastings he thought better, "bating some vulgarity and Macaulay's usual want of all power of reasoning." Lord Cockburn wrote to Mr. Napier (1844) a word or two on Macaulay. "Delighting as I do," says Lord Cockburn, "in his thoughts, views, and knowledge, I feel too often compelled to curse and roar at his words and the structure of his composition. As a corrupter of style, he is more dangerous to the young than Gibbon. His seductive powers greater, his defects worse." All good critics now accept this as true. Jeffrey, by the way, speaking of the same essay, thinks that Macaulay rates Chatham too high. "I have always had an impression," he says, "(though perhaps an ignorant and unjust one), that there was more good luck than wisdom in his foreign policy, and very little to admire (except his personal purity) in any part of his domestic administration."

It is interesting to find a record, in the energetic speech of contemporary hatred, of the way in which orthodox science regarded a once famous book of heterodox philosophy. Here is Professor Sedgwick on the _Vestiges of Creation_:--

"I now know the Vestiges well, and I detest the book for its shallowness, for the intense vulgarity of its philosophy, for its gross, unblushing materialism, for its silly credulity in catering out of every fool's dish, for its utter ignorance of what is meant by induction, for its gross (and I dare to say, filthy) views of physiology,--most ignorant and most false,--and for Its shameful shuffling of the facts of geology so as to make them play a rogue's game. I believe some woman is the author; partly from the fair dress and agreeable exterior of the Vestiges: and partly from the utter ignorance the book displays of all sound physical logic. A _man_ who knew so much of the surface of Physics must, at least on some one point or other, have taken a deeper plunge; but _all_ parts of the book are shallow.... From the bottom of my soul, I loathe and detest the Vestiges. 'Tis a rank pill of asafoetida and arsenic, covered with gold leaf. I do, therefore, trust that your contributor has stamped with an iron heel upon the head of the filthy abortion, and put an end to its crawlings. There is not one subject the author handles bearing on life, of which he does not take a degrading view."

Mr. Napier seems to have asked him to write on the book, and Sedgwick's article, the first he ever wrote for a review, eventually appeared (1845),--without, it is to be hoped, too much of the raging contempt of the above and other letters. "I do feel contempt, and, I hope, I shall express it. Eats hatched by the incubations of a goose--dogs playing dominos--monkeys breeding men and women--all distinctions between natural and moral done away--the Bible proved all a lie, and mental philosophy one mass of folly, all of it to be pounded down, and done over again in the cooking vessels of Gall and Spurzheim!" This was the beginning of a long campaign, which is just now drawing near its close. Let us at least be glad that orthodoxy, whether scientific or religious, has mended his temper. One among other causes of the improvement, as we have already said, is probably to be found in the greater self-restraint which comes from the fact of the writer appearing in his own proper person.

VALEDICTORY.[1]

[Footnote 1: On the writer's retirement from the editorship of the _Fortnightly Review_, in 1882.]

The present number of the Review marks the close of a task which was confided to me no less than fifteen years ago--_grande mortalis cevi spatium_, a long span of one's mortal days. Fifteen years are enough to bring a man from youth to middle age, to test the working value of convictions, to measure the advance of principles and beliefs, and, alas! to cut off many early associates and to extinguish many lights. It is hardly possible that a Review should have been conducted for so considerable a time without the commission of some mistakes; articles admitted which might as well have been left out, opinions expressed which have a crudish look in the mellow light of years, phrases dropped in the heat or hurry of the moment which one would fain obliterate. Many a regret must rise in men's minds on any occasion that compels them to look back over a long reach of years. The disparity between aim and performance, the unfulfilled promise, the wrong turnings taken at critical points--as an accident of the hour draws us to take stock of a complete period of our lives, all these things rise up in private and internal judgment against anybody who is not either too stupid or too fatuously complacent to recognise facts when he sees them. But the mood passes. Time, happily, is merciful, and men's memories are benignly short.

More painful is the recollection of those earlier contributors of ours who have vanished from the world. Periodical literature is like the manna in the wilderness; it quickly loses its freshness, and to turn over thirty volumes of old Reviews can hardly be exhilarating at the best: least of all so, when it recalls friends and coadjutors who can give their help no more. George Henry Lewes, the founder of the Review, and always cordially interested in its fortunes, has not survived to see the end of the reign of his successor, His vivacious intelligence had probably done as much as he was competent to do for his generation, but there were other important contributors, now gone, of whom this could not be said. In the region of political theory, the loss of J.E. Cairnes was truly lamentable and untimely. He had, as Mill said of him, "that rare qualification among writers on political and social subjects--a genuine scientific intellect." Not a month passes in which one does not feel how great an advantage it would have been to be able to go down to Blackheath, and discuss the perplexities of the time in that genial and manly companionship, where facts were weighed with so much care, where conclusions were measured with such breadth and comprehension, and where even the great stolid idols of the Cave and the Market Place were never too rudely buffeted. Of a very different order of mind from Cairnes, but not less to be permanently regretted by all of us who knew him, was Mr. Bagehot, whose books on the English Constitution, on Physics and Politics, and the fragment on the Postulates of Political Economy, were all published in these pages. He wrote, in fact, the first article in the first number. Though himself extremely cool and sceptical about political improvement of every sort, he took abundant interest in more ardent friends. Perhaps it was that they amused him; in return his good-natured ironies put them wholesomely on their mettle. As has been well said of him, he had a unique power of animation without combat; it was all stimulus and yet no contest; his talk was full of youth, yet had all the wisdom of mature judgment _(R.H. Hutton)_. Those who were least willing to assent to Bagehot's practical maxims in judging current affairs, yet were well aware how much they profited by his Socratic objections, and knew, too, what real acquaintance with men and business, what honest sympathy and friendliness, and what serious judgment and interest all lay under his playful and racy humour.

More untimely, in one sense, than any other was the death of Professor Clifford, whose articles in this Review attracted so much attention, and I fear that I may add, gave for a season so much offence six or seven years ago. Cairnes was scarcely fifty when he died, and Bagehot was fifty-one, but Clifford was only four-and-thirty. Yet in this brief space he had not merely won a reputation as a mathematician of the first order, but had made a real mark on his time, both by the substance of his speculations in science, religion, and ethics, and by the curious audacity with which he proclaimed at the pitch of his voice on the housetops religious opinions that had hitherto been kept among the family secrets of the _domus Socratica_. It is melancholy to think that exciting work, done under pressure of time of his own imposing, should have been the chief cause of his premature decline. How intense that pressure was the reader may measure by the fact that a paper of his on _The Unseen Universe_, which filled eighteen pages of the Review, was composed at a single sitting that lasted from a quarter to ten in the evening till nine o'clock the following morning. As one revolves these and other names of eminent men who actively helped to make the Review what it has been, it would be impossible to omit the most eminent of them all. Time has done something to impair the philosophical reputation and the political celebrity of J.S. Mill; but it cannot alter the affectionate memory in which some of us must always hold his wisdom and goodness, his rare union of moral ardour with a calm and settled mind. He took the warmest interest In this Review from the moment when I took it up, partly from the friendship with which he honoured me, but much more because he wished to encourage what was then--though it is now happily no longer--the only attempt to conduct a periodical on the principles of free discussion and personal responsibility. While recalling these and others who are no more, it was naturally impossible for me to forget the constant and valuable help that has been so freely given to me, often at much sacrifice of their own convenience, by those friends and contributors who are still with us. No conductor ever laid down his _bâton_ with a more cordial and sincere sense of gratitude to those who took their several parts in his performance.

One chief experiment which the Review was established to try was that of signed articles. When Mr. Lewes wrote his Farewell Causerie, as I am doing now, he said: "That we have been enabled to bring together men so various in opinion and so distinguished in power has been mainly owing to the principle adopted of allowing each writer perfect freedom; which could only have been allowed under the condition of personal responsibility. The question of signing articles had long been debated; it has now been tested. The arguments in favour of it were mainly of a moral order; the arguments against it, while admitting the morality, mainly asserted its inexpediency. The question of expediency has, I venture to say, been materially enlightened by the success of the Review." The success of other periodicals, conducted still more rigorously on the principle that every article ought to bear its writer's signature, leaves no further doubt on the subject; so that it is now almost impossible to realise that only fifteen or sixteen years ago scarcely anybody of the class called practical could believe that the sacred principle of the Anonymous was doomed. One of the shrewdest publishers in Edinburgh, and also himself the editor of a famous magazine, once said to me while Mr. Lewes was still editor of this Review, that he had always thought highly of our friend's judgment "until he had taken up the senseless notion of a magazine with signed articles and open to both sides of every question." Nobody will call the notion senseless any longer. The question is rather how long the exclusively anonymous periodicals will resist the innovation.

Personally I have attached less stern importance to signature as an unvarying rule than did my predecessor; though, even he was compelled by obvious considerations of convenience to make his chronique of current affairs anonymous. Our practice has been signature as the standing rule, occasionally suspended in favour of anonymity when there seemed to be sufficient reason. On the whole it may be said that the change from anonymous to signed articles has followed the course of most changes. It has not led to one-half either of the evils or of the advantages that its advocates and its opponents foretold. That it has produced some charlatanry, can hardly be denied. Readers are tempted to postpone serious and persistent interest in subjects, to a semi-personal curiosity about the casual and unconnected deliverances of the literary or social star of the hour. That this conception has been worked out with signal ability in more cases than one; that it has made periodical literature full of actuality; that it has tickled and delighted the palate--is all most true. The obvious danger is lest we should be tempted to think more of the man who speaks than of the precise value of what he says.

One indirect effect that is not unworthy of notice in the new system is its tendency to narrow the openings for the writer by profession. If an article is to be signed, the editor will naturally seek the name of an expert of special weight and competence on the matter in hand. A reviewer on the staff of a famous journal once received for his week's task, _General Hamley on the Art of War_, a three-volume novel, a work on dainty dishes, and a translation of Pindar. This was perhaps taxing versatility and omniscience over-much, and it may be taken for granted that the writer made no serious contribution to tactics, cookery, or scholarship. But being a man of a certain intelligence, passably honest, and reasonably painstaking, probably he produced reviews sufficiently useful and just to answer their purpose. On the new system we should have an article on General Hamley's work by Sir Garnet Wolseley, and one on the cookery-book from M. Trompette. It is not certain that this is all pure gain. There is a something to be said for the writer by profession, who, without being an expert, will take trouble to work up his subject, to learn what is said and thought about it, to penetrate to the real points, to get the same mastery over it as an advocate or a judge does over a patent case or a suit about rubrics and vestments. He is at least as likely as the expert to tell the reader all that he wants to know, and at least as likely to be free from bias and injurious prepossession.

Nor does experience, so far as it has yet gone, quite bear out Mr. Lewes's train of argument that the "first condition of all writing is sincerity, and that one means of securing sincerity is to insist on personal responsibility," and that this personal responsibility can only be secured by signing articles. The old talk of "literary bravoes," "men in masks," "anonymous assassins," and so forth, is out of date. Longer experience has only confirmed the present writer's opinion, expressed here from the very beginning: "Everybody who knows the composition of any respectable journal in London knows very well that the articles which those of our own way of thinking dislike most intensely are written by men whom to call bravoes in any sense whatever would be simply monstrous. Let us say, as loudly as we choose, if we see good reason, that they are half informed about some of the things which they so authoritatively discuss; that they are under strong class feeling; that they have not mastered the doctrines which they are opposing; that they have not sufficiently meditated their subject; that they have not given themselves time to do justice even to their scanty knowledge. Journalists are open to charges of this kind; but to think of them as a shameless body, thirsting for the blood of better men than themselves, or ready to act as an editor's instrument for money, involves a thoroughly unjust misconception."

As to the comparative effects of the two systems on literary quality, no prudent observer with adequate experience will lay down an unalterable rule. Habit no doubt counts for a great deal, but apart from habit there are differences of temperament and peculiar sensibilities. Some men write best when they sign what they write; they find impersonality a mystification and an incumbrance; anonymity makes them stiff, pompous, and over-magisterial. With others, however, the effect is just the reverse. If they sign, they become self-conscious, stilted, and even pretentious; it is only when they are anonymous that they recover simplicity and ease. It is as if an actor who is the soul of what is natural under the disguises of his part, should become extremely artificial if he were compelled to come upon the stage in his own proper clothes and speaking only in his ordinary voice.