Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885

by Various

GENERAL GORDON AND THE SLAVE TRADE.

In an article in the Fortnightly Review for the month of October,[46] under the heading of “The Future of the Soudan,” grave charges are made against General Gordon.

It is alleged in that article that General Gordon’s proclamation at Khartoum, of the 18th or 19th of February last, will have a very injurious effect upon the condition of thousands of unhappy negroes from the upper regions of the Nile, who are, or will become, slaves. That General Gordon has undone by his own hands the work he devoted years of his life to accomplish. That his proclamation to the slaveholders showed that he was inclined to temporize with an injustice, and that the English Government have confirmed the right of man to sell man. It is further asserted that the issue of the proclamation secured General Gordon’s safe arrival at Khartoum.

The writer advocates the total abolition of slavery in Egypt at once, without any compensation. He is of opinion that General Gordon should not have accepted a commission from the Khedive. He thinks that if an equitable administration, under the British Government, cannot be established, it would be better to abandon the Soudan absolutely, and leave the native chiefs to themselves, even at the risk of there being a period of anarchy; but further on he says there is no reason why we should allow the Soudan to sink into barbarism. And then he goes on to assume that some form of government might be established, separate from Egypt, and that the railway from Suakim to Berber ought to be made, if we wish to keep open the road to Khartoum, and our access to the heart of Africa. The writer considers that the garrisons of Kassala and Sennaar should have been relieved through Abyssinia, and that General Gordon was most unwisely empowered to settle the nomination of the future native administration of the country, in place of frankly withdrawing from the Soudan, and leaving the tribes to settle their government among themselves. The writer then makes a direct charge against General Gordon to the effect that he, in a proclamation of February 26, said he had been compelled to send for British troops, who were then on the road, and would arrive in a few days. In conclusion, the writer of the article states that the despatch of the present expedition is a sufficient proof that General Gordon overrated his powers.

Now what are the facts?

According to the terms of the Convention[47] between the British and Egyptian Governments for the suppression of the slave trade, dated August 4, 1877, it was agreed that slave-hunting should cease, and that any persons engaged therein should be treated as murderers, and it was further arranged that after certain dates—viz., August 4, 1884, in lower Egypt, and August 4, 1889, in the Soudan, all trafficking in slaves between family and family, should be illegal, and be punished with imprisonment. It was further resolved that a special ordinance should be published throughout the land of Egypt, in order to prepare the people for the change determined upon.

General Gordon, during the time that he was Governor-General of the Soudan, rigidly adhered to this Convention, and annually published a proclamation to the effect that the sale of slaves between family and family would determine in 1889. In Lower Egypt, where, by the terms of the Convention, the sale of slaves has already become illegal, no such proclamations have been promulgated, nor have any steps whatever been taken to put the terms of the Convention into force. Although General Gordon faithfully carried out the provisions of this article of the Convention, he was adverse to the conditions. He saw that they could not be carried out; and suggested that the only effectual way of abolishing slavery would be the following:—

1. The registration of all existing slaves.
2. Registers to be kept in each Government office of the names of slaves and their owners, with a description of each.
3. Every slave not registered within six months from a certain date to be free.
4. All slaves born after a certain date to be free.

And he suggested that the Convention should be cancelled, and that the foregoing proposals should take its place.

Prior to General Gordon’s arrival in the Soudan in February last, it was rumored throughout that country by the emissaries of the Mahdi, that General Gordon would proclaim the freedom of all slaves, which form seven-eighths of the population of that province. In order to counteract this baneful influence, General Gordon, on his arrival at Khartoum, issued the proclamation[48] complained of. What are its terms? It simply tells the people what they are by law entitled to—viz., “That whoever has slaves shall have full right to their services, and full control over them, and that no one shall interfere with their property.” General Gordon had no power to cancel the Convention and abolish slavery. What he did was in accordance with a solemn convention entered into by the Governments of Great Britain and Egypt, and in no way referred to the making of new slaves, and still less to slave-hunting, against which nefarious traffic, as is well known, all his energies have been exercised.

It is not the case that the issue of the proclamation procured the safe arrival of General Gordon at Khartoum. The proclamation was not issued until after his arrival at Berber—most probably not until after his arrival at Khartoum itself.

With regard to the total abolition of slavery, without compensation, at once—the writer can hardly have considered the question. For a powerful nation like Great Britain to confiscate the personal property of a people, with whom slavery dates from the time of the Pharaohs, would be as impolitic as it would be unjust. We have no right, human or divine, to so deal with property that is not our own. We did not dare to act in this manner when we gave our slaves their freedom, we began by proposing a loan of £15,000,000, and we ended by a gift of £20,000,000.

With respect to General Gordon’s commission as Governor-General which is objected to—how could he have derived any power without it? The number of Egyptian employés and troops could be counted by thousands, each province being under the government of an Egyptian Pasha. How could he have issued any orders unless he derived his authority from the firman of the Khedive.

The writer advocates the evacuation of the Soudan upon any terms, even if such withdrawal would result in anarchy—always provided that Great Britain is not prepared to exercise a protectorate over it—and then he goes on to recommend the construction of the Suakim and Berber railway under any circumstances, with the view of opening the road to Khartoum, and giving us access to the heart of Africa. He seems to consider that the people of the Soudan would, after a time of anarchy, form good governments. It is asserted, on the contrary, that the country, at present a productive one, would revert into barbarism, and, after a scene of murder, rapine, and plunder, would become the resort of slave-hunters,[49] who would carry on raids into all the surrounding provinces.

The writer does not say where the money is to come from for the construction of the railway, or how it is to be maintained. When he speaks of the garrisons of Sennaar and Kassala being withdrawn through Abyssinia, he apparently forgets the extreme hatred that exists between the natives of the Soudan and the Abyssinians. He seems to have forgotten the thousands of people whom General Gordon was sent to remove. Putting on one side the Egyptian garrisons in the Bahr-el-Gazelle, and at the equator, and other places, Colonel Coetlogen states[50] that the people to be removed from Khartoum and Sennaar alone consists of from 40,000 to 50,000 persons, and is of opinion that the evacuation would take two years to carry out, and could only be carried out at great risk, and with much bloodshed.

It is very difficult to explain the meaning of the proclamation of February 26,[51] wherein General Gordon speaks of having sent for British troops who would in a few days be in Khartoum. It would seem as if the proclamation had been promulgated under some misapprehension or misunderstanding open to explanation. General Gordon is not an Arabic scholar, and his interpreter may have inserted words that he did not use. Again, General Gordon may have intended to allude to Graham’s force proceeding to Suakim,[52] since the proclamation is addressed to the inhabitants of the Soudan generally, of which Suakim is an integral part; or he may refer to the 200 Indian troops that on the same day (February 26) he requests[53] may be sent to Wadi-Halfa.

As this incident has nothing to do with the future of the Soudan, nor with the slave proclamation, it would seem quite unnecessary for the writer of the article in the Fortnightly Review to go out of his way to charge General Gordon, an absent officer, with having proclaimed an untruth.

As to the statement that “the dispatch of the present expedition is a sufficient proof that General Gordon overrates his powers,” it is not to be believed that the people of England will endorse any such unfair statement. On the contrary, they will be of opinion that General Gordon’s prestige has never stood so high as it does at this time. It has certainly carried him through the perils of a terrible ordeal out of which it seems probable that he and his companions will emerge with undiminished reputation. Few persons will ever know the fearful anxiety which he has undergone during this time of trial—not on account of himself, but on account of those who were with him, and for whose lives he considered himself responsible. General Gordon never asked for any expedition to Khartoum. After Graham’s victories, he requested that two squadrons of British cavalry should be sent to Berber, and 200 men to Wadi-Halfa. He himself remarked, he made these requests solely on account of the moral effect they would produce if acceded to.

It is difficult to know for what purpose the present expedition is sent, except it be to carry out the evacuation of this fertile country. It is to be hoped, however, in the interests of humanity, that the country may be retained under Egyptian rule, the more especially as Khartoum is as essential to Egypt as our frontier position at Quetta is to India. Under Egyptian rule it returned a surplus revenue of over £100,000.

The question of Zebehr requires no comment, and it is too long a subject to go into.

In conclusion, it may be observed that, while General Gordon would perhaps deprecate any notice being taken of the article referred to, yet in his absence his friends do not consider it should be allowed to pass unobserved.—Contemporary Review.

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WÜRZBURG AND VIENNA.
SCRAPS FROM A DIARY.

BY EMILE DE LAVELEYE.

Going to Vienna to collect books and documents, with the intention of studying the results of Bosnia’s occupation by Austro-Hungary, I take the Rhine route, and stop two days at Würzburg to see Ludwig Noiré and have a talk on Schopenhauer. The Vater Rhein is now changed beyond recognition: quantum mutatus ab illo. How different all is to when I visited it for the first time, years ago on foot, stopping at the stages mentioned in Victor Hugo’s “Rhin,” which had just appeared. All those grand peeps of Nature to be got on the old river, as it forced its majestic way through barriers of riven rocks and volcanic upheavals, have now almost wholly disappeared. The wine-grower has planted his vineyards even in the most secluded nooks, and built stone terraces where the rocks were too steep for cultivation. All along the banks, these giant staircases climb to the summits of peaks and ravines. The vines have stormed the position, and their aspect is uniform. The Burgs, built on heaps of lava, “the Maus” and “the Katze,” those sombre retreats of the Burgraves of old, now covered with the green leaves of the vine, have lost their former wild aspect. The Lorelei manufactures white wine, and the syren no longer intoxicates sailors with the songs of her harp, but with the juice of the grape. There is nothing here now to inspire Victor Hugo’s “Burgraves,” or Heine’s

“Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, Dass ich so traurig bin; Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”

Below, engineering skill has dammed in the waters of the river, and the basaltic blocks form a black wall with white lines between the stones. Black and white! Even the old God of the Rhine has adopted the Prussian colors. Embankments have been constructed at the wide points of the river, for the purpose of increasing its depth, and of reconquering meadows, by the slow but natural process of raising the level by mud deposits. Between Mannheim and Cologne, the current has gained ten hours, and the dangers of navigation of legendary celebrity have disappeared. All along the embankments immense white figures inform navigators at what distance from them it is safe to pass. On each bank, too, runs a railway, and on the river itself pass steamers of every shape, form, and description—steamers with three decks, for tourists, as in the United States, little pleasure-boats, iron barges from Rotterdam, steam-tugs worked by paddle or screw, and dredgers of various proportions; all these hundreds of chimneys vomit a continuance of black smoke, which darkens the whole atmosphere. The carriage roads are in admirable order; not a rut is visible, and they are lined with fruit-trees, and with the same black and white basaltic blocks as the river. The Prussian colors again; but the aim is to point out the road for carriages on dark nights. When the way turns either to the right or the left, the trees on each side of it are painted white, so as to be distinctly visible. I have never anywhere seen a great river so thoroughly tamed, subdued, and utilized, so completely bent to man’s necessities. The free Rhine of Arminius and of the Burgraves is as well disciplined as any grenadier of Brandenburg, The economist and the engineer admire, but painters and poets bewail.

Buffon, in a page published in every “Cours de Littérature,” sings a hosanna to cultivated Nature, and appears unable to find words strong enough to express his horror of Nature in its savage state, “brute” Nature as he calls it. At the present day, our impression is precisely the reverse of this. We seek on almost inaccessible summits, in the region of eternal snow, and in the very heart of hitherto unexplored continents, a spot where man has not yet penetrated, and where we may behold Nature in her inviolate virginity. We are stifled by civilization, wearied out with books, newspapers, reviews, and periodicals, letters to write and to read; railway travelling, the post, the telegraph, and the telephone, devour time and completely mince up one’s life; any solitude for fruitful reflection is quite out of the question. Shall I find it, at least, among the fir-trees of the Carpathians, or beneath the shade of the old oaks of the Balkans? Industry is spoiling and soiling our planet. Chemical produce poisons the water, the dross from different works and factories covers the country, quarries split up the picturesque slopes of valleys, black coal smoke dulls the verdant foliage and the azure of the sky, the drainage of large cities turns our rivers into sewers, whence emerge the germs of typhus. The useful destroys the beautiful; and this is so general as at times to bring tears to the eyes. Have not the Italians on the lovely Isle of Sta. Heléna, near to the public gardens in Venice, erected works for the building of engines, and replaced the ruins of a fourth-century church by chimneys, whose opaque smoke, produced by the detestable bituminous coal of the Saar, would soon leave a sooty trace on the pink marble of the Doge’s palace and on the mosaics of St. Mark, just as we see them on St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, so ugly covered with sticky streaks. It is true that the produce of this industrial activity becomes condensed in revenue, which enriches many families, and adds considerably to the list of the bourgeois population inhabiting the capital. Here, on the banks of the Rhine, these revenues are represented by villas and castles, whose pseudo-Greek or Gothic architecture peeps out from among masses of exotic trees and plants in the most sought-after positions, near to Bonn, Godesberg, St. Goar or Bingen. Look! there is an immense feudal castle, beside which Stolzenfels, the Empress Augusta’s favorite residence, would be a mere shooting box. This immense assemblage of turrets, galleries, roofs, and terraces must have cost at least £80,000. Has it sprung from coal or from Bessemer steel? It is situated just below the noble ruin of Drachenfels. Will not the dragon watching over the Niebelungen treasure in Nifelheim’s den, avenge this impertinent challenge of modern plutocracy?

All that I see on my way up the Rhine leads me to reflect on the special characteristics of Prussian administration. The works which have so marvellously “domesticated” the river as to make it a type of what Pascal calls “un chemin qui marche,” have taken between thirty and forty years, and have been carried out continuously, systematically and scientifically. In her public works, as in her military preparations, Prussia has succeeded in uniting two qualities which are only too often lacking—a spirit of consistency, and the love of progress. The desire to be as near as possible to perfection is apparent in the most minute details. Not unfrequently consistency, and a too close following of traditions, leads to routine which rejects innovations. Great strength is attained, and the chances of success are considerably increased if, while one aim is kept always in view, the best means to attain it are selected and applied without delay.

I have remarked, when speaking of parliamentary administration, that a lack of consistency was one reason of the feebleness of democracies. This should be guarded against as soon as it becomes apparent, or inferiority will ensue. A few trifling facts will show that the Prussians are as great lovers of useful novelties and of practical improvement as the Americans. On the Rhine, at the ferries the old ferry-boats have been replaced by little steamers, which are constantly crossing the river from one side to the other. At the railway stations, I notice that the trucks for luggage are made of steel, and are lighter and stronger than any I have seen elsewhere. The system for warming the railway compartments is also more perfected. Heated pipes run under the seats of the carriages, and the passengers can regulate the temperature by turning a needle on a disc from Kalt (cold) to Warm or vice-versâ. At the summit of the tower of the Town Hall of Berlin the different flagstaffs for the flags hoisted on the fête days are ranged in order. Outside the highest gallery iron rings have been fitted all round in which to fix the staffs, each of which has a number corresponding to the same number on the ring it is to fit into. In this manner both rapidity and regularity are insured. Order and foresight are safe means to an end.

I intended going to see at Stuttgart a former member of the Austrian Cabinet, Albert Schüffle, who now devotes all his time to the study of social questions, and has published some very well-known works—among others, “Capitalismus und Socialismus,” and “Bau und Leben des Socialen Körpers” (“Construction and Life of the Social Body”), books which place him at the extreme left of Professorial Socialism. Unfortunately, he is at the baths in the Black Forest. But I stop at Würzburg to meet Ludwig Noiré, a philosopher and philologist, who has deigned to study political economy. The sight of the socialistic pass to which democratic tendencies are leading modern society, induces many philosophers to turn their attention to social questions. This is the case in France with Jules Simon, Paul Janet, Taine, Renouvier; in England with Herbert Spencer, William Graham, and even with that æstheticist of pre-Raphaelite art, Ruskin.

I hold that political economy should go hand in hand with philosophy, religion, and especially with morality; but as I cannot myself rise to these elevated spheres of thought, I am only too happy when a philosopher throws me out a bit of cord by which I may pull myself a little higher, above our workaday world. Ludwig Noiré has written a book, which is exactly what I needed in this respect, and which I hope to be able to speak of at greater length a little later. It is entitled “Das Werkzeug” (“The Tool”). It shows the truth of Franklin’s saying: Man is a tool-making creature. Noiré says that the origin of tools dates from the origin of Reason and Language. At the commencement, as far back as one can conceive, man was forced to act on matter to obtain food. This action on Nature for the purpose of satisfying wants is labor. As men were living together in families and in tribes, labor was carried on in common. A person making a muscular effort very naturally pronounces certain sounds in connection with the effort he is making. These sounds, repeated and heard by the entire group, were after a time understood to signify the action of which they were the spontaneous accompaniment. Thus was language born from natural activity in view of supplying imperious needs, and the verb representing the action preceded all their words. The effort to procure the necessary and useful develops the reasoning powers, and tools soon became necessary. Wherever traces of prehistoric men are found, there is also to be found the flint implement. Thus reason, language, labor, and implements, all manifestations of an intelligence capable of progress, appeared almost simultaneously.

Noiré has developed this theory fully in another book, entitled, “Ursprung der Sprache” (“Origin of Speech”). When it was published, Max Müller stated in the Contemporary Review, that, although he considered this system too exclusive, yet it was far superior to either the onomatopœia or the interjection theory, and that it was certainly the best and the most probable one brought forward at present. I can but bow before this appreciation.

Noiré is a fanatical Kantian, and an enthusiastic admirer of Schopenhauer. He has succeeded in forming a committee for the purpose of erecting a statue in honor of the modern Heraclites. The committee, he says, must be international, for if as a writer Schopenhauer be German, as a philosopher he belongs to the entire world, and he asked me to join it. “I am exceedingly flattered by the proposal,” said I; “but I offer two objections.” In the first place, a humble economist has not the right to place his name side by side with such as are already on the list. Secondly, being an incurable disciple of Platonism, I fear that Schopenhauer did not remain in the Cartesian line of spiritualism. I feel persuaded that two notions, which, it appears, are at the present day very old-fashioned—I speak of a belief in God and in the soul’s immortality—should form the basis of all social science. He who believes in nothing but matter cannot rise to a notion of what ‘ought to be’—i. e., to an ideal of right and justice. This ideal can only be conceived as a divine order of things imposing itself morally on mankind. The ‘Revue Philosophique’ of October, 1882, says, ‘Positive Science, as understood at the present day, considers not what should be, but only what is. It searches merely the formula of facts. All idea of obligation, or of imperative prohibition, is completely foreign to its code. Such a creed is a death-stroke to all notion of duty. I believe that faith in a future life is indispensable for the accomplishment of good works. Materialism weakens the moral sense, and naturally leads to general decay.’

“Yes,” replied Noiré, “this is just the problem. How, side by side with the dire necessities of Nature, or with Divine omnipotence, can there be place for human personality and liberty? Nobody, neither Christian nor Naturalist, has yet been able satisfactorily to answer this. Hence has sprung, on the one hand, the predestination of the Calvinists and Luther’s De servo arbitrio, and, on the other, determinism and materialism. Kant is the first mortal who fearlessly studied this problem and studied it satisfactorily. He plunged into the abyss, like the diver of Schiller, and returned, having vanquished the monsters he found there, and holding in his hand the golden cup from which henceforward Humanity may drink the Divine beverage of Truth. As nothing can be of greater interest to us than the solution of this problem, so our gratitude, be it ever so considerable, can never possibly equal the service rendered by this really prodigious effort of the human mind. Kant has provided us with the only arm which can combat materialism. It is full time we should make use of it, for this detestable doctrine is everywhere undermining the foundations of human society. I venerate the memory of Schopenhauer, because he has inspired the truths revealed by Kant with more real life and penetrating vigor. Schopenhauer is not well known in either France or England. Some of his works have been translated, but no one has really understood him thoroughly, because to understand a philosopher it is necessary not only to admire but to be passionately attached to him. ‘The folly of the Cross’ is an admirable expression.

“Schopenhauer maintains that the will is the great source of all; it means both personality and liberty. We are here at once planted at the antipodes of naturalistic determinism. Free intelligence creates matter. Spiritus in nobis qui viget, ille facit. God is the great ideal. He does not make us move, but moves Himself in us. The more we appropriate to ourselves this Ideal, the freer we become; we are the reasonable and conscious authors of our actions, and liberty consists in this. Schopenhauer’s moral law is precisely that of Christianity—a law of abnegation, of resignation and asceticism. What Christians call Charity, he designates as ‘Pity.’ He exhorts his followers to struggle against self-will; not to let their eyes dwell on the passing delusions of the outside world, but to seek their soul’s peace by sacrificing all pursuits and interests which should fix their attentions solely on the changing scenes of this life. Are not these also the Gospel principles? Must they be rejected because Buddha also preached them? ‘The sovereign proof of the truth of my doctrines,’ says Schopenhauer, ‘is the number of Christian persons who have abandoned all their earthly treasure, position and riches, and have embraced voluntary poverty, devoting themselves wholly to the service of the poor and the sick and needy, undaunted in their work of charity by the most frightful wounds, the most revolting complaints. Their happiness consists in self-abnegation, in their indifference to the pleasures of this life, in their living faith, in the immortality of their being, and in a future of endless bliss.’

“The chief aim of Kant’s metaphysics,” proceeds Noiré, “is to fix a limit to the circle that can be embraced by man’s reason. ‘We resemble,’ he says, ‘fish in a pond, who can see, just to the edge of the water, the banks that imprison them, but are perfectly ignorant of all that is beyond.’ Schopenhauer goes farther than Kant. ‘True,’ he says, ‘we can only see the world from outside, and as a phenomenon, but there is one little loophole left open to us by which we can get a peep at substantial realities, and this loophole is each individual “Myself,” revealed to us as “Will,” which gives us the key to the “Transcendent.” You say, dear colleague, that you are incurably Platonic; are you not then aware Schopenhauer constantly refers to the ‘divine’ Plato, and to the incomparable, the prodigious, der erstaunliche Kant. His great merit is to have defended idealism against all the wild beasts which Dante met with in the dark forest, nella selva oscura’ into which he had strayed—materialism and sensualism, and their worthy offspring selfishness and bestiality. Nothing can be more false or dangerous than physics without metaphysics, and yet this truth proclaimed at the present day by great men merely provokes a laugh. The notion of duty is based on metaphysics. Nothing in Nature teaches it, and physics are silent on the subject. Nature is pitiless; brute force triumphs there. The better armed destroys and devours his less favored brother. Where then is right and justice? Materialists adopt as their motto the words which Frenchmen falsely accuse our Chancellor of having uttered, ‘Might is Right.’ Schopenhauer’s ‘Pity,’ Christian ‘Charity,’ the philosopher’s and jurist’s ‘Justice,’ are diametrically opposed to instinct and the voice of Nature, which urge us to sacrifice everything to the satisfaction of animal appetites. Read the eloquent conclusion of the book of Lange, ‘Geschichte des Materialismus.’ If materialism be not vanquished while it is yet time, all the law courts, prisons, bayonets and grape-shot in the world will not suffice to prevent the downfall of the social edifice. This pernicious doctrine must be banished from the brains of learned men, where it now reigns supreme. It has started from thence, and has gradually obtained a hold on the public mind. It is the duty of true philosophy to save the world.”

“But,” I replied, “Schopenhauer’s philosophy will never be comprehended but by a small minority; for myself, I humbly confess I have never read but fragments translated.”

“It is a pity you have never perused the original,” answered Noiré, “the style is exceedingly clear and simple. He is one of our best writers. He has exposed the most abstruse problems in the best possible terms. No one has more thoroughly justified the truth of what our Jean Paul said of Plato, Bacon and Leibnitz, the most learned reflection need not exclude a brilliant setting to show it off in relief, any more than a learned brain excludes a fine forehead and a fine face. Unfortunately, M. de Hartmann, who popularized Schopenhauer, has too frequently rendered his ideas unintelligible by his Hegelian Jargon. Schopenhauer could not endure Hegelianism. Like an Iconoclast, he smashed to shivers its idols with a heavy club. He approved of violent expressions, and indulged in very strong terms. So, for instance, he liked what he calls die göttliche Grobheit, ‘divine coarseness.’ At the same time, he praises elegance and good manners, and even, strange to say, has translated a little manual on ‘The Way to Behave in Society,’ ‘El Oraculo Manual,’ published in 1658, by the Jesuit, Baltasar Gracian. ‘There was a time,’ he writes, ‘when Germany’s three great sophists, Fichte, Schelling, and especially Hegel, that seller of senselessness, der freche unsinnige Schmierer, that impertinent scribbler, imagined they would appear learned by becoming obscure. This shameless humbug succeeded in winning the adulations of the multitude. He reigned at the Universities, where his style was imitated. Hegelianism became a religion, and a most intolerant one. Whosoever was not Hegelian was suspected even by the Prussian State. All these good gentlemen were in quest of the Absolute, and pretended that they had found it, and brought it home in their carpet-bags.’

“Kant maintainedthat human reason can only grasp the relative. ‘Error,’ cry in chorus Hegel, Schelling, Jacobi and Schleiermacher, and tutti quanti. ‘The Absolute! Why, I know it intimately; it has no secrets from me,’ and the different universities became the scenes of revolutions of the Absolute which stirred all Germany. If it were proposed to attempt to recall these illustrious maniacs to their right reason, the question was asked, ‘Do you adequately comprehend the Absolute?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then hold your tongue; you are a bad Christian and a dangerous subject. Beware of the stronghold.’ The unfortunate Beneke was so startled by this treatment that he went mad and drowned himself. Finally these great authorities quarrelled between themselves. They informed each other that they knew nothing of the Absolute. A quarrel on this subject was very often deadly. These battles resemble the discussion at Toledo between the Rabbi and the Monk in Heine’s ‘Romancero.’ After they had both lengthily discussed and quarrelled, the king said to the queen: ‘Which of the two do you think is right?’ ‘I think,’ replied the queen, ‘that they both smell equally unpleasantly.’

“This nebulous system of the Hegelian Absolute-seekers, reminding one of Nephclokokkygia, ‘the town in the clouds,’ in Aristophanes’ ‘Birds,’ has become a proverb with our French neighbors, who very rightly are fond of clearness. When anything seems to them unintelligible, they dub it as German metaphysics. Cousin did his best to clarify all this indigestible stuff, and serve it up in a palatable form. But in so doing he lost, not his Latin, but his German and his French. I am sure you never understood that ‘pure Being’ was identical with ‘no Being.’ Do you recollect Grimm’s story, ‘The Emperor’s Robe?’ A tailor condemned to death promised, in order to obtain his pardon, to make the Emperor the finest robe ever seen. He stitched, and stitched, and stitched ceaselessly, and finally announced that the robe was ready, but that it was invisible to all, save to wise people. All the servants, officers, and chamberlains of the court came to examine this work of art with the ministers and high dignitaries, and one and all pronounced it magnificent. On the coronation day the Emperor is supposed to put on the costume, and rides through the town in procession. The streets and windows are crowded; no one will admit that he has less wisdom than his neighbor, and all repeat; ‘How magnificent! Was ever anything seen so lovely?’ At last a little child calls out, ‘But the Emperor is naked,’ and it was then admitted that the robe had never existed, and the tailor was hanged.

“Schopenhauer is the child revealing the misery, or rather the non-existence of Hegelianism, and his writings were consequently unappreciated for upwards of thirty years. The first edition of his most important work found its way to the grocer’s shop and thence to the rubbish heap. It is our duty to-day to make amends for such injustice, and to render him the honor which is his due; his pessimism need not stay you. ‘The world,’ he says, ‘is full of evil, and all suffer here below. Man’s will is by nature perverse.’ Is not this doctrine the very essence of Christianity? Ingemui tomnis creatura. He maintains that our natural will is selfish and bad, but that, by an effort over itself, it may become purified and rise above its natural state to a state of grace, of holiness, of which the Church speaks, δευτἑρος πλὁυς. This is the deliverance, the Redemption, for which pious souls long, and it is to be attained by an indifference to and condemnation of the world and of self. Spernere mundum, spernere se, spernere se sperni.”[54]

Before leaving Würzburg I visit the Palace, formerly the residence of the Prince-Bishops, and also several churches. The Palace, die Residenz, is immense, and seems the more so when one reflects that it was destined to ornament the chief town of a small bishopric. Built between the years 1720 and 1744, after the plan of the palace of Versailles, it is very nearly as large. There is not such another staircase to be found anywhere. This, and the hall which precedes it, occupy the entire width of the building and a third of its length, and the effect is really of imperial magnificence. The trains of crowds of cassocked prelates and fine ladies could sweep here with ease. The cut stone balustrades are ornamented with statues. There is a suite of 350 reception-rooms—all for show, none for use. A certain number of these were decorated at the time of the French Empire. How mean the paintings on the ceilings, the pseudo-classic walls, and the mahogany furniture with brass ornaments, appear when compared to the apartments completed at the beginning of the eighteenth century, where the “chicorée” ornamentation exhibits all its seductions. I have never seen, all over Europe, anything in this style so perfect or better preserved. The curtains are in material of the period, and the chairs, sofas, and arm-chairs are covered to match. Each room is of a dominant color. There is a green one with metallic shades, like the wings of a Brazilian beetle. The broché silk on the furniture is to correspond. The effect is magical. In another, splendid Gobelin tapestry, after Lebrun, represents the triumph and the clemency of Alexander. Another, again, is all mirrors, even to the door-panels, but groups of flowers in oil-painting on the glass temper the excessive brilliancy. The stoves are really marvels of inventive genius and good taste, all in white and gold Saxony china. The blacksmith’s art never produced anything finer than the immense wrought-iron gates which enclose the pleasure-grounds, with their terraces, lawns, grass-plots, fountains, and rustic retreats. This princely residence, which has been almost invariably vacant since the suppression of episcopal sovereignty, has remained perfectly intact. It has been deteriorated neither by popular insurrections nor by changes in taste. What finished models of the style of the Regency architects and furniture makers could find here to copy from!

The contemplation of all these grandeurs suggests two questions to my mind. Where did these Sovereigns of tiny States find the money to furnish themselves with splendors and luxuries which Louis XIV. might have envied? My colleague, George Schanz, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Würzburg, informs me that these bishops had scarcely any troops to maintain. “Make,” he says, “builders, joiners, upholsterers, and carpenters of all our soldiers all over the land at the present day, and Germany might soon be covered with such palaces.”

Second question: How could these bishops, disciples of Him “who had not where to lay His head,” spend the money raised by taxation of the poor, on pomps and luxury worthy of a Darius or a Heliogabalus? Had they not read the Gospel condemnation of Dives, and the commentaries of the Church’s Fathers? Was the Christian doctrine of humility and of charity, even to voluntary property, only understood in monasteries and convents? Those grandees of the Church must have been completely blinded by the mistaken sophism which leads to the belief that extravagance and waste benefits the working man, the real producer. This unfortunate error is only too harmful at the present day.

During the eighteenth century the majority of the churches of Würzburg were completely spoilt by being ornamented in that Louis XV. style, suited only to the interior of palaces. As Boileau says, “ce ne sont que festons, ce ne sont qu’astragales,” gothic arches disappear beneath garlands of flowers, clouds with angel’s draperies in relief and interlacings of “chicorée,” the whole in plaster and covered with gilding. The altars are frequently entirely gilt. It is a perfect profusion of make-believe riches. In the towns the façades of some houses here and there are finished examples of this florid architecture. Doubtless the radiance of Versailles magnificence urged Germany to decorate her monuments and dwellings “à la Française,” even after the Sun there had set.

From my windows, which look out on to the square before the palace, I see a battalion of troops march past to exercise. Even the guards at Berlin could not march more automatically. The legs and the left arm move exactly together, while the guns are held precisely at the same angle by each soldier. Their steel barrels form a perfectly straight line as they glisten in the sunshine. The ranks of soldiers are absolutely rectilinear. The whole move in a body as if they were fastened on to a rail. It is perfection. What care and pains must have been bestowed before such a result could be attained! The Bavarians have naturally done their very best to equal and even to surpass the Prussians. They do not choose to be esteemed any longer as mere beer-drinkers, heavy, and somewhat dense. I wonder if this exceedingly severe drill, so effective on parade, is of use on a battle-field of the present day, where it is usual to disperse to attack. I am not competent to answer this question, but it is certain that rigid discipline accustoms the soldier to order and obedience; two very necessary virtues, especially in a democratic age. Obedience is still more wanted when the iron hand of despotism gives place to the authority of magistrates and laws. The mission of schools and military service is to teach this lesson to the citizens of Republics. The more the chief power loosens its hold, the more should free man bend at once to the exigencies necessary for the maintenance of order in the State. If this be not so, anarchy will result, and a return to despotism is then inevitable, for anarchy cannot be tolerated.

In the evening the sound of bugles is heard. It is the retreat sounding for the garrison troops. It is a melancholy farewell to the day passing away, and, religious, like a call to rest, from the night, which is fast falling. Alas! how sad it is to think that these trumpets thus harmoniously sounding the curfew will one day give the signal for battle and bloodshed! Men are still as savage as wild beasts, and with less motive, for they no longer devour their slaughtered enemy. I am a member of at least four societies whose object is to preach peace and recommend arbitration. No one listens to us. Even free nations prefer to fight. I admit perfectly that when the security or the existence of a country is at stake, it is impossible to have recourse to arbitration, although its decisions would be at least as just as those of violence and chance; but there are cases which I call “Jenkins’s ears,” since reading Carlyle’s “Frederic the Great.”[55] In such as these, where the question is one of amour propre, of obstinacy, and frequently, I may say, also, of stupidity, arbitration might often prevent conflicts.

But if man is still hard on his fellow, he has become more tender towards animals. He has forbidden their being uselessly tortured. I take note of a touching example of this. I walk up to the Citadel, whence there is a splendid view over all Franconia. I cross the bridge over the Maine. In a street where the quaint pinions of the houses and gaudy sign-posts over the doors would delight the eye of a painter, I see a sort of sentry-box, on which is written in large characters, Theirschutz-Verein (“Society for the Protection of Animals”). A horse is standing there. Why? To be at the disposal of waggoners with a heavy load who are going up the slope to the bridge, and thus to prevent them ill-treating their horses. This seems to me far more ingenious and efficacious than the infliction of a fine.

Würzburg is not an industrial town. There appears to be no special reason why the population and the wealth of the city should increase rapidly, and yet the old town is surrounded with fine new quarters, fashionable squares, pretty walks and fine wide streets, handsome houses and villas. Here, as elsewhere, that singular phenomenon of our age, the immense increase in the number of well-to-do families, is distinctly apparent. If this continue in the same proportions, the “masses” of the future will not be composed of those who live on wages and salaries, but of those living on profit, interest, or revenue. Revolutions will become impossible, for the established order of things would have more protectors than assailants. These countless comfortable residences, these edifices of all kinds which spring up in every direction, with their luxurious and opulent appointments, all this wealth and well-being, is the result of the employment of machinery. Machinery increases production and economizes labor, and as the wages of labor have not diminished, the number of those who could live without working has increased.

Würzburg possesses an ancient University. It is a very old sixteenth-century building, situated in the centre of the town. As they recently did me the honor to confer on me the degree of Doctor honoris causa, I wished to see the Rector to offer him my thanks, but I had not the good fortune to meet him. On the Boulevard, special institutes have been constructed for each separate science, for chemistry, physics, and physiology. Immense sums have been spent in Germany to add a number of those separate institutes to the different Universities. The eminent professor of chemistry at Bonn, M. Kekulé, recently took me over the building constructed for his branch of science. With its Greek columns, and its palatial façade, it is considerably more extensive than the whole of the old University. The subsoil devoted to experimental and metallurgical chemistry resembles immense works or foundries. The professor’s apartments are far more sumptuous than those of the first authorities. Neither the Governor, the Bishop, nor even the General himself, can boast of anything to be compared with them. In the drawing-rooms and dancing saloons the whole town might be assembled. This Institute has cost more than a million francs. In Germany it is very rightly considered that a professor who has experiments to make ought to live in the same building where are the laboratories and lecture-rooms. It is only thus that he is able to follow analyses which need his supervision, at times even at night. Comparative anatomy and physiology have also each their palace. Several professors of natural sciences complain that it is really an excess. They say they are crushed by the extent and complications of their appurtenances, and especially by the cares and responsibilities they involve; nevertheless, if exaggeration there be, it is on the right side. Bacon’s motto, “Knowledge is Power,” becomes truer every day. The proper application of science is the chief source of wealth, and, consequently, of power. Nations, do you wish to be powerful and rich? Then encourage to the utmost your learned men.

I stop a day en route to revisit Nuremberg, the Pompeii of the Middle Ages. I will not speak of its many interesting churches, houses, towers, of the Woolding Chamber, nor of the terrible Iron Virgin, covered inside with spikes, like Regulus’ barrel, which, in closing, pierced its victim through and through, and opened to drop the corpse into the torrent roaring a hundred feet below. Nothing gives a more vivid idea of the refined cruelty of these dark ages. But I have no wish to encroach upon Baedeker’s prerogative. A word only as to what I see before the cathedral. I observe there a small Gothic monument, which reminds me of the Roman column of Igel, on the Mosel, near Trèves. It has a niche on each of the four sides, under glass. In the first niche is a thermometer, in the second an hygrometer, in the third a barometer, and in the fourth the day’s telegrams from the observatory, and the meteorological maps. These instruments are enormous, from four to five feet in height at least, so that the figures may be large enough to be clearly legible. I have seen similar monuments in several German towns, and in Switzerland, at Geneva, in the gardens near the Rhone, at Vevey, close to the landing-stage, and at Neuchatel, on the promenade near the lake. It would be excellent if all towns would adopt them. I take every opportunity of urging this. Their cost is but trifling. A perfectly plain one can be made for £40, something more elegant might cost £80 or £100; they are a source of amusement and a means of instructing the people, and a daily lesson in physics for all classes. The laboring man learns there far better than he would do at school the practical use of these instruments, which are most useful for agricultural purposes and for sanitary precautions.

Towards midnight I go on foot to the railway station, to take the express to Vienna. The old castle throws a black shadow over the town, the roofs of which seem to whiten in the silvery moonlight. This, I say to myself, is the birthplace of the Hohenzollern family. What a change has taken place in its destiny since its name first appeared in history, in 1170, when Conrad of Hohenzollern was made Burgraaf of Nuremberg! One of his descendants, Frederick, first Elector, left this town in 1412 to take possession of Brandenburg, which the spendthrift Emperor Sigismund had sold him for 400,000 florins of Hungarian gold. He had already borrowed half this sum from Frederick, who was as economical as the ant, and had even mortgaged the electorate as security. Being unable to repay his debt, and in want of more money to defray the costs of an expedition to Spain, he very willingly yielded up this inhospitable northern “Mark,” the sands of the “Marquis of Brandenburg,” which Voltaire so turned into ridicule. The Emperor could not suppose that from this petty Burgrave would spring a future wearer of the imperial crown. Economy is a small virtue made up of small privations, but which makes much of little—Molti pochi fanno un assai—“Mony a pickle maks a mickle,” as the Scotch say. Though far too often forgotten or ignored by rulers, it is nevertheless even more necessary for nations than for individuals.

A short June night is soon passed in a sleeping car. I wake up and find myself in Austria. I perceive it at once from the delicious coffee and cream which is served me in a glass, by a fair young girl in a pink print dress and with bare arms. It very nearly equals in quality that of the Posthof at Carlsbad. We are very soon in view of the Danube, but the railway does not keep alongside it. Whatever the well-known waltz, “The Blue Danube,” may say to the contrary, the river is not blue at all. Its waters are yellow-green, like the Rhine, but how infinitely more picturesque is the “Donau!” No vineyards, no factories, and very few steamers. I saw but one, making its way with difficulty against the rapid current. The hills on either side are covered with forests and green meadows, and the branches of the willow trees sweep the water. The farm-houses, very far apart, have a rustic and mountain-like appearance. There is very little movement, very little trade; the peasant is still the chief producer of riches. On this lovely summer morning the sweet repose of this peaceful existence seduces and penetrates me. How delightful it would be to live quietly here, near these pine forests, and these beautiful meadows, where the cattle are at pasture! But on the other side of the river where there is no railway! There are several reasons for this great contrast between the Rhine and the Danube. The Rhine flows towards Holland and England, two markets that have been well established for upwards of three hundred years, and ready to pay a high price for all the river brings them. The Danube flows towards the Black Sea, where the population is exceedingly poor, and can scarcely afford to purchase what we should call here the necessaries of life. The produce of Hungary, even live cattle, is taken westward by rail to London. The transport by water is too long. Secondly, coal, the indispensable fuel of all modern industry, is cheaper on the Rhine than anywhere else. And thirdly, the Rhine, ever since the Roman conquest and at the earliest period of the Middle Ages, has been a centre of civilization, whereas that portion of the Danube the most valuable for traffic was, until yesterday, in the hands of the Turks.

At the Amstett Station I purchased the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, which is, I think, with the Pester Lloyd, the best edited and the pleasantest paper to read in the German language. The Kölnische Zeitung is exceedingly well-informed, and the Allgemeine Zeitung is also as complete and interesting as possible; but it is a terrible pell-mell of subjects, a dreadful muddle, where, for instance, many little paragraphs from France or Paris are disseminated haphazard in the six sheets. I would rather read three Times’ than one Kölnische, in spite of the respect with which that paper inspires me. I have scarcely unfolded my Neue Freie Presse than I find myself in the very heart of the struggle of nationalities, just as I was sixteen years previously, only that the strife is no longer, as it then was, between Magyars and Germans. The Deak dual compromise created a modus vivendi, which is still in force. The dispute is now between Tchecks and Germans on the one hand, and between Magyars and Croatians on the other. The Minister Taaffe has decided to dissolve the Bohemian Parliament and there will be fresh elections. The national and feudal Tchecks banding together will overthrow the Germans, who will no longer possess more than a third of the votes in the Diet. The Freie Presse is perfectly disconsolate at this, and foresees the most terrible disasters in consequence: if not the end of the world, at least the upset of the monarchy. On account of these warnings, the numbers are seized by Government order three or four times a month, even although it be the organ of the Austrian “bourgeoisie.” It is Liberal, but very moderate, like the Débats and the Temps in France. After two or three months have elapsed, the numbers seized are returned to the editor, only fit for the waste-paper basket. These confiscations (for they are, in fact, nothing more nor less, although effected through the Administration) are absolutely contrary to the law, as is proved by the reiterated acquittals. Their constant recurrence reminds one of the worst periods of the French Empire. Applied to a newspaper that defends Austrian interests with so much skill as the Freie Presse, they are more than surprising. If my friend, Eugène Pelletan, were aware of this he would no longer claim for France “liberty as in Austria,” for which saying he suffered at the time three months’ imprisonment. It is said that the influence of the Tchecks dictates these confiscations, and this alone is sufficient to show the violence of the enmity between the races. The Viennese with whom I travel declare that this enmity is far less bitter than it was fifteen years ago. At that period, I tell them, I travelled across the country without meeting a single Austrian. I met with Magyars, Croatians, Saxons, Tchecks, Tyrolians, Poles, Ruthenians, Dalmatians, but never with Austrians. The common country was ignored, the race was all in all. At the present day, my fellow-travellers tell me this is very much subdued. You will find plenty of excellent Austrians, they say, to-day amongst the Magyars, and to-morrow amongst the Tchecks.

The reader will permit a short digression here touching this nationality question. You meet with it everywhere in the dual Empire. It is the great preoccupation of the present, and it will be in fact the chief agent in determining the future of the population of the banks of the Danube and the Balkan peninsula. You Englishmen cannot well understand the full force of this feeling which is so strong in Eastern countries. England is for you your country, for which you live and for which, if needs, you die. This love of country is a religion which survives even when all other faith or religion has ceased to exist. It is the same in France. M. Thiers who, as a rule, so thoroughly grasped situations, never realized the immense force of these aspirations of races, which completely rearranged, before his eyes, the map of Europe on the nationality footing. Cavour and Bismarck were, however, well aware of this, and knew how to take advantage of this sentiment, in creating the unity of Italy and of Germany.

One evening, Jules Simon took me to call on M. Thiers, in rue St. Honoré, who asked me to explain the Flemish movement in Belgium. I did so, and he seemed to consider the question as most unimportant, quite childish in fact, and very much behind the age. He was at once both right and wrong. He was right because true union is one of minds, not of blood. Christ’s saying is here admirably applicable: “Whosoever shall do the will of God the same is my brother and sister and mother” (St. Mark iii. 35).

I grant that mixed nationalities which, without consideration of diversity of language and race, rest, as in Switzerland, on an identity of historical reminiscences, of civilization and liberty, are of a superior order; they are types and forerunners of the final fusion when all mankind will be but one great family, or rather a federation. But M. Thiers, being idealistic, like a true son of the French Revolution, was wrong in not taking into account things as they actually are, and the exigencies of the transitory situation.

This awakening of nationalities is the inevitable outcome of the development of democracy, of the press, and of literary culture. An autocrat may govern twenty different peoples without in the least troubling himself as to their language or race; but if once assemblies be introduced, everything is changed. Speech governs. Then what language is to be spoken? That of the people of course. Will you educate the young? It must be done in their mother tongue. Is justice to be administered? You cannot judge a man in a foreign language. You wish to represent him in Parliament and ask for his votes; the least he can claim in return is that he may understand what you say. And thus by degrees the language of the multitude gains ground and is adopted in Parliament, law-courts, and schools of every degree. In Finland, for instance, the struggle is between the Swedes, who form the well-to-do classes and live in the towns on the coast, and the rural population who are Finns. When visiting the country with the son of the eminent linguist, Castrén, who died while in Asia seeking out the origin of the Finn language, I found that the latter was more spoken than Swedish, even in the suburbs of large towns such as Abö and Helsingfors. All official inscriptions are in the two languages. The instruction in the communal schools is almost entirely in the Finn tongue. There are Finn gymnasiums, and even at the University, lectures in this language. There is also a national theatre, where I heard “Martha” sung in Finn. In Gallicia, Polish has completely replaced German; but the Ruthenians have also put in a claim for their idiom. In Bohemia the Tcheck dialect triumphs so completely that German is in danger of being wholly cast aside. At the opening of the Bohemian Diet, the Governor made a speech in Tcheck and one in German. At Prague a Tcheck University has recently been opened next to the German one. The clergy, the feudals, and the population are strongly in favor of this national movement. The Archbishop of Prague, the Prince of Schwarzenberg, although himself a German, appoints none but Tcheck priests, even in the North of Bohemia where Germans dominate.

It is certain that in countries where two races are thus intermingled, this growing feeling must occasion endless dissensions, and almost insurmountable difficulties. It is a disadvantage to speak the idiom of a small number, for it is a cause of isolation. It would certainly be far better if but three or four languages were spoken in Europe, and better still if but one were generally adopted; but, until this acme of unity be attained, every free people called upon to establish self-government, will claim rights for its mother tongue, and will try to unite itself with those who speak it, unless the nation be already fully satisfied with its mixed but historical nationality like Switzerland and Belgium. Austria and the Balkan peninsula are now agitated with these claims for the use of the national tongue, and with aspirations for the formation of States based on the ethnic groups.

As we near Vienna the train runs through the most lovely country. A succession of small valleys, with little streamlets rippling through them, and on either side green lawns between the hills covered with woods, chiefly firs and oaks. One might imagine oneself in Styria or in Upper Bavaria. Soon, however, houses make their appearance, often charming châlets buried in creeping plants, “Gloire de Dijon” roses, or jessamine and clematis. These become more and more frequent, and, near the suburban stations, there are quite little hamlets of villas. I know of no capital with such beautiful suburbs, save perhaps Stockholm. Nothing could be more delightful than Baden, Möoling, Brühl, Schönbrun, and all those little rustic nooks south of Vienna, on the road to the Sömering.—Contemporary Review.

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ANCIENT ORGANS OF PUBLIC OPINION.[56]

BY PROF. R. C. JEBB.

During several weeks in the early part of this year, the attention of the English public was fixed with intense anxiety on the fortunes of one man, who had undertaken a perilous mission in the service of his country. When the Egyptian difficulty was at its worst, General Gordon had started for Khartoum, to aid the Government, by his personal influence, in the policy of rescuing the garrisons and retiring from the Soudan. The journey, while it reflected fresh honor on him, necessarily imposed a grave responsibility on those who had sanctioned it. Any moment might bring the news of his death. If such news came, it was generally thought and said, the Ministry would fall. In a country with the temperament of England, the mere existence of such a belief set one thinking. A year ago, Gordon’s name, though familiar to the well-informed classes, would not have acted like a spell on the nation. But a popular biography of him which had appeared had given occasion for much writing in the newspapers. A short time had sufficed to make the broad facts of his career known throughout the length and breadth of the land. People knew that he had welded a loose Chinese rabble into an army which saved the reigning dynasty of China; that, alone of Christians, he is named in the prayers of Mecca; that he does not care for personal rewards; that he is fearless of death; and that he trusts in God. To impress these facts on the popular imagination had been the work of a few weeks; to concentrate the force of popular opinion, if he had been sacrificed, would have been the work of a few hours. Seldom, perhaps, has anything illustrated more vividly that great and distinctive condition of modern existence in free countries,—the double power wielded by the newspaper press, at once as the ubiquitous instructor and as the rapid interpreter of a national mind. It was natural at such a time, for one whose pursuits suggested the comparison, to look from the modern to the ancient world, and to attempt some estimate of the interval which separates them in this striking and important respect. In the ancient civilisations, were there any agencies which exercised a power analogous in kind, though not comparable in degree, to that of the modern press? To begin with, we feel at once that the despotic monarchies of the ancient East will not detain us long. For them, national opinion normally meant the opinion of the king. We know the general manner of record which is found graven on stone, in connection with the images or symbols of those monarchs. As doctors seem still to differ a good deal about the precise translation of so many of those texts, it might be rash to quote any, but this is the sort of style which seems to prevail among the royal authors: “He came up with chariots. He said that he was my first cousin. He lied. I impaled him. I am Artakhshatrá. I flayed his uncles, his brothers, and his cousins. I am the king, the son of Daryavush. I crucified two thousand of the principal inhabitants. I am the shining one, the great and the good.” From the monarchical East, we turn with more curiosity to Greece and Rome. There, at least, there was a life of public opinion. Apart from institutions, which are crystallised opinion, were there any living, non-official voices in which this public opinion could be heard?

The Homeric poems are not only the oldest monuments of Greek literature, but also the earliest documents of the Greek race. Out of the twilight of the prehistoric past, a new people, a new type of mind, are suddenly disclosed in a medium of pellucid clearness. Like Athene springing adult and full-armed from the head of Zeus, this new race, when Homer reveals it, has already attained to a mature consciousness of itself, and is already equipped with the aptitudes which are to distinguish it throughout its later history. The genius of the Homeric Greek has essentially the same traits which recur in the ripest age of the Greek republics,—even as Achilles and Ulysses are personal ideals which never lost their hold on the nation. This very fact points the contrast between two aspects of Homeric life—the political, and the social. In Homeric politics, public opinion has no proper place. The king, with his council of nobles and elders, can alone originate or discuss measures. The popular assembly has no active existence. But the framework of Homeric monarchy contains a social life in which public opinion is constantly alert. Its activity, indeed, could scarcely be greater under the freest form of government. And we see that this activity has its spring in distinctive and permanent attributes of the Hellenic race. It arises from quickness of perception and readiness of speech. The Homeric Greek feels keenly, observes shrewdly, and hastens to communicate his thoughts. An undertone of popular comment pervades the Homeric poems, and is rendered more impressive by the dramatic form in which it is usually couched. The average man, who represents public feeling, is expressed by the Greek indefinite pronoun, τις. “Thus would a man speak, with a glance at his neighbor,” is the regular Homeric formula. We hear opinion in the making. This spokesman of popular sentiment is constantly introduced at critical moments: for the sake of brevity we may call him by his Greek name Tis. When the fight is raging over the corpse of Patroclus, Tis remarks to his friends that they will be disgraced for ever if they allow the Trojans to carry off the body;—better die on the spot. Hector, in proposing a truce to Ajax, suggests that they should exchange gifts, and imagines what Tis will say: Tis will approve of it as a graceful courtesy between chivalrous opponents. Menelaus considers that another hero, Antilochus, has beaten him in a chariot race by unfair means; but thinks it necessary to take precautions against Tis imagining that he has brought this complaint in the hope of prevailing by the influence of his rank. This is perhaps one of the most remarkable Homeric compliments to the penetration and to the influence of Tis. When the sounds of music and dancing, as at a marriage feast, are heard in the house of Odysseus in Ithaca, Tis is listening outside; and he blamed Penelope for her fancied hardness of heart, “because she had not had the courage to keep the great house of her gentle lord steadfastly till he should come home.” Tis is not always the mouthpiece of such elevated sentiments. With a frank truth to life and nature, Homer depicts Tis as indulging in an ignoble joy by stabbing the corpse of his once-dreaded foe, Hector, and remarking that he is safer to handle now than when he was burning the ships. In the Odyssey, when the maiden Nausicaa is conducting Odysseus to the city of her father Alcinous, we catch glimpses of a Tis who nearly approaches the character of Mrs. Grundy, with an element of spiteful gossip added. The fidelity with which Tis reflects public opinion is further seen in the circumstance that his solicitude for the rights of man is not strong enough to counteract his natural disposition to exalt over the fallen. Thersites was a commoner who presumed to speak his mind among his betters,—when one of them, Odysseus, dealt him a smart blow on the back, and caused him to resume his seat in tears. Tis laughed for joy, saying in effect that it served Thersites right, and that he probably would not do it again. The Tory sentiment of this passage makes it appropriate to quote the version of it by the late Lord Derby:—

“The Greeks, despite their anger, laughed aloud, And one to other said, ‘Good faith, of all The many works Ulysses well hath done, Wise in the council, foremost in the fight, He ne’er hath done a better, than when now He makes this scurril babbler hold his peace. Methinks his headstrong spirit will not soon Lead him again to vilify the kings.’”

Here it might be said that Tis figures as the earliest authentic example of a being whose existence has sometimes been doubted by British anthropologists, the Conservative working-man. But, if we would be just to Tis in his larger Homeric aspects, we must allow that his sympathies are usually generous, and his utterances often edifying. As to the feeling with which Tis was regarded, Homer has a word for it which is hard to translate: he calls it aidos. This aidos—the sense of reverence or shame—is always relative to a standard of public opinion, i.e. to the opinion formed by the collective sayings of Tis; as, on the other hand, the listening to an inner voice, the obedience to what we call a moral sense, is Homerically called nemesis. And just as Tis is sometimes merely the voice of smug respectability, so aidos is sometimes conventional in a low way. When Diomedes is going by night to spy out the Trojan camp, several heroes offer to go with him, but only one can be chosen. Agamemnon tells him that he must not yield to aidos, and take the man of highest station rather than the man of highest merit: where aidos appears as in direct conflict with nemesis. But more often these two principles are found acting in harmony,—recommending the same course of conduct from two different points of view. There is a signal example of this in the Odyssey, which is also noteworthy on another ground, viz., as the only episode in the Homeric poems which involves a direct and formal appeal from established right of might to the corrective agency of public opinion. The suitors of Penelope have intruded themselves into the house of her absent lord, and are wasting his substance by riotous living. Her son Telemachus convenes the men of Ithaca in public assembly, and calls on them to stop this cruel wrong. He appeals to nemesis, to aidos, and to fear of the gods. “Resent it in your own hearts; and have regard to others, neighboring folk who dwell around,—and tremble ye at the wrath of the gods.” The appeal fails. The public opinion exists, but it has not the power, or the courage, to act.

After the age which gave birth to the great epics, an interval elapses before we again catch the distinct echoes of a popular voice. Our Homeric friend Tis is silent. Or, rather, to be more exact, Tis ceases to speak in his old character, as the nameless representative of the multitude, and begins to speak in a new quality. The individual mind now commences to express itself in forms of poetry which are essentially personal, interpreting the belief and feelings of the poet himself. Tis emerges from the dim crowd, and appears as Tyrtaeus, summoning the Spartans, in stirring elegy, to hear his counsels; or as Sappho, uttering her passion in immortal lyrics; or as Pindar, weaving his thoughts into those magnificent odes which glorify the heroes and the athletes of Greece. It is a capital distinction of classical Greek literature that, when its history is viewed as a whole, we do not find it falling into a series of artificial chapters, determined by imitation of models which were in fashion at this or that epoch. Greek literature is original, not derivative; we trace in it the course of a natural growth; we hear in it the spontaneous utterance of Greek life from generation to generation. The place of Pindar in this development has one aspect of peculiar interest. There is a sense in which he may be said to stand midway between Homeric epos and Athenian drama.[57] His poetical activity belongs to the years which immediately preceded and followed the invasions of Greece by the hosts of Persia. A great danger had drawn the members of the Hellenic family closer together; a signal deliverance had left them animated by the memory of deeds which seemed to attest the legends of Agamemnon and Achilles; warmed by a more vivid faith in those gods who had been present with them through the time of trial; comforted by a new stability of freedom; cheered by a sense of Hellenic energies which could expand securely from the Danube to the Nile, from the Euxine to the Atlantic; exalted in thought and fancy by the desire to embody their joy and hope in the most beautiful forms which language and music, marble, ivory, and gold could furnish for the honor of the gods, and for the delight of men who, through the heroes, claimed a divine descent. The Greek mind, stirred to its centre by the victorious efforts which had repelled the barbarian, could no longer be satisfied by epic narratives of the past. It longed to see the heroes moving; to hear them speaking; to throw back upon their world the vivifying light of contemporary reflection. In a word, the spirit of drama had descended upon Hellas; and already it breathes in Pindar, the poet of the games. Olympia, with its temples, its statues, and its living athletes, corresponded to the essence of Greek drama—action idealised by art and consecrated by religion. Pindar, the last of the great lyric poets, is the lyric exponent of an impulse which received mature expression from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

The community which Athenian drama addressed was precisely in the mood which best enables a dramatist to exert political and moral force. There was much in its temper that might remind us of Elizabethan England; but I would venture to illustrate it here by words borrowed from the England of a later time. The greatest plea in the English language for the liberty of the press—or perhaps we should rather say, for the freedom of the mind—belongs to the close of that year which saw the hopes of the Parliamentarians, in their struggle with the Royalists, raised to an assurance of final success by the crushing defeat of Rupert. An enthusiastic confidence in the large destinies opening before the English people already fired the mind of the poet who was to end his days, like Samson

“Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke.”

Then, in 1644, Milton, thinking of the victory of Marston Moor, was rather like Aeschylus raising his dramatic paean for the victory of Salamis; and the glowing language in which he describes the new alertness of his country’s spirit might fitly be applied to the Athens for which the great dramatists wrote. “As in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous not only to vital but to rational faculties and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of wit and suttlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the cherfulnesse of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversie and new invention, it betok’ns us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatall decay, but casting off the old and wrincl’d skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entring the glorious waies of Truth and prosperous vertue destin’d to become great and honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an Eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl’d eyes as the full mid-day beam, purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain it self of heav’nly radiance.”

In estimating the influence of Athenian drama on public opinion, we must, first of all, remember the fact which makes the essential difference between the position of the dramatist—viewed in this light—and that of the epic poet. The epic poet gave expression to a mass of popular belief and feeling in an age when they had as yet no direct organ of utterance. But in the Athens of the dramatists the popular assembly was the constitutional organ of public opinion. Every Athenian citizen was, as such, a member of that assembly. The influence of the Athenian dramatist was thus so far analogous to that of the modern journalist, that it was brought to bear on men capable of giving practical effect to their sentiments. A newspaper publishes an article intended to influence the voters in a parliamentary division, or the constituents whom they represent. An Athenian dramatist had for his hearers, in the theatre of Dionysus, many thousands of the men who, the next day might be called upon to decide a question of policy in the assembly, or to try, in a law-court, one of those cases in which the properly legal issues were often involved with considerations of a social or moral kind. Even Tragedy, in its loftiest and severest form, might be the instrument, in a skilful hand, of inculcating views or tendencies which the poet advocated—nay, even of urging or opposing a particular measure. Thus, in his Furies, Aeschylus finds occasion to encourage his fellow-citizens in their claim to a disputed possession in the Troad, and utters a powerful protest against the proposal to curtail the powers of the Areopagus. He becomes, for the moment, the mouthpiece of a party opposed to such reform. In verses like the following, every one can recognize a ring as directly political as that of any leading article or pamphlet. “In this place”—says the Athene of Aeschylus—that is, on the hill of Ares, the seat of the court menaced with reform—

“Awe kin to dread shall stay the citizens From sinning in the darkness or the light, While their own voices do not change the laws ... Between unruliness and rule by one I bid my people reverence a mean, Not banish all things fearful from the State. For, with no fear before him, who is just? In such a righteous dread, in such an awe, Ye shall possess a bulwark of the land, A safeguard of the city, not possess’d By Scythia or the places of the south. This court, majestic, incorruptible, Instant in anger, over those who sleep The sleepless watcher of my land, I set.”

Again, there are at least two tragedies of Euripides—the Heracleidae and the Supplices—in which the strain of allusion to the politics of the Peloponnesian War is unmistakable. It is needless to dwell on the larger sense in which Euripides everywhere makes drama the vehicle of teachings—political, social, moral—which could nowhere have received such effective publicity as in the theatre. Nowadays, they would have been found in the pages of a newspaper or a magazine accepted as the organ of a party or a school. In the days of Voltaire, journalism, as free countries now understand it, had no more existence than in the days of Euripides; and, as a recent historian of French literature remarks, it has been thought that the tragedies of Voltaire owed their popularity chiefly to the adroit manner in which the author made them opportunities for insinuating the popular opinions of the time.[58] We must not forget that peculiar feature of Greek drama, the Chorus, who may be regarded as a lineal descendant of the Homeric Tis. The interest of the Chorus, in this connection, does not depend so much on the maxims that it uttered as on the fact that it constituted a visible link between the audience and the drama, bringing the average spectator into easier sympathy with the action, and thereby predisposing him to seize any significance which it might have for the life of the day. I have so far dwelt on this aspect of Athenian Tragedy, because we might be rather apt to regard it as a form of art altogether detached from contemporary interests, and to overlook the powerful influence—not the less powerful because usually indirect—which it must undoubtedly have exercised in expressing and moulding public sentiment.

But we must now turn to that other form of Athenian drama in which the resemblance to the power of the modern press is much more direct and striking—that which is known as the Old Comedy of Athens. Mr. Browning, in his Apology of Aristophanes, makes the great comic poet indicate the narrow limits to the influence of Tragedy on opinion. The passage is witty; and though, as I venture to think, it considerably underrates the effect of Tragedy in this direction, at least it well marks the contrast between the modes in which the two forms of drama wrought. When we think of the analogy between Aristophanes and the modern political journalist, one of the first things that strikes us is the high and earnest view which Aristophanes took of his own calling. He had gone through every stage of a laborious training before he presumed to come before the Athenian public. He had seen his predecessors fail, or fall from favor. So in the Peace, he claims that he has banished the old vulgar tomfoolery from the stage, and raised his art “like an edifice stately and grand.” He saw clearly the enormous force which this literary engine, Comedy, might wield. He resolved that, in his hands, it should be directed to more elevated and more important aims. Instead of merely continuing the traditions of scurrilous buffoonery, in which virulent personality was often the only point, he would bring his wit to bear on larger aspects of politics and society.

But, while his wit and style had the stamp of bold originality, Aristophanes is not the champion of original ideas. Rather his position depends essentially on the fact that he represents a large body of commonplace public opinion. He represents the great “stupid party,” to use a name which the English Tories have borne not without pride, and glories to represent it; the stupid party, who are not wiser than their forefathers; who fail to understand how the tongue can swear, and the soul remain unsworn; who sigh for the old days when the plain seafaring citizen knew only to ask for his barley-cake, and to cry “pull away;” who believe in the old-fashioned virtues, and worship the ancient gods. He describes himself as the champion of the people, doing battle for them, like a second Hercules, against superhuman monsters. The demagogues, whom he lashes, try to represent him as slandering the country to foreigners; but he is the country’s best friend. Athenians are hasty, fickle and vain. He has taught them not to be gulled by flattery. He has taught them to respect the rights and redress the wrong of their subjects. The envoys who bring the tribute from the island long to see him. The King of Persia, he says, asked two questions about the combatants in the Peloponnesian War. Which side had the strongest navy? and which side had Aristophanes? Thirlwall, in his History of Greece, denies that Aristophanic Comedy produced any serious effect. “We have no reason,” he says, “to believe that it ever turned the course of public affairs, or determined the bias of the public mind, or even that it considerably affected the credit and fortunes of an obnoxious individual.” Grote’s opinion is much the same, except that he is disposed to credit Comedy with a greater influence on the reputations of particular men. The question is much of the same nature as might be raised concerning the precise effect of political writing in newspapers, or of literary reviews. The effect is one which it is impossible to measure accurately, but which may nevertheless be both wide and deep.

In the first place, we must dismiss the notion that Comedy could make no serious impression because the occasion was a sportive festival. The feelings of Athenians at Comedy were not merely those of a modern audience at a burlesque or a pantomime. Comedy, like Tragedy, was still the worship of Dionysus. Precisely in those comedies which most daringly ridicule the gods—such as the Birds and the Frogs—we find also serious expressions of a religious sense, illustrating what might be called the principle of compensatory reverence. Again, the power of the Old Athenian Comedy is not to be gauged by any influence which it exercised, or sought, over special situations or definite projects. Indeed, it rarely attempted this. Almost the only extant instance occurs in the Frogs of Aristophanes, where he urges that a general amnesty should be granted to all citizens who had been implicated in the Revolution of the Four Hundred. In such a sense, it may be granted, Comedy might do little; but its real power operated in a totally different way. When a large body of people has common opinions or feelings, these are intensified in each individual by the demonstration that so many others share them. A public meeting tends in itself to quicken enthusiasm for a party or a cause, be the oratory never so flat and the sentiments never so trite. Aristophanes gave the most brilliant expression to a whole range of thought and feeling with which thousands of minds were in general sympathy. Can it be doubted that he contributed powerfully to strengthen the prejudice against everything that he regarded as dangerous innovation? Or, again, can it be doubted that he did much to give his fellow-citizens a more vivid insight into the arts of unscrupulous demagogues? The cajolers of the people, as depicted in the comedy of the Knights, are drawn in strong colors, but with fine strokes also: while the character of Demus, the People—their supposed dupe—is drawn with a tact which no satirist or political journalist has ever surpassed. If I have to stake the political power of Aristophanes on the evidence of one short passage, it should be that dialogue in which the Knights deplore the dotage of Demus, and Demus tells them that, while he seems to doze, he always has one eye open (vv. 1111-1150).

When a change of Ministry occurs in England, no one would undertake to say exactly what share in that result is attributable to journalistic repetition and suggestion—to the cumulative impression wrought on the public mind, through weeks, months, and years, by the Conservative or the Liberal press. And he would be a bold man who presumed to say how little or how much the Old Comedy may have to do with the phenomena of oligarchic reaction in the latter part of the Peloponnesian War, or with the stimulation of all those sentiments which have their record in the death of Socrates. The confused travesty of Socrates in the Clouds corresponds, in its general features, with the confused prepossessions of which he was afterwards the victim. In this case, as in others, Comedy was not the origin, but the organ, of a popular opinion. It did not create the prepossessions; but it strengthened them by the simple process of reflecting them in an exaggerated form. Briefly, Aristophanic Comedy had many of the characteristics of vehement party journalism, but was directed either against persons, on the one hand, or against general principles and tendencies on the other—not against measures. Its most obvious strength lay in brilliant originality of form; but its political and social effect depended essentially on its representative value. It was the great ancient analogue of journalism which seems to lead opinion by skilfully mirroring it—unsparing in attack, masterly in all the sources of style, but careful, where positive propositions are concerned, to keep within the limits of safe and accepted generalities.

Just as the Old Comedy was losing its freedom of utterance, a new agency began to appear, which invites comparison with journalism of a calmer and more thoughtful type. Rhetoric, of which we already feel the presence in Athenian drama, had now become a developed art. Skill analogous to that of the modern journalist was often required, for purposes of speaking, by the citizen of a Greek republic.[59] He might desire to urge his views in a public assembly where the standard of speaking was high and the audience critical. He might be compelled to defend his fortunes, or even his life, before a popular jury of many hundreds, when the result would depend in no small measure on oratorical dexterity. Already a class of men existed who composed speeches for private persons to deliver in law-courts. The new art was naturally enlisted in the service of any party politics. A skilful writer now felt that there was a way of producing an effect which would be less transient than that of a speech in the assembly. From the end of the fifth century b.c. we begin to meet with a species of composition which may best be described as a political pamphlet.

The paper on the Athenian polity, which has come down under Xenophon’s name, is an aristocratic manifesto against the democracy, which might have appeared in an ancient Quarterly Review. The paper on the Revenues of Athens, belonging to the middle of the fourth century b.c., is a similar article in favor of peace and the commercial interests. Many of the extant pieces of the orator Isocrates, in the fourth century b.c., though couched in the form of speeches, were meant to be read, not spoken, and are in reality highly finished political pamphlets. More, perhaps, than any other writer of antiquity, Isocrates resembles a journalist who is deeply impressed with the dignity and responsibility of his calling; who spares no pains to make his work really good; and who has constantly before his mind the feeling that his audience is wider, and his power greater, than if he was actually addressing a public assembly on the same theme. His articles—as we may fitly call them—are usually intended to have a definite effect at a particular moment. He wishes to make Athens and Sparta combine at once in an expedition to Asia. He wishes to strike in with a telling argument for peace at the moment when negotiations are pending between Athens and her allies. He desires to strengthen the hands of the party, at Athens and at Sparta, who refuse to recognize the restoration of Messene by the power of Thebes. In this last case, we know that a pamphlet on the other side was written by the rhetorician Alcidamas. Here then is an example of literary controversy on contemporary public affairs.

Nor is it merely in regard to the political questions of the day that Isocrates performs the part of a journalist. He deals also with the social life of Athens. He expresses the feeling with which men of the old school observed a deterioration of manners connected, in their views, with the decay of Conservative elements in the democracy. He shows us the throngs of needy citizens, eagerly casting lots outside the law-courts for the privilege of employment as paid jurymen—while at the same time they are hiring mercenary troops to fight their battles abroad. He pictures the lavish display which characterized the festivals of the improvident city—where the amusement of the public had now become a primary art of statesmanship—when men might be seen blazing in gold spangled robes, who had been shivering through the winter in rags. He brings before us the young men of a degenerate Athens—no longer engaged in vigorous exercises of mind and body, in hunting or athletics; no longer crossing the market-place with downcast eyes, or showing marks of deference to their elders—but passing their hours in the society of gamesters and flute-players, or lazily cooling their wine in the fountain by the Ilissus. He is, in brief, a voice of public opinion on all the chief matters which come within the province of the publicist. In order that such a writer should have an influence similar to that of a newspaper, it was enough that copies of his writings should be sufficiently multiplied to leaven the conversation of the market-place and of private society. Every possessor of a copy was a centre from which the ideas would reach the members of his own circle. And there is good evidence that, in the fourth century b.c., the circulation of popular writings throughout the Hellenic world was both wide and rapid. The copying industry, in the Greece of that age, doubtless fell far short of the dimensions to which the labor of cultivated slaves (the literati) afterwards raised it at Rome—where we hear of Augustus, for instance, confiscating no fewer than two thousand copies of a single work—the psuedo-Sibylline books. But it was still amply sufficient to warrant a general comparison, in the sense just defined, between the influence of such a writer as Isocrates, and that of a modern journalist.

We have hitherto spoken only of the written rhetoric, in which the form of a speech was merely a literary fiction, like that adopted—in imitation of Isocrates—by Milton, when he chose to couch his Areopagitica in the form of a speech addressed to the Lords and Commons of England. But in passing, we should note that the actually spoken rhetoric of antiquity—especially of Greece—bore a certain analogy to the more elaborate efforts of journalism. This depends on the fact that ancient usage fully recognised, and generally expected, careful premeditation; while the speaker, conscious of the demand for excellence of form, usually aimed at investing his speech with permanent literary value. Demosthenes and Cicero are both witnesses to this: Cicero, doubtless, piqued himself on a faculty of extemporising at need, but probably trusted little to it on great occasions; while with Demosthenes it was the rule, we are told, never to speak without preparation. Take the oration delivered by Lysias at the Olympian festival, where he is exhorting the assembled Greeks to unite against the common foes of Hellas in Sicily and in Persia. Here the orator is essentially an organ of patriotic opinion, and his highly-wrought address is a finished leading-article, for which the author sought the largest publicity.

In turning from Greece to Rome, we are prepared to find literature holding a different relation towards public opinion. The Greek temperament with its quick play of thought and fancy, had an instinctive craving to make the sympathy of thoughts continually felt in words, and to accompany action with a running comment of speech. The Roman, as we find him during Rome’s earlier career of conquest, was usually content to feel that his action was in conformity with some principle which he had expressed once for all in an institution or a statute. His respect for authority, and his moral earnestness—in a word his political and social gravity—rendered him independent of the solace which the lively Greek derived from a demonstrated community of feeling. Rome, strong in arms, severe, persistent, offering to people after people the choice of submission or subjugation; Rome, the head of the Latin name, the capital of Italy, the queen of the Mediterranean, the empress of a pacified, because disarmed, world; Rome, who never deemed a war done until conquest had been riveted by law which should be the iron bond of peace,—this idea was the true inspiration of the Roman; and, as the literature was matured, it was this which added order to strength, and majesty to order, in the genius of the Roman tongue. It is especially curious to observe the fate which Comedy experienced when it first appeared at Rome, and endeavored to assume something of the political significance which its parent, Greek Comedy, had possessed at Athens. The poet Naevius appeared just after the first Punic War. He was a champion of popular liberties against the domination of the Senate; and, in his plays, he treated some of the Senatorian chiefs with satire of a quality which, to judge from the extant specimens, was exceedingly mild. “Who had so quickly ruined the commonwealth?” was a query put in one of his comedies; and the reply was, “New speakers came forward—foolish young men.” In another piece, he alluded to the applauses bestowed on him as proving that he was a true interpreter of the public mind, and deprecated any great man interfering with him. A very slave in one of his comedies, he added, was better off than a Roman citizen nowadays. Contrast these remarks with the indescribable insults which Aristophanes had boldly heaped on the Athenian demagogues. Mild as Naevius was, however, he was not mild enough for the “foolish young men.” Having ventured to observe that the accession of certain nobles of high office was due to a decree of fate, he was promptly imprisoned; he was afterwards banished; and he died in exile. This seems to have been the first and last attempt of Roman Comedy to serve as an organ of popular opinion. The Roman reverence for authority was outraged by the idea of a public man being presented in a comic light on the boards of a theatre. On the other hand, Roman feeling allowed a public man to be attacked, in speaking or in writing, with almost any degree of personal violence, provided that the purpose was seriously moral. Hence the personal criticism of statesmen, which at Athens had belonged to Comedy, passed at Rome into another kind of composition. It became an element of Satire.

The name of Satire comes, as is well known, from the lanx satura, the platter filled with first-fruits of various sorts, which was an annual thank-offering to Ceres and Bacchus. “Satire” meant a medley, or miscellany, and the first characteristic of Roman satire was that the author wrote in an easy, familiar way about any and every subject that was of interest to himself and his readers. As Juvenal says,—

“Men’s hopes, men’s fear—their fond, their fretful dream— Their joys, their fuss—that medley is my theme.”

Politics, literature, philosophy, society—every topic of public or private concern—belonged to the Satura, so long as the treatment was popular. Among all the forms of Roman literature, Satire stands out with a twofold distinction. First, it is genuinely national. Next, it is the only one which has a continuous development, extending from the vigorous age of the Commonwealth into the second century of the Empire. Satire is pre-eminently the Roman literary organ of public opinion. The tone of the Roman satirist is always that of an ordinary Roman citizen, who is frankly speaking his mind to his fellow-citizens. An easy, confidential manner in literature—as of one friend unbosoming himself to another—seems to have been peculiarly congenial to the ancient Italian taste. We may remember how the poet Ennius introduced into his epic a picture of the intimate converse between himself and the Roman general Servilius Geminus—a picture not unworthy of a special war-correspondent attached to head-quarters. Then Satire profited by the Italian gift for shrewd portraiture of manners. Take, for instance, the picture of a coquette, drawn some twenty centuries ago by Naevius:

“Like one playing at ball in a ring, she tosses about from one to another, and is at home with all. To one she nods, to another she winks; she makes love to one, clings to another.... To one she gives a ring to look at, to another blows a kiss; with one she sings, with another corresponds by signs.”[60]

The man who first established Satire as an outspoken review of Roman life was essentially a slashing journalist. This was Lucilius, who lived in the latter years of the second century b.c. He attacked the high-born statesmen, who, as he put it, “thought that they could blunder with impunity, and keep criticism at a distance by their rank.” On the other hand, he did not spare plebeian offenders. As one of his successors says, “he bit deep into the town of his day, and broke his jawtooth on them.” Literature and society also came under his censures. He lashes the new affectation of Greek manners and speech, the passion for quibbling rhetoric, the extravagance of the gluttons and the avarice of the misers. Even the Roman ladies of the time do not wholly escape. He criticises the variations of their toilettes. “When she is with you, anything is good enough; when visitors are expected, all the resources of the wardrobe are taxed,” The writings of this trenchant publicist formed the great standing example of free speech for later Roman times. Horace eschews politics; indeed, when he wrote, political criticism had become as futile as it was perilous; but he is evidently anxious to impress on the Roman public that he is true to the old tradition of satire by fearlessly lashing folly and vice. Persius, who died at the age of twenty-eight in the reign of Nero, made Roman Satire a voice of public opinion in a brave and a pure sense. Horace had been an accomplished Epicurean, who found his public among easy-going, cultivated men of the world. Persius spoke chiefly to minds of a graver cast: he summoned Roman citizens to possess themselves of a moral and intellectual freedom which no Cæsar could crush, the freedom given by the Stoic philosophy,—that philosophy which had moulded the jurisprudence of the Republic, and was now the refuge of thoughtful minds under the despotism of the Empire. Then we have once more a slashing publicist in Juvenal, who is national and popular in a broader sense than Horace or Persius. His fierce indignation is turned against the alien intruders, the scum of Greece and Asia, who are making Rome a foreign city, and robbing Roman citizens of their bread. He denounces the imported vices which are effacing the old Roman character. He is the last of the Roman satirists, and in much he resembles the first.

It may be noted that each of the three satirists of the Empire—Horace, Persius, Juvenal—gives us a dialogue between himself and an imaginary friend, who remonstrates with him for his rashness in imitating Lucilius, the outspoken satirist of the Republic. Horace, replies, in effect, “Never mind, I’m not afraid—Augustus will stand by me as Scipio and Laelius stood by Lucilius;” but, in fact, Horace never strikes like Lucilius; he keeps us smiling while he probes our faults; “he gains his entrance, and plays about the heart;” his censures even when keen, show cautious tact. Persius replies: “You need not read me if you do not like: but the joke is too good; I must tell some one that Midas has the ears of an ass.” When Juvenal is warned, we catch quite a different tone in the answer. After painting the Rome of his day, he says (I venture to give a version of my own):—

“Nought worse remains: the men of coming times Can but renew our lusts, repeat our crimes. Vice holds the dizzy summit: spread thy sail, Indignant Muse, and drive before the gale! But who shall find, or whence—I hear thee ask— An inspiration level with the task? Whence that frank courage of an elder Rome, When Satire, fearless, sent the arrow home? ‘Whom am I bound,’ she then could cry, ‘to spare? If high-placed guilt forgive not, do I care?’ Paint now the prompter of a Nero’s rage— The torments of a Christian were thy wage,— Pinned to the stake, in blazing pitch to stand, Or, on the hook that dragg’d thee, plough the sand....

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No danger will attend thee if thou tell How to Aeneas warlike Turnus fell; No spite resents Achilles’ fateful day, Or Hylas, with his urn, the Naiads’ prey; But when Lucilius, all his soul afire, Bared his good sword and wreak’d his generous ire, Flush’d cheeks bewrayed the secrets lock’d within, And chill hearts shivered with their conscious sin. Hence wrath and tears. Ere trumpets sound, debate: Warriors, once armed, repent of war too late. ‘Then shall plain speech be tried on those whose clay Rests by the Latin or Flaminian Way.’”

He did indeed try the plainest of speech, not only on dead tyrants and their ministers, but on the society of his own time. The elder Disraeli remarks that Richard Steele meant the Tatler to deal with three provinces—manners, letters, and politics; and that, as to politics, “it remained for the chaster genius of Addison to banish this disagreeable topic from his elegant pages.” Horace was in this respect the Addison of Satire under the Empire. In Juvenal, the Italian medley once more exhibits, though with necessary modifications, the larger and more vigorous spirit of its early prime. The poetical epistle, which in Horace is so near to Satire, usually differed from it in having less of the chatty miscellaneous character, and in being rather applied to continuous didactic exposition. The prose epistle, which was often meant for publication even when formally private, also contributed not only to express, but to mould, public opinion. Epigrams and lampoons might happen to be vehicles of a general feeling; but they differ from the forms of literature here considered in being essentially personal, like the satirical poetry of early Greece.

There is yet another agency, common to Greece and Rome, at which we must glance—the Oracles. Often, of course, they had a most important part in directing public opinion at critical moments; but this was not all. There were occasions on which an oracle became, in a strict sense, the organ of a political party. Thus the noble Athenian family of the Alcmaeonidae bribed the Delphian priests to make the oracle an organ of public opinion in favor of freeing Athens from Peisistratus. Accordingly, whenever Spartans came to consult the god on any subject whatever, this topic was always worked into the response. Apollo, in short, kept up a series of most urgent leading articles; and at last the Spartans were roused to action. Then, when Cleomenes, one of the two Spartan kings, wished to have his colleague Demaratus deposed, he made friends with an influential man at Delphi; the influential man bribed the priestess; and the oracle declared that Demaratus was not of the blood royal. In this case, the fraud was found out; the priestess was deposed; and when Cleomenes died mad, men said that this was the hand of Apollo. When the Persians were about to invade Greece, the Delphic oracle took the line of advising the Greeks to submit. The Athenians sent to ask what they should do, and the oracle said, “Fly to the ends of the earth.” The Athenians protested that they would not leave the temple until they got a more comfortable answer. Hereupon an influential Delphian advised them to assume the garb of suppliants; and this time Apollo told them to trust to their wooden walls. Herodotus mentions between seventy and eighty oracles (I believe) of one sort or another, and less than half of these contain predictions. The predictions usually belong to one of two classes; first, those obviously founded on secret information or on a shrewd guess; and, secondly, those in which the oracle had absolutely no ideas on the subject, and took refuge in vagueness.

Any one who reads the column of Answers to Correspondents in a prudently conducted journal will recognize the principal types of oracle. In truth, the Delphic oracle bore a strong resemblance to a serious newspaper managed by a cautious editorial committee with no principles in particular. In editing an oracle, it was then, as it still is, of primary importance not to make bad mistakes. The Delphian editors were not infallible; but, when a blunder had been made, they often showed considerable resource. Thus, when Croesus had been utterly ruined, he begged his conqueror to grant him one luxury—to allow him to send to Delphi, and ask Apollo whether it was his usual practice to treat his benefactors in this way. Apollo replied that, in point of fact, he had done everything he could; he had personally requested the Fates to put off the affair for a generation; but they would only grant a delay of three years. Instead of showing annoyance, Croesus ought to be grateful for having been ruined three years later than he ought to have been. There are Irish landlords who would see a parable in these things. Sometimes we can see that Apollo himself is slightly irritated, as an editor might be by a wrong-headed or impertinent querist. Some African colonists had been pestering Apollo about their local troubles and his own former predictions; and the response from Delphi begins with the sarcastic remark, “I admire your wisdom if you know Africa better than I do,” The normal tendency of the Delphic oracle was to discourage rash enterprise, and to inculcate maxims of orthodox piety and moderation. The people of Cnidos wanted to make their peninsula an island by digging a canal, but found it very hard work; and the oracle told them that if Zeus had meant the peninsula to be an island, he would have made it an island—which reminds one of some of the arguments against the Channel Tunnel. In one special direction, however, Delphi gave a real impulse to Hellenic progress. It was a powerful promoter of colonization: for instance, the first Greek settlements in Corsica and on the coast of Africa were directly due to Delphic oracles. We even find the oracle designating individuals for work abroad; as when it nominated a man of Mantinea to reform the constitution of Cyrene. In Scotland we are wont to take a keen interest in everything that bears on colonial careers for young men; and one day a Greek class had been reading about the Delphic oracle telling some Thracians to choose as their king the first man who should ask them to dinner. Miltiades had this privilege, and forthwith got the Thracian appointment. “Do you think,” a thoughtful student asked, “that there could have been any collusion?”

A brief mention is due to those Roman publications which, in form, came nearest to our newspapers—the official gazettes. Julius Caesar, when consul in 59 b.c., first caused the transactions of the Senate (Acta Senatus) to be regularly published; before his time, there had been only an occasional publication of its decrees. Augustus stopped the issue of this Senatorial Gazette, though the minutes continued to be regularly kept, at first by senators of the Emperor’s choice, afterwards by a secretary specially appointed. Further, Julius Caesar instituted a regular official gazette of general news, the Acta diurna, which continued under the Empire. There was an official editor; the gazette was exhibited daily in public, and copied by scribes, who sold it to their customers; the original copy was afterwards laid up in the public archives, where it could be consulted. This gazette contained announcements or decrees by the Government, notices relating to the magistrature and the law-courts, and other matters of public interest; also a register of births, marriages, and deaths, and occasionally other advertisements concerning private families. This gazette had a wide circulation. Tacitus, for example, says that a certain event could not be hidden from the army, because the legionaries throughout the provinces had read it in the gazette. But it was simply a bald record of facts; there was no comment. Cicero, writing from Asia, complains that a private correspondent at Rome has sent him only such news as appears in a gazette—about matches of gladiators and adjournment of courts—and has given him no political intelligence.

The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1740 contains a short and quaint paper by Dr. Johnson, in which he transcribes some supposed fragments of a Roman gazette for the year 168 b.c. These were first published in 1615, and in 1692 were defended by Dodwell, but are now recognized as fifteenth-century forgeries. We have no genuine fragments of the Roman gazettes. None the less, Johnson’s comparison of them with the English newspapers of 1740 may well suggest a reflection. The Roman gazette under the Empire did not give the transactions of the Senate, any more than it admitted political comment. In the newspapers of Johnson’s time, the parliamentary reports were still very irregular and imperfect; while criticism of public men was fain to take the disguise, however thin, of allegory. Thus the Gentleman’s Magazine regaled its readers, from month to month, with “Proceedings and Debates in the Senate of Lilliput.” It was when the House of Commons had ceased to represent the public opinion of the country, that this opinion became resolved to have an outlet in the press. Parliament having ceased to discharge its proper function, the press became the popular court of appeal. The battle for a free press, in the full modern sense, was fought out between 1764 and 1771—beginning in 1764 with the persecution of Wilkes for attacking Bute in the North Briton, and ending with the successful resistance, in 1771, to the proclamation by which the Commons had forbidden the publication of their debates. Six printers, who had infringed it, were summoned to the bar of the House; five obeyed; and the messenger of the House was sent to arrest the sixth. The Lord Mayor of London sent the messenger to prison. The House of Commons sent the Lord Mayor to the Tower. But he was followed by cheering crowds. He was released at the next prorogation; and the day on which he left the Tower marked the end of the last attempt to silence the press. The next few years saw the beginning of the first English journals which exercised a great political and social power. The Times dates from 1788. Thus a period memorable for Americans has something of analogous significance for their kinsmen in England. For the English people, also, those years contained a Declaration of Independence; they brought us a title-deed of freedom greater, perhaps, than the barons of the thirteenth century extorted from John—the charter of a complete freedom in the daily utterance of public opinion.

The attempt here has been to indicate some of the partial equivalents for such an utterance which may be traced in classical literature. A student of antiquity must always in one sense, resemble the wistful Florentine who, with Virgil for his guide, explored the threefold realm beyond the grave. His converse is with the few, the spirits signal for good or for evil in their time; the shades of the great soldiers pass before him,—he can scan them closely, and imagine how each bore himself in the hour of defeat or victory on earth; he can know the counsels of statesmen, and even share the meditations of their leisure; the poets and the philosophers are present: but around and beyond these are the nameless nations of the dead, the multitudes who passed through the ancient world and left no memorial. With these dim populations he can hold no direct communion; it is much as if at times the great movements which agitated them are descried by him as the surging of a shadowy crowd, or if the accents of their anguish or triumph are borne from afar as the sound of many waters. So much the more, those few clear voices which still come from the past are never more significant than when they interpret the popular mind of their generation. The modern development of representative institutions has invested the collective sentiment of communities with power of a kind to which antiquity can furnish no proper parallel. But this fact cannot dispense the student of history from listening for the echoes of the market-place. And such attention cannot fail to quicken our sense of the inestimable gain which has accrued to modern life through journalism. It is easy to forget the magnitude of a benefit when its operation has become regular and familiar. The influence of the press may sometimes be abused; its tone may sometimes be objectionable. But take these three things—quickness in seeking and supplying information,—continual vigilance of comment,—electric sympathy of social feeling: where in the ancient world do we find these things as national characteristics, except in so far as they were gifts of nature to the small community of ancient Athens—gifts to which her best literature owes so much of its incomparable freshness and of its imperishable charm? It is mainly due to the agency of the press that these things are now found throughout the world,—these, which, in all lands where man has risen above barbarism, are the surest safeguards of civilization and the ultimate pledges of constitutional freedom.—Fortnightly Review.

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