"The first days of spring have less grace than the
growing virtue of a young man."
"You must rouse in men a consciousness of their own prudence and strength if you would raise their character."
Just as Tocqueville said: "He who despises mankind will never get the best out of either others or himself."[1]
[Footnote 1: The reader who cares to know more about Vauvenargues will find a chapter on him in the present writer's Miscellanies, vol. ii.]
The best known of Vauvenargues' sayings, as it is the deepest and the broadest, is the far-reaching sentence already quoted, that "Great thoughts come from the heart." And this is the truth that shines out as we watch the voyagings of humanity from the "wide, grey, lampless depths" of time. Those have been greatest in thought who have been best endowed with faith, hope, sympathy, and the spirit of effort. And next to them come the great stern, mournful men, like Tacitus, Dante, Pascal, who, standing as far aloof from the soft poetic dejection of some of the moods of Shelley or Keats as from the savage fury of Swift, watch with a prophet's indignation the heedless waste of faculty and opportunity, the triumph of paltry motive and paltry aim, as if we were the flies of a summer noon, which do more than any active malignity to distort the noble lines, and to weaken or to frustrate the strong and healthy parts, of human nature. For practical purposes all these complaints of man are of as little avail as Johnson found the complaint that of the globe so large a space should be occupied by the uninhabitable ocean, encumbered by naked mountains, lost under barren sands, scorched by perpetual heat or petrified by perpetual frost, and so small a space be left for the production of fruits, the pasture of cattle, and the accommodation of men.
When we have deducted, said Johnson, all the time that is absorbed in sleep, or appropriated to the other demands of nature, or the inevitable requirements of social intercourse, all that is torn from us by violence of disease, or imperceptibly stolen from us by languor, we may realise of how small a portion of our time we are truly masters. And the same consideration of the ceaseless and natural pre-occupations of men in the daily struggle will reconcile the wise man to all the disappointments, delays, shortcomings of the world, without shaking the firmness of his own faith, or the intrepidity of his own purpose.
MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT.[1]
[Footnote 1: February 1886.]
"If the government of the Many," says the distinguished author of the volume before us, "be really inevitable, one would have thought that the possibility of discovering some other and newer means of enabling It to fulfil the ends for which all governments exist would have been a question exercising all the highest powers of the strongest minds, particularly in the community which, through the success of its popular institutions, has paved the way for modern Democracy. Yet hardly anything worth mentioning has been produced on the subject in England or on the Continent." To say this, by the way, Is strangely to ignore three or four very remarkable books that have been published within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years, that have excited immense attention and discussion, and that are the work of minds that even Sir Henry Maine would hardly call weak or inactive. We are no adherents of any of Mr. Hare's proposals, but there are important public men who think that his work on the Election of Representatives is as conspicuous a landmark in politics as the Principia was in natural philosophy. J.S. Mill's volume on Representative Government, which appeared in 1861, was even a more memorable contribution towards the solution of the very problem defined by Sir Henry Maine, than was the older Mill's article on Government In 1820 to the political difficulties of the eve of the Reform Bill. Again, Lord Grey's work on Parliamentary Government failed in making its expected mark on legislation, but it was worth mentioning because It goes on the lines of the very electoral law in Belgium which Sir Henry Maine (p. 109) describes as deserving our most respectful attention—an attention, I suspect, which it is as little likely to receive from either of our two political parties as Lord Grey's suggestions. Nor should we neglect Sir G.C. Lewis's little book, or Mr. Harrison's volume on Order and Progress, which abounds in important criticism and suggestion for the student of the abstract politics of modern societies. In the United States, too, and In our own colonies, there have been attempts, not without merit, to state and to deal with some of the drawbacks of popular government.
Nothing has been done, however, that makes the appearance in the field of a mind of so high an order as Sir Henry Maine's either superfluous or unwelcome. It is hardly possible that he should discuss any subject within the publicist's range, without bringing into light some of its less superficial aspects, and adding observations of originality and value to the stock of political thought. To set people thinking at all on the more general and abstract truths of that great subject which is commonly left to be handled lightly, unsystematically, fragmentarily, in obedience to the transitory necessities of the day, by Ministers, members of Parliament, journalists, electors, and the whole host who live intellectually and politically from hand to mouth, is in itself a service of all but the first order. Service of the very first order is not merely to propound objections, but to devise working answers, and this is exactly what Sir Henry Maine abstains from doing.