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THE
CONTEMPORARY
REVIEW

VOLUME XXXVI. OCTOBER, 1879

CONTENTS.

INDIA AND AFGHANISTAN.

When the news arrived that Major Cavagnari and his companions had fallen victims to the fury of the Kabul populace, the Daily Telegraph “called aloud, before Heaven, for a punishment which should ring from end to end of the Continent of Asia.” It is a pity that so much fine and eloquent indignation should be expended on the Afghans instead of those who are truly responsible for the catastrophe which has evoked it. If ever there was a future event which might be predicted with absolute certainty, it was that Major Cavagnari and his companions would perish precisely as they have done. Twice, within forty years, have we invaded Afghanistan, although on both occasions we have frankly avowed that with the inhabitants of the country we had no cause of quarrel whatever. Nevertheless, we carried fire and sword wherever we went, cutting down their fruit trees, burning their villages, and leaving their women and children shelterless under a winter sky. What could we expect as the fruit of such acts, except that our victims—knowing, as we did, that they were revengeful, passionate, and too ignorant to forecast the consequences of their actions—should retaliate in kind the moment that they had the opportunity? The first invasion of Afghanistan is now known by general consent as “the iniquitous war;” but it is open to question if even that war was so elaborately contrived, or so long laboured for as this—the first act of which has terminated in the slaughter of Major Cavagnari and his escort.

The circumstances which preceded it are briefly these. For eighteen months Lord Lytton had attempted, by alternate threats and cajolery, to prevail upon the Ameer Shere Ali to make a surrender of his independence, and become a vassal of the Indian Empire. These attempts having failed, war was declared against him on the pretence that he had insulted us before all Asia by declining to receive a “friendly” mission sent by the Indian Government. This mission was not friendly. It was notorious throughout India that it would go to Kabul charged with an ultimatum which offered the Ameer the choice of war, or the sacrifice of his independence. But even this mission the Ameer never refused to receive—nay, it is certain that he would have received it if the opportunity had been given to him, so great was the value he attached to English friendship. But what the Government of India desired was not the reception of the mission, but a pretext for making war upon the Ameer. It knew that the policy which it meditated in Afghanistan would so completely destroy the sovereignty of the Ameer, that it was impossible he should agree to it. At the same time, it was impossible to declare war against an independent prince, simply because he declined to divest himself of his independence. The war must, somehow or another, be made to appear as if it were due to some act of the Ameer. Consequently, almost from the hour in which the announcement was made that the mission was to start, the Ameer was plied with insults and menaces which, if they were not intended to drive him to some act of overt hostility, had no purpose at all. And when these proved unavailing, Lord Lytton directed Sir Neville Chamberlain to attempt to force his way through the Khyber Pass, without waiting for the permission of the Ameer. In the most courteous manner the Afghan officer, in command at the Khyber, intimated to the mission that, without the sanction of his master, it was impossible to allow it to proceed; and this refusal was instantly telegraphed to England as a deliberate insult which must be wiped out in blood. From first to last, so far as his conduct towards us is concerned, the Ameer was absolutely blameless. During his entire reign his consistent endeavour had been to draw closer the ties of amity between himself and us. The Russian mission had forced its way to Kabul, despite of all his endeavours to hinder its advance; and there can be no question that but for the previous action of Lord Lytton that mission would never have come to Afghanistan. But eighteen months before that occurrence Lord Lytton had withdrawn our Native Agent from the Court of the Ameer. This had been done as a mark of displeasure, and a proof that no alliance of any kind existed between the two States. This proceeding Lord Lytton followed up by the occupation of Quetta, although he was well aware that such an occupation would be interpreted—and rightly—by the Ameer, as a menace to his independence, and the harbinger of war. So it came about that when the Russian mission knocked for admission at the doors of his capital, the Ameer found himself on the one side threatened by Russia, and on the other abandoned and threatened by Lord Lytton. Lord Lytton, in point of fact, is as directly responsible for the entry of the Russian mission to Kabul as he is for the dispatch of his own.

But if Lord Lytton’s treatment of the Ameer was cruel and ungenerous, criminal, at least to an equal extent, was his treatment of the people over whom he ruled. At that time there was an appalling amount of suffering all over India. The country had been ravaged by a series of famines. In the Punjab prices were abnormally high. The North-West Provinces were still unrecovered from a dearth, during which the Government of India had exhibited a rapacity and indifference to human suffering which would, with difficulty, be credited in England. Terrible as is the mortality resulting from a famine in India, the death-roll represents but a tenth part of the suffering which such visitations inflict. For every human being that dies, ten are left, without money and without physical strength, to struggle feebly for existence on the margin of the grave. They cannot give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage. They may reckon themselves fortunate if their enfeebled powers can earn just sufficient to keep body and soul together. For all these wretched beings—and last year in Upper India they numbered many millions—the smallest rise of price in the necessities of life means death from hunger. A war, therefore, with the enormous rise of prices which it would immediately produce, was nothing less than a sentence of torture and death passed upon tens of thousands of our own subjects. Undeterred, however, by the warnings of experience, deaf to considerations of humanity and justice, the Government of India started on its wild-goose chase after a “Scientific Frontier.” The victims whom it trampled to death in this mad chase have never been numbered—they never can be numbered. The Afghans who died in defence of their village homes form but a hundredth part of them. The residue was composed of our own mute and uncomplaining subjects.

A war thus wantonly commenced resulted in a failure as ignominious as it deserved. Long before the Treaty of Gundamuck the ambitious policy of the Government had become an object of contempt and ridicule all over India. It was known that Lord Lytton and his advisers were at their wit’s end to discover something which might be made to do duty as a “Scientific Frontier,” and so bring a misjudged enterprise to a conclusion. But it is the peculiarity of our Ministers to believe that they can arrest the inexorable sequence of cause and effect by a dexterous manipulation of the faculty of speech. Lord Beaconsfield appears to have imparted to his colleagues his own belief in the omnipotence of phrases to remove mountains, and make rough places smooth. So the Treaty of Gundamuck was no sooner signed than Ministers and Ministerial journals raised a great hymn of triumph over the wondrous things which they had wrought in Afghanistan. The one solid national advantage to be derived from the sacrifice of Cavagnari and his comrades, is that this method of treating facts will have to be laid aside. Lord Lytton is not likely to appeal again to his “carefully verified facts” as a proof that he is a much wiser man than Lord Lawrence. Lord Cranbrook will not again express his conviction that the “objections (to an English Resident) expressed by Shere Ali will be shown to have been without substantial foundation.” Yakoub Khan and his five attendants are all that remain of that “strong, friendly, and independent Afghanistan” which Mr. Stanhope informed the House of Commons had been created by the war. The anguished cry of the Daily Telegraph “for a punishment which shall ring from end to end of the Continent of Asia” is the latest expression of the “results incalculably beneficial to the two countries” which, according to Lord Lytton, were to flow from the Peace of Gundamuck.

A failure in policy more signal and more complete than this it is impossible to imagine. But it is to be noted that the Ministerial journals are doing their utmost to save the “Scientific Frontier” from the destruction which has overtaken the projects of the Ministry. And so long as a belief in this Frontier is cherished anywhere, the return to a safe and rational policy is obstructed. In the following pages, therefore, I shall, firstly, endeavour to show that the (so-called) “Scientific Frontier” is as purely fictitious as the “strong, friendly, and independent Afghanistan” which we were told had been created out of chaos by means of the war. And, secondly, I shall discuss the various lines of conduct which lie open to us, when we have occupied Kabul, in order to determine which is best fitted to ensure the stability of our Indian Empire and the contentment of its inhabitants.

The Scientific Frontier.

In all the discussions on this Frontier question, a very obvious, but all-important, fact has been persistently forgotten. It is that British rule in India is a rule based upon military supremacy; and that, therefore, our Indian army—English as well as native—is primarily a garrison, having its duties upon the places where it is quartered. We could not withdraw our troops from any part of India without incurring the risk of an outbreak in the districts thus denuded. The “Punjab Frontier Force” has always been a force distinct from the “Army of India,” and recognized as having special duties of its own. So far as I know, in the discussions on a “Scientific Frontier” no reference has been made to the above circumstance. The Indian army has been spoken of as if it were so much fighting power, which we were free to concentrate at any point we pleased. And to this oversight is due the hallucination that an improved frontier would enable us to diminish the strength of the Indian garrison (properly so called). The fact is, that before this last war we had almost the very frontier which our situation in India required. If the authority of the Ameer had extended up to the boundaries of our Empire, troubles between the two States must have occurred, resulting inevitably in the extinction of the weaker. The evil of such an extension of territory no one denies; we should not only have had to hold Afghanistan with a strong garrison—certainly not less than twenty thousand men—but we should have been compelled to maintain a frontier force, to guard against aggression from without, either from Russia or Persia. Forty thousand men would have been needed for this double duty, in addition to the pre-existing garrison of India. But by a piece of supreme good fortune the authority of the Ameer did not begin where ours left off. Between us and him were interposed the tribes which dwell in the hills along our North-Western frontier. These tribes acknowledged allegiance neither to him nor to us. Broken up and divided amongst themselves, the worst they could inflict upon us was an occasional raid into our territories; and these we could repress without having to call the Ameer to an account for the lawlessness of his subjects. A few regiments of horse and foot were all that we needed for the defence of our frontier; while as against foreign invasion we possessed a frontier that needed no defence at all. That frontier consisted of the foodless deserts and inaccessible hills of Afghanistan. These were impenetrable to an invader, so long as we retained the friendship and the confidence of the people who dwell among them. Consequently, to quote the language of Sir Henry Rawlinson, “our main object has ever been, since the date of Lord Auckland’s famous Simla Manifesto of 1838, to obtain the establishment of a strong, friendly, and independent Power on the North-Western frontier of India, without, however, accepting any crushing liabilities in return.” We all know the manner in which Lord Auckland set about obtaining the “strong, friendly, and independent Power,” and the “crushing liabilities” we had to accept in consequence. Tutored by experience, we adopted a wiser and more righteous policy, which was producing admirable results.

The difficulty of establishing a stable friendship with Afghanistan arises from the character of the people. It is the habitation, not of a nation, but of a collection of tribes, and the nominal ruler of Afghanistan is never more than the ruler of a party which, for the time, chances to be strongest. Consequently there never existed an authority, recognized as legitimate throughout the country, with which we could enter into diplomatic relations. At the same time, their divided condition crippled the Afghans for all offensive purposes. We had, therefore, nothing to fear in the way of unprovoked aggression, and our obvious policy was to win the confidence of these wild tribes and their chiefs, by carefully abstaining from encroachments on their independence. Such, in fact, has been the policy which every Governor-General has pursued in the interval which divides the “plundering and blundering” of Lord Auckland from the like achievements of Lord Lytton. And it had been attended with the greater success, because under the firm guidance of two remarkable men, Afghanistan had progressed considerably towards the status of an organized kingdom. Shere Ali had diligently trod in the footsteps of his father, the Dost, and it is in these terms that the Government of India describes the rule and policy of the Ameer in the year 1876:

“Those officers of our Government who are best acquainted with the affairs of Afghanistan, and the character of the Ameer and his people, consider that the hypothesis that the Ameer may be intimidated or corrupted by Russia (even supposing there was any probability of such an attempt being made) is opposed to his personal character and to the feelings and traditions of his race, and that any attempt to intrigue with factions in Afghanistan, opposed to the Ameer, would defeat itself, and afford the Ameer the strongest motive for at once disclosing to us such proceedings. Whatever may be the discontent created in Afghanistan by taxation, conscription, and other unpopular measures, there can be no question that the power of the Ameer Shere Ali Khan has been consolidated throughout Afghanistan in a manner unknown since the days of Dost Mahomed, and that the officers entrusted with the administration have shown extraordinary loyalty and devotion to the Ameer’s cause. It was probably the knowledge of the Ameer’s strength that kept the people aloof from Yakoub Khan, in spite of his popularity. At all events, Herat fell to the Ameer without a blow. The rebellion in Salpoora in the extreme West was soon extinguished. The disturbances in Budukshan in the North were speedily suppressed. Nowhere has intrigue or rebellion been able to make head in the Ameer’s dominions. Even the Char Eimak and the Hazara tribes are learning to appreciate the advantages of a firm rule.... But what we wish specially to repeat is that, from the date of the Umballa Durbar to the present time, the Ameer has unreservedly accepted and acted upon our advice to maintain a peaceful attitude towards his neighbours. We have no reason to believe that his views are changed.”

This “strong, friendly, and independent Power”—this edifice of order and increasing stability—the British Government deliberately destroyed in the insane expectation of finding a “Scientific Frontier” hidden somewhere in the ruins. It is difficult to conceive of an action more impolitic or more cruel. In a month the labours of forty years were obliterated, old hatreds rekindled, and the wounds of 1838, which the wise and gentle treatment of former Viceroys had almost healed, were opened afresh.

We come next to the inquiry as to what this “Scientific Frontier” is, in order to obtain which this act of vandalism was perpetrated. This is a question involved in some obscurity. The Times is the great champion of the “Scientific Frontier,” but in its columns, as also in Ministerial speeches, it changes colour like a chameleon. Sometimes it is called the “possession of the three highways leading to India,” thereby rendering the Empire “invulnerable.” At other times it is recommended to us because it protects the trade through the Bolan Pass, and enables us to threaten Kabul. The fact is that the (so-called) “Scientific Frontier”—meaning thereby the frontier we acquired by the Treaty of Gundamuck—is a make-believe, an imposture. It is not the “Scientific Frontier” in pursuit of which we “hunted the Ameer to death” and reduced his territories to a condition of anarchy.

Those who have followed the history of the war with attention will remember that in September of last year the Calcutta correspondent of the Times was smitten with a really marvellous admiration for Lord Lytton. “India,” he wrote, “is fortunate in the possession at the present time of a Viceroy specially gifted with broad statesmanlike views, the result partly of most vigilant and profound study, partly of the application of great natural intellectual capacity to the close cultivation of political science and the highest order of statecraft.” Here we have the portrait of the lion painted by himself; and it is not surprising that this superb creature should have regarded with considerable scorn the policy of his predecessors who never claimed to be “specially gifted” for the exercise of “the highest order of statecraft.” “The present measure,” the correspondent went on to say, “for the despatch of a mission to Kabul forms but a single move in an extensive concerted scheme for the protection of India, which is the outcome of a long-devised and elaborately worked-out system of defensive policy.” Here we have a fine example of the “puff preliminary.” In the issue of the Times for the 10th September this “extensive concerted scheme for the protection of India” is detailed at length, and is there plainly set forth as intended for a barrier against Russia:—

“The Indian Government are most anxious to avoid adopting any policy which would bear even the semblance of hostility towards Russia, but the extreme probability of a collision sooner or later cannot be overlooked. It is necessary, therefore, to provide for a strong defensive position to guard against eventualities. From this point of view it is indispensable that we should possess a commanding influence over the triangle of territory formed on the map by Kabul, Ghuznee, and Jellalabad, together with power over the Hindoo Khosh.... This triangle we may hope to command with Afghan concurrence if the Ameer is friendly. The strongest frontier line which could be adopted would be along the Hindoo Khosh, from Pamir to Bamian, thence to the south by the Helmund, Girishk, and Kandahar, to the Arabian Sea. It is possible, therefore, that by friendly negotiations some such defensive boundary may be adopted.”

Such were the moderate designs entertained by the Indian Government when they dispatched what they called a “friendly mission” to the Court of the Ameer. If Lord Lytton imagined that “friendly negotiations” would obtain these tremendous concessions from the Ameer, it would show that a training in “the highest order of statecraft” does not preserve even a “specially gifted” Viceroy from the credulousness of an infant. But his acts show that he entertained no such belief. He felt, as every one must feel who reads the extract I have made, that demands such as these must be preceded by a war. Hence the menacing letters addressed to the Ameer; hence the rude and insulting manner in which Sir Neville Chamberlain was ordered to attempt an entrance into Afghanistan without awaiting the permission of the Ameer; and hence, finally, the monstrous fiction of a deliberate “insult” inflicted upon us, when, in point of fact, we had been the “insulters” all along. The obvious intention throughout was to obtain a pretext for declaring war, because without a war the “Scientific Frontier” was manifestly unattainable. Lastly, when war had been determined upon, the same “official” correspondent came forward in the Times to make known the objects of the impending campaign. “We have,” he wrote, “been driven into what will probably be a costly war entirely against our will, and all our endeavours to avoid it. The occasion, therefore, will now be seized to secure for ourselves the various passes piercing the mountain ranges along the whole frontier from the Khyber to the Bolan; and further strategic measures will be adopted to dominate entirely the Suleiman range and the Hindoo Khosh.”

It is impossible not to admire the hardihood of this remarkable correspondent when he alleges that the war was “entirely against our will, and all our endeavours to avoid it.” But this is not the matter with which I am at present concerned. The official character of these communications will be denied by no one, and they make it clear that the “Scientific Frontier” was intended as a barrier against Russia, and would have made the Hindoo Khosh the external boundary of the Indian Empire. Such a frontier is manifestly the dream of a military specialist, to whose mental vision the Indian Empire, with all its diverse interests, has no existence except as a frontier to be defended against the Russians. And it illustrates the ignorance and precipitate folly which has plunged us in our present difficulties that a project so wild should have been seriously entertained. To have carried it out the subjugation of Afghanistan would have been an indispensable preliminary, and then the civilizing of it, by means of a system of roads and strong garrisons throughout the country; the entire cost of these vast operations being defrayed by a country already taxed to the last point of endurance, heavily burdened with an increasing debt, and ravaged by periodical famines. Such, however, was the “Scientific Frontier” for which a “specially gifted Viceroy,” trained in “the highest order of political statecraft,” declared war against the Ameer. But the frontier which we obtained at the close of the war, and which Ministers and Ministerial journals would have us believe is the genuine article which they wanted from the beginning, is not only not this frontier, but it has not the smallest resemblance to it.

The new frontier does not differ from the old except in three particulars. We hold the Khyber Pass as far as Lundi Kotal, and we have acquired the right to quarter troops in the Kurram Valley and the Valley of Peshin. Of these the Kurram Valley is a mere cul-de-sac, leading nowhere. But I will not ask of my readers to accept of my judgment on this matter. Among the best known advocates for a forward and aggressive policy in Afghanistan is Dr. Bellew. An accomplished linguist and an experienced traveller, he accompanied Colonel Lumsden’s mission to Kandahar in 1857; he was also a member of the mission entrusted with the settlement of the Seistan boundary question, and no man living is better acquainted with the geography and people of Afghanistan. I believe it will not be denied that Lord Lytton, during the recent war, trusted largely in his knowledge and suggestions. He has thus expressed himself on the policy of occupying the Kurram Valley:—

“The Kurram Valley would involve the addition of about one hundred and fifty miles of hill frontage to our border, and would bring us into contact with the independent Orakzais, Zaimukhts, Toris, Cabul-Khel, Waziris, and others, against whose hostility and inroads here, as in other parts of the border, we should have to protect our territory. By its possession, as we are now situated, we should be committed to the defence of a long narrow strip of land, a perfect cul-de-sac in the hills, hemmed in by a number of turbulent robber-tribes, who are under no control, and acknowledge no authority. In ordinary times its acquisition would add to the serious difficulties of our position. In times of trouble or disturbance on the border, its possession would prove a positive source of weakness, a dead weight upon our free action. In it we should run the risk of being hemmed in by our foes in the overhanging hills around, of being cut off from our communications with the garrison of Kohat, by the Orakzais on the one side, by the Waziris on the other. These are the disadvantages of the step. In return what advantages should we derive? Not one. With Kurram in our possession we certainly could not flank either the Khyber or the Goleri Pass, because between it and the one, intervenes the impassable snowy range of Sufed Koh; and between it and the other, intervenes the vast routeless hilly tract of the Waziris. From Kurram we could neither command Kabul nor Ghazni, because the route to either is by a several days’ march, over stupendous hills and tortuous defiles, in comparison with which the historical Khyber and Bolan Passes, or even the less widely-known Goleri Pass, are as king’s highways.”

This, I think, is sufficient to dispose of the Kurram Valley. If the old frontier has been rendered “invulnerable,” it is not the acquisition of the Kurram Valley which has made it so. There remains the Peshin Valley. This valley is an open tract of country lying almost midway on the line of march between Quetta and Kandahar, but nearer to the former than the latter. Three easy marches from Quetta suffice to place a traveller in the centre of it. It cannot accurately be described as an extension of our frontier, because it is dissevered from it by more than two hundred miles of difficult country. Between the valley and British territory, the lands of the Khan of Khelat are interposed in one direction, and numerous robber-tribes—Kakers, Murrees, Bhoogtees—in another. Until the valley is securely linked to the Indus by a railway from Sukkur to the Bolan Pass—a costly work, which could not be executed in less than seven years—it will be impossible to quarter more than a few thousand men in it—and these for six months of the year will be as completely detached from their base of supply and reinforcement in India, as if a tract of empty space ran between them. So far from ensuring any increased security to India by our premature occupation of this valley, we have only enhanced the chances of a hostile collision with the rulers and people of Afghanistan. We were already in military occupation of Quetta, and until easy and rapid communication had been established between Quetta and the Indus, nothing was to be gained by a yet further advance from our base. As a barrier against Russia this frontier is without meaning, and no better proof of this fact could be adduced than Sir Henry Rawlinson’s commentary upon its merits in the Article on the “Results of the Afghan War” which recently appeared in the Nineteenth Century:—

“The Afghan settlement is a very good settlement as far as it goes, but it is not immaculate—it is not complete. To yield us its full measure of defence, the Treaty must be supplemented by all legitimate precautions and supports. Persia must be detached from Russia coûte que coûte. Russia herself must not be left in any uncertainty as to our intentions. She must be made to understand ... that she will not be permitted unopposed to establish herself in strength ... even at Abiverd, nor to commence intrigues against the British power in India. She might indeed be warned that, if necessary, we were prepared in self-defence to support the Turcomans—with whom she has no legitimate quarrel—with arms or money, or even to turn the tables on her by encouraging the efforts of the Uzbegs to recover their liberty.... It would be almost fatuity at such a moment to withdraw our garrison from Candahar.... Yacub Khan must be made to see that it is as much for his interest as our own to hold an efficient body of troops in such a position that, on the approach of danger ... they might, with military alacrity, occupy Herat as an auxiliary garrison.”

And what is implied in detaching Persia from Russia he explains in another part of his Essay.

“If Russia, as there is strong reason to believe, is now pushing on to Merv or Sarakhs ... with the ultimate hope of occupying Herat, then it might very possibly be a sound policy to extend to Persia the provisions of the Asia Minor Protectorate, or even to support her actively in vindicating her rights upon the frontier of Khorassán.”

From all which it would appear that our “Scientific Frontier” is simply good for nothing until it has been supplemented by an offensive and defensive alliance with the barbarian enemies of Russia all over the world. In order to ensure the safety of India, we must protect not only our own “Scientific Frontier,” but we must guarantee the Sultan all his Asiatic possessions; we must be ready at any moment to fight for the “integrity and independence” of Persia; we must be prepared to march our troops to Herat, and to show a front against the Russians on the Oxus; we must provide the Tekeh-Turcomans with arms and money, and assist the Uzbegs in their attempts to recover their liberty. Such are the “legitimate precautions and supports” which are requisite to render the new frontier immaculate and complete. But if with a “Scientific Frontier” we remain liable to such tremendous demands as these, it passes imagination to conjecture in what respect we could have been worse off when our frontier was “haphazard.”

The Circumstances of the Peace.

I shall next endeavour to show the circumstances which compelled the Indian Government to acquiesce in a peace which thus left the avowed object of the war unfulfilled. The preparations for the invasion of Afghanistan were on a scale corresponding to the magnitude of the enterprise as explained by the “official” correspondent of the Times. Troops were set in motion for the North-West frontier from garrisons in the extreme south of India. Men were sent from England to man heavy gun batteries. In addition to the troops under General Roberts, no less than three columns were formed to invade Afghanistan viâ Sukkur and the Bolan, and the same number to advance through the Khyber. The force which marched to Kandahar was supplied with four heavy gun batteries, and a fifth was sent up subsequently, although, except upon the supposition that permanent entrenched camps were to be formed in Afghanistan, these heavy guns were simply an encumbrance and a source of danger. But the campaign had barely commenced before the Government became aware that it had utterly miscalculated its cost and difficulty. It is easy enough for an army to enter Afghanistan; it is next to impossible for it to subsist when it has got there. It is easy enough to scatter the Afghans when collected in battle array; it is next to impossible to subjugate them because they never are so collected. From these causes our raid into Afghanistan was but little removed from an ignominious failure. If we had not made peace we should have been compelled to evacuate the country from the enormous costliness of retaining troops in it. Under such circumstances, a peace was needed too urgently to allow the Government to stand out for any extraordinary concessions. They took what they could get, which proved to be, as we have seen, the right to place garrisons in the two valleys of Kurram and Peshin. But having gone to war in search of a “Scientific Frontier,” no alternative was left to them except to frankly confess that they had not found it; or to affirm that these two valleys constituted it.

We come now to the causes of our failure. These are all-important, and ought to dissipate for ever the fear of an invasion of India by Russia or any other Power. The plan of the campaign required that Afghanistan should be invaded from three points; but the most important operation was understood to be the advance of General Stewart upon Kandahar. As soon as hostilities appeared inevitable, a small force under General Biddulph had been sent forward to secure Quetta against a sudden attack. General Stewart followed later on, and the two columns numbered upon paper about 20,000 men, with 60 guns. Meanwhile, a third column was ordered to assemble at Sukkur in support, and placed under the command of General Primrose. These extensive preparations were supposed to indicate the determination of the Indian Government to push on as far as Herat. The distance which had to be traversed between Sukkur and Kandahar is, roughly speaking, about four hundred miles, but the country presents extraordinary difficulties. From Sukkur to Jacobabad extends a level tract which, during the rains, is flooded to a depth of seven feet. Between Jacobabad and Dadur—a town situated at the entrance of the Bolan Pass—extends the Sinde desert. Any large force marching across this desert would have to take with them, not only food and forage, but water, for only at intervals of fifteen or twenty miles is the parched and barren soil pierced by a few brackish springs, which just suffice for the needs of the hamlets which have sprung up around them. For six months of the year this desert is literally impassable. A hot wind sweeps across it, which is fatal to man and beast. Only once did the Indian Government venture to send troops across it after this “blast of death” (as the natives call it) had begun to blow. This was in the last Afghan war. Some hundreds of native troops were sent as an escort in charge of supplies, and in four days one hundred Sepoys perished, three hundred camp followers, and (I think) nine officers out of fourteen. Beyond Dadur is the Bolan Pass. This Pass is about eighty miles in length; regular road there is none; what purports to be a road is merely the bed of a stream, which, during the rainy weather, is filled from bank to bank with a volume of rushing water. Neither food nor forage is obtainable in the Pass, and even the camels, when starting from Dadur, had to carry a seven days’ supply of food for themselves. Between Quetta and Kandahar the country is open, but neither is food procurable for a large force, nor forage for the horses and camels. From first to last General Stewart’s troops were almost wholly fed from India. The winter, luckily, was one of unprecedented mildness. But for this, in place of a march upon Kandahar, a terrible catastrophe could hardly have been averted. In ordinary seasons the snows fall heavily in and around Quetta early in November, and the cold is intense. The Bolan Pass is swept from end to end by hurricanes of wind and rain and snow. At the very time when these storms usually occur we had a dozen regiments and batteries straggling along the whole length of the Bolan Pass. Last year, however, there was neither snow nor hurricane, and our troops got through the Pass in safety. There was no opposition offered to our advance on Kandahar, but, from the want of food and the hardships which had to be endured, no less than twenty thousand camels perished upon the march. This mortality decided the campaign. When General Stewart reached Kandahar the situation was as follows:—The magazines at Quetta were nearly empty. Four months’ food was collected at Sukkur, but awaited carriage for its transport to Quetta. The third column under General Primrose was assembling on the Indus, and needed ten thousand camels to enable it to advance. To supply all these wants there were at Sukkur about 1600 camels. In order to lessen the pressure on the Commissariat, General Stewart divided his forces, despatching one column to hunt for supplies in the direction of Giriskh, and sending another with the same object to Khelat-i-Ghilzie. These movements caused the death from cold and hunger of a large additional number of camels, and demonstrated that there was not food in that part of Afghanistan sufficient for a force so large as that collected at Kandahar. Sinde, meanwhile, had been swept so bare of camels that it was impossible to collect a sufficient number for the carriage of food to Quetta before the hot weather had set in, and the march across the desert was barred by “the blast of death.” Immediate action was necessary if General Stewart’s troops were not to starve; and eight thousand men returned to India, reducing the garrison left at Kandahar to four thousand. This number, it was trusted, the Commissariat would be able to feed during the hot weather. But even this small force was so scantily supplied with carriage that it could not have moved, in a body, for fifty miles in any direction. It was, so to speak, nailed to the spot on which it was encamped. This want of food, far more than the physical difficulties of the country, is and always will be the insuperable obstacle to carrying on extensive military operations in Afghanistan. The people obtain no more from the soil than just suffices for their own wants; and for days together an invading army has to pass over huge wastes with hardly a trace of human habitation, and consequently destitute of food.

Not a little amusing was the revulsion of feeling caused throughout India by the lame and impotent conclusion of the advance on Kandahar. It was a demonstration of the impossibility of an invasion which convinced those who were most reluctant to be convinced. If when we had all India from which to draw our supplies, and with no enemy to oppose us, our utmost efforts had merely sufficed to place four thousand men in Kandahar, and leave them there, isolated and defenceless, it was chimerical to suppose that the Russians could march for double that distance an army capable of attempting the conquest of India. “Kandahar,” writes a military correspondent to the Pioneer—the official journal of India—“is acknowledged to be a mistake, and it is hoped that a British army will never again be dispatched in that direction; it is a mere waste of men, money, and means, and an unsuitable line for either attack or defence.”

And the Pioneer, the very purpose of whose existence is to preach the infallibility of the Indian Government, thus endorses the remarks of its correspondent: “The theories about Kandahar are by this time exploded; indeed, there are many critics who have refused to adopt them from the very beginning; believing against General Hamley, that the main road into Afghanistan, whether we march as defenders of the Kabul Ameer or as avengers, must lie past Peshawur and Jelalabad.”

The failure on the Kandahar side placed the Indian Government in an extremely difficult position. An advance on Herat was plainly out of the question; even one on Ghuznee was beyond the power of General Stewart and his troops. Elsewhere the aspect of affairs was hardly less cheering. The expedition in the Kurram Valley had resulted in the somewhat ignominious retreat out of Khost. We had about 15,000 men holding the line from the Khyber to Jelalabad; but in effecting this, 14,000 camels had perished, and several of the regiments had been more than decimated from sickness and exposure. We had not subjugated a rood of territory on which our troops were not actually encamped. The main strength of the Ameer’s army was untouched, while all along our Trans-Indus frontier the hill tribes were in a state of dangerous unrest. The hot weather was coming on apace, when cholera and typhoid fever would be added to the number of our enemies. Thirty thousand troops had been set in motion, the garrisons in the interior of India dangerously weakened; three millions of money expended; and this was all that had been achieved. If now Yakoub Khan refused to come to terms, what was to be done? General Brown might be ordered to force his way from Jelalabad to Kabul, but what was he to do when he got there? The cost in money would be certainly heavy—the cost in men, not improbably, heavy also. And if, on our arrival at his capital, Yakoub Khan retired to either Balkh or Herat, we were powerless to follow him. Yakoub Khan, in fact, had the game in his hands. We had shot our bolt and failed. He had simply to decline to make peace, and keep out of our reach. We should then have been compelled either to evacuate the country, or to occupy it with the certainty that a little later on we should be compelled to withdraw, when the drain on the finances of India became too heavy to endure. Sir Henry Rawlinson rightly says, that a very small force can march from one end of Afghanistan to another; but a very large force is requisite permanently to hold it. The tribal divisions which hinder unity of resistance hinder also the achievement of any decisive victory. Each tribe is an independent centre of life, which requires a separate operation for its extinction.

Such was the dilemma in which the Government found themselves involved. It was almost equally disastrous either to withdraw or to advance. If the troops were withdrawn, they would return burdened with the ignominy of failure. If they advanced, it would be into a tangle of military and political embarrassments, the issue of which it was impossible to foresee. There was only one way of escape possible, and that was to relinquish the ambitious projects from which the war originated, and acquiesce in any settlement which the adversary would agree to. The result was the Treaty with Yakoub Khan—a Treaty which I have no hesitation in saying has placed in peril the existence of our Indian Empire.

It is, indeed, impossible to account for the infatuation or the obstinacy which caused the Indian Government to stipulate for the reception of an undefended British Envoy at the Court of a prince in the position of Yakoub Khan. It would have been so easy to have introduced a clause in the Treaty, to the effect that as soon as Yakoub Khan’s authority was firmly established an English Envoy should be accredited to Kabul. This would have saved the political consistency of the Government without exposing the Indian Empire to the tremendous strain and peril of a second Afghan expedition. There was absolutely nothing to be gained, either in India or England, by immediately forcing an English Envoy on the luckless Yakoub; while it enormously enhanced the difficulties with which he had to cope. Nevertheless, in the face of historic precedents, in defiance of multiplied warnings, Lord Lytton deliberately resolved to reproduce, for the edification of Asia, the tragedy of Shah Soojah and Sir William Nacnaghten, the only difference being that on this occasion the principal parts were played by Yakoub Khan and Major Cavagnari. The fact is that from first to last in this bad business the chief agents were moving in a world of their own imagining. They appear to have persuaded themselves that they had but to refuse to see facts, and the facts would vanish. They had but to publish in the Times that Lord Lytton was a “Viceroy specially gifted,” and forthwith he would become what he was described to be. They had but to assert that the Afghans had no objection to the presence of a British Envoy at Kabul, and immediately their objections would disappear. The mischief is done now past recall. Hardly even in 1857 was our Indian Empire in a position of greater peril than it is now. The persistent opposition between official acts and official language which has been the distinguishing characteristic of Lord Lytton’s administration has created an universal disbelief in the sincerity of our speech and the equity of our intentions. In the circle which surrounds the Viceroy, it seems, indeed, to have become an accepted maxim that it is a matter of indifference whether or not the natives are heartily loyal to our rule. And Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, in his Minute on the Repeal of the Cotton Duties, notes the fact as “a grave political danger.” It is a maxim which could not have been formulated except by the agents of a Government who felt that they had forfeited, past hope of recovery, the confidence of those they were set to rule over. Of the alienation itself there can be no question. The loyalty of the native has, probably, never been at a lower ebb since 1857. And any reverse in Afghanistan might kindle a flame that would spread from one end of India to the other.

But there is nothing to be gained by anticipating greater difficulties than already beset us. I will assume that no additional complications occur—that General Roberts has succeeded without much difficulty in the occupation of Kabul—that General Stewart has possession of Kandahar, and that all we have to determine is what to do with Afghanistan now we have got it. There are but three courses of conduct possible—withdrawal from the country altogether, a return to the arrangements formulated in the Treaty of Gundamuck, or annexation. I will consider the last first.

Annexation.

Nobody, so far as I know, desires to annex Afghanistan. But there are, I apprehend, but few who are aware of what is involved in “the annexation of Afghanistan,” and the danger is that we may drift almost unwillingly into annexation, to discover the full consequences only when too late. Everybody is agreed that India cannot defray the costs. This is set down by the supporters of Government at a sum of five millions annually. I believe it would be much larger; but we will assume that five millions is a correct estimate. By no possibility could we screw this additional sum from the people of India. Already the expenses of the administration increase at a far quicker rate than the revenues which have to meet them. The costs of governing Afghanistan, therefore, would have to be defrayed from the English Exchequer. But assuming this to be arranged, the pecuniary difficulty is the smallest which has to be encountered. To garrison the interior and frontier of Afghanistan we should require not less than forty thousand men—one-half of whom would have to be English soldiers. For, until the interior of Afghanistan is completely opened out by roads which can be traversed throughout the year, the garrisons holding the country would have to be sufficiently strong to be independent of reserves and supports during the winter. And if we attempted to hold Balkh and Herat, twenty thousand English soldiers would not suffice. Now where are these English soldiers to come from? An addition of at least forty thousand men to our regular army would be required in order to supply them. But the English part of our Afghanistan garrison does not present so insuperable a difficulty as the native. It would not be safe, at least for many years, to organize our native garrison from the Afghans themselves. The regiments would have to be recruited in India specially for this service—but out of what races? The natives of the Southern parts of India have not the physique capable of enduring the severities of an Afghanistan winter. The Sikhs or Hindoos of Upper India would certainly not enlist in a service which carried them so far from their homes into the midst of an alien people and an alien faith. The only recruits we should obtain in large numbers would be Muhammadans. The danger, then, is obvious. In India the fierce fanaticism of the Moslem creed is mitigated by its contact with the milder tenets of Hindooism; but remove an Indian Moslem to Afghanistan, and he would very soon become inspired by the religious zeal of his co-religionists around him. We should be exposed to the risk, perpetually, of our native garrison combining with the people of the country to expel the infidel intruders from the land, and restore the supremacy of the Prophet. But even these dangers dwindle into insignificance when we contemplate the main result of an annexation of Afghanistan. That result would be that the hills and deserts of Afghanistan would no longer extend between the Russian Power and our own. We should have given to Russia the power to interfere directly in the internal concerns of India.

I have never supposed Russia to have any sinister designs upon India. After much reading I have failed to discover any proof of such designs. Those who suspect Russia obtain their evidence by a very simple process. They reject as incredible the objects assigned by the Russian Government as guiding its policy, and substitute their own fixed preconception in place of them. I believe that neither Russia nor any other Power would accept of India as a free gift. I cannot imagine a rational statesman coveting for his country so burdensome and unprofitable a responsibility. But that a Russian Government should ever attempt the invasion and conquest of India is to me beyond the power of belief. What Mr. Cobden wrote in 1835 appears to me as convincing at this day as it was then.

“China,” he wrote, “affords the best answer to those who argue that Russia meditates hostile views towards our Indian possessions. China is separated from Russia by an imaginary boundary only; and that country is universally supposed to contain a vast deposit of riches well worthy of the spoiler’s notice. Besides, it has not enjoyed the ‘benefit’ of being civilized by English or other Christian conquerors—an additional reason for expecting to find a wealthy Pagan community, waiting, like unwrought mines, the labours of some Russian Warren Hastings. Why, then, does not the Czar invade the Chinese Empire, which is his next neighbour, and contains an unravaged soil, rather than contemplate, as the alarmist writers and speakers predict he does, marching three thousand miles over regions of burning deserts and ranges of snowy mountains to Hindostan, where he would find that Clive and Wellesley had preceded him?”

Apart, however, from the question of motives, it is not possible to march an army from Herat to the Indus. And we must always bear in mind that even if the Russian army reached the Indus, their real work, instead of being over, would only then commence. With that vast extent of hill and desert behind them they would have before them some sixty thousand British troops in an entrenched position. Even a victory would leave the invader begirt about with dangers and difficulty; a defeat would be his utter annihilation. Not a soldier of the army of invasion would return to tell the tale. It is impossible to divine where or how Russia could raise the money for so gigantic an enterprise; and if the money was forthcoming it is not credible that any Government should fling it away on such a hopeless undertaking. In assuming that Russia will refrain from an attack upon India, there is no need to credit either the Government or the people with more than that ordinary common sense which hinders men and nations from attempting to achieve the impossible.

The danger to India arises not from the existence of any Russian designs against our Empire, but from the belief that such exist. This belief will, so to speak, hybernate for a season; then all at once we find it in full activity, and creating a panic in every heart of which it takes possession. These are the critical moments for the well-being and security of our Indian Empire. In such a period of panic we rushed into the disastrous war in Afghanistan in 1838. Under the influence of like feelings we involved ourselves in the inglorious raid the first act of which has just terminated. On both occasions we have been guilty of assailing a Prince whose only desire was to form an intimate alliance with us. On both occasions we have carried fire and sword among a people with whom we frankly avowed that we had no assignable cause of quarrel. But so long as Afghanistan extended between us and the Russian dominions in Asia it was physically impossible to declare war against Russia. In our unreasoning panic we fell upon the Ameer and his people, because there was no one else to attack. But if we make the Hindoo Khosh our military frontier, then Russia, by assembling a few thousand men upon the Oxus, can, whenever she pleases, agitate India from one end to the other. She will not need to attack. The menace will be sufficient. For we must remember that the undisputed supremacy of British rule in India depends, in the main, upon two conditions, both of which are destroyed if we annex Afghanistan. The one is, that no heavier burden be laid upon the people than they are willing to bear; and the other, the absence of any hope of deliverance. The cost of maintaining our supremacy in Afghanistan will make the burden of our rule utterly intolerable alike to our native soldiers and our civil population; the assembling of a Russian army on the frontiers of Afghanistan will provide the hope of deliverance. The hazards and uncertainties of the situation would keep the natives in a state of perpetual unrest. The ambitious and the disaffected would engage in intrigue and conspiracy; trade would languish; the internal development of the country be abruptly arrested; and the Empire would assuredly be wrested from our hands on the occasion of the first European war in which we became involved.

The Treaty of Gundamuck.

Annexation being impossible, is it wise, or is it practicable, to return to the provisions of the Treaty of Gundamuck? It is neither wise nor possible, for the simple reason that this Treaty was based upon a fiction. It was grounded upon the utterly false assumption that there existed in Afghanistan a central authority, acknowledged as legitimate by all the people of Afghanistan, with whom we could establish permanent diplomatic relations. There is no such authority. Instances have been adduced of attacks made upon European Embassies in other Oriental countries, and the argument has been put forward, that as, notwithstanding such outbreaks, diplomatic relations have been maintained with Turkey and Persia, there is no reason to conclude from the fate of Major Cavagnari that they are impossible in Afghanistan. The cases are not parallel. The Ameer of Kabul has no such authority in his capital or throughout his dominions as the Sultan or the Shah. It is possible, though not very probable, that a British Envoy might reside in Kabul without being murdered, but the measure of his utility would depend upon the fluctuating fortunes of the Ameer to whom he was accredited. The only way to obviate this would be to place a force at the disposal of the Envoy, sufficient to put down all insurrectionary movements against the Ameer. But if we undertook this duty, we should become responsible for the character of the civil administration. We could not punish the victims of a cruel or rapacious Ameer, without at the same time cutting off at their source the cruelty and rapacity, by the deposition of an unworthy ruler. And thus, in a very brief time, we should find that virtually we had annexed the country. Facts are stubborn things, and it is worse than useless to fight against them. Those who contend that the murder of Major Cavagnari ought not to be allowed to overturn what they term the “settled policy” of the Ministry, are bound to show in what way this “settled policy” can be carried out. How do they propose to obtain an Ameer towards whom all the sections of the Afghans shall practise a loyal obedience? And if no such Ameer can be obtained, with whom or with what are we to establish diplomatic relations?

The Policy of Withdrawal.

There remains the policy of withdrawal. The surest barrier against foreign aggression in India is to be obtained in the contentment and prosperity of the people. A people thus situated are prompt to repel invasion, and secret intrigue is deprived of the conditions essential to its success. But in order that the people of India should be prosperous and contented, it is absolutely necessary that the financial burdens they have to carry—and especially the military charges—should not be enhanced. It is not possible to advance our military frontier—even to the extent of the (so-called) “Scientific Frontier”—without an enormous enhancement of our military expenditure. And all military expenditure is unprofitable, in the sense that it takes so much from the tax-payer and brings him no material equivalent. Consequently, whatever else this forward policy accomplishes, it cannot fail to impoverish the people and stimulate their discontent. Moreover, the incidents of the war have demonstrated that an invasion of India from Central Asia is physically impossible. We started from the Indus, firmly resolved to march to Herat, if necessary; but when we had reached Kandahar, we found it impossible to advance further. It would be equally impossible for a Russian army to march from Herat to the Indus. There is, therefore, no such reason for a change of frontier as was alleged in justification of the war.

In all probability there is not even a Tory in England who does not in his heart approve of a policy of withdrawal; but there are, he would say, difficulties in the way. There are. After all the glowing eulogies they have pronounced upon themselves, it will not be pleasant or easy for Ministers to transfer these eulogies to their opponents. It will be extremely disagreeable for a “specially gifted Viceroy” to have to confess that his chiefest gift was a gigantic capacity for blundering. But if India is to be preserved to the nation, there is no escape from this unpleasant alternative. Either Ministers must acknowledge an error that is now patent to all the world, or India must be saddled with the heavy costs and the incalculable risks of an annexation of Afghanistan. These risks, it must be remembered, are not transitory, but enduring; and if we accept them, we must be prepared for a doom of absolute effacement in the politics of Europe. The argument which will be urged against withdrawing from Afghanistan is, of course, the old familiar one—the loss of prestige. This is an argument impossible to refute because the exact worth of prestige is an unknown quantity, as to which no two people are agreed. But whatever be its value, to rush upon ruin and destruction in order to preserve our prestige is an act of insanity. It is as if a man should commit suicide in order to preserve his reputation for courage. When we retired from Afghanistan in 1842, we frankly confessed the mistake we had committed, and I am not aware that any evil resulted from the confession. The wrongs that we had done left behind them a legacy of evil, but not the confession of those wrongs. And so it is now. The frontier policy of Lord Lytton has ruined our reputation for justice, truthfulness, and generosity, and the stain of that policy must cling to us for ever. We shall not conceal or efface it by laying a crushing burden upon our native subjects and upon future generations of Englishmen, in order to evade the humiliation of a confession. On the contrary, we make what reparation is still in our power when, in the interests of both, we refuse to annex Afghanistan.

Robert D. Osborn,
Lieutenant-Colonel.

CRITICAL IDEALISM IN FRANCE.

La Science positive et la Métaphysique. Par Louis Liard, Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux. (Ouvrage couronné par l’Institut de France.) Paris, 1879.

For some years past there has been observable in France, outside of and in opposition to Positivism, a growing movement in favour of idealism in general, and of the critical idealism of Kant in particular. This philosophy, which had previously found very few adherents in our country, has now begun to make its way into our teaching and our Universities. Berkeley and Kant have been the subjects of special works, and an attempt has been made to translate and reproduce their ideas by harmonizing them with the principal doctrines of spiritualism. We have here a movement full of promise and well deserving of attention.[1] Among the different productions affording some notion of this philosophical tendency, we make choice—as being both the most recent and the most complete—of a remarkable work, distinguished and crowned by the French Institute, Positive Science and Metaphysic, by a young and learned professor of Bordeaux, M. Louis Liard.

To begin with, M. Liard’s work is well composed, its plan being simple, severe, and lucid. It divides itself into three parts. The first is devoted to determining the nature and limits of positive sciences—that is, of the sciences properly so called—and to showing that they cannot pretend to abolish or replace metaphysics. In this portion of his book the author discusses the three forms of the experimental philosophy of our day, namely—Positivism, the philosophy of association, and that of evolution.

In the second part, the author examines what he calls Criticism—that is to say, the philosophy of Kant. The preceding discussion having demonstrated that the human mind is incapable of departing from certain forms, certain laws, without which experience itself would be impossible,—the author now resolves these into five fundamentals: space, time, substance, cause, the Absolute. But are these forms or laws of the mind the laws of things as well? Have they an objective authority? We know that metaphysics hang upon the solution of this question. We know, too, what is the solution given by Kant to this great problem. In recognizing the necessary existence of these forms as laws of the mind he disputes their external reality; hence he only admits critical, not real and dogmatic metaphysic. Now, as regards this point the author of the book under our notice, instead of dissenting from Criticism as he had done from Positivism, appears on the contrary to accept it by its own name, and to admire and endorse its conclusions. He seems to grant or even to affirm that if Positivism is wrong, Criticism is right, and that, strictly speaking, metaphysic is not a science.

And yet if metaphysic were not a science in the strict sense of the word—that is to say, in the sense of objective sciences—would it follow that it was nothing, or nothing more than criticism itself? By no means: our author does not stop at that apparent solution; metaphysic according to him has an object that criticism has not reached, has not shaken; metaphysic has its own proper function, in which criticism can never take its place. Only instead of founding it on the object, we must found it on the subject. The mind must turn away from the external world and re-enter itself. It is there that, without need of forms or categories of which criticism has demonstrated the fallacy, the subject grasps itself not only in its phenomena but in its being, and determines itself in conformity to an end. This end is goodness: and this is the only notion we can form to ourselves of the Absolute. Thus, metaphysic is not the science of the object, but that of the subject; or if the name of science be still withheld, it is at least the study of the subject, and it is founded on and completed by morality. Thus, the author ends by an evolution very similar to that of Kant, but with certain differences which it will be our part to point out.

These constitute the three parts of the work. We will now take them up in succession.

I.

Let us first of all consider the characteristics of positive science. It has for its object the conversion of facts into laws, or in other words the resolving the composite into the simple, the particular into the universal, the contingent into the necessary. But let us observe with our author that we are only dealing here with a relative simplicity, a partial universality, a conditional necessity. None of these characters present themselves in a really absolute manner. The simple is invariably composed of several terms; the universal only applies itself to a certain class of phenomena; the necessary is so only with relation to the consequences of a law, but the law itself always remains contingent. Thus, no positive science can ever attain to the absolute. It is the same with methods. These methods are induction and deduction. Now, however precise these processes be, however marvellous the sequence and interdependence of the propositions they discover and demonstrate, their data are never more than particular and contingent facts; consequences, then, can only be proportioned to those data. Hence it is certain that the positive sciences cannot go beyond a relative universality or necessity. It may seem as though we ought to make an exception in favour of mathematics. But by a subtle discussion which it would be difficult to give summarily, the author shows that they too come under the same law, whence it follows that the domain of positive science properly so-called is contained within the relative.

From this consideration there has sprung up in our day a philosophy that reduces all sciences without exception to the knowledge of relation, and by so doing has declared all metaphysics impossible: and this philosophy is called Positivism. “Any proposition,” says Auguste Comte, “which is not finally reducible to the simple enunciation of a particular or general fact, is incapable of holding a real or intelligible meaning.” “There is nothing absolute,” says the same philosopher, “if it be not this very proposition that there is nothing absolute.” As to the proof of this proposition, it lies, according to the school in question, in the celebrated law which reduces all progress of the human mind in all orders of research to three phases: the theological phase, in which facts are explained by causes and supernatural agents; the metaphysical, in which they are explained by abstract and ontological entities; and, finally, the positive, in which phenomena are verified by experience and referred to their laws—that is to say, to constant and always verifiable relations of coincidence and succession.

Our author, having expounded this doctrine with much precision, proceeds to criticize it with equal sagacity. He points out what is illusory in this law of the three states; shows that it confuses metaphysic with scholasticism; and proves, finally, that, in aiming at merging mind in knowledge, and subordinating, as he says, the subjective to the objective, Positivism does not understand what it is speaking of, since all knowledge is ultimately referable to facts of consciousness—that is to say, to something subjective, which is in effect, as Descartes has pointed out, the only order of absolutely certain truths. Besides which, let positive science, or rather the positive philosophy, in the name of positive facts, proscribe metaphysic as it will, is it not evident that the fundamental conceptions of all science—number, atom, force, matter, cause, law—are metaphysical conceptions? Is it not evident that all science whatever is impossible without a certain number of principles or notions,—in a word, of intellectual laws, which even govern experience itself? As yet the positive school has not answered the learned demonstration of Kant on the necessity of the à priori principle, or rather it has ignored it. It has made no addition to that old empiricism which the school of Leibnitz and of Kant had refuted.

But since the Positivism of Auguste Comte, too little versed in metaphysical knowledge to discuss it authoritatively, there have arisen two important schools, the one of association, the other of evolution. The former has endeavoured to base experience on an experimental and positive law; the latter has generalized this law, and made of it a particular case of a more general law embracing the whole of Nature—namely, the law of evolution.

The doctrine of association may be referred to the fundamental law that all ideas rising simultaneously or successively in the human mind, tend invariably to recall each other in the same order; this is what is called association of ideas. When any two ideas have thus been constantly associated without ever being separated (as, for instance, form and colour), they unite indissolubly and thus become necessary laws. Now, of all these necessary connections, the most universal is this: no phenomenon ever appears without having been preceded by some other phenomenon, which is always the same under the same circumstances. This law is that of causality, which is both the supreme principle and, at the same time, the result of all experience. To this doctrine of J. S. Mill and Alexander Bain our author opposes the two following objections:—1st, How does it explain the generalization? 2nd, How does it explain the necessity of the laws of the understanding? On the first point the English School appeals to a law that it calls the law of similarity or faculty of identifying the like in the different. But this is indeed, strictly speaking, a fact of association? Should not association, properly understood, be reduced to the law of contiguity—that is to say, to the fact of our ideas only becoming associated through relations of time? To admit the faculty of recognizing similarity in diversity, what is this but to admit mind, intelligence—something, in short, which is other than a simple external association? As to the second point, can we reduce the rational necessity that Kant and Leibnitz have laid down as the criterion of à priori principles to a pure necessity of habit—that is to say, to the automatic expectation of the future inscribed on the past? Where is the scientific guarantee in this hypothesis? Why should Nature bend to our habits? “Who can assure us that we do not dream in thinking of the future, and that the next sensation may not interrupt our dream by an unforeseen shock?” We see how far-reaching this doubt is; it affects not only metaphysic but science as well.

As to the philosophy of evolution, we know that, with regard to the origin of the principles of thought, it consists in linking the experience of present generations to that of generations past; in substituting secular for individual experience—in a word, in filling up by the accumulation of ages on ages the interval existing between particular and contingent facts and the universality of principles. This hypothesis is always at bottom no other than that of the tabula rasa, only it is no longer the individual who is this tabula rasa, since each one has, by heredity, received a pre-formed intelligence. Nevertheless, under pain of contradicting the hypothesis, we are forced to admit that there was a first subject who, prior to the action of the object, must have been this tabula rasa. But here the objections of Leibnitz reappear. What can a pure, abstract, and unmodified subject be? And again, before any meeting of subject with object, we have to admit a pure object having nothing subjective, just as the subject had nothing objective. What shall we affirm of this pure object? Let us divest it if you will of colour, heat, sound; must we not at least conceive it as extended, as existing in time, conceive it, that is, according to the necessary forms that are supposed to be suppressed? For to say that it has been capable of existing without having anything in common with these forms, and that out of this unknown and nameless condition have arisen, by way of transformation, the notions of which we treat, were to admit that something can come out of nothing. We must therefore acknowledge that universal notions do at least exist as germs at the origin of evolution. It is not evolution that has created them, evolution has only developed them, and be they ever so attenuated, they still remain conditions without which nothing can be thought.

Such is the gist of the first part of M. Liard’s book, and we have nothing to add to it but our approbation. We can but admire the skilful analysis with which it begins, and the vigorous discussion accompanying that analysis. The three stages traversed by the experimental philosophy of our days—namely, Positivism, the Associative Philosophy, and that of Evolution—are competently and precisely summed up. The discussion is cogent, solid, and could not be further developed without injury to the unity of the work. No doubt it requires close attention to follow it; but it is lucid and well sustained. Whatever the difficulty metaphysic may encounter in constituting itself a science, and getting recognized as such, it has been established that empiricism is not a tenable position, since it has been found necessary to pass from positivism to association, from association to evolution; while evolution itself still supposed some pre-formation. One thing is certain, intelligence invariably contains a something that does not come from without—namely, intelligence itself.

II.

The criticism of Positivism has taught us that there is no knowledge possible without à priori elements—that is to say, without laws inherent in thought, which impose themselves upon phenomena, so as to constitute veritable knowledge. This is the system of Kant, and thus that system avoids not only empiricism, but scepticism as well, though commonly confounded with it. For without necessary laws phenomena only form an arbitrary succession, entirely dependent upon the organization of the individual; we have no longer anything but individual sensations. In the Kantian philosophy, however, the individual is subjected to laws that are superior to himself; these are the laws of human thought, and even, perhaps, of all thought whatever. These laws impose themselves on each one of us in a necessary and universal manner, and by so doing communicate to phenomena an objective reality in this sense at least, that they are for individuals veritable objects; and thus it is that mathematical truths are objects to the intellect, even supposing they should be nowhere realized in any existence independent of thought.

But are these laws of thought anything else than laws of thought? Do they really attain to objective reality—to things in themselves. Kant has denied that they do, and our author, in following in his steps, agrees, or seems to agree, with the “Kritik” of Kant.

Let us then resolve the fundamental laws of the human intellect into five principal concepts: these are, space and time, forms of sensibility, substance and cause, laws of external experience, and, lastly, the Absolute, the final and supreme condition of all knowledge. Now, according to Kant and our author, these notions, at least the four first, are at the same time necessary as subjective conditions of thought, and contradictory so soon as we seek to realize them outside of thought.

For example, that space and time are found by implication in every internal or external representation, that they are not the result of abstraction and generalization, this has been firmly established by Kant; for the elements from which some have sought to derive them already imply them. But, at the same time, they are only internal conditions, of which the objects are unrealizable outside of ourselves, and the reason of this is given by M. Liard, as follows:—Space and time have three essential characteristics, they are homogeneous, continuous, and unlimited. Now, if we seek to make of space and time things in themselves we may doubtless conceive them as homogeneous and continuous, but not as unlimited, for no actual magnitude is unlimited; all magnitude is expressed in numbers, and numbers are necessarily finite, an infinite number involving a contradiction.

We will not enter into a question here mooted by the author, leading to what Leibnitz calls the labyrinth of the continued (Labyrinthus continui), or of invisibles; we will content ourselves with pointing out that the reason here given is not by any means in conformity with the ideas of Kant—indeed, that it contradicts them. In fact, our author here applies to the two forms of sensibility the objection that Kant raised only about real things and the sensible world. The world, indeed, being composed of parts, can only be conceived as infinite by adding these parts to each other, and by thus supposing the actual reality of an infinite number. But it is not so with space, which, not being composed of parts, is consequently not representable by numbers. “There is only one single space, there is only one single time,” says Kant. The notion of space is therefore not formed by the infinite addition of small portions of space and time. These are unities, not numbers. Hence illimitableness is given with the very intuition. “Space,” says Kant, “is represented as a given infinite magnitude,” als eine gegebene unendliche Quantität. Now, so soon as the infinite is given, instead of being made by a mental addition, it seems to us that the above difficulty vanishes.

Let us pass to the notion of substance and to that of cause. These two notions are necessary to render possible the connection of phenomena in the human mind. Our perceptions are, in fact, diverse; if they were only diverse, and had no unity, there would be no passage from one phenomenon to another; consciousness would arise and disappear with each phenomenon, to arise and die anew with the next, and so on. But then there would be no thought, for in order that thought should exist there must be at least two different things presented to the unity of consciousness. In other terms, we should be incapable of perceiving a changing thing without something that was changeless. Hence this is a necessary condition of knowledge. Now, let us see whether this condition can be rendered objective. According to our author it cannot, for if we subtract from surrounding things all the phenomena that fall under the domain of the senses, what remains? Nothing. Common-sense, indeed, believes in substance, but does not mean thereby an abstract and metaphysical entity, it means the whole of what strikes the senses; when the phenomenon is opposed to substance nothing is meant but that a new phenomenon has just added itself to preceding ones. Wood burns; here wood is the substance, combustion the phenomenon. This is how common-sense understands the matter; but if we separate from the idea of wood all that characterizes it as wood, nothing remains but a pure abstraction, of which common-sense takes no account, and has never so much as thought. Our author further combats the idea of substance by appealing to the metaphysical difficulties that it suggests. Is there only one substance, or are there several? Either hypothesis is equally difficult to sustain. In other words, substance is nothing more than that law in virtue of which the mind connects phenomena in one and the same act of thought.

Here, again, we are obliged to say that the preceding arguments against the objectivity of the notion of substance are, in our opinion, far from conclusive. In the first place, it seems to us a false philosophical method to exclude an object from the human mind because it suggests difficulties that we are incapable of solving. Every object must be presented to us as existing before we can judge of the possibility of that object. Perhaps we do not possess the means of solving all the questions which the existence of an object may suggest, but this is no reason why it should not exist. The existence of things cannot be subordinated to the limits of our understanding; it is this very principle which seems to us soundest of all in the “Kritik” of Kant. Even should we be for ever incapable of knowing whether there is one substance or whether there are many, even should we be for ever doomed to doubt as to this point, it would not follow that the existence of one or of many substances were thereby done away with. Moreover, the criticism of our author goes much further than the imperilling the objectivity of substance; it really bears against the very notion itself. If, in fact, every phenomenon being withdrawn, nothing remains any longer in my mind, it is not merely objective substance that vanishes, it is the notion itself. What, indeed, is a notion which, analyzed, comes to naught? And what is this necessary law which is a nonentity? Our author tells us that if we remove all the accidents there remains “nothing perceptible to the senses.” This is mere tautology, for it is too evident that nothing sensible ought to remain in the notion, all sensible accidents having been withdrawn; but what does remain is that without which phenomena could not be connected. And this is no empty concept, for how should an empty concept have any uniting power? And, lastly, when the author, correcting himself, as we think, says that the notion of substance reduces itself to what he calls a “fundamental phenomenon,” he does nothing but change the word, and in reality reverts to what we call substance. For in what sense does anything fundamental—that is to say, that to which other phenomena ultimately reduce themselves, and which cannot be reduced to any other—still preserve the name of phenomenon? All this, therefore, is but admitting under one name what has been denied under another.

The criticism of the notion of cause is quite similar to that of the notion of substance. It is a notion necessary to the mind, for just as without substance there can be no mental connection between simultaneous phenomena, in the same way without cause there can be no connection between successive phenomena. Causality is the necessary law that connects each phenomenon with its anterior conditions. Without this law there could be no science, no induction, no experience. It cannot, consequently, be derived from experience, since it is the very condition of it. But do we seek to render cause objective as well as substance? If so, we must understand it in a different sense. Cause is no longer merely a phenomenon anterior to another, the antecedent of a consequent. It is something quite different, it is force, the active power, that initiates the movement, and of which we find the type in our own consciousness. Hence, to render cause objective is nothing less than to spiritualize the universe, to suppose everywhere causes similar to ours—it is a kind of universal Fetichism. And, further, we fall into the same difficulties as we did with regard to substance. Is there only one cause or many causes? Lastly, causation thus understood is of no use whatever to science, for science has no need at all of metaphysical forces, that which is necessary to science, and employed by it under the name of force, being a measurable quantity which it disengages from phenomena and from experience.

On this new ground the difficulty that confronts critical idealism is the same as that affecting the notion of substance. It lies in defending the position against empiricism, from which are borrowed all the arguments against the reality of the cause, while attempting, nevertheless, to preserve the notion of it. How succeed in retaining as an à priori law what empiricism declares to be only an acquired habit? How explain a law of mind imposing a determined order on external phenomena? How can the entirely subjective need of relation determine phenomena to produce themselves in the order desired by our intelligence? The thunder rolls: my mind, in virtue of an innate law, insists on this phenomenon being connected with a certain totality of antecedent phenomena—namely, heat, the formation of clouds charged with electricity of different kinds, the meeting of these clouds, and the combination of the two electricities, &c. How and why have these phenomena produced themselves in order to satisfy my mind? Our author somewhere reproaches the partisans of innate ideas with supposing ideas on one side and phenomena on the other. How can he exonerate Kant’s system from this objection? No philosopher ever insisted more than he on the opposition between matter and form, the former being, as he says, “given à posteriori,” the latter ready prepared à priori in the mind. No philosopher, not even Leibnitz, has more radically separated sensibility which is passive from the understanding whose principle is spontaneity. How do these two opposite principles happen to agree? Even were it pointed out that our senses themselves are innate, since our sensations are but the manifestation of the specific activity of each one of them—light, of the optic nerve, sound, of the acoustic—it still remains certain that our sensations are only subjective as regards their content and not as regards their origin; they arise in virtue of causes to us unknown. How should understanding, by aid of a purely mental law, and in order to its own satisfaction, evoke sensible phenomena from nothingness, and if it had such a power, it could only be in virtue of an active force, that is, of a veritable causality? You say that you require relation, without which there could be no knowledge. And why must there be knowledge because you feel the need of it? And why should there not be in the understanding a need of unity and relation that sensibility does not satisfy? To say that the mind at the same time that it thinks the law produces phenomena conformable to that law, is to make the mind itself the cause in the objective and metaphysical sense of the word—is no other than that universal spiritualism that the author began by refuting. We are therefore very far from admitting his criticism of the principles of causality. Let us go on to the notion of the absolute.

M. Liard begins very properly by pointing out the confusion too often made between the notion of the infinite and that of the absolute. He says that the infinite can only be strictly understood in the mathematical sense, but that hence, as Leibnitz has said, the true infinite is the absolute. He admits the existence in the mind of the notion of the absolute in so far as it is inseparable from that of the relative. The Scotch philosopher, Hamilton, had endeavoured to suppress this notion, and had reproached Kant for not having completely exorcised the phantom of the absolute,[2] and for having retained it in the character of idea while contesting its objective existence. It is remarkable that on this point, so decisive for metaphysics, Hamilton should have been opposed and refuted by the more modern English philosophers, who often pass for having pushed the critical and negative spirit further than he, when, indeed, on this point it is just the contrary. Herbert Spencer especially is one whom it is interesting to consult here. He maintains against Hamilton the notion of the absolute as positive, not negative, “as the correlative notion of the relative, as the substratum of all thoughts”—I quote verbally—“as the most important element of our knowledge.”[3] He also maintains in opposition to Hamilton that the affirmation of the absolute is “a knowledge and not a belief.” Only according to him this object that underlies all our thoughts is absolutely indeterminable by us. We know that it is, not what it is. It is the incomprehensible, the unknowable.

M. Liard seems to us substantially to admit all these conclusions. “Existence by others,” he says, “is not to be understood without self-existence.” “Without the spur of the notion of the absolute, how comprehend the obstinate persistence of the human mind in transcending the limits of the relative? Is not this a proof that the relative is not sufficient to itself?” It is one thing to affirm the absolute, another to determine its nature. Even granting that we be powerless to speak as to the essence of the absolute, and that it can never be for us other than the indeterminable and unknowable, “is it nothing to be assured of the existence of an unknowable? At all events religious beliefs might in default of scientific certainty find in an irremovable basis this conviction.”

We see therefore that our author agrees with Mr. Herbert Spencer in granting the existence of the absolute; he does not seem to reduce it, as Kant does, to a mere idea. He confines himself to saying that it cannot be determined. He shows that none of the notions that have been previously examined can fill up the concept of the absolute. Neither space, nor time, nor substance, nor cause, nor the totality of phenomena, can be raised to the notion of absolute. It is therefore indeterminable. Now, as the absolute is the proper object of metaphysics, it follows that metaphysics lack an object, having nothing to say thereon. Hence it is self-condemned, and consequently metaphysics is not a science.

Such is the conclusion of the second part. The first appeared to raise us above phenomena by establishing the necessity of thought and of its fundamental law. But the second confines us within the domains of thought, and forbids us to go beyond. There is, indeed, a science of thought, but this science is criticism, not metaphysics. Have we, then, only escaped from positivism to fall into the abyss of scepticism?

Before explaining in what manner the author has endeavoured to escape from this abyss, there is room for an important remark on the previous discussion as to the notion of the absolute. Scepticism on this point may assume three forms. Either, first, we do not even possess the notion of it, our notion is entirely negative,—the absolute is the non-relative, is indeed the relative with a negation: such is the view of Sir W. Hamilton. Or else, secondly, we have the notion of the absolute, of being in itself and by itself, of the superlatively real being, ens realissimum, as Kant expresses it, but it is only a notion, we cannot affirm the existence: this is Kant’s doctrine. Or, thirdly, we have indeed a positive notion of the absolute, and we necessarily affirm its existence, only we are unable to determine its nature: this is the conclusion arrived at by Herbert Spencer. Now, of these three doctrines the two first alone, in our opinion, belong to what may be called criticism. The third is manifestly a return to dogmatism. The more or less of determination in the notion of the absolute is only the second problem of metaphysic; the first is the existence of that absolute. And, moreover, the doctrine of the divine incomprehensibility has always been maintained by the greatest metaphysicians as well as the greatest theologians. All mystics incline to it. There may therefore be room for debate as to the more or less approximative character of our concepts of the absolute. That any of these are adequate, or absolutely adequate, is what no philosopher has ever thought himself obliged to maintain. No doubt, to define the absolute as the unknowable, is to express the doctrine under a very rigorous form, but one could hardly refuse to allow the absolute to be the incomprehensible.

Consequently, then, if the author, as appears to be the case from the passages we have quoted, thinks with Mr. Herbert Spencer that the notion of the absolute corresponds to an existence, and if he contents himself with maintaining its indeterminability, we may, if we like, consider this to be a singularly attenuated metaphysic, but we are not entitled to deny that it amounts to a departure from criticism and a return to metaphysic. If, on the other hand, criticism does at least suppose one fundamental datum,—thought, namely, and with the thought the thinking,—we are still forced to grant to Descartes, and consequently to metaphysic, the existence of the thinking subject; and hence that science which our author declares not to be one would be found already in possession of the claim by the single fact of what he has called the criticism of two fundamental postulates: I think, I am—I think the absolute, the absolute is. And is this then nothing?

We are therefore of opinion that M. Liard ought to have concluded the second part of his work as he did the first—that is to say, that he ought to have shown the insufficiency of criticism as he did that of positivism. To our mind, criticism supposes metaphysic, as positivism supposes criticism. Metaphysic contains the reason of criticism, as criticism does that of positivism. Instead, then, of saying that metaphysic is not a science, we should rather call it the culminating point of science. But in place of following this natural order, which is, indeed, only his own method, our author has preferred to prove criticism right in the second part of his book, and metaphysic right in the third, by a sort of saltus, not contained in what goes before. He has chosen to appear nearer to Kant than he really is; has chosen to carry on his own evolution in Kant’s manner, and to rebuild on different bases what he had demolished; but we shall see that this evolution is in reality quite different from that of Kant, and that his justification of criticism is only apparent, or at least if he defends it, this is really only in order subsequently to undermine it.

III.

Kant’s evolution, which makes dogmatism to result from scepticism, was an entirely moral evolution, substituting for speculative the authority of practical reason. The evolution we have now to deal with is of a quite different character; it consists in passing from objective to subjective knowledge, from the object to the subject. Even if all that has been just said on the side of criticism were true, there is at least invariably one existence that remains untouched by it: this existence is that of the thinking subject, and this existence is incontestable. What appears to us as a circle to the circumference are objects, in the centre is the subject. We do not confound ourselves with our sensations, we distinguish between them and ourselves. Can, then, this consciousness of the thinking subject be no more than the transformation of external events? No; for all exterior events reduce themselves to one—i.e., motion; and all interior events to one—i.e., thought. There is no transition or transformation possible between one of these phenomena and the other. “We acknowledge,” says a distinguished savant, Professor Tyndall, “that a definite thought and a molecular action of the brain occur simultaneously, but we do not possess the essential organ, nor even a rudiment of the organ we should require in order to pass by reasoning from the one to the other.” Thus, then, the subject exists and is not reducible to the object. Shall we say that this subject is nothing more than a sum of phenomena? But what adds up these phenomena? A common bond is needed. Have we any consciousness of such a bond? “Yes,” replies our author, “we call internal states of consciousness, past, present, or possible; we attribute them to ourselves, we say that they take place within us. What does this mean if the ego to which we refer them is only their succession? How comprehend the continuity of consciousness?” In a word, our author admits absolutely that the ego has a consciousness of its own being, as distinct from its sensations and from external objects. “It is,” he says, “an activity constantly modified, but yet always one, which dominating its states refers them to the unity of one same consciousness.”

Here, then, we have, without possibility of mistake, the fundamental doctrine of the spiritualistic philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, Maine de Biran, and Jouffroy. By laying down this principle the author believes himself enabled to reinstate that metaphysic which criticism had condemned. We, for our part, have no doubt of this; but we fail to see how the author can at the same time hold this principle and the Kantian principle of idealism. The “Kritik” of Kant bears upon the subject as well as the object; according to it both the one and the other are unknowable and incomprehensible noumena. The human mind is but a complex compound of sensations and categories, the unity of which is reached by the same process as the unity of external objects. No doubt Kant is, indeed, obliged to concede something to the ego, the cogito as he calls it; but he does not very clearly say what it is; it is not a substance, not a category, not a result. “It is,” says he, “the vehicle of all categories.” What can be more vague? The metaphor shows both how little disposed Kant was to assign its due part to the ego—how vague and uncertain he left it, and at the same time how he was forced to take it into account. The ego, the active, continuous, self-conscious ego, is the rock ahead to Kant’s philosophy. For how dispute the consciousness of substance and of cause, when one admits “a continuous activity dominating all states of consciousness and reducing them to unity?”

What, then, is substance, according to our author? It is, he says, something that does not change considered as the necessary condition of that which changes. What is cause? Is it not the power of initiating any given movement? Now, this same consciousness which gives us the ego as a continuous activity, does it not in so doing give it us as the condition of phenomena and as the productive cause of movement in voluntary efforts? Consequently, to grant that the ego knows itself as ego, and as activity, is in point of fact to restore the notions of cause and substance which had been done away with. At most all that has been gained from criticism is the difficulty of comprehending substance and cause without objective, that is, material form. Its results, then, amount only to the incomprehensibility of matter. But the cause of metaphysic is not to be confounded with that of matter; metaphysic is not tied to the existence of materialism; and were it even led in self-defence to deny the very existence of matter altogether, one does not see that such a negation need cost it much. Descartes did not hesitate to place the existence of bodies in doubt, in order to save the existence of spirit. Malebranche did not believe that the existence of bodies could be proved except by revelation. Leibnitz did not think that bodies were more than phenomena, the reality of which was spiritual. There is, then, no common cause between the interests of metaphysic, or of what Kant calls dogmatism, and the question of material objectivity, which may be left open without compromising the fundamental basis of things. How, then, can our author appear to assign the victory to criticism while in reality depriving it of its chief support by restoring to the ego the immediate consciousness of itself as a being, one, active, permanent, and continuous? Kant may have played this game, because, in effect, outside of criticism, he only admits moral reasons for reinstating dogmatism. But although our author follows him too on that ground, he nevertheless enters in point of fact upon an entirely different path when he invokes immediate consciousness as a guarantee of the existence and activity of the mind. These are not moral and practical, but metaphysical reasons. Metaphysic, then, independently of morality, has its own proper foundation, which, far from being affected by criticism, is the very foundation of criticism itself. This foundation once admitted, are we entitled to declare metaphysic no science? We hold that we are not. Doubtless, if by science be meant an absolutely adequate knowledge of the object, such as mathematics affords, metaphysic cannot pretend to such knowledge; but we have here only a question of degree. The perfection of a science is not the same thing as its existence. A science is what it is by reason of the difficulties its objects present, and the imperfections of its method; but it is science none the less if it possesses a given object and a solid foundation. Now, such a foundation is admitted by our author when he admits the intuition of the ego by itself; and hence it is no longer a mere question of words to refuse the name of science to the series of deductions that may be drawn from a principle which has been admitted valid.

If our author grants the foundation of metaphysics by adhering to the Cartesian principle of the immediate knowledge of the mind by itself, he at the same time acknowledges its most elevated term by defending the existence of an absolute perfection, a supreme type of spirituality. “If in ourselves,” he says, “relatively perfect ideas realize themselves in virtue of their relative perfection, why should not the total perfection from whence they are derived exist? There is nothing contradictory in such an absolute.” Is not this to admit the doctrine of the perfect being as the Cartesian School has constantly expressed it? but is it enough to say that the total perfection may exist, enough to inquire why it should not exist? Should we not go further, and say with Bossuet, “On the contrary, perfection is the reason of being.” Here we are forced to allow, in the views, or at all events in the expressions of our author, a fluctuation and uncertainty which now impel him towards the critical, and now towards the metaphysical position, without his arriving at a sufficiently decided conclusion. “The absolute,” he says, “would then be the ideal of moral perfection. But by such a definition do we not compromise its reality?” To which doubt he replies that the “true reality is precisely the ideal.” Now, this is an equivocal and obscure reply, demanding explanation. No doubt the reality claimed for the perfect being is not a sensible and material reality. But there is another than material reality—there is a spiritual, such as is manifested to us in the reality of consciousness, in the immediate activity and intuition of our being. We may, indeed, style this sort of existence ideal, in opposition to material existence; but the expression is incorrect, for that which, properly speaking, is an ideal existence is one merely represented to the mind when thinking of something that no longer exists, does not yet exist, nor ever will exist. Now, the question is, whether the moral absolute, of which we have just had the definition given, belongs to the first or to the second of these ideals; whether it exists for itself, or only for us, in so far as we think it, and while we think it. For a mode of existence like this, dependent on our own thought, is very far from being the supreme reality; it is only a modal and subjective reality. Thus our author, we see, expresses himself too uncertainly. Nevertheless, his own principles sufficiently authorized him to declare himself with more precision. Indeed, we have seen, on the one hand, that he, with Mr. Herbert Spencer, affirms the existence of the absolute; and, on the other hand, that he acknowledges the concept of total perfection to be in nowise contradictory. Granting so much, must not absolute perfection be the reason of the existence of the absolute, as relative perfection is the reason of the existence of the relative? If, however, any choose to call that supreme perfection the Idea, with Hegel—as Plato calls it the Good, Aristotle the pure Act, Descartes the Infinitely Perfect Being—we have nothing to object, so long as it be clearly understood that the idea shall signify the identity of the thought and the being, and not merely a subjective conception of the human mind.

To sum up: it results from what has been already said, that spite of his powers of thought, the author has not been able to escape a certain fluctuation between criticism and spiritualism, and has only arrived at a contradictory compromise between the two conceptions. From criticism he borrows the ideality of the notions of space, time, substance, cause, and the idea of a moral absolute founded on purely moral motives. From spiritualism he borrows the existence of the absolute as the necessary correlative of the relative, and the consciousness of the subject which perceives itself in its continuity as the cause of its phenomena; and, finally, the idea of a total perfection, which may, without involving any contradiction, have the reason of its existence in itself. These two orders of conception are not so closely connected as they should be; too much is conceded to criticism, too little to metaphysic; and M. Liard inclines overmuch to give to morality the exorbitant privilege of deciding between the two.

IV.

But is this equivalent to saying that we blame our author for his enterprise, and for the attempt he has made to reconcile criticism with dogmatism? By no means; for we are inclined to believe that this is the very aim that all metaphysic should set before itself at the present day. How, indeed, could we possibly admit that so powerful, so lofty an intellectual effort as that initiated by Kant, which under the name of criticism, of subjective or objective idealism, or even of positivism, has but been the development of his primary thought; that so prodigious a mental movement as this should be absolutely void of meaning, and destined to leave no trace in science? How believe that since the days of Descartes the human intellect has gone mad? Would not this be to express ourselves in the same way as those who, including Descartes himself in this condemnation, have maintained that since St. Thomas the whole course of human thought has been only one long error? Can there be anything more contrary to the laws of the human mind than this hypothesis of absolute truth discovered once for all, leaving no room beside it for anything but error? And besides, what more did Kant do than, under the form of a system (a defective form, no doubt, but hitherto the only one known to philosophy)—what more, we ask, did he than develop and render prominent what had been implicitly contained in the teaching of all preceding metaphysicians? Had not they all assigned a share in human consciousness to the subjective and relative, and very often a larger share than we are led to think, if we only regard their conclusions? Has there, for example, been since the days of Plato a single metaphysician who has denied the knowledge of the senses to be relative, and has the full scope and bearing of this principle been accurately measured? Can that be denied which has been scientifically demonstrated, which Descartes already affirmed, i.e., that light and sound—Nature’s two great languages—are only the products of our physical organization, and that outside of the eye that sees, and the ear that hears, there is nothing external to us but a series of vibrations and undulations, which are neither luminous nor sonorous? Reduced to itself, without the presence of men or animals, matter is merely darkness and silence! What sort of matter may this be, and how little resembling the one we know? But is not, it may be said, the reality of that matter attested at least by resistance, by impact? The reality—yes; but is the very nature of the external thing, as it is in itself, manifested thereby? What is impact, what is resistance, if not a mode of our sensations? To be assured of this, we have but to turn to all that metaphysicians teach us as to the nature of God. All agree in saying that God has no sensations. If God be cognizant of matter, as is indubitable, it follows that He does not know it through sensations similar to ours. The argumentum baculinum which appears so convincing to Sganarelle, would be powerless with regard to a pure spirit, still more an infinite spirit. Now is not this as much as to say that impact is the mode of action bodies exercise on each other, and by which sentient beings are made aware of their existence, but that it is a mode purely relative to the sensibility of finite beings? Say that, we at least admit with Descartes the reality of extension. But what is the real size of the extended things by which we are surrounded, and which according to the shape of our lenses we see enlarged, diminished, or even distorted in a thousand ways? Were it to please God, as Leibnitz has said, to collect the immensity of worlds into a walnut-shell, while preserving the proportion of objects, we should never find it out; and such diminution might be carried on infinitely, without ever reaching any term of smallness. ‘We grant it,’ will be the reply—‘all sensible knowledge is relative; Plato, Malebranche, Leibnitz, have sufficiently told us this; but above the senses there is the understanding, which alone is made for truth. Our senses give us the appearance of things, our understanding makes us see them as they are in themselves.’ Nothing more true, and this is the basis of metaphysics. But the question is, to what point the understanding is separated and separable from sensibility, and reciprocally, to what point sensibility enters into the understanding. Is there anything in us which can really be called understanding pure? Understanding—yes; but pure—no! Man cannot think without images, says Aristotle; this alone demonstrates that our understanding is always obliged to sensibilize its most abstract concepts. Moreover, between pure concepts and the data of sensibility there is still a debatable and obscure region—that, namely, of space and time. And here it is that Kant has made his mark ineffaceably. It is by so doing that he renovated metaphysics. He believed, thought, that both these domains belonged to sensibility and not to intelligence, that they too were only modes of representation—that is to say, modes purely relative to the nature of our mind. On this point also traditional metaphysics came to his support, at least as regards time. For is it not said by all schools whatever that God is not in time, that He is an eternal Now, that past and future are nothing to Him? Is it not this conception which is constantly appealed to as affording the solution of the conflict between divine prescience and human liberty? Now to affirm that God is not in time, and that He sees all portions of time in one sole and eternal present, is not this as much as to say that time is only the mode of representation of finite beings with regard to themselves; that, consequently, it is an image belonging to their finitude, but not to what they are in themselves, since God, who must see them as they are, sees them in an absolutely and radically different manner? Let us add another difference between the human and divine intelligence, pointed out by Bossuet, when he said, “We see things because they are, but they are because God sees them.” Therefore in God intelligence is anterior to things, in us posterior. Now, though we can, through artistic creation, form some idea of an intelligence anterior to things, the analogy is, after all, a coarse one, since in us creative imagination only deals with materials borrowed from without. Hence it follows that our intelligence is but a very imperfect image of the divine. Now, as the latter alone can be the type of veritable intelligence, we can only attribute to ourselves a relative intelligence, subordinated to the conditions of the creature. But does not this amount precisely to saying that we only see things in a subjective and human manner, and that, consequently, we do not know them as they are in themselves? Let us go further still; let us raise ourselves to conceptions of the perfect being, the divine being. Here, too, all metaphysicians agree in acknowledging that we have only an entirely relative view of the Divinity. Is there one who admits that we can, without anthropomorphism, understand literally all the attributes that we impute to the Deity? Has not God Himself defined Himself in Scripture as Deus absconditus, and does not the doctrine of mysteries in every great religion imply that the true essence of the Deity is unknown to us, and that, consequently, the philosophic doctrine of the attributes of God is a purely human conception, by which we strive to represent to ourselves the unrepresentable, and to bring within the grasp of our sensibility and our imagination the august and sublime notion that confounds all created substance?

This is what we are taught by all metaphysic doctrine whatever, and not only by that of Kant, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Fénelon: all alike teach us that the senses are but a confused and relative knowledge, that space and time are modes of finite existence, that God can only be conceived of by analogy, and not in His essence. Are such conceptions as these very different from those of Kant? And if he has taken them up again under another form, if by isolating he has exaggerated them, his is the merit of having brought them into prominence, of reminding us of them, and forcing us to assign them a more important place in our doctrines. Despite the warnings of the greatest minds, and of all great minds, are we not ceaselessly tempted to yield to the automatic instinct which makes us believe things to be as we see them, makes us suppose the existence of a matter, solid, coloured, sonorous, cold, or hot, such as the senses acquaint us with; makes us believe in an absolute space and time, with which we no longer know how to deal when we think of the true Absolute; makes us conceive of this true Absolute or Goodness as of a species of great man, that we strip of a body, without even reflecting whether we have really the power of representing to ourselves anything absolutely incorporeal? It is against this vulgar current dogmatism, which philosophy has so much trouble in getting rid of, that not only Kant, but every metaphysician, protests. Kant only expounded, under a rigorous and systematic form, all the critical portion of previous metaphysics. To us it seems impossible—with more or less reservation, and without insisting at present too rigidly on the share of the relative and subjective in human knowledge—impossible, we say, not to allow this share, and consequently, in a certain measure, not to give in our adherence to transcendental criticism and idealism. There is, however, as we have seen above, something which escapes from this relativity of all human knowledge: it is the very fact of knowing. This fact has in itself something absolute. I know not whence it comes, I cannot explain it; I marvel that a being should be met with in whom at one time or other what we call knowledge has appeared; but this fact cannot exist without being known by the knower. All knowledge supposes, then, a subject that knows itself—that is to say, who is internally present to himself. Here knowledge comes from within, not from without. Whatever is objective can only appear to me, and is consequently a phenomenon. I only see its outside, and it is only in relation to myself that I can grasp even that outside. But the conscious ego sees itself from within. Shall we say that it appears to itself? I am willing to say so, but as it appears to itself that appearance is a reality, for the form that I give it is my own form. In order that it should become me, I must be me. Every other object has to be given in the first instance before it is perceived; in order that I should see a house, a house must be there. It is not so with the ego. For if at the moment it is given me it is not already me, how is it to become so? How shall I know it as such? And if it be already me, it is already perceived as such. Hence it follows that the external thing may be represented without being, as happens in sleep, while I cannot think without thinking myself, or think myself without existing. All subjectivism, all relativism, all criticism, therefore, are baffled in presence of the ego.

It is from this solid and immovable foundation laid by Descartes at the entrance of science that we may set out to extend the sphere of our knowledge. Everything, it is said, is relative. What matter if that relative be connected by precise and fixed relations with the unknown, if that which is given be a strictly faithful projection of that which is thought? For instance, we do not know the souls of other men in themselves, we have never seen a soul such as it is in itself; those even which are dearest to us are unknown like the rest. But if we suppose all the signs by which they manifest themselves to be sincere, is it not to know them truly and in the only way intelligible to us, to hear their voices, and understand their words, and interpret their actions? No doubt nothing external to ourselves can be known internally by us; but if the exterior be the expression of the interior, is not the one the equivalent of the other? And to ask more would amount to asking to be more than man. Science teaches us that all appearances have a fixed and precise relation to reality. The visible apparent sky is strictly what it ought to be to express the real sky. The deeper our knowledge of things goes, the more we see the perfect conformity of the apparent to the real, the more faithfully do phenomena translate noumena. Are we not, therefore, justified in supposing that these relative noumena, which are still no more than appearances, could be translated in their turn, if only we had the key to them, into other noumena of which they are the form and image? I may say the same about the anthropomorphic representations of Deity. I admit that the Absolute is in its essence above all human representations. But these representations, when we disengage them as much as possible from all sensible elements, are none the less the true expression of that incomprehensible essence in so far as it appears to a human consciousness. If not God in Himself, it is God in relation to me; and it is with only this last that we have to do so long as we are but men.

We do not, therefore, consider it impossible to assign to the critical element its part in metaphysic without denying the objective reality of knowledge. We think that the famous old distinction between being and phenomena, the intelligible and the sensible, still endures, despite the “Kritik” of Kant; or rather, this very “Kritik” itself is, in our eyes, only a hyperbolical but striking manner of expressing this great truth.

Paul Janet.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest appearance, by an article that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes of the 19th October, 1873, under the title, “A New Phase of Spiritualism.” We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new school.

[2] Hamilton’s “Discussions: Cousin, Schelling.”

[3] Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” First Part p. 18.

ON THE MORAL LIMITS OF BENEFICIAL COMMERCE.

When a Professor of Political Economy was first established in the University of Oxford, a controversy presently arose in the academical common rooms concerning the just meaning of the phrase. Among elder and conservative men, the most active-minded insisted that it ought to receive the full width of meaning attached to it by Aristotle in his Treatise on Economy, which, with him, was essentially the economy of the State—that is, in pure Greek, political economy, although this epithet is not annexed to his title. By this interpretation, the science naturally and necessarily became implicated with moral considerations, which never can be excluded from the statesman’s view. But the actual students and professors of the new science—eminently Mr. Nassau Senior and Dr. Whately, shortly afterwards Archbishop of Dublin—naturally feared that by such an interpretation political economy would become confounded with politics; would, indeed, cease to be a science; and by so great an enlargement of its area, would fail to receive that special and definite cultivation which Adam Smith had bestowed on it, as the theory of national wealth. Whately indeed, to avoid this inconvenient extension of the sense, proposed to call the topic, not political economy, but Catallactics—that is, the science of exchanges. Excellent in many respects as the last title was, it might have seemed to exclude the whole doctrine of taxation, and still more decisively all discussion of Malthus’s theory of population, which belongs to politics or to morals, not at all to the doctrine of exchange. In the end, the economists ruled that their science does not at all teach what ought to be, but simply what is, what goes on, and will go on, as an inevitable result of individuals holding exchangeable right in definite articles. Thus they seemed to have driven moral considerations out of their science, as much as out of gardening or medicine. To call their political economy, on that account, heartless (as so many have done) may seem ridiculous; but this form of attack on it arose from a perception or belief that its professors were claiming for it an imperative force, while disclaiming morality, and were assuming that it was a sufficient and supreme rule for political action.

Of late it has been maintained on a special ground that moral considerations cannot wholly be excluded from political economy. Dr. W. B. Hodgson, first holder of a new chair in Edinburgh as Professor of Mercantile Economy, has urged that, in so far as morality or immorality in individuals affects wealth and the markets, we do not exhaust the discussion on exchanges while we neglect this consideration. Perhaps indeed no one, in discussing taxation, has omitted to consider what taxes lead to fraudulent evasion or to smuggling; but economists hitherto, with great unanimity, have resolved that, in their character of economists, they will not notice moral evils from an opium trade, or from sale of deadly weapons and ammunition, or from traffic in intoxicants; nor can one in general discover from their writings that they know vice to be wasteful, or national expenditure on needless and foolish objects undesirable. They have a right to select what topics they will treat, and what they will not treat. They have a right to say: “Such and such considerations belong to morals, not to our political economy.” But, on the one hand, if they are resolved that their science shall be as unmoral as engineering or navigation, they must not claim for it any decisive weight in State-politics; on the other hand, the topics which they neglect need, so much the more urgently, to be treated by others, especially since we have no professors of practical morals, and (for more reasons than one) questions of the market are not thought suitable to the pulpit.

That an exchange of one thing for another does, on the whole, please both parties to the exchange, is evidently testified by the fact that each acts voluntarily; hence, the inference is too lightly made that each is benefited by the transaction. Not only so, but from an increasing magnitude of exchanges increase of wealth is inferred, without any reference to the nature of the things exchanged. In a rough estimate, this reasoning has, no doubt, a primâ facie weight, for we may not dictate to the tastes of others, nor assume that tastes which are not ours are therefore silly. Yet, evidently things which perish in the using quickly cease to be wealth, and things which are not likely to be approved continuously cannot long command the same high price. No article could fetch a price at all if it were not intended to be enjoyed, used, or consumed; the final purchase is called expenditure, and all expenditure is liable to moral judgment, approving or censuring. When we censure expenditure, not merely because it is excessive, but because it is essentially foolish or evil, we necessarily deplore and deprecate the traffic which feeds it—the traffic which it encourages; hence, some vicious trades are even forbidden by law. Short of this, there is necessarily a large margin of trades which law does not, and perhaps cannot successfully, forbid, which nevertheless may be justly regretted, censured, and, as far as may be, discountenanced. Economists are not here blamed if they (disowning moral considerations) do nothing of the kind; but they must not be allowed to blind us to the fact that some trades, not forbidden by law, are so far from promoting wealth and weal as to be gravely pernicious. To rejoice in their magnitude, to announce it triumphantly as a proof of national prosperity, is something worse than a mistake.

No reader, it is believed, will complain that the last sentence is mysterious or obscure. Our manufacturers of cotton and woollen have of late loudly deplored the falling off of their home trade, while the consumption of intoxicating drink continues to increase. They believe that if the labouring classes spent less on the brewer and distiller, they would spend more on the clothier. The most fanatical devotee of alcohol cannot deny that too much of it is drunk, in face of the long-continued avowal of the judges that drink is by far the greatest cause of crime—drink, short of evident and provable drunkenness. Indeed, it is not from those who are outright drunk, but from those who have been drinking, that the worst and most numerous outrages come, while the foot and the eye are steady, though the brain and the passions are perverted. To boast and rejoice in the magnitude of the drink traffic, legal as it undoubtedly is, has no moral defence. The topic is here adduced, not in order to push that argument further, but in order to insist that the mere increase of a trade does not in itself denote an increase of wealth; is not in itself necessarily a thing to be applauded either by the economist or by the moralist. In each case we must look into detail, and consider whether this or that prosperous trade, like a huge weed in a garden, dwarfs or kills other growths, which, but for it, might thrive.

An avowed ardent disciple of Mr. Cobden—a gentleman in some eminence of place and rank—has recently dissuaded taxes on wine and tobacco for the sake of revenue, not on the ground which one might expect—viz., that a Government ought not to base a revenue on what may chance to be public vice, but on the ground that “the grower of wine in France and of tobacco in America” can reasonably refuse to trade with us, if “we will not accept payment in the only coin which he has to offer—namely, in his wine or his tobacco.”[4] As if we were not competent to reply: “Of wine and tobacco we quickly get more than enough. Preserve your grapes in sawdust, or make them into raisins, and you will not find our people averse to enjoy them, nor will you encounter any unreasonable duty from our Custom-houses. As to tobacco, surely the rich land which alone can raise it, can raise no end of other products which we are certain to value.” This well-informed writer, in his whole argument, seems to account wine the only food-product which we receive from France (to silks and elegant articles he once slightly alludes); but he cannot be ignorant that the solid food which France sends us in eggs, cheese, butter, vegetables, chickens, and dry fruit is enormous; she would in ordinary years send us wheat, did not America, Russia, and Australia make it needless. To speak of wine as the only coin of France is a wonderful straining of argument. But the reason for quoting it here is to illustrate how completely the School of Cobden wishes the State to ignore moral considerations in trade. Yet the State deserves no reverence, if it be not moral. Laws and enactments, framed by minds reckless of morality, are apt to be, on the one side unjust and oppressive, on the other eminently corrupting. A State which gains revenue from a vicious trade, such as gambling and debauchery, demoralizes its people so effectually as to deserve reprobation rather than reverence. According to the ancients, the lawgiver begins to civilize society and to earn veneration by establishing marriage and sanctifying the family. Are we to say, “We have changed all that now; let the Church care for morality: it is no concern of the State?” Who first taught such sentiment as wise policy, it is not easy to say; but it certainly has, in practice, if not in theory, attained a deadly currency. It never was the doctrine of Adam Smith. It is obviously a sure road to ruin, if its development be unopposed.

A legislator, of course, ought not to guide his enactments by the morality of any one school. If, in Greek fashion, we were to set up an Epimenides, a Solon, a Lycurgus, as plenipotentiary to start us in a new course, there might be some little danger of one-sided and conceited morals; yet not much, even so; for a very one-sided or very stupid man would hardly be elected: every lawgiver wishes his new institutions to be permanent, and is sure to have some regard to the friction which they would encounter in working. But where the legislation must have sanction, not from one man, but from a thousand men, of whom six hundred are elected from different circles of mixed ranks, from diverse localities, where forms and schools of religion, based on variety of thought, prevail, it is evidently impossible that in the laws collectively approved any moral ideas should dominate, except those which are common to all who are morally cultivated. To dread moral considerations in the debates of an English Parliament, lest the morality prevailing in its laws become one-sided and arbitrary, pedantic and ascetic, is so baseless, so wanting in good sense, as scarcely to seem sincere. When people tell us, “We shall be liable to have laws against dancing and cardplaying, or laws compelling us to go to church, if we insist that legislation ought to study for the public virtue,” they not only make themselves ridiculous, they even force us to suspect that they fear lest vice be repressed in ways inconvenient to the vicious. So much is premised, lest it be imagined or pretended that in pointing at moral limits to beneficial commerce any morality is desired less broad than that which all noble and well-reputed schools accept—the morals of mankind. At the same time, what is here advanced is intended to bear less immediately on law than on the general tenor of public opinion and practical writing.

Many economists write, as assuming that it is a step forward in civilization when a barbarous people learns artificial wants. If a New Zealander, instead of being satisfied with a mat for his back, which, made by himself, will last him for years, betakes himself to an English coat, which he must buy with a price,—which indeed less effectually shields him from wet, and sooner wears out,—he does that which is convenient to the English trader, but to him is a very doubtful gain: perhaps rather he brings on himself colds, cough, and consumption. If a thousand Maoris did the same, the commerce might figure in a Maori budget, and a Maori economist might point to the new trade as a step forward in national prosperity. The Zulus, as described by Englishmen who have travelled in Zululand or lived in the midst of them in Natal, are an upright, generous, faithful, honest race; and strange to say, Englishmen, who have such experience of them, are found to corroborate the utterance of Cetewayo, “A Zulu trained by a missionary is a Zulu spoiled”—that is, when trained in our habits they lose their national virtues. How can this be? why should it be? Apparently, because from us they learn artificial wants. While an apron suffices a Zulu for clothing, and a very simple hut for shelter, he can in many ways afford to be hospitable and generous. A man with very few wants has all the feelings of superfluity and wealth while surrounded by possessions so slender that we count him very poor: and when with an amount of toil which to his hardihood is not at all severe, he can always calculate on providing for himself and family all that their simple habits need, he is not deterred from present generosity by studying for his own future. But if he learn to covet and count necessary a number of articles which require from him threefold labour, he feels himself no longer rich, but poor; then, instead of giving small favours gratuitously, he claims to be paid for everything; instead of being princely, he becomes mercenary and stingy. If he imitate the dress, he is liable to envy the wealth of the Englishman, and in schemes of laying up for the future he easily becomes avaricious, perhaps fraudulent. Such are the steps by which one may justly calculate that some or many barbarians degenerate from the normal goodness of their fellows. The artificial wants which they learn when housed with our missionaries, or imbibe from the crafty allurements of traders, are not (primâ facie) a benefit at all, do not conduce to independence, to the sense of wealth, nor to the practice of virtue. They are simply a convenience to the European trader. If a Maori or Zulu chief frown upon such trade, which judgment does he deserve—to be scolded as barbarous, or to be praised as sagacious? With them, perhaps also with us, to account but few things necessary is a foundation for many virtues. Our economists often reverse the picture.

No stress is here laid on the fact that the historical saints of Christendom thought it an excellence to be satisfied with a minimum of external appliances for the comfort of the body. So much of arbitrary opinion may be imputed reasonably to them, and so much of fancy and credulity to their biographers, that it does not occur to the present writer to account their practices or principles any support to his argument. But the case of Socrates, and many other Greek philosophers, is different, and much to the point. With them, high thought, cheap feeding, and mean circumstantials frequently went together; and perhaps even those philosophers, who were somewhat mercenary and rich, would vehemently have renounced the idea that it is a good thing to acquire habits and tastes which make necessary to us things previously needless. But there is danger of drawing the reader’s thoughts into a new channel by this allusion to Greek philosophers when an argument of national economy is chiefly intended, not of personal virtues. As it is better for an individual to be satisfied with supplies that are sufficient, close at hand, and easy of attainment, than to have fastidious tastes which cannot be supplied without considerable effort and labour, so it is better for a nation to have a taste for its native products, so far as our lower wants are concerned. If we can get all that the health and strength of the body needs from our own soil, and with small expenditure, this is better for us than to be enslaved to artificial tastes, which multiply labours for mere bodily supply. To fix ideas, let me illustrate the principle here contained by discussing those popular beverages, tea and coffee.

Tea undoubtedly, as superseding beer, cider, and wine, has wrought much benefit to England, even if it have been (when heavily taxed) dearer than our native intoxicants. When taken with little food, in strong and frequent cups, it may often have weakened the nerves; but it does not, like alcohol, pervert the brain and inflame the mind, thus leading to folly, vice, and crime. The present writer is, and always has been, a tea drinker; nor have the many assaults on this beverage which have been sent to him shaken his belief that, taken in moderation, it has no evil comparable to its good. The present argument does not aim to prove that tea is in itself bad, only that the too-exclusive addiction to it has hurtfully excluded the trial of native beverages, which are perhaps better, certainly cheaper, and far more accessible.

Rigid enemies of alcoholic drink often assure us, in poetical and ecstatic language, that water is the only reasonable and right drink for man, as for other animals; but the water which they recommend and describe as gushing and sparkling in mountain rills does not come to the hearth and home of every mountain dweller, much less is it attainable by the inhabitants of cities or boggy plains. The hardy beasts of the field, if they can get the water pure, manage to endure its coldness in all seasons; so perhaps might we, if we could recover robustness of the stomach without losing any advantage of a developed brain. That such recovery is impossible is not here asserted, but simply that, under the existing circumstances, the water (through its impurities or its coldness) often needs to be cooked, to be warmed, to have then some taste superadded which shall overcome mawkishness. When this is conceded, the question arises, will no native botany suffice? Are we of necessity driven to import tea from China or Assam? Such are the wonderful and deep harmonies of Nature that in each long-inhabited country the constitution of animals becomes adapted to its plants as well as to its climate, and finds among them not only its food, but its remedies for disease. Native herbs are often found more health-restoring than pretentious foreign drugs; nor is it extravagant to imagine that native leaves and berries might adapt themselves as well to the palate of Englishmen as tea and coffee, and better to their stomachs, if, instead of buying from the foreigner, we had duly studied our home resources. In the case of coffee, it curiously happens that there are persons among us who prefer what is called dandelion coffee to the coffee of Arabia; and that the preference is sincere seems proved by the accident that the dandelion thus prepared is dearer than the best Mocha. Nor does this dearness weigh against our argument. Twenty years ago brown bread was charged by bakers as fancy bread; ten years ago lentils were double their present price; in each case because the demand was so uncertain. The price of dandelion would quickly come down if it were in large and daily request. As substitutes for tea many leaves may be named which will not be called simply medicinal, prominently those of the sweet bay, the peach, and the black currant. If we were by any cause cut off from tropical markets, some combination would soon be discovered which carried off public preference; and when a national taste in it had once been established, every good purpose would have been attained without the foreign article. Should we not in that case moralize with wonder over the vast apparatus of great ships, which had been built, and manned, and stored, and sent to sea, with loss of sailors’ lives, entailing widowhood and orphanhood, for no better reason than to bring back leaves, for which adequate substitutes abound at home? This argument undertakes not to prove, but to illustrate. It is not specially confined to the case of tea or coffee. It does not make positive assertion that we can now change the English taste, nor does it urge a transition which would be violent, if at all sudden. It merely points to reasonable probabilities, as showing that a vast trade with a distant country to gratify an artificial want, if it prove how much we can afford to spend without being ruined, yet does not at all prove that we enrich ourselves by the exchange. At the same time, so great is the facility for making drinks, that we might assume higher ground and press our argument farther. The deliciousness of Oriental sherbet is no matter of doubt or controversy. Its basis is simply barley-water; to flavour it, the foreigner, of course, uses some of his own fruits, but we have plenty of substitutes at hand, at least while sugar abounds to us. It may be warmed, if necessary: so little need we depend on the Chinese. Besides, some among us are satisfied with, and warmly applaud, the drink prepared from simple oatmeal. If we all had this taste, we should nationally be richer.

It may be retorted, “Did you not name Sugar? Do you advocate making sugar of beetroot?” But no general renunciation of foreign commerce is for a moment here suggested as expedient. While we can bring sugar made from cane, and save our lands for other uses than beetroot, we presume this commerce to conduce to wealth. Not but that we may suspect the cheapness of sugar to conspire with other causes in slackening our zeal for Honey. Bees do not occupy and use up arable land. An abundance of cottage gardens and little rockeries satisfy them. Their depredations do not lessen the sweetness of flowers, nor the savour of herbs. They add to our wealth, at very small expense. They greatly add to the fertilization of plants. By all means let us get from the foreigner what we need; only let us not therefore neglect and forget our native resources.

In other and greater matters a like topic recurs. When the controversy against the Corn Laws was at its height, the advocates of repeal were taunted with wishing to explode native wheat. They replied, “Wheat is now largely sown in England where the climate or soil is unfavourable; in such fields only, the culture will be discouraged; where it can be produced and ripened with greater certainty it will still be grown, and the price will no longer be forced up; the lands less suited to wheat may well yield, either some other grain in rotation, or other needful crop.” Valid as this reply seemed, grand and glorious as are the results of opening our ports to foreign corn, the retrospect of thirty years nevertheless suggests new lines of thought. Want of food in Ireland when the potato crop failed was the argument which converted Sir Robert Peel; but the desire of selling cotton and woollen fabrics, or hardware, to those whose “chief coin” was wheat, gave an earlier impetus to the Anti-Corn Law League. Cobden and his associates were in the right, and performed well the task of the day; but the existing state of our agriculture is now discerned to be highly unsatisfactory. Every year widens and deepens the conviction that our laws of Land Tenure are fundamentally wrong; indeed, they are diverse from those of all the world; if they are not signally better than those of all other nations, they are gravely and lamentably worse; and the idea now presents itself, that the temporary relief given to us by the free importation of wheat has proved a buttress to an evil system of land laws, and has blinded us to the essential evils contingent on a perpetual increasing ratio of the population in great towns to that of the rustic districts. Much wealthier, no doubt, we are, and our poorer classes are less hard-worked. To dwell on the drawbacks through higher expectations, artificial wants, higher prices of coal, bricks, and houses—not to mention worse matters—might lead into too long digression. But, to bring out the idea here pointed at, we may speculate as to the results which must have followed, if no foreign markets had been able to give us permanent supplies of necessary food. Suppose that barely we had been able in 1847 to save from starvation as many poor Irishmen as we did save, but that in succeeding years the United Kingdom had been cast on its own resources for grain and cattle; will any one maintain that by a proper use of the land we could not have fed our own population?

If any one is of that opinion, let him consider the phenomena of French agriculture. A century ago France seemed unable to feed her inhabitants. Thousands of the population died of starvation, even the king’s own servants. Misery among the peasants and the poorer classes in towns was universal. No one imagined that the country could afford to export food, or had any idea of its vast capacity of production. Her climate is not now superior to what it was; her area is somewhat enlarged by the sagacious plantings on dunes of sand; the soil is improved by a century’s tillage; the produce is more valuable, because the peasants have been taught many secrets of fruit culture. Most important of all, millions of peasants are owners of small freeholds. The “magic of property” has made them industrious, saving and ever vigilant to increase and improve the crops. We in England censure and deplore the compulsion on a French parent to divide his petty freehold and his gains equally among his children. If this be a grave evil, yet so much the more remarkable are the marvellous results of the union in one man of landlord, farmer, and labourer: for we see that by the universal and untiring industry which this fact elicits, not only were the great extravagances of the Second Empire and its wars sustained, but, in spite of the scarcely calculable losses of the Franco-German war, the fine of two hundred and fifty millions sterling, which France had to pay, was paid within four or five years, while a larger army than ever was raised and maintained. No one can dispute that the unexampled buoyancy of French finance is due mainly to the sound conditions of French landed tenure. Ireland, Scotland, and England all await a similar development, and never can be satisfied without it: but we have postponed the day of necessary reform by buying our food of almost every kind, in dangerous amount, from foreign countries, while our own arable land goes back into grass and pasture.

And what reply does the Right Hon. John Bright make, when addressed with a claim of reformed landed tenure? His name is here adduced for honour, as an eminent type of the Cobden School; but the habitual reply is, “Good! we are in favour of Free Trade in land:” as though Free Trade were in itself a charm which can scare away all evils; as though the existing freedom to accumulate land to any extent by purchase were not one of our greatest mischiefs. Men cannot live in the air. Land for a dwelling is as essential as air and water. Land is very limited in quantity, especially land conveniently situated, with favourable conditions. Land primitively belongs to a nation, and no man naturally has any right to more of it than he can himself cultivate and use. Large landed estates are a vast power, social and political. Their possession was originally in England an official trust, coupled with political duties and customary dues in payment: but without right of ejectment while those dues were paid. The commercial idea of land is a perversion and abuse. Those who fancy that the abolition of entails and primogeniture and whatever makes conveyances expensive, will bring about the desirable reform, boast that their remedy will hoist up the market price of land; in other words, it would make an effective purchase by the State more and more difficult, more and more burdensome to the community. Nay, it might even delay the necessary reform, until the patience of a nation under a landlord Parliament broke down, and such a revolution followed as that of France under Louis XVI. As there is a moral limit to the magnitude of beneficial commerce with the foreigner, much more is there a moral limit to the beneficial magnitude of landed estates. Happily some despots are philanthropic; yet we are not in love with despotism. Some great landowners are philanthropic: higher honour be to them! but we must calculate that very many will covet power over all who reside on the estate, and will use the power not always kindly; or will employ it as a political engine to win state-offices and salaries for their families; others, more directly and unblushingly mercenary, will think chiefly how to raise rent, and will forbid both crops and inhabitants, if wealthy lovers of occasional sport outbid ordinary farmers. If from mere pride and love of the romantic a landlord make his estate a wilderness, the nation still suffers the damage. Its population is cooped into towns or driven into exile, its markets are starved, its military force is lowered. While the Cobden School pertinaciously connives at these great evils, and juggles with the phrase “Free Trade” as if land were an article which ought to be on the same footing as moveables, they are playing into the hands of their nominal adversaries.

The first measure which we need is not one which shall facilitate the purchase of new and new estates by the over-wealthy, who, if they are not gamblers or otherwise vicious, often know not what to do with their vast incomes; but much rather a measure which shall set a maximum area for estates. The mildest thing to do is, not in the first instance to pass any new Act, but only a resolution or Vote of the Commons, declaring that it is against the public interest for any individual to possess more than a thousand acres of rustic land, or more than five acres of town land; and that whoever bequeaths to one person more than the above-named, ought to be subjected to a heavy and special land tax. In the same direction we need other special votes of the House, to the effect—that by legislation, by purchase, and by taxation the recovery of the national soil for the nation from year to year ought to be systematically pursued, wherever now held in large masses by bodies of men or by individuals; and that in order to give to cultivators the full results of their own industry, it is expedient that the State, out of its own present or future domains, carve out numerous small farms to be held under it as by copyright tenure, not subject to rise of rent. Space does not permit further detail, or reply to objections; but the idea intended is to work in the direction of virtual freeholds, ever increasing in number, which cannot be bought out of the hands of the cultivators by tempting prices from the rich, because they are legally State property, and destined to remain as areas of small culture. By buying up from time to time the lands possessed by large charities, by legacy taxes directed to discourage bequests of land in great mass, and by direct purchases of land or rather by taking the legacy tax in land itself, the State would beneficently in the course of many generations undo the injustices and frauds of the past.

Land is so far from being a desirable object of unlimited commerce (called by the Cobden School Free Trade), that, especially under the modern interpretation which makes the lord (or chief man) owner of the land, the most jealous limitations ought to be imposed on it by the State. So long, indeed, as a man holds no more of it than one family can cultivate, jealousy is needless; for the holder (especially if he pay a quit-rent for it) is sure to cultivate it, and cannot offend by excluding population. Town land ought, as soon as possible, to become town property; and, meanwhile, as early as possible, all town building to be subjected to a public veto for sanitary reasons. To make away into mercenary hands, as an article of trade, the whole solid area on which a nation lives, is astonishing as an idea of statesmanship. There is another matter connected with land as to which the State may justly feel great jealousy—namely, as to the consumption and exportation of material which cannot be reproduced. It is said that Sicily, under the Romans first, was largely deteriorated by the perpetual exportation of corn, exhausting even very fertile soil. Ireland in the past may have suffered by the constant sending out of cattle and pigs, with no back-current of commerce to restore all that their bones and flesh took out of the earth. Virginia and other States of the American Union largely ruined their soil by unceasing exportation of tobacco and other products. But to come closer home, no crops of coal can be grown in England and Wales. We reap where we have not sown, where we cannot sow. We export in enormous mass what we cannot reproduce. We allow individuals to become, out and out, proprietors of the national coal, and then sanction their unlimited exportation of it, with the high probability that this may cripple industry in the near future of England. This surely is a commerce, the benefit of which is very doubtful even in a cosmopolitan view. It may seem better to stimulate other nations to search for coal on their own soil than to use up what we cannot replace. And as for some other articles of immense commerce, as tobacco, it may seem doubtful which nation loses more by it—the importers or the exporters. Surely in all these cases the quality of the things bought and sold must be considered carefully, before we regard the magnitude of any trade a national benefit or a source of national wealth.

F. W. Newman.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] “Reciprocity,” by Sir Louis Mallet, C.B., 1879: Printed for the Cobden Club.

THE MYTHS OF THE SEA AND THE RIVER OF DEATH.

At the present time, when theologians and those who have most aptitude for such discussions are arguing “in thoughts more elevate” of the soul’s future life, and its rewards and punishments therein, the pre-historic student is tempted to let his thoughts wander backwards over a different aspect of the same subject, in an effort to link again the chain of belief concerning heaven and hell, which joins this present with a long-forgotten past. The difficulty which we feel in uniting ourselves in thought with past ages, arises surely more often from the imperfection of our sympathies than from the deficiency of our positive knowledge. So many questions which were once new have long been settled, so many experiments have been tried, such experiences have been lived through since then; it is so impossible that the earlier conditions of life and society should return; and we cannot bring ourselves to make the effort of imagination necessary to place us in harmony with bygone times. But there are some few questions which seem as far from settlement now as they ever were; one of these is the question concerning the destiny of man after death, the character of his journey into that undiscovered country, and the sort of life he will lead when there.

“A riddle which one shrinks
To challenge from the scornful sphinx.”

Some would dissuade us from the continuance of these (so they say) unfruitful speculations; but it is very certain that man must change his nature before they will lose their fascination for him; and until he does so, he cannot read without sympathy the guesses which past generations of men have made towards the solution of the same problems. For them, indeed, these solutions have lost their interest, as ours will soon do for us. Whatever lot that new condition may hold in store, eternal pleasure or eternal pain, they have tried it now; whatever scene the dark curtain hides, they have passed behind it. This is very certain: as that we soon must. But so long as we remain here upon this upper earth, we must be something above or below humanity if we refuse ever to let our thoughts wander toward the changes and chances of another life.

Not, indeed, that questions of this sort have ever had for the majority of men in one age, or for the collective mass of human kind, an all-absorbing interest. If we choose to look closely into the matter, and to test men’s opinion as it is displayed in their actions (the only real opinion), we shall at first perhaps be struck by the slight belief which they possess in a future state. For it is slight compared to their “notional assent,” that which they think they believe concerning it. With the majority, faith upon this point is at best but shadowy, of an otiose character suitable for soothing the lots of others, and sometimes, alas! called into requisition to relieve us from the stings of conscience on account of the pain which our own misconduct or neglect has introduced therein. And as it is with us, so, save under exceptional conditions, it has always been with men in the full vigour and enjoyment of life. There have been times when one aspect of the future—its terror—has been realized with an intensity, and has exercised an influence upon life and conduct, such as is unknown in our days. But these times have not been ordinary ones, and we are apt, I think, even to over-estimate the force of faith during the Middle Ages. That term, “dark ages,” overrides our fancy; “we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping.”[5] But, then, neither have the most light-hearted and sceptical of people been able to shut their eyes utterly to the warnings of death. We are wont to think of the Greeks as of just such a light-hearted, and in a fashion sceptical, temperament, and to contrast the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of mediæval Europe. Scarcely any thought of death, or of judgment after death, disturbs the serenity of Greek art, such as it has come down to us. Thanatos is not to be found;[6] even the tombs are adorned with representations of war and of the chase, or with figures of the dancing Hours. And yet Greek art was not without its darker side. It had, like mediæval poetry, its Dante—Polygnotus, namely—who adorned the pilgrims’ house at Delphi with frescoes representing the judgment and the tortures of the damned,—a Greek Campo Santo. He would have given us a different impression of the Greek mind in presence of the fact of mortality, and shown us how easily we are led to exaggerate the divergence in thought between different nations and different times.

So we find as far back as we can test the belief of men, certain theories touching the fate of the soul after death, which represent, in the germ at least, the prevalent opinions of our own day; and out of some of which these opinions have sprung. First among these, probably in point of time, stands the purely sceptical theory which takes its rise from the earliest efforts of language to give expression to the unseen. Casting about for a name for the essential part of man, the life or soul of him, language finds at first that it has no suitable word, and then supplies its want by using the breath—the ψυχη, spiritus—in this sense. Like the vital spark itself, the breath is seen to depart when the man dies. Whither has it gone? The purely negative, the purely sceptical answer would be, “It has disappeared.” The answer actually given in most religious creeds is, “It has gone to the unseen place,” or the concealed place; as the Greeks said, to Hades (Ἀ-ίδης); or, as our Northern ancestors said, to Hel.[7] Thus, out of pure negation we have the beginning of a myth: the spirit becomes something definite, and the place it has gone to is partly realized. The unseen place is underground, gained by a dark valley which stretches there from the upper earth. Enough of the old belief remains to keep this home of the dead itself dark and shadowy and lifeless. “The senseless dead, the simulacra of mortals,” as Homer says. And we remember how even a hero like Achilles “would rather be on earth and serve for hire to a man of mean estate, than rule a king among the dead.”

The same thought is expressed by the Hebrew poet,[8]

“Sheol shall not praise thee, Jehovah,
The dead shall not celebrate thee;
They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth;
The living, the living, shall praise thee, as I do this day.”

No people have held up this destructive side of death, this negative theory of a future, with sharper outline than the Greeks and Hebrews. What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is that line, “They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth!” Other people have found themselves unable to rest at this point; they have endowed their place with a personality, but, still strongly impressed with its horrors, this personality is grim and fearful. Even with the Greeks, Hades is a person, not a place; with the Teutons, Hel has gone through the same transformation: and a thousand other images of horror to be met with in different creeds, devouring dragons, dogs who, like Cerberus, threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom, can be shown by their names to have sprung from merely negative images of death, the unseen, the coverer, the concealer, the cave of night.

In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later growth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul’s future finds expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a complete history of the dead man’s journey across the Nile and through the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.

This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven, disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one, mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason, though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their myth of the soul’s journey, drawing all its distinctive features from the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.

The most probable conjecture has fixed the cradle of our race in that corner of land which lies westward the steep range of the Beloot Tagh mountains, an off-shoot of the Himalayas, and northward from the high barren land of Cabul. This country, the ancient Bactriana, is the most habitable district to be found anywhere in Central Asia. There the hills stretch out in gentle slopes towards the west, and enclose fertile valleys, whose innumerable streams, fed by the mountains east and south, all go to swell the waters of the Oxus, now called the Jihon. Farther north lies another fruitful country, watered by the Jaxartes, separated from the first by a range of hills much inferior to those which divide both lands from Yarkand and Cashgar on the east, and from Cabul on the south. Both the great rivers empty themselves into the Sea of Aral, between which and the Caspian, sharply cutting off the fertile country from that sea, stretches the Khiva desert, a barren land affording a scanty nourishment to the herds of wandering Turkic tribes. There is good reason to believe, however, that this desert did not always exist, but that in times not extraordinarily remote the Caspian Sea, joined to the Sea of Aral, extended over a much larger area than it at present covers: it is known even now to be sinking steadily within its banks. With such a contraction of the great sea the desert would grow by a double process, by the laying bare its sandy bed and by the withdrawal of a neighbouring supply of moisture from the dry land. So it may well have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward—to people, at last, all the countries of Europe. The root which is common to the European languages for the names of the sea, means, in the Indian and Iranian languages, a desert: how can we account for this fact better than by supposing that after the European nations had left their early home, their brethren, who remained behind and who long afterwards separated into the people of India and Persia, came to know as a desert the district which their fathers had once known as the sea?

Thus, these ancient Aryans stood with their backs toward the mountains and their faces toward the sea. All their prospect, all their future, seemed to be that way; when their migrations began they were undertaken in that direction—towards the west. Most important of all in the formation of a creed, their sun-god, or sun-hero,[9] was seen by many of them quenching his beams in the waters; the home of the sun is always likewise the home of souls. What more natural, nay, what so necessary, as that the Aryan paradise should lie westward beyond the sea? It has been said just now that the Indian word for desert corresponds etymologically with the European word for sea: that word must have been, in the old Aryan, something like mara, from which we get the Persian mĕru, desert, the Latin mare, the Teutonic (German and English) meer. But from identically the same root we likewise get the Sanksrit and the Zend (old Persian) mara, death, the Latin mors, the old Norse mordh, the German mord, our murder, all signifying originally the same thing.[10] What, then, does this imply? The word which the old Aryans used for sea they used likewise for death. How would this be possible, unless this, their first sea, were likewise the sea of death, the necessary stage upon the road to paradise?

It might have been expected that such a connection of ideas would have endowed the sea with an entirely terrible character, precluding any attempt to explore its solitudes, or the lands which lay beyond. It has been already said that as a matter of experience we find that the earthly paradise often comes to be realized so vividly that men lose the fear which should attach to any attempt at finding it. They were not religious, heavenward-looking men who, in Mr. Morris’s poem, set out in quest of the happy land; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a true instinct, and that of all those mediæval mariners who were lost in their search after St. Brandon’s isle, none knew that they had found what they were seeking—Death. The Greeks eagerly cherished delusions of the same kind; and long before they had summoned up courage sufficient to navigate the Mediterranean they had invented the myths of their western islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired Rhadamanthus was taken when expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, or of those gardens kept by the daughters of the west,[11] where decay and death could not enter. It is likely enough that for the Aryans their western sea did long retain its more fearful meaning, a death; but that they at last gained courage to look upon it only as the road[12] to the land of which they had long been dreaming.

How much more weighty a position the sea takes in men’s thoughts than is warranted by their real familiarity with it! Into the mass of sedentary lives—the vast majority—it enters but seldom as an experience, provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of all countries which possess a sea-board, how full is the literature of reference to this one phenomenon of physical nature! The sun and the moon, and all the heavenly bodies, the familiar sights and sounds of land, are the property of all; and yet allusions to these are not more common in literature than allusions to the sea: one might fancy that man was amphibious, with a power of actually living upon, and not only by, the water. Charles Lamb acutely penetrates the cause of a certain disappointment we all feel at the sight of the sea for the first time. We go with the expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from true voyages, and what we cherish as credulously from romances and poetry, come crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. Thus we are imbued with thoughts of the sea before we have had any sight of it ourselves, merely by the sea’s great influence acting through the total experience of humanity. “We think of the great deep and of those who go down unto it: of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells and the mariner—

“For many a day and many a dreadful night,
Incessant labouring round the stormy cape;

of fatal rocks and the ‘still-vexed Bermoothes;’ of great whirlpools and the water-spout; of sunken ships and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths.” We must not narrow the influence of the sea in mythology within the compass of man’s mere experience of it. Few among the Aryans lived by the Caspian shore; but the Sea of Death appears in one form or another in the religious belief of all the Aryan people. The tradition of the sea, its real wonders, and greater fancied terrors, must have passed from one to another, from the few who lived within sight and sound of the waters to others quite beyond its horizon, to whom it was not visible even as a faint silvery line.

It is natural that, in early myths, no accurate distinction should have been drawn between the sea and rivers with which the Aryans were familiar. The Caspian was imagined a broad river bounding the habitable earth, the origin of the Oceanus of the Greeks; and the sea of death is, in its earliest form, a river of death. All after-forms of mythical geography, moreover, such as we find among Indians, Greeks, or Norsemen, are but graftings upon this central idea. As the Aryans changed their homes, the new experiences gradually blotted out the old. The Greek transferred his thoughts about the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and when his geography extended, the Oceanus was pushed farther and farther away, until the later Euhemerist geographers came to confound it with the Atlantic. Thus it is but by accident that we give to ocean the meaning which it now bears. The first ocean was the mythical river which flowed round the earth, and the real physical forerunner of the myth was not the Atlantic or any of our oceans, but the Caspian Sea as it stretched before the eyes of the ancient Aryan folk.

The Norseman, especially the Icelander,[13] lived so close to the ocean, that the older myth was forgotten beside the aspect of nature so familiar to him. In the middle of his earth stood a high mountain, on which was a strong city, Asgaard, the house of the Æsir or gods. Below Asgaard lay the green and fruitful earth, man’s home. Then outside flowed or lay the great mid-earth ocean, just like the Greek ocean in character, despite all differences of climate and country. At other times the mid-earth sea is personified as a devouring monster, Jörmungandr (“great monster”), the name of the mid-gaard serpent who lies at the bottom of the encircling sea, shaking the earth when he moves.[14] Beyond, lies the ice-bound land of giants—Jötunheim, giant’s home—dark like the Cimmerian land, and peopled with beings as weird and terrible as the Cyclops or the Gorgons.

Gradually the myths of the river of death and the sea of death from being one became two. The second was confined to those nations who lived upon the sea-shore, and lost in great part its early shape; but neither Indians, Greeks, nor Norsemen forgot the myth of the mortal river. The Indian retained it singly; for when his turn for wandering came, he passed over the eastern mountains and reached a land where no sea was any longer to be seen or heard of. In the mythical language of the Vedas, the mortal river is called Vaiterani; it lies “across the dreadful path to the house of Yama,”[15] the god of Hell.

From the belief in the river of death no doubt arose also the practice of committing the dead to the care of the sacred Ganges; for just as the Hindus kindle a funeral fire in the boat which bears the dead down this visible stream of death, so used the Norsemen to place their hero’s body in his ship, and then having lighted it send it drifting out seawards with the tide. In conjunction with that thought of the other world which placed the final resting-place in a dark kingdom underground, the river is seen in Greek mythology transferred to Hades; but it is multiplied into four, which have all grown out of one, inasmuch as they were feigned to flow out of the upper-earth river Oceanus:—

“Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.”

These pictures are not quite in character with the Hellenic thought about the future state. But it is certain that the more gloomy images of death are preserved in connection with the rivers of Hades, with Hades itself, and all that it contains. So it is with the northern Styx, Gjöll,[16] as it is called in the Eddas. This, too, is an underground stream lying, like the Indian, on the road to the gates of death.

Thus a separation arises between the sea and the river myths. If we wish for something more cheerful than the pictures of Styx and Gjöll and Vaiterani, we must look, for the tales of an earthly paradise which sprang up when men had lost their first terror of the sea, but had not lost the beliefs to which their earliest thoughts about that sea gave birth.

Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life, and then made literal and physical by their transference to the unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The Ægean was his home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care, and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the Ægean had become parts of his familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth and the borders of Hades.

Some writers have attempted to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than a myth of the sun’s course through heaven. But surely there is too much solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of belief around it, to suit a tale relating such airy unrealities as those. The Greeks who first sung the ballads must have been thinking of a real journey upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many images and notions which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. They would interweave in the story such truths—or such sailors’ yarns—as Phœnician mariners or adventurous Greeks brought home from the distant waters, with many images which had been first made of the sun’s heavenly voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. Their geography would, indeed, be mythical; for they could have no accurate notions of the lands which they spoke of; but it would not be without a kernel of reality. Justin and Augustine may look upon the garden of the Hesperides or the garden of Alcinoüs as a reminiscence of Paradise; Strabo may assign them an exact position on the coast of Libya; and both may be right. The myth of the two gardens—the Hebrew and the Greek paradises—sprang up in obedience to an identical faculty of belief, and therefore the two stories are in origin the same. But each myth supported itself upon so much of reality as it could lay hold of: and it is likely enough that the famous golden apples which Hercules was sent to fetch owed their origin to the first oranges brought by Phœnician merchantmen to Greece.

Besides some such slender thread of reality, the adventures of Odysseus are built upon what men’s imagination told them might lie in the western seas. Now in reality there was only one thing which at the bottom of their hearts they believed actually did lie there—namely, death; and beyond that, the home of the departed. Therefore their stories of adventure in the Mediterranean do all, upon a minute inspection, resolve themselves into a variety of mythical ways of describing death; and upon this as a dark background the varied colours of the tale are painted. It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the brilliant picture to acknowledge this. Nay, it gather adds to it, for behind the graceful air of the poem, sung as a poem only, we hear a deeper note telling of the passionate, obstinate questionings of futurity which belonged not more to Greece three thousand years ago than they now belong to us.

Any one acquainted with the genesis of myth would at once be disposed to see in the Odyssey the combination of two different legends; for one series of adventures comes as a tale told during the course of the second. We first see our hero on the island of Calypso, the sea-nymph; and when Hermes has brought from the gods the command for his release, he is carried thence by storms to the land of the Phæaceans. There Nausicaa finds him and brings him to her father Alcinoüs, by whom he is hospitably entertained, and at last sent back to Ithaca, his home. This forms one complete legend, the simplest and probably the first, because into it is woven the account of Odysseus’ earlier adventures. In the halls of Alcinoüs the wanderer tells what happened to him before he reached the cave of Calypso, and in this narrative we follow him to the island of the Lotus-eaters, to the island of the Cyclops, thence to the house of Circe, and from there to the very borders of hell itself. And we guess that we have here got hold of a later amplified legend built up out of the earlier myth. We find just such changes as this in Norse mythology; a story told in a few lines by the elder Edda, is expanded into an elaborate history in the younger. Looking again more closely at the Odyssey, we discover that many circumstances in the expanded tale bear close resemblance to one or other of the adventures in the shorter category. Take, for instance, the life with Calypso and with Circe. Both Calypso and Circe are nymphs, enchantresses; each lives alone upon her island: with each Odysseus passes a term of years, living with her as her husband, longing all the while to return to his own wife and his own home, and yet unable to do so: from each Hermes is the deliverer. What if Calypso and Circe both repeat in reality the same myth; and what if Odysseus’ other great adventure, the voyage to the Phæaceans, have likewise its counterpart in the expanded story? The question of the real identity or difference of the two stories can only be decided when we have seen how much significance there is in the points of their apparent likeness.

Who is Calypso? Her name bespeaks her nature not ambiguously. It is from καλύπτειν, to cover or conceal. She is the shrouder, or the shrouded place, answering exactly therefore to Hel, which, as has before been said, comes from the verb helja, “to hide.” How, then, can Calypso be anything else than death, as she dwells there in her cave, by the shores of the sea? How can Odysseus’ life with her, his sleep in her cave, be anything else than an image of dying? The gods have determined that the hero shall not remain in this mortal sleep for ever; so Hermes is sent to command Calypso to let Odysseus go. Hermes is the god whose mission it is to lead souls down to the realm of Hades—the psychopomp, as in this office he is called. But sometimes he may come upon an opposite message, to restore men to life; the staff which closes the eyes of men may likewise open them when asleep. On such a task he comes—

“Wind-like beneath, the immortal golden sandals
Bare up his flight o’er the limitless earth and the sea;
And in his hand that magic wand he carried,
Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber,
Or wakens from sleeping.”

He comes like the breath of morning awakening the world, to rouse our hero from the embrace of death; and the whole scene is beautifully attuned to an image of returning life. Therefore the interference of Hermes between Odysseus and Calypso is full of significance. We accordingly meet the same episode in the Circe tale. That this last is a later widening of the first story appears from many things; chiefly in this, that there is more moral in the history; for the truest myth is content to follow the actual workings of nature, without attempting to adorn a story with extraneous incident, or to convert its simplicity into the complexities of allegory. That turning the companions into swine was a punishment for luxury—that points the moral; the original Circe, we may be sure, only touched her lovers with her sleepy magic rod. It was the same wand with the “slepy yerde”[17] of Hermes, and she used it not wantonly but only because all whom she embraces must fall into the unwakeful slumber. If Circe’s name does not reveal her nature so nakedly as Calypso’s does, this is but consistent with the fact of her later creation. Nevertheless, we easily recognise by it death in one of its many types—a ravenous animal or bird, a hawk or wolf.[18]

When Odysseus is freed from the fatal embrace of Calypso, he is not at once restored to the common earth, but from his descent into hell goes heavenwards, or at least to the happy islands of the blessed. The land of the Phæaceans, Scheria, can scarcely be anything else than this Paradise, to which, according to one myth, Rhadamanthus fled from his brother Minos when he reigned in Crete. The Phæaceans, too, have had dealings with “yellow-haired Rhadamanthus,” whom they carried back in their swift barques to Eubœa. The name of their island is merely land, shore;[19] perhaps at first only the farther coast of the sea of death.

“Far away do we live at the end of the watery plain,
Nor before now have we ever had dealings with other mortals;
But now there comes some luckless wanderer hither.
Him it is right that we help; for all men, fellows and strangers,
Come from Zeus; in his sight the smallest gift is pleasing.”[20]

They live close to the gods, and in familiar converse with them. It is a place where decay and death cannot enter. In the gardens of Alcinoüs flowers and fruit do not grow old and disappear; winter does not succeed to summer; all is one continuous round of blossoming and bearing fruit; in one part of the garden the trees are all abloom; in another they are heavy with clusters. There it is, as in that wizard’s tower of Middle-Age legend it only seemed to be—

“That from one window men beheld the spring,
And from another saw the summer glow,
And from a third the fruited vines arow.”[21]

In name the Phæaceans appear as beings of the twilight—φαίαξ, strengthened from φαιός, dusky, dim. Their most wondrous possessions are their ships, which know the thoughts of men, and sail swifter than a bird or than thought. “No pilots have they, no rudders, no oarsmen, which other ships have, for they themselves know the thoughts and minds of men. The rich fields they know, and the cities among all men, and swiftly pass over the crests of the sea, shrouded in mist and gloom.”[22] Yet the Phæaceans themselves live remote from human habitation, unused to strangers. It would seem, therefore, that the ships travel alone on their dark voyages. For what purpose? It is not difficult to guess. Their part is to carry the souls of dead men over to the land of Paradise.[23] We can imagine them sailing in every human sea; calling at every port, familiar with every city, though in their shroud of darkness they are unseen by men. They know all the rich lands, for every land has its tribute to pay to the ships of death. They are the exact counterparts of the “grim ferryman which poets write of;” only that the last plies his business in the ancient underground Hades, while the Phæacean mariners are really believed to be inhabitants of the upper earth; albeit they can pass from this life to the other.

Their business with Odysseus is to bring him back to the common world of Greece—to beloved Ithaca. He has passed to the cave of Hel, and emerged from it to visit the land of Paradise; now he returns, that his adventures may be sung in the homes of Greece. How could men ever tell tales of that strange country, if it really were a shore from which no traveller returned? Accordingly, this traveller is laid to sleep in the black barque of the Phæaceans, “a sweet sleep, unwakeful, nearest like to death; and as arose the one brightest star to herald the morning, the sea-troubled ship touched the shore.”[24] Thus end the adventures of the wanderer; and, as far as regards the belief concerning the sea of death, this is all his adventures can tell us. His doings with the Cyclops, with the Lotus-eaters, have their relationship with the same belief; but they scarcely bring in any new elements; they only change the method of their treatment and symbolize them in a new way. Hades is more distinctly treated of in the second series; and this is enough to show us that the mortal character of the whole journey has been lost sight of more completely than in the first myths; so we noticed before, that the significance of Calypso’s name is half forgotten when her part is assigned to Circe. The journey to Hades from Circe’s island, Ææa, tallies exactly with the journey to Scheria from the island of Calypso; only, for the island of the blest is substituted the underground home of souls; and when Odysseus addresses there his companion, Elpenor, whom he had but a little while ago left dead on Circe’s island, and asks him how he could have come under the dark west more quickly on foot than Odysseus did sailing in a black ship, we see that the meaning of the ocean journey is forgotten, and that a sort of confusion has arisen between the Hades under men’s feet, to which the souls of the dead descend, and the Hades at the end of the journey lying far away. This part, then, is not significant of the Greek belief concerning an earthly Paradise. The learned Welcker, who first showed how these Phæacean ships were the carriers of souls,[25] wishes also to connect the myth with some non-Hellenic source. He supposes it to have been gathered from the Teutons. But surely we are not obliged to go so far, unless we are prepared to consider Charon non-Hellenic also; and no one can really pretend that. For the Phæacean myth is in many ways truer than the myth of Charon and Styx. Styx is but the earth-river (or sea), Oceanus, transferred to beneath the earth; and the story of the ferryman is a compromise between the two creeds—that of the under-world and that of the western paradise beyond sea; while the myth of the Phæaceans is a simple expression of the last. The connection which we find between Greek and German in these beliefs is derivable only from their common ancestry—not from a contact in later days. Certainly these legends have their close counterparts in Norse mythology; the two series only require to be stripped of local colouring, and some unessential details, to display very clearly their common brotherhood. How curious, for instance, is it to see that Calypso corresponds literally in name with the Northern goddess of the dead, Hel! Another myth, the story of the burning of Baldur, repeats the same images of death which we trace in the legend of Odysseus.

Baldur is quite evidently the sun-god. Less of a hero, more of a god, than Odysseus, he is nevertheless mortal—as, indeed, all the Norse gods are—and falls pierced by the hand of his own brother, Hödur. Then his corpse is placed upon his ship, Hringhorn, and sent out upon this, as on a pyre, drifting into the ocean. We can imagine how to the Norsemen upon their stormy seas, the image of the sun dying red upon the western waters recalled the story of Baldur’s burning ship. The Viking imitated his god in this, and when his time came ordered his funeral fire to be lighted in like manner upon a ship and himself to be set sailing, as Baldur was. After this we are brought in the myth to the underground kingdom of Hel, and there the goddess entertains Baldur, as Calypso entertained Odysseus, making ready her best to do him honour, and seating him in the highest place in her hall. Then the gods take counsel how Baldur is to be brought back again, and one of them, Hermödr,[26] the messenger, like Hermes, is sent to beg Hel to let Baldur out of Helheim. Fate and death are more powerful in northern lands than they are in Greece. The gods cannot command that this Calypso should let her prisoner go; and alas! they do not even obtain an answer to their prayer save on conditions which they are unable to fulfil. Hel will set Baldur free, if all things, both living and dead, weep for him; but if one thing refuses to weep, then he must remain in the under-world. Thereupon the gods sent messengers over the whole earth, commanding all things, living and lifeless, to weep Baldur out of Helheim; all things freely complied with the request, both men and stones, and trees and metals; until as the messengers were returning, deeming that their mission was accomplished, they met an old witch sitting in a cave, and she refused to weep, saying, “Let Hel keep her own.”[27] This old witch is Calypso or Circe in another guise. Her name is Thokk, that is, darkness (dökkr).

The Teutonic people had many myths and stories about the carrying the dead across the sea. We have signalized the belief in such a passage as the origin of those countless mediæval legends of the earthly Paradise: doubtless it is the parent of the modern superstition that ghosts will not cross the running water. Side by side with the story of the Phæaceans we may place the superstition which Procopius records touching our own island. The Byzantine historian of Justinian seems to have had but vague ideas of the position of Britain, which, by the tide of Teutonic invasion across the Rhine, had long been cut off from intercourse with the Empire. These Easterns were careless and ignorant of the remote West. So Procopius speaks of Britannia as lying opposite to Spain; and then he mentions another island, Brittia—evidently in reality our island—which faces the northern coast of Gaul, and of this he tells the following strange story:—There is, he declares, an island called Brittia, which lies in the Northern Seas. It is separated into two divisions by a wall;[28] and on one side of this wall the air is healthy and the land fertile and pleasant, and all things most apt for human habitation. But on the other side the air is so noxious that no one can breathe in it for an hour: it is given up to serpents and poisonous animals and plants. Yet not entirely; for this is the home of the dead. Then he goes on to relate how the fishermen who inhabit the coast opposite this part of Brittia have to perform the strange duty of carrying the souls across the strait. Each does his office in rotation; when the man’s night has come he is awoke by a knocking at his door, but when he opens it, sees no one. He goes down to the shore, and finds there strange vessels, which, though empty to mortal eyes, lie deep in the water as though weighed down by some freight. Stepping in, each fisherman takes his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the vessels are wafted in one night across the channel, a distance which, with oar and sail, they could usually scarce accomplish in eight. Arrived at the opposite side—our coast—the fishermen heard names called over and voices answering in rota, and they felt the boats becoming light. Then, when all the ghosts were landed, they were carried back to Gaul. We may picture them returning to the habitable world in the first glow of morning, or with the one bright morning star which shone on Odysseus landing at Ithaca.

So much for the myth of the sea, or river, of death. A most important change was wrought in belief when the custom of burning the dead was introduced. It would seem that our Aryan ancestors were the beginners of this rite. Whence it arose we cannot say; but if the God of Fire was a prominent divinity, the thought of committing the dead into his charge seems a simple and natural one. Among the Aryan people the only deep traces of fire-worship are to be seen in the Vedic and Iranian religions,[29] while the fire-burial survived in all: but the former may well have held a prominent place in their older creed. Or—and this is far from unlikely—the custom of fire-burial may have arisen out of the sun myth, just as the belief in the soul’s journey after death was suggested by watching the sun’s journey to the west. The two great fire-funerals mentioned in Greek and Teutonic mythology are the funerals of sun-gods. Heracles burning on Mount Œta, on the western coast of the Ægean, may have been first thought of by Greeks who saw the sun setting in fire over that sea; and Baldur’s bale on the ship Hringhorn is evidently the Norse edition of the same story, his blazing ship the blaze in the sky, as the sun sinks into the water. Burning the dead never seems to have been a universal practice; rather a special honour paid to kings and heroes. But then we must remember that immortality itself was not, in ancient belief, granted to all men indiscriminately, only to the greatest.

We see at once that with the use of fire-burial many of the old beliefs had to be given up; all those, for instance, which depended upon the preservation of the bodily remains. Of old time men had buried treasures with the corpse in the expectation that they would be of some kind of use to it; the body itself was at first imagined to descend to the under-world or to travel the western journey to the home of the sun. But now the body is visibly consumed upon the funeral pile, where, too, are placed, by a curious survival of old custom, the precious things which would formerly have been buried with it in the ground. The body and these things have been consumed, are gone; where have they gone? Have they perished utterly, and is there nothing more left than the earliest belief of an Ἀ-ίδης—a nowhere; is nothing true of all those myths of the soul passing away to a home of bliss? Instead of giving up this faith, the Aryan people have only spiritualized it, robbed it of the too literal and earthly clothing which in earlier times it wore. The thought which had once identified the life with the breath comes again into force, or, if some material representation is still wished for, we have the smoke of the funeral pyre, which rises heavenwards like an ascending soul. In this spirit we find in long after years, in the description of the funeral fire of Beowulf the Goth, it is said that the soul of the hero wand to wolcum, “curled to the clouds,” imaging the smoke which was curling up from his pyre. There is even a curious analogy between the words for smoke and soul in the Aryan languages, showing how closely the two ideas were once allied. From a primitive root dhu, which means to shake or blow, we get both the Sanskrit root dhuma, smoke, and the Greek θυμός, the immaterial part of man, his thought or soul. Θυμός is not a mere abstraction like our word mind, but that which could live when the body was killed or wasted to death by disease.[30]

Evidently, therefore, even the inanimate things, the weapons and treasures which are burnt with the dead, survive in a land of essences for the use of the liberated soul. To the question, Where does man’s essence go to when it rises from the funeral fire? the answer, if the wish alone urged the thought, would be “To the gods.” But with the majority of burying people the belief in future union with the gods was not strongly insisted upon. The islands of the blest are certainly not to be confounded with Olympus; although the Phæaceans claim to live very near the gods.[31] Yet with the use of burning, and among the Aryan people, the hope gains a measure of strength. The gods of the Aryan were, before everything, gods of the air. As the soul and the smoke mounted upwards, “curled to the clouds,” the belief of its having gone to join the gods—chief god, Dyâus, the air—was impressed more vividly upon his mind. And as the notion of the western journey to the home of the sun was not abandoned, a natural compromise would be to send the soul upwards to the path of the sun, and make its voyage a voyage in heaven, led by the sun or by the wind. But his path still lay westward; the home of the dead ancestors lay beyond the western boundary; there was still an Oceanus to be crossed, and a dark Cimmerian land to be passed through.

The heavenly path taken by the soul becomes, in the eye of mortals, a bridge spanning the celestial arch, and carrying them over the river of death; and men would soon begin asking themselves where lay this heavenly road. Night is necessarily associated with thoughts of death—“Death, and his brother Sleep”—and of the other world. The heavens wear a more awful aspect than by day. The sun has forsaken us, and is himself buried beneath the earth; and a million dwellers in the upper regions, who were before unseen, now appear to sight—the stars, who in so many mythologies are associated with souls. Among the stars we see a bright, yet misty, bow bent overhead: can this be other than the destined bridge of souls? The ancient Indians called this road gods’-path, because besides that it was the way for souls to God, it was also the way from gods to men. They also called it the cow-path—gôpatha, meaning possibly cloud-path—from which it is likely we derive our name for it, “the Milky-way.” The Low-German name for the Milky-way is kau-pat—i.e., kuh-pfad, cow-path. But in their hymns the Indians oftenest speak of it as the path of Yama, the way to the house of Yama, the god of the dead:—

“A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of:

“On it the wise who have known Brahma ascend to the world Svarga, when they have received their dismissal,” sings a Sanskrit poet.[32]

Another (R. V. i. 38. 5) prays the Maruts, the gods of the wind, not to let him wander on the path of Yama, or, when he does so—that is, when his time shall come—to keep him that he fall not into the hands of Nirrtis, the Queen of Naraka (Tartarus). In another place we find as guardians of the bridge two dogs, the dogs of Yama, and the dead man is committed to their care:—

“Give him, O king Yama, to the two dogs, the watchers, the four-eyed guardians of the path, guardians of men: grant him safety and freedom from pain.”

Thus stands out in its complete development the myth of the Bridge of Souls: a narrow path spanning the arch of heaven, passing over the dwelling of Nirrtis, the Queen of Tartarus (perhaps not clearly distinguishable from the river of death), and reaching at last the country of the wise Pitris, the “fathers” of the tribe, who have gone to heaven before, and who since their death have not ceased to keep watch over the descendants of their race. This road is guarded by two dogs, the dogs of Yama, both wardens of the bridge and likewise psychopomps, or leaders of the soul up the strait road.

This was essentially an Indian myth—or perhaps an Indian and Iranian—and took the place of the myth of the sea journey, as it was conceived by Greeks and Germans. The Indians and Iranians had never a sea of death, so they could not have such ferrymen as the Phæaceans, or legends such as the voyages of Odysseus and the burning of Baldur. In the place of them, and with their mortal river, they adopted this Bridge of Souls. The guardians are manifold in their nature; for their names show them related both to Cerberus, who guards Hades, and to Hermes, who leads the souls of the dead below; and, so far as we can gather from the Vedas, these dogs of Yama discharged both offices, sometimes keeping the bridge and sometimes conducting souls along it. “Give him,” says the prayer, “O Yama, to the two dogs.” No doubt their terrors were for the wicked only, and they are thus apt images of death:—

“Death comes to set thee free;
Oh, meet him cheerily
As thy true friend.”[33]

Still, as we see from their appearance, the dreadful aspect of death predominates. In like forms, as dogs or wolves, they return time out of mind in Norse mythology and in Middle-Age legend.

It has been said that this myth of the Bridge of Souls was essentially Indian and Iranian (old Persian). It is often most difficult to ascertain what were the ancient Persian beliefs: but in this case the myth has been handed down to us from the Persians through the Arabs, a people possessing of right no part or lot in its construction. It is generally acknowledged that Mohammed took from the Persians that famous bridge so vividly described in the Korân.[34] Es-Sirât is the bridge’s name. It is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, and is, besides, guarded with thorns and briars along all its length. Nevertheless, when, at the last day, the good Muslim comes to cross it, a light will shine upon him from heaven, and he will be snatched across like lightning or like the wind; but when the wicked man or the unbeliever approaches, the light will be hidden, and, from the extreme narrowness of the bridge and likewise becoming entangled in the thorns, he will fall headlong into the abyss of fire that is beneath. This is the fragment of our old Aryan mythology which the Mohammedan has taken to himself to form an image of hell and of punishment after death. It is significant that from the Persians should have been inherited the most gloomy myth concerning the Bridge of Souls. For from the same source we (Christians) gain our fearfullest notions of the Devil.

The bridge cannot be always the Milky-way. In at least one Sanskrit hymn we learn—

“Upon it, they say, there are colours, white, and blue, and brown, and gold, and red.

“And this path Brahma knows, and he who has known Brahma shall take it; he who is pure and glorious.”

Here the singer is evidently describing the rainbow. Now in the Norse cosmology the rainbow had the same name as the Indian patha-devayano, gods’-path. The Eddas call it As-bru, the bridge of the Æsir, or gods. Its other name, Bifröst, the trembling mile, it may even have inherited from the Milky-way, for that, when we look at it, seems to be always trembling. Asbru or Bifröst, then, is the bridge whereby the gods descend to earth. One end of it reaches to the famous Urdar fount, where sit the weird sisters three—the Nornir, or fates. “Near the fountain which is under the ash stands a very fair house, out of which come three maidens, named Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld (Past, Present, Future). These maidens assign the lifetime of men, and are called Norns.”[35] To their stream the gods ride every day along Bifröst to take counsel. For in the Norse creed the gods know not the hidden things of the future, nor have power to ward them off. Fate and death, the Twilight of the Gods, lies ahead for them also, as these things lie ahead of mortals.

It is possible that a trace of the rainbow bridge is to be seen in the Greek myth of the asphodel meadows, which are a part of the infernal regions. But no other trace of the Bridge of Souls—if this be one—is to be found throughout the range of Hellenic mythology.

The Eddas have nothing to say of the Milky-way. But we have clear evidence that it was considered by the German people a path for the dead. Indeed, in the scanty legends which survive, we can trace the characteristic features of the Indian myth of the bridge guarded by Yama’s dogs, and the souls led along it by the wind-god. The wind-god of the north is the father of gods, none less than Odin himself; and this is why Odin is described as riding with his Valkyriur to the battle-fields, to choose from the dead the heroes who shall go with him to Valhöll, the hall of the chosen. It is because, as the wind-god, he collects the breath of the departed. Odin and Freyja (Air and Earth) divide the slain, says one legend—that is, the bodies go to earth, the breath goes to heaven. Now, in the Middle Ages, when Odin-worship had been overthrown, the gods of Asgaard descended to Helheim; from being deities they were turned into fiends. Odin still pursued his office as leader of the souls; but now he was huntsman of hell. One of the commonest appearances of this fiend, therefore, is as a huntsman—called the Wild Huntsman. He is heard by the peasants of the wild mountain districts at this day. He is companioned by two dogs, and his chase goes on along the Milky-way all the year through, save during the twelve nights which follow Christmas. During that time he hunts on earth, and the peasant will do well to keep his door well-barred at night. If he does not, one of the hell-hounds will rush in and lie down in the ashes of the hearth. No power will move him during the ensuing year, and for all that time there will be trouble in the house. When the hunt comes round again he will rise from his couch and rush forth, wildly howling, to join his master.

A gentler legend is that which we find preserved in a charming poem of the Swede, Torpelius, called “The Winter Street”—another of the names for the Milky-way. With this, in the form in which it has been rendered into English,[36] we may end our list of legends connected with the Sea of Death or the Bridge of Souls. The story is of two lovers:—

“Her name Salami was, his Zulamyth;
And each so loved, each other loved. Thus runs the tender myth:

“That once on earth they lived, and, loving there,
Were wrenched apart by night, and sorrow, and despair;
And when death came at last, with white wings given,
Condemned to live apart, each reached a separate heaven.

“Yet loving still upon the azure height,
Across unmeasured ways of splendour, gleaming bright,
With worlds on worlds that spread and glowed and burned,
Each unto each, with love that knew no limit, longing turned.

“Zulamyth half consumed, until he willed
Out of his strength one night a bridge of light to build
Across the waste—and lo! from her far sun,
A bridge of light from orb to orb Salami had begun.

“A thousand years they built, still on, with faith,
Immeasurable, quenchless, so my legend saith,
Until the winter street of light—a bridge
Above heaven’s highest vault swung clear, remotest ridge from ridge.

“Fear seized the Cherubim; to God they spake—
‘See what amongst thy works, Almighty, these can make!’
God smiled, and smiling, lit the spheres with joy—
‘What in my world love builds,’ he said, ‘shall I, shall Love itself destroy?’”

C. F. Keary.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Elia.

[6] Unless indeed we are to except a figure upon the Ephesian drum (Artemisium) now in the British Museum, which some have imagined to represent Thanatos.

[7] Hel is from the Icl. helja “to conceal.”

[8] Isaiah xxxviii. 18, 19; cf. also Genesis xxxvii. 35; 1 Samuel xxviii. 19. Sheol is misrendered “grave” in our version. It means the place of the dead, not of bodies only.

[9] The fact that the sun dies every day militates against his claim to the rank of a god: otherwise he would probably always receive the greatest meed of worship. As it is, he is often worshipped rather as a hero or demigod than a true immortal.

[10] Fick. “Verg. Wörterbuch der I.-G. Sp.” s.v. mara.

[11] Hesperides. They are, however, called the daughters of Night by Hesiod and others.

[12] Πόντος is from the same root as the Skr. patha, a path, pfad, &c. One might suppose from this that the Greeks were the first adventurers upon the deep waters. While the other Aryan folks called the sea “a death,” they called it a “road.”

[13] There can be no doubt that the cosmology of the Eddas is to some extent infected by the source from which we derive it. The picture of earth, with its mountain Asgard and its surrounding sea, is nearly exactly the picture of Iceland.

[14] So Poseidôn, the god of the sea, is the earth-shaker; earthquakes being apparently attributed to the water under the earth.

[15] Weber in Chambr., 1020.

[16] “The sounding,” from gialla, to sound (yell).

[17] Chaucer.

[18] Κίρκος (whence Κίρκη) is given as both hawk and wolf in L. & S. It is most likely from a root krik, meaning to make a grating sound, and therefore probably applied originally to the bird (cf. our nightjar). The Latin quercus seems to be from the same root—from its rustling? We may compare Circe with Charôn, which means “an eagle.”

[19] From σχερός.

[20] Od. vi. 204, sqq.

[21] “Earthly Paradise.”

[22] Od. viii. 562.

[23] Justin Martyr identifies the gardens of Alcinoüs with Paradise. “Cohort. ad Græc.” xxix.

[24] Od. xiii. 79, 88.

[25] “Rheinisches Museum für Philologie,” vol. i. N.S. p. 219. Die Homerische Phäaken.

[26] Hermödr (heer-muth, kriegsmuth) was originally one of the names of Odin, and therefore originally the wind. We easily see the connection between the rushing wind, and the battle’s rage. Hermes is likewise the wind, and means “the rusher” (ὁρμάω, and cf. Sârameyas of the Vedas).

[27] Edda Snorra, Dæmisaga, 49.

[28] Procopius, Bel. Goth. iv. The wall identifies the island with Britain.

[29] The Iranian religion, as it has come down to us, is the historical one founded by Zarathustra, who swept away most of the traces of the old Aryan faith. There is difficulty, therefore, in obtaining the evidence of a belief which was shared by the old Persians.

[30]

κὰδ’ δ’ ἔπεσ’ ἐν κόνιῃσι μακὼν, ἀπὸ δ’ ἔπτατο θυμός.—Od. x. 163.

οὔτε τίς, οὖν μόι νοῦσος ἐπήλυθεν, ἥτε μάλιστα
τηκεδόνι στυγερῇ μελέων ἐξείλετο θυμόν.—Od. xi. 200.

[31] We are here speaking of beliefs which sprang originally from the days of burial in the earth. Of these were all that class which included the journey of the soul.

[32] Vrhadâranayaka. Ed. Pol. iii 4-7.

[33] Fouque.

[34] Sale’s Koran, Introd. p. 91. The Persian bridge was called Chinvat.

[35] See Edda den Eldra, Grimnismâl 44, and Edda Snorra, D. 15. That Bifröst did not tremble through weakness we may gather from the fact that it is the “best of bridges,” “the strongest of all bridges” (Simrock, D.M. 28), and that it will only be broken at the day of judgment.

[36] By E. Keary: Evening Hours, vol. iii.

MR. MACVEY NAPIER AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEWERS.

Selection from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, Esq. Edited by his son, Macvey Napier. London: Macmillan & Co.

Mr. Macvey Napier, who succeeded Francis Jeffrey in the editorship of the great Whig Review, had, of course, a perfect right to preserve the letters which are published in this volume, and to study them in private as much as he pleased. Indeed, for anything that appears to the contrary in the “Introduction” by his son, the present Mr. Macvey Napier, they may have been bequeathed by the original recipient with instructions that they should some day be published. An edition, privately circulated a short time ago, led to “representations that a correspondence of so much interest ought to be made more accessible,” and the present volume is the result; but it might be maintained that the writers of such letters would, if they could have been consulted, have objected to their publication; and that to send them forth to the world in all their nakedness was, at all events, not a delicate or magnanimous thing to do. “Much might be said on both sides.” Paley, in his chapter on the original character of the Christian Morality, remarked that though a thousand cases might be supposed in which the use of the golden rule might mislead a person, it was impossible in fact to light on such a case. That was a hazardous observation, for the truth is that when we once get beyond elementary conditions of being and doing, we find human beings differ so very widely, and in such utterly incalculable ways, that it is in vain to poll the monitor in the breast on questions that do in fact arise daily—five hundred in a thousand will vote one way, and five hundred in another. “How would you like it yourself?” is a question that elicits the most discordant replies. I have a very positive feeling that I should have left many of these letters in the portfolio, or put them into the fire; but when I look about me for a standard which I could take in my hand to Mr. Napier, I am baffled—he might produce one of his own that would silence me on the spot. And when one has taken up a book to comment upon it with as little reserve as may be, it seems idle, if not Irish, to begin by saying that the most amusing or most fertile things in it ought never to have seen the light.

This point may recur before we have done; and in the meantime it should be remarked that nothing very momentous, either to the honour or the disgrace of human nature in general, or literary human nature in particular, can be extracted from this correspondence. A late essayist used to tell a true anecdote of a distinguished statesman who had lived many years and seen as many changes as Ulysses. A friend asked him something like this: “Well, now, you have had a great deal to do with mankind, and you have outlived the heats and prejudices of youth; what do you think of men in general?” And the veteran replied: “Oh, I like them—very good fellows; but”—and here we shall mollify his language a little—“but condemnably vain, you know.” And really that is about the worst thing you can find it in your heart to say of literary men after running through these letters—“very good fellows, but very vain, you know.”

Another point which lies less near the surface, and has at least the look of novelty, would perhaps be this. It is the most frequent and most voluminous of the writers who unconsciously tell us the most about themselves; and who, with the pleasing exception of Jeffrey, show us the most of their unamiable sides. But there is comfort for impulsive people in the fact that it is not always the most self-controlled and inoffensive of the writers who win upon us. The Brougham-Macaulay feud runs sprawling through these pages till we are tired of it; and some of poor Brougham’s letters are downright venomous. But the total absence of disguise and the blundering boyish inconsistency disarm us. Taking the letters one by one, the moral superiority is with Macaulay on Brougham as against Brougham on Macaulay, but taking the correspondence in the lump, it is something like Charles Surface against Joseph Surface, in another line—only, of course, there is no hypocrisy. While you come to feel for Brougham in his spluttering rages, you feel also that Macaulay, in his too-admirable self-continence, can do very well without your compassion, whatever he may have to complain of. It is easy to discern that Brougham honestly believed in his own superiority to the young rival who outshone him, and yet that he was inwardly tormented. Macaulay’s forbearance was of the kind qui coûte si peu au gens heureux. The editor, Mr. Napier, was, we may conjecture, the greatest sufferer of the three. Much was owed to Brougham as a man of enormous intellectual force; to which, apart from his past services, great respect was due: but Macaulay was by far the best writer, and (to employ a bull which is common enough) incomparably the most attractive contributor. The strength of his hold upon the Review and its editor is apparent on every tenth page of the book, and comes out forcibly enough in a letter from Sir James Stephen to Mr. Napier. Mr. Napier had written to Sir James, expressing some delicate surprise that no article from his pen had reached the Review for a long time. Sir James excuses himself in this fashion:—

“I know that many of your contributors must be importunate for a place; that you must be fencing and compromising at a weary rate; that there are many interests of the passing day which you could not overlook; and that we should all have growled like so many fasting bears if denied the regular return of the Macaulay diet, to which we have been so long accustomed.”

Sir James was an exceedingly busy man, and he was not professedly a man of letters like Macaulay; but we may, if we like, read between the lines in these excuses and find a little pique there, as well as a just sense of an editor’s difficulties.

Another point which lies broadly and prominently upon the surface in these letters is a very unpleasant one. It is scarcely credible how much dull conceit and sheer ignorant arbitrariness there often is in the minds of able and cultivated men. It does not seem even to occur to them that their own range may be limited, and their judgments upon many (or even a few) topics not worth ink or breath. It should hardly be offensive to an ordinary man to be told, or at least to find it tacitly assumed, that he could not have invented fluxions, painted like Rembrandt, or sung like Pindar. Why, then, should it be difficult for any cultivated specialist, of more than ordinary faculties, to make the reflection that he must be deficient in some direction or other? Yet we find in practice that it is not only difficult, but impossible, in the majority of cases. Mr. Napier seems to have invited, or at all events not to have repelled, free criticisms on his Review from the contributors in general, and the outcome is little short of appalling. If ever there was an able man it was Mr. Senior, yet these are the terms in which he allows himself to speak of an article on Christopher North—or rather of Christopher North himself:—“The article on Christopher North is my abomination. I think him one of the very worst of the clever bad writers who infest modern literature; full of bombast, affectation, conceit, in short, of all the vitia, tristia, as well as dulcia. I had almost as soon try to read Carlyle or Coleridge.” Now Mr. Senior was, of course, entitled to dislike Christopher North, and there is plenty to be said against him in the way of criticism; but the charge of “affectation” is foolish, and the whole passage pitched in the most detestable of all literary key-notes. John Wilson was a man of genius, whose personal likings and rampant animal spirits led him most mournfully astray. He was wanting also in love of truth for its own sake; but he was as much superior to Mr. Senior as Shakspeare was to him. And the addition about Carlyle or Coleridge—or Coleridge!—is just the gratuitous insolence of one-eyed dulness. There is enough and to spare of blame ready in any balanced mind for either of these great writers, but they can do without the admiration of wooden-headed prigs, however able. The point, however, is that it never dawns upon the mind of even so clever and cultivated a man as Mr. Senior, that his head may have gaps in it.

Another instance to the same purport may be selected from a letter from Mr. Edwin Atherstone, the poet—for it would perhaps be hard and grudging to deny him the title, since he found an audience, and I have a vague recollection of having once read verses of his about Nineveh or Babylon which had in them power of the picturesque-meditative order. Now, this is the way in which Mr. Edwin Atherstone speaks of Dr. Thomas Brown, the metaphysician:—“For myself, I know not a writer, with the exception of Shakspeare, Milton, Homer, and Scott, from whom I have derived such high delight as from Dr. Brown.”

Was ever such a category put on paper before? It is as if a man should say his favourite musical instruments were the organ, the harp, the trumpet, the violin, and the sewing-machine. Brown was one of the most readable of metaphysicians; he made some acute hits, and he wrote elegant verses; but his position in Mr. Atherstone’s list is as inexplicably quaint as that of “Burke, commonly called the Sublime,” in the epitaph on the lady who “painted in water-colours,” and “was first cousin to Lady Jones.”

The worst examples of all, however, come from the letters of Francis Jeffrey himself. Jeffrey has been underrated, and he was a most amiable man; but some of the verdicts he thought fit to pronounce upon articles in the Edinburgh, when edited by Mr. Napier, are saugrenus. In one case he is about suggesting a contributor, to deal with a certain topic, and is so polite as to say that the name of Mr. John Stuart Mill had struck him:—“I once thought of John Mill, but there are reasons against him too, independent of his great unreadable book and its elaborate demonstrations of axioms and truisms.”

There might be weighty “reasons against” Mr. Mill, but what his “Logic” could have to do with the question is not clear. It never seems to have crossed Jeffrey’s mind that he might be totally disqualified for forming an opinion of a book like that; and, having called it “unreadable” (though to a reader with any natural bent towards such matters it is deeply interesting), he actually puts forward the fact that Mill had written it as a reason against his being entrusted with the treatment of a political topic in a Whig Review. Editors are human, and the editorial position is a very troublesome one. An editor may lose his head, as an overworked wine-taster may lose his palate. In a word, allowances must be made; but, after a disclosure or two like this, it is difficult not to conclude that the Review owed no more of its success to its former editor than it might have owed to any intelligent clerk. But we cannot let Jeffrey go yet. The following passage relates to an article on Victor Cousin:—

“Cousin I pronounce beyond all doubt the most unreadable thing that ever appeared in the Review. The only chance is, that gentle readers may take it to be very profound, and conclude that the fault is in their want of understanding. But I am not disposed to agree with them. It is ten times more mystical than anything my friend Carlyle ever wrote, and not half so agreeably written. It is nothing to the purpose that he does not agree with the worst part of the mysticism, for he affects to understand it, and to explain it, and to think it very ingenious and respectable, and it is mere gibberish. He may possibly be a clever man. There are even indications of that in his paper, but he is not a very clever man, nor of much power; and beyond all question he is not a good writer on such subjects. If you ever admit such a disquisition again, order your operator to instance and illustrate all his propositions by cases or examples, and to reason and explain with reference to these. This is a sure test of sheer nonsense, and moreover an infinite resource for the explication of obscure truth, if there be any such thing.”

Now, the writer of the article in question was Sir William Hamilton. “He may possibly be a clever man, but beyond all question he is not a good writer on such subjects.” So much for Jeffrey.

“Nec sibi cœnarum quivis temere arroget artem,
Non prius exacta tenui ratione saporum.”

Poor Mr. Carlyle is again dragged in, and Sir William is pronounced “ten times more mystical” than he—“mystical” in italics. When a writer, using the word mystical opprobriously, prints it in italics, it is usually safe to decide that he knows nothing of metaphysics. The concluding sentences are instructive examples of editorial self-confidence: “If ever you admit such a disquisition again, order your operator to” do so-and-so. Thus, the treatment of Mill and Hamilton being equally ignorant and inept, there is no escape for the ex-editor. Both verdicts were after the too-celebrated “this-will-never-do” manner, and that is all.

In the communications from literary men there are some fine instances of just self-consciousness. Tom Campbell writes, with great warmth and alertness, to promise an article upon a new work about the Nerves; but shortly afterwards writes again, candidly confessing that he had found, upon looking again at the work, that his aptitude for scientific detail was not great enough to enable him to do justice to the subject. A letter from William Hazlitt is so striking, both for its truthfulness and its clear-headedness, as to deserve quoting in full. He had been written to by Mr. Napier for some contributions to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and he replies, from his well-known retreat at Winterslow Hut, in these terms:—

“I am sorry to be obliged, from want of health and a number of other engagements, which I am little able to perform, to decline the flattering offer you make me. I am also afraid that I should not be able to do the article in question, or yourself, justice, for I am not only without books, but without knowledge of what books are necessary to be consulted on the subject. To get up an article in a Review on any subject of general literature is quite as much as I can do without exposing myself. The object of an Encyclopædia is, I take it, to condense and combine all the facts relating to a subject, and all the theories of any consequence already known or advanced. Now, where the business of such a work ends, is just where I begin—that is, I might perhaps throw in an idle speculation or two of my own, not contained in former accounts of the subject, and which would have very little pretensions to rank as scientific. I know something about Congreve, but nothing at all of Aristophanes, and yet I conceive that the writer of an article on the Drama ought to be as well acquainted with the one as the other.”

The honesty of this is quite refreshing. There is one more letter, of a similar order, which deserves to be signalized. In August, 1843, Macaulay, being pressed for more frequent contributions, writes from the Albany that he can promise, at the very utmost, no more than two articles in a year:—

“I ought to give my whole leisure to my History; and I fear that if I suffer myself to be diverted from that design as I have done, I shall, like poor Mackintosh, leave behind me the character of a man who would have done something if he had concentrated his powers instead of frittering them away. There are people who can carry on twenty works at a time. Southey would write the history of Brazil before breakfast, an ode after breakfast, then the history of the Peninsular War till dinner, and an article for the Quarterly Review in the evening. But I am of a different temper. I never write so as to please myself until my subject has for the time driven away every other out of my head. When I turn from one work to another a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition. I must not go on dawdling and reproaching myself all my life.”

There is something melancholy in this, admirable as it is. Macaulay had begun to watch the shadow on the dial too closely to permit him to do much miscellaneous work with an easy mind. There is an important lesson for men of letters in the sentence,—“When I turn from one work to another, a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition.” Here lies the great difference between serious literary work and that of ordinary business, where the mind is solicited by one thing after another in rapid succession. In the first case, time and energy have to be expended in evolving from within a fresh impulse for every topic. The most readable writings of Southey are those which he produced fragment by fragment, on topics for which little renewal of impulse was required. To write a great poem in scraps, all by the clock, was a task which only a very conceited and rather wooden man would have attempted; and the result we know, though there are fine things in Southey’s longer poems. A powerful passage by Cardinal Newman on the difficulties of literary work is almost too well known to bear quoting, but a living poet, Mrs. Augusta Webster, has put the case so fairly that Macaulay’s shade—which is, of course, a shade that reads everything—may be gratified by seeing in a handy way a few of her sentences:—

“Occupations of study, scientific research, literary production—of brain-work of any kind that is carried on in the worker’s private home with no visible reminder of customer or client—are taken to be such as can lightly be done at one time as well as another, and resumed after no matter what interruptions, like a lady’s embroidery, which she can take up again at the very stitch she left her needle in. Professions of this sort not only admit, but in many instances require, considerable variation in the amount of daily time directly bestowed on them,—directly, for the true student is not at his work only when he is ostensibly employed, but whenever and wherever he may have his head to himself,—and there is no measure of visible quantity for the more or less results of application.... The literary man probably fares the worst of all. He is not merely not protected by the manual part of his processes, but it is his danger. It is so easy—what anybody can do at any time!... Of course the simple fact is that it is more difficult for this class of persons to practise their vocations under the drawback of perpetual breaks, actual and (what comes to nearly the same thing) expected, than it is for ‘business men.’ Let the attention of the solicitor, for instance, busied on the points of an intricate case, be perforce diverted to another matter, there is lost from that case just the time diverted, and a little extra to allow for the mind which returns to any interrupted course of thought, never returning to it exactly at the point at which it was forced to leave it. But there are the recorded facts; the direct conclusions to be drawn remain unaltered; nothing has disappeared, nothing has lost its identity. But suppose, let us say, a dramatist, devising his crisis after hours, perhaps days, of gradual growth, to the moment when he sees it before him as a reality.... Force his attention away, and he has lost, not merely the time he needed to complete a spell of works, with something over for the difficulty of resuming, but the power of resuming. All has faded into a haze; and the fruit of days, may be, has been thrown away at the ripening, for such moments do not come twice.”

There are but few of Mr. Napier’s own letters in this volume, so that we have only indirect means of measuring his idea of his editorial rights or duties as against contributors. There is one case in which Macaulay complains strongly of certain excisions, and there is another in which he defends certain phrases of his own which appear to have offended the taste of Mr. Napier, who found them undignified, if not slightly vulgar. He submits of course—all the mutilated ones submit—and he says he submits “willingly;” but all the while we can too plainly see the wry faces he is making. Mr. Napier was, apparently, a purist in the matter of style; but there is something almost grotesque in the spectacle of a man of his quality correcting Macaulay. It reminds one of cet imbécile Buloz.[37] The case of Leigh Hunt was very different, for he sometimes went to the extreme verge of decorum—quarterly review decorum, that is—and beyond it. But we may safely conclude that Macaulay knew much better than his editor how to turn a sentence, or when the use of a French locution was desirable for ends of literary effect. Upon this subject of imported phrases Mr. Napier was, it seems, very punctilious, for with Mr. G. H. Lewes he must have had a brisk correspondence about it. Mr. Lewes, who was then a young writer, anxious to get his feet well planted, submits, with every possible expression of acquiescence, one might almost say, of abject agreement; but it is easy to see that his compliance was forced. Macaulay in his discussion of this little matter with Napier, easily and decisively lays down the true guiding principle:—“The first rule of all writing,—that rule to which every other rule is subordinate,—is that the words used by the writer shall be such as most fully and precisely convey his meaning to the great body of his readers. All considerations about the purity and dignity of style ought to bend to this consideration.”

This, indeed, exhausts the subject; and leaves the editor only one question to solve—namely, whether the writer whom he employs has presumably a meaning fit to be conveyed to the readers of his periodical. Upon that point he must use his own judgment; but it was idle for a man like Mr. Napier to criticize the phrasing of a man like Macaulay, who had ten thousand times his reading. For it is upon the “reading” that the matter very largely turns. The force of a quotation or a phrase imported from a foreign tongue depends, not upon the bare meaning of the words, but upon the suggestiveness of certain associations. This does not necessarily imply that the precise context is recalled, or certain hackneyed trifles from Lucretius and Horace, and a score of such chips in porridge, would be indecent. If it be said that all this implies that an editor should be omniscient, or at lowest an omnivorous reader, the reply is, that it certainly does—unless the principle adopted in the conduct of the periodical be the more recent one of choosing contributors largely on account of their names, and then leaving them to answer for their own sins, if any. One thing is clear, that if a man like Jeffrey—or like Napier—could be shown the number of blunders he made in mutilating the writings of his contributors, he would feel very much humiliated. Thackeray complains very bitterly of the suppression of some of his touches of humour, and his sufferings at the hands of a critic like Mr. Napier (able man as he was) must have been terrible indeed.

The system recently adopted of having every article signed, has not yielded the results which were predicted or expected by those who so long struggled to get it introduced. It has led to “starring” more outrageous and more audacious than any that was ever seen upon the stage, and to mischief far more serious. The worst of these is the substitution of a spurious sort of authority for the natural influence or weight of the writing, even upon some of the most important topics which can engage the human mind. The opinion, for example, of a versatile politician, or traveller, or physicist, on a question of religion or morals may be of no more value than that of the first man you meet on passing into the streets. But it will attract attention in proportion to the notoriety of the author, and though wise men may know that it is weak or foolish, they may wait a long while for the chance of saying so from any pulpit worth preaching in, because the platforms are pre-engaged; and also because, the “organs of opinion” being bound to live by keeping up a succession of attractive names in their pages, it will not do to offend the owners of such names. One other result of the recent system (not everywhere and always, of course, but generally and most frequently) is a want of freshness in periodical literature. This evil our American friends manage to escape; only they are much bolder than we are, and do not stand in terror of the charge of levity. But, as a rule, writers who are fit for starring purposes lose freshness in a very short time; and then they do a still farther mischief by striking that key-note of second-hand thought which is so prevalent, or at least so common in even our better literature.

It is amusing enough to recall the superstition of secrecy which inspired the policy of the first Edinburgh Reviewers. Lord Jeffrey has told us how the conspirators, Brougham, Sydney Smith, Horner, and himself, used to meet by night in the back room of a printing-office, and steal to their work by winding paths and back stairs, like assassins. This was folly, though not inexcusably without rational ground or motive, and one cannot resist the belief that the more modern plan will work well some day, if it does not now. But the difference in the results is not so great as might have been hoped for. Men of letters do not now openly insult each other for differences of opinion in politics or theology; but it is not any variation of mechanism which has made the change, and, though less brutality of phrasing is now permitted, it would be difficult to surpass in bitterness or unfairness some of the signed and accredited criticism of our own day. On the whole, it comes to this,—you can get no more out of given moral conditions than there is in them. If public writers are clique-ish (a word to disturb Mr. Napier in his grave, and certainly an ugly one) and unjust to each other, it is because you cannot change the spots of the leopard. A man who loves the truth will employ his pen conscientiously and kindly, whether he writes anonymously or otherwise. To this it may be added that there is something extremely quaint in one thing that we may see taking place every week—the greater part of our newspaper writing is still unsigned, and, considering what a hastily got-up miscellany a newspaper necessarily is, it can hardly be otherwise. A column of reviews in a newspaper is sometimes the work of as many hands as there are books reviewed in it. But it might certainly have been expected beforehand that reviewers who write without signature should be both careful and moderate in attacking writers who sign, and who, presumably, take more time over their work than contributors to newspapers can generally do. Yet the newspaper columns in which quarterly and monthly periodicals are reviewed are “too often” (we must round the corner with the help of that commonplace) models of flippancy and dogmatism.

On the whole, it is not from any mechanical changes of method that we must expect improvement in Review literature. Of course, in largeness, fulness, richness, and versatility the Review-writing of to-day is immeasurably superior to that of the days when Macaulay and Brougham fought for precedence in the Edinburgh. But so is the literature reviewed—one is a big “rolling miscellany,” and so is the other. It does not seem to some of us that, other things being made equal, the literature of our modern Reviews (using the word widely) is either superior or inferior to that of the Edinburgh, for example. The growth, however, of literature generally in force, colour, range, and effectiveness, is something astounding. We note this, or rather it overwhelms us, in turning over such a book as the Memoirs of Harriet Martineau; and there is more than the insolence of new-fangled tastes in putting such a question as—where would Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope” be if it were published to-morrow? One day when Brougham had just left (for London) a country-house where he had been staying, Rogers, who was a fellow-guest with him, made some such remark as this—“In that post-chaise went away this morning, Bacon, Newton, Demosthenes, and Solon.” It is not recorded that Rogers meant this as a joke; but where would Brougham be after a little manipulation by Mr. Jevons or Mr. Goldwin Smith? It would be tiresome to dwell upon this, and wrong to suggest that the men were smaller because the outlook was less; but this view, if anything, helps us to see the direction in which one of our best hopes for literature must lie—namely, in its ever-increasing volume. There will always be hostile camps, and there will always be warriors of low morale, but as each camp enlarges, the average pain of those who suffer from injustice or neglect will be lessened. And this observation is by no means addressed to mere questions of reviewing in the minor sense, but rather to literature in the mass as representing the culture of the time.

Since the time when Jeffrey ruled the Edinburgh Review, and even since the death of Mr. Napier, “the advertising element,” and commercial elements in general, have played a great and new part, an increasing part, too, in the fortunes, and thus in regulating the quality and tendency, of current literature. One result of this state of things is an ever-increasing tendency to compromise in the expression of opinion. In spite of the spirit of tolerance of which we hear so much, there was perhaps never a time in which the expression of opinion was so much emasculated in the higher periodical literature, or in which so much trickery of accommodated phraseology was going forward. This will last for a long time yet—as long as periodical literature is a matter of commercial speculation. It is an evil omen that the greatest amount of freedom now displayed is in political and scientific discussion. It is difficult to see where the remedy is to come from in discussions of another kind. Probably we shall have a lesson by the cataclysmic method before very long. There is in this volume a letter from Brougham to Napier, in which Brougham is very angry about an indirect disclosure of Romilly’s heterodoxy, and he goes off at a tangent to express a doubt whether Macaulay was any better than Romilly, but is very anxious that conventional conformity should be strictly maintained in the Review, even to the length of concealing from the general reader as far as possible such facts as that a man so good and “religious” as Romilly could be a disbeliever in this, that, or the other. We have now got beyond that; the accredited policy is in a vague way to trump the cards of the dangerous people, and then nobody shows his hand fairly and freely. Meanwhile, everybody feels uneasy, from a latent sense of insincerity; and, when once the excitement is off, the natural perception that out of nothing nothing can come, reassumes its sway. The game cannot go on in this way for ever, though no one can foresee by what accident the lights will be blown out, the tables thrown over, and the stakes roughly dealt with at last.

A great difference, as might be expected, arises from the incredible widening of what might be called the constituencies of opinion. Political articles of the “inspired” order do not count as they did, or were supposed to do, in the days of “Coningsby” even, much less as they did a decade or two sooner. The effective currents of thought are far too numerous and far too massive to be guided—nay, too numerous and too massive for even the most conceited of propagandists or prophets to fancy he could calculate them. What sort of figure as a publicist or “inspired” political writer would a man like Croker cut at this end of the century? It must have been a dolorous day for such as he when they first felt sure the tides were coming up which were to sweep them and their works into oblivion, or at least into limbo, and make successors to their function impossible in future. We do not affirm that the present phase of change is for the best; no theory of progress will justify statements of that kind. In fact, things are quite bad enough; but some security against certain evils there must be, in the fact that these are days in which it is difficult to hide a wrong, or an error, which has an immediate sinister bearing upon ends cherished by any school of opinion. Who on earth would now think of calling the Times the Thunderer? Just when middle-aged men of to-day were babies it was thought finely argumentative, if not conclusive, to call the London University “Stinkomalee”—in the interest of Church and King; but the “hard hitting” of our own time is done in other fashion. Even if the Marquis of Salisbury were to edit a paper he would not be able to make much out of Titus Oates. But the allusion to that episode in another sphere of action may remind us of the late Lord Derby, who might almost be called the last of the old school of politicians. The mere mention of his name seems to flash light upon the gulf we have traversed since the days when the world was divided between a Whig organ and a Tory organ.

Simultaneously with the incalculable increase of devotion to science, we have had an increase of devotion to ends held to be practical, and this has largely governed our literature. The subject now barely hinted at is well worth extended treatment. It is, however, no more than the truth that there has been recently a great diminution of speculative enthusiasm of all kinds, with a largely increased tendency to make things pleasant for all parties. Convenience, in fact, becomes more and more the governing factor of life; this tells upon our better literature; and until the wind sets again from the old quarters—as it certainly will some day—we shall feel the want of certain elements of freshness, individuality, and moral impulse which touch us more closely than we at first recognize in reading the old Edinburgh Reviewers.

Matthew Browne.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] One, at least, of the contributors whom Buloz tortured (Georges Sand wrote that she wished him “au diable” ten times a day, only he held her purse-strings) used to date his letters in this style:—“A vingt-cinq lieues de cet imbécile Buloz.”

THE SUPREME GOD IN THE INDO-EUROPEAN MYTHOLOGY.

Comparative Mythology.[38]

Towards the end of the last century the men of letters of Europe were astonished to hear that in Asia, on the banks of the Ganges, a more ancient and richer language had been found than that of Homer. It offered in its words and forms striking analogies with the languages of Rome and Athens. Interest once roused, systematic comparisons were made, and comparative grammar was founded. The sphere of comparisons widened and the group of Aryan languages was established.

It was thus ascertained that the languages of the Romans, of the Greeks, of the Gauls, of the Germans, of the Lithuanians, and of the Slavs in Europe, of the Hindoos and Persians in Asia, are made out of the same materials and cast in the same mould; that they are only varieties of one primitive type. The precise laws which regulated the formation of each of these varieties were discovered, so that it is both possible to proceed from one of these languages to the other, and to trace all of them to the original type whence they come, to the lost type which they reproduce. This lost type, the source of all the idioms of nearly the whole of Europe and of a third of Asia, science has reconstructed: with an almost absolute certainty, it has described the grammar, drawn up the lexicon of that language, of which no direct echo remains, not the fragment of an inscription on a broken stone, of that language of which the life and the death are pre-historic, and which was spoken at a period when there were as yet neither Romans, nor Hindoos, nor Greeks, nor Persians, nor Germans, nor Celts, and when the ancestors of all those nations were still wandering as one tribe, one knows not where, one knows not when.

Closely following comparative grammar, almost at the same time rose up comparative mythology, and with the ancient words awoke the gods that they had sung, the beliefs that they had fostered. It was recognized that if the Indo-Europeans spoke essentially the same language, they also worshipped essentially the same gods and believed in the same things. As comparative grammar, on hearing the sister-tongues, caught up the echo of the mother, whose voice they repeat, so comparative mythology, in its turn, on looking at the sister religions, has tried to see through them the original image which they reflect. As the one restored the words and forms of the language which lived on the lips of the Aryans at the moment of the breaking up of the Aryan unity, the other endeavoured to restore the gods and beliefs which lived in their souls at the moment when, with the unity of the race, the identity of language and belief passed away. This restoration of the pre-historic gods and of the pre-historic beliefs is the final object of comparative mythology, just as the reconstruction of words and forms is the final object of comparative grammar. The object was analogous and so was the method. It is the comparative method, which by comparing kindred divinities and kindred beliefs, finds the original divinity and the original belief which gave birth to them, and which are reproduced in them. To sketch the picture of the original mythology, it is sufficient to separate from the various derivative mythologies the essential characteristics common to them. Every characteristic common to the secondary religions will be legitimately referred to the primitive one, whenever it is essential—that is to say neither borrowed from one of the kindred religions nor due to an identical, but quite independent development. If, for instance, the various Indo-European mythologies agree in naming the gods Daiva, “the shining ones,” it follows that in the primitive mythology, in the religion of the period of unity, they were known already as beings of light and called thus. It is a great deal easier to admit that the seven derived religions have faithfully repeated what has been handed down to them from their common source, than to imagine that once separated they have created the same conception, each one on its side, and have clothed it with the same expression: the former hypothesis is a simple and natural induction: the second is in reality made up of seven hypotheses, and implies seven chances agreeing together, seven miracles.

Our object in the following pages is to give a sketch of one of the chapters of the Aryan mythology. We try to show that the religion of the Indo-European unity recognized a Supreme God, and we try to find the most ancient form and the earliest origin of that conception among the Aryans, and to follow out the transformations it has undergone in the course of ages.

The Supreme God: Zeus, Jupiter, Varuna, Ahura Mazda.

The Aryan Gods are not organized as a Republic: they have a king. There is over the gods a Supreme God.

Four of the Aryan mythologies have preserved a clear and precise notion of this conception: they are those of Greece, of Italy, of ancient India, and of ancient Persia. This Supreme God is called Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Italy, Varuna in ancient India, Ahura Mazda in ancient Persia. Let us then listen to Zeus, to Jupiter, to Varuna, and to Ahura Mazda each in his turn.

Zeus and Jupiter.[39]—About three centuries before our era a Greek poet thus addressed Zeus:—

“Oh! Thou most glorious of immortals, whose names are many, for ever Almighty, Zeus, Thou who rulest nature, directing all things according to a law, hail! To Thee all this universe moving round the earth yields obedience, following whither thou leadest, and submits itself to Thy rule.... So great in Thy nature, King Supreme above all things, no work is achieved without Thee, neither on the earth, nor in the celestial regions of ether, nor on the sea, but those which the wicked accomplish in their folly.”

This is the Zeus of the philosophers, of the Stoics, of Cleanthes: but he was already the Zeus of the ancient poets. Powerful, omniscient, and just is the god of Æschylus, as that of Cleanthes: he is the king of kings, the blessed of the blessed, the sovereign power among all powers, the only one who is free among the gods, who is the master of the mightiest, who is subservient to no one’s rule; above whom no one sits, no one to whom from below he looks with awe; every word of his is absolute; he is the God of deep thoughts, whose heart has dark and hidden ways, impenetrable to the eye, and no scheme formed within his mind has ever miscarried. Finally, he is the Father of Justice, Dike, “the terrible virgin who breathes out on crime anger and death,” it is he who from hell raises vengeance with its slow chastisement against the bold wayward mortal. Terpander proclaims in Zeus the essence of all things, the god who rules over everything. Archilochus sings Zeus father, as the God who rules the heavens, who watches the guilty and unjust actions of men, who administers chastisements to monsters, the God who created heaven and earth. The old man of Ascra knows that Zeus is the father of gods and of men, that his eye sees and comprehends all things and reaches all that he wishes. In short, as far back as the Greek Pantheon appears in the light of history, even from Homer, Zeus towers above the nation of gods which surrounds him. He himself proclaims, and the other gods proclaim after him, that, unrivalled in power and strength, he is the greatest of all; the gods, at his behest, silently bow down before him; he would hurl into the gloomy depths of Tartarus whomsoever should dare to disobey him: he would hurl him down into the uttermost depths of the subterranean abyss: alone against them all, he would master them. Should they let fall from the sky a golden chain on which all the gods and goddesses might be suspended, they still would be powerless, however hard they might strain to drag him from the heavens to the earth; and if it pleased him, he could draw them up even with the earth, even with the sea, and he would then fix the chain on the ridge of Olympus, and suspend on it the whole universe; so much is he above mankind, above the gods. Not only is he the most powerful, but also he is the wisest—the μητιέτης; he is all wisdom and he is likewise all justice. It is from him that the judges of the sons of the Achæans have received their laws: very good, very great, he holds learned conversations with Themis (the law) who sits at his side; prayers are his daughters, whom he avenges for all the insults of the wicked.

Thus, power, wisdom, justice, belonged from all time to Zeus, to the Zeus of Homer as well as to the Zeus of Cleanthes; to the Zeus of the poets as to him of the philosophers, in the remotest period of paganism as at the approach of the religion of Christ. A providential god rules the Pantheon of the Hellenes.

What Zeus is in Greece, Jupiter is in Italy: the God who is above all the gods. The identity of the two deities is so striking that the ancients themselves, forestalling comparative mythology, recognized it from the very first. He is the God, great and good amongst them all: Jupiter, optimus, maximus.

Varuna.—The most ancient of the religions of India, which the Vedas have made known to us, has also a Zeus, whose name is Varuna.[40]

“Truly admirable for grandeur are the works of Him who has separated the two worlds and fixed their vast extent: of Him who has set in motion the high and sublime firmament, who has spread out the heavens above and the earth beneath.

“These heavens and this earth which reach so far, flowing with milk, so beautiful in form, it is by the law of Varuna that they remain fixed, facing each other, immortal beings with fertile seed.

“This Asura,[41] who is acquainted with all things, has propped up these heavens, he has fixed the boundaries of the earth. He is enthroned above all the worlds, universal king; all the laws of the world are the laws of Varuna.

“In the bottomless abyss the king Varuna has lifted up the summit of the celestial tree.[42] It is the king Varuna who has traced out to the sun the broad path he is to follow: to footless creatures he has given feet so that they may run.

“Those stars, which illumine the night, where were they during the day? Infallible are the laws of Varuna: the moon kindles itself and walks through the night.

“Varuna has traced out paths for the sun: he has thrown forwards the fluctuating torrent of rivers. He has dug out the wide and rapid beds where the waves of the days, let loose, unroll themselves in their order.

“He has put strength into the horse, milk into the cow, intellect into the heart, Agni[43] into the waters, the sun in the sky, soma[44] into the stone.

“The wind is thy breath, O Varuna! which roars in the atmosphere, like the ox in the meadow. Between this earth and the sublime heaven above, all things, O Varuna, are of thy creation.”

There is an order in nature, there is a law, a habit, a rule, a Rita. This law, this Rita, it is Varuna who has established it. He is the god of the Rita, the god of Order, the guardian of the Rita; he is the god of efficient and stable laws; in him rest as in a rock the fixed immovable laws.

Organizer of the world, he is its master. He is the first of the Asuras, “of the lords;” he is the Asura, “the Lord;” he is the sovereign of the whole world, the king of all beings, the universal king, the independent king; no one amongst the gods dares to infringe his laws; “it is thou, Varuna, who art the king of all.”

As he has omnipotence, he has omniscience too, he is “the Lord who knows all things,” the Asura viçva-vedas. He is the sage who has supreme wisdom, in whom all sciences have their centre; when the poet wishes to praise the learning of a god, he compares it to that of Varuna. “He knows the place of the birds which fly in the air, he knows the ships which are sailing on the ocean, he knows the twelve months and what they will bring forth, he knows every creature that is born. He knows the path of the sublime wind in the heights, he knows who sits at the sacrifice. The God of stable laws, Varuna, has taken his place in his palace to be the universal king, the god with the wondrous intellect. Hence, following in his mind all these marvels, he looks around him at what has happened and what will happen.”

As he is the universal witness, he is also the universal judge, the infallible judge whom nothing escapes: none can deceive him, and from above he sees the evil done below and strikes it: he has sevenfold bands to clasp thrice round the liar by the upper, by the middle, and by the lower part of the body. The man, smitten by misfortune, implores his pity, and feels that he has sinned, and that the hand which strikes is also the hand that punishes:

“I ask Thee, O Varuna, because I wish to know my fault:

“I come to Thee, to question Thee who knowest all things. All the sages, with one voice, said to me, Varuna is angry with thee.