ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

Essays - ‘Mr John Morley’s Essays’

From The Contemporary Review - June 1871 - Vol. XVII, pp. 319-337.

(Reprinted as ‘A Young English Positivist’ in Master-Spirits (London: Henry S. King and Company, 1873).)

MR. JOHN MORLEY’S ESSAYS.

                                                                   Critical Miscellanies. By JOHN MORLEY. London: Chapman and Hall.

THE world is wrong on most subjects, and Mr. John Morley, with the encyclopædic pretensions of his school, is going to set it as right as may be; but it is chiefly wrong in the department of Sociology, and to that, in the meantime, Mr. Morley endeavours to confine his attention. In a series of finely-wrought and thoroughly stimulating essays—which we have heard called “hard” in style, possibly just because they exhibit no love of mere rhetorical ornament, and are, indeed, only rhetorical here and there because they become the necessary vehicle of intense and passionate denunciation—the last disciple of Auguste Comte takes occasion to classify the failures of the old theology and its advocates, to estimate anew the intellectual and moral significance of the great Revolutions, to demolish the intuitionalism of Carlyle, to apotheosize Byron from the point of view of revolt, to examine and criticize the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of Sociology, and to strengthen many delicate lines of reflection awakened by the greater or less progress of morals. In all this work, undertaken as a veritable labour of love, he exhibits diligence, patience, and temperance towards opponents, coupled with a literary finesse almost bordering on self-consciousness, and broken only here and there by outbursts of honest hatred against social ³²⁰ organization as at present understood. With theology, of course, he has no patience, though he can be generous (as in the case of De Maistre) to theologians. He is scarcely less tolerant to metaphysics, having, so far at least as we can perceive, little faculty for metaphysical distinctions, and actually seeming to imagine that such men as De Maistre represent the highest forms of metaphysical inquiry. Like every leading thinker of the school to which he belongs, like Mr. Mill, like Mr. Buckle, like Mr. Lewes, he is very painstaking, very veritable, very honest, very explicit; like every one of that school, he astonishes us by his fertility of illustration and general power of classifying arguments; and like the very best of them, starting with the great Positivist distinction between absolute and relative truth, he ends by leaving the impression on the reader’s mind that the relativity of the truth under examination has been forgotten in the mere triumph of verification. But Mr. Morley must not be blamed because, like most really powerful writers, he is a bigot—like many Positivists, over-positive—like all very earnest men, armed only against one kind of intellectual attack. With any thinker of his own school he is certainly able to hold his own; for, having the choice of weapons, he chooses the rapier and affects the straight assertive thrust at the heart of his opponent; but his rapier would be nowhere before the flail of a Scotch Calvinistic parson, and would be equally unavailing against the swift sweep of Mr. Martineau’s logic. In all this thoughtful volume, where he seldom loses an opportunity of assailing popular forms of Christian belief, he never once condescends to absolute verification of his formula that Christianity is a creed intellectually effete and fundamentally fallacious. No one of the Scottish worthies could handle “grace” and “damnation” with a stronger sense of absolute truth than Mr. Morley has of this formula; and thus it happens that the pupil of a philosophy which specially insists on clear intellectual atmosphere and perfectly verifiable results, starts his science of Sociology on the loose assumption that Positivism has successfully demolished the whole framework of theosophy and metaphysics, that “the doctrine of personal salvation is founded on fundamental selfishness,” and that the whole spiritual investigation has a merely emotional sweep which, while it agitates and stimulates the brain like all other emotional currents, neither explains phenomena nor tends to make thought veracious. Of course, Mr. Morley altogether rejects as impossible any science of the Absolute, and holds with Comte that the proper study of man is phenomena, and social phenomena properest of all. A scientific reorganization of society, in which the wisest would reign supreme, the wicked be punished and the vicious exterminated, women get their proper ³²¹ place in the human scheme—a sort of social Academy, composed of Mr. Morley and the rest of the prophets, and “constituting a real Providence in all departments”*—this, and this alone, is perhaps what is wanted. So Mr. Morley, after a comprehensive survey of what other systems have done for humanity, decides, or seems to decide, on a system which he has not definitely explained, but which we take to be the Comtist method, short of many of those later eccentricities, such as the great social and political scheme, which are very generally understood to verge upon hypothesis.
     Much injustice is done to authors by criticising their works as if they were actually something else than they really profess to be; and it would be very unfair to condemn a volume avowedly “critical” because it is in no sense of the word creative, ^† and while applying to existing systems the Positive criterion, offers nothing definite and formal in its place. The true position of Comte himself is not among the critics, but the creators; for although much criticism was incidental to his scheme, and it was necessary first to demolish old faiths before substituting a new method, by far the finest part of Comte’s work was constructive and imaginative—in the highest sense of that last much-misused word. As a historical critic and a practical politician, the place of the author of the Catechism is not high. As an imaginative philosopher, elucidating four points of principle, applying them to five sciences, and illustrating them by innumerable points of wonderful detail, he surely stood in the very front rank of philosophic creators, and has left behind him a mass of magnificent speculation only to be forgotten when the world forgets Aristotle and Bacon. In the department where his master, perhaps, conceived most startlingly—that of Social Physics—Mr. Morley applies the Positive criterion with no ordinary success. If it is distinctly

     * “In the name of the past and the future, the servants of humanity, both its philosophical and practical servants, come forward to claim as their due the general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all departments—moral, intellectual, and material; consequently they exclude once and for all from political supremacy all ‘the different’ servants of God—Catholic, Protestant, or Deist—as being at once behindhand and a cause of disturbance!”—See Comte’s “Preface to the Catechism.” We have always held that Comte wanted to be a Pope.
     ^† Some years ago the present writer, on publishing a slight volume of Essays, avowedly crude concentrated “ideas,” not worked out into any formal shape creative or critical, expressly printed in black and white at the beginning of the book these words: “The following Essays arc prose additions and notes to my publications in verse, rather than mere attempts at general criticism, for which, indeed, I have little aptitude.” This was quite enough for the journalist instinct, which, like the pig in the picture, can only be driven in one direction by being urged in the other; and by every journal that condescended to review them, these Essays were discussed as criticism, criticism pure and simple, nothing less and nothing more. Such is the cheering reward given in England to any man who condescends to be explicit.

³²² understood, then, that Mr. Morley in the present volume is avowedly and always a critic, never willingly a theorist, and if it be conceded, as all must concede, that he criticises with singular judgment and strange fairness, readers have no right to find fault because in demolishing their Temples he does not come forward actually prepared with a substitute. Probably enough he would refer all grumblers to the Positive system itself as supplying some sort of compensation for the loss of Christian and metaphysical ethics. But that is neither here nor there. If truth is what we seek, truth absolute, and verifiable any moment by human experience, we must begin by throwing all ideas of compensation aside. Doubtless it is a comfortable thing to believe in salvation and the eternal life, a blissful thing to muse on and cling to the notion of a beneficent and omnipresent Deity working everywhere for good; and it is therefore no uncommon circumstance for the theologic mind, when threatened, to retort with a savage “Very good; but if you prove your case and demolish my belief, what have you to give me in exchange?”—surely a form of retort only worthy in dealing with the heathen and the savage. Yet it is here precisely that Comtism fails as a political construction; for Comte himself, as much as the most orthodox of divines, places perpetual stress on the human necessity for a faith, though what he at last supplied in the place of God is universally felt to be the very washiest of sentiments, only worthy of the metaphysical school he hated most thoroughly. The dynamic ball rolled along all very well up to this generation. If Protestantism overthrew the Pope and the saints, it left heaven and hell open to all the world and the Georges. If Calvin triumphantly demonstrated “predestination,” he substituted “grace” as a comforting possibility. Unitarianism lets God be, beneficent, all-wise, all-giving. The higher Pantheism admits at the very least that the period of mortal dissolution is only the moment of transition—in many cases from a lower state to a higher. In exchange for any of these creeds, what has that religion to give which tells man that he must cease to believe himself the last of the angels, and be contented to recognise himself as the first of the animals? Expressly declaring, as Mr. Morley declares after Comte,* that the longing for individual salvation is basely selfish (this, by the way, is a fallacy of the most superficial kind), the new faith offers us absorption and identification^† with the “mighty and eternal Being, Humanity,” a

     * Thus Comte: “The old objective immortality, which could never clear itself of the egotistic or selfish character.” And Morley: “The fundamental egotism of the doctrine of personal salvation.”
     ^† What is Christian beatification but “absorption” and “identification” of this very sort?

³²³ secondary or subjective existence in the heart and intellect of others, unconscious of course, but for that very reason the more blissful and supreme. Without pausing to smile at the metaphysical difficulty at once obtruded by the apostle of identification, it may well be asked how a creed is to thrive which offers such a very slender inducement to the neophyte. It doubtless sounds very grand at once and for ever to dispense with these inducements and to appeal to the grandest ideal of human unselfishness, but nevertheless the bonus has been the secret of all religious successes from the beginning, and the system which leaves that out will never hold the world very long together. That, however, is not the question. The test of a creed is not “Will it prosper?” but, “Is it true?” It would be far beyond the limits of an article to apply that test here, even if we felt competent to apply it at all. The present question is a less difficult one. Does Mr. Morley, while applying the Positive criterion in certain cases to other faiths, conclusively establish his hypothesis that these faiths are effete or false? They have prospered, they have been comfortable; but—“are they true?” They are true only historically, is the reply of Mr. Morley; they are now inert and dead; and because nothing better has yet been got to take their place, the world, socially speaking, is in a very bad way. A new system must be inaugurated at once. Mr. Morley will perhaps tell us by-and-by what that system is to be. Meantime he is content to hint that the first step toward improvement will be the resolution to suppress mere vagrant emotions, and to use the intelligence with more scientific precision in the act of examining even the most sacred beliefs of every-day existence.
     Mr. Morley almost inclines us to believe that the nearest approach to his ideal type of manhood is Vauvenargues, a short essay on whom he places, as a sort of vignette, at the beginning of his volume. His brief treatment of the French moralist seems to us nothing less than masterly, both as thoughtful criticism and literary workmanship; and the impression left upon the mind is quite as vivid as that of the best biography we ever read. Not a word is wasted, but Vauvenargues’ perfect sweetness of heart and strange rarity of intelligence are presented to us in a series of commanding touches. The essay is, in fact, an apotheosis—fit pendant to Comte’s own verdict when he placed Vauvenargues in the Positivist Calendar: “for his direct effort, in spite of the desuetude into which it had fallen, to reorganize the culture of the heart according to a better knowledge of human nature, of whom this noble thinker discerned the centre to be affective.” It is an open question, indeed, whether both Comte and Mr. Morley, while discerning in Vauvenargues the eighteenth-century prophet of a certain cardinal doctrine—if not the ³²⁴ cardinal doctrine—of Positivism, are not led to overrate his literary services to the cause; for the passages Mr. Morley quotes in indirectly vindicating his subject’s right to a place in the Calendar, while certainly capable of the highly prophetic construction he seems to put upon them, again and again point far away into Theism and chime in ill with that creed which regards man as the first of animals. Vauvenargues would certainly have admitted man’s position as the highest of Animals, but he would positively have rejected man’s pretensions to be the highest of Beings, capable, without Divine aid, of regulating the tumultuous forces of the world by the co- ordination of the intellect and the heart. His virtual identification of the passions and the will, however, in answer to the theology which makes man the mere theatre of a fight between will and passion, seems to us unanswerable as a scientific proposition, altogether apart from its grandeur as a moral aphorism. This, however, does not destroy the theological statement, but merely clears away a misinterpretation. Whether we distinguish between will and passion, and view one as the mere index of the other, there can be no doubt of the power of the intelligence in regulating, determining, and guiding them—there can be no doubt that man has the power, within certain conditions, of acting as his will, or passion, impels him. True theology never meant to distinguish will and passion so absolutely as thinkers of Mr. Morley’s school seem to imply. What it did mean to convey was, that the power of certain wild original instincts in human nature is limited by the power of intellectual restraint. This restraint over, or co-ordination of, the passions, is what Mr. Morley would call the culture of the passions themselves, so that the entire intellectual proclivity is towards good, and bad passion becomes impossible. Mr. Morley would be the last man to deny the natural imperfection of men, call it by whatever name he will; or to limit the office of the intelligence in regulating such passions as that, for instance, of desire. This is precisely what theology means. If a man, by culture or will, or restraint of any kind, or educated virtuous instinct, can prevent himself from lusting after his neighbour’s wife, or coveting his neighbour’s wealth, or envying his neighbour’s success, it matters little whether the happy state of mind is effected by perfect tone of the passions themselves, their invariable harmony with the dictates of reason, or their houndlike obedience to the uplifted finger of a Will. In any case, the intelligence is supreme in the matter, and decides pro or contra, for or against any given line of conduct. The other difference is only a difference of procedure immediately preliminary to action.
     Turning from Vauvenargues, Mr. Morley attempts another apotheosis—that of Condorcet; and his treatment, on the whole, perhaps because it is more elaborate, and bears more the form of the ordinary ³²⁵ review-essay, is not so perfectly satisfactory. Yet this essay, taken with certain modifications, is a clear gain to the loftier biography, and leaves on the mind of the reader a vivid—and what is better, a vivifying—effect. It may at once be admitted that the apotheosis is successful, and would vindicate Condorcet’s place in any Calendar of Saintly Souls, benefactors to the species, if the list is not to be limited to commanding intellects. It will be doubted, however, whether Mr. Morley, in his avidity to detect another prophet of the Gospel according to Comte, does not highly exaggerate the position of Condorcet as a contributor to the literature of reason. Insane and inane raving against all religious creeds, with a grim reserve in favour of Mohammedanism, possibly on account of its scope in the sensual direction; the blind exaggeration of the importance of the scientific method, coupled with a lurking love of hypothesis quite akin to that of Comte in his later musings; a rabid hatred of all opponents; a virtual damnation of all disbelievers in Propagandism, the very kernel theory of which was the infinite perfectibility of every human being—all this illustrated in a temperament which Mr. Morley, with justice indeed, calls “non-conducting,” and lying inert in literature destitute of the pulse of life. If the man who represented these things, and who for these and other failings has been justly forgotten by history, is to be picked out for an apotheosis on no stronger showing than the resemblance of his avowed process to that of contemporary types, then surely the catalogue of Positive saints will be great indeed, and Roman Catholicism will be beaten altogether. Indeed, it may be doubted if the Church in its worst days ever exhibited so extraordinary a tendency to proselytize the living and apotheosize the dead as the present school of Positivists. Adherence to their cardinal principle of scientific procedure is quite enough to make them countenance encyclopædic pretensions in anybody; and it is with no regret that they perceive the infallible airs of men who, except from the point of view of the true faith, have no claim whatever to the title of first-class intellects. Condorcet was no more a first-class intellect than is Professor Huxley. Mr. Morley’s picture of him is grand and vivifying, and sufficiently proves him to have been a social benefactor, a servant of the race, a thinker touching truth in a false time; but then the world was and is full of benefactors, of servants, of thinkers most apprehensive in the direction of light. In our opinion, the only circumstance which could have warranted the claim put forward by Condorcet, on the score that his “central idea was to procure the emancipation of reason, free and ample room for its exercise, and improved competence among men in the use of it,” would have been the verification of Condorcet’s own rationality as a historical critic. As for his exalted ³²⁶ hopes regarding the future of humanity, which are put forward as another merit, they were the hopes of thousands—part of the great tidal wave which had arisen after long weary years nourished on Pascal’s bitter apple of human degeneracy. If Condorcet is to be calendared for merely sharing the great reaction which he by no means caused, and never guided, how many other contemporaries must be calendared also? Altogether, Mr. Morley’s apotheosis of Condorcet must be pronounced less satisfactory than that of Vauvenargues.
     Something, too, of Condorcet’s own savagery—that worst savagery of all, characteristic of “reasonable” men— seizes Mr. Morley once or twice during his second essay. Even in the very act of rebuking the Encyclopædist for his intolerance towards religious forms, Mr. Morley ceases to be cool and generous, and condescends to the “set-teeth” sort of enunciation, observing that Condorcet might have “depicted religion as a natural infirmity of the human mind in its immature stages, just as there are specific disorders incident in childhood to the human body. Even on this theory, he was bound to handle it with the same calmness which he would have expected to find in a pathological treatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness with indignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet’s pertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this would be, from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed.” Now, it is too bad to talk about the “scientific point of view” in the same breath with such writing as this. It is sheer rampant dogmatism, not to be excelled by any polemical disputant. Even on Mr. Morley’s own showing, even accepting Comte’s classification, which regarded every Fetichism as having exercised a distinctly valuable influence on mankind, the theological period was a necessary step in human progress, and we have yet to learn that a man or a society can finally attain health by undergoing a course of diseases. If religion is fairly comparable to the “sweating sickness” or to “zymotic diseases,”* how is it that it has served its turn in the historical sense? Mr. Morley might as well have compared it to the cholera or the small-pox at once; and then, if possible, explained to us from what point of view these complaints help the sufferer to an ultimate condition of robust manhood. Or does Mr. Morley mean to demolish religion even historically, and aver that, if not a disease itself, it is only possible in a diseased state of society? Even then his description is scientifically inaccurate; unless the process of evolution is simply the casting off of unhealthy matter from a body virtually whole, instead of the healthy development of simple forms of life into complex forms.

     * Zymotic diseases, it must be remembered, are due to some supposed poison introduced into the system.

³²⁷ Zymotic diseases sometimes kill, and always injure more or less; and the history of thought as a series of such diseases would naturally leave us where the ingenious American Professor Draper found us, at the stage of moral decrepitude, instead of where (we rejoice to say) Mr. Morley finds us, at some stage preliminary to health and robust manhood. Elsewhere in his book Mr. Morley has this unguarded exclamation—“As if,” he cries, “the highest moods of every age necessarily clothed themselves in religious forms!” Does the writer mean to assert, again in the face of the historical classification as laid down by Comte, that they do not? or has he merely made the mistake of writing the word “religious” in place of the word “theologic?” Really, Mr. Morley seems to have imbibed so much of Condorcet’s hatred for priests and the priesthood, that the very words “Christian,” “religious,” “theologic,” put him quite out of his boasted science. So far as it is positively excited, his destructive criticisms on religions destroy nothing, except a little of the confidence we usually feel in the writer. That confidence never flags long. We could forgive Mr. Morley for being infinitely more unjust to what he hates, when we remember his tender justice to what he honours. Nothing to our thinking is more beautiful in this volume than the recurring anxiety to vindicate the memory of Voltaire. Here is one terse passage on the tender-hearted Iconoclast; it forms
part of the paper on Condorcet:—

     “Voltaire, during his life, enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was an unsurpassed master of the art of literary expression in a country where that art is more highly prized than anywhere else; he was the most brilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supreme passion; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the learned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by his never-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which lacks vigour, and freshness, and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter, and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of all institutions—the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honour and popularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression and injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, and absolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of oppression or injustice whose case was once brought under his eye” (p. 44).

     We owe Mr. Morley thanks for his vindication of the eighteenth ³²⁸ century as a great Spiritual Revolution,—in excess of course, like all such revolutions, but incalculably beneficial to the cause of humanity. The movement which began with the Encyclopædia and culminated in Robespierre, has been only half described by Carlyle’s phrase, that it was an universal destructive movement against Shams;—it was an eminently constructive movement as well, and though it failed historically, it did not fail ultimately, for the wave of thought and action to which it gave birth has not yet subsided, and is not likely to subside till the world gets some sort of a glimpse of a true social polity. A leading cause of the public misconception as regards the eighteenth century has been Mr. Carlyle. It is chiefly for this reason, we fancy, that Mr. Morley devotes to Carlyle one of the longest, and in some respects the very best, paper in the series. We think, indeed, that his anxiety to find here another prophet, however cloaked and veiled, of the new gospel, leads him to be far too lenient to Carlyle’s shortcomings—we had almost said his crimes. From the first hour of his career to the last, Carlyle has been perniciously preaching the Scotch identity—a type of moral force familiar to every Scotchman, a type which is separatist without being spiritual, and spacious without being benevolent—to a generation sadly in need of quite another sort of preacher. With a phrase perpetually in his mouth, which might just as well have been the Verbosities as the Eternities or the Verities, with a mind so self-conscious as to grant apotheosis to other minds only on the score of their affinity with itself, and with a heart so obtuse as never, in the long course of sixty years, to have felt one single pang for the distresses of man as a family and social being, with every vice of the typical Scotch character exaggerated into monstrosity by diligent culture and literary success, Mr. Carlyle can claim regard from this generation only on one score, that of his services as a duct to convey into our national life the best fruits of Teutonic genius and wisdom. His criticisms are as vicious and false as they are powerful. Had he been writing for a cultured people, who knew anything at all of the subjects under discussion, they would never have been listened to for a moment. He has, for example, mercilessly brutalized Burns in a pitiable attempt to apotheosize him from the separatist point of view; and he has popularized pictures of Richter and Novalis which fail to represent the subtle psychological truths these men lived to illustrate. For Voltaire as the master of persiflage he has perfect perception and savage condemnation, but of Voltaire as the apostle of humanity he has no knowledge whatever, simply because he has no heart whatever for humanity itself. He has written his own calendar of heroes, and has set therein the names of the monsters of the earth, from Fritz downwards,—always, be it remembered, aggrandizing these men on ³²⁹ the monstrous side, and generally wronging them as successfully by this process as if his method were wilfully destructive. Blind to the past, deaf to the present, dead to the future, he has cried aloud to a perverse generation till his very name has become the synonym for moral heartlessness and political obtusity. He has glorified the gallows and he has garlanded the rack. Heedless of the poor, unconscious of the suffering, diabolic to the erring, he has taught to functionaries the righteousness of a legal thirst for revenge, and has suggested to the fashioners of a new criminal code the eligibility of the old German system of destroying criminals by torture. He has never been on the side of the truth. He was for the lie in Jamaica, the lie in the South, the lie in Alsace and Lorraine. He could neither as a moralist see the sin of slavery, nor predict as a prophet the triumph of the abolitionists. He has been all heat and no light, a portentous and amazing futility. If he has done any good to any soul on the earth it has been by hardening that soul, and it is doubtful if Englishmen wanted any more hardening—by separating that soul’s destiny from that of the race, as if the English character were not almost fatally separated already. He is not only, as Mr. Morley expresses it, “ostentatiously illogical and defiantly inconsistent;”—he pushes bad logic to the verge of conscious untruth, and in his inconsistency is wilfully criminal. He begins “with introspections and Eternities, and ends with blood and iron.” He has impulses of generosity, but no abiding tenderness. He has a certain reverence of individual worth, especially if it be strong and assertive, but he has no pity for aggregate suffering, as if pain became any less when multiplied by twenty thousand. He is, in a word, the living illustration of the doom pronounced on him who, holding to God the mirror of a flawed nature, blasphemously bids all men be guided by the reflection dimly shadowed therein. Why should this man, like a sort of counsel for the prosecution, represent Providence? God versus Man, Mr. Carlyle prosecuting, and, alas! not one living soul competent or willing to say a word for the defence! It is “you ought to do this,” and “you must, by the Verities!” So the savage pessimist inveighs; but the world gets weary in time of the eternal “ought,” and turns round on the teacher with a quiet “very good; but why?”* If Positivism only teaches the world to distrust men

     * A Scotchman of much the same type of mind, though of course infinitely weaker in degree, once reminded me, in answer to such charges, that they were made by people who were blind to the prophet’s “exquisite sense of humour.” Of course humour is at the heart of it,—but humour is character, and nothing so indicates a man’s quality as what he considers laughable. Carlylean humour, often exquisite in quality, may be found in a book called “Life Studies,” by J. K. Hunter, just published at Glasgow. Note especially the chapter called “Combe on the Constitution of Woman.” Mr. Hunter is a parochial Carlyle, with some of the genius and none of the culture.

³³⁰ who come forward to try the great cause of humanity by the wretched test of the individual consciousness, and who, because they can control their own heart-beats, fancy they have discovered the secret of the universe, it will have done enough to secure from posterity fervent and lasting gratitude.
     But Positivism—or at least its last exponent—has something to learn in its own department of Sociology. On one vital question— to the present writer the most vital of all questions—Mr. Morley writes as follows:—

     “There are two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some degree by the primitive and pathological principle of repression and main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal and vicious persons whose unsocial propensities are constantly straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in the midst of the most highly civilized communities, with all the predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occupied the same moral and social level as the best of their generation. We are amply justified in employing towards them, wherever their offences endanger order, the same methods of coercion which originally made society possible. No tenable theory about free will or necessity, no theory of praise and blame that will bear positive tests, lay us under any obligation to spare either the comfort or the life of a man who indulges in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr. Carlyle has done much to wear this just and austere view into the minds of his generation, and in so far he has performed an excellent service” (p. 225).

     Here Mr. Morley is at one with the “hard school” of political economists; but what is defensible from their point of view becomes unpardonable from his. Is the “hard and austere” view of crime, then, the scientific view? Is it scientific to deal with the criminal as if they stood (by nature) on a lower moral level than the rest of mankind? and is it effective? To all these questions we venture to interpose an emphatic negative. If there is any truth which this generation does not recognise, it is the divine law of human relationship: the fact—which we should fancy it the glory of Positivism to disseminate—that crime and sin are abnormal and accidental conditions, to an enormous extent remediable, and never—even in the most awful instances—quite eclipsing the divine possibilities of the spiritual nature. To treat criminals as mere nomads, to pursue them as Tristran l’Hermite pursued the “Egyptians,” to offer them no alternative but instant conformity or the gibbet, is merely to give us another version of Mr. Carlyle’s eternal “Ought.” There are points of view, indeed—strictly scientific points of view—from which the existence of these very classes in the heart of the community may be regarded as a distinct social blessing; and it is ³³¹ doubtful if, with all their errors and with all their sins, they contaminate society to any fatal degree. But whatever may be the nature of their influence, it is certain that no good has ever come from dealing with them on the principle of extermination. More has been wrought among them by reverence than by hate or oppression—by approaching them, we mean, in a reverent spirit, conscious of the sacredness of life, however deeply in revolt against organization. It is one of the dangers of Positivism that it may lead its disciples to set too light a value on mere life, as distinguished from life intellectual; and we therefore find many leading Positivists writing as if the life intellectual, being the life spiritual, was necessarily the only life sacred. We do not, however, accuse Mr. Morley of being unconditionally in favour of the gallows. Further on, indeed, he protests against the kind of thinking which “stops short” at the gibbet and the soldier as against a very bad form of hopelessness. He would probably agree with us that Punishment and War are entirely defensible up to the point where they are confounded with righteous vengeance and human retribution. If they are necessary, no more is to be said; the defence is perfect when their necessity is shown. But vengeance and retribution are terms unworthy of science, and so is the point of view which views the criminal classes as mere nomads*—a superficial classification not more characteristic of the Positivist love for symmetrical arrangement than the haunting determination to regard every fact and event as links in a long chain of evolution, or the constant willingness to admit hypotheses in any number so long as they develop naturally from the great cardinal hypothesis, never yet  verified, that the basis of life is physiological.
     Elsewhere, with delicious ingenuity, Mr. Morley takes many articles of Mr. Carlyle’s creed, inverts them, and shows their value as dim foreshadowings of the religion of common sense. He certainly does Carlylism fair justice; and we wish him joy of the contributions he finds in it to the new gospel—such as that portion of it which insists on the primitive treatment of criminals and points logically (let us add) to a similar treatment towards all who are guilty of moral or intellectual revolt of any sort.
     These Essays are so pregnant with references to the great subjects which now interest men of culture, that we might prolong again and again the reflections awakened by them at every page. Our purpose, however, is rather to call attention to their intellectual

     * In point of fact, the most hopeless forms of crime in this country occur strictly within the body of society as a consequence of its present organization. Conformity to the social law, not revolt outside its circle, created the crimes of Tawell, and numberless others. Was Madeline Smith a nomad?

³³² interest than to discuss them in detail; for, indeed, each question involved could only be treated adequately at great length. The essays on “Joseph de Maistre” and on “Byron” are quite as good in their way as the rest. The great Ultramontanist is chiefly interesting to Mr. Morley—and to us—because his scheme for the reorganization of European society was the skeleton of Comte’s own social scheme. After a brilliant survey of De Maistre’s life and works, Mr. Morley utters his own “epode” on Catholicism:—

     “De Maistre has been surpassed by no thinker that we know of as a defender of the old order. If anybody could rationalize the idea of supernatural intervention in human affairs, the idea of a Papal supremacy, the idea of a spiritual unity, De Maistre’s acuteness and intellectual vigour, and, above all, his keen sense of the urgent social need of such a thing being done, would assuredly have enabled him to do it. In 1817, when he wrote the work in which this task is attempted, the hopelessness of such an achievement was less obvious than it is now. The Bourbons had been restored. The Revolution lay in a deep slumber that many persons excusably took for the quiescence of extinction. Legitimacy and the spiritual system that was its ally in the face of the Revolution, though mostly its rival or foe when they were left alone together, seemed to be restored to the fulness of their power. Fifty years have elapsed since then, and each year has seen a progressive decay in the principles which then were triumphant. It was not, therefore, without reason that De Maistre warned people against believing ‘que la colonne est replacée, parcequ’elle est relevée.’ The solution which he so elaborately recommended to Europe has shown itself desperate and impossible. Catholicism may long remain a vital creed to millions of men, a deep source of spiritual consolation and refreshment, and a bright lamp in perplexities of conduct and morals; but resting on dogmas which cannot by any amount of compromise be incorporated with the daily increasing mass of knowledge, assuming, as the condition of its existence, forms of the theological hypothesis which all the preponderating influences of contemporary thought concur directly or indirectly in discrediting, upheld by an organization which its history for the last five centuries has exposed to the distrust and hatred of men as the sworn enemy of mental freedom and growth, the pretensions of Catholicism to renovate society are among the most pitiable and impotent that ever devout, high-minded, and benevolent persons deluded themselves into maintaining or accepting. Over the modern invader it is as powerless as paganism was over the invaders of old. The barbarians of industrialism, grasping chiefs and mutinous men, give no ear to priest or pontiff, who speak only dead words, who confront modern issues with blind eyes, and who stretch out but a palsied hand to help. ‘Christianity,’ according to a well-known saying, has been tried and failed; the religion of Christ remains to be tried. One would prefer to qualify the first clause, by admitting how much Christianity has done for Europe even with its old organization, and to restrict the charge of failure within the limits of the modern time. To-day its failure is too patent. Whether, in changed forms and with new supplements, the teaching of its founder is destined to be the chief inspirer of that social and human sentiment which seems to be the only spiritual bond capable of uniting men together again in a common and effective faith, is a question which it is unnecessary to discuss here. ‘They talk about the first centuries of Christianity,’ said De Maistre; ‘I ³³³ would not be sure that they are over yet.’ Perhaps not; only if the first centuries are not yet over, it is certain that the Christianity of the future will have to be so different from the Christianity of the past, as almost to demand or deserve another name” (pp. 189—191).

     This is, however, strongly felt, and put as strongly. Mr. Morley is hardly prepared for a scientific judgment on Protestantism. He approaches it too much in the spirit of the doctor of lunacy, who believes all the world to be mad but himself. One turns with relief to the article on Byron, perhaps the best that was ever written on the subject, but unfortunately flawed, because the writer, who has just recommended a severe handling of the criminal classes, seems unconscious that he is dealing with a great criminal’s life and character. Scientific criticism, so sharp to the anti-social Outcasts, might be less merciful to the Outcast whose hand was lifted against every man’s life and reputation, and who was consciously unjust, tyrannous, selfish, false, and anti-social. We do not agree with Mr. Morley that the public has nothing to do with Byron’s private life. The man invited confidence for the sake of blasting the fair fame of others; and the lie of his teaching is only to be counteracted by the living lie of his identity. If revolters and criminals are to be gibbeted, then we claim in the name of Justice the highest gibbet for Byron. The following passage is too important not to be quoted entire:—

     “More attention is now paid to the mysteries of Byron’s life than to the merits of his work, and criticism and morality are equally injured by the confusion between the worth of the verse he wrote, and the virtue or wickedness of the life he lived. The admirers of his poetry appear sensible of some obligation to be the champions of his conduct, while those who have diligently gathered together the details of an accurate knowledge of the unseemliness of his conduct, cannot bear to think that from this bramble men have been able to gather figs. The result of the confusion has been that grave men and women have applied themselves to investigate and judge Byron’s private life, as if the exact manner of it, the more or less of his outrages upon decorum, the degree of the deadness of his sense of moral responsibility, were matter of minute and profound interest to all ages. As if all this had anything to do with criticism proper. It is right that we should know the life and manners of one whom we choose for a friend, or of one who asks us to entrust him with the control of public interests. In either of these two cases we need a guarantee for present and future. Art knows nothing of guarantees. The work is before us, its own warranty. What is it to us whether Turner had coarse orgies with the trulls of Wapping? We can judge his art without knowing or thinking of the artist. And in the same way, what are the stories of Byron’s libertinism to us? They may have biographical interest, but of critical interest hardly the least. If the name of the author of ‘Manfred,’ ‘Cain,’ ‘Childe Harold,’ were already lost, as it may be in remote times, the work abides, and its mark on European opinion” (p. 254).

     Coming from a man of Mr. Morley’s calibre, these words are at the very least remarkable. They are worthy of the critic of the ³³⁴ Second Empire, M. Taine, in his most anti-didactic mood. Byron is, according to Mr. Morley, the poet of the Revolution, the English expression of vast social revolt all over Europe. In cases of such revolt, involving ethical distinctions, is it not of the very highest consequence, from a scientific point of view, to examine the personal reasons of the revolter? An inquiry into Byron’s life verifies the hypothesis awakened at every page of his works, that this man was in arms, not against society, but against his own vile passions; that he was a worldly man full of the affectation of unworldliness, and a selfish man only capable of the lowest sort of sacrifice—that for an egoistic idea; and that at least half of what he wrote was written with supreme and triumphant insincerity. Mr. Morley is very wroth at the piggish virtues fostered by the Georges, and with reason; but he sometimes forgets that Byron did not rebel so much against these as against the domestic instinct itself. His fight being throughout with his own conscience, it is of supreme importance to learn what he had done and what he had been. Pure practical art, like that of Turner, offers no analogy in this case; it would not even do so in the case of Shelley; for even Shelley has hopelessly interwoven his literature with his own life and the life of men. The confusion in Mr. Morley’s mind is M. Taine’s confusion, and gives birth to half the meretricious and silly literature of the day. Byron was a poet, an intellectual and emotional force, finding expression in written words. He was not distinctively a singer, nor a musician, nor a painter, nor a philosopher, nor a politician; but he was something of all these, as every great poet must be. Music and art do not arbitrarily imply ethics, but ethics is included in literature, and is within the distinct scope of the poetic intellect.* Byron was not merely an artist—in point of fact, he was very little an artist; and he never did write a line, or paint a picture, which tells its own tale apart from himself. He rose in revolt to try the question of himself against society, and his life is therefore the property of society’s cross-examiners. The question remaining is—can they show that he had no fair cause for revolt at all?
     With almost every word of what Mr. Morley says about Byron’s poetry we cordially agree. The glorious animal swing of much of the verse, the faultless self-characterization, the shaping and conceiving power, the wit and humour abundant on every page, are amply and cordially appreciated. Byron’s wealth of mind was miraculous. As a creative poet, he was immeasurably the master and superior of Shelley, however wondrous we may consider Shelley’s spiritual quality. It seems to us, moreover, that Shelley’s spirituality is

     * Observe, says the æsthetic critic, that the end of all art is to give pleasure. Yes; and so is the ultimate end of all virtue.

³³⁵ deeply mixed with intellectual impurities, fatally tinged with the morbid hues of a hysteric and somewhat peevish mind. It is the fashion now to call him “divine,” nor do we for a moment dispute the apotheosis; but we doubt exceedingly if the “Cenci” could bear the truly critical test and retain its limpid and divine transparency, or if the choice of so essentially shallow and false a myth as that of Prometheus, coupled with numberless similar predilections, was not the sign of a second-class intellect. One way of noting the radical difference between Byron and Shelley is very simple. Let the reader carefully peruse, first, “Prometheus,” and then look at the reflection in his own mind twenty-four hours afterwards. Let him next read, say even “Manfred”—bad though that is as a piece of writing—and go through the same process. He will find that he experienced, during the actual perusal of the first poem, a sense of exquisite fascination at every line; that, twenty-four hours afterwards, the impression was dim and doubtful; and that, sooner or later, it is expedient to go again through the process of perusal. In the other instance the result will be inverse. The reader’s feeling during perusal will be one almost of impatience; but twenty-four hours afterwards the impression will be very vivid, not as to particular passages, but as to the drama as a whole. In point of fact, there is more real creative force and shaping power, infinitely less of the aroma and essence of beauty, in “Manfred” even, than in the “Prometheus.” Pursuing this analogy further, let the reader who has carefully studied and enjoyed both Byron and Shelley look at the reflections in his own mind at the present moment. A wild and beautiful rainbow-coloured mist, peopled by indefinite shapes innumerable, and by two or three shapes definite only as they are morbid and terrible: such, perhaps, is the reflection of the poetry of Shelley. A clear mountain atmosphere with a breezy sense of the sea, a succession of romantic faces singularly human and vivid in spite of their strange resemblance to each other, a ripple of healthy female laughter, a life, a light, an animal sense of exhilaration —surely all these things, and many other things as human, take possession of us at once when we think of the poetry of Byron. Shelley possessed supremely and separately a small portion of those qualities which Byron possessed collectively. Shelley had some gifts in excess, and he lacked all the others. It may be suggested, in answer to this, that one supreme gift is better than all the gifts in dilution. Undoubtedly. But Byron, at his very best, exhibits all the gifts supremely, and even in the direction of spirituality penetrates very high indeed in his noblest flights. He wrote too often for scribbling’s sake; but when he wrote from true impulse he often produced the highest sort of poetry—perfect vision in perfect language. Let it be remembered also, to his glory, that ³³⁶ he shared with the greatest creators of the world— with Shakspere, with Boccaccio, with Cervantes, with Chaucer, with Goethe, with Walter Scott—something of that rare faculty of humour which is as necessary a qualification for testing most forms of life as certain acids for testing metals, and without which a first-class intellect generally yields over-much to the other rare and besetting faculty of introspection to produce literature of the first rank. All human truth is misapprehended till it is conceived as relative, and there is nothing like humour for betraying, as by magic, Truth’s relativity.
     We should have liked to say something of the last two papers in Mr. Morley’s volume, that “On some Great Conceptions of Social Growth,” and that “On the Development of Morals;” but the subjects are too tempting and spacious; it is enough to say that their treatment, although very slight, is as satisfactory as possible from Mr. Morley’s point of view. That point of view, we may remark in concluding, fluctuates a little in these pages; and we find the writer contradicting himself on the nature of justice, on the right of punishment, and on the greater or less perfectibility of the race. Altogether, however, these Essays are as much distinguished by logical consistency as by wealth of study and literary skill. Mr. Morley is one more illustration of the old saying, that the soldiers of Truth fight under many different banners. His conviction that speculation in the theological direction is a sheer waste of time and a sign of weak intellect would be more startling if he himself, with a secret consciousness of being far adrift, showed less anxiety to cast anchor somewhere. This anchoring, the Positivists call getting hold of a “method.” That there are many men in the world who do not think it proves better seamanship to get into harbour and lie there through all weathers than to venture out boldly and to explore the great waters, is a fact which Mr. Morley does not seem to understand at its value. To him, the wild speculative instinct—the fierce human thirst to face the mysterious darkness, and battle through all the wild winds of the unknown deep—is merely lunatic and miserable; more than that, it is despicable and selfish. Examined at its true worth, this feeling of his is merely a consequence of intellectual temperament, as it is in the case of Mr. Lewes. All these attempts to criticize Systems from the outside are abortive. The Positivists talk nonsense about Metaphysics; the metaphysicians talk nonsense about Positivism—almost invariably, for example, confusing it with Comtism. But forgetting all such questions for the moment, let us congratulate ourselves that a man like Mr. Morley is seriously working at the great problem of Sociology in a constructive as well as a critical spirit. He fights for the Truth, and his motto is of no ³³⁷ more consequence than mottos generally. Hating shams, loving truth and beauty, reverencing almost to idolatry the great and deathless figures of literature and history, compassionating the sorrows of mankind and hating the laws which complicate them, looking forward to a mundane future closely approaching perfection, and feeling that it is only to be reached by virtuous living and high thinking, he is to be welcomed as another adherent to the blessed cause of Humanity—which was that of Plato as well as John the Baptist, and was paramount in the troubled heart of Mahomet as well as in the divine soul of Christ. He serves God best who loves Truth most; and we, at least, do not conceive how Truth, which is the very essence and quality of many things and many men, can be arbitrarily confined to any one set of those mental phenomena which we call Religion.

                                                                                                                                 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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