Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

has been a great pressure on him to take up the cause of the Polish insurgents. There are the wildest ideas as to the political importance of Poland. The war party talks of a Poland twice as large as Prussia, and one third more populous, which is to be the ally of France, and her citadel, interposed between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, a check on them all. It affirms that it would be an easy thing to march on Poland by land, and that the sight of the first French uniform would raise up a Polish population of twenty millions.

claims; but I am not vain enough to think that what I have published as yet, entitles me to the honour of being a member of the first literary society in the world. I want somebody to say so for me. You may think that I ought to delay my candidature till the Cæsar has appeared. But I know now whom I should succeed, and whose loge I should have to pronounce. If I delay I may have to make a speech in praise of Feuillet or of Victor Hugo.'

"You," I said to Maury, "have read his Cæsar as far as it has gone. Will it give him a claim to the Academy?”

"I think," said Maury, "that it will. It is a work of great and sagacious research, and contains passages admirably written. It is a wonderful improvement on the Idées Napoléoniennes.”

"When Louis Napoleon," I said, "wrote the Idées Napoléoniennes he was already a practised writer. He had been for years writing in the Pas de Calais journal Le Progrès. It is seldom that a writer improves much after he is fifty. The only instance of an English writer that I recollect is that of Dr. Johnson, whose best work, the Lives of the Poets, was written after he was seventy."

"It associates Poland with the proudest times of the Empire. The Emeutiers recollect that the Poles have always fought by their sides - have often been their leaders, and sometimes their exciters. The army is, as it always, is, and perhaps ought to be, furious for war. The Catholic party hopes to make a religious war. It cares not what damage it may do to the country if it can do good to the Pope and harm to the Greek Church and to its schismatic head. Though the peasantry of the provinces are pacific, the low town population — and it is the population of towns, or rather of Paris, that governs France is always warlike. It does not suffer, or does not know that it suffers, "That may be the case," answered the miseries of a war, and it delights in Maury, "in England, where you enjoy a the excitement. If the insurrection be language much purer from arbitrary reput down in a couple of months, or with-straints and idioms than ours is, and in three months, it will be a fait accompli, and be forgotten. But if it lasts, if it be carried on with heroic vigor on the part of the Poles and with barbarity on the part of the Russians, a force will be put on him which I doubt his being able to withstand. Again, if the New Chamber should be intolerable - and no one knows how it may act - he may dissolve it, appeal to the people in defence of Poland, and flatter them by promises of which war must be the result. It will be a very dangerous expedient, but he is accustomed to rush into dangerous enterprises, and to succeed in them.

"There is one subject, however, on which he has not decided, and that is the time of his candidature for the Academy. Pasquier's vacancy is to be filled up on Thursday next. His mind is still set on pronouncing Pasquier's éloge. I wish,' he said to me, that I could get some one to propose me as a candidate.'

"That is not the practice,' I said. 'The candidate presents himself.' "I am shy,' he answered. If Cæsar, or even the first volume of it, had appeared, I should feel that I had some

my

where you prefer the substance to the form. La forme is our idol. It resembles cookery. The best meat ill cooked is uneatable. Inferior meat well cooked

may be delicious.

"We have been at work refining our style, introducing into it des malices et des délicatesses, until to write perfect French is the acquisition of only a long life. Our best writers, Voltaire, for instance, have gone on improving till they died. We spend much of what you would call useless labour on it, we omit ideas worth preserving because we cannot express them with perfect elegance; we are somewhat in the state of a man speaking a foreign language, qui ne dit pas ce qu'il veut, mais ce qu'il peut; bat we have created a literature which will live, for it is the style, not the matter, which preserves the book. Good matter ill expressed is taken possession of by a master of style, and reproduced in a readable form, and then the first writer is forgotten."

[This was Mr. Senior's last conversation with Madame R. They never met again. — M. C. M. S.]

From The Saturday Review.
EXTRAVAGANCE.

difference in the habitual conduct of life may depend. He was speaking on behalf of a very praiseworthy Society whose object it is to make known to the working classes the advantages offered by the Post Office Saving Banks. The fact that such institutions are at everybody's door must be pretty generally known; but the machinery has never been set in motion to an adequate degree. There is a helpless sluggishness in the human mind which prevents us from stooping to pick up a penny, though we are willing enough to hold out our hand. It has been found in certain Friendly Societies that the depositors prefer paying a shilling to a collector who calls at their houses rather than walk across a street to pay ninepence at the office. The principle is one with which we are familiar enough in everyday life. A man who has given an order to his bankers will cheerfully subscribe to a club for years; when, if he had to draw a cheque or to pay the money in hard cash, his zeal would have broken down after the first payment. The introduction of a single link completes the electric circle; and the removal of a trifling obstacle sets in action a whole set of forces which would otherwise remain in a state of complete

LORD DERBY the other day made some characteristically sensible remarks upon the importance of thrifty habits for all, but especially for the working classes. Speaking on so well-worn a topic, he could of course say nothing very new; but he suggested one or two curious problems. Englishmen, as he remarked, are distinguished amongst all the races of the earth by their extravagance, or are surpassed by their American cousins alone. He quoted some very pithy remarks of Defoe, who said nearly the same thing more than a century and a half ago. Then as now, an Englishman could scarcely scramble through life upon an income which would enable a Dutchman to grow rich; and then as now it was the pleasant habit of a large number of our fellow-countrymen to fill their pockets with money and then to drink till the golden tide had ebbed. Lord Derby explained this phenomenon, or declined to explain it, by appealing to the permanence of national character. It is always a puzzling question how far national characteristics are inherited and how far they are merely the result of the permanence of certain conditions. Of course it saves a great deal of trouble to say that Eng-inertness. The mere difference between lishmen waste their means because, as declaring a regulation to be valid unless Dr. Watts put it, "it is their nature to "; it is vetoed and declaring it to be valid and by that simple device to avoid all in- as soon as it is approved seems often to vestigation of the political and social con- be imperceptible; and yet in practice it ditions by which the habit may have been often determines whether a law shall be fostered. There is indeed no reason to dead or alive. This simple principle lies doubt that Frenchmen may inherit a ten- at the bottom of the theory of frugality, dency to hoard money as a dog inherits a and suggests how small a change may tendency to bury bones; but, on the sometimes be necessary to convert a other hand, that inheritance is itself the wasteful into a saving people. On which result of the conditions under which pre- side is the burden of proof? The claims vious generations of Frenchmen have of the public-house and the savings banks lived; and by altering their circumstances may be pretty equally balanced, and a we need not despair of producing an slight difference in accessibility will make English breed with the same peculiari- the whole difference in their popularity. ties. The labours of successive genera- The theory of advertising rests on the tions have developed special instincts in same principle. If the name of Smith various breeds of domestic animals; and occurs to the minds of a hundred people the saving instinct may be strengthened with ever so little greater facility than in the races which are at present most the name of Brown, that infinitesimal wasteful. Indeed it is probable that saving of trouble will determine them to Englishmen are not so far from posses- go to Smith's shop. To make people do sing this cardinal virtue of the political economists as we sometimes persuade ourselves. The Lowland Scot belongs to the same race with ourselves; and yet he is not generally considered to err on the side of extravagance. Some of the facts mentioned by Lord Derby prove upon what slight differences of position a great

[blocks in formation]
[ocr errors]

anything, you must save them the trouble of thinking. Mental exertion is the one thing to which nearly everybody has an ineradicable antipathy; and therefore, if you can make an ally of intellectual indolence, there is nothing which you may not hope to accomplish.

From another point of view, unluckily,.

this is the great obstacle in the way of putting it in prac'ice. A certain social preaching thrift. We are extravagant machinery is provided, costly and extravbecause we find it so easy to act like our agant it may be, but yet with the surpas neighbours. The tendency is generally sing merit that it is there. To provide denounced as a proof of the moral slav- the more reasonable machinery would ishness of mankind. People complain, require an amount of thought and trouble and with some apparent justice, of the which nearly everybody dreads far more tyranny of custom. An English curate than the expense. You would prefer has often a smaller income than an your children to go to schools where they artisan or a coal-miner; and yet custom would be taught something besides orders him to wear a black hat and a cricket, and would pay fees on a German frock-coat, to have a steady supply of scale of economy; then you must become white neckcloths, and to live up to a cer- an educational reformer yourself, and tain standard of external decency. Cus- convert parents enough to start your new tom orders the struggling middle classes system. You wish for a house built on to give elaborately bad dinners, to live in more rational principles; you must be separate houses instead of taking modest your own architect, or, in other words, apartments, to send their children to run a risk of going to a lunatic asylum. schools whose only recommendation is in You wish to entertain your friends on the high scale of charges, and generally more economical principles. The chances to spend their income according to an are that you save a very few pounds, and arbitrary code of rules prescribed by the make your home unbearable. Simple vague entity called society, instead of meals are perhaps better than bad imitasuiting their mode of life to their real tions of elaborate cookery; but unluckily wants. Moralists and novelists delight simplicity both in food and dress is very in expatiating upon the manifold evils apt to mean expense. You wish to imwhich result, and they have of course no prove your relations to your servants, and difficulty in showing that nine-tenths of you discover that they prefer the conventhe customary rules have very little to tional system, and that you have only say for themselves in the court of pure made them more idle and discontented reason. They infer that all the foolish than before. Reformers in all these matextravagance of English life is due to the ters deserve every praise, and we earinherent snobbishness of our nature. nestly desire their success; but reform in The merchant apes the noble, and the domestic economy, as in everything else, shopkeeper apes the merchant; and the requires an amount of time, thought, and first notion of the poor man who has made energy to which very few people are a few shillings is to dress himself in the equal. costume of the class just above him. We The real,objection to living simply fully agree that the standard rate of living and cheaply is that one cannot afford it. has been pitched too high in most ranks A few geniuses can strike out new plans of society; and it is probable enough of life, but most men will find that more that that desire to imitate our betters of trouble is saved by falling in with the which snobbishness is the uglier side stream than by struggling against it. has been at the bottom of it. An Eng- The more favourite method of economy, lish household, as compared with a house- especially with the female mind, is that hold of the corresponding class in most which is generally known as cheese-parContinental countries, is a model schooling. Without descending to a lower in the art of throwing away money for an inadequate return. But when reformers propose a change, they have to deal not only with the spirit of snobbishness, but with the more powerful, if less offensive, spirit of general indolence. They invite us to break our chains; to plan a rational mode of living, and to carry it out in defiance of other people's opinions. Give up, they say, all the useless apparatus with which an English family surrounds itself, and be simple and independent. The doctrine is so excellent that we only wish it were easier to act on it; but these eager persons underrate the difficulty of

platform, it is possible to effect something by minute attention to details. Money may of course be saved by substituting an omnibus for a cab, by retiring to the cheaper places in a theatre, and by all that painful system of minute attention which is irritating until it becomes a habit. Here, too, one must ask whether the game is worth the candle. To keep out of debt is not only the first of duties, but the most essential condition of happiness, and therefore no sacrifice which makes both ends meet should be grudged. But, though a person who pushes his economy to any further point

may boast of setting a good example, he will scarcely find that he has consulted his own happiness. The strength of character which enables a man to retire to a hermitage and devote himself to intellectual studies on bread and water will bring its own reward; but the man who tries to divide his allegiance, to remain in the world without paying the world's price for it, will generally have little reward beyond the trifling satisfaction of a good conscience. In one sense it may almost be said that saving comes easier to the poor man than to his richer neighbour. If an appreciable fraction of your income goes in drink, you can save what is to you a considerable sum by improving in sobriety. The advantage, at least, is tangible, if the temptation to be surmounted is great. But the rich man who has succeeded by the exertion of much thought in putting his establishment on a more reasonable scale often finds that the advantage is rather shadowy and affects posterity more than himself. The chains with which we are bound are riveted upon us with terrible strength. Our bondage cannot be broken by a single good resolution, or a mere change of personal habits. Our families, our relatives, and our acquaintances combine to force us into the regular grooves. And undoubtedly many men who could do better things are forced to miserable hackwork for daily subsistence, and tempted to grow daily more commonplace, and plod more contentedly along the mill-horse round of existence. We would gladly welcome a deliverer, though we can see few signs of his appearance. Society grows more luxurious; and even our good qualities rather tend to increased energy in growing rich than to increased judgment in using wealth.

come necessity. There have been struggles and hot speeches, and some divisions; but, on the whole, the majority is probably satisfied with the measure, which is certainly not characterized by timidity or irresolution. It was decided by a narrow majority not to insert a provision altogether banishing the Jesuits out of the country; and on one other point there was a serious contest, but a majority of twenty-one supported the Government in accepting a reasonable compromise. The Government had proposed to recognize the existence of the Generals of the monastic orders, and of the corporations belonging to them; and this recognition was such as to insure their existence in perpetuity. These orders number fiftytwo; and as in the rest of Italy monastic orders have no recognized existence, it was constituting a very striking exception that in the capital fifty-two monastic orders should be recognized in perpetuity. Not only the Opposition, but even many supporters of the Cabinet, viewed with the utmost alarm and disapproval so extreme a concession to the pretensions of the Papacy. The Bill and the Ministry were alike in jeopardy when Baron Ricasoli came to the rescue, and made a proposal which got the Government out of its difficulty. It must be confessed that the Ministry only retrieved its fortunes by deserting to a great extent the cause of those whom it had undertaken to befriend. The proposal was that the Generals should receive a pension of 16,000l. a year from the State, and that the present Generals should during their lifetime, if they remained so long in office, be allowed to occupy part of their present residences. The pension is to be handed over to the Holy See as an increase of the Pope's endowment, and, until the Vatican will accept the grant, a special board is to be constituted to apply it to the purposes to which it is destined. It is evident that the orders get something by this arrangement, but what they get is very much less than what the Ministry THE final vote on the Religious Corpo- propose to bestow on them. During the rations Bill has been taken, and a major- remainder of their lifetime the present ity of four to one has declared in favour Generals will have a home in such a porof the measure. The resignation of the tion of their residences as the State may Ministry was not without its desired be willing to relinquish to their use. But, effect; and when it was found that no as one after another of their heads expire other Ministry could carry a Bill, and the orders will cease to have a local centhat no other Bill than that of the Minis- tre, and their Generals must, sink into try could be carried, the habitual shrewd- the position of hangers-on of the Papal ness and moderation of the Italian Par- household. If the Papacy is reconciled liament easily induced it to bow to what to Italy, the Head of the Church will was, to many of its members, an unwel- have at his disposal the not very consid

From The Saturday Review.
ITALY.

erable sum of 16,000l. a year for the founded. In all other Catholic countries maintenance of what has always been declared to be an indispensable part of the machinery of his government. Until this reconciliation is effected, this pittance will be doled out to the orders at the discretion of those whom they regard as their enemies and oppressors. It is a striking sign of the feelings and attitude of the Italian Parliament towards the Papacy that this arrangement has been sanctioned by a small and reluctant majority as a compromise almost too liberal in favour of bodies which ought properly to have nothing.

where a contest is being waged between the Church and the State there is a strong clerical party in the bosom of a hostile Legislature. But in Italy, which is still undoubtedly Catholic in its religious sentiments, which is attached to the Papacy by a thousand ties of intimacy and tradition, and which would resent it as a distinct national grievance if the reigning Pope were not an Italian, there is no clerical party at all which can make its influence felt in the conduct of public affairs. There must be some reason for this, and the reason is probably to be found in the long hostility of the Papacy to the national aspirations of Italy. The Papacy has been the cordial ally of Austria and the grudging servant of France, but no living Italian can remember the day when the Pope was not willing to use the heel of the foreigner to trample on the hopes of Italy. The Papacy is everywhere influential in proportion as it has allied itself with the nation in which it is working, It is strongest in Ireland, where the cause of the people and the Church is the same; it is strong in France and Germany, where at least a numerous minority sees in the history of the Papacy something that is bound up with what is dearest to it in the history of its own country; and it is weakest in Italy, where Pope after Pope has been obliged by the force of circumstances to eat the bitter fruits of his temporal power, and to remain an alien to the fondest wishes of his kinsmen and fellow-countrymen.

It is not surprising that the Pope should have been thrown into unaccustomed agitation by the decision at which the Italian Parliament has arrived. He reasonably hoped for better things. For many months the Italian Government evidently showed that it was somewhat afraid of him. The inconveniences of an open and enduring quarrel with the Papacy press upon those who are charged with the difficult duty of administering Italian affairs, and it may be remarked that no one has been more forward in endeavouring to conciliate the Pope than Visconti Venosta, who has had greater opportunities than most Italians for considering the bearings of the religious question on the relations of Italy with foreign Powers. Until the decision was known the Pope was unusually mild, and affected to regard the leaders of Italian policy as good sheep who would never wander more than a little way from the true fold. Now that the worst is known, Even if the Pope could see this, and his spiritual wrath has been aroused, and could bring himself to acknowledge its he has broken out into his ordinary luxu- truth, it is not to be supposed that at his riance of anathemas. He has devoted to age he would change his policy and alter the ruin they have invoked those who the habits of a lifetime. But then the have once more dared to insult and rob Pope may die, and his successor may see him. But even in this dark hour of mis- things in a different light, and it is therefortune he has invented a theory which fore of extreme importance to Italy who brings consolation to his aged and this successor is to be. Europe has lateafflicted mind. He has persuaded him- ly rung with the hourly intelligence that self that there are two Italies-the Italy Pius IX. was at the point of death, and a of the faithful, the submissive, and the medical paper has published with revoltdevout, and the Italy of the headstrong, ing accuracy a list of his diseases, which the violent, and the unbelieving; and seem to the lay reader as if they must that the former Italy is numerically far kill any one in the prime of life within the larger of the two. The good are kept twenty-four hours. Still the Pope lives down by the bad, and are for the moment on, and his protracted existence has enaoverpowered by them; but they are bled him to experience a pleasure which really the stronger party, and will soon some old men would enjoy with the keenshow what their strength is, will prostrate est delight. Lord Brougham is said to themselves at the feet of their good Father, have adopted the coarse expedient of inand will work confusion on his enemies. venting a fatal carriage accident, in order The strange thing is that this theory that he might read his own obituary noshould be to all appearances entirely un-tices, and see what the world would say

« VorigeDoorgaan »