66

"The

design of this Treatise," says Butler, speaking at the conclusion of his "Analogy," "is not to vindicate the character of God, but to show the obligations of men; it is not to justify his providence, but to show what belongs to us to do."

sity, no doubt, of defending the credibility | right of resisting the claims of conscience of the testimony by which the truth of by the voice of so-called reason. Revelation is established. On the other hand, they know that it is not incumbent on them to persuade the Christian world of the truth of Revelation, but rather on their adversaries to prove its falsehood, and that this is a physical impossibility. The moral obligations imposed by Chris- If we turn from religion to the sphere tianity on the conscience can never, there- of politics, probably every one will readily fore, be disregarded. Religion," says allow Burke to be the best representative Butler, "is a practical thing, and consists that could be selected of the broad Conin such a determinate course of life, as servatism of the eighteenth century. He being what, there is reason to think, is is the most eminent of the Whigs or modcommanded by the Author of Nature." erate Liberals before the French Revolu Relying, then, on the strength of their tion. Since that epoch there has been a moral and spiritual position, Christian constant tendency in the leaders of the writers have often made use of intellectual Whig party to gravitate towards Revoluweapons calculated to give their adversa- tionary Radicalism. They have shown ries wrong ideas as to their belief. Jeremy the greatest ingenuity in appropriating to Taylor, in his "Liberty of Prophesying," employs a purely sceptical line of argument in order to establish the right of freely interpreting Scripture. Locke, in "Reasonableness of Christianity," followed a course of reasoning which Toland afterwards developed into an argument for Deism. As for Butler, no one who reads the following passage can mistake, except designedly, the purpose of the "Analogy:

his

I desire it may be considered with respect to the whole of the foregoing objections, that in this Treatise I have argued upon the principles of others, not of my own; and have omitted what I think true and of the utmost importance, because by others thought unintelligible or not true. Thus I have argued upon the principles of the Fatalists, which I do not believe; and have omitted a thing of the utmost importance which I do believe the moral fitness or unfitness of actions prior to all will whatever; which I apprehend as certainly to determine the Divine conduct, as speculative truth and falsehood necessarily determine the Divine judgment.

Put into a summary form, what I may, I hope without offence, call the Conservative position of the Anglican divines of the eighteenth century seems to be something of this kind: The fact that the Christian law, eighteen hundred years after its institution, continues to exercise a living power over the conscience of men, is the highest proof that can be afforded of its divine origin. But this divine authority is denied by some on purely speculative grounds: let us, therefore, meet them on the grounds of speculation, and test the arguments on which they rely, so that, by proving their un soundness, we may deprive them of the

their faction abstract principles, as when Fox drank to " The Sovereignty of the People," and his successors to "The cause for which Hampden perished in the field, and Sidney on the scaffold." Such Platonic enthusiasm is harmless enough, so long as it is confined to animating the Liberal party to exertions sufficient to turn out the Tories when they happen to be in power. But now that it is being employed to persuade the people of the inbred wickedness of the Tories, it is well congenital virtue of the Liberals, and the to remember that old-fashioned Whiggism was something fundamentally different in character from anything that at present disguises itself under the name. Whiggery, in Burke's days, meant simply adherence to the principles of the Revolution of 1688, and the Whig party meant the connection of noblemen and gentlemen associated in Parliament to control the still preponderant power of the crown. And because it meant this, and only this, there was scarcely a Tory statesman or writer of distinction in the eighteenth century who would have hesitated, as far as principle was concerned, to call himself a Whig. Oxford and Bolingbroke, as well as Pitt and Canning, started in their polit ical careers in connection with the Whig party; Bolingbroke avowedly bases his political theories on the old Whig princi ples; Swift, long after writing his "Examiners," declares that he is still, what he always was, a Whig of the Revolution settlement; Pope bitterly denounces Walpole in glowing lines which Warton declares to be the incarnation of Whiggism. What, then, made it so easy for rival statesmen in the last century to occupy common ground of principle? Two or

three passages from Burke will set the | tive movement, distinctive of the eighmatter in the plainest light. teenth century, in its literature; but I think that a little consideration will show it to be very visible in the work of Pope, whom I have chosen as the natural representative of the poetry of the period. If we go back to the poetry of Chaucer, we find very clearly shown in it the begin nings of two separate streams of inspiration, each of which may be traced in a distinct course through the history of our literature, the poetry of romance and the

In the 1st of William and Mary [says he] in the famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two houses utter not a syllable of "a right to frame a government for themselves." You will see that their whole case was to secure the religion, laws, and liberties that had been long possessed, and had been latterly endangered. "Taking into their most serious consideration the best means for making such an establishment, that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in danger of being again subverted," they auspicate all their proceedings, by stating as some of those best means, in the first place to do as their ancestors in like cases have usually done for vindicating their antient rights and liberties, to declare;" and then they pray the king and "that it may be declared and enacted, queen that all and singular the rights and liberties asserted and declared are the true antient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom."

You will observe [Burke continues] that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity, as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our Constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.

an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the original plant. reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example. .

poetry

of manners.

The former had its

source in the institutions of chivalry and
in medieval theology. It makes its first
appearance in many of the " Canterbury
Tales," and in poems like "The Romance
of the Rose" and "The Flower and the
Leaf;" it runs strongly through our
national ballad poetry; it attains a large
and noble flow in the "
and then, wasting itself among the refine-
Faery Queen,'
ments and gallantries of the seventeenth
century, may be said to run underground
till it reappears in a new and unexpected
shape in the romantic outburst of the
early part of the present century. The
other poetical river has been fed by the
life, action, and manners of the nation.
After showing itself in full flow in the
admirable prologue to the "Canterbury
Tales," it almost vanishes from sight for
two centuries, when it is suddenly dis-
covered again in the satires of Hall, and
the comedies and historical plays of
Shakespeare, being carried on through
the series of noble historical portraits in
"Absalom and Achitophel," through the
moral satires of Pope and the didactic
Poems of Johnson and Goldsmith — and
in prose through the novels of Fielding,
Smollett, Madame d'Arblay, and others

till it exhausts itself, temporarily at all events, in the "Tales " of Crabbe.

Now, if we trace the course of the romantic stream of our poetry, we shall find that it affords a very remarkable illustra tion of what has been already said about the exhaustibility of poetical materials. In Chaucer and in our ballad poetry the volume of imagination is swift and strong; but in the poetry of succeeding generations the impulse is far feebler, and even in the "Faery Queen" the reader feels, in spite of the genius of the poet, that as springs of social action, medievalism and feudalism are losing their force. The poem is an allegory: of dramatic life and movement it is entirely devoid. When we come to the seventeenth century, the It may seem at first a more difficult source of inspiration seems almost to have and obscure matter to trace the Conserva- | run dry. Here and there a genuine note

There is not a syllable in these utterances to which a modern Conservative would not cheerfully subscribe. But how many leagues away do they carry us from the Liberal-Radicalism now crying out for the abolition of the hereditary branch of the Legislature, because it appeals to the people against the arbitrary will of the dominant faction in a House of Commons which is approaching the term of its constitutional existence !

As for the wits of either Charles's days,
The mob of gentlemen who write with ease,
Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more.
Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er,
One simile, that solitary shines
In the dry desert of a thousand lines,
Or lengthened thought that gleams through

very wide indeed of the mark. Correct- There is something equally Conservaness in metrical composition, as I under- tive in the development of the metrical stand Pope to mean, implies obedience to form in which the new movement clothed the laws of imaginative thought, and, itself. No one, I think, can doubt that therefore, not only precision of poetical the colloquial form of the heroic couplet, expression, but justice of poetical concep- as it is handled first by Chaucer, and aftertion. In this sense, the fashionable met- wards by Dryden and Pope, affords adrical writing of the seventeenth century mirable scope for the expression of those was astonishingly incorrect. The poets thoughts and feelings which lie properly of the age sought to invest with fanciful within the sphere of imagination, and yet and romantic forms, thoughts and feelings not far from the sympathies of common which had long ceased to move the imag social life. Mr. Arnold, it is true, speaks ination of society. Pope perceived this, of the style of eighteenth-century verse and he understood that the quibbles, re- as if it were not poetical at all; but it is finements, and affectations that mark their evident that he has no sympathy with the style, were the product of imaginative ex- writers of the period, or he would scarcely haustion. His criticism on their work is have selected one of the poorest couplets sweeping, but few will deny it to be just. Pope ever wrote as a good specimen of his manner.* When we think, however, of the distinctness with which writers of different genius have stamped their own character on the heroic couplet, and the varying themes of which it is made the vehicle, it seems to me impossible not to regard it as a noble and harmonious poetical instrument. Let us remember how social were the aims of the great writers of the age. cies of the English," says Dryden, the "The proprieties and delicaimmediate father of the whole line, " are known to few; 'tis impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them without the help of a liberal education, long reading and digesting of those few good authors we have among us, the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom and habitude of conversation with the best company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust he has acquired while laying in a stock of learning." This is an excellent description of that union of traditional metrical language with the forms and idioms of modern society which is the groundwork of the "poetical diction" of the eighteenth century; and it may be supplemented by what Pope tells us of the capacities of the heroic couplet as the vehicle of expression for such a poem as the "Essay on Man."

many a page,

Has sanctified whole poems for an age.

Vividly attracted as his own keen and sensitive nature was to the romantic traditions of English literature, his instinct told him that these had, for the time at least, lost their vitality, and that the true course of poetical development lay in the direction which Dryden had given to our poetry in "Absalom and Achitophel," and other satiric and didactic compositions. So, though he had set out in his own career on the high romantic road, he takes credit to himself in the full maturity of his judgment

That not in Fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stooped to Truth and moralized his song.

Addison had prided himself on having "brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell at clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses," and so Pope, in the true spirit of his ancestor, Chaucer, taught poetry to come down from her romantic heights to sympathize with the thoughts and to elevate the language of men busily engaged in establishing for themselves new traditions of political and social order. The ancient spring of inspiration derived from national life and manners was renewed, and a long succession of poets-Thomson, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Crabbe, carried on the ethical impulse communicated to poetry by Pope.

but I chose verse, and even rhyme, for two This [says he] I might have done in prose: reasons. The one will appear obvious that principles, maxims, or precepts so written, both strike the reader more strongly at first, and are more easily retained by him afterwards; the other may seem odd, but it is true : I found I could express them more shortly this way than in prose itself; and nothing is more certain, than that much of the force, as well as

*To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down: Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my

own.

of the grace, of arguments or instructions de- |
pends on their conciseness. I was unable to
treat this part of the subject more in detail
without becoming dry and tedious, or more
poetically without sacrificing perspicuity to
ornament, without wandering from the preci-
sion, or breaking the chain, of reasoning. If
any man can unite all these without diminu-
tion of any of them, I freely confess he will
compass a thing above my capacity.

It would be impossible to find a passage
indicating better than this the general
aims of "correctness," in poetry, namely,
a clear perception in the poet of what it is
just to express in metre; a severe exclu-
sion of whatever is not subsidiary to the
end in view; and a determination not to
be satisfied with any form of metrical
language short of that which is exactly
required for the forcible, concise, and har
monious expression of the thought.

time to the most ancient sources of na tional tradition; everywhere we are reminded of Wordsworth's lines:

O joy that in our embers

Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive.

lead us to expect.

The work of reconstruction is performed by an intellectual and social aristocracy, and it is distinguished accordingly by all the features which such authorship would Its art, its poetry, its taste, its criticism, its manners, are strictly limited in scope and conception, and are marked by a consciousness of design which lets us see plainly that if form be ever mistaken for substance, prodigious opportunities will be offered to artificiality, mannerism, and affectation. But it will not be denied that the best performances of the eighteenth century, whether of statesmen who had something special to do, or of poets, essayists, novelists, and painters, who had something special to say, show, on the whole, in a very extraor• dinary degree, manliness, robustness, lucidity, terseness, penetration, and good sense.

WILLIAM JOHN Courthope.

From Good Words.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

A MODERN ROMANCE.

JACQUELINE,'

"" 66

66 CITOYENNE 'LADY BELL,” ETC.

CHAPTER XXIX.

REPARATION.

These illustrations will, I hope, sug-
gest in outline the nature of the Conserva-
tism of the eighteenth century. So far
from being the destructive period that its
critics represent it to be, such revolutions
of thought and manners as took place in
England were accomplished in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, and the
task of the eighteenth was to recombine
the shattered forms of the old national
life into a system suited to modern cir-
cumstances. The Reformation had de-
stroyed the external unity and absolute
authority of the Church; Protestantism
generated a multitude of sects, the most
extreme of which questioned the founda
tions of Revelation itself. Such rebellion BY SARAH TYTLER, AUTHOR OF
could no longer be put down by interdict
and excommunication, but Butler met it
by asserting the supremacy of conscience,
and the authority of the continuous Chris-
tian tradition. The Revolution of 1688
overthrew the last remains of monarchi-
cal feudalism, but the aristocracy carried
on the best traditions of the old into the
new régime, and, as has been said, Burke
contended with justice that the Revolu-
tion gave Englishmen no rights which
they did not previously possess under the
law of their country. In the sphere of
thought the decay of medieval and
feudal influences had exhausted those
romantic imaginations on which men's
minds had once loved to linger. But to
renew the sunken springs, Dryden, Pope,
and their followers introduced a generous
fountain of fresh inspiration by reviving
and developing Chaucer's old satiric
methods of portraying life and character.
Everywhere we see signs of development
with a constant reference at the same

LADY FERMOR gave no token of missing the girl who had been her companion for the last twenty years. The old lady awoke and breakfasted, read the newspapers or got Soames to read them to her, took her stroll on the terrace, ate her luncheon, had her afternoon drive, her nap, her dinner, her evening game of écarté if Major Pollock dropped in, or, failing him, condescended to a game at cribbage with Soames, retired to bed, and slept apparently without a care on her mind or a feather's weight on her conscience. She had always boasted that though she was fond of company in her day, she could suffice for herself; and now it looked like it. To the few visitors who made a point of inquiring for her, she merely alluded to Iris's absence without stating its cause or term; and when it