VOLTAIRE'S "CANDIDE; OR ALL FOR THE BEST "1 [1898: AET. 35] ALHALLA is by no means the open court that we mostly dream of. Jutting out from the central nave, the few occupants of which, being unapproachable, are undisturbed, there are the private chapels, so to speak, enshrining local feeling and sectional conviction. That the merit of Themistocles was supreme appeared from the fact that everyone else was willing to put him second to himself. That a man is a prophet or a poet in his own country proves nothing, or at any rate less, elsewhere. Of this we have a good example within our own borders. A Scotch peer, more cultivated, perhaps, than critical, recently and in public conjoined Robert Burns and Napoleon the Great as parallel phenomena. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that when the books are opened, and the final class-list is announced to the sound of the last trump, Burns may find himself only a little higher than Teniers and a little lower than Béranger. Those as to whose primacy there is and can be neither doubt nor denial are fit indeed, but very few. To them Voltaire, in spite of the fact that he embodied the spirit of a whole epoch so fully as to appear its very emblem and synonym, proxime accessit. For in England we have never conceded the claims put forward and allowed on his behalf in France and the rest of Europe. In this, as in so much else, the island has held aloof-stolidly and sullenly peculiar-from the Continent. The causes that led to this result are abroad and active still. Voltaire purposely and persistently committed a crime for which in England there is neither tolerance nor forgiveness. He called a spade a spade. A new translation with introduction by Walter Jerrold; "Literature," July 2, 1898. We are far more willing to tolerate criticism of our achievements than ridicule of our hypocrisies. Accordingly, boasting as we do of "development" to the disadvantage of our neighbours' clumsy trick of revolution, we are by no means pleased that Voltaire should openly have scoffed at superstition instead of laying stress upon its moral grandeur, its spiritual beauty, its abounding semi-reasonableness. Like all genuine reformers, as opposed to the satirist on easy terms who, like Thackeray, points the finger at precisely those things and people that do not matter, Voltaire was overtaken by a measure of the fate of Samson. That which his own hands overthrew buried him in its ruins. In fact, he may almost be said to live in and through one book, though he composed a hundred. And it is probable that even "Candide" would have been found too veracious for optimism and too witty for convention, if a strange chance had not thrown Voltaire-on his way to join the immortals-into the company of Dr. Johnson. Truly immortality acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows! Nowadays, unfortunately, few people read "Rasselas." Mr. Leslie Stephen, deserted for once by his customary power of sympathy and judgment, has likened that exercise to wading through a vast expanse of sand; but we read and talk about Johnson more than ever, and the echo of his cello-tones deepens and sustains the light-fingered rattle of Voltaire's spinet. THE PRIVILEGE OF PEERS1 [1901: AET. 38] HE trial of Earl Russell by his peers with an antique formality and ceremonial that is only too apt to overpass the dividing line between the sublime and the ridiculous has called attention less to the particular case than to the general question of the possession and exercise by the House of Lords of a privilege that goes back to Magna Carta. That the question should be raised or threatened in the other House was to be expected, though this of itself is no argument against the privilege on its merits. If the peers had simply been rendering in the ordinary course of business an admitted service to society, it would seem good to many members of the House of Commons to contrive that they should never again have the chance of appearing too useful or too venerable. What is more to the purpose is that many of the peers themselves are in doubt as to the policy of retaining a privilege obscure in origin, doubtful in value, and cumbersome and expensive to exercise. That a peer can be tried only by his peers is generally supposed to be a deduction from the provision made in the Magna Carta that no free man should be tried-and those who quote the Great Charter, whether from memory or from other quotations, are apt to omit the word "free"-nisi per legale iuditium parium suorum " or (uel) by the law of the land." The Latin of Magna Carta must not be pressed too closely; but it would seem at least possible that judgment by peers and by the law of the land were regarded as two distinct processes. It is not even certain that the term "free man" was meant to include peers, seeing that earls and barons are specially dealt with in another place of the same document. However, little more than a hundred years had passed before the Great Charter stood in need of reaffirmation. Then there was no doubt about it, for in 1341 1 66 Archbishop Stratford secured the right of the peers to be tried only by their peers en pleyn Parlement. But at this point Selden's opinion is worth noting that, though judgment belongs to the Lords alone, full Parliament must be taken to include the Commons:-" How can it be said in full Parliament when the Commons, one of the States, are absent?" If, then, the peers should think fit to divest themselves of their privilege, as in the reign of Edward III they divested themselves of the right to try other than peers, the simplest plan would be to let the law of the land take its course; and this, after all, would be in accordance with the plain terms of Magna Carta. The benefit of peerage nowadays, when aristocracy is visibly quickening into the lower and more dangerous form of plutocracy, is more than doubtful. Aurum omnes victa iam pietate colunt. The danger is not lest the peers should be a little kind to the faults of one of their own order, but rather lest they should be led to exercise their power with undue harshness through fear of the Commons or out of deference to the rabble. If the Commons are to share the ceremony, they would be likely in their present mood to claim to influence the sentence; while a committee of Law Lords, though legally valid, " for it is not material whether some Lords do absent themselves," would, save for the honour of the thing, come to much the same as the ordinary Court. LADY SARAH LENNOX1 [1901: AET. 38] HERE is a glamour about Holland House which it is difficult to define. It seems at first sight to be the outcome of a long tradition; but in reality it is due to the genius and charm of a single man, and to the talkative brilliance of a motley group who, in the silver age, without showing more than a family likeness to Agamemnon, succeeded to his merits when his work was done. It is true that the ghost of Addison was brought into the family by a marriage that was little to his credit; but the great spirit of all those that rise at the sound of the name is Charles James Fox, though even in his day the main stream of Whig policy did not flow through Holland House. The mention of Lord Rockingham calls up the figure of Burke. The Duke of Portland resided at Burlington House, the property of his kinsman, the Duke who came after "the king of the Whigs"; while Sheridan was at home, if anywhere in London, with Fox's Duchess. The truth is that the great day of Holland House was a day of high talk, but, so far as the Whigs were concerned, of small things. Whiggery seems to have passed abruptly from the state of a grandiose ideal into that of a venerable tradition. There was no summer. The illusions of promise gave way without a break to the legends of memory. There is no gap and no link between Charles Fox, generous and full of faith, with the broad light of a great epoch upon him, retaining to the last the virtues of youth when its failings had deserted him, and Lord Holland, whom we figure as essentially and permanently elderly, monumental between the fuss of Lord John Russell and the flow of Macaulay, and ever ready to temper or to instruct the present with an example or a maxim of " my uncle." 1 "The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, 1745-1826." Edited by the Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale. London. 1901. "Quarterly Review," January, 1902. |