war

worldly matters proved too strong in the "species" of ginger-ale as some adlong run for those of good; and such as vanced congregations have already procannot bear this truth, but require that posed unless the parson can elude the abiding temporal good should come of churchwarden with white port, or othertheir good works, had better go into mon- wise persuade him; and, every now and asteries. Considering what men are, the then all this will be changed, and we shall wonder is, not that all great nationalities have to tip our policemen and inspectors should have come to a shameful end, but for looking over our infractions of popular that their ordinary duration of life should moralities of a newer pattern. Our condihave been a thousand years. How any of tion will very much resemble Swedenthem should have lasted a hundred must borg's hell, in which everybody is incesseem a miracle to those who fail to take santly engaged in the endeavor to make into account the agency of the two guar- everybody else virtuous; and the only comdian angels of national life, religion and pensating comforts to the same will be, religion which keeps alive the that, though wine and tobacco, those natuhumility and generosity of reasonable sub-ral stimulants to good impulses and fruitful mission to law and the spirit of self-sacri- meditations, may be denied him, he may fice for corporate life, and war, which find abundant time and opportunity, in the silences for a time the envy and hatred of cessation of all external interests of a the evil and ignorant for moral and cir- moral and intellectual nature, for improvcumstantial superiorities, and compels ing his own character, which, perhaps, is, them to trust their established leaders, on after all, the only way in which a man can pain of prompt annihilation. be sure of improving the world's; and, furthermore, he will no longer be discomposed by the prospect of "national disaster," since there can be no national disaster where there is no nation, however freely the gutters may run with blood. Private disaster, in such an infernal millennium, will be a trifle.

Even our great "liberal " prophet, Mr. Herbert Spencer, is compelled, in spite of himself, to prophesy with terror of what he rightly calls "the coming slavery," the despotism, not of a single irresponsible tyrant, who must content himself with doing good or evil in so general a way that the sense of private compulsion or injury would weigh little on each individual, but the paltry and prying despotism of the vestry the more "virtuous" the more paltry and prying - persecuting each individual by the intrusion of its myriadhanded, shifting, ignorant and irresistible tyranny into the regulation of our labor, our household, and our very victuals, and, however "pure" in its abstract intention, necessarily corrupt in its application by its agents, since men, as a rule, are corrupt. Indications are not wanting of the sort of "government" we are committed to, unless the coming war shall leave us in the grip of a less irksome tyranny. It will be a despotism which will have to be mitigated by continual "tips," as the other kind has had to be by occasional assassination. Neither the voter nor the inspector yet know their power and opportunities; but they soon will. We shall have to "square "the district surveyor once or twice a year, lest imaginary drains became a greater terror than real typhoid; we shall have to smoke our pipes secretly and with a sense of sin, lest the moral supervisor of the parish should decline our offer of half-a-crown for holding his nose during his weekly examination of our bedrooms and closets; the good churchman will have to receive communion under the

Under such conditions, secret societies of discontented and hopeless minorities will abound. Dynamite will often shake the nerves of smug content, and enrage the people beyond bounds at such revolt against its infallible decrees. But none of these societies will be so hateful as the secret and inevitable aristocracy of the remnant that refuses to give interior assent to the divinity of the Brummagem Baal. Its members will acquire means of association and methods of forbidding intrusion which will infuriate the rest, who, in their turn, will invent tests for the discovery, in order to the punishment, of these "enemies of mankind," as the Dutch traders in Japan did, in inviting all persons of doubtful character to trample on the crucifix.

I have called these glances at the near future "pessimist," because that is the word now generally applied to all such forecasts as are made by those who do not ignore or pervert patent facts. "Optimists," as far as I can gather, are those who hope all things from "local option."

III.

A SPANISH NOVELETTE.

MR. GOSSE is doing useful work in editing a series of translations of remark

sons

66

sense

especially such as have been endowed
with the artistic temperament.
"reli-

able foreign novels, most of which are little known to English readers. To perthe most of us - whose knowledge "Pepita Jiménez " is essentially a of Spanish books is confined to "Don gious novel," none the less so because it Quixote," "Pepita Jiménez" will come as represents the failure of a good young a complete and delightful surprise; and aspirant to the priesthood to attain a deyet it not only is, as Mr. Gosse says, "the gree of sanctity to which he was not called, typical Spanish novel of our days," but it and depicts the working in his aspirations is typical of a great and altogether unique of a pride so subtle as to be very venial, national literature. Though Juan Valera's though, in some degree, disastrous. Mr. personality differs from the priestly char- Gosse seems to me to mistake the motif acter of Calderon as far as may well be, of the novel entirely in regarding it as since he is said to have made himself representing the necessary failure of a conspicuous by his bonnes fortunes, his "divine ardor brought face to face with wild freaks at the gaming-table, his crazy an earthly love." It represents nothing escapades, his feats of horsemanship, and but the exceedingly common mistake of his powers as a toreador," the very same young and ardent minds in measuring distinguishing vein which makes such their present capacity by their desires, plays as Calderon's "Life is a Dream," and striving to take their station on the and "The Wonder-working Magician' top of an alp, when they are only fit for the astonishment and delight of every the ascent of a very moderate hill. One reader who comes upon them for the first of the many points in which Catholic phitime an astonishment and delight al-losophy shows itself superior to the phimost like that of the acquisition of a new losophy of Protestant religionists in the - this very same vein sparkles knowledge of the human mind is its disthrough and vivifies the modern novel tinct recognition of the fact that there "Pepita Jiménez." Alike in Calderon are as many degrees of human capacity for and in this work of Juan Valera we find holiness as for any other kind of emithat complete synthesis of gravity of mat- nence, and that for most men a very modter and gaiety of manner which is the erate degree of spirituality is the utmost glittering crown of art, and which out of for which they are entitled to hope. An Spanish literature is to be found only in ardent Protestant, misinterpreting the Shakespeare, and even in him in a far words, "Be ye perfect as I am perfect," less obvious degree. It is only in Span-is apt to think that he is nothing if not a ish literature, with the one exception of Dante, that religion and art are discovered to be not necessarily hostile powers; and it is in Spanish literature only, and without any exception, that gaiety of life is made to appear as being not only compatible with, but the very flower of that root which in the best works of other literatures hides itself in the earth, and only sends its concealed sap through stem and leaf of human duty and desire. The reason of this great and admirable singularity seems mainly to have been the sin. gular aspect of most of the best Spanish minds towards religion. With them, religion has been, as it was meant to be, a human passion; they have regarded dogma as the form of realizable, and, by them, realized experience; and the natural in stincts of humanity as the outlines of the lineaments of the divinity-"very God and very man." Witness the writings of their greatest saints and theologians, in which dogma is, as it was, fused in, and becomes psychology, instead of remaining, as it has done with us, a rock, indeed, of refuge to many, but a rock of stumbling and offence to many more, and of these

saint, whereas Juan Valera knew that to be a saint, as to be a poet, is to be about one in twenty millions, and he has made a very amusing as well as a very useful book out of the vain strivings of his hero for

Heroic good, target for which the young Dream in their dreams that every bow is strung;

and the course of experience by which he is brought to conclude

That less than highest is good, and may be high.

That disgusting abortion, the English "religious novel," would have made the enthusiastic young deacon relapse into despair and profligacy, instead of letting him marry the pretty girl who had turned him from his supposed vocation, and caused him to live an exemplary, conscientious, and religious life as a country gentleman and farmer of his own land.

There is plenty of analysis in the English religious novel, but no psychology; and analysis which has not psychological knowledge for its material is merely the anatomy of a corpse, and fails as com

and humanly interesting as one of Sir Walter Scott's. There is in it no sense of dislocation or incompatibility between the natural and the spiritual. From the dainty, naive, innocently coquettish, and passionate Pepita, who is enraged by her lover's pretensions to a piety which, though she is devoted to her beautifully adorned "Infant Jesus," she cannot understand, and in which she sees only an obstacle to the fulfilment of her love for him, to the saintly ecclesiastic, who, almost from the first, sees the incapacity of his pupil, Don Luis, for the celibate heights to which he aspires, but who understands life in all its grades too well to look upon his strivings and his "fall," as Don Luis at first esteems it, with other than a good-humored smile, all is upon one easy ascending plane and has an intelligible unity. Valera has taken no less care with and interest in the subordinate characters than the principals in the story. They are all true and vivid and unique in their several ways, and we have the most complete picture of a very foreign world without the slightest drawback of strangeness or want of verisimilitude.

pletely in illustrating and extending knowledge of life as the anatomy of the body has confessedly failed, from the time of Galen and Hippocrates, in explaining the vivifying powers of nature. Psychology comes naturally to the typical Spanish mind, for the reasons given above. It deals with the personal relationships of the soul with the personalities which are above the soul, from which the soul exists, and of which the soul is the express mirror; but of these personal relationships, which every religion confesses, the modern mind, out of Spain, knows comparatively little, though, thanks to the works of St. John of the Cross (two editions of which have lately appeared in England), and of certain other works, magnificent as literature as well as for burning psychological insight, the study of true psychology, vulgarly called "mysticism" and "transcendentalism" (what good thing is not "mystic" and "transcendental to the modern "scientist" and his pupils ?), shows signs of revival in Europe generally. A most important consequence of the human character of Spanish faith, a character manifest alike in the religious philosophy of the times of Calderon and of those of Juan Valera, is the utter absence of the deadly Manicheism which is the source of modern "nicety" in that portion of literature and art which does not profess, like French, and, in great part, Amer- LORD SHERBROOKE'S death recalls one ican literature and art, to have abandoned of the most brilliant episodes in our Parlia all faith and real decency. Calderon, in mentary history. He had the courage to works which glitter with an incomparable take up the cause of Conservatism when purity, is more plain-spoken, when need the late Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli were be, than Shakespeare, and constantly ex- preparing the way for that desertion of it alts the splendor of that purity in his main which a year later they accomplished. It theme by a by-play of inferior characters would have been wiser, perhaps, if Mr. which is as gay and "coarse" as anything Lowe had given his support to the very in "Othello or "Romeo and Juliet;" moderate reform which Lord Russell's and though Juan Valera in this novel con-government proposed, on the principle forms in the main to the daintiness of the fashion, there is a freedom in his story from the cant of Manichean purity which will certainly limit the number of his readers among ourselves, and probably give some scandal to the most "serious" among those the immense majority of our countrymen and women who do not really believe that God made all things pure, and that impurity is nothing but the abuse of that which is pure, and that such abuse is impure in proportion to the purity perverted.

In consequence of the characteristics I have endeavored to indicate, this novel, though expressly "religious" in its main theme and most of its details, is as "natural," concrete, and wholesomely human

From The Spectator.

LORD SHERBROOKE.

that a concession frankly given at an early date, often averts a much more dangerous concession a few months later, and also educates the people gradually for the use of larger powers. But Mr. Lowe was a believer in the principle of obsta principiis. He never anticipated that the true danger of revolution could proceed from the Tory party and not from the Liberals, and supposed that in contesting the field with Mr. Gladstone, he was face to face with the only dangerous foe. Circumstances proved that he was quite mistaken. Probably his insight into individual character was not nearly as keen as his insight into the meaning of democracy. But so far as the dangerous side of democracy was concerned - he never seems to have contem

whom the English Parliament has ever been able to boast. The vibration of his voice, which always reminded one of the stroke of a tongue of glass on a glassy surface, as he pushed his pungent questions as to the nature of the abstract rights for which the reformers pleaded — whether, for instance, they would not equally have justified the concession of a Parlia ment to the beasts, such as is described in "Reineke Fuchs". or how far these abstract rights would go, and whether, if the fleas had but been unanimous, they would not have been in their strict right in pushing Curran out of the bed, struck his audience as representing the

plated its better aspects his insight was certainly very keen indeed. He was a courageous, cold, and remorseless critic of its short-sightedness and rashness. Those who heard some of his great speeches can recall even now the cold, metallic ring of those keen sarcasms on uninstructed enthusiasm which deserved more attention, though they attracted much less, than his more celebrated thrusts at the ignorance, venality, and intemperance of the class whom it was proposed to enfranchise. Mr. Lowe never showed the searching character of his rather depreciating intelligence more vividly than when he attacked, not the corruption and selfishness, but, on the contrary, the intellectual ne plus ultra of human contempt. We sensibilities and eager heats and ardors call his scorn, scorn of a physical species, of the half-educated classes. "It is not because he always asked, as he asked in the educated and reflective," he said, "who the Education Department, for "payment are influenced by ideas, but the half-edu- by results;" and the results for which cated and the unreflective; and if you alone he was inclined to pay, were results show to the ignorant and poor and half- that could be weighed and measured, and educated, wrong, injustice, and wickedness which were not to be estimated in any anywhere, their generous instincts rise appreciable degree by general moral and within them, and nothing is easier than to intellectual impressions. In the same get up a cry for the redress of those griev- year in which he made his great speeches ances. We feel the injustice, too; but against Reform, he attended an annual we look not merely at the injustice itself; dinner of the Association of Civil Engiwe look before and after at the collateral neers, and pronounced a great panegyric circumstances, at what must happen to on their characteristic works and achievetrade, revenue, and our own position in ments, on the ground that their profession the world; and we look also to what must does pay by striking and indeed gigantic happen to the very poor persons them- results, as compared with the results of selves, before we commit ourselves to a almost any other profession that could be decided course. Persons who have some-named. "The Civil Engineers," he said, thing to lose are less anxious to lose it" were the heirs of all the ages, and the than they who have little at stake often, even though these last may by the loss be reduced to absolute poverty." That was the speech of a statesman who fully understood how potent is the power of ideas over minds which are quite incapable of estimating the difficulty of embodying these ideas adequately in practice. That passage indicates a far keener insight into the dangers of democracy than the celebrated denunciation of the working classes for venality, which Sir Algernon West has recently been airing on behalf of the Gladstonian cause. Indeed, the support that has been so frequently given by local English politicians to Irish Home Rule, is one of the best illustrations that could be found of the extreme danger which is caused by these rashly generous sympathies in untrained minds when they discern a fancied injustice without discerning the political peril of applying a superficial remedy.

Lord Sherbrooke was one of the greatest masters of a physical species of scorn of

field of their investigation was boundless." "He hoped, if ever the day arrived when the universities, rising to the true level which they should occupy, became really national establishments, the science of engineering would be admitted to at least a perfect equality with every other branch of knowledge." Civil engineers might well be proud, he insisted, of their railways and electric telegraphs, "which enabled us to exchange thoughts in spite of those petty districts into which the selfishness of mankind had divided the universe." It was something very different from the selfishness of mankind, we think, which constituted nations and the different species of national genius; but it was characteristic of Lord Sherbrooke that he thought little of the finer inward tendencies and qualities which cement nations, and much of the physical means of communication which tend to the disintegration of nations, and of the denationalizing influence of cosmopolitan intercourse. It was visible results which