Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885

If Auguste Comte had ever used language which could fairly be so understood, I will not stop to inquire. I do not believe he has. But if I were shown fifty such passages, they would not weigh with me a grain against the entire basis and genius of Positivism itself; which is that human life shall henceforward be based on a footing of solid demonstration alone. If enthusiastic Positivists, more Comtist than Comte, ever gave countenance to such an extravagance, I can only say that they no more represent Positivism than General Booth’s brass band represents Christianity. If words of Auguste Comte have been understood to mean that the religion of Humanity can be summed up in the repetition of phrases, or can be summed up in anything less than a moral and scientific education of man’s complex nature, I can only treat it as a caricature unworthy of notice. This hall is the centre in this country where the Positivist scheme is presented in its entirety, under the immediate direction of Comte’s successor. And speaking in his name and in the name of our English committee, I claim it as an essential purpose of our existence as an organised body, to promote a sound scientific education, so as to abolish the barrier which now separates school and Church; to cultivate individual training in all true knowledge, and the assertion of individual energy of character and brain; to promote independence quite as much as association; personal responsibility, quite as much as social discipline; and free public opinion, in all things spiritual and material alike, quite as much as organised guidance by trained leaders. Whatever makes light of these, whatever is indifferent to scientific education, whatever tends to blind and slavish surrender of the judgment and the will, whatever clings to mysticism, formalism, and priestcraft, such belongs not to Positivism, to Auguste Comte, or to humanity rightly regarded and honored. The first condition of the religion of Humanity is human nature and common sense.

Whilst Positivism has been making good its ground within the area of scientific philosophy, scientific metaphysics has been exhibiting the signal weakness of its position on the side of religion. To those who have once entered into the scientific world of belief in positive knowledge there is no choice between a belief in nothing at all and a belief in the future of human civilisation, between Agnosticism and Humanity. Agnosticism is therefore for the present the rival and antagonist of Positivism outside the orthodox fold. I say for the present, because by the nature of the case Agnosticism is a mere raft or jurymast for shipwrecked believers, a halting-place, and temporary passage from one belief to another belief. The idea that the deepest issues of life and of thought can be permanently referred to any negation; that cultivated beings can feel proud of summing up their religious belief in the formula, that they “know nothing” this is too absurd to endure. Agnosticism is a milder form of the Voltairean hatred of religion that was current in the last century; but it is quite as passing a phase. For the moment, it is the fashion of the emancipated Christian to save all trouble by professing himself an Agnostic. But he is more or less ashamed of it. He knows it is a subterfuge. It is no real answer. It is only an excuse for refusing to answer a troublesome question. The Agnostic knows that he will have to give a better answer some day; he finds earnest men clamoring for an answer. He is getting uneasy that they will not take “Don’t know” for an answer. He is himself too full still of theology and metaphysics to follow our practice, which is to leave the theological conundrum alone, and to proclaim regard for the human race as an adequate solution of the human problem. And in the meantime he staves off questions by making his own ignorance – his own ignorance! – the foundation of a creed.

We have just seen the failure of one, of these attempts. The void caused by the silent crumbling of all the spiritual creeds has to be filled in some way. The indomitable passion of mankind towards an object to revere and work for, has to be met. And the latest device has been, as we have seen, to erect the “Unknowable” itself into the sole reality, and to assure us that an indescribable heap of abstract terms is the true foundation of life. So that, after all its protestations against any superstitious belief, Agnosticism floats back into a cloud of contradictions and negations as unthinkable as those of the Athanasian creed, and which are merely our old theological attributes again, dressed up in the language of Esoteric Buddhism.

II

I turn now, as is our custom, to review the work of the year under its three-fold heads of Cult, Education, Politics. You will see that I avoid the word Worship, because worship is so often misunderstood; and because it wholly fails to convey the meaning of the Positivist cultus, or stimulus of the noblest emotions of man. Worship is in no way a translation of Comte’s word culte. In French we can talk of the culte des mères, or the culte des morts, or the culte des enfants, or the culte de l’Art. We cannot in English talk of worshipping our mothers, or worshipping our dead friends, or worshipping children, or worshipping art; or, if we use the words, we do not mean the same thing. Comte has suffered deeply by being crudely translated into English phrases, by people who did not see that the same phrase in English means something different. Now his culte de l’Humanité does not mean what Englishmen understand by the worship of Humanity: i. e., they are apt to fancy, kneeling down and praying to Humanity, or singing a hymn to Humanity. By culte de l’Humanité is meant, deepening our sense of gratitude and regard for the human race and its living or dead organs. And everything which does this is cult, though it may not be what we call in English worship. So service is a word I avoid; because the service of Humanity consists in the thousand ways in which we fulfil our social duties, and not in uttering exclamations which may or may not lead to anything in conduct, and which we have no reason to suppose are heard by any one, or affect any one outside the room where they are uttered. The commemoration of a great man such as William the Silent or Corneille is cult, though we do not worship him; the solemn delight in a piece of music in such a spirit is cult, though it is not worship, or service, in the modern English sense of these words. The ceremony of interring a dead friend, or naming a child is cult, though we do not worship our dead friend, nor do we worship the baby when brought for presentation. Cult, as we understand it, is a process that concerns the person or persons who worship, not the being worshipped. Whatever stimulates the sense of social duty and kindles the noblest emotions, whether by a mere historical lecture, or a grand piece of music, or by a solemn act, or by some expression of emotion – this is cult.

In the same way, I avoid the word religion, to signify any special department or any one side of our Positivist life. Religion is not a part of life, but a harmonious and true living of our lives; not the mere expression of feeling, but the right convergence of feeling and thought into pure action. Some of our people seem to use the word “religion,” in the theological sense, to mean the formal expression of a sentiment of devotion. This is a mere distortion of Comte’s language, and essentially unworthy of the broad spirit of Positivism. The full meaning of culte, as Comte employed it, is every act by which man expresses and every means by which he kindles the sense of reverence, duty, love, or resignation. In that sense, and in that sense only, do I now employ cult, which is obviously a somewhat inadequate English phrase.

The past year opened with the commemoration of this day, in which, though the words of praise and devotion that we uttered were few, we sought to brace our spirits and clear our brains by pausing for an hour in the midst of the whirl of life, to look forth on the vast range of our social duties and the littleness of our individual performance. On the 5th of September, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the death of Auguste Comte, we met, as usual, to commemorate his life and work. The discourse then given will be shortly published. At the friendly repast and in the social meeting of that day we had the welcome presence of several members of our Positivist body in Paris and also from the northern cities of England. The hundredth year since the death of Diderot, the two hundredth since that of Corneille, the three hundredth since that of the great founder of the Netherlands, William of Orange, called the Silent, were duly commemorated by a discourse on their life and work. Such vague and unreal ideas are suggested by the phrase, the worship of humanity, that it is useful to point out that this is what we in this hall mean by such a notion: the strengthening our sense of respect for the worthy men in the past by whom civilisation has been built up. This is what we mean by the worship of humanity. A mere historical lecture, if its aim and its effect be to kindle in us enthusiastic regard for the noble men who have gone before us, and by whose lives and deaths we are what we are, – this is the worship of humanity, and not the utterance of invocations to an abstract idea.

On the 28th of last month we held a commemoration of the great musician, Beethoven, in all respects like that which we had given two years ago for Mozart. Our friend Professor Henry Holmes and his admirable quartet again performed two of those immortal pieces, and our friend, Mr. Vernon Lushington, again gave us one of those beautiful discourses on the glorious art to which he and his have devoted so much of their lives. These occasions, which are a real creation of Positivism, I deeply enjoy. They are neither concert nor lecture, nor service specially, but all three together, and much more. It is the one mode in which at present the religion of the future can put forth its yearnings for a sacred art worthy to compare with the highest types of Christian art. We meet not to listen to a musical display – not to hear the history of the musician’s life – not to commemorate his career by any formal ceremony; but we mingle with our words of gratitude, and honor and affection for the artist, the worthy rehearsing of his consummate ideas in a spirit of devotion for him and the glorious company of whom he is one of the most splendid chiefs.

Last night, as the year closed, we met as before to dwell on the past, on the departing year that was being laid to rest in the incalculable catacombs of time, and on the infinite myriads of human beings by whom those catacombs are peopled; and with music and with voice we sought to attune our spirits to the true meanings of the hour. The year has been to many of us one of cruel anxieties, of sad memories and irreparable loss. In Mr. Cutler we have lost a most sincere and valued brother. As we stood round his open grave, there was but one feeling in our gathered mourners – a sense of loss that could ill be borne, honor to his gentle and upright career, sympathy with those whom he had left. The occasion will long be remembered, perhaps, as the first on which our body has ever been called on to take part in a purely Positivist burial service. Did any one present feel that the religion of Humanity is without its power to dignify, to consecrate, and to console in the presence of death? I speak not for others, but for myself. And, for my part, when I remember the pathetic chant of our friends at the grave, the reality of their reverend sorrow, the consolatory sense of resignation and hope with which we laid our brother in his peaceful bed, I feel the conviction that in this supreme office, the great test of religious power, the faith in Humanity will surpass the faith in the fictions – in beauty, in pathos, in courage, and in consolation, even as it so manifestly surpasses them in reality.

The hand of death has been heavy on us both abroad and at home. The past year has carried off to their immortal life two of the original disciples and friends of our master, Auguste Hadery and Fabien Magnin. Both have been most amply honored in funeral sermons by M. Laffitte. Fabien Magnin was one of those rare men who represent to the present the type that we look for in the future. A workman (he was an engine-pattern maker,) he chose to live and die a workman, proud of his order, and confident in its destinies; all through his long life without fortune, or luxury, or ambition; a highly-trained man of science; a thoroughly trained politician, loyal unshakenly to his great teacher and his successor; of all the men I have ever known the most perfect type of the cultivated, incorruptible, simple, courageous man of the people. With his personal influence over his fellow-workmen, and from the ascendency of his intellect and character, he might easily in France have forced his way into the foremost place. With his scientific resources, and his faculty both for writing and speech, he might easily have entered the literary or scientific class. With his energy, prudence, and mechanical skill, he might easily have amassed a fortune. The attractions of such careers never seemed to touch by a ripple the serene surface of his austere purity. He chose to live and die in the strictest simplicity – the type of an honest and educated citizen, who served to make us feel all that the future has to promise to the workman, when remaining a workman, devoted to his craft and to his order, he shall be as highly educated as the best of us to-day; as courteous and dignified as the most refined; as simple as the ideal village pastor; as ardent a Republican as the Ferrys and Gambettas whose names fill the journals.

We have this past year also carried out another series of commemorations, long familiar to our friends in France, but which are a real creation of Positivist belief. I mean those Pilgrimages or religious visits to the scenes of the lives of our great men. This is a real revival of a noble mediæval and Oriental practice, but wholly without superstitious taint, and entirely in the current of modern scientific thought. We go in a body to some spot where one of our immortal countrymen lived or died, and there, full of the beauty of the scene on which he used to gaze, and of the genius loci by which he was inspired, we listen to a simple discourse on his life and work. In this way we visited the homes or the graves of Bacon, of Harvey, of Milton, of Penn, of Cromwell, and of our William of Orange. What may not the art of the future produce for us in this most fruitful mode, when in place of the idle picnics and holidays of vacant sightseers, in place of the formal celebration of some prayer-book saint, we shall gather in a spirit of real religion and honor round the birthplace, the home, it may be the grave, of some poet, thinker, or ruler; and amidst all the inspiration of Nature and of the sacred memories of the soil, shall fill our hearts with the joy in beauty and profound veneration of the mighty Dead?

III

In our Sunday meetings, which have been regularly continued excepting during the four summer months, we have continued our plan of dealing alike with the religious, the social, and the intellectual sides of the Positivist view of life and duty. The Housing of the Poor, Art, Biology, Socialism, our social Duties, the Memory of the Dead, the Positivist grounds of Morality, and our Practical Duties in Life, formed the subject of one series. Since our re-opening in the autumn, we have had courses on the Bible, on the religious value of the modern poets, and on the true basis of social equality. Amongst the features of special interest in these series of discourses is that one course was given by a former Unitarian minister who, after a life of successful preaching in the least dogmatic of all the Christian Churches, has been slowly reduced to the conviction that the reality of Humanity is a more substantial basis for religion to rest on than the hypothesis of God, and that the great scheme of human morality is a nobler Gospel to preach than the artificial ideal of a subjective Christ. I would in particular note the series of admirable lectures on the Bible, by Dr. Bridges, which combined the results of the latest learning on this intricate mass of ancient writings with the sympathetic and yet impartial judgment with which Positivists adopt into their sacred literature the most famous and most familiar of all the religious books of mankind. And again I would note that beautiful series of discourses by Mr. Vernon Lushington on the great religious poets of the modern world: – Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley. When we have them side by side, we shall have before us a new measure of the sound, sympathetic, and universal spirit of Positivist belief. It is only those who are strangers to it and to us who can wonder how we come to put the Bible and the poets in equal places of honor as alike the great organs of true religious feeling.

The systematic teaching of science, which is an essential part of our conception of Positivism, has been maintained in this hall with unabated energy. In the beginning of the year Mr. Vernon Lushington commenced and carried through (with what an effort of personal self-devotion no one of us can duly measure) his class on the history and the elements of Astronomy. This winter, Mr. Lock has opened a similar class on the History and Elements of Mathematics. Positivism is essentially a scheme for reforming education, and it is only through a reformed education, universal to all classes alike, and concerned with the heart as much as the intellect, that the religious meaning of Humanity can ever be unfolded. The singing class, the expense of which was again assumed by Mr. Lushington, was steadily and successfully maintained during the first part of the year. We are still looking forward to the formation of a choir. The social meetings which we instituted last year have become a regular feature of our movement, and greatly contribute to our closer union and our better understanding of the social and sympathetic meaning of the faith we profess.

The publications of the year have been first and chiefly, The Testament and Letters of Auguste Comte, a work long looked for, the publication of which has been long delayed by various causes. In the next place I would call attention to the new and popular edition of International Policy, a work of combined essays which we put forward in 1866, nearly twenty years ago. Our object in that work was to state and apply to the leading international problems in turn the great principles of social morality on which it is the mission of Positivism to show that the politics of nations can only securely repose. In an epoch which is still tending, we are daily assured, to the old passion for national self-assertion, it is significant that the Positivist school alone can resolutely maintain and fearlessly repeat its dictates of morality and justice, whilst all the Churches, all the political parties, and all the so-called organs of opinion, which are really the creatures of parties and cliques, find various pretexts for abandoning them altogether. How few are the political schools around us who could venture to republish after twenty years, their political programmes of 1866, their political doctrines and practical solutions of the tangled international problems, and who could not find in 1885 a principle which they had discarded, or a proposal which to-day they are ashamed to have made twenty years ago.

Besides these books, the only separate publications of our body are the affecting address of Mr. Ellis On the due Commemoration of the Dead. The Positivist Society has met throughout the year for the discussion of the social and political questions of the day. The most public manifestation of its activity has been the part that it took in the third centenary of the great hero of national independence, William, Prince of Orange, called the Silent. The noble and weighty address in which Mr. Beesly expressed to the Dutch Committee at Delft the honor in which we held that immortal memory, has deeply touched, we are told, those to whom it was addressed. And it is significant that from this hall, dedicated to peace, to the Republic, to the people, and to Humanity, there was sent forth the one voice from the entire British race in honor to the great prince, the soldier, the diplomatist the secret, subtle, and haughty chief, who, three hundred years ago, created the Dutch nation. We have learned here to care little for a purely insular patriotism. The great creators of nations are our forefathers and our countrymen. Protestant or Catholic are nothing to us, so long as either prepared the way for a broader faith. In our abhorrence of war we have learned to honor the chief who fought desperately for the solid bases of peace. In our zeal for the people, for public opinion, for simplicity of life, and for truthfulness and openness in word as in conduct, we have not forgotten the relative duty of those who in darker, fiercer, ruder times than ours used the weapons of their age in the spirit of duty, and to the saving of those precious elements where-out the future of a better Humanity shall be formed.

IV

Turning to the political field, I shall occupy but little of your time with the special questions of the year. We are as a body entirely dissevered from party politics. We seek to color political activity with certain moral general principles, but we have no interest in party politics as such. The idea that Positivists are, as a body, Radicals or Revolutionaries is an idle invention; and I am the more entitled to repudiate it, in that I have myself formally declined to enter on a Parliamentary career, on the express ground that I prefer to judge political questions without the trammels of any party obligation. On the one hand we are Republicans on principle, in that we demand a government in the interest of all and of no favored order, by the highest available capacity, without reference to birth, or wealth, or class. On the other hand, we are not Democrats, in that we acknowledge no abstract right to govern in a numerical majority. Whatever is best administered is best. We desire to see efficiency for the common welfare, responsible power intrusted to the most capable hand, with continuous responsibility to a real public opinion.

I am far from pretending that general principles of this kind entitle us to pass a judgment on the complex questions of current politics, or that all Positivists who recognize these principles are bound to judge current politics in precisely the same way. There is in Positivism a deep vein of true Conservatism; as there is also an unquenchable yearning for a social revolution of a just and peaceful kind. But no one of these tendencies impel us, I think, to march under the banner either of Mr. Gladstone or Lord Salisbury. As Republicans on principle, we desire the end of all hereditary institutions. As believers in public opinion, we desire to see opinion represented in the most complete way, and without class distinctions. As men who favor efficiency and concentration in government, we support whatever may promise to relieve us of the scandalous deadlock to which Parliamentary government has long been reduced. It may be permitted to those who are wholly detached from party interests to express a lively satisfaction that the long electoral struggle is happily got out of the way, and that a great stride has been taken towards a government at once energetic and popular, without regarding the hobbies about the representation of women and the representation of inorganic minorities.

It is on a far wider field that our great political interests are absorbed. There is everywhere a revival of the spirit of national aggrandisement and imperial ambition. Under the now avowed lead of the great German dictator, the nations of Europe are running a race to extend their borders by conquest and annexation amongst the weak and uncivilised. There is to-day a scramble for Africa, as there was formerly a scramble for Asia; and the scramble in Asia, or in Polynesia, is only less urgent for the moment, in that the rivalry is just now keenest in Africa. But in Asia, in Africa, in Polynesia, the strong nations of Europe are struggling to found Empires by violence, fraud, or aggression. Three distinct wars are being waged in the East; and in Africa alone our soldiers and our Government are asserting the rule of the sword in the North, on the East, in the centre, on the South, and on the West at the same time. Five years ago, we were told that for England at least there was to be some lull in this career of blood and ambition. It was only, we see, a party cry, a device to upset a government. There has been no lull, no pause in the scramble for empire. The empire swells year by year; year by year fresh wars break out; year by year the burden of empire increases whether Disraeli or Gladstone, Liberal or Conservative, are the actual wielders of power. The agents of the aggression, the critics, have changed sides; the Jingoes of yesterday are the grumblers of to-day; and the peaceful patriots of yesterday are the Jingoes of to-day. The empire and its appendages are even vaster in 1885 than in 1880; its responsibilities are greater; its risks and perplexities deeper; its enemies stronger and more threatening. And in the midst of this crisis, those who condemn this policy are fewer; their protests come few and faint. The Christian sects can see nothing unrighteous in Mr. Gladstone; the Liberal caucuses stifle any murmur of discontent, and force those who spoke out against Zulu, Afghan, and Trans-Vaal wars to justify, by the tyrant’s plea of necessity, the massacre of Egyptian fellahs and the extermination of Arab patriots. They who mouthed most loudly about Jingoism are now the foremost in their appeals to national vanity. And the parasites of the parasites of our great Liberal statesman can make such hubbub, in his utter absence of a policy, that they drive him by sheer clamor from one adventure into another. For nearly four years now we have continuously protested against the policy pursued in Egypt. Year after year we have told Mr. Gladstone that it was blackening his whole career and covering our country with shame. There is a monotony about our protests. But, when there is a monotony in evil-doing, there must alike be monotony in remonstrance. We complain that the blood and treasure of this nation should be used in order to flay the peasantry of the Nile, in the interests of usurers and speculators. We complain that we practically annex a people whom we will not govern and cannot benefit. We are boldly for what in the slang of the day is called “scuttling” out of Egypt. We think the robber and the oppressor should scuttle as quickly as possible, that he is certain to scuttle some day. We complain of massacring an innocent people merely to give our traders and money-dealers larger or safer markets. We complain of all the campaigns and battles as wanton, useless, and unjust massacres. We especially condemn the war in the Soudan as wanton and unjust even in the avowal of the very ministers who are urging it. The defender of Khartoum is a man of heroic qualities and beautiful nature; but the cause of civilisation is not served by launching amongst savages a sort of Pentateuch knight errant. And we seriously complain that the policy of a great country in a great issue of right and wrong should be determined by schoolboy shouting over the feats of our English Garibaldi.

It is true that our Ministers, especially Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, and Lord Derby, are the public men who are now most conspicuously resisting the forward policy, and that the outcry of the hour is against them on that ground. But ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Those who aspire to guide nations should meet the folly of the day with more vigorous assertion of principle. And the men who are waging a wanton, bloody, and costly war in the sands of Africa have no principle left to assert.

It may well be that Mr. Gladstone, and most of those who follow him in office, are of all our public men those who have least liking for these wars, annexations, and oppressive dealings with the weak. They may have less liking for them it may be, but they are the men who do these things. They are responsible. The blood lies on their doorstep. The guilt hangs on their fame. The corruption of the national conscience is their doing. The page of history will write their names and their deeds in letters of gore and of flame. It is mockery, even in the most servile parliamentary drudge, to repeat to us that the wrong lies at the door of the Opposition, foreign intriguers, international engagements, untoward circumstances. Keep these threadbare pretexts to defend the next official blunder amidst the cheers of a party mob. The English people will have none of such stale equivocation. The ministers who massacred thousands at Tel-el-Kebir, at Alexandria, at Teb, at Tamasi, who are sinking millions of our people’s hard-won savings in the sands of Africa, in order to slaughter a brave race whom they themselves declare to be heroes and patriots fighting for freedom; and who after three years of this bloodshed, ruin, and waste, have nothing to show for it – nothing, except the utter chaos of a fine country, the extreme misery of an innocent people, and all Europe glowering at us in menace and hate – the men who have done this are responsible. When they fail to annex some trumpery bit of coast, the failure is naturally set down to blundering, not to conscience. History, their country, their own conscience will make them answer for it. The headlong plunge of our State, already over-burdened with the needs and dangers of a heterogeneous empire, the consuming rage for national extension, which the passion for money, markets, careers, breeds in a people where moral and religious principles are loosened and conflicting, this is the great evil of our time. It is to stem this that statesmen should address themselves. It is to fan this, or to do its bidding, that our actual statesmen contend. Mr. Gladstone in his heart may loathe the task to which he is set and the uses to which he lends his splendid powers. But there are some situations where weakness before powerful clamor works national ruin more readily even than ambition itself. How petty to our descendants will our squabbles in the parliamentary game appear, when history shall tell them that Gladstone waged far more wars than Disraeli; that he slaughtered more hecatombs of innocent people; that he oppressed more nations, embroiled us worse with foreign nations; left the empire of a far more unwieldy size, more exposed and on more rotten foundations; and that Mr. Gladstone did all this not because it seemed to him wise or just, but for the same reason (in truth) that his great rival acted, viz., that it gave him unquestioned ascendency in his party and with those whose opinion he sought.

I have not hesitated to speak out my mind of the policy condemned, not in personal hostility or irritation, however much I respect the great qualities of Mr. Gladstone himself, however little I desire to see him displaced by his rivals. No one will venture to believe that I speak in the interest of party, or have any quarrel with my own countrymen. All that I have said in condemnation of the African policy of England I would say in condemnation of the Chinese policy in France. I would say it all the more because, for the reasons on which I will not now enlarge, our brethren in France have said so little, and that little with so broken a voice. It is a weakness to our common cause that so little has been said in France. But I rejoice to see that in the new number of our Review, our director, M. Laffitte, has spoken emphatically against all disturbance of the status quo, and the policy of founding colonial empires. It behooves us all the more to speak out plainly here. There is the same situation in France as in England. A ministry whom the majority trust, and whom the military and trading class can bend to do their will; a thirst in the rich to extend the empire; a thirst in the adventurers for careers to be won; a thirst in the journalists for material wherewith to pamper the national vanity. There, too, are in the East backward peoples to be trampled on, a confused tangle of pretexts and opportunities, a Parliamentary majority to be secured, and a crowd of interests to be bribed. In the case of M. Ferry, we can see all the weakness, all the helpless vacillations, all the danger of his game; its cynical injustice, its laughable pretexts and excuses, its deliberate violation of the real interests of the nation, the formidable risks that he is preparing for his country, and the ruin which is as certain to follow it. In Mr. Gladstone’s case there are national and party slaves for the conscience of the boldest critic.

The year, too, has witnessed a new form of the spread-eagle tendency in the revival of one of our periodical scares about the strength of the navy. About once in every ten or twenty years a knot of shipbuilders, journalists, seamen, and gunners, contrive to stir up a panic, and to force the nation into a great increase of its military expenditure. I am not going to discuss the truth about the Navy, or whether it be equal or not to the requirements of the Service. I look at this in a new way: I take up very different ground. I say that the service, to which we are now called on to make the navy equal, is a service that we ought not to undertake. The requirements demanded are wholly incompatible with the true interests of our nation. They are opposed to the real conditions of civilisation. They will be in a very few years, even if they are not now, beyond the power of this people to meet. The claim to a maritime supremacy, in the sense that this country is permanently to remain undisputed mistress of all seas, always able and ready to overwhelm any possible combination of any foreign Powers, this claim in itself is a ridiculous anachronism. Whether the British fleet is now able to overpower the combined fleets of Europe, or even of several Powers in Europe, I do not know. Even if it be now able, such is the progress of events, the ambition of our neighbors, and the actual conditions of modern war, that it is physically impossible that such a supremacy can be permanently maintained. To maintain it, even for another generation, would involve the subjection of England to a military tyranny such as exists for the moment in Germany, to a crushing taxation and conscription, of which we have had no experience. We should have to spend, not twenty-five, but fifty millions a year on our army and navy if we intend to be really masters in every sea, and to make the entire British empire one continuous Malta and Gibraltar. And even that, or a hundred millions a year, would not suffice in the future for the inevitable growth of foreign powers and the constant growth of our own empire. To guarantee the permanent supremacy of the seas, we shall need some Bismarck to crush our free people into the vice of his military autocracy and universal conscription.

“Rule Britannia,” or England’s exclusive dominion of the seas, is a temporary (in my opinion, an unfortunate) episode in our history. To brag about it and fight for it is the part of a bad citizen; to maintain it would be a crime against the human race. To have founded, not an empire, but a scattered congeries of possessions in all parts of the world by conquest, intrigue, or arbitrary seizure, is a blot upon our history; to perpetuate it is a burdensome inheritance to bequeath to our children. To ask that this inorganic heap of possessions shall be perpetually extended, made absolutely secure against all comers, and guarded by a fleet which is always ready to meet the world in arms – this is a programme which it is the duty of every good citizen to stamp out. Whilst this savage policy is in vogue, the very conditions of national morality, of peace, of true industrial civilisation are wanting. The first condition of healthy national progress is to have broken for ever with this national buccaneering. The commerce, the property of Englishmen on the seas must protect itself, like that of other nations, by just, prudent, and civilised bearing, and not by an exclusive dominion which other great nations do very well without. The commerce and the honor of Americans are safe all over the world, though their navy is not one-tenth of ours. And Germany can speak with us face to face on every ocean, though she can hardly put a first-rate ship in array of battle. To talk big about refusing to trust the greatness of England to the sufferance of her neighbors is mere clap-trap. It is the phrase of Mexican or Californian desperadoes when they fill their pockets with revolvers and bowie-knives. All but two or three of the greatest nations are obliged, at all times, to trust their existence to the sufferance of their stronger neighbors. And they are just as safe, and quite as proud, and more civilised than their great neighbors in consequence. Human society, whether national or international, only begins when social morality has taken the place of individual violence. Society, for men or nations, cannot be based on the revolver and bowie-knife principle.

We repudiate, then, with our whole souls the code of buccaneer patriotism. True statesmen are bound to check, not to promote, the expansion of England; to provide for the peaceful disintegration of the heterogeneous empire, the permanence of which is as incapable of being justified in policy as of being materially defended in arms. These aggressions and annexations and protectorates, these wanton wars amongst savages are at once blunders and crimes, pouring out by millions what good government and thrift at home save by thousands, degrading the present generation and deeply wronging the next. We want no fleet greater than that of our greatest neighbors, and the claim to absolute dominion at sea must be put away like the claim to the kingdom of France or exclusive right to the British Channel. We can afford to smile at the charge that we are degenerate Britons or wanting in patriotism. Patriotism to us is a deep and working desire for the good name of England, for the justice and goodness of her policy, for the real enlightenment and well-being of her sons, and for her front place in humanity and civilisation. We smile at the vaporing of men to whom patriotism means a good cry, and several extra editions.

It may seem for the moment that doctrines such as ours are out of credit, and that there is little hope of their ever obtaining the mastery. We are told that to-day not a voice is raised to oppose the doctrines of spoliation. It is true that, owing to the hubbub of party politics, to the servility of the Christian Churches, and the low morality of the press, these national acts of rapacity have passed as yet with but small challenge. But at any rate here our voice has never wavered, nor have considerations of men, parties, or majorities led us to temporise with our principles. We speak out plainly – not more plainly than Mr. Gladstone and his followers on platform and in press spoke out once – and we shall go on to speak out plainly, whether we are many or whether we are few, whether the opinion of the hour is with us or not. But I am not despondent. Nor do I doubt the speedy triumph of our stronger morality. I see with what weather cock rapidity the noisiest of the Anti-Jingoes can change their tone. The tribe of Cleon, and the Sausage-seller are the same in every age. I will not believe that the policy of a great nation can be long dictated by firms of advertising touts, who will puff the new soap, a comic singer, and an imperial war in the same page; who are equally at home in the partition of Africa or a penny dreadful. Nations are not seriously led by the arts which make village bumpkins crowd to the show of the fat girl and the woolly pig. In the rapid degradation of the press to the lower American standard we may see an escape from its mischief. The age is one of democracy. We have just taken a great stride towards universal suffrage and the government of the people. In really republican societies, where power rests on universal suffrage, as in France, and in America, the power of the press is reduced to a very low ebb. The power of journalism is essentially one of town life and small balanced parties. Its influence evaporates where power is held by the millions, and government appeals directly to vast masses of voters spread over immense areas. Cleon and the Sausage-seller can do little when republican institutions are firmly rooted over the length and breadth of a great country.

The destinies of this nation have now been finally committed to the people, and to the people we will appeal with confidence. The laborer and the workman have no interest in these wanton wars. In this imperial expansion, in this rivalry of traders and brag of arms; no taste for it and no respect for it. They find that they are dragged off to die in wars of which they know nothing; that their wages are taxed to support adventures which they loathe. The people are by instinct opponents of these crimes, and to them we will appeal. The people have a natural sense of justice and a natural leaning to public morality. Ambition, lucre, restlessness, and vainglory do not corrupt their minds to approve a financial adventure. They need peace, productive industry, humanity. Every step towards the true republic is a step towards morality. To the new voters, to the masses of the people, we will confidently appeal.

There is, too, another side to this matter. If these burdens are to be thrust on the national purse, and (should the buccaneers have their way) if the permanent war expenditure must be doubled, and little wars at ten and twenty millions each are inevitable as well, then in all fairness the classes who make these wars and profit by them must pay for them. We have taken a great stride towards democracy, and two of the first taxes with which the new democracy will deal are the income-tax and the land-tax. The entire revision of taxation is growing inevitable. It is a just and sound principle that the main burden of taxation shall be thrown on the rich, and we have yet to see how the new democracy will work out that just principle. A graduated income-tax is a certain result of the movement. The steady pressure against customs duties and the steady decline in habits of drinking must combine to force the taxation of the future more and more on income and on land. A rapid rise in the scale of taxing incomes, until we reach the point where great fortunes cease to be rapidly accumulated, would check the wasteful expenditure on war more than any consideration of justice. Even a China merchant would hardly promote an opium war when he found himself taxed ten or twenty per cent. on his income.

One of the first things which will occur to the new rural voters is the ridiculous minimum to which the land-tax is reduced. Mr. Henry George and the school of land reformers have lately been insisting that the land-tax must be immensely increased. At present it is a farce, not one-tenth of what is usual in the nations of Europe. I entirely agree with them, and am perfectly prepared to see the land-tax raised till it ultimately brings us some ten or even twenty millions, instead of one million. If the result would be to force a great portion of the soil to change hands, and to pass from the rent receivers to the occupiers, all the more desirable. But one inevitable result of the new Reform Act must be a great raising of the taxes on land, and when land pays one-fifth of the total taxation, our wars will be fewer and our armaments more modest.

One of the cardinal facts of our immediate generation is the sudden revival of Socialism and Communism. It was not crushed, as we thought, in 1848; it was not extinguished in 1871. The new Republic in France is uneasy with it. The military autocracy of Germany is honeycombed with it. Society is almost dissolved by it in Russia. It is rife in America, in Italy, in Denmark, in Austria. Let no man delude himself that Socialism has no footing here. I tell them (and I venture to say that I know) Socialism within the last few years has made some progress here. It will assuredly make progress still. With the aspirations and social aims of Socialism we have much in common, little as we are Communists and firmly as we support the institution of private property. But if Socialism is in the ascendant, if the new democracy is exceedingly likely to pass through a wave of Socialist tendency, are these the men, and is this the epoch to foster a policy of imperial aggression? With the antipathy felt by Socialists for all forms of national selfishness, with their hatred of war, and their noble aspirations after the brotherhood of races and nations, we as Positivists are wholly at one. Let us join hands, then, with Socialists, with Democrats, with Humanitarians, and reformers of every school, who repudiate a policy of national oppression; and together let us appeal to the new democracy from the old plutocracy to arrest our nation in its career of blood, and to lift this guilty burden from the conscience of our children for ever.

So let us begin the year resolved to do our duty as citizens, fearlessly and honestly, striving to show our neighbors that social morality is a real religion in itself, by which men can order their lives and purify their hearts. Let us seek to be gentler as fathers, husbands, comrades, or masters; more dutiful as sons and daughters, learners or helpers; more diligent as workers, students, or teachers; more loving and self-denying as men and as women everywhere. Let us think less about calling on Humanity and more about being humane. Let us talk less about religion, and try more fully to live religion. We have sufficiently explained our principles in words. Let us manifest them in act. I do not know that more is to be gained by the further preaching of our creed – much less by external profession of our own conviction. The world will be ours, the day that men see that Positivism in fact enables men to live a more pure and social life, that it fills us with a desire for all useful knowledge, stimulates us to help one another and bear with one another, makes our homes the brighter, our children the better, our lives the nobler by its presence; and that on the foundation of order, and in the spirit of love, and with progress before us as our aim, we can live for others, live openly before all men. —Fortnightly Review.

THE POETRY OF TENNYSON

BY RODEN NOEL

It is perhaps difficult for men of middle age to estimate Tennyson aright. For we who love poetry were brought up, as it were, at his feet, and he cast the magic of his fascination over our youth. We have gone away, we have travelled in other lands, absorbed in other preoccupations, often revolving problems different from those concerning which we took counsel with him; and we hear new voices, claiming authority, who aver that our old master has been superseded, that he has no message for a new generation, that his voice is no longer a talisman of power. Then we return to the country of our early love, and what shall our report be? Each one must answer for himself; but my report will be entirely loyal to those early and dear impressions. I am of those who believe that Tennyson has still a message for the world. Men become impatient with hearing Aristides so often called just, but is that the fault of Aristides? They are impatient also with a reputation, which necessarily is what all great reputations must so largely be – the empty echo of living voices from blank walls. “Now again” – not the people, but certain critics – “call it but a weed.” Yet how strange these fashions in poetry are! I well remember Lord Broughton, Byron’s friend, expressing to me, when I was a boy, his astonishment that the bust of Tennyson by Woolner should have been thought worthy of a place near that of Lord Byron in Trinity College, Cambridge. “Lord Byron was a great poet; but Mr. Tennyson, though he had written pretty verses,” and so on. For one thing, the men of that generation deemed Tennyson terribly obscure. “In Memoriam,” it was held, nobody could possibly understand. The poet, being original, had to make his own public. Men nurtured on Scott and Byron could not understand him. Now we hear no more of his obscurity. Moreover, he spoke as the mouthpiece of his own time. Doubts, aspirations, visions unfamiliar to the aging, breathed melodiously through him. Again, how contemptuously do Broad-church psychologists like George Macdonald, and writers for the Spectator, as well as literary persons belonging to what I may term the finikin school, on the other hand, now talk of our equally great poet Byron. How detestable must the North be, if the South be so admirable! But while Tennyson spoke to me in youth, Byron spoke to me in boyhood, and I still love both.

Whatever may have to be discounted from the popularity of Tennyson on account of fashion and a well-known name, or on account of his harmony with the (more or less provincial) ideas of the large majority of Englishmen, his popularity is a fact of real benefit to the public, and highly creditable to them at the same time. The establishment of his name in popular favor is but very partially accounted for by the circumstance that, when he won his spurs, he was among younger singers the only serious champion in the field, since, if I mistake not, he was at one time a less “popular” poet than Mr. Robert Montgomery. Vox populi is not always vox Dei, but it may be so accidentally, and then the people reap benefit from their happy blunder. The great poet who won the laurel before Tennyson has never been “popular” at all, and Tennyson is the only true English poet who has pleased the “public” since Byron, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, and Mrs. Hemans. But he had to conquer their suffrages, for his utterance, whatever he may have owed to Keats, was original, and his substance the outcome of an opulent and profound personality. These were serious obstacles to success, for he neither went “deep” into “the general heart” like Burns, nor appealed to superficial sentiments in easy language like Scott, Moore, and Byron. In his earliest volume indeed there was a preponderance of manner over matter; it was characterized by a certain dainty prettiness of style, that scarcely gave promise of the high spiritual vision and rich complexity of human insight to which he has since attained, though it did manifest a delicate feeling for nature in association with human moods, an extraordinarily subtle sensibility of all senses, and a luscious pictorial power. Not Endymion had been more luxuriant. All was steeped in golden languors. There were faults in plenty, and of course the critics, faithful to the instincts of their kind, were jubilant to nose them. To adapt Coleridge’s funny verses, not “the Church of St. Geryon,” nor the legendary Rhine, but the “stinks and stenches” of Kölntown do such offal-feeders love to enumerate, and distinguish. But the poet in his verses on “Musty Christopher” gave one of these people a Roland for his Oliver. Stuart Mill, as Mr. Mathews, in his lately published and very instructive lecture on Tennyson, points out, was the one critic in a million who remembered Pope’s precept,

“Be thou the first true merit to befriend,
His praise is lost who waits till all commend.”

Yet it is only natural that the mediocrities, who for a moment keep the door of Fame, should scrutinize with somewhat jaundiced eye the credentials of new aspirants, since every entry adds fresh bitterness to their own exclusion.

But really it is well for us, the poet’s elect lovers, to remember that he once had faults, however few he may now retain; for the perverse generation who dance not when the poet pipes to them, nor mourn when he weeps, have turned upon Tennyson with the cry that he “is all fault who has no fault at all” – they would have us regard him as a kind of Andrea del Sarto, a “blameless” artistic “monster, “a poet of unimpeachable technical skill, but keeping a certain dead level of moderate merit. It is as well to be reminded that this at all events is false. The dawn of his young art was beautiful; but the artist had all the generous faults of youthful genius – excess, vision confused with gorgeous color and predominant sense, too palpable artifice of diction, indistinctness of articulation in the outline, intricately-woven cross-lights flooding the canvas, defect of living interest; while Coleridge said that he began to write poetry without an ear for metre. Neither Adeline, Madeline, nor Eleanore are living portraits, though Eleanore is gorgeously painted. “The Ode to Memory” has isolated images of rare beauty, but it is kaleidoscopic in effect; the fancy is playing with loose foam-wreaths, rather than the imagination “taking things by the heart.” But our great poet has gone beyond these. He has himself rejected twenty-six out of the fifty-eight poems published in his first volume; while some of those even in the second have been altogether rewritten. Such defects are eminently present in the lately republished poem written in youth, “The Lover’s Tale,” though this too has been altered. As a storehouse of fine imagery, metaphor, and deftly moulded phrase, of blank verse also whose sonorous rhythm must surely be a fabric of adult architecture, the piece can hardly be surpassed; but the tale as tale lingers and lapses, overweighted with the too gorgeous trappings under which it so laboriously moves. And such expression as the following, though not un-Shakspearian, is hardly quarried from the soundest material in Shakspeare – for, after all, Shakspeare was a euphuist now and then —

“Why fed we from one fountain? drew one sun?
Why were our mothers branches of one stem, if that same nearness
Were father to this distance, and that one
Vaunt courier to this double, if affection
Living slew love, and sympathy hewed out
The bosom-sepulchre of sympathy?”

Yet “Mariana” had the virtue, which the poet has displayed so pre-eminently since, of concentration. Every subtle touch enhances the effect he intends to produce, that of the desolation of the deserted woman, whose hope is nearly extinguished; Nature hammering a fresh nail into her coffin with every innocent aspect or movement. Beautiful too are “Love and Death” and “The Poet’s Mind;” while in “The Poet” we have the oft-quoted line: “Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.”

Mr. G. Brimley was the first, I believe, to point out the distinctive peculiarity of Lord Tennyson’s treatment of landscape. It is treated by him dramatically; that is to say, the details of it are selected so as to be interpretative of the particular mood or emotion he wishes to represent. Thus in the two Marianas, they are painted with the minute distinctness appropriate to the morbid and sickening observation of the lonely woman, whose attention is distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections. That is a pregnant remark, a key to unlock a good deal of Tennyson’s work with. Byron and Shelley, though they are carried out of themselves in contemplating Nature, do not, I think, often take her as interpreter of moods alien to their own. In Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” it is true, Margaret’s lonely grief is thus delineated though the neglect of her garden and the surroundings of her cottage; yet this is not so characteristic a note of his nature-poetry. In the “Miller’s Daughter” and the “Gardener’s Daughter” the lovers would be little indeed without the associated scene so germane to the incidents narrated, both as congenial setting of the picture for a spectator, and as vitally fused with the emotion of the lovers; while never was more lovely landscape-painting of the gentle order than in the “Gardener’s Daughter.” Lessing, who says that poetry ought never to be pictorial, would, I suppose, much object to Tennyson’s; but to me, I confess, this mellow, lucid, luminous word-painting of his is entirely delightful. It refutes the criticism that words cannot convey a picture by perfectly conveying it. Solvitur ambulando; the Gardener’s Daughter standing by her rose-bush, “a sight to make an old man young,” remaining in our vision to confound all crabbed pedants with pet theories.

In his second volume, indeed, the poet’s art was well mastered, for here we find the “Lotos-eaters,” “Œnone,” “The Palace of Art,” “A Dream of Fair Women,” the tender “May-Queen,” and the “Lady of Shalott.” Perhaps the first four of these are among the very finest works of Tennyson. In the mouth of the love-lorn nymph Œnone he places the complaint concerning Paris into which there enters so much delightful picture of the scenery around Mount Ida, and of those fair immortals who came to be judged by the beardless apple-arbiter. How deliciously flows the verse! – though probably it flows still more entrancingly in the “Lotos-eaters,” wandering there like clouds of fragrant incense, or some slow heavy honey, or a rare amber unguent poured out. How wonderfully harmonious with the dream-mood of the dreamers are phrase, image, and measure! But we need not quote the lovely choric song wherein occur the lines —

“Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,”

so entirely restful and happy in their simplicity. If Art would always blossom so, she might be forgiven if she blossomed only for her own sake; yet this controversy regarding Art for Art need hardly have arisen, since Art may certainly bloom for her own sake, if only she consent to assimilate in her blooming, and so exhale for her votaries, in due proportion, all elements essential to Nature, and Humanity: for in the highest artist all faculties are transfigured into one supreme organ; while among forms her form is the most consummate, among fruits her fruit offers the most satisfying refreshment. What a delicately true picture have we here —

“And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall, and pause and fall did seem,”