17 JULY 1897, Page 19

JUSTIN McCARTHY'S " HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES."

Tarp,: is much of sadness attached to Mr. Justin McCarthy's latest volume, which brings up to the present date a work which has been the result of infinite and loving pains, and is by the nature of both subject and treatment one of rare interest to the world. He has been long the victim of en- during illness, and has been obliged to sever his connection with the cause to which his political life was given, at a time Ishen it has, if the expression may be used, missed fire. We

• A History of Our Own Times, from 1890 to the Diamond Juti ace. By Jidd:: McCarthy, M.P. London : Chatto and Windns. do not think he was well fitted for the work. By gift and taste and training an English literary man, he is one of those who, like Mr. Morley or Lord Bowen or Sir George Trevelyan,

abandoned letters for the temptation of a more dazzling—if not, as in Lord Bowen's case, a more solid—career, or at least made letters a secondary thing. But if he has in that sense proved himself unfitted for a Home-rule chieftain, he has been of the greatest value to his cause in another. Uni- versally liked and respected, and wonderfully free from the spirit of bitterness and violence which, sometimes in a real form and sometimes in an assumed, has damaged Home- rule so much in the eyes of many not disinclined to favour it, he has done all that one man could to soften the nature of the controversy, and to make the old idea of " coercion " dis- tasteful everywhere. No one could seriously regard so polished and upright a gentleman as what was once called a " traitor."

It was of the occasion of the Jubilee of 1887 that Mr. McCarthy wrote as follows, and if we quote the extract at length it is because it comes home to us this year so closely :-

" One discordant note, and one only, was heard during the celebration of the Jubilee. Perhaps it ought not even to be called a discordant note. Perhaps we ought rather to say that one note of possible acclamation was silent. The Irish people as a whole bore no part in the celebration. On May 23 in the Jubilee year the Dublin Corporation agreed by twenty-five votes to five not to take any share in the public rejoicing. This was indeed a correct expression of the feeling entertained by the vast majority of the Irish people. It would be to fail utterly in the duty of a serious historian if one were not to take account of a fact of this kind. It would be a poor and worthless compliment to the Queen herself if the veriest courtier who was instructed to tell the story of the whole celebration were to leave such a fact unnoticed. The honest truth must be told, that Ireland had had for many years little or no share of royal countenance. The Queen during all her reign had only spent a few days in Ireland. A fortnight would more than cover the whole time of the two or three royal visits. The Irish people were allowed to feel that they had nothing to do with the Sovereign of the country. The Irish people as a whole were long inclined to be devotedly loyal ; even Mr. Disraeli admitted that much about them. They cared little or nothing about the controversy between monarchy and republic. Their natural inclination was an enthusiastic, and, I had almost said, a servile, loyalty to the appointed Sovereign. They became wildly enthusiastic over George, the Prince Regent ; and, as I have shown in the earliest part of this history, there was no one living who we7comed the new Sovereign at the opening of her reign with a more chivalrous and thorough enthusiasm than Daniel O'Connell, who was then the recognised leader and dictator of the whole Catholic and Nationalist population of Ireland. But it would be impossible to doubt that the enthusiasm inspired by O'Connell soon began to chill and die. To Ireland the Sovereign became a mere name or a mere myth, for the Crown was only represented by a partisan Viceroy, who was changed with each succeeding change of partisan government."

It would be difficult to put the case more dispassionately ; and it makes thoughtful reading at the date of a second Jubilee. There is no mention here of landlordism or of terrorism,— merely a plea for the absence of loyalty which is hard to

answer. If it was hard to worship Gessler's hat, it would have been harder if the hat had changed with every fashion ; and we have still hopes of an Irish Court-residence at some future day. Meanwhile we lately disinterred a remarkable letter of the late Dean Merivale's, in which, after a visit to Ireland, he attributes its hopeless want of homogeneousness

to the absence of that Roman rule to which he traced the origin of the civilised European world. An invasion of .Agrippa, he says, would have prepared Ireland in a year to grow up on a plane with her sister-islands. At first the theory seems far-fetched, but it was curiously argued out, and very striking. Unhappily it leads to nothing now ; and the sad note which Mr. McCarthy sounds will find an echo in many hearts which long for a genuine union, and decline to despair of it still. It was to Mr. McCarthy's remarks upon the Irish question that we naturally turned at first; and of course we have cited but a brief specimen. In the book

generally we cannot help thinking that we trace a little the effect of illness, in a certain falling-off of the picturesque vigour which marked the historian's early writing. But it may well be that this is fancy upon our part, and the result

only of an interest which lessens a little, in spite of ourselves, as we draw nearer and nearer to the actual present. It is

inevitable that a record of contemporary events should assume, in the hands especially of a skilled journalist, somethin g of the appearance of a newspaper or of the Annual Register.

Time is of the essence of all really historical judgments, and

time itself, in such matters, is liable to very grave mistakes.

The story of Parnell's fall and end is told quietly and without severity, with greater mildness even than might have been anticipated from the historian's political action at the time. But we do not think that, naturally enough, he has quite succeeded in seizing the fact that this was above all things a question of the one-man power. With the loss of Parnell the movement really collapsed ; and it speaks wonders for his extraordinary ability that through sheer force of mind he should for the first time have brought it within a measurable distance of success. He converted the Liberal party, and " alone he did it." The description of his reception in the House after the collapse of the famous " Parnellism and Crime" trial is brief but vivid, and gives Mr. McCarthy the opportunity of speaking of the " generous and manly tribute " paid by the House of Commons. " Why did you fellows all stand up P" said Parnell to a friend. "You almost frightened me."

Mr. McCarthy's volume opens with the early spring days of 1880, when the Liberals, " after a long exile from office, came back to favour with a triumphant majority, and with Mr. Gladstone as their leader." That busy political time is well within the memory, strange as it seems to think that some years before that Mr. Gladstone had declined to hold the leadership of the party any longer, on the ground of age.

The historian leads us at once through the ignoble Bradlaugh agitation, which exercised the minds of men to an extent which seems incredible when we reflect how tamely and anpractically it all ended, to the larger Egyptian puzzle and the bombardment of Alexandria. But in the chapter before this he gives a quiet and moving acount of Lord Beaconsfield's death, with an interesting summary of his character :—

"He sometimes sparkled with epigram and paradox, and some- times fell into a fit of brooding silence. His hosts and hostesses could not count on him. He might delight the dinner-table with his talk, or he might sit mute, with his head bent over his plate. He was not very companionable even with his colleagues on the Treasury Bench, or on the front bench of Opposition. He had his chosen friends, to whom he was always kind and confiding, but his colleagues in general, like his hosts and hostesses, could not always count upon his mood. He had, one might say, no friends among the outer public. For all the splendour of his opportunities and his successes he was a lonely, self-sufficing man."

Like a true literary man, Mr. McCarthy notices Lord Beacons- field's habit of "taking his goods wherever he found them" without using quotation marks. " Men of light and leading "

he appropriated from Burke, and "extinct volcanoes " he took from Byron. Our historian forms his own estimate, of course, of the political figures of the time, and does it with conspicuous fairness, though not always in a fashion with which we can agree. He places Lord Randolph Churchill, for instance, in

a higher light than any in which we are ourselves disposed to regard him. He attributes to him, "with all his audacious spirit, a very cool head and a firm grasp of realities," and

believes that had he reached his maturity as a statesman he

would have developed into a classical English worthy. For the annexation of Burmah to the Crown, a step so much canvassed at the time, Mr. McCarthy abates Lord Randolph to have been alone responsible, and defends him entirely for the deposition of Sir Stafford Northcote from the leader- ship of the House,—a post for which the latter was actively unfitted. To Sir Stafford's personal qualities the historian does the justice which was done by every one. We doubt, however, if Sir Stafford's peculiarities could be better summed up than by saying that, as Macaulay was said to have been cocksure about everything, he, on the other hand, was never cocksure about anything. Lord Rosebery's con- spicuous failure is compassionately but fairly dealt with. With literature and with art, as we think unfortunately, Mr. McCarthy only deals passingly in connection with the losses that occurred through death. We should have liked some ex- pansion of what so skilled a craftsman might have told us of a writer like Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he cites as "one of the greatest writers during the latter part of the nineteenth century who stole quietly into the world of fame. Hyper- bolical admiration apart, it cannot be doubted that he started a new chapter, or at least that he revived an old and brilliant chapter of English fiction." Madox Brown, the painter, Spurgeon, the preacher, and Cardinal Manning, the ecclesi- astic, are dealt with in the same chapter with Stevenson, and on the same plea, as is Professor Freeman. We own that this is not a form of arrangement which much commends itself to us, as it interferes with the sense of continuity which should be one of the safeguards of historic reading. Bat we have indicated our own reason for supposing that Mr. McCarthy may not have been at his best and clearest when dealing with the materials of this his latest volume. His appreciation of the humorous aide of things comes out in many places, as in his enjoyment of Mr. Labouchere's gifts in that way ; and throughout his book he shows, if in some- thing of a less degree, the qualities which made its early volumes such a success. He does not always seem to us quite at home on the question of proportion, for surely Blondin is scarcely entitled to four pages of serious history all to himself. Nansen, who follows him, gets but half a page more. But we are not inclined to find small faults. All who want their memories pleasantly and effectively refreshed upon all that has passed in the political and other camps since 1880 can do no better than turn to the pages of Mr. McCarthy, and of the value of his book to future historical research there can be no question. Irish Home-ruler though he be, he does not grudge his tribute to the Queen's reign as having been one of great success. She "finds a happier Great Britain now than when she came to the throne." Republics and Empires have passed in France ; a German Empire has been made, and Austria is in no sense German any more. Italy is a kingdom, and Greece is trying to fulfil what she naturally believes her destiny. The Empire of Brazil has vanished, too; "but the monarchical system of Great Britain has not been seriously threatened in the slightest way since Queen Victoria came to the throne." With that happy state of things her own conduct and character have had much to do. "This," Mr. McCarthy concludes, "is the history of a time, and not of a sovereign ; but it would be unjust even to the history of the time not to give a word of praise to the steady, constitutional action of the Sovereign."