THE QUARTERLIES AND THEIR MANAGEMENT.
TT is time, we think, to warn the managers of the Quarterlies that they are falling into a mistake, exaggerating a truth until they run the risk of impairing the influence of very valuable publications. It is, no doubt, quite true that the great Reviews cannot hope to occupy in the present day the position they held thirty years ago, cannot exercise a direct effect on contemporary politics, cannot inspire debates or direct the action of parties. The world moves too fast for all that. When a campaign occu- pies seven weeks, a journal t ublished at intervals of thirteen must necessarily be behindhand. The increasing speed of events, the immense improvement in the literary power of weekly journals, the rise of daily papers, which reflect the tone of the more scep- tical and better informed classes, all conspire to restrict the political sphere of the Quarterlies. Their conductors are clearly right in accommodating themselves to facts so patent, and ab- staining from temporary politics, but still they may push this abstinence too far. There are still political functions which only the Quarterlies can fulfil, there is still a political vacuum which they can supply. Journalists, however compe- tent, cannot treat politics exhaustively, cannot give to any one subject the space which any topic of importance impera- tively requires. That they can exhaust it in the end is true, as newspaper readers know to their cost, but the effect of a series of essays, say on Reform, and of one essay is not, and cannot be, the same. Half is forgotten while the other half is being read ; there is no picture, but only a series of isolated figures. Nor can journalists be absolutely judicial in their comments. Their papers must sell, and very exhaustive writing in a newspaper does not sell, and the men who can best write the condensed thought which best suits newspaper readers are not those who most care- fully state all the reservations which in all actual politics temper every conclusion, however sound. The Magazines, again, do not supply the want. When they treat of politics they are apt to be heavy without being exhaustive, for the question of space weighs on them even more than on the Journals. Most people buy- them for their novels, and want the padding to be something which can be read as easily and almost as quickly as a novel. The longest magazine article is seldom more than eight pages, and a great political subject can no more be treated fittingly in eight pages than in one. The Reviews might supply precisely the missing article, and it is a mistake to think that if supplied it would not be popular. People weary of entremets, and turn to the joint with a relish the entrenzets have only provoked. They will read quarterly articles on political sub- jects as they would read clever books on them, will regard them, in fact, as short books, the most acceptable of all publica- tions. The very heaviness of the Quarterlies is, in this respect, in their favour. They do not rely on a " snap" circulation, on railway travellers, and the like. People sit down to read them, and they will not sit down to read magazines, will not study and never keep journals. The proprietors of the Cornhill are so well aware of this, that they seldom or never publish a political article ; the new magazines, which are springing up like mushrooms after a shower, are almost all adopting the same policy ; the Fortnightly, which has made the experiment of political essays, even if fikaccessful, has by no means rendered the Reviews unnecessary, and Blackwood and Fraser, year by year, contract their political space.
Moreover, we sadly want organs through which politicians of great experience and high standing can address the public. Anonymous journalism does not suit them, for they do not want their work to disappear in a week, and they have a prejudice against the company they are obliged in most magazines to keep. They can expand themselves best in the Reviews, where the public is not surprised to find them, whefe they need not condense them- selves after a fashion which always strikes men accustomed to public speaking as intolerable, and where they are sure of the kind of audience they most desire,—an audience with which they have intellectual relations, and which it is seriously worth while to influence. This is especially true of great persons who under- stand foreign questions. These must be treated at length, for average. readers want every allusion explained, every personage mentioned described, as no journal or magazine can or will de-
scribe or explain. The real nature of the movement now going on in Germany could, for example, only be conveyed to average Englishmen through the Quarterlies, for only in them will diplo- matists write, and only in them is there space to give fair play to qualifying facts. No journal or magazine would or could
have obtained or published the intensely interesting account which Sir John Lawrence sent to the Edinburgh of his own'
foreign policy.
The Reviews, we say, may still be great and useful political powers, and it is with deep regret that we notice the tendency their conductors display to throw away their undoubted advan-
tages. Here is the Edinburgh, for example, published this week. England is passing through a revolution ; principles which to the Edinburgh, as this generation has known it, seem almost divine, are being thrown into the crucible; the very existence of the party it has so splendidly upheld is being threatened, yet the Edinburgh is absolutely silent. For all that appears in it, we might still be under the Government of Lord Palmerston, or all occupied with Enclosure Bills. Not only has it no political article, but it has no article at all which would not be just as suitable in any other century. Nothing would have been more valuable, or to literary politicians more interesting, than a sketch of the English situation from the old Whig point of view,—the point, that is, of men who
seek to preserve our society without rejecting the help of popular force or ignoring the necessity for progress. A gravely exhaustive
article on Household Suffrage, or any other of the larger incidents of Mr. Disraeli's Reform, would have been quoted all over the country with only too much respect, and those who expected it
cannot be satisfied with a review of George IIL's early administra- tions. It is very good, but it lacks the living interest a defence of the Whig policy on Reform, or an attack on Mr. Disraeli's scheme, or even a general estimate of the results of Household Suffrage would have yielded. Surely, too, there are dozens of Continental questions in which readers would take a more vivid interest' than in any article in this extraordinary list, however good it may be in itself :—
" 1. The Early Administrations of George III.; H. Agriculture and Prices in England (1259-1400); III. Ferrier's Philosophical Remains ; IV. The Council of Constantinople ; V. Indian Costumes and Textile Fabrics VI. Life and Speeches of Lord Plunket ; VII. Wine and the Wine Trade; VIII. Josiah Wedgwood ; IX. Burton's History of Scot- land ; X. Military Institutions of France."
The Quarterly is not quite so indifferent to the hour, for some-
body who writes like Lord Cranborne contributes a political paper, and moans through one whole page over the Bill now pass- ing; but still the paper is only a review of ideas on Reform, not an essay on what is doing. Such careful reticence on the part of journals which are still the first and best of all printed in English is disappointing, and will in the end, if persevered in, be injurious to their position. When men cease to quote the Reviews the hour of their decay will be near at hand, and it will, in our opinion, be a bad hour for English periodic literature.
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