BOOKS.
SIR MOUNTSTUART GRANT DUFF'S DIARY.*
IT is no wonder that diaries by any one with a gift for reflecting either his own state of mind, or that of his fellow- men and the society in which he lives, should be interesting. The interest is something like that of the mathematician who is set an algebraic formula to which he at first attaches no geometrical meaning at all, but which he soon learns to inter- pret so that it expresses for him a definite curve passing through space, and perhaps passing through it with absolutely infinite branches stretching out in opposite directions, and em- bracing, or trying to embrace, vast universes in its orbit. And this is exactly what an honest diary does for its reader. It begins, perhaps, with a mere name, and then it fills in the meaning of that name,—to a certain extent, though only to a certain extent,—with the jotted details of the thoughts and deeds of the man to whom that name was given by his contemporaries ; shows the points at which he touched other careers than his own, and interlaced with them ; what were the great spheres of thought round which his mind hovered, it may be with fruitful, it may be with fruitless, results; where it lived an eager, and where a somewhat barren, life; and how the complexities of its interests tended to shape out a definite and permanent form of character. In the present case Sir Mountetuart Grant Duff has not allowed himself to give us one of the great branches of the curve into which his life has run. On his title-page he quotes from Renan,—that great Breton genius with all the saccharine and few of the sword- like qualities of the Breton character, of whom we hear a good deal in the course of the Diary,—the principle by which he has selected what he gives us and what he declines to give us in this Diary :—" One should never write except of that which one loves ; oblivion and silence are the punishment that one in- flicts on that which one has found ugly and common in the walk through life; " and perhaps for a Diary published in the life- time of the contemporaries whom it affects, that may be a wise principle. Still, though it does not exactly halve, at least it greatly attenuates, the interest of a Diary considered as the revelation of a human life. One craves to know what a man hates as well as what he loves, and though from what he loves one may shrewdly infer what he hates, one is deprived of that most interesting aspect of a man's life,—how he hates and to what extent his mental and moral repulsions carry him. Here we see the chronicle of a man of the most curiously wide knowledge in almost all the departments of European culture, with distinguished friends in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Russia, to say nothing of the masters of English literature and science, with a profound knowledge of history, both general and political, a considerable acquaint- ance with the criticism of our religious literature, a vast delight in the poetry of many European tongues, and an insatiable curiosity as to the secrets of literary power,—who tells us only what he appreciated and enjoyed, and never what he loathed. He may be quite right, but it is like the work of a mathematician who traces out carefully one branch of his hyperbolic curve and ignores the other altogether.
• Motes from a Diary. 1851-110t. By the Right Eon. 131r Mountatuart B. Or. I Duff, 0.0.8.1. London John Murray.
Still, nobody can deny that the book is very attractive and at times fa.soinating,—though we may parenthetically object to the embodiment of the long article on the Italy of 1867 in the second volume, an article which has no more business in a diary than a scientific memorandum would have had,—for Sir Mountstuart, without indulging in elaborate description, gives that touch of personal feeling and historical interest to his travels for which his own keen poetical feeling and wide reading provide the natural materials. This, for instance, is his charming description of his first approach to Rome :-
" We passed along through thickets of brambles, above which the broom grows high and tree-like, over wide extents of short grass, among scattered oak-trees still wearing their last year's leaves, across streams, here running clear and rapid, a little below or above, slimy and stagnant, but all with deep channels overhung by tangled brushwood. Up one gentle ascent, down another, passing now a herd of the mild-eyed, long-horned oxen of the country, next perhaps a flock of sheep, tended by shepherds whose peculiar arrangement of goatskin about the leg, leaves no doubt as to whence ancient art borrowed its Satyrs ; hero a solitary, ague-stricken house (in one we passed, some brigands had a few days before been captured), there a marsh with seagulls wheeling about it, while everywhere cultivation had its outposts in the waste, trying, it would seem, to keep up a sort of claim to the territory, most of which it bad so long abandoned. We baited at Baccano, a bad and pestilential post-house ; however, at this season one had nothing to fear from the last peculiarity. Again on the road, but little to interest in tufa grottoes and ruined brick media:vat towers. At last, after many disappointments, we reached the brow of a low rising ground, and there stretching far to left and right, were white houses and grey towers, with hills and clouds mingling confusedly in the background. I was glad to have this sort of view as my first, to have one's attention directed to no particular spot or building, but to see and think of the whole as Rome and Rome only. For, great doubtless as is the interest of particular things and places in it, how infinitely does it fall short of that absorbing interest which attaches to the city itself, to the very ground on which it is built. Even if we accept the ordinary account, and it is now pretty certain that the Foundation of Rome is placed too late by several centuries, there was a city here long before the Eastern monarch, in the pride of his heart, said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built ?' When the rival brothers climbed the rival hills, and fate seemed for a moment to hesitate whether Rome should be Rome or an Italian Carthage, the merchant princes still dwelt in Aradus, she and Sidon and Tyre were still the markets of the world,—the Persians were unknown among their mountains, and Athens and Sparta were slowly maturing, in petty wars and municipal changes, the strengtt. which was to prevent Asia becoming the leading quarter of the globo,—Sardinia was still to the Eastern imagination an island of the blest, and the white sails of Massilia gleamed not yet upon the Western waters. Barbarism, or civilisa- tion such as now exists in the Pacific, lay dark upon Spain and Gaul, while all beyond was, we should say, dead and silent, were it not for here and there a pillar or a tomb, on shores washed by the North Sea or the Baltic." (Vol. I., pp. 5-7.)
That is the sort of description which helps to make a fasci- nating diary. And the pleasure of the writer in all true humour furnishes us with many charming variations on the ordinary routine of a diary. For instance :—
" There was a bishop in Perugia in whose house lived a nephew, of whose morals his uncle took the greatest possible care. He particularly objected to the young man's staying out late at night. The nephew was extremely steady, and came home usually at a very early hour. One night, however, he did not do so-11 o'clock came, 12 o'clock came, still he did not appear. At last the bishop went to bed, and the next morning sent for the offender, and asked him where he had been. The nephew replied that he had only been at the marriage supper of one of his friends. The bishop, flying into a passion, said that marriage suppers were very bad things. The young man, thinking it would be a telling argument, suggested that his Right Reverend uncle must have forgotten that Christ himself went to a marriage supper at Cana in Galilee, whereupon the old man blurted out, Primo chi sa se b vero, e poi non it la pin bells cosa the ha fatto Nostro Signor ! '" (Vol. I., p. 8.)
For a Roman Catholic Bishop first to throw doubt on the authority of St. John's gospel, and then to suggest that what is reported in it of his divine master's doings was not, if true, en- tirely creditable to Christ, was certainly a delightful illustration of the straits to which a theologian is sometimes reduced. All that we have just quoted is to be found in the first few pages of the Diary, and the whole of it contains elements of the same kinds of interest, distributed with much variety over the two volumes. Take this again, as illustrating Sir Mountetuart's
keen eye for the character of his friends. It is from the Diary for February, 1857 " Stanley recalled to me too the end of a sermon of Jewett's at Oban : In Thy light shall we see light. From the dimness of the sick-chamber, from the darkness of the grave, we shall creep into the light of the Almighty.' A friend had asked-me to fake her to hear A. P. Stanley preach, which he rarely did in London at this period. Having learnt that he was to do so to-day, at a church in the City, I took her thither. Just as I left the house, I. said, Stanley is sure to preach upon " Whittington and his• Ceti': or something interesting.' We went to the church, which was St. Michael's, College Hill—one of Wren's—and were placed opposite each other'in a large square pew. My feelings can be, easily imagined, when, about the middle of the sermon, Stanley said, ' And at this place, and at this time, it may not be inappro- priate to allude to that old story '—and we had Whittington and his Cat'—the charity for which he preached, or the church, or- something connected with it, having by an odd aecident been really founded by Whittington." (Vol. I., pp. 91-92.)
And the Diary notes; foo, as all effective diaries should note, the more important improvements introduced into physical or mechanical art that fell under the author's observation :—
" Mr. Whitworth took us over his gun factory. He began by pointing out that exactitude was the soul of his invention. He showed us true planes, and made us see how one floated on the other while there was a little air between them, and how as soon as the upper one was slightly pushed down and the air driven out, they became as one mass. His method of precise measurement was then explained. He can measure the millionth part of an inch. In his young days people used to talk of one thirty-second part of an inch as a very minute measure of length, the smallest ever considered in practice. Now his workmen speak continually of one twenty-thousandth part of an inch. He him- self can detect by the touch the lengthening of a piece of iron one thirty-thousandth part of an inch. The machine for precise measurement marks even the effect produced on a bar of iron by the expansion caused by touching it with the finger-nail."
(Vol. I., pp. 221-22.) And, again, Sir Mountstuart notices the joke made in June, 1872, when people had got bored with the Tichborne case, the divisions on the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, and the "Indirect Claims" in the Alabama arbitration,—namely, that the best way to get rid of these tiresome subjects would be for " the Claimant to marry the deceased wife's sister, and have the indirect claims settled upon them." Once more, what could be better than this illustration of the extraordinary fascination which inherited customs exer- cise over the minds of multitudes of the human race who as little understand the love of innovation so common in the United States and the West of Europe, as we understand the Oriental passion for accepting as a matter of obligation the calling imposed by a caste-rule P-
" Much of the 13th was passed on the always charming Lido; and on the 14th we went with Layard, who has now left the House of Commons and is our Minister in Spain, to see Salviati's glass manufactory at Murano, where a man was at work, whose ancestors have been blowing glass at Murano for five hundred years—pretty well for our degenerate West. Our degenerate West I say, having in my mind the answer of a punkah-puller to an English lady, who encouraged him to improve his position. Mem Sahib,' he said, when he at last grasped her meaning, ' my father pulled a punkah, my grandfather pulled a punkah, all my ancestors for four million ages pulled punkahs, and before that, the god who founded our caste pulled a punkah over Vishnu! '" (Vol. II., p. 205.)
The diary of the tour in Asia Minor and the Troad, which is recorded in the second volume, is fall of the most lively interest, but we could give no idea of it within the limits at our disposal.
We may say of the whole book that it gives a very bright picture of the wide range of intellectual and moral interests . which fill Sir Monntstnart Grant Duff's keen and reflective mind, and which range from botany to literature, biological science, politics, and religion, so that we hardly know which of these very different fields occupy him most. The note of the book is the great variety of its interests and of the striking personalities which appear and disappear in it. We do not know whether the distinguished men's or women's characters interest the reader most. But wherever the author moves, we find him most at home with those gracious figures which, like that of the late Arthur Russell, always seemed to introduce an atmosphere of " sweet reasonableness," and also of the finer kinds of idealism into the tone of conversation. The Diary touches the various life with which it deals rather lightly, and expresses few deep convictions, but then its object is rather to chronicle transient impressions than to give the story of its author's thoughts.
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